Between Law & Love
To the classical Christian moralist, the teachings of the church are moral imperatives that apply always and everywhere to men faced with an ethical decision. To the modern-day existentialist, all guidelines are irrelevant; he argues that any authentic decision must arise spontaneously from man's inner sense of what the moment demands. To day, a number of Christian theologians expound a third way—halfway between the two previous paths—which they call "situation" or "contextual" ethics.
"Situation ethics" is rapidly gaining ground in U.S. divinity schools as a way of systematic thinking about morality, and it claims an impressive array of advocates. In Europe it has found a home in the thinking of Karl Earth, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Rudolf Bultmann. Its chief American exponents include Paul Lehmann of Union Theological Seminary, James Gustafson of Yale, and Joseph Fletcher of the Episcopal Theological School in Cambridge, Mass. In a recent issue of Commonweal, and in a book called Situation Ethics that Westminster will publish this spring, Fletcher offers a lively, readable defense and definition of this way to moral decision.
Principles as Tools. Fletcher argues that situation ethics avoids the pitfalls of other approaches to morality. In both the natural-law morality of Roman Catholics and the scriptural law of Protestantism, he argues, principles become inflexible and "obedience to prefabricated 'rules of conduct' is more important than freedom to make responsible decisions." On the other hand, the antinomian, or nonprincipled, approach of the existentialists leads to anarchy and to moral decisions that are "random, unpredictable, erratic, quite anomalous."
The situationist agrees with Bonhoeffer, the anti-Nazi Lutheran pastor who decided that it was his Christian duty to join the plot on Hitler's life, that "principles are only tools in the hand of God, soon to be thrown away as unserviceable." In the vast majority of instances, Fletcher believes, the principle will probably apply. Yet by refusing to acknowledge absolutes, the situationist can defend, for example, the World War II concentration-camp doctor who saved the lives of 3,000 Rumanian Jewish women by secretly performing abortions on them. Had she not done so, they would have been killed simply because they were pregnant. Attacking abortion, the legalist would say that acts are good or bad in themselves; the situationists would say that they take on moral value only in relation to circumstances.