Stanley Hauerwas, Christ Church Cathedral, Nashville Feb 12, 2011

These are notes from a presentation Stanley Hauerwas gave on Sunday afternoon at Christ Church Cathedral in downtown Nashville years ago. They are my notes and may not represent Hauwerwas's exact words or intentions. I tend to make notes in the margin. These will be placed in double brackets as relevantly as I can place them.

----------

I always get the impression, when talking to Dr. Hauerwas, that, as any good Southerner, he'd rather be talking about gardening. Christianity's Family Tree.

Somber time. War for ten years. No one has noticed. War is a moral practice. Drawing on McIntrye. McClindon on the Powers. Begin in some place other than pacifism and just war. We should clarify both of these, but neither change war. War is an economic boom. No one likes it, but no one refrains. We must find a way to tell our stories without war. We must think of a world without war. Pacifists can be as dependent on war as anyone else. Peace goes deeper than pacifism. War is a habit of our imaginations. Why is war so morally compelling--if not beautiful? Here are characteristics of war as a practice: war preserves a moral of hardihood, discipline, risk, valor and its reward. James felt we need an alternative. [[W. James "The moral equivalent of war."]] Some other thing besides was is a sacrificial system--not a sacrifice of life but of our normal unwillingness to kill. The sacrifices of war is a counter-liturgy to Christ's once-and-for-all sacrifice. [[Paul Kahn. Sacred Violence.]] War's practice instantiates the sovereignty of a people.  [[Chris Hedges. War is a force that gives life meaning.]] The battlefield is a pledge of the power of the sovereign to destroy bodies. Demonstrates sovereignty. Death is the power of the monarchy. Grotesque and dark beauty. War is hard to discuss because it has revealed our deepest evils. War dismisses trivia. It makes time noble. Chivalry depended on the sacramentalization of violence. WWI soldiers seeing their violence as participation in the Mass. The US depends on the story of our wars as the ties that bind up and unify our story. WWI made the US into the number-one nation. Violent sacrifice helps nation states endure; "a god who organizes killing" I belong to the flag :: baptism. Sacrifice to honor past sacrifice. Was is a sacrificial system that creates its own culture & justification. [[Statue of Liberty as the American cross?]] We cannot live without it. War also requires moral sacrifice. What leads soldiers to kill is the power of another form of intimacy. The military is the most impressive moral community that we have left in this world. [[Military as a social petri dish.]] Should people kill to defend a society of shoppers? Jargon of war is an attempt to blunt the moral force of murder. Survivor guilt. Were you being courageous enough? Killing creates a world of silence and isolation. No one who hasn't killed can understand. In the early church, soldiers had to perform penance before they could again take the Eucharist. We ask soldiers not to tell us about the meaninglessness of what they've done. The Religion of American Patriotism -- the worship of killing authority. What is really true in a society is what's worth killing and suffering for. We aren't ready to die for Christianity anymore. The Christian alternative to war is worship, not making war just. The church doesn't have a social ethic, it is one. It is the alternative to the sacrifice of war. God forbids sacrifice to any being other than himself. The world no longer needs to make sacrifice -- the sacrifice has already been make. We cannot leave the Eucharist to kill each other. We were created for community, not killing. We seek not to survive but to live in the light of the resurrection.

[Timothy Kimbrough gave a short follow-up talk. I only took one line of notes: "The Book of Common Prayer asks that we pray differently in times of war. That we don't commonly know this is a demonstration that this church does not live as Other."]

[the Q&A]

Is Christianity an honor code?

Democracy killed honor. It is a hierarchy that cannot acknowledge itself. Honor is what limits war. The myth is that the nation state is necessary to keep religious violence at bay. Nonviolence may make the world more violent because it does not wants its peace to be seen as the violence it is. Christians don't do capital punishment because it isn't a punishment that fits the crime but because we don't kill. Memorialization. The nation cannot hear that there is only one God. Why war is a moral necessity for Americans. Pacifists always assume the burden of proof. Nonviolence is parasitic, they say, and exists only because others are willing to kill. How the Civil War works for our understanding. In Augustine, just war is a theory about police functions. If war is a sacrificial system, how can it be limited by just war. A religiously accepted nation state must have . . . [confusion in notes] All who die for country die for humanity. The war became for both sides a ritual that both needed. Gettysburg Address makes sacred ground. Means you, as a nation, are perpetually at war. National bond overcomes the bonds of the Kingdom of God. Realism is used to dismiss pacifism. Democracy requires war. Those who actually fight have no illusions. Pacifists are realists. Christians confuse the sacrifice of war with the sacrifice of Christ. When Christians do not commit to their own sacrifice (Jesus), they abandon the world.

[[Peter Berger, "The Decline of Honor." Nancy Sherman. The Warrior's Ethic. Bill Kavenaugh. Torture & Eucharist and The Myth of Religious Violence. Kant, On Perpetual Peace. Stout, On the Altar of the Nation. Mark Knoll, The Civil War as Theological Crisis.]]

The Jews historically have been the community that exemplified nonviolence. We have to give up temporal power. [[Colonists that do not abandon their home country.]] There is something antithetical in the nation state vis-a-vis Christianity. "Before you are a German, you are a Christian. Stay in New York." [[Message to Bonhoeffer, which he ignored.]] If Christianity is an alternative to war, we are going to have to be as disciplined as the marines. [[Military as a social services agency.]] Who cares about your subjectivity! And how do Christians tell the story of America? I articulate challenges for which I have no response at all. There is a demonic character to war that must be named. It perverts the created order to some awful ends. The comradeship of battle can be quite demonic. You'd like to see that intimacy reproduced in marriages, but it won't happen. // The particular goods war supplies are summed up in killing. The church's "killing" is the Eucharist.

What practices can keep the church from capitulating? [[This is the community to which I will be lost.]] Christian never will their way into faithfulness. God has to make us faithful. 1 Cor 11. Better to go ill than out of boredom. Even our unfaithfulness is a witness to the gospel. "We Methodists." Sacrifice must be a gift, not a mode of control. Serious commitment to nonviolence entails conflict. Implicit assumptions are the sources of our violence. So communication has to occur to keep these assumptions out. Hospitality to the stranger. Bishops are to assure Eucharistic assemblies are hospitable to other Eucharistic assemblies. This is what the word catholic means. The Christian hears the voice of Christ in the stranger. The military is an attractive community to be part of. The church cannot be an idol. We don't offer as morally compelling a life. Think of the moral regard you get for being in the service. We are all dying for that regard. What is means to be a Christian is to have something to do. We don't have to do the same old thing. And people who have something to do are attractive. [[The Bible is not owned by conservatives. Nor is it dismissed by liberals.]] It takes a lifetime to learn how to speak well. Desperateness is you saying you aren't sure that what you are living is true. The Christian narrative is complex. The church is in no hurry. [[Bonhoeffer as martyr?]] Christians martyrs do not seek death. Atonement [theory] is a mistake. You can't isolate it [the atonement?] from the death and life of Christ. If you have a church, you don't need an atonement theory. We are to live as the forgiven in a world of the unforgiven. Moral typography of war.

Pattern Language: Obedience

PATTERN: Obedience (19)

Even as God Leads Out (81), the Son follows. The pericoretic dance requires an obedient answer. There is a "Let there be" and a "so there was." The Son willingly, lovingly obeys (Phil 2). And in his incarnation, all of creation is taken up. His obedient response becomes the model for every created thing. We are not the makers of providence, but its willing participants. And freedom is not the bondage of infinite choice but wisdom's happy response. "I hasten and do not tarry to keep your commandments (Ps 119.60).

Category

Christology * Ethics * Natural Theology

Related Cards

God leads out (81) * Every action a reaction (82) * kenosis (4) * providence (54) * imago Dei (6) * choice (45) * freedom (53) * decently and in order (71) * faith (76) * work (77) * mission (34)

What does in-fraction mean? (first try)

Two people have asked me recently what in-fraction means. I'm flattered and blush to have chosen so enigmatic a title. I understood it in my gut long before it made any sense through the work. And lately I have been thinking of writing a post to define what in-fraction means. That is what this post is about.

When I started in-fraction on March 17, 2005, I explained that the title is a synthesis of two dissimilar words. In liturgical use, the fraction is the point of the Eucharistic service in which the celebrant breaks the host into pieces, representing the broken body of Jesus. Though the bread is broken, communal unity is front and center (οἱ γὰρ πάντες ἐκ τοῦ ἑνὸς ἄρτου μετέχομεν; 1 Cor. 10.17). People come to the same rail and eat the one life-giving bread. No such unity attends the word infraction. That word means a rude violation. It is a broken bone that never heals right. In-fraction, I said, holds these two words together. It is about entropy's undoing in the breaking of the broken man.

Now, when something is broken, like a window or a serving plate, there is nothing to do but to kneel down and collect up the pieces (Lk 15.8). My project pantomimes this very act. Here, I always lift an illustration from Gospel studies. The implicit theology of each Gospel is described as coming from below or from above. John's Gospel, for example, exemplifies a theology from above. Jesus is so divine that he barely touches the ground. He is the incarnate Son, the second person of the Trinity, glowing with divine action, who was before all things. Contrast that with Mark's Gospel. In Mark, Jesus's humanity is at the fore. Jesus is very much a second-temple Jewish prophet embedded in a people in a culture and acting at a certain moment in history. In-fraction is like the latter, an exercise from below. And I don't find this surprising. I am a Protestant after all.

Protestant theology is characteristically from below. Martin Luther's criticism of the Roman Catholic scholastic theology of his day was that it tried to climb a ladder and view the naked God (deus nudus), a tendency he called a theology of glory (theologus gloriae). A theology of glory seeks God in reason, in being moral, in private revelation. Luther said his would be a theology of the cross (theologus crucis). The Jews of Jesus's day were lost in fantasies of glory. Their "one as a son of man" was to come on the clouds without suffering, like Baal of old (Dan. 7.13). But the truth and glory of God was revealed in the death and resurrection of the Suffering Servant, a man. So, God is revealed to all in the broken body of his son on the tree as properly witnessed by the apostles and prophets. We sum this up by saying that we find God in his word and sacraments. And in-fraction attempts to be such a theology of the cross.

In his Heidelburg Disputations, Luther said, "A theologian of the cross calls the thing what it actually is." I bundle this with the Reformation principle of "to the sources" and the Enlightenment turn to observation rather than metaphysics. The arc "from below" becomes an affirmation of the cosmos and reason in their proper spheres. The theologians of glory see "the invisible things of God in works as perceived by man" (Luther) which leads to the God of the Philosophers, to Schleiermacher, to New Thought, and to be guilty of Feuerbach's projection. But the point is not to deny matter or reason, as the fundamentalists do, but to affirm these in their proper spheres.

Our time is a child of the Enlightenment. Science governs the public square. And science has disenchanted the world. A great deal of evangelical theology ignores this. It attempts to remain in an enchanted universe by building walled gardens. This is a Gnostic move away from matter, the body, beauty, and reason and toward sentimentality, tribal community, spectacle, and emotion. Secret gardens breed private revelation and virtual worlds. Such a move is anathema to proper theology.

Beginning from below, theology confesses, with the ancient creeds, that it pleased God that the Son became incarnate as a real human man. His body is a real body. And that body assumes a kinship with the created cosmos. As science tells us, we are all made of stars. The body of Jesus demands we confess that matter is real and good. And matter can hope, for what is assumed is atoned for, paraphrasing Gregory of Nazianzus. For the Christian, science is no enemy. Not that this is a new affirmation. Theology has always confessed two sources of revelation: scripture and the created world (mirroring the two-natures of Jesus, its proper Adam). In Reformation theology, the former, through Calvin's spectacles, is for salvation and the latter for praise. Revealed and natural theology are both productions of the same God.

Now, it is true that science disenchanted the world. But that disenchantment is but an extension of the iconoclastic affect of Christianity on the pagan pantheon of Rome. I welcome the acid bath of scientific skepticism as thought welcomes new understanding. The process of seeing--of contemplation--is a process of disenchantment, of disillusionment. That is how we come to contextualize knowledge properly. And apart from disenchantment, theology cannot discover the beautiful thing: that sacraments are the world's proper re-enchantment. When lamps are extinguished, the stars do shine. Thinking on whatever topic done on in-fraction must move in a common direction. All must go forward and kneel at the eucharistic rail ad fontes. So, too, science goes forward to the altar or it is no proper science.

Science, like all human things, must be properly handled. Human things are distorted by the noetic effects of sin. Unredeemed human beings make their tools into idols. And, in our day, science unbrackets it naturalism, forgets its creator, and sets up its gospel of scientism and its proponents as a priestly class. It abstracts itself away from things as they are and is lost to its own enchantment. It, too, must be disenchanted in order to properly see. Science should regain its place as a human tool working to garden a world made in God's creative providence (Gen. 1.28).

This from below principle suggests, where this blog approaches aesthetics, a similar approach to art. A movement from below calls the artist (the arts) away from groping around in pure subjectivity, in phantasie, in enchantment. The arts are freed to the contemplation of things as they are "in the light of Easter" (Balthasar). They are restored to their natural theology. The cross frees the arts for praise.

----------

You haven't talked about the move from the individual
 to the community as a basic datum re: existential to
 political. Nor did you discuss narrative (synchronic;
 eschatological) over systematic (asynchronic; atemporal).
 Nor did you discuss historical-grammatical exegesis
 versus, say, the fourfold use. All of these emphases
 are woven through the blog and are part of this same,
 common direction, which I can sum up as my attempt to
 act as a theologian of the cross. Oh, and what about
 the direction of aesthetics from gathered ascetic
 contemplation of the concrete quiddity of things that
 naturally contextualises and moves up to contemplation
 of things in light of their creator, coram deo,
 (imagism, phenomenology, Balthasar) versus the scattered
 uncontextual, meaninglessness of subjectivity, the
 aesthetic imago-impossible godlessness explored
  by Baudrillard?

Indeed, you actually should rewrite, for the central
 symbol here is the incarnate Jesus, not a series of
 abstract arguments from historical theology.

A method for exploring poetry

Dear friend,

You say you are interested in poetry and wonder how to get started. I have been trying to expand my own repertoire for several years. It has been much harder than expected. But here is the method I am using:

(1) Respect the genre. Poetry has a history parallel to literature. Take a moment to learn the periods. Chances are, you'll like some periods and not others. And knowing who is who in the periods you like will save you time. It will allow you to zero in on the poets you either like or need to try.

(2) Rely on the experts. Poetry is a generous discipline, meaning that people that love it are happy to talk about what they love. Get a list and start working it. You can get a list from poetryfoundation.org or scan the table of contents in The Oxford Book of English or American Poetry or just google lists online or college lit syllabi until you can construct your own. But this is going to be true even on the micro level. When you find a poet you want to dig more deeply into, like Frost, for example, or Pope, you don't have time to read it all. Go find a list of the best and begin there. If you finish those and you still want to loiter--which is good--you'll be ready, then.

(3) Like theater, poetry is in the ear far more than in the eye. If you can hear a poem, hear it: on the Poetry Foundation website, YouTube, the internet, Spotify--anywhere! If you can read a poem aloud, do it. I recommend taking a look at Tracy K. Smith's the Slowdown and Pádraig Ó Tuama's Poetry Unbound for their combination of audio and selection by a master poet.

(4) You cannot nor will you swallow poetry in a lifetime. Especially in a discipline where exposure and intimacy are required for knowledge. The quicker you can lay down a general understanding, find a period and then a poet that appeals to you, and begin rooting around, the better. But you will never get it all. You will always be conscious of how much you don't know.

(5) Time. As in a museum, you are walking past items, but something catches you. Obey that. Say you are reading a list of twenty-five recommended Dickinson poems and you are just reading them and nothing is catching. But then one does; "The revery alone will do / if bees are few." Stay with that poem until it is done with you, and then move on. "Attention is the beginning of devotion" (Mary Oliver). You might keep a small notebook of the ones that do.

(6) Putting some poetry any poetry on your shelf is tremendous. Do it now. Grab some chapbook of a poet you have never heard of and tuck it in somewhere. A slim volume of verse gives such a nice, briny flavor to your library. And it will be there when you need something with coffee.

(7) Finally, poetry is the work of a people. It comes in pairs. Perhaps there are bits of verse tucked in between rocks in the Pyramid of the Moon at Teotihuacán or scratched into the stony roof of the Duomo di Milano. But even there, a god sees. Find someone who loves poetry. Ask them to share what they love, and you do the same. That, in the love poem of St. Paul, is the better way.