Hauerwas on Evangelicals

In this very short video, Stanley Hauerwas points to a few things that evangelicals need to recover.  His thoughts are a simple articulation of what I often struggle to communicate to my evangelical friends.  I left my work with a campus ministry organization because Dietrich Bonhoeffer (and later Karl Barth) showed me that the church is not a second reality to my immediate relationship with God.  Instead, it is precisely through the church that a person knows God.  Jesus mediates between humanity and God, and the church is inexorably bound up with Jesus.

After coming to Duke and taking (only) two semesters of church history, it is clear to me that our conception of faith, and the church as well, is one that we’ve inherited  As Hauerwas says, “You don’t get to make up God.”  I’ve come to see that it is absolutely vital to the Christian faith of today that we engage with the faith of old in order to remain faithful tomorrow.  This means that we need to read Scripture in concert with the voices of past Christians, in dialogue with the wisdom of the Church.  Recognizing that we are actors in a drama that began 2000 years ago is crucial to combat myopic, and thus heretical, conceptions of God.

For What Its Worth: A 2009 Ranking of Graduate Programs in Theology

R.R. Reno, Professor of Theology at Creighton University and an editor at First Things, ranked the best places to do Theology in North America.  This is an explicit evaluation of graduate schools engaged in Orthodox theology.

It is difficult to distill his rankings into a simple, ordered, linear list.  I suggest you read the article:

Duke University

Here is a rough distillation:

1. /2. DUKE University  2./1. Notre Dame (Reno makes a case for why each school is perhaps better than the other)

3. Princeton University/ Princeton Theological Seminary (if considered as a package)

3. Wycliffe College/ Toronto School of Theology

5. Marquette

Other notable mentions:

- University of Dayton

Notre Dame

-Perkins School of Theology

-Baylor

-Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology at Berkeley

-Harvard, Yale, Chicago

Reno refers to a previous article undergirding his rationale, which he published a few months ago.

As for my thoughts:

I am happy to see that Reno praised two of my professors this semester: my OT professor, Dr. Stephen Chapman (AKA: Chaps) and my church history professor, Dr. Warren Smith.   Both are excellent.

The Life-and-Death Contest

I think a Bonhoeffer quotation is far past due:

“Thus at the very beginning of Christian fellowship there is engendered an invisible, often unconscious, life-and-death contest.  “There arose a reasoning among them.” :  this is enough to destroy a fellowship.

Hence it is vitally necessary that every Christian community from the very outset face this dangerous enemy squarely, and eradicate it.  There is no time to lose here, for from the first moment when a man meets another person he is looking for a strategic position he can assume and hold over against that person.  There are strong persons and weak ones.  If a man is not strong, he immediately claims the right of the weak as his own and uses it against the strong.  There are gifted and ungifted persons, simple people and difficult people, devout and less devout, the sociable and the solitary.  Does not the ungifted person have to take up a position just as well as the gifted person, the difficult one as well as the simple?  And if I am not gifted, then perhaps I am devout anyhow; or if I am not devout it is only because I do not want to be.  May not the sociable individual carry the field before him and put the timid, solitary man to shame?  Then may not the solitary person become the undying enemy and ulitimate vanquisher of his socialbe adversary?  Where is there a person who does not with instinctive sureness find the spot where he can stand and defend himself, but which he will never give up for another, for which he will fight with all the drive of his instict of self-assertion?

All this can occur in the most polite or even pious environment.  But the important thing is that a Christian community should know that somewhere in it there will certainly be “a reasoning among them which of them should be the greatest.”  It is the struggle of the natural man for self-justification.  He finds it only in comparing himself with others, in condemning and judging others.  Self-justification and judging others go together, as justification by grace and serving others go together.”

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together, pg. 90-91

Busyness: The Enemy of Spirituality

A friend handed me a photo-copied and coffee stained interview with Eugene Peterson published in 1991 in The Wittenburg Door (I just visited the website of the aforementioned magazine and found it to be reprehensible; a magazine brandishing satire to chop down to size those religious leaders it considers pompous is unfortunate).  Peterson struck a chord with me; his words resonate with my own attempts at spirituality and ministry.

I am posting a few excerpts which are, for me, both a hearty call for repentance and an affirmation of  some of my suspicions about the contemporary protestant Church.  Peterson’s insights are the fruit of a long, faithful pastoral service, thoughtful introspection, and the prophetic viewpoint of a person entrenched in Scripture with one foot in the here and now of the Church and the other in God’s future kingdom.

PETERSON: “Busyness is the enemy of spirituality.  It is essentially laziness.  It is doing the easy thing instead of the hard thing.  It is filling our time with our own actions instead of paying attention to God’s actions…It is an either/or situation.  Busyness has nothing to do with activity, and spirituality is not the absence of activity.  You either enter into what God is doing or you don’t.  A busy person is a lazy person because they are not doing what they are supposed to do.”

DOOR: “It seems like most pastors we know are just like you have, described.  Busy, busy, doing the work of the Church.”

PETERSON: “Most pastors want to run a good church and they will do just about anything to make that happen.  We pastors have a good nose for the market.  We sense when people are getting a little bored and we jazz things up a bit, challenge them with a new project, and we use Sunday morning ‘worship’ as the stage to do that.  I am convinced that pastors don’t give two cents about worship.  They really don’t.  And there’s a good reason for it.  True worship doesn’t make anything happen.  It is a losing of control, a weaning from manipulative language and entertainment.  It’s tough to practice that reality because give the choice between worship and dancing around the golden calf, pastors know people are going to dance.  Pastors sense if they really practice worship they are going to empty out the sanctuary pretty fast.”

“…The pastor’s primary work is leading the people in worship on Sunday morning, proclaiming the word of God, being knowledgeable in theology and scripture, and being committed to a pastoral chair which does not have the therapeutic model for its structure…Pastor’s pray a lot.  Prayer is hard work, but the prayer should be the distinctive about us.  We should have a deliberate or a conscious, intelligent, personal relationship with God which is articulated in prayer.”

DOOR:  “You mentioned earlier that your model for ministry is spiritual direction…What would [that] look like?

PETERSON:  “It doesn’t have a very exact definition, but classically, it is a friendship or companionship which enables another person to recognize and respond to God in their lives in detail, not in generalities.  It takes a lot of leisure.  You can’t do it in a hurry.  It requires extensive knowledge of your people.  You do this over a number of years, not a number of days.  It has no goal in the end.  It is not counseling.  Counseling has a goal, but there’s no goal in spiritual direction.

There is a great story in Moby Dick .  They are in the whale boat and they are chasing Moby Dick.  The sailors are rowing furiously and the sea is frothing, but there is one person in the boat who is not doing anything.  He is just sitting there, quiet and still.  It’s the harpooner, ready to throw the harpoon.  Melville has this great line:  ‘To ensure the greatest efficiency in the dart, the harpoonists of this world must start to their feet out of idleness and not out of toil.’  For a long time the harpoonist appears to be ‘non-productive’.  But that is only so that when the right moment comes he can be productive.”

DOOR:  “So spiritual direction is a slow process that looks idle and inefficient.”

PETERSON:  “It’s subversive.  I’m a subversive, really.  I gather the people in worship, I pray for them, I engage them often in matters of spiritual correction, and I take them on two really strong retreats a year.  I am a true subversive.  We live in a culture that we think is Christian.  When a congregation gathers in a Church, they assume they are among friends in a basically friendly world (with the exception of pornographers, ect.).  IF I, as their pastor, get up and tell them the world is not friendly and they are really idol worshippers, they think I’m crazy.  This culture has twisted all of our metaphors and images and structures of understanding.  But I can’t say that directly.  The only way that you can approach people is indirectly, obliquely.  A head-on attack doesn’t work.  Jesus was the master of indirection.  The parables are subversive.   His hyperboles are indirect.  There is a kind of outrageous quality to them that defies common sense, but later on the understanding comes.  The largest poetic piece in the Bible, Revelation, is a subversive piece.  Instead of being a three point lecturer, the pastor is instead a storyteller and a pray-er.  Prayer and story become the primary means by which you get past people’s self-defense mechanisms…

If the church member actually realized that the American way of life is doomed to destruction and that another kingdom is right now being formed in secret to take its place, he would be pleased at all.  If he knew what I was really doing and the difference it was making, he would fire me.

True subversion requires patience.”

DOOR:  “This sounds so… well … opposite of what most people think a successful pastor should do.

PETERSON:  “Pastors should not give people what they want just because it brings in customers–which it does.  The biggest enemy to the Church is the development and proliferation of programs to meet people’s needs.  Everyone has a hunger for God, but our tastes (needs) are screwed up.  We’ve been raised on junk food, so what we ask for is often wrong or twisted.  The art of spiritual leadership is not to tell people that they can’t have what they want, but to give them something of what they’ve asked for and not let it go at that.  You try to shift the dimensions of their lives slowly towards what God wants.”

If you are interested in reading the whole article, which I encourage you to do, then click here: original article.

The Political Dilemma of Faith

Hauerwas asks, "What do I need, or what do we need, to be a community of friends that can not only tell one another the truth, but want to be told the truth?"

This appears to me to be one of the tenets of  “Hauerwasian” thought:

“The call to be part of the gospel is a joyful call to be adopted by an alien people, to join a countercultural phenomenon, a new polis called church…The challenge of Jesus is the political dilemma of how to be faithful to a strange community, which is shaped by a story of how God is with us.” Resident Aliens, Pg. 30

Our living is dictated by the way in which we frame the problem of faith.  What part of me is being confronted by faith?  God and his Gospel is demanding something of me, but what?

The locus of faith does not reside in right belief; it is not an intellectual problem, but a problem of trust.  The compulsion of the Gospel is not to believe a worldview or adopt a series of propositions, but a summon to entrust my whole self to a good God, a merciful Savior.  The challenge is not to believe the right thing, but to trust in the right person.  Let me be clear, it is precisely because faith it is not an issue of “what”, but a matter of “whom”, that it is imperative what we believe.

Hauerwas contends that while Christianity is not a system of belief, unbelief (atheism) is a problem.  He defines the problem not as intellectual unbelief, but socio-political unbelief.  In other words, the Christian faith is a matter of right living not right thinking. Therefore, atheism cannot be defined in the terms of wrong thinking; it must be defined as wrong living. The problem is not intellectual, but political. The Christian must act on the presupposition that he is a part of God’s people and his plan for history.

The Gospel, as a result, is an invitation to entrust my whole life to God.  Consequently, I now also trust that being adopted into his family (the Church) signifies a new allegiance and with it, a new dilemma: to be faithful to the promise that God is with us.  The moment I ask, “What does it look like to live with a trust that God is with his people in a special way?” faith becomes a sociopolitical predicament.   How do I arrange my life in fidelity to a God and his community to reflect who he is and that I believe in him?  Hauerwas, of course, suggests that to do this is to embrace the oddity of being a Christian.

The Sermon on the Mount is a call for the church to be faithful to who God is and to believe that he is with his people in a way that means something.  The Christian life should be noticeably odd if a person’s values are prioritized around the those Jesus marked in the beatitudes: “blessed are the poor, those who hunger, those who weep, those who are persecuted”.  Certainly, the command to “love your enemies, do good to those who hate you” and to “turn the other cheek” is a sociopolitical challenge.  Jesus says that the world loves those who love them, and the world worries about what they will eat, drink and wear; but this is not true of those who seek the kingdom first.  To seek the kingdom first requires odd living in the eyes of a society that believes each person has the right to make the most of his life.

I Pledge Allegiance?

Hauerwas' theology makes for an uncomfortable read.

Stanley Hauerwas’ classic work, “Resident Aliens,” explores the implications of the church as polis. That is, those who are called out by God are to embody a social alternative that the world cannot on its own terms know. What does it mean for the Christian to be a stranger, to live in community with other believers as an alien colony amidst society?

Is society fundamentally opposed to the church? In particular, is the American axiom, “Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” antithetical to the Cross of Jesus Christ? Democracy is rooted in the belief of unalienable rights. Our society exists to serve the individual’s needs, wants and desires. Our supreme value is freedom: each person as the individual right to choose and to pursue whatever is wanted as long as she does not impede upon that same right in another. Consider the prophetic assessment of Hauerwas:

“The primary entity of democracy is the individual, the individual for whom society exists mainly to assist assertions of individuality. Society is formed to supply our needs, no matter the content of those needs…It has thus become our unquestioned assumption that every person has the “right” to develop his or her own potential to the greatest extent, limited only by the parallel rights of others.”

The primary entity of the Church is Jesus Christ, for whom the Church exists to mirror the very nature of God as revealed through Jesus Christ. The church was formed in and through an all encompassing act of self-donation: the cross.  And on the cross, Jesus forfeited his agenda, his rights, his health, his future, and even his own blood.  If we are a to be a witness, a carrier of our Savior’s costly cross, maybe Jesus’ exhortation to “deny himself and take up his cross and follow me” (Mark 8:34-38) is more than a privatized “spiritual” allegiance.  Perhaps this pledge constitutes a person’s whole life in such a way that he or she becomes very peculiar in society that values “freedom” above all else.

After all, the followers of Jesus relinquish EVERY personal right, and he calls them “blessed” (Matt. 5:3-10).

What consonance is there, then, between the life of the Christian and the rhythms of a society that presumes to be human is to have unalienable rights?

Authentically Christian Community

Founded in 1791, the initials UVM stand for the Latin words Universitas Viridis Montis, or University of the Green Mountains.

The following is an essay I submitted for entrance to Duke Divinity School:

In Life Together, Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s delineation of Christian fellowship brought a theological framework to bear on two of my very different experiences in Christian community.  At a conservative Baptist college, I became disenchanted with Christian community.  The contemporary church culture seemed to value entertainment, proper intellectual assent, and growing numbers over and against the simple goal to love one another.  After graduation, I began work with the Navigators Campus Ministry at the University of Vermont (UVM).  There I encountered a different kind of community centered on loving one another; the challenge of fostering an authentically Christian community confronted my own jaded assumptions of faith and spiritual formation in community.

Our goal at UVM was to build healthy and spiritually mature people, not to build a campus ministry.  As our ministry team desired to nurture Christian community, Dietrich Bonhoeffer provided an articulate theology to guide us.  He states that the greatest threat to Christian fellowship is a visionary ideal for community because this “wish dream” demands that members meet its criteria.  This challenged us to rethink our interactions with those in the community whose relentless need and those whose regular disinterest burdened the ministry.  Did an ideal for spiritual formation motivate my decision to admonish a student who showed little change over the semester?  Am I allowing a student to exist as a completely free person, as God made them to be or am I fashioning them in the image that seems good to me?  Admitting that I might not know what is best for a person freed me to better love students.  It enabled me to release students from the pressures of performance and group expectation; it freed students to follow Jesus and develop into the Christian God created him/her to be.

The resulting community valued spiritual formation and in Bonhoeffer’s words worked to:  “meet one another as bringers of the message of salvation.”  In a culture of authenticity and collaboration, intentional relationships replaced gimmicky events and entertaining group meetings.  Instead of creating a movement, we engendered an environment of grace.  We experienced a community of trust where the message of salvation, the reality of Jesus, continually liberated us from self-justification and self-centeredness and spurred us on to love another in the manner of Christ.  In short, I want to be an experience of Christ for others in the same way these loving relationships rendered an experience of Christ for me.