Stanley Hauerwas

Stanley Hauerwas is a fascinating thinker who reckons that narrative and character are the keys to moral thinking in the Christian life. He writes this:

"We do not become free by conforming our actions to the categorical imperative but by being accepts as disciples and thus learning to imitate a master. Such discipleship can only appear heteronomous from the moral point of view, since the paradigm cannot be related to, or determined by, principles known prior to imitation. For the Christian, morality is not chosen and then confirmed by the example of others; instead, we learn what the moral life entails by imitating another.”

What he empahises is that Christian moral teaching is not something "out there", abstracted from the people who live such teaching out in their daily lives.

He thinks too, that Protestant doctrines of justification haven't helped us to live out our discipleship in the world actually:

“The Protestant condemnation of moral theology did not help, as Protestants did little more than assert that good works “flow” from faith. Concern for moral development from the Protestant perspective was thus seen as a form of works righteousness”.

The result he says is that Protestant morality has just been an adaptation of local moral values and ends up being just "decency".

I think he has a point: when i hear people explain what it is to be Christian in practice sometimes it just sounds like they are just talking about middle-class moral decency and not the kind of costly discipleship that Jesus seems to advocating.

He also says:

“What is crucial is not that Christians know the truth, but that they be the truth”.

Which brings me to a further issue: what is the role of suffering for the Christian? Can middle-class white educated Christians (like me) with every privilege going really speak of themselves as taking up their crosses and following Jesus in any convincing way?

An introductory paragraph

“Yes: we are all individuals.” (The Life of Brian)

Imitation of others is not merely a matter of choosing some deeds over others but is basic to the formation of the self. Though the idea that our identities are a composite of those we know is not one that contemporary culture enjoys, it is really not a matter of choosing whether we will imitate someone, but who it is we will imitate. Sociologist George Herbert Mead wrote “the individual develops a self by first becoming an object to himself and he does this by adopting the ‘attitudes’ of the individual members of the group to which he belongs”.The moral self is constructed from the impress of other selves: usually consisting of a conglomeration of parental and societal influences. In the contemporary world of course celebrity and fame have assumed an exalted position in imitation: the exalted figures are, ironically, paradigms of individual freedom and hedonistic excess.

"Jesus the exemplar": what could that mean?

[This may be long and rambling but I would appreciate your comments: one of my supervisors has asked me to "open myself to the kiss of imagination"(!) and write something "wild" in order to hone in on my thesis topic.]

Well, then, what role has/does/should Jesus of Nazareth in moral theology?

"Jesus plays a normative role in Christians’ moral reflection."

"Jesus lived a particular life that has universal meaning; the analogical imagination recognizes how to be faithful to Jesus in ever new situations."
William C. Spohn Jesus and Ethics p.2; p. 186


It is scarcely disputable that Jesus plays “a normative role” in the moral reflection of Christians.
What is in dispute is what that normativity consists of. I like Sphon's observation, that Jesus lived a particular human life - located in space and time quite precisely, and not repeatable, unique in many ways, but that it has a "universal meaning". Jesus' human particularity must be upheld: he is not the instance of a type, or the first of many Christs. You cannot paint an African Christ, or a female Christ, or a Western, blond Christ (more to the point) without doing real violence to true meaning of Christ. He was "like us in every way", but precisely in being himself: he couldn't have been just any of us for exactly that reason.

This means that Jesus' life is made available to us as a pattern of life but only in a way that is conditioned by this particularity and uniqueness. However, I would want to strength the "analogical imagination" idea and say that Jesus is still present, but in a way universally present. He has overcome that particularity by being pneumatologically present in the members of the body and by incorporating them into himself, so that they are at home with him, his brothers and sisters under the Fatherhood of the Father.

Karl Rahner writes:
The imitation of Christ does not consist in the observance of certain moral maxims which may be perfectly exemplified in Jesus, but which have an intrinsic value in themselves independently of him…[but] in a true entering into his life and in him entering into the inner life of the God that has been given to us.

The great Roman Catholic theologian gets it right here: following in the way of Jesus Christ is not a matter of pursuing the values that Jesus represented or embodied, though it is often presented as such. Discipleship of Christ is not merely a matter of resembling him in actions but of "participation" in his life: living with him. "Entering into his life", as Rahner puts it.

The resurrection is a key here because an exemplar can be dead, a mere memory we invoke. But Christ - according to the fundamental Christian testimony - is not dead: he is risen. The resurrection explodes the regular use of Christ as a pattern, because in seeing him resurrected by his Father in the Spirit we know that we can never without external aid follow him in this. We could conceivably even suffer a more a tragic death than Christ's, on behalf of others even: but the resurrection is his and his only to share with us by faith.

Interestingly, the New Testament has a role for a mediated pattern of the way of Christ, in that the apostles and saints were to be afterChrists - I think this Stanley Hauerwas' term.

Bernd Wannenwetsch on sex and the Trinity

Bernd Wannenwetsch replies to an advocate of Christian homosexual marriage, raising some interesting issues for applying the Trinity to our social relationships:

"This necessary move to the doctrine of creation within the doctrine of the Trinity makes a crucial difference to Rogers’ (pro-homosexual marriage) argument, which brings the Trinity into immediate relation with marriage. The Trinity may be the “paradigm or perfect case of otherness as an exchange of gift and gratitude”, as Rogers says. But it cannot as such render the proper model for sexual unions exactly because the Trinity is not a bodily union…

Now it is easy to see why this non-bodily “perfection” of communion may provide a model perfectly suited for Rogers’ claim, which feeds on the marginalization of the meaning of bodily differences. But invoking the Trinity to suggest a “richer” and theologically fuller account of marriage should not make us overlook the bare fact that nowhere in the Scriptures are human sexual unions intended to mirror the Trinity (or at least the union of the Father and Son). Rather, they are specifically assigned to mirror the union of Christ and the church which is a “material”, sensual, in fact a bodily relationship.

That these bodily differences characterize our creaturely existence, means that we should mirror God’s will for human beings to the extent that it can be known from (the witness of) God’s deeds in creation, salvation and perfection. Therefore, when Rogers claims “marriage can represent the Trinity in space and time” he claims at the same time too much and too little. Seeking the sort of perfect community in mirroring God’s Trinitarian life seems to be, at best, a triumphalist anticipation of the eschaton, and, at worst, a denial of our creaturely finitude. "

anyone?

use of Greco-Roman background

How ought knowledge of the historical and cultural context be applied to Paul’s thought, especially as exemplified in 1 Corinthians? Since H.-D. Betz's 1979 commentary on Galatians, Paul’s epistles have been read in the light of the alleged influence of the various streams of First Century Greco-Roman culture. The tendency is to read for (and emphasize) similarity with the background and not to notice difference. It is frequently assumed that Paul is a creature of his times, incapable of challenging the mores and fashions of his day; or, perhaps, of producing from a synthesis of various strands of thought something novel. So it is suggested that Paul uses conventional Greco-Roman rhetoric (so Betz); or apes Platonic thinking about hierarchies (so Castelli); or imports a particular local ideology of the body (so Martin). While in general, the investigation of the conditions for the production of any text is to be applauded, this strategy risks becoming blind to the originality of Paul and the uniqueness of his message; and of a perhaps arbitrary selectivity over which elements of Greco-Roman culture are to be applied in each case.

So, the question is: (humanly speaking) is Paul a genius who come up with something new, or merely a product of his times? To what degree ought we to see his thought as ground-breaking?

Dining with Terrorists anyone?

My review of "Dining with Terrorists" is online here:


http://www.sydneyanglicans.net/culture/reading/dining_with_terrorists/


Love to hear your thoughts. I wrote it along time before the recent spate of "terrorist" attacks...

Imitation as an ethic for today? Some po-mo babble

The value of imitation as an ethic has its detractors. Is the imitation of an example a feasible approach to ethical thinking today? Gender theorist Judith Butler, in an essay entitled “Imitation and Gender Insubordination”, argues in the context of sexual – and particularly homosexual – self-identification that the rhetoric of imitation is dependent on an ordering of the inferior and derivative copy to the superior and authentic original:

[R]econsider then the homophobic charge that queens and butches and femmes are imitations of the heterosexual real. Here “imitation” carries the meaning of “derivative” or “secondary”, a copy of an origin which is itself the ground of all copies, but which is itself a copy of nothing.

For Butler, however, imitation is dubious because the so-called imitated is dependent on the imitator for its status as the original:

Logically, this notion of an “origin” is suspect, for how can something operate as an origin if there are no secondary consequences which retrospectively conform the originality of that origin? The origin requires its derivations in order to affirm itself as an origin, for origins only make sense to the extent that they are differentiated from that which they produce as derivatives…the entire framework of copy and origin proves radically unstable as each position inverts into the other and confounds the possibility of any stable way to locate the temporal or logical priority of either term.

Butler seeks thereby to subvert the entire logic of imitation by undoing the precedence of the original. She cites in particular Jacques Derrida’s riff on Mallarme’s “Mimique”, his “The Double Session”. Derrida’s strategy is to show that an imitator, such as a mime artist, does not in fact imitate some prior thing, but instead actually constitutes the spectre of the original in and through the mime:

[H]e represents nothing, imitates nothing, does not have to conform to any prior referent with the aim of achieving adequation or verisimilitude. One can here foresee an objection: since the mime imitates nothing, reproduces nothing, opens up in its origin the very thing he is tracing out, presenting or producing, he must be the very movement of truth. Not, of course, truth in the form of adequation between the representation and the present of the thing itself, or between imitator and imitated, but truth as the present unveiling of the present... but this is not the case.... We are faced then with mimicry imitating nothing: faced, so to speak, with the double that couples no simple, a double that nothing anticipates, nothing at least, that is not itself already double. There is no simple reference... this speculum reflects no reality: it produces mere "reality-effects"... in this speculum with no reality, in this mirror of a mirror, a difference or dyad does exist, since there are mimes and phantoms. But it is a difference without reference, or rather reference without a referent, without any first or last unit, a ghost that is the phantom of no flesh...

Further, the structure of imitation, for Derrida, is radically compromised because the imitation can only exist insofar as it is not a perfect imitation. If imitation succeeds too well, then it dissolves itself:

For imitation affirms and sharpens its essence in effacing itself. Its essence is its non-essence…A perfect imitation is no longer an imitation…Imitation does not correspond to its essence, is not what it is – imitation – unless it is in some way at fault or, rather, in default. It is bad by nature. It is only good insofar as it is bad.

Imitation undoes itself. Derrida is mainly concerned with mimhsij in the aesthetic sphere, as in Plato and Aristotle; Butler, by casting human identity as performative, appropriates Derrida’s deconstruction of mimetic ideas for what is essentially an ethical discussion.