Our friend Dan Morehead has interviewed Stanley Hauerwas for Wunderkammer Magazine. Among other things, they discuss his new memoir, Hannah's Child: A Theologian's Memoir (Eerdmans 2010). You can also check out a review of the memoir at Englewood Reviews.
Our friend Dan Morehead will soon be interviewing Stanley Hauerwas for a feature in Wunderkammer Magazine. So Dan has invited us to have some input into the interview. What question would you ask Hauerwas? What would you like him to discuss in the interview?
Bernd Wannenwetsch, ed., Who Am I? Bonhoeffer's Theology Through His Poetry (T&T Clark 2009), 259 pp. (thanks to T&T Clark for a copy)
I've been waiting eagerly for this book, and I wasn't disappointed. An impressive range of scholars – including Oliver O'Donovan, Stanley Hauerwas, Bernd Wannenwetsch, Hans Ulrich, Brian Brock, Philip Ziegler, and others – offer theological readings of Bonhoeffer's poetry.
The ten poems that Bonhoeffer wrote in Tegel prison in 1944 were among his last works. This book includes the text of the poems (German and English on facing pages), together with an essay on each poem. The kind of close reading modelled in these essays is unfortunately rare in contemporary theology; and the essays show that our own theological horizons can be extended through such a discipline of slow, attentive reading.
Of course, Bonhoeffer was scarcely a first-rate poet. Yet as Marilynne Robinson has observed, poetic language for Bonhoeffer "functions not as ornament but as ontology"; or as Philip Ziegler puts it, "even at its most stylized – as in the prison poems – [Bonhoeffer's] writing advances nothing less than decisive claims about reality" (p. 142). This does not mean that the poems should be regarded merely as "versified theology", as though they could be translated without remainder into prose. The contributors to the volume are aware of this, and so their aim is not so much to explain or interpret the poems as to think along with them and to see what theological possibilities they might open. Indeed, as Hauerwas very aptly remarks: "I do not, however, want to give the impression that the poem is an explanation.... For I assume that one of the tasks of poetry is to teach why 'explanations' are not all that interesting" (p. 101).
Three of the essays here really stand out. Hauerwas offers some incisive reflections on the poem "The Friend". This poem was written for Bonhoeffer's friend Eberhard Bethge; some early readers mistakenly took it to be a poem about a homosexual partnership. "Such an assumption," Hauerwas notes, betrays our own "impoverished understanding of friendship" (p. 100). For Bonhoeffer, friendship belongs not to the sphere of the orders of creation (work, marriage, government). It belongs instead to the sphere of freedom; it is grounded in nothing and has no necessity. It is not divinely mandated, nor is it a matter of ethics and obedience. But since friendship stands outside the mandates of creation, it is also able to transform these mandates, turning them from law to gospel. Marriage, for example, is divinely ordained; it requires obedience and responsibility. But marriage can be "given life by the realm of freedom in which friendship flourishes" (p. 106). It is thus friendship that "saves the mandates from their potential to be repressive" (p. 108). On this basis, Hauerwas goes on to argue that this poem evokes an alternative politics: "'The Friend' is Bonhoeffer's attempt not only to say, but to enact in a world of terror, that God's church exists making friendships possible" (p. 111).
Michael Northcott's essay explores the relation between human identity and spiritual disciplines in the poem "Who am I?" In a brilliant reading of the poem, he critiques the way Rowan Williams and Bernd Wannenwetsch (he might also have mentioned Hauerwas) have "enlisted Bonhoeffer ... in the post-liberal attempt to recover the moral self through the public worship and the politics of the body of Christ" (p. 15). In Northcott's view, Bonhoeffer is not trying to overturn the modern quest for interiority or authentic selfhood. He is comfortable using language of inwardness and individuality; but against modern narratives of the self, he argues "that moral responsibility is the mark of true personhood" (p. 17).
Another critique of postliberal ecclesiology appears in Hans Ulrich's remarkable essay on the poem "Stations on the Way to Freedom" – far and away the most powerful and compelling contribution to the book. Ulrich argues that Bonhoeffer's whole theology is pervaded by the theme of God's acting, God's presence. The poem indicates "the places of God's acting", the stations of God's presence in our lives: God is present where our lives are structured by the disciplines of discipleship; God is present where we act rightly; and God is present where we suffer because of our dedication to God. In ecclesiological terms, this means the church does not represent God's action, but is instead "the place holder for God's acting in the world". As a place holder, the church "does not become the new polis"; it is "the place of transformation, the place of change, the place of giving oneself over to God" (p. 165).
Ulrich thus argues that Bonhoeffer's political theology must be understood as a distinctively Lutheran theology of the cross: not a political theology in which the church represents God's gifts or action, but one in which "God stands in our place – and there happens our suffering because we cannot act any more" (p. 162). And it is only in this way that true freedom appears in our lives: not a freedom consisting in a plurality of options, but a kind of cruciform freedom, the suffering experience of God's presence, guidance and action.
I've highlighted just three of the essays here: but this whole collection is an exciting, creative, tightly focused exploration of Bonhoeffer's poetry and theology. It's not only an invaluable contribution to Bonhoeffer studies; it also contributes significantly to contemporary conversations about ecclesiology, ethics, politics, and human identity.
Speaking of books and publishing, I’m always pleased when I come across some weird and unaccountable publishing mishap in one of my books, some defect that sets it apart from the common herd. A notable example is the well-known Hauerwas and Willimon book, Resident Aliens (Abingdon 1989). My copy has the following pagination: 1-32, then 65-96, then 33-64, then 97-175. I have no idea how many copies were printed like this: perhaps I’ve got a Very Rare and Lucky Copy? Or perhaps a whole print-run came out like this?
In any case, pagination like this really adds to the element of surprise: you never quite know what’s coming next. And it’s perhaps a mark of the book’s tightly focused argument that it still reads pretty coherently when you cross that boundary from p. 32 to p. 65. If you lost concentration for a moment while reading, you might not even notice. The text reads: “What we call ‘freedom’ becomes the tyranny of our own desires. We are kept detached, strangers to one another as we go about fulfilling our needs and asserting our rights. The [page break] me. I must be true to myself. The more we can be free of parents, children, spouses, duties, the more free we will be to ‘be ourselves’…”
Over at Halden’s blog, we’ve been discussing English grammar (in response to some silly sausage who disapproves of gender-neutral language). This led Halden to post the following anecdote about Hauerwas’ use of grammar:
Stanley Hauerwas was at Harvard to deliver a lecture and, being there early and still needing to do some preparation, he set out to find the library. Not finding it, he stopped a student and asked him, “Excuse me, where’s the library at?”
Incredulous, the student responded, “Sir, at Harvard we don’t end our sentences with a preposition.”
Stanley paused for a moment and then rephrased his question in a more grammatically appropriate manner: “Where’s the library at, asshole?”
Speaking of L’Arche, IVP recently launched a new series, Resources for Reconciliation. The first volume discusses justice and reconciliation. The second volume in the series is a dialogue between Stanley Hauerwas and Jean Vanier, Living Gently in a Violent World: The Prophetic Witness of Weakness (IVP 2008). Their dialogue explores the prophetic witness of L’Arche to the church and to society. “In a world determined to cure those who cannot be cured, Christians should refuse to do anything other than be with those Jesus taught us to be loved by – that is, those we ‘help’ by simply being present” (p. 56).
Vanier writes: “Today in France they are saying that within a few years there will be no more children with Down syndrome because they will all have been aborted…. The heart of L’Arche is to say to people, ‘I am glad you exist.’ And the proof that we 
are glad that they exist is that we stay with them for a long time. We are together, we can have fun together. ‘I am glad you exist’ is translated into physical presence” (p. 69).
And Hauerwas writes: “Long story short: we don’t get to make our lives up. We get to receive our lives as gifts. The story that says we should have no story except the story we chose … is a lie. To be human is to learn that we don’t get to make up our lives because we’re creatures…. Christian discipleship is about learning to receive our lives as gifts without regret” (p. 93).
And in a concluding reflection, John Swinton observes: “L’Arche reminds us that time is not simply a commodity to be wasted, spent, saved or used but is rather a gift given…. The people living in L’Arche have recognized that time is a gift…. L’Arche lays down a marker in the fabric of time, a marker reminding us that in Jesus, time has been redeemed for the practices of peace” (pp. 104-5).
Okay, I promise this will be my last post on Stringfellow – here are some brief excerpts from four different essays on Stringfellow (by Stanley Hauerwas, Rowan Williams and others). Note especially the brilliant title of the second essay: “Speaking 
Nonsense to Power.” I think that’s a great way of summing up Stringfellow’s theology.
“Stringfellow sometimes comes over refreshingly as someone very short on common sense. He had massive imagination, massive depth, and some ways very little self-protective sense. What the world calls common sense was uncommonly lacking in much of what he did. This is characteristic of many of the servants of Jesus Christ throughout the ages, because it is not common sense that they are interested in, it is the uncommon sense of Christ himself.”
—Rowan Williams, “Being Biblical Persons,” in William Stringfellow in Anglo-American Perspective, ed. Anthony Dancer (Ashgate 2005), p. 185.
“Whereas the whole 20th-century Christian theological project has been conditioned by multiple arguments about how biblical texts can fit into our way of seeing things (whether that way is one circumscribed by autonomous secular reason or by pluralistic religious expressivism), Stringfellow’s point of departure is to transform existing procedures and to invite us to re-encounter the world narrated biblically. As he said …, his purpose was to construe America biblically, not to construe the Bible Americanly.”
—Simon Barrow, “Speaking Nonsense to Power: The Mission of William Stringfellow,” in William Stringfellow in Anglo-American Perspective, ed. Anthony Dancer (Ashgate 2005), p. 175.
“ ‘Translating’ Stringfellow’s apocalypticism … is a means of evading what he was saying and avoiding what really disturbs the reader about him – the uncompromising character of his criticisms, his refusal to leave any ‘common ground’ for dialogue…. What is so remarkable about Stringfellow’s use of apocalyptic is that he did not think it needed to be demythologized. Rather than seeing apocalyptic as an extravagant and overblown way of talking about matters that liberal politics and social science discuss more directly, Stringfellow … wanted to help us see how apocalyptic language narrates our world.”
—Stanley Hauerwas and Jeff Powell, “Creation as Apocalyptic: A Homage to William Stringfellow,” in Radical Christian and Exemplary Lawyer: Honoring William Stringfellow, ed. Andrew McThenia (Eerdmans 1995), p. 32.
“Stringfellow died before I could have known him personally. In the books, though, he draws us into his circle, mixing anecdotes about himself and his acquaintances in with theological tracts. He seems to offer himself as a friend, one with bits of crazy advice and carelessly-repeated stories. Beneath our cacophonous politics, his pages whisper about how to live in a world both consumed by the power of death and infused in every corner with, for what it is worth, the Word of God.”
—Nathan Schneider, “The Biblical Circus of William Stringfellow”, Religion Dispatches March 2008.
As a regular contributor to our discussions, Nate Kerr is well known to F&T readers. His forthcoming book Christ, History and Apocalyptic is one of the most exciting theological works I’ve read in quite some time. This is mind-expanding, first-.jpg)
rate stuff: it’s both a brilliant critical reading of modern theology (moving through Troeltsch, Barth, Hauerwas and Yoder), and a compelling constructive argument for an “apocalyptic” approach to Christian theology. Really, it could be read as a kind of manifesto: it points the way towards a new way of doing theology, and towards a distinctively theological way of thinking about history and the church’s mission. The book will soon be released in the UK by SCM (as part of their new Veritas series), and in the US by Cascade (as part of their new Theopolitical Visions series).
Nate has kindly given me permission to post an excerpt here. So let me whet your appetite – this sample is from Chapter 5, entitled “John Howard Yoder: The Singularity of Jesus and the Apocalypticization of History.”
Nathan R. Kerr, Christ, History and Apocalyptic: The Politics of Christian Mission (SCM/Cascade, 2008)
Throughout his oeuvre, Yoder struggles to articulate an understanding of the Incarnation in terms of the human-historical or lived character of Jesus’ identity with God. In doing so, Yoder aims to eschew a too easily assumed ‘metaphysical’ or ‘logological’ sense of the Incarnation, which would make of the idea that Jesus is ‘the Word become flesh’ a mere representation to us of some metaphysically conceptualized relation of the Logos to God, according to which conceptualization we might then proceed ontologically to ‘locate’ or ‘emplot’ history within a mediated hierarchy of eternity and time. Against this, Yoder argues for what he calls the ‘historical’ or ‘Jesulogical’ sense of the Incarnation:
When the Jewish writer of the Fourth Gospel sang ‘the word became flesh and tabernacled among us … he meant to describe the setting for the entire earthly work of the man Jesus, fully human, vulnerable, to whom that other John pointed as the ‘Lamb who takes away the world’s sin’. ‘Incarnation’ then means that in the concrete historical reality of the life and death and rising of Jesus, the otherwise invisible God has been made known normatively.’What I take Yoder to mean here is that we can only speak of Jesus as God – but not only that, of the eternal Logos itself – from within the density and angularity of his constituent life-story. Yoder remarks, for example, that the statement at Jesus’ baptism, ‘Thou art my Son’, is ‘not the definition or accreditation of a metaphysically defined status of Sonship; it is the summons to a task. Jesus is commissioned to be, in history, in Palestine, the messianic son and servant, the bearer of the goodwill and the promise of God.’ The words of Rowan Williams help to sum up Yoder’s point here: ‘There is no sense in thinking that we can talk about the Incarnation without talking of the whole course of Jesus’ life, the whole historical identity of Jesus’ – with all the ambiguity, uncontrollability, and contingency that such an identity entails.
The point that apocalyptic makes is not only that people who wear crowns and who claim to foster justice by the swords are not as strong as they think – true as that is: we still sing, ‘O where are Kings and Empires now of old that went and came’? It is that people who bear crosses are working with the grain of the universe. One does not come to that belief by reducing social process to mechanical or statistical models, nor by winning some of one’s battles for the control of one’s own corner of the fallen world. One comes to it by sharing the life of those who sing about the Resurrection of the slain Lamb.It is by way of doxology that we move beyond ideology and come to participate in the lived ‘Messianic time’ that is the singular political act of Jesus. And so it is according to this mode of doxological action that I shall seek to follow the political logic of the ‘apocalypticization of history’ as it occurs in Jesus’ historicity on its way to becoming an ‘apocalyptic politics of Christian mission’.
Here’s a picture from last week’s conference in Rome: Milbank and Hauerwas meet Benedict XVI. (Thanks to Luke Bretherton for the pic.) A free book for the best caption…
We’ve discussed this before – but, just as a reminder, here’s a remark from Stanley Hauerwas on churches and Independence Day. Addressing a group of seminary students, he said:
“I assume most of you are here because you think you are Christians, but it is not all clear to me that the Christianity that has made you Christians is Christianity. For example: How many of you worship in a church with an American flag? I am sorry to tell you that your salvation is in doubt. How many of you worship in a church in which the fourth of July is celebrated? I am sorry to tell you that your salvation is in doubt.”
Update: Jim thinks Hauerwas is wrong; and Chris and Lee agree.
There are just a few books that I’m really anticipating this year. One of them 
is Nate Kerr’s forthcoming book in the new Veritas series: Christ, History and Apocalyptic: The Politics of Christian Mission. This was originally a Vanderbilt dissertation under Paul DeHart – and it looks like an exceptional work which brings together some of the most important (but usually separate) strands of contemporary theology. The book will be launched later this year at the AAR meeting in Chicago. Here’s the table of contents and the blurb:
this work comprises an original genealogical analysis of twentieth-century theological encounters with the modern historicist problematic through a series of critical engagements with the work of Ernst Troeltsch, Karl Barth, Stanley Hauerwas, and John Howard Yoder. Bringing these thinkers into conversation at key points with the work of Walter Benjamin, Carl Schmitt, John Milbank, and Michel de Certeau, among others, this genealogy analyses and exposes the ideologically ‘Constantinian’ assumptions shared by both modern ‘liberal’ and contemporary ‘post-liberal’ accounts of Christian politics and mission. On the basis of a rereading of John Howard Yoder’s place within this genealogy, the author outlines an alternative ‘apocalyptic historicism’, which conceives the work of Christian politics as a mode of subversive, missionary encounter between church and world. The result is a profoundly original vision of history that at once calls for and is empowered by a Christian apocalyptic politics, in which the ideologically reductionist concerns for political effectiveness and productivity are surpassed by way of a missionary praxis of subversion and liberation rooted in liturgy and doxology.”
One of Stanley Hauerwas’s most memorable essays is his 1993 piece, “Why Gays (as a Group) Are Morally Superior to Christians (as a Group)” (reprinted in the excellent Hauerwas Reader) – an essay in which Hauerwas argues that gays are morally superior to 
Christians, since they managed to get themselves excluded from military service. His point is simply that the church often fails to take its own identity seriously, and so we pose no real threat to the status quo. But imagine a church that really took itself seriously – it would be an intolerable threat, an unbearable disruption! “Could you trust someone who would think it more important to die thank to kill unjustly? Are these people fit for the military? … Would you want to shower with such people? You never know when they might try to baptize you.”
Further, Hauerwas observes that the real function of society’s “no” to gays is simply to shield ourselves from the painful truth of our own moral confusion. In a culture of drastic moral incoherence, “the moral ‘no’ to gays becomes the necessary symbolic commitment to show that we really do believe in something.” We pronounce this “moral no” precisely in order to convince ourselves of our own security; we exclude someone else in order to reassure ourselves that we are not without a moral norm. But in holding up the gay community as a moral example, Hauerwas turns the tables. He poses a prophetic challenge to the church, a challenge to our complacency and our calm assurance of our own moral superiority.
I think a similar prophetic challenge underlies Rowan Williams’ famous lecture, “The Body’s Grace”, presented to 
the Lesbian and Gay Christian Movement in 1989. The lecture has been widely discussed – vigorously praised by some, and feverishly condemned by others. But in the first instance, we should realise that Williams was not simply trying to provide a descriptive account of same-sex desire, or a straightforward theological description of human sexuality.
First and foremost, his aim was to provoke a certain kind of response. His lecture was more a prophetic challenge than a didactic analysis: he was concerned precisely with the question of the church’s identity. Like Hauerwas’ essay, Williams’ lecture tries to rouse the church, to provoke us to action – to ask what an authentic Christian community might look like here and now, in an environment of moral confusion and fragmentation.
I have a suspicion that the real heart of Williams’ lecture is disclosed in his humorous offhand remark that, within the church, the ordinary “norm” of male-female intercourse may itself be the exemplary sexual perversion, since such intercourse can involve the action of “one agent [i.e. the husband] … who doesn’t have to wait upon the desire of the other.” As Williams puts it: “in a great many cultural settings, the socially licensed norm of heterosexual intercourse is a ‘perversion’.”
It is at precisely this point that the fundamental intention of Williams’ lecture becomes clear: to disturb the complacency of Christians, characterised as we are by a seemingly invincible aura of moral superiority. Williams is trying to threaten us, to show us that we are not morally safe and secure. Thus his whole lecture turns on the argument that “sexual union is not delivered from moral danger and ambiguity by satisfying a formal socio-religious criterion” – it’s simply not that easy; we’re not as safe as we thought we were.
As writers like Williams and Hauerwas remind us, then, the task of Christian ethics is not to shore up the status quo, not to reassure us of our own security – and certainly not to naturalise the status quo, so that our own behaviour becomes the self-evident norm against which every deviation can be identified and condemned as such. Instead, the task of Christian ethics is to bring us under the judgment of the gospel, and to remind us that our action is always fraught with danger. In every new decision we are balanced precariously on the edge of a knife. In every decision, we stand under judgment. It is the false prophet who cries “peace, peace – when there is no peace.”
A sermon by Kim Fabricius
Two numbers forever etched in our memories of infamy: 9/11. Reflecting back on the 
event a year later, one commentator (Stanley Hauerwas) wrote: It was “an apocalyptic moment Christians in America cannot ignore. Surely something like how we felt as we survived the days after September 11, 2001, is how the followers of Jesus felt after the crucifixion”: disbelief, confusion, grief, anger – and fear. We were all afraid of further acts of terror. The disciples too were afraid of further acts of terror – the state terror – of imperial Rome. What happened next?
For the followers of Jesus, there were two days of total eclipse, and then – resurrection! – an even more apocalyptic moment than the crucifixion: in Jewish thought resurrection belonged to the scenario of the end-times, when God would bring the old world of suffering and death to a dramatic conclusion and begin a new world of justice and joy. Surely a cause for celebration, you might think. But – observe – the immediate reaction of the disciples to the presence of the risen Christ is not joy – but, again, fear. A different kind of fear, the commentators tell us, than frightened fear, rather “awe” in the presence of the holy. But I wonder if there isn’t a bit of special pleading here. I wonder if there wasn’t that same fear-as-fright about their reaction, except now with a different object: not Caiaphas and Pilate but Jesus himself. For had not the cowardly disciples denied, betrayed, abandoned their leader to his fate? In other words, hadn’t they behaved in such a way as to invite and expect some sort of payback? Indeed, isn’t it that the most astonishing thing of all about the resurrection of Jesus: there was no payback!
Think of 9/11 again. On the third day, as it were, America rises from the dead, from the ashes of Ground Zero. What is the immediate reaction of the nation, embodied in the melodramatic speeches, soon to become military policy, of George Bush? What else but payback? First the easy pickings of Afghanistan, then the full-scale invasion of Iraq; and now here we are, five years later, with George Bush unbowed and unrepentant, in defiance of reason and evidence still speaking the empty rhetoric of freedom and democracy, still claiming that he did the right thing, and, notwithstanding the current anarchy and slaughter, eyes wide shut in denial, still declaring that he’d do it again: bring the superior firepower of the US, its swift and righteous sword, to bear on the evil and cowardly terrorists.
But after Easter, what does the crucified and risen Jesus do? Does he respond to his execution by marshalling that legion of angels he refused to deploy on Golgotha, smashing his way into the imperial palace with shock and awe, overwhelming the hopelessly outgunned royal guard, and exacting a righteous and terrible revenge on Pilate, who, of course, had form as a ruthless tyrant long before his showdown with the rebel from Galilee? Does he storm the Temple in a way that makes the disruptive demonstration the Sunday before look like the piece of street theatre that, in fact, it was, then advance beyond the court of Gentiles and invade the court of priests, seize the hapless Caiaphas and – how ironically apt – cast him from the spire he had once stood atop with the devil himself? Does he round up those reprehensible disciples, perhaps hood and humiliate them, or take them down to the pool of Bethesda for a bit of waterboarding, which, after all, isn’t really torture, or, at the very least, give them a tongue-lashing they’ll never forget and send them away in guilt and despair? None of the above. No violence, no vengeance – no payback!
So what does the crucified and risen Jesus do? He ignores Pilate and Caiaphas, his judges and executioners, completely. And when he meets his followers – who would believe it! – he says things like, “Do not be afraid,” and “Peace be with you.” He shows them his wounds to reassure them, and to demonstrate that even in his regnant glory his decorations will always be scars. And he commissions them to carry on his ministry – how? As avenging furies, agents of retribution? (“I’ll be back, through you, my shock troops, and this time it’s personal.”) No, no payback! Indeed the mission impossible he gives them is a ministry of forgiveness and reconciliation.
But why should this surprise us? Hadn’t the crucified One already disarmed his disciples in the garden, and forgiven his killers on Calvary? Will the risen One now change his mind? In John’s gospel Jesus breathes the Holy Spirit on the disciples as he gives them the gift of peace (John 20:21-22). This is John’s version of Luke’s Pentecost. But the peace of Christ is not for them alone. The man for others (Bonhoeffer) commissions a church for others. The peace they receive they must share, declare, and effect. And this peace takes the form of – forgiveness! Jesus says: “If you forgive people’s sins, they are forgiven; if you do not forgive them, they are not forgiven” (John 20:23). And though the construction looks like a conditional, as if forgiveness were discretionary – as if the disciples might grant forgiveness to this one but withhold it from that one – the key to Jesus’ command is its gracious sweep and urgency. Forgiveness itself is God’s judgement on sin, and forgiveness itself is the condition that makes justice possible. Wrath – whatever that might mean – must be left to the Father. This is John’s version of Matthew’s Great Commission.
Am I suggesting that forgiveness become the central plank of the West’s ethical foreign policy against terrorism? A counter-question: why the absolute astonishment, indeed repugnance, with which Christian themselves react to such a suggestion? Does it not, in fact, demonstrate – in the sense of “what difference does it make to our discipleship?” – that we do not live the truth that Jesus is the risen Lord, that we ignore the events of Holy and Easter week, as well as his life and teaching, that we honour the seventh beatitude more in the breach than the observance; rather we live as if Caesar (in whatever guise) were Lord, as if the events recorded in our tabloids rather than the stories of Jesus in the Bible define the “real” world, as if violence rather than peace were the origin, goal, and very grain of the universe? If being Christian trumped being American, British, or whatever, and if the church itself practiced a politics of peace, then at least we would have something to say to government that wasn’t the mere echo of its own loud voice.
It is a commonplace to say that the autumn of 2001 changed everything. In fact, 9/11 and its six-year wake has changed nothing. No, it was a spring weekend in the year 33, when there was a most rude interruption to the way the world does its business – a gruesome gibbet, an empty tomb, an unarmed man passing through barricades, waging peace – that is what changed everything. Though you wouldn’t know it. And why on earth should anyone, governments included, believe it when even the church doesn’t?
The American theologian Stanley Hauerwas was once asked, in his dissent from the war on terrorism: “Well, what alternative foreign policy do you have to bombing Afghanistan [and invading Iraq]?” Hauerwas replied: “My only response is [that] I do not have a foreign policy. I have something better – a church constituted by people who would rather die than kill.” People who believe in a saviour who would rather die than kill, who did die rather than kill, and who lives and rules the world – no payback! – with truth and grace, because God is non-violent, and in him there is no violence at all.
A guest-post by Scott Stephens
Peace is one of the most deceptive terms in public discourse. Consequently, it is not at all clear to me that people know what they are referring to when they talk about 
peace. Take the current political climate: peace most commonly refers to not having been part of the invasion of Iraq in the first place, or now getting the hell out of Iraq and thus bringing an end to our part in this bloody war. When it comes to Iraq itself, the West’s dreams of peace are for an end to sectarian violence and the emergence of some kind of nascent democratic society. And yet even at this point things are not what they seem.
Notice, for instance, that the recommendations coming out of the United States Institute of Peace (USIP) have increasingly stressed the importance of the creation of low-wage employment for Iraqi youths (who comprise over sixty percent of the population). The rationale is: get them spending all their time working and saving for clothes, leisure activities or a new iPod and they won’t have either the energy or the motivation to kill other Iraqis. What I find remarkable about this is not just that the grand American rhetoric of ‘bringing freedom to Iraq’ is reduced to the more banal image of adolescent Iraqis flipping falafels at some street vendor in Baghdad. It is the way that this image reflects back to Western democratic societies its fantasies of what peaceful existence looks like. Let me explain what I mean.
The fundamental delusion that rationalised America’s invasion of Iraq was the belief that, once set free from the grasp of a maniacal tyrant, Iraqis would spontaneously 
adopt recognisably democratic forms of social life. In other words, they believed that beneath the skin we are all American, and that the longing for freedom, peace and the advantages of the free market run deep in the human soul. The reality of the situation, however, was that deposing Saddam Hussein opened the gates of hell. As George Packer wrote in The Assassins’ Gate, ‘Iraq without the lid of totalitarianism clamped down has become a place of roiling and contending ethnic claims’.
This state of affairs should have come as no surprise, for the chaos to which the nation reverted post-Saddam was anticipated in King Faisal’s chilling description of his own people in 1933: they are, he said, ‘unimaginable masses of human beings devoid of any patriotic ideas, imbued with religious traditions and absurdities, connected by no common tie, giving ear to evil, prone to anarchy and perpetually ready to rise against any government whatsoever’. Far from releasing Iraqis from the terror of the Ba’athist régime so that some repressed longing for peace could bloom, the American invasion exposed the inherent violence and sheer bloodlust that had been held in check for four decades.
My point here is not to try to exaggerate the violent nature of the Iraqi people, but rather to call into question the widespread belief that peaceableness is a quality that underlies the human condition, which is allowed to surface whenever the external determinants of tyranny or extremism are removed. Is it not rather that human beings partake in a violence so profound that it dwarfs even the most aggressive mammalian behaviour? And are humans not remarkable for their natural incapacity to organize themselves peacefully? These were the observations that troubled Thomas Hobbes, whose immense political theology stemmed from the conviction ‘that during the time men live without a common Power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called warre; and such a warre, as is of every man, against every man.’ War, for Hobbes, is not an exceptional state of mass violence that interrupts a more fundamental tranquillity. War is the human condition itself.
(I have to admit that I like Stephen King’s variation on this same theme. In one of his more gruesome novels, Cell, there is a kind of electromagnetic ‘Pulse’ that is transmitted through mobile phones, which seemingly produces uncontrollable aggression in its recipients. As the book progresses, though, it is revealed that the Pulse didn’t introduce or generate this bloodthirsty animalism; it simply wiped away the veneer of human civility, exposing – to use Carl Jung’s phrase – our more fundamental ‘blood-consciousness’. Here’s how one character explains it to his companions: ‘At bottom, you see, we are not Homo sapiens at all. Our core is madness. The prime directive is murder. What Darwin was too polite to say, my friends, is that we came to rule the earth not because we were the smartest, or even the meanest, but because we have always been the craziest, most murderous motherfuckers in the jungle. And that is what the Pulse exposed five days ago.’)
What then of the so-called ‘peace’ enjoyed and promoted by democratic societies? Isn’t it apparent from the Pax Americana that now holds sway – whether at home or abroad – that such peace has become little more than an obsession with the trivial, a benevolent boredom, or worst of all, the inalienable right to excess? It acts, in other words, like a palliative, a form of cultural sedation aimed at distracting us from our violent predisposition, all the while satisfying our bloodlust through vicarious means (television, movies, sport, etc.).
I think it is important at this point to register the extent of my disagreement with Stanley Hauerwas, someone I otherwise greatly respect, on just this question of the substance and character of peace. For all his notorious anti-American rhetoric, it 
seems to me that on this very point he remains an unreconstructed ‘good ol’ boy’, and his ethical program is perfectly at home within the greater Pax Americana.
I have already suggested that the conception of peace as a deeper (ontological) reality than violence – a concept that is fundamental for Hauerwas, John Milbank and David Bentley Hart – is theologically problematic and ethically impotent. But it is the way that Hauerwas characterises a life narrated by nonviolence as one of profound boredom, marked by the willingness to enjoy the trivial (he often likens the life committed to nonviolence to watching baseball) that I find deeply problematic. For he seems thereby to have accepted in advance the price to be paid for becoming a beneficiary of this idolatrous peace: that we abandon any kind of moral seriousness, renounce every ‘higher’ cause – such a subordination of one’s life to the state, party or cause, Hauerwas says, ‘is the character of totalitarian regimes’.
At this point, isn’t Hauerwas pandering directly to the American obsession with leisure? And further, is this depiction of the ethical life as one which ‘takes time for the trivial’ not an uncanny reiteration of George W. Bush’s urging of people to fight terrorism by continuing to indulge in the excesses of the American way of life? Hauerwas thus unwittingly confirms the accuracy of Slavoj Žižek’s recent observation, that ‘the split between the First and Third World runs increasingly along the lines of an opposition between leading a long, satisfying life full of material and cultural wealth, and dedicating one’s life to some transcendent cause. We in the West are immersed in stupid daily pleasures, while Muslim radicals are ready to risk everything.’
Perhaps now, more than ever, it is important to be reminded of Jesus’ words, which war against this pseudo-peace – whether the bloody peace-through-submission of the Pax Romana, or the indolent peace-through-sedation of our current Pax 
Americana: ‘Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division!’ The intense conflict introduced by Jesus and radicalised in his resurrection, cuts through every organic or ethnic tie (family, nation, gender), leaving those who follow him alone and unprotected in a world determined by self-interest. The apostle Paul goes even further, locating this conflict at the level of the Dawkinsian ‘selfish genes’ themselves – his term for which is ‘flesh’. If there is any peace recognized by Christianity, it is this experience of being profoundly disconnected within a world that knows only violence.
But today, the Church has traded peace for leisure, whoring after the trinkets of our pleasure economy and abandoning its calling to risk everything for the sake of Christ’s kingdom. Our Easter declaration that ‘Jesus is Lord’ is a manifesto for the only peace that really counts. Will we have ears to hear?
Halden has posted this little gem from Stanley Hauerwas – some questions which he asked a group of trainee youth pastors in Princeton:
Let’s face it: there’s no one quite like Stanley Hauerwas. In a discussion of Milbank’s view of the relation between theology and the university, Hauerwas remarks:
“I confess I am tempted to side with Milbank if for no other reason than that his position is so offensive. Moreover, that such a position does not have a ‘snowball’s chance in hell’ of being realized in the university as we know it makes it all the more attractive” (The State of the University [Oxford: Blackwell, 2007], p. 23).
“As a way to challenge such a [liberal] view of freedom, I start my classes by telling my students that I do not teach in a manner that is meant to help them make up their own minds. Instead, I tell them that I do not believe they have minds worth making up until they have been trained by me. I realize such a statement is deeply offensive to students since it exhibits a complete lack of pedagogic sensitivities. Yet I cannot imagine any teacher who is serious who would allow students to make up their own minds.”
—Stanley Hauerwas, “Christian Schooling or Making Students Dysfunctional,” in Sanctify Them in the Truth: Holiness Exemplified (Nashville: Abingdon, 1998), p. 220.
Over at Swords to Plowshares, Scott asks whether military chaplaincy can be a valid form of Christian witness. And he also points us to some excellent online video-lectures by Stanley Hauerwas.
A guest-post by Kim Fabricius
I have never met Stanley Hauerwas, but a colleague who has describes him as a thoroughly unpleasant man. Another colleague tells of Hauerwas at Cambridge dismissing Jürgen Moltmann as “full of shit.” And Hauerwas himself admits to a violent streak.
As a New Yorker I am inclined to snipe: “What else do you expect from a Texan?” But then Hauerwas also happens to be an Episcopalian layman and one of the church’s most outspoken apostles of non-violence. Gandhi would not be surprised: the violent, he said, often make the best pacifists.
Rowan Williams I love because he’s so humble and irenic; Stanley Hauerwas I love because he’s such a rootin’ tootin’ gunslinger. He stands in the venerable tradition of the rabies theologorum that can be traced back to the vitriolic Paul, via the hot-headed Luther and the ruthless Augustine.
Theologically, I like the way Hauerwas keeps his work seamless: dogmatics and ethics (Barth), doctrine and narrative (MacIntyre), character and action (Bonhoeffer), church and world (Yoder). The accusation of sectarianism is preposterous, as Hauerwas roars his counter-cultural critiques in the fora. The professor’s The Peaceable Kingdom (1983) will issue in the public intellectual’s Dissent from the Homeland: Essays after September 11 (2003). Here Hauerwas declares: “I do not have a foreign policy. I have something better—a church constituted by people who would rather die than kill.” He also says: “If we do not think it possible to love our enemies then we should plainly say Jesus is not the messiah.”
The Sermon on the Mount obviously resources Hauerwas’ theology, but the ultimate source is the God who is our friend. Indeed “friendship” lies at the heart of Hauerwas’ understanding of the Christian life, and informs his thinking not only on peacemaking, but also on sexuality, abortion and—a special concern—the mentally handicapped. Indeed, the recent Cross-Shattered Christ: Meditations on the Seven Last Words (2004) is more poignant than polemical.
Hauerwas may be a son-of-a-bitch—but he is our son-of-a-bitch.
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