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.
No comments:
Post a Comment