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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 April 2015
My assignment is to respond, from the perspective of the discipline of Christian ethics, to my broad and vague picture of the oeuvre of my old friend and cross-campus colleague Tom Shaffer. It is not easy to focus a pointed critique within a larger context of considerable agreement.
My assignment calls for me to pass by other important dimensions of Tom's work. I begin with a quite representative characterization, which happens to be in the words of Robert Coles.
The author has no interest in providing us with “principles and propositions” in this book. He knows that we each live through a series of events,… in a journey of sorts. He is interested in stories rather than theories, how we try to make sense of things through narration. His heroes, naturally, are the story-tellers of the past and the present. …“
Presented on a panel honoring the work of Thomas L. Shaffer at the Sixth Annual Symposium on Law, Religion & Ethics, Hamline University, St. Paul, Minnesota, October 14-15, 1993.
1. I thank the victim himself for his generosity in helping me with recent bibliography.
2. For example, the pedagogical contribution of his book review column, his legal aid seminar which I had the privilege of visiting, his review of major theological schools in the 1984 inaugural volume of Notre Dame's Journal of Law, Ethics, and Policy (1/1, 1984, 11-114). All of this educational service has certainly contributed to the credibility of his ethical studies.
3. The Coles review is in Theology Today and the book was Faith and the Professions Brigham Young U Press, (1987)Google Scholar. But it could be any of his books.
4. Except for the slight slip where Coles telescoped narrators and heroes. The narrators themselves are not the heroes.
5. The point is spelled out most fully by Ayer, John D., Narrative in the Moral Theology of Tom Shaffer, 40 J of Legal Educ 173 (1990)Google Scholar. Narratives of Disobedience by Teresa Godwin Phelps in the same journal at 133, further documents the ambivalence of the probative use of story.
6. It was of course in fact a classical phrasing.
7. As Tom did at the banquet honoring him.
8. A representative case in the standard literature is the young man whose mother asked him to swear repeatedly that he would not fornicate. Now he was (repeatedly) committing three sins; breaking a sworn promise, fornicating, and lying. His confessor, taking no account of the interests of the women being abused, not asking the man to dare to tell his mother the truth, advised him rather to tell her that the priest said he should not swear so much.
9. I do not reject the quandaristic method in principle. I have used it to testify to the creativity which a larger vision can bring even to a punctually defined problem. Cf my pamphlet, What Would You Do…? (Herald Press, 1983)Google Scholar. Yet I must insist that it constitutes a powerful reduction of the moral agenda.
10. I follow Emily Hartigan (on the same panel) in following, at present for purposes of discussion, Shaffer's electing the adjective “hebraic” where “Judeao-Christian” has been devalued. Yet I do it under protest. The traits we care about do not belong to a language nor to a tribe. “Abrahamic” might be better.
11. How does it happen that Horace Rumpole and Perry Mason always take the defense and always win? Atticus Finch and Judge Horton were on the side of the accused. Are there good stories about tough prosecutors and hanging judges?
12. We note Thomas Shaffer's predilection for losers Thomas More, Finch, Horton, and Ball's admiration for Schwartzschild.
13. In the light of faith, there are always four logical possibilities: (a) human creative intelligence finding a previously unseen way out; (b) providence, miracle, or fluke, providing an unforeseeable way out; (c) an apparent failure is the cost of doing the right thing, having done justice even when the heavens did fall; and (d) sin. The unbelieving way of setting up the quandary is calculated to make (d) inevitable.
14. Ayer (cited in note 5) names four authors at 182; his notes 43-45 refer to several more.
15. I have thus serendipitously come upon one more reason for recourse to non-narrative moral discourse. Pedestrians like me need to be told by an expert litterateur what is the moral of the story. Everything that has happened in the field of literary criticism in recent generations makes this weakness more clear.
16. Cf my paper On Not Being in Control presented at Washington University in St. Louis.
17. The reference to Constantine is the way his name labels a profound social change; the biography of the man is not the point. Cf my essay The Constantinian Sources of Western Social Ethics in The Priestly Kingdom 135 (U Notre Dame Press, 1985)Google Scholar.
18. Shaffer's debt to Rodes is stated frequently; they cosigned the especially important (for my purposes) Dayton paper, where the sense of being willing and able to stand on grounds other than the national consensus, with which I am concerned here, was stated with special clarity.