Our People

Truth and Faith in Ethics: An International Conference on Moral Philosophy

Homily for Conference Mass
University of Notre Dame Broadway

By Most Rev. Anthony Fisher OP
Auxiliary Bishop of Sydney
26/6/2008

It is the 16th of March 597 BC. For more than three hundred years a long line of no-hopers and criminals have sat upon the throne of David and survived a series of chastisements. But in today’s reading (2 Kings 24:8-17) Israel’s apostasy finally catches up with her. Today the kingdom falls to Nebuchadnezzar and the Babylonian captivity begins. Today the Temple is sacked; in due course it will be destroyed and the Holy City laid waste. Today the upper and middle classes are banished; in due course there will be further deportations and despoliations.

In the years ahead the exiles will be assimilated to Babylonian culture and contribute their skills and energies. Most will be comfortable; some quite affluent. Many will lose touch with their spiritual history and no longer worship the Lord God or abide by His Law. They will be a bit Jewish and more than a bit Pagan. Is today the beginning of the end for the Jewish people? When Ezekiel arrives on the scene to prophesy to the dry bones, will it be too late?

Well, of course, we know the story. As with the Egyptian and Assyrian empires before it, the Babylonian will be superseded. Under the Persians the People will be allowed to return home and rebuild the Temple. But this exile will be second only to the Exodus for its influence on Jewish identity and culture and became a metaphor for the Jewish diaspora. It was the end of Israel’s organisation along tribal lines. It was the beginning of a new era in which the Torah – God’s law – was to be central to Israel’s theology and life. It heralded the end of the prophets, and a new chapter in which scribes and pharisees took their place. Even the Jewish alphabet, writing script and temperament have changed.

Are we also, in a sense, comfortably in exile from our spiritual roots, worshipping a panoply of foreign gods alongside or instead of our own? Certainly there are parallels to be drawn between the old Israel and the new. In post-modern, eclectic, secularising cultures, we Christians are all perhaps “a bit Jewish and a bit pagan”.

It is a complex thing this and has always been so. Unless we fly from the world into caves or communes, we must live our ideals amidst cultures we hope to influence which are at the same time influencing us; we have to build on what we share in common with those around us, and be clear-sighted about what distinguishes us. Julia Annas suggested yesterday that Christianity is especially permeable to surrounding cultures and ready to engage them. Our secularising culture is less obviously alien than was Chaldean culture for the Jews, and so we are probably even less resistant. It is less alien because, however fading or fragmentary, however unacknowledged, the Judeo-Christian heritage is deeply embedded in the thought patterns, institutions and practices of our societies.

Some would like a richer religious diet; some are happy with the ‘religion lite’ served up in many places; and some would think even the low-fat version too much. There are those, for instance, of an intolerant secularist bent, who are determined to extinguish the Christian heritage out altogether. But that is difficult, not only because religion proves so resilient, but because secularism is in many ways the child of an Enlightenment father and a Judeo-Christian mother: the illegitimate child, some might say, but the child nonetheless. There are family resemblances, even if there are major difficulties in the family, including feuding and breakdowns in communication. This Conference might be thought to be a kind of family therapy, trying to bring back together, at least into conversation, those who have so much in common, deep in their blood and genes, but who for whatever reason seem to have forgotten where they have come from and where they have been.

When Pope John Paul II talked of ‘the new evangelisation’ his thought was that the missionary challenge for our age is not so much to foreign peoples who have yet to hear the Gospel as to our own people who have become deaf to it or forgotten what once they knew. And the starting point for telling Good News is some shared language, so that the story may be told. The very project of evangelisation, at least in the Catholic version with which I am most familiar, begins with the assumption that we can think and articulate and converse and persuade each other – with God’s grace, of course, but also with human words and arguments, reasons and emotions.

World Youth Day looms large over this country at this time. As we consider the future of our young people, we are aware that many, like the exiles in Babylon, have been absorbed into a lifestyle that brings comfort and security, but little support for religious heritage and moral ideals. In many ways our surrounding culture distracts us from the sorts of questions regarding faith and ethics to which this Conference draws our attention. You might even say our culture inoculates us, when we are young, to that curiosity about truth (which John Finnis commended), that sensibility to the sacred (which Rai Gaita raised), that seriousness about thoughts, words and deeds, which several speakers in our Conference have suggested we need. Sadly our ecclesiastical and academic institutions have often been as much the cause as the cure: they have offered small doses of dead or nearly dead germs of truth, faith and ethics, with the predictable effect of building immunity.

For all that, some of our young people – and again it is a delight to see them in such numbers at this Conference – seem to have survived the best efforts of the culture to dull their curiosity, sensibility and seriousness. This gives us cause for hope and challenges us, whether we are philosophers or preachers, to be seeking to convert those whose eyes and minds are closed, and to be seeking to feed those hungry for truth and faith and ethics.

Hayden Ramsay told us yesterday that “Religious faith is interested in choices, not just compliance.” In several places in the Gospels, Christ tells us that it is not enough to be law-abiding: that our heart must be in it, our intentions pure. In today’s Gospel (Mt 7:21-29) we are presented with the flipside: it is not enough to believe the right things and be good willed: these must be enacted. These are complementary Christian insights and they are taught by Truth Incarnate. He is spiritual-moral truth, will, intentionality “in the flesh”, in living, breathing, choosing, doing; in life-changing, world-changing action. He is Divinity communicating Himself, as is especially appropriate to the Logos; but he is the Logos, reason, argument, Word of God who communicates himself not just by saying “Lord, Lord” but by doing the will of the heavenly Father.

God comes to us in the flesh of Jesus Christ, not just to contend with sin and ignorance, not just to redeem the victims and the agents of sin and ignorance, but also to communicate and inspire the alterative. Even for God, you might say, “Holy, Holy, Holy” is not enough. Even God puts His money where His mouth is, puts His life on the line, to tell the true and good and beautiful in action. We need new Ezekiels, whether philosophers or theologians, to prophesy to the dry bones of our world. We need new Ezekiels, whether clerics or laity, to speak God’s Word anew to those immunized to faith and reason. The Babylonian captivity of philosophy, religion and culture need not be the end of the story.