Book Notes: Samuel Wells, Improvisation (Part 1)

With deep gratitude to my friend David Vinson for putting me on to it, I am now reading through Samuel Wells, Improvisation: The Drama of Christian Ethics.

(Two asides: (1) everyone needs a friend or two who read everything we should have read and lets us know about it; and (2) since getting a conservative Reformed theological education that was seriously deficient in the area of ethics, I have never ceased to be thankful that out in the larger world there are people doing ethics that are not only interesting, but also profoundly Christian. Thank God for the breadth of the church. Amen.)

Wells is writing a book of ecclesial ethics. This has several important ramifications. In terms of the overall shape of the book (and ethic), Wells wants to build an ethic that is rooted in scripture, and therefore narrative in shape, but enacted by the church, and therefore dramatic–but not simply scripted by the scripture and so it consists in dramatic improvisation.

Because this is an ecclesial ethic, Wells distances his approach from those that are weighed down with various “realisms” and other limiting factors: “there are no ‘givens,’ no nonnegotiable facts about existence that one must simply except, other than the great gift of the gospel” (15).

Further, because it is an ecclesial ethic, it is insufficient merely to say the right things. A truly Christian ethic must be embodied in a community.

Put these concerns for drama, the gospel, and the church’s life together, and Wells charts a course that is music to my ears: “I see the Bible as making the conversation that is Christian ethics possible, rather than concentrating on command and making conversation impossible” (16).

After the introduction, Wells walks through the first section, building his case as follows: Ethics as Theology (ch. 1); Theology as Narrative (ch. 2); Narrative as Drama (ch. 3); and Drama as Improvisation (ch. 4).

The chapter on ethics as theology gives a tremendously succinct overview of how perspectives on Christian ethics changed in different eras of church history. It ends with a call to see ethics as enabling faithful imitation of God and Christ as those formed by the Spirit.

The chapter on theology as narrative gives another quick overview–this time of the Bible and Jesus’ place in the narrative. Wells outlines dangers entailed in seeing Christian ethics focused too much on the whole world: it ignores God’s visible means of action (the church) and becomes coercive to outsiders. There’s an opposite, dualist danger, too–that the church so separates itself that it neglects God’s care for the world and cutting itself off from other ways God is at work besides the church. Finally, a “gnostic” danger so privatizes “ethics” that people who are maintaining the sufficient doctrinal purity end up thinking they’re being faithful to God while ignoring the love to which they’ve been called (and acting quite against it).

On a narrative account of ethics, what is the goal? Witnesses. “These witnesses are the church’s truth claim–it has no purchase on truth that is detached from the transformation of lives and communities brought about by its narrative and practices” (41).

So far, so good. The book is going to head toward a Christianized idea of “virtue” ethics, in which the type of people we are, formed by practice, story telling, etc., will lead us into faithful performance in the present. I’m finding a good bit of affinity between Wells’ proposals and some of my own thoughts on Pauline ethics, especially as it is attuned to the narrative dynamics of the Christian story.

Next time: Drama and Improvisation