Abstract
There are few anthologies that come across my desk where I express enthusiasm to read the included essays. Without surprise, the anticipation for good reading was fulfilled with this book, which has gathered a constellation of notable scholars, all friends, former students, and/or colleagues of Gerald McKenny. A review could end here, with the addition of encouragement for others to read this book too. Yet I will say more, since more has been asked of me.
Each of the scholars gathered to this project was invited to prepare an essay that demonstrates either a response to or constructive guidance from McKenny's research and scholarship over the past several decades. And the opportunity to see how his works have impacted or challenged others, or where others might challenge and press McKenny on particular claims and themes, added to my interest in reading this volume. Of course, interest also mounted because of how McKenny's To Relieve the Human Condition (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1997) and The Analogy of Grace (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), for example, proved edifying for my early thinking about the nature and task of medicine, critique of biomedical ethics, and Barth's moral theology. McKenny's recent writing on the question of nature with approaching and actual advancements of biotechnology in mind continue to feature in my recommendations to research students, for example, who work on questions concerning technology and the authority of the body for Christian ethics. Moreover, a collection of essays such as this might also help me to advance further thinking about where I might continue to think through and engage McKenny's scholarship and for whom I might gather McKenny's work to share with other students and colleagues for critical examination or constructive influence.
Of course, the following does not intend to elaborate further on my interests and anticipation. Neither will I extend repetitions of the review, which I have already mentioned: this is a book that should be read. Rather, the following will discuss a few of the essays contained within this book edited by Michael Mawson and Paul Martens. Focused on these few essays, I will consider whether the editors’ invitation to solicit scholarly contributions that engage diagnostically, presenting ‘robust criticisms’ (p. 1), or productively, displaying McKenny's ‘influence’ (p. 1), was successful. Obviously, measuring success by the mere inclusion of essays that demonstrate such criticism and influence would not afford opportunity for sustained review. The editors have ensured a balance across these aims and the care of the respective authors to attend to the invitation is evident throughout. Thus, by such accounting, the editors have proven their editorial success. And there is surely unanimous admission by those contributing to this volume that, as Gilbert Meilaender compliments, McKenny is a theologian who reads the texts he considers ‘carefully’ and writes ‘precisely’ (p. 7). The demand to honour his contributions to moral theology and rise to such a level of consideration and fastidiousness was matched by so many of the contributions in this collection.
That question of success, however, might be delimited further by asking a subsequent question: for whom might the diagnostic and productive reflections on McKenny's contributions to moral theology benefit? To consider the editors’ success accordingly requires a different kind of question less concerned about whether Gerald McKenny is a scholar other theologians and ethicists need to read. He is. And one should. Nor is the question of success here concerned with the quality of the respective essays. I write confidently that each essay stands alone as something I will commend certain others to read for one reason or another. Rather, my asking a question about the editors’ success in collating the respective essays might be put the following way, while giving attention to a particular possible audience: in their construction of an edited project that probes critically and constructively into McKenny's contributions, I wonder whether this collection might aid a young scholar, like those who find themselves at the beginning of their journey learning about an ethics of grace, for example. The question of success here is to speculate about whether this book might prove to be a successful resource for learning and advancing the scholarship of students (my most significant concern these days)?
For the student encouraged to read McKenny's contributions to moral theology, the volume is thoughtfully apportioned by his scholarly writing (1) on God's grace as a priority for the understanding of Christian ethics and (2) on the normative authority or moral significance of nature, including the body. But an essay like Jean Porter's ‘Nature and Grace: A Contribution to a Long Conversation’ (pp. 125–41), while located in the second half of the volume (which focuses on the nature/body), does well to examine with due attention the ways that McKenny has sought answers to these two streams of thinking, not in isolation but together. An essay like Porter's is helpful to the student learning from McKenny in two ways. First, it shows the way one might begin to evaluate the kinds of claims and contentions McKenny offers, while showing a reader the ways another might read the same source material, whether Aquinas or Barth. Specifically, Porter's attention to Aquinas in this instance demonstrates how the two themes of grace and nature can also be traced carefully with a Thomistic analysis showing where and how Aquinas might ‘fit within’ (p. 140) McKenny's own view of nature, which ‘has normative significance in how it equips and prepares us for life with God’ (p. 5). For the student, I consider what Porter offers is an opportunity to think critically about McKenny's careful typologising of nature identified in his Biotechnology, Human Nature, and Christian Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018) and the critique of Aquinas via Barth he endorses. Of course, the purpose of Porter's essay is not to offer an alternative typology, but to present a careful reading of Aquinas to demonstrate where he might be an ally for McKenny and others to consider nature and grace further. Porter's essay is an example that a student might turn toward while learning how to take a carefully crafted argument seriously and to consider whether the sources solicited by the author have been considered as judiciously as possible—a vital skill for any scholar learning to examine a persuasive argument seriously and charitably.
For the student, however, Stanley Hauerwas’s essay does something different than that of Porter's. The difference here demonstrates, in the first instance, the range of purposes identified by Mawson and Martens’ invitation. While attentive to McKenny's To Relieve the Human Condition, Hauerwas’s ‘Body Matters: Some Brief Remarks in Praise of Jerry McKenny’ (pp. 81–85) demonstrates why a thinker like McKenny might need to be read. A reason for such need, for example, concerns the approach that McKenny takes in order to understand a thinker—in this case, Hauerwas himself. That McKenny so well understands Hauerwas’s contributions to medical ethics, for example, is because ‘he has absorbed’ (p. 83) those figures central to Hauerwas’s own sense of tradition, power, and the like. Hauerwas also praises McKenny for the ways he champions an ethics where the actualities of bodily vulnerabilities and the corresponding tradition of medical practices to attend to such vulnerabilities establish a kind of syntheton, where ethics and politics are inseparable. Put differently, the participation of medical workers in the lives of sickly persons, and vice versa, seems to demand, for both McKenny and Hauerwas, the ‘common practice of care of the body’ (p. 85). The student taking up this essay can learn from Hauerwas’s gracious praise of McKenny's work, which is itself a repetition of the way McKenny also takes due care to attend to and to foreground, with an abundance of humility, those he has learned from. Thus, the student might learn here that critique is not the only way to show intellectual prowess. Commendation and complement, where due, can open up an opportunity to show where and how a thinker has shaped not only our thinking but also supports central claims of an argument or tradition.
Finally, two essays might benefit a postgraduate student learning to explore new intellectual territory, showing different approaches to such constructive efforts. Angela Carpenter's essay, ‘To Live by Grace: The Role of a Distinctive Reformation Psychology in Barth's Ethics’ (pp. 19–33), and Eric Gregory's essay, ‘Supererogation for Protestants’ (pp. 53–67), show how thinkers might discover avenues for new thinking when considering a scholar that stimulates or surprises, respectively. By stimulate, Carpenter ventures to think with and after McKenny as she considers whether Karl Barth's ethics are ‘workable and coherent’ (p. 19), while attending to a possible deficiency regarding an ‘account of moral formation’ (p. 19). Sketching out the probable coherence of Barth's concern with ‘who one is in relation to God’ (p. 32), while grounding her analysis through a difficult discovering which takes place within a ‘psychology of grace’ (p. 32), Carpenter opens up a question concerning the way of moral development or growth for further examination. Likewise, albeit a surprise, Gregory introduces the concept of supererogation (simply, doing more than one's duty) while reflecting on McKenny's ‘The Rich Young Ruler and Christian Ethics’, a proposal found in the Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics. Though an unlikely concept in relation to McKenny, since it is never mentioned in his work, what Gregory does is orient the reader to possible new directions for further learning, while giving the student reader of his essay, for example, a question she might take up for sustained study and further development. Of course, good teachers do this sort of thing. Both McKenny and Gregory have proven to be such good teachers, since they leave questions hanging on vines, ripened and ready for picking and enjoyment. I think Carpenter too proves as such, since she not only has benefited from such fruit, but shows through her essay where further harvest might take place.
While only highlighting a few of the essays included in this volume, I am encouraged by the essays in Mawson and Martens’ anthology since throughout they give not only the scholar of ethics fodder for further reflection, but examples from which students of moral theology might learn. The examples offer not only theoretical material from which to mature thinking and criticism, but also constructive avenues of scholarship made available because of McKenny's ranging works that map a career focused on the ethics of grace and the normativity of the body. So, returning to my question concerning the success of this volume, there is much one can point toward to suggest the editors have done well to produce a book worth reading. It is certainly a book from which seasoned scholars and new learners might consider the various ways to engage a given thinker, from critical interrogation through to constructive proposals, from charitable disagreement to judicious approval. The Ethics of Grace: Engaging Gerald McKenny is a book we should read and McKenny a scholar from whom we might learn and with whom we might discover the Christian moral life.