Abstract
In the following pages I want to address a question at the intersection of authority, power, and religion. How can and ought we to speak about moral authority, that is, the authority of norms, ideals, and values in the responsible life. The focus of my reflections is the “sources of normativity,” as Christine Korsgaard has called it.1 In contrast to Korsgaard and many others as well, my argument does not center on the values that individuals or communities make and impose on the world, the stance of the “love of power” as denoted in the title of these reflections. Rather, moral normativity, I contend, has to be understood with respect to responsibility toward what makes us human. To ask about the sources of normativity is then just to ask about the character of the claim that moral responsibility makes on persons and even communities. Responsibility designates the practice of the moral life. The account of responsibility outlined below is set within a theological context, and so is the relation between the God of Christian faith and the moral space of human life. The task of theological ethics, accordingly, is to articulate and analyze the structures of lived reality in relation to the divine and thereby to interpret the ultimate environment within which we must responsibly orient our lives.
This essay started as a lecture for the conference “Before Authority: Renegotiating Power and Religion” held at The University of Chicago Divinity School, May 11–12, 2012. I want to thank the organizers, Joshua Daniel and Rick Elgendy, for the invitation to speak.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Christine M. Korsgaard, The Sources of Normativity, ed. O. O’Neill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
On hermeneutical realism see William Schweiker, Responsibility and Christian Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995)
William Schweiker, Theological Ethics and Global Dynamics: In the Time of Many Worlds (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004).
Maria Antonaccio, “Moral Truth” in The Blackwell Companion to Religious Ethics, ed. William Schweiker (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 27–35.
Kevin Jung, Christian Ethics and Common Sense Morality: An Intuitionist Account (New York: Routledge, 2014).
Jonathan Glover, Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), 405
There is considerable literature on divine command ethics. See, for instance, Philip Quinn, “The Recent Revival of Divine Command Ethics” in Philosophy andPhenomenological Research 50, supplement (Fall 1990), 47–64; Robert M. Adams, The Virtue of Faith and Other Essays in Philosophical Theology (New York: Oxford, 1987)
Divine Command Morality: Historical and Contemporary Readings, ed. Janine Marie Idziak (New York: Edwin Mellon, 1980)
William Schweiker, Power, Value and Conviction: Theological Ethics in the Postmodern Age (Cleveland, OH: Pilgrim Press, 1998).
On this topic see Robin W. Lovin, Christian Realism and the New Realities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
See John Rawls, Political Liberalism, 2nd ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005).
Richard Swinburne, Responsibility and Atonement (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989), 123.
One thinks here of so-called Radical Orthodoxy. For a brief account, see Radical Orthodoxy, eds. J. Milbank, C. Pickstock, G. Ward (London: Routledge, 1999).
Charles Taylor, A SecularAge (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007).
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, trans. L. B. White (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1956), 129
For an elaboration and defense of this claim see William Schweiker, “Consciousness and the Good: Schleiermacher and Contemporary Theological Ethics” in Theology Today 56, 2 (1999): 180–196.
Czeslaw Milosz, To Begin Where I Am: Selected Essays, ed. B. Carpenter and M. G. Levine (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2001), 327.
On this see, Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction:An Unnatural History (New York: Henry Holt, 2014)
E. O. Wilson, The Social Conquest of Earth (New York: Liveright, 2012).
See also Jürgen Habermas, TheFuture ofHumanNature (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2003).
James M. Gusafson, A SenseoftheDivine: TheNaturalEnvironmentfrom a Theocentric Perspective (Cleveland, OH: Pilgrim Press, 1994), 58.
I have developed the idea of the “integrity of life” in various books and articles. For two recent statements see William Schweiker, Dust That Breathes: Christian Faith and the New Humanisms (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010)
David E. Klemm and William Schweiker, Religion and the Human Future: An Essay on Theological Humanism (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2008).
See, Robert D. Putnam and David E. Campbell, American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2010)
Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of the Harvard University Press, 2007)
Rajeev Bhargava, ed. Secularism and Its Critics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998)
Jose Casanova, Public Religion in the Modern World (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1994)
Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003).
See Paul Tillich, The Dynamics of Faith (New York: HarperCollins, 2001).
Editor information
Copyright information
© 2015 Joshua Daniel and Rick Elgendy
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Schweiker, W. (2015). The Love of Power. In: Daniel, J., Elgendy, R. (eds) Renegotiating Power, Theology, and Politics. New Approaches to Religion and Power. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137548665_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137548665_2
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-137-54865-8
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-54866-5
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)