Grace might seem to be a problem for ethics. Awareness of our gracious creation and redemption by a loving God seems to undermine the motivation for moral rectitude. The Apostle Paul identified the issue in his letter to the Romans: ‘Should we continue in sin in order that grace may increase?’ (6:1b) In Paul’s rendering, why adhere to the law if we know ourselves already saved by God’s action in Christ? Or conversely, why not sin all the more so that God’s power might be more generously displayed?
In her book, Grace and Social Ethics: Gift as the Foundation of Our Life Together, Angela Carpenter, the Leonard and Marjorie Maas Associate Professor of Reformed Theology at Hope College, develops a Reformed psychology of grace that persuasively responds to this problem. Rather than undermining the possibility of ethics, Carpenter argues that Reformed accounts of grace – our creation and redemption in God – have profound implications for our life together, thus for our social ethics. She insists that knowing ourselves as the recipients of grace can motivate actions of interdependent care, not as a way to shore up our worth but as a free gift of response.
Carpenter begins the book by laying out what she calls a Reformed psychology of grace. Her primary theological interlocutors are Martin Luther, John Calvin and Karl Barth. From these venerable founts, she concludes that all human existence, including our knowledge of God and union with God, are first and foremost gifts of grace. This recognition, and thus the psychology of grace, enables a creature to love God and other creatures.
Having laid out this theological foundation, Carpenter engages with the disciplines of evolutionary anthropology and social psychology in a refreshingly appreciative way. In both disciplines, she finds resonance with this theological account of grace. From evolutionary anthropology, Carpenter develops an account of human sociality as interdependent and cooperative. Rather than a Darwinian competition, Carpenter identifies more fundamentally a capacity for mutual support in the deep evolutionary history of the human species. From social psychology, Carpenter affirms the significance of belonging and self-worth, human yearnings that find their fullest realisation in the embrace of a loving God. In both cases, Carpenter smartly displays the respect of an outsider reading another’s discourse. She remains a theologian, but engages each scholarly discourse on its own terms. In so doing, she offers a careful methodological humility that is worth emulating.
Shifting from this interdisciplinary engagement, Carpenter develops a theological anthropology of grace. She affirms that human dependence on God is expressed in and mediated through our dependence on other creatures. Human worth, therefore, is rooted in God’s loving concern and sustenance. While straightforward theologically, in part two of the book, Carpenter engages the radical political implications of such affirmations in three distinct spheres of concern: work, criminal justice and gun control. Each chapter has an autonomy that would enable use in a social ethics course treating these subjects independently. Together, though, they demonstrate the power of Carpenter’s argument that an awareness of God’s grace in our lives has social implications.
Grace and Social Ethics makes three signal contributions. The book’s wonderful interdisciplinarity is distinctive. Carpenter remains fully theological while engaging the disciplines of evolutionary anthropology and social psychology on their own terms. She does not shy away from debates internal to these disciplines while also demonstrating points of both resonance and dissonance between them and theological affirmations. She thus models a method of appreciative interdisciplinary engagement.
A second contribution is the book’s recasting of social ethics as rooted, first and foremost, in grace. Much of the work of social ethics has centred on questions of sin and injustice. These are important themes for Carpenter as well, but she rightly identifies them as secondary to the fundamental affirmation of grace as the foundation of what it means to be a creature in God.
A third contribution is the insistence that the grace of God’s creative and salvific action is not merely or even primarily individual. Recovering the social vision of the Reformation, Carpenter persuasively reminds us that gift is indeed the foundation of our life together.
The book will be of interest to teachers and students for classes in social ethics, theology and science, and Reformation ethics. Ethicists with particular interest in economic and business ethics, criminal justice and prison abolition, and gun control and violence prevention will all benefit from engagement with Carpenter’s applied chapters in part two of the book.
It is appropriate and telling that Carpenter concludes with a turn to spirituality. Her rigorous yet accessible account of grace ends in prayer and worship, action and hope. Reading Grace and Social Ethics forms the reader in these practices by awakening a fuller awareness of God’s loving care.
