Theology and Ethics
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Mark Tully in conversation with James Alison (Alison, 2006)

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We cannot help but create Jesus in our own image, because all our knowledge, always, is projective, as humans – I think that this is simply part of who we are. What is very difficult, therefore, is to allow ourselves to be ‘broken out of’ our own reflexive criteria – and that is why, it seems to me, there is an important space for, precisely, those, if you like, ‘monuments’ to ‘something-else-happening-here’ which is what, I think, the text of Scripture and, and the doctrinal crystallisations, at their very best, serve to do – they serve to say, ‘if you step over here and make this too tame, you will end up only with yourself’.

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Wrath and the gay question: on not being afraid, and its ecclesial shape (Alison, 2006)

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I’d like to start by comparing two stories. The second, just to show catholicity of taste, and in case there are any adults present, will be Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice; but the first is DreamWorks 2005 film Shark Tale….
So, there is no wrath at all in what Jesus is doing. He understands perfectly well that there is no wrath in the Father, and yet that “wrath” is a very real anthropological reality, whose cup he will drink to its dregs. His Passion consists, in fact, of his moving slowly, obediently, and deliberately into the place of shame, the place of wrath, and doing so freely and without provoking it. However, from the perspective of the wrathful, that is, of all of us run by the mechanisms of identity building, peace building, unanimity building “over against” another, Jesus has done something terrible. Exactly as he warned. He has plunged us into irresoluble wrath. Because he has made it impossible for us ever really to believe in what we are doing when we sacrifice, when we shore up our social belonging against some other. All our desperate attempts to continue doing that are revealed to be what they are: just so much angry frustration, going nowhere at all, spinning the wheels of futility.

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Discipleship and the Shape of Belonging (Alison, 2006)

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My guess is that when you heard the word “Discipleship” in the title of this conference, and of this lecture, you intuited, for however brief an instant, that it was “Christian Discipleship” or “Discipleship of Christ” that was to be discussed. And, at least as far as this talk goes, you were right. But isn’t it strange that a word which is in itself object-neutral has come to acquire a quick-flash association with Christ? In principle, at least, discipleship could be of any model at all: Ho Che Minh, Ethel Rosenberg, Marian Anderson or Saladin. What is odd is that because the followers of Christ are called his disciples, so discipleship has come to be particularly associated with him, as though there is a special form of religious following called discipleship which is an especially good thing and different from any other form of following. Well, my hunch is that when ordinary words become “religious”, it is time to take them to the laundry. Because what has usually happened is that they are being taken out of their normal field of application in interpersonal relationships and given a patina of specialness. This “special” quality then often mystifies at least as much as it illuminates.

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Living the Magnificat (Alison, 2006)

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Ethics without grace tends to moralism; and the shape, the pattern of grace, which informs ethics is a far subtler matter, and one much more difficult to pin down, than we usually attend to. So I’m going to try to offer you something in the way of prefatory remarks about the shape of grace which is revealed to us through the presence of Our Lady.

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Is it Ethical to be Catholic? – Queer Perspectives (Alison, 2006)

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Well, I hope you can see why I was surprised by the question “Is it ethical to be Catholic?” Being Catholic for me has meant discovering myself on the inside of something where God and many wonderful people are doing things for me long before I can manage to do anything minimally presentable for others. The relationship between being Catholic and ethics is not a straightforward one, and I would like to give you a brief reminder of its strangeness before turning to look at how this impacts the queer perspectives which you have invited me to discuss.

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Blindsided by God: reconciliation from the underside (Alison, 2006)

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So, at last we have come to the place of reconciliation in all this. I hope you can see why I took the scenic route rather than plunging straight in. I wanted to make it clear that for us the first and root meaning of reconciliation is not an ethical demand. In the understanding of the Christian faith, it is first of all something which has triumphantly happened in a sphere more real than ours, and which is tilting our universe on a new axis, whether or not we understand it. This means that what we think of as real, as stable and as ordered is not so, and what is real and true and ordered and stable is not what is behind us, but what we can become as we learn to undergo being set free from our imprisonment in what we might call “social order lived defensively”.

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Letter of response to friends in the aftermath of the Vatican Instruction of 29 November 2005 (Alison, 2005)

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Now here is the crucial point: it is from this premise of the free-standing second teaching concerning the objective disorder of what you and I call being gay that everything else in this document flows. And yet that teaching is here presented in the most muted form I have seen it in a recent Roman document. It is almost as if some of the many higher authorities which have reviewed this document before allowing this particular dicastery to publish it might be saying something rather like this:

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Good-faith learning and the fear of God (Alison, 2005)

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The virtue of fear of God is little mentioned nowadays [1], but I would like to bring it back into our discourse. I invoke it because typically those who enter into some sort of moral discussion imagine that we are starting off from the standpoint of the good guys. Those who are moved by fear of God fear lest our own irresponsibility, our own hardness of heart and defect of vision perhaps be carrying us down a route that is too easy, one that is ever more free of voices which question and challenge us. So fear of God obliges us to a certain athletic tension with respect to our own way, lest it lead us into disaster.

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Collapsing the closet in the house of God: opening the door on gay/straight issues (Alison, 2005)

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I’m going to look at a rather odd phrase of St Paul’s in his Epistle to the Galatians. It comes at Galatians 3:10: For all who rely on the works of the law are under a curse; for it is written, “Cursed is everyone who does not observe and obey all the things written in the book of the law.”

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Deliver us from evil (Alison, 2005)

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I would like to offer as a resource for our discussion here what I hope will turn out to be a straightforward presentation of what one might call the old-fashioned or traditional view typical of Christian theology. Namely that what we call evil is a non-thing, something which is properly speaking uncaused and inexplicable, incomprehensibly parasitic on reality. I am not only going to attempt to present this, but will also try and defend it, since it is the theological approach to this matter which I believe to be true, and I think that the psychological consequences flowing from it, and the psychological consequences of ignoring it are very weighty indeed.