Educating Desire through Worship: A Theologian's Approach to Ethics

Thou shalt or Thou shalt not: with ten commandments carved in stone, does the world need theologians to analyze ethics? In A Very Short Introduction to Theology, author David Ford writes that there's more to ethics than rules.  The surprise is, he connects ethics to prayer in his title to chapter four, "Living Before God: Worship and Ethics."

[PHOTO: I'd thought the connection between Ethics and Worship was a pretty strange one to make, but a quick Google search proved me wrong. The photo comes from an article on "The Relationship Between Prayer and Morals" at Salt & Light]

He blows through the popular approaches to ethics in a paragraph:

follow your conscience; do your duty; cultivate certain virtues and habits; relate your actions to certain values, standards, or some idea of what is good; stick to certain principles; accept the norms of a particular tradition; imitate good examples; pursue your deepest desires; make a rational choice taking into account the consequences of your actions. (53)

Philosophers have probed these approaches for 3000 years. Ford lists Platonists, stoics, utilitarians, and existentialists, among others. They're all familiar to me from discussions between Kirk and Spock on Star Trek.

When we bring God into the discussion, Ford asks, "Which God?" and advises Christians to do some theological reflection to be sure we're not calling our own tangle of desires and culturally-based values by His name. In an essay "Last Words," former Archbishop Rowan Williams echoes this concern, warning against worshipping the "God of our agenda."

When Ford defined God in the previous chapter as "that which is worshipped," that covered non-religious "gods" too -- what Paul Tillich called "ultimate concerns" of our lives. We can have many such gods. "In every major area of life," Ford writes, "there is a dimension that you do not experience as basically your own choice...and which shapes your behavior." For example, if "money" takes "practical priority over everything else in your life, then it is ... a form of worship, [your] religion." Other examples include identity, justice, self-fulfilliment.

Ford's intention isn't to downplay the importance of earning a living or pursuing justice, but to propose that theological reflection -- on sources such as religious traditions, the values in our culture, and our own life experiences -- can "wean us away from inadequate ultimates" (Nicholas Lash). He writes:

A theology that is not prepared to start thinking in relation to some particular conception of the divine condemns itself to lining up and describing various options without ever moving into issues of truth and practice. (49)

Ford relates morality to desire, as human behavior is so involved with "shaping and directing" our desires.

Ford notes, while all the major religions teach us how to "educate desires," any discussion of desire in Christianity should start with God's desire for us -- "God so loved the world." (The Hebrew prophets also express God's yearning for recalcitrant children.) But if God wills for us to obey the law, or to give up our lives to follow Jesus, does God infringe on our freedom and fulfillment? Ford ticks off some answers to that question: that God doesn't interfere, or that God may encourage and persuade but won't direct, and the intriguing analogy to love between people, influence by a relationship. But that conceives God as a being like us "only better," not transcendent.

A part of Ford's answer came earlier in the chapter, where he went into some detail about kinds of prayer: praise, thanks, intercession for others, petition for oneself or one's community, and confession. In the habit of prayer and worship, a relationship with the transcendent God can form over time -- so long as the forms of worship do not themselves become an idol.

That approach echoes what I've read in Life Together, Dietrich Bonhoeffer's plan for a kind of underground monastery of believers dispersed under the Nazi regime. Ford may have been thinking of that, too, because his chapter ends with a photo of Bonhoeffer and a discussion of an ethical imperative of responsibility.

[David F. Ford, "Living Before God: Worship and Ethics," fourth chapter in Theology: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press). In other posts I've reflected on chapters 3 and 6. See What We Talk About When We Talk About God (10/2022) and Angles on the Crucifixion (10/2018).]