Hauerwas - oh, it's provocative and its brilliant!

One of my favourite Hauerwas quotes:


'One reason why we Christians argue so much about which hymn to sing, which liturgy to follow, which way to worship is that the commandments teach us to believe that bad liturgy eventually leads to bad ethics. You begin by singing some sappy, sentimental hymn, then you pray some pointless prayer, and the next thing you know you have murdered your best friend.'

Revolutionary Calvinism - Stout again

Stout speaks passionately about democracy, and against the anti-liberal-democratic reading of history proposed by Hauerwas and co:

The first modern revolutionaries were not secular liberals; they were radical Calvinists. Among the most important democratic movement in American history were Abolitionism and the Civil Rights movement; both of these were based largely in the religious communities. Religious colleges and seminaries provided strong support for both movements. If religious premises had not been adduced in support of them, it is unlikely that either movement would have resulted in success. The Christian majority needed to be persuaded in both cases that commitment to scriptural authority was at least compatible with the reform being proposed. If the religious Left does not soon recover its energy and self-confidence, it is unlikely that American democracy will be capable of counteracting either the greed of its business elite or the determination of many whites to define the authentic nation in ethnic, racial or ecclesiastical terms. Democracy and Tradition, p. 300

This reminder is salutary. I think a nice renaissance of religious reasoning is occurring in Australia, and it isn't just a Right wing thing. I wonder if it will bear fruit... Stout could have added Prohibitionism to his list, and that was a movement stemming from the same source but which squandered a good deal of political capital as far as religious groups were concerned.

Stout savages Hauerwas

Hauerwas is so dominant in the thinking of a generation of American theologians that is a relief to hear him challenged. But Stout does so as a non-theologian: it is a shame that it took a non-theologian to do it:

A cynic might say that the secret of Hauerwas's vast influence in the church in the 1980s and 1990s lay in the imprecision of the sacrifice he appeared to be demanding of his followers. Surely he was not proposing that the strength of one's sentimental identification with the church could by itself secure noncomplicity with the evils of the world. His favourite patristic text appears to be Origen's Exhortation to Martyrdom. [Actually, here Stout is taking a piece of O'Donovan's rhetoric in Desire of the Nations rather literalistically! - a bit of a schoolboy error. MJ] But in the absence of a clear statement of the price Christians must be willing to pay, his audience was able to indulge itself in fantasies of martyrdom without experiencing
actualy poverty or persecution at all. (p. 158)

Ouch - harsh but fair. Tenure at Duke hardly seems like persecution, now, does it? He charges Hauerwas with inconsistency over his reading of Scripture. Hauerwas wants to make non-violence thee central feature of the Christian message. But is the pacificist case really convincing on the basis of Scripture? And how come he is such a rigorist on this issue, but not on others - say, on remarriage after divorce? As Stout says:

It is hard...to escape the conclusion that his ethics rests on an extremely selective reading of the Bible. (p. 160)

And further, Stout articulates a point I had thought of but not really expressed before: Hauerwas's church, his 'peaceable kingdom', doesn't seem to exist. When he says 'the church', which church is he talking about? What does he mean? As Stout says,

The actual church does not look very much like a community of virtue, when judged by pacificist standards. (p. 161)

Jeffrey Stout asks three good questions

It's been a hard couple of weeks!

Stout challenges MacIntyre, Hauerwas and Milbank - who have harboured such resentment against modern secular democracy. He asks three good questions (Democracy and Tradition, p. 104):

is it not possible to discern the workings of the Holy Spirit, and thus some reflections of God's redemptive activity, in modern democratic aspirations?

is there nothing in the political life of modern democracies, or in the lives of those who are struggling for just and decent arrangements within them, that a loving God would bless?

if the plenitude of God's triune inner life shones forth in all of creation, cannot theology discren some such light in democratic political community?

Well indeed. I would add a fourth question: is it not the case that modern democratic community is the child of Christendom, even if it is somewhat of a prodigal?

Jeffrey Stout and Piety

Jeffrey Stout is a very interesting figure in the American political philosophy and ethics scene. For one, he is a liberal who takes theologians and theology seriously. In particular, he addresses the work of Stanley Hauerwas and Alasdair MacIntyre as 'new traditionalists', and even adds to this company John Milbank. Stout is a finder of common ground, a man who mediates between seemingly intractable positions.

In his 2004 book Democracy and Tradition, Stout traces some interesting themes. Often, democracy is accused of 'impiety' by traditionalists: it emphasises self-reliance rather than observance of the conventions of the community and the spirit of place. Yet, in his reading of Emerson and Whitman, Stout finds that piety is in fact reconfigured rather than abandoned. He would contend then, that democracy is spiritual and pious, if not religious.

More on this anon.

Update

The view from my room at Nuneham College, Cambridge.

Well it has been a slower period than normal on what my sister affectionately calls 'the most boring blog in the world.' Not that I'm sensitive...

Chiefly, the reason is that my HP/Compaq laptop has given up the ghost, and it has taken the Uni computer dudes a few days to decide this. This is the longest I have ever owned a single laptop: others have been lost to lightening strike, theft, water spillage (what idiot left a paper cup of water on the computer desk at Moore College), and virus. I would love your help on a replacement: at the moment I am favouring a Toshiba Satellite Pro.

Cambridge was excellent: I went to a Symposium on Oliver O'Donovan's Ways of Judgment which is proving to be a re-readable book - which in a world of many great books is high praise. Trouble with the English in formats like this is that they are too polite, and so it is hard to tell when they are actually having an intellectual disagreement. Jonathan Chaplin, Nigel Biggar and Ben Quash gave papers, and O'Donovan responded to each. He is a very fine and engaging speaker, and concedes very little!

The Tyndale Conference followed: this was more of a mish-mash of issues and papers. We heard some very interesting stuff on Islam, and also from David Ford (Prof at Cambridge) on 'Scriptural Reasoning'. He has a new book out called 'Christian Wisdom' which looks enticing. Basically, he is suggesting that inter-faith dialogue (and ecumenical dialogue) take place on the basis of reading one another's scriptures. This prevents an annoying liberal consensus having to be established first (WCOC style). Brian Brock gave a great paper on Genesis 1-4 and ethics. We heard some other papers on politics that made me feel more and more that Christendom wasn't so bad, crusades and what-not notwithstanding. Whenever I hear a Christendom-basher make huge sweeping statements about some fourteen centuries of Church-state relations - as is currently the fashion in Hauerwas-dominated circles - it makes my toes curl. I am becoming more grumpily conservative in me old age...

I also went to one of the Biblical Theology papers given by Brian Rosner. What was fascinating for me is that I realised that there is a HUGE chasm between the methods of biblical studies scholars and those involved in doctrine and ethics. And it seems to me that there is not a great deal of mutually respectful conversation going on between the two...

Since then: I have been reading Barth's Dogmatics II.i, one of the must-read volumes. His review of the Supralapsarian-Infralapsarian controversy is fascinating... though you can see how he is introducing his own position as the only alternative through his account.

I should also report that I have an almost complete first draft of my thesis. Blogging has not hindered but rather helped this! Having had a couple of readers review parts of it, I am encouraged to do a lot better of course. But at least I am getting better at answering that 'what is your thesis about' question...

Hauerwas on Narrative theology

A key question for narrative theologians is this: 'how may the claims of a story to shape our lives be judged?'

Stanley Hauerwas offers four “working criteria”, without claiming for his list completeness or absolute clarity:

First, a story must display the power to release us from destructive alternatives.
It must, secondly, it must display ways of seeing through current distortions.
Thirdly, it ought to allow room to keep us from having to resort to violence.
Lastly, it should show a sense for the tragic: how meaning transcends power.

This list of criteria appears to be a little arbitrary, or linked to Hauerwas’ own ethical preferences (for non-violence, for example). Has he at this point reintroduced some abstract ethical ideas having previously disavowed them? Perhaps this is the weakness of the narrative turn that Hauerwas advocates: are these criteria prior to, or the result of a narrative understanding of discourse? Even despite his protestations about the provisionality of his criteria, there is no clear answer given (in this essay) as to how these have arisen. One proposal at this stage would be for an appeal to a master-story – namely the one that Christians tell about Jesus Christ and his Father - that narrates these criteria as the ones by which subsidiary stories ought to be evaluated (and adopted or rejected); and I suspect this is what Hauerwas has in fact done (and does do in practice) but appears to conceal somewhat. Towards the end of his essay, he more explicitly suggests that it is the acceptance of certain stories as “canonical” that marks religious faith. What this means in effect is that through these stories recognized as canonical we “discover our human self”, and are able to judge the adequacy of “alternative schemes for humankind”. Again, we need to ask “why are these stories canonical?” Isn’t this shifting the plausibility problem rather than answering it?

Further, Hauerwas’ criteria appear to ask which narrative works best, leaving him open to the charge of pragmatism. He freely concedes that there may be a plurality of narratives that meets his criteria. However, if these narratives make contradictory, even inimical claims about the world, and God, but work equally well to (say) steer us from violence, are we not able to make further discrimination between them? Are the differences between them merely irrelevant in that case? For those who inhabit these competing stories, it is unlikely to be an easy matter to cast off some parts of the narrative as unimportant.

There are many stories that do not exhibit these criteria and yet have claims to shape our lives. In our time as in the ancient world, stories of violent vengeance make powerful and popular appeal to the ideal of individual, extra-legal action to resolve outstanding moral business. Violence is essential for a feeling of justice in the resolution of these tales. This is even now advocated by Peter A. French, The Virtues of Vengeance ([Lawrence]: University Press of Kansas, 2001), who analyses the pursuit of vengeance in Western films like The Searchers and Unforgiven. Hauerwas would, no doubt, say that these are “bad” stories...But then, he already decided this on - well what grounds exactly?