SEMINAR ON METHODOLOGIES IN APPROACHING SOCIAL AND ETHICAL ISSUES
Morges, Switzerland
8 – 12 October 2003

SUGGESTIONS FOR REFLECTION
by Professor Anna Marie Aagaard, Aarhus, Denmark.

From the early 1990s study reports reminded the member churches of the World Council of Churches (WCC) that ethics is a social practice marked by the respective communities within which it is situated.1

Whatever their impact (or lack of thereof) on WCC's practice, the "ecclesiology-ethics" studies succeeded in identifying some salient features that shape the churches' conceptions of moral issues. I shall take up a few of these features and in that way attempt to deal with my somewhat abstract topic: "Methodologies in Approaching Social and Ethical Issues".

Ecclesial ethics, common sources and different configurations
The Joint Working Group (JWG) between the Vatican and the WCC spent some years in the mid-1990s on guidelines for dialogue on moral issues.2 The document merits continued attention because it proved equal to the challenges posed by a pluralistic, post-modern world

a) by positing ethical deliberations and decisions squarely within traditioned communities,
b) by acknowledging that even common sources of moral discernment are used differently within different ecclesial traditions. There is no one, single Christian approach to decisions on moral matters.

ad a) Ecclesial ethics

I: Who are the primary agents?
The conciliar fellowship can only by recognizing the churches as subjects of moral formation and decision-making deal responsibly with concrete moral issues at WCC gatherings.3 In concreto it means that churches 1) must provide any common deliberation with clear statements of own positions, and in so doing they must 2) articulate how they arrive at their particular positions by "discerning the will of God rooted in Scripture and tradition, liturgical life, (and) theological reflection, all seeking the guidance of the Holy Spirit".4

An emphasis on the WCC's self-understanding as articulated in the "Common Understanding and Vision"5 will, inevitably, put fewer items on the Council's agenda, but within a Council committed to work by consensus a focus on the churches as the primary agents of moral decisions may allow for a moral discernment owned by the member churches participating in the conversation and not merely by some meeting of specialists or by parts of the Council's constituency. Furthermore: procedures that move the churches into center-stage may move the Council toward a deepened awareness that the cultural and political pluralism of the present world and the deep-seated conflicts return the congregations to the joyful task of maintaining a clear identity - not just to be relevant to culture, but to be a distinct culture, a distinct traditioned public. The cultural climates challenge the churches to become "a peculiar people" with a distinct way of life, embodying an identifiable story that may be encountered nowhere else. Christian ethics is the body politics of being church, and if churches have nothing to offer through their way of life but what secular people (and people of other faiths) can tell themselves, the churches are utterly superfluous on the market.

... the community of the disciples... is the bearer of the tradition and the form and matrix of the moral life... Koinonia in relation to ethic does not mean in the first instance that the Christian community designs codes and rules; rather that it is a place where, along with the confession of faith and the celebration of the sacraments, and as an inseparable part of it, the Gospel tradition is probed permanently for moral inspiration and insight, and where incessant moral counsel keeps the issues of humanity and world alive in the light of the Gospel.6

The assumptions are that faith and discipleship are embodied in and as a community way of life... the church not only has, but is, a social ethic.

The JWG document articulates the assumption in the following way:

The church has the enduring task to be a community of "The Way" (cf. Acts 9,2;22,4), the home, the family which provides the moral environment of right living and conduct "in Christ", who in the Spirit makes known "the paths of life" to his disciples (Acts 2,28; Ps 16,11). Discipleship holds together what Christians believe, how believing Christians act and how they give to fellow Christians and to others an account of why they so believe and so act.7

All Christian traditions... have a particular way of linking liturgical practice, theological reflection, assessment of the issues of world and humanity, and formulations of moral judgment... The approach is rooted in Scripture and living Tradition. We need to realize that highly divisive issues (e.g. attitudes to human sexuality, the status of women in church and society, the content of social justice in a given society, and the notion of a just war) can only be addressed through a dialogue which draws on the particular configurations of Scripture, Tradition, experience, and reason as used within the different ecclesial traditions.9

The Special Commission on Orthodox Participation in the WCC (SC) followed the lead of the earlier conversations:

faced with the need to develop Christian ethics that responds to current problems and struggles, it is the responsibility of each church to shape its own moral teaching,

and the Commission stated (rather bluntly):

Whilst the Council has a critical role to play in helping churches in fellowship... to work together to fulfil their common calling, the following affirmations should be kept in mind: Member churches belonging to the fellowship of the WCC are the subject of the quest for visible unity, not the Council. Member churches belonging to the fellowship of the WCC teach and make ethical decisions, not the Council.10

Although the WCC's most recent policy statements (The CUV and the Final Report of the SC )11 make the member churches the subjects of moral formation and decision-making, current practice continues an ecumenical history of policy decisions prepared by staff teams and pronounced by WCC meetings of international experts and church leaders. If unaddressed this tension will continue to obstruct reaching any consensus on which issues, by which procedural means, should find a place on the common agenda.12

II: The criticism

Addressing the doctrinal/ecclesiological differences involved in the current debates on "the prophetic voice" may prove more fruitful to ecumenical consensus on moral matters than a continuation of the inherited "political ethics" debates which combine diverse readings of Reformation heritage with varying degrees of commitment to Enlightenment agendas and liberal values. Such discussions exclude a priori parts of the Council's Orthodox constituency.

The deliberate move to ecclesial ethics and the churches as the primary agents of moral discernment and decision has been, and continues to be, contested vigorously by parts of the WCC's Protestant constituency. The opposition emerges (not exclusively) in demands for "keeping the Council's prophetic voice" and it takes the institutionalized WCC to be the prime ecumenical agent. Although it is far from clear what "a prophetic voice" might denote, it is possible to read the criticism as referring to the major objections to ecclesial ethics.

Three charges are invariably repeated: the charges that ecclesial ethics succumbs to relativism (epistemological objections), to tribalism (political objections), and to fideism (sociological objections).

First, prophets talk at the faith community. Keeping a "prophetic voice" thus means keeping a distance between what God does in creation and redemption and what human beings are empowered to do in the Holy Spirit. The criticism claims that the circularity between the truth of any story and the sort of community it generates is overblown in ecclesial ethics. The Protestant doctrinal extra nos must be kept. Faith and discipleship are, although mediated by the faith community, not intrinsically ecclesial.

I read the position as the ecumenical parallel to objections charging ecclesial ethics with relativism. References to "a prophetic voice" function in ecumenical parlance as theological resorts to an external vantage point that makes it possible to judge between versions of Christian life. Such references to a God-story over and above the church comply with Western modernity's insistence on having the justification of moral principles set off from their origination in order to avoid solipsistic self-validation of ethics.

Second, prophets seek - and find - alliances outside the faith community, and thus references to "a prophetic voice" challenge the tribalism of the church. The following lines capture some of the issues at work, and at stake, in ecumenical calls for the churches' prophetical voice:

There is... a danger for the ecumenical movement to be deserted because of its absence of relevance to the issues of our time... there are many, among the laity particularly, who would wish the ecumenical movement to deal with the whole inhabited world more than with the world of the churches.13

The quote sets the world of the churches over against the whole inhabited world with its issues relevant to human persons, and it makes an emphasis on the churches equal ecclesiastical navel-gazing. Assuming such fundamental polarity between world and church presupposes secular modernity's belief in a wider and deeper and broader community than the community in the body of Christ and a more unified world than the world that holds together in and because of Christ. Secular groups and movements may, consequently, be better positioned than the churches to witness to a human community with no other limits than the whole human race.

Abiding firmly with the turn to ecclesial ethics the Special Commission's Final Report situates the demands for "a prophetic voice" within the pastoral obligations of each church:

It is critical that the result of such dialogue and cooperation (i.e. member churches consulting with one another on moral matters and, wherever possible, speaking and acting together, AMAa) be clearly shown to be coming from a distinctively Christian perspective, embracing the values of the Gospel. The churches take on a "prophetic role" when they truthfully describe and react to situations in the world precisely in the light of the Gospel... A prophetic voice can never be divorced from the pastoral role, which includes building up, encouraging, and comforting (1 Cor 14,3).

I contend, however, that the charges of fideism carry the weight in the critique of ecclesial ethics and the concomitant preference for abiding with inherited WCC policies that make dialogue on moral matters aim at policy pronouncements based on communication by argument and assumptions of a universal, single system of truth.14 A "charge of fideism" may be construed in different ways, but generally it implies that for religious beliefs and practices to be intelligible it must be possible to account for them in terms of reasons and explanations external to "the Way". Why would people listen to the prophetic voice of the churches, if it was not intelligible to all rational creatures? Why would the social witness of the churches be able to impact society, if it was not perceived as expressing a common moral ground?

The ecumenical "fideism objection" to ecclesial ethics does not assume that Christian beliefs can be reformulated within the idioms of secular culture. It charges ecclesial ethics with the lack of a proper foundational basis that upholds a distance, not a separation, between the church and human beings determined also outside the church by the God of the Christian story. The Archimedian point may be articulated as a christianized natural law, as "law" or orders of creation, or as the eschatological kingdom present; but basic is the assumption of church and world as "always antecedently being involved in one conversation".15 Even the least elaborate articulations of the calls for the World Council's "prophetic voice" imply that it is possible to speak simultaneously to church and world on moral issues. It is possible, because the Word (the Creator Spirit; the reign of God) is mediated also in non-ecclesial ways. What is primarily done by God is only secondarily received - actively or passively according to the denominational divides - by the church.

III. "Liberal civil standards and the values of religious identity"

In a recent article16 metropolitan Kirill reflects on the hegemony of liberal values in the present world of secular politics and economics. While identifying "an irreconcilable difference between secular liberalism and the traditional Christian world-view" (481) as one of the fundamental divides of "modern civilization" the Metropolitan does not plead for an illusory return to a societal past without the liberal values enshrined in international law and the codified human rights with their civil liberties. The essay aims, on the contrary, at challenging the Christian churches to concentrate on Christian ethical formation in order that the faithful will be able to assess their life-experiences in a liberally ordered world in the light of the Gospel and engage critically with exactly this world. The Metropolitan's approach "aims for the church and every Christian to take a constructive part in the life of today's secularized society rather than to isolate themselves" (483). He is aware that any Christian impact on a given society and its institutions "depends on whether we are able to embody the world-view born by the faith in socially significant tasks, and in convincing answers to modern problems" (483).

Using the language of rights, which is grounded in notions of individual rights, to bolster a plea for nations' rights to order their own way of life - including "the preservation of their (= the nations, AMAa) religious and cultural identity" (484) - might not serve metropolitan Kirill's purpose, but I don't intend to open up a discussion of political philosophy and the metropolitan's understanding of particular liberal and Christian values.

More pertinent to our topic is the essay's emphasis on Christian formation and the adoption of "the truly Christian way of life" (480). The latter refers to a mode of existence in the world "built on religious motivation in everyday life, including professional work and participation in social affairs" (480).

These formulations beg the question: what is a truly Christian way of life? Metropolitan Kirill claims

... the religious way of life is distinct in that it is rooted in the Tradition of the Church. The Tradition, for us, is a totality of doctrinal and didactic truths which have been adopted by the Church through the apostolic witness and which are preserved and developed by the Church with reference to the historical circumstances... In short, the Tradition is a living flow of continued faith within the Church and is nothing else but the norm of faith. We undertand every deviation from the Tradition as primarily a breach of the norm, or, in short, a heresy... (480).

Metropolitan Kirill's article thus situates the ecumenical discussion on Christian ethics in the living faith traditions and their diverging pathways of arriving at decisions on moral matters. It is possible to continue the World Council's inherited majority-minority ethos and make the Council's statements on the various ills of the world cover up the lack of Christian unity, but there are so shortcuts to ecumenical consensus on moral matters. the journey to consensus can only begin with doctrine and tradition - with the member churches' different configurations of "the truly Christian life".

ad b) Common sources and different configurations

No position on complex moral matters drops ready-made from heaven. It is developed as faith communities listen to the Scriptures, interpret liturgical and doctrinal tradition and bring to bear the resources of spiritual discernment and affirmed ways of reasoning on the formation of the faithful. Moral positions are part and parcel of a community ethos, and "one issue shouting matches" between proponents of conflicting views on a particular moral matter do not make sense.

A summary of the JWG study on "The Ecumenical Dialogue on Moral Issues" claims

For those pathways of moral reflection and deliberation which churches use in coming to ethical decisions, the churches share the Scriptures and have at their disposal such resources as liturgy and moral traditions, cathechisms and sermons, sustained pastoral practices, the wisdom distilled from past and present experiences, and the arts of reflection and spiritual discernment. Yet church traditions configure these common resources in different ways.17

A recent collection of statements on "Methodology in Approaching Social and Ethical Issues"18 verifies that many churches do use the same resources for arriving at moral discernment. The Evangelical Church in Germany (EKD) establishes "memoranda" as orientation for the faithful by drawing on Scripture in the light of doctrinal and spiritual traditions of the Reformation (e.g., the law-gospel dialectics). The EKD policies for acting in society also draw on philosophy, empirical sciences, and the history of German state-church relations.

The Russian Orthodox Church shapes its teaching on moral matters by reflections on Scripture in the light of doctrinal, moral, pastoral and cultural tradition. Findings of the arts and sciences (e.g., philosophy, history, law; medicine, psychology, and bioethics) impact the moral discernment.

The methodology used by these two churches resembles the methodology followed by, for example, the Presbyterian Church USA, although the material made available to the SC indicates that this latter church makes extensive efforts to include the local congregations as agents of a moral discernment that links personal faith to what goes on in the public sphere:

A faith community cannot be adequately understood solely by consulting its formal policy. It can only be understood as a gathering of persons who bring with them all kinds of life substance..., a community which aims at configuring all this so as to represent the identity of Jesus Christ and thereby to articulate the shapes of God's presence in the world through the work of the Holy Spirit.19

Lack of shared resources is not the ecumenical problem. It is the configuration of the resources that differs "even when similar attitudes and outcomes often emerge", as the JWG pointed out. Differing ecclesiologies and doctrinal traditions will keep the churches apart and divided, even when these same churches react in a similar way to abortion, racism, armed humanitarian intervention or economic globalization processes. And divisive, conflicting views on specific moral matters will not be solved by ecumenical consultations on single moral matters. The following examples of different configurations must substitute for a sustained argument for prioritizing doctrine and ecclesiology in the ecumenical dialogues on moral matters.

I: Individual vocation
In the context of continued bilaterial dialogues between the EKD and the Romanian Orthodox Church bishop Rolf Koppe has provided an introduction to the basic ethics guiding the EKD's engagement with secular German society. Koppe describes the adopted approach to ethics and ecclesiology under the rubric of "vocation" and claims:

The specific place of the human being within the social order, i.e. in his or her "office" or "vocation" in the world, determines to a large extent the scope and nature of his or her ethical responsibility... ((A) generally acknowledged and widely recognizable Protestant church ethic does not exist, if by this is meant an elaborate casuisty)... But there are characteristics of a Protestant ethic which are essential: fostering the ability to become a real person, able to live in community and to act within the tension betwen plurality and integration, reflection and action, community and institution... (In) Protestant thinking, it is the individual human being who is the acting subject. (But)... the believer lives, and makes decisions, as one who partakes of Christ - as a member of a local congregation or of the church in a broader sense - in the community of the people of God.20

This view makes individual "vocation" the configurating glue of the moral life. It places church and world, faith and "works", law and gospel, witness and service, ecclesiology and ethics in distinct, although not separated, spheres. In the perspective of the ecumenical "ecclesiology-ethics" dialogues it follows that the distinctive identity of this version of Protestantism is located in a law-gospel dialectic's ability to affirm the secular nature of the world and to empower individual responsibility and autonomy in ethical action. Moral life is the worldly "vocation" of the individual Christian, and the role of the church is not "to do politics" but to enable politics by "advocating values which serve the well-being of all, including the poor, deprived and powerless, the next generation of creation which has no voice of its own".

Social ethics as political ethics rallying individuals, believers and non-believers, around specific tasks of reducing perceived damages to life - the position makes sense of the moral experience of contemporary Germans. The individual must make moral choices and cannot find her or his evaluative commitments by tending to the question of own social identity. The individual moral agent is sovereign, and the sovereignty is backed up not only by the agent's (German) history and vocabulary, but by Protestant doctrinal convictions that makes the single human being stand before God as a justified sinner abstracted from all social relations and practices.

II. Building up the body of Christ

In the Orthodox tradition ethics is an ecclesial, corporal matter. Decisions on moral matters involve informed use of complex resources, but these resources must be configured so that language, practices and virtues will be aiming at building up the body of Christ:

The Church is the assembly of believers in Christ, which He Himself calls everyone to join. In her "all things heavenly ad earthly" should be united in Christ, for He is the Head of "the Chuch which is His body, the fullness of Him that filleth all in all" (Eph 1,22-23). In the Church the creation is deified and God's original design for the world and man is fulfilled by the power of the Holy Spirit.21

The opening sentences of the Russian Orthodox position paper on personal and social ethics leave no doubt that the Christian story absorbs the world. The Christian narrative leaves nothing out, but encompasses all reality from alpha to omega, from beginning to end. But the Christ-centered narrative does not by and in itself figure all of cosmos and history in. The claims of the story to universal significance imply that the story must be inhabited and constantly shown to be able to absorb all human enterprises and all reality. Separated from a living, believing church which turns to Christ, confesses own sins, accepts forgiveness, and engages in becoming the eucharistia it celebrates, the story becomes empty fables. The God-story and the worshipping community is mutually constitutive. Unembodied the Christian gospel loses its claims to autority; it is the ecclesial body of Christ that mediates and practices the reality and the purposes of all of cosmos, of life and human nature, of history and society.

Affirming the nexus between the Christian narrative and the church as its paradigmatic setting does not make Christian living or "the liturgy after the liturgy" identical with applying a fixed, ahistorical story to the stuff and conundrums of everyday life. Narrational foundationalism is not the danger of current Orthodox theology, but the absolutizing of a specific history-bound conceptual language employed to draw out the theological assumptions of the biblical story.

Where Orthodox theology keeps tending to the provisional character of the conceptual language that in-form the Christian community's practice and readings of world and societies, a Christian way of life may be interpreted as the struggle to live transfigured life:

There is no final, rigid, arbitrary pattern to this process... First and foremost we will seek to keep before us all the time that our ultimate goal is conformity and communion with the Triune God, that all our ethical decisions - in order to be correct - must be in harmony with and contribute to growth for the fulfillment of the image and likeness of God in persons and to the realization of the Kingdom of God.22

Ethics deals with the never finally achieved task of reading the world and living "the liturgy after the liturgy" in such a way that "all things heavenly and earthly" become transfigured and thus build up the body of Christ. Everything else would be to abandon the Christian claim that there are no more fundamental readings of the world and no more exemplary community than the practices that build up the body of Christ.

III: Make us an everlasting gift to you
Immediately after the attack on the World Trade Towers in New York Anglican archbishop Rowan Williams wrote,

The hardest thing in the world is to know how to act so as to make the difference that can be made; to know how and why that differs from the act that only releases or express the basic impotence of resentment.

It involves remaining in communion with people judged to be "dangerously deluded in their belief about what (is) involved in serving Christ", because only in the body of Christ can disagreements, considered to betrayals of hearing and showing the truth, be enfolded in learning to live Christ's gift of self-giving, healing holiness.

An ethic of the Body of Christ asks that we first examine how any proposed action or any proposed style or policy of action measures up to two concerns: how does it manifest the selfless holiness of God in Christ? and how can it serve as a gift that builds up the community called to show that holiness in its corporate life? What I have to discover as I try to form my mind and will is the nature of my pre-existing relation with God and with those others whom God has touched, with whom I share a life of listening for God and praising God. Self-discovery, yes; but the discovery of a self already shaped by these relations and these consequent responsibilities. And then, if I am serious about making a gift of what I do to the Body as a whole, I have to struggle to make sense of my decision in terms of the common language of the Faith, to demonstrate why this might be a way of speaking the language of the historic schema of Christian belief. This involves the processes of self-criticism and self-questioning in the presence of Scripture and tradition, as well as engagement wit the wider comunity of believers.

Moral decisions involve a risk, because we are trying to hear the truth and show the truth of God's character revealed in Christ, and at times we must recognise "that we are no longer speaking the same language at all, no longer seeking to mean the same things, to symbolise or communicate the same vision of who God is". There might be moments, when we have to conclude that there is no reality involved in maintaining communion, "yet our first call, so long as we can think of ourselves as speaking the same language, is to stay in engagement with those who decide differently".

Christian unity is Christ-shaped, or empty, and to remain in communion means remaining in solidarity with those who are wounded as well as wounding the church, "in the trust that in the Body of Christ the confronting of wounds is part of opening ourselves to healing".

No one will confuse this vocabulary and way of thinking with current Orthodox reflections on ethics, but Williams' emphasis on an ethic of the body of Christ does point to cracks in the walls dividing the Christian East and West.

Configurations matter. By placing ethics, moral life, and ethical decision-making in the context of asking what it means to build up the up the body of Christ, the conciliar fellowship of churches will at least be consistent with its own policy statements and begin to place ecumenical discussions of moral matters at the centre of its search for Christian unity.

NOTES

1. Ecclesiology and Ethics. Ecumenical Ethical Engagement, Moral Formation and the Nature of the Church (Thomas F. Best and Martin Robra, eds.) WCC Publications, Geneva 1997. Cf. Duncan Forrester, The True Church and Morality, Risk Book, WCC Publications, Geneva 1997. Lewis S. Mudge, The Church as Moral Community. Ecclesiology and Ethics in Ecumenical Debate, Continuum, NY and WCC Publications, Geneva 1998. Lewis S. Mudge, "Towards a Hermeneutic of the Household. "Ecclesiology and Ethics" after Harare", in ER 3/1999,243-254. Additional documents on ecclesiology and social witness in ER 2/1995 and in "Methodology in Approaching Social and Ethical Issues", in Background Materials, Special Commission on Orthodox Participation in the WCC, 2001. Some sections of the following paper recycle my essay "The Church, the Churches, the Orthodox Churches, and the World Council of Churches: Notes on "Ecclesiology and Ethics" in Conciliar Debate", in For All People. Global Theologies in Context (E.M.W. Pedersen, H.Lam and P. Lodberg eds.), Eerdmans 2002, 159-173 .

2.ER 2/1996,139ff; available also in Background Materials (note 1),129ff.

3."Final Report...", ER 1/2003,25: ...(The SC) was created in part because of dissatisfactions raised by Orthodox and others with the ways in which certain social and ethical issues have reached the agenda of the WCC, and the ways in which they have been treated. Specifically, there was a perception that churches are coerced into treating issues they deem as either foreign to their life or inappropriate for a worldwide forum. There has also been a perception that the WCC has on occasion sought to "preach" to the churches rather than be the instrument of their common reflection

4. "Final Report...", ER 1/2003,9

5. Towards A Common Understanding and Vision Of The World Council Of Churches, A Policy Statement, Geneva 1997, 3.5.2: The essence of the Council is the relationship of the churches to one another. The Council is the fellowship of churches on the way towards full koinonia. It has a structure and organization in order to serve as an instrument for the churches as they work towards koinonia in faith, life and witness...

6. Ecclesiology and Ethics...(note 1),9.

7. The Ecumenical Dialogue on Moral Issues (note 2),146;145

8. The phrase is coined by Jon Bria. Cf. his "The liturgy after the Liturgy", in Orthodox Visions of Ecumenism (G. Limouris, ed.), Geneva 1994,216ff

9. SC, Report Sub-committee III, 2000. Slightly edited.

10."Final Report...", ER 1/2003,8,6

11. The Final Report of the SC is inconsistent when it (B,III,20 on ecclesiology) expects the WCC/Faith and Order to be the prime agent for sorting out burning ecclesiological questions.

12. Cf. Final Report IV,28 and 32-35

13. SC, Documents from the Meeting of Sub-Committees I and IV, March 2002.

14. Lewis S. Mudge's description of the inherited Presbyterian model of establishing Christian presence in the public sphere is also an apt description of the model hitherto preferred by the WCC:
"Social analyses by specialists, public pronouncements by leaders. This has been a typical policy of mainline Protestantism. It describes what has gone on for years in the Presbyterian Church. The "social action curia" produces a mass of material each year, much of it of high quality. The general Assembly votes on it, usually with little attention to the details, although some issues call forth vigorous debate. The Stated Clerk from time to time issues letters to public officials or makes public declarations which seek to carry forward the policies the Assembly has enacted. These procedures are not as effective as they once were. It used to be that protestant church leaders were visible and listened to. Who is listening now? The media pay little attention unless something scandalous or momentous is involved. Politicians, convinced that we command very short parades, pay little attention. They hardly know that the National Council of Churches exists. Above all these procedures are basically ineffective at the congregational level. Our congregations, absent very determined pastoral leadership, are as oblivious as are the media of what our asssembly has said about public issues", in "The Church and Social Witness: Pastor, Congregation and Public Leadership in the Reformed Tradition", Special Commission, Background materials,10

15. Robert Jenson, "The Hauerwas Project", in Modern Theology 8:3 (1992), 285-95

16."The Orthodox Church in the Face of World Integration. The Relation between Traditional and Liberal Values", ER 2001,479ff.

17. ER 2/1996,147

18. SC, Background materials (note 1).

19. Lewis S. Mudge (note 14),14

20. "Fundamental Protestant Principles for Acting in Society", provisional translation of "Evangelische Grundlagen für das Handeln in der Gesellschaft", in SC, Methodology in Approaching Social and Ethical Issues, Background materials, 29-34

21. http://www.russian-orthodox-church.org.ru/sd00e.htm

22. Stanley S. Harakas, Toward Transfigured Life. The Theoria of Eastern Orthodox Ethics, Light and Life Publishing Company, Minneapolis 1983,226. Cf. Background materials (note 1),26

23. Writing in the Dust, Eerdsmans 2002

24. "Making Moral Decisions", reprinted in Background materials (note 1) 15ff

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