Wannenwetsch's concern is for a recontextualisation of Christian ethics: ‘Do we not have to see the Church … as the matrix out of which Christian ethics is born?’(p. 2). In thus locating the aetiology of Christian ethics, he engages both with the nature of the Church, which he sees as ‘political’, and with the nature of Christian ethics, which he sees as springing from worship. However, the title of this densely argued book is misleading, since it is not itself an ‘ethics’, nor is it about ‘politics’ or ‘Christian citizens’ as the terms are ordinarily used. It might more accurately be entitled ‘Political worship: the source of ethics for citizens of the City of God’, or even ‘A Christian metaphysics of morals’.
Wannenwetsch engages first with ‘Worship as the Beginning of Christian Ethics’, moving towards the integration of ‘lex orandi – lex credendi – lex bene operandi’. He argues that ‘“the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus”(Rom 8:2) is what constitutes the church as a political community, as distinct from an amorphous social process … As the Greeks knew – for a community to be free to act, it must have a law; and that is how it becomes a political community’(p. 26). So far as I can tell, his fundamental point about ‘political worship’ is that it is worship which is truly Spirit‐governed, so that the action which springs from that worship can be expected also to be Spirit‐governed. The Church as a spiritual polity (a term he does not use) thus generates through its worship norms for ethical action. One fundamental problem in this section is that Wannenwetsch never explores precisely what he means by ‘worship’. Though he makes extensive use of Wainwright and later Dix, there is, for example, no study of the eucharist and ethics to focus his argument in liturgical praxis. A second problem is that nowhere does he discuss issues of church governance or magisterium, which must inevitably arise if the Church is to be articulated in the way he commends. Another problem is that there are some extraordinary judgments – for example: ‘Children express their thanks spontaneously. Gratitude, on the other hand, betrays a slave‐like turn of mind’(p. 49, my emphasis).
In a longer central section, Wannenwetsch considers ‘worship as the critical power of Christian ethics: Christian citizens in a torn and divided world’. This is not so much a discussion of what Christian citizens ought to do in a torn and divided world, but of what it means to be a Christian citizen (i.e. a citizen of the City of God) in a world of contested loyalties, and the way in which worship tests and renews Christian identity for members of the Church. Key interlocutors here are William Temple, Hannah Arendt and John Milbank. Amongst the curious judgments in this section is the exclusion of Charles Gore from the Anglo‐Catholic wing of the Church of England and his supposed failure – by contrast with Eric Mascall – to recognise the central significance for ‘political ethics’ of the Church as a social and political entity in its own right (p. 101). Another is that, ‘It would be difficult to ignore the political character of the Church to the degree to which [Wayne] Meeks does’(p. 134), a judgment which appears to be based solely on The First Urban Christians(1983) and entirely to ignore Meeks's later work on early Christian ethics.
In his final section on ‘Worship as formative power for Christian ethics’, Wannenwetsch has a series of short essays on ‘unlearning the hermeneutics of suspicion’; on consensus (without discussion of conciliarity or synodality); on homiletics, ‘life out of abundance’, and sabbath. This section, which I found the best in the book, is, however, relatively underdeveloped, and, given its title, it is surprising to find that it makes no mention whatsoever of the eucharist.
The blurb on the back cover speaks of this book ‘bringing into conversation a variety of traditions (including Lutheran, Catholic, Anglican, and Orthodox)’. This disguises the extent to which Wannenwetsch, who originally wrote the book in German, works out of Lutheranism and the tradition of German, and to some extent American, evangelical theology. It is striking that a study that repeatedly emphasises the centrality of worship for the formation of Christian living makes so little reference to Orthodox sources. The value of this book lies in its clear presentation of a contemporary, German Protestant (but not Reformed) perspective – but this is a perspective which here looks distinctly ethnocentric. I thought I was being offered a theological study of worship and the ethics of transformative participation in the secular, plural polis. Unfortunately, Wannenwetsch's book throws virtually no light on any of the issues that trouble the ‘Christian citizens’ I encounter in a ministry at Westminster Abbey.
