Christ, History and Apocalyptic: A Symposium, part 4

The fourth chapter of Nathan Kerr's Christ, History and Apocalpytic: The Politics of Christian Mission is engaged today by John W. Wright. Chapter four is entitled "Stanley Hauerwas: Apocalyptic, Narrative Ecclesiology, and 'the Limits of Anti-Constantinianism' ", a topic which John Wright has given much thought to in the many years that he has known Hauerwas personally and engaged his thought.  John Wright is the senior pastor of the Church of the Nazarene in Mid-City in San Diego, CA, as well as Professor of Theology and Christian Scriptures at Point Loma Nazarene University, also in San Diego.  [Full disclosure: John was my pastor and professor for many years when I lived in San Diego.]  Be sure to click the 'continue reading' link at the bottom for the remainder of the post, and of course, to click on the comment link to offer your thoughts, questions, and comments!

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If I understand my task correctly, I am to engage Nathan Kerr's engagement of the texts of Stanley Hauerwas in Kerr's newly published Vanderbilt dissertation, Christ, History, and Apocalyptic:  The Politics of Christian Mission.  Perhaps I am the wrong person to write this response.  I am not a "Hauerwas scholar;" I have merely been immersed in the Hauerwasian text for over twenty-five years, though not in a disciplined manner.  At times I do not know where my thoughts ends and Hauerwas' begins, nor do I care.  Interlocutors have occasionally granted me the label "Hauerwasian" -  a verbal indicator that one has had one's frontal lobes surgically removed to become a glassy-eyed follower of the Master in his sectarian, fideistic, irresponsible, violently non-violent irrationality.  Kerr's claim that Hauerwas parallels Carl Schmitt's "rational ideology" (pp. 117-22) hits deeply at my existential sensitivities, particularly when one realizes that Schmitt's political theory paved the way for the rise of the National Socialists in Germany and re-emerged as a viable political theory within the Bush administration.  Kerr plays for keeps. 

Academic departments are good to discipline such purveyors of imperialistic ideologies as Hauerwas supposedly represents to preserve the freedom that liberalism presents - the freedom that prevents Nate from teaching at a state university as a theologian.  I have had the ability to teach classes and positions within my university limited because I am "ideological" in my "Hauerwasian" leanings.  Nor am I alone; if one listens closely one can hear stories like one I heard from a major North American seminary theologian that (s)he cannot assign books with "postliberal" in the title or authored by Hauerwas because colleagues will find them in the bookstore and submit him/her to informal and formal disciplinary actions.  Kerr's analysis, though admittedly at times based upon "my suspicion" (p. 104) and that "these are tendentious claims and that I have articulated them with an edge" (p. 112), confirms this "need" for the policing of "anti-liberal" thought or its Marxist inversion within contemporary theology.  One thinks of Zizek's work On Totalitarianism concerning the rhetorical effectiveness of this trope within current society.  It is interesting to note the tension between Nate's deep sensitivities and affinities with the Hauerwasian text and the rhetoric that Hauerwas seeks "to secure a certain fixed narrative and linguistic 'identity' for the church [that] forces him into a structurally imperialistic and functionally 'ideological' articulation of the church's political and missionary existence in the world" (p. 93).  One wonders the significance of the semi-quotes within this quote.  Kerr steps deeply into the fissure within the academy that the Hauerwasian text has formed and at times I wonder what exactly emerges.  Does Kerr's analysis show deep Oedipal tendencies within a Hauerwasian 'anti-liberal theological liberalism' or are other dynamics at work in the text?  Or both?  Neither?

I wonder, then, how I might contribute more light than smoke in response to Nate's profoundly reflective text.  Several curiosities immediate spring to mind: why include Hauerwas at all?  Kerr's genealogy moves smoothly and bodily from Troeltsch to Barth to Yoder without Hauerwas.  Why cover Hauerwas between Barth and Yoder?  Yoder, not Hauerwas, studied under Barth.  Hauerwas has continually invoked Yoder after he discovered Yoder's famous mimeographed articles at the back of a church; Yoder only occasionally noted Hauerwas' text - usually to distinguish his program from Hauerwas' invocations.  At Notre Dame Yoder's stern Teutonic presence publicly masked their friendship when compared to Hauerwas' Texas-accented, gratuitously obscenity-laced guffaw.  For Kerr's constructive task, Hauerwas seems only to provide a cautionary tale in the unfolding logic of the book.  I would argue that one does not need to read Hauerwas to understand Yoder; Hauerwas, however, is unintelligible without Yoder's ecclesiological mediation of Barth.  If Kerr was to treat the figures, why not treat Hauerwas after Yoder, rather than before?  Does Hauerwas represent a foil for Kerr?

Second, can one adequately interrogate Hauerwas solely within a trajectory of 20^th century Protestant theology?  Kerr's genealogical presentation of Hauerwas is not false; it is no secret of Hauerwas' interventions with liberal Protestantism and its underlying 'crisis of historicism', Barth, Yoder, and Lindbeck.  It is, however, profoundly skewed, I would argue.  Hauerwas had worked out his basic program before Lindbeck published The Nature of Doctrine.  Only then did scholars discover that Hauerwas was a "postliberal" - a term that he accepts but of which he can gladly abandon.  One could attribute Hauerwas' anti-theological liberalism to his analytic philosophical backgrounds rejection of romanticism as much as to Barth; the absence of Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Elizabeth Anscombe, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Victor Preller, and David Burrell in Kerr's genealogy pushes the Hauerwasian text in a direction that grants plausibility to Kerr's Oedipal reading of Hauerwas' relationship to Troeltsch and the Protestant liberal tradition.  One need not be "anti-liberal" to understand that unless one follows Marechal, Rahner, and the "transcendental Thomists" into revising Thomas by a Kantian anthropology, the Thomistic tradition stands in fundamental tension with the liberal tradition.  Hauerwas' Wittgensteinian/Augustinian Thomism goes "all the way down."  Can one adequately criticize the Hauerwasian text without engaging this dynamic, textual resource for his thought?  I do not think so.

This opens me to two substantive questions that are fundamental to Kerr's presentation:  (1) is Hauerwas 'anti-liberal'? and, (2) does Hauerwas have a 'narrative ecclesiology'?  Kerr's reads Hauerwas as a reaction against liberalism.  Kerr states, "in conceiving the church-as-polis as over-against the state as such, Hauerwas has put himself in a position such that the 'church' can only be defined as a kind of political 'identity' that requires its own mode of ideological legitimation if it is to 'survive'.  Hauerwas appears thus to risk repeating the error of his own bête noire, Protestant liberalism, by conceiving the church's political existence in the world as conditioned in part by its positioning vis-à-vis the secular ideological forces of imperialistic nationalism and cultural liberalism" (pp. 118-19).  Kerr accuses Hauerwas of Nietzschean theological Ressentiment, caught in a Hegelian trap of anti-thesis to the thesis of liberalism. 

One wonders, however, about this reading of Hauerwas.  Surely Kerr is aware that liberalism began as explicitly anti-Christian, at least Christianity in it evangelical, orthodox, and especially Catholic form.  The Constitutional Church in revolutionary France first demanded a loyalty oath from clergy against loyalty to the Catholic Church in its attempt to wrest authority/loyalty away from the Catholic Church.  To define any Christian position as anti-liberal is to call the Oedipal offspring a victim of its own attack on its parent.  By defining Hauerwas as "anti-liberal" (why is liberalism not "anti-Christian" or at least "anti-Hauerwas"), Kerr asserts a subtle normativity to liberalism, rather than recognize that the church had worked out its convictions, profoundly imperfectly practiced as still done today, before the fathers (and the male gender should be noted) of liberalism intellectually, rhetorically, socially, and violently attacked them.  Hauerwas is not "anti-liberal"; he is a Ressourcement theologian who attempts to up-date the thought of the church to address the current age by re-stating its normative past.  His argument that "liberalism" is anti-Catholic Christian would not shock Rousseau or Kant or Leo XIII; Hauerwas' assessment that the philosophical basis of liberalism makes empirically false claims continues a discourse deep within a minority Thomistic discourse of Western culture.  It seems rather non-controversial in light of the embodied, particular historicity of all human existence.  Moreover, Hauerwas does not call Christians from participation in certain activities of the liberalism; he merely asks that Christians exercise ad hoc casuistic discernment concerning their involvement with the state and deeper loyalty to following Jesus as part of a people with a long, particular history called the church.  Christians should then not be surprised to find that the liberal state often finds them as "anti-liberal."  This is not new for Christians; Roman critics accused early Christians of a similar misanthropy.

Second, does Hauerwas really have a "narrative ecclesiology"?  This is Kerr's presupposition behind his claim that Hauerwas moves the apocalyptic event from Jesus to the life of the church that remains necessary for the truthfulness of the claim that Jesus is Lord of history.  I was not able to discern precisely what Kerr means by a "narrative ecclesiology"; he does draw upon the analysis of J. Thomson in a book that I have yet to read, The Ecclesiology of Stanley Hauerwas: A Christian Theology of Liberation (Ashgate, 2003).  Kerr claims that "Hauerwas seems to be moving progressively towards identifying Jesus' 'story' with the ongoing lived narrative that is the church" (p. 107).  For Hauerwas, however, the church is never a "lived narrative" or a "story" but always concrete human beings, sinful human beings.  From his dissertation onward, Hauerwas emphasizes the embodied nature of human life.  He has no triumphalistic narrative concerning the history of the church as an abstract narrative that governs the story of Jesus in the Gospels.  If anything, for Hauerwas it is not the life of the church per se that witnesses to the truthfulness of the gospel; it is the life of the saints.  Kerr's chief textual basis for his claim that Hauerwas possesses a "narrative ecclesiology" is that Hauerwas "fully endorses" John Milbank's program in Theology and Social Theory from which Kerr pulls his damning quotes (pp. 107-8).  Kerr then moves, without explicit basis in the Hauerwas text, but quoting much explicitly to the contrary, to burn a Hauerwasian straw man on the basis of suspicions, confirmations in others works, and "it seems as if."  Kerr has more textual work to do before his criticism stands, particularly in light of Hauerwas' careful, numerous statements of the priority of the "story of Jesus" to the life of the church and the embodied nature of the life of the saints.

Kerr, however, has helpful opened a rift that Hauerwas and others often obscure - the profound theological differences between Hauerwas and Yoder.  Yoder is very much a child of the Enlightenment.  In Body Politics Yoder shifts, for instance, the Lord's Supper per se as participating in God to participating in the ethics/politics represented by the Lord's Supper as participating in God's kingdom whenever Christians eat together.  Hauerwas, in contrast, lives in a sacramental universe.  In an important footnote (fn. 96, pp. 119-120), Kerr records Hauerwas' statement that his thought remains much more catholic than Yoder - a difference that emerges in Hauerwas' consistent reservations about Yoder's emphasis on the voluntary nature of the church - a difference that goes back to different baptismal theologies.

One wonders, then, whether Kerr has expressed Protestant discomfiture with Hauerwas' catholicity in light of the social gospels emphasis on the kingdom of God.  Forcing Hauerwas into a grid that Hauerwas would reject, Kerr then criticizes him from within the perspective of the grid that he has forced his text.  In so doing, however, Kerr does us a great service - he shows what happens when we read Hauerwas as a "Protestant" rather than a "Catholic" thinker - as many do.  Perhaps the criticism and issues Kerr identifies can help us to think, pray, and confess past the sin of the Reformation to participate in the healing of the Body of Christ that we have come to accept as normative for theology.  

 

Comments

[Davey Henreckson]

This was really a fascinating response. I think there's definitely a strong point to be made concerning the anti-creedal nature of liberalism, as Pastor Wright points out. You don't even need to be a glassy-eyed Hauerwasian to acknowledge the strongly ideological dogmas of the Enlightenment, and its essential challenge to the Church. However, I do wonder whether Kerr isn't on to something that Hauerwasianism sometimes ignores. Kerr makes the point, if my reading of this chapter is correct, that Hauerwas has a tendency to recast the ideology of liberalism as the normative ideological stance of the State (and, by extension, the "world" prior to the parousia). In doing so, Hauerwas invites a kind of sociological Manichaeism, since the ideology of the world is irreversibly anti-Church and anti-creed throughout history. This in turn (ironically) internalizes the Church's outward mission, as it creates a closed alternative society to that of the (liberal) world.

Perhaps I'm misreading Kerr's critique, or Hauerwas' ecclesiology. I'd love to hear other takes on the question.

And I'd also like to offer my general thanks to those who organized (and contributed to) this symposium. It's been great.

[Adam Kotsko]

This post is fundamentally flawed. The author's defensiveness about Hauerwas has completely clouded his reading -- above all his apparent assumption that since Nate is critiquing Hauerwas, he must be defending liberalism. That's the sure sign of someone who can't think outside the Hauerwasian system, and perhaps also (at the risk of being inflammatory) of someone who hasn't even read the whole book. I don't see how anyone could read Nate's final "constructive" chapter and conclude that this whole time liberalism was what he was after -- it's literally impossible to sustain such a reading, unless we're to view Yoder as an anti-Christian liberal.

In short, the post gives a kind of performative demonstration of the way in which Hauerwasianism can quickly devolve into a Schmittian friend-enemy logic. You're either with us or you're against us -- and being against us means you're automatically allied with our designated enemy, "liberalism." Nate's book deserves a better response than this.

[Halden]

I agree that Wright's account here does not reflect the whole of Nate's book (obviously Nate is not invested in the project of liberal modernity). However I think some good questions are raised here, especially the question of why Hauerwas is included in the genealogical account at all and why he's included where he is.

And I also think that Wright's point about how we narrate Christianity and liberalism is important. In other words, if liberalism is inherently anti-Christian, and in some sense the child of Christendom, is it fair to paint a Christian critic of modernity as being an anti-modern reactionary? This way of narrating liberalism may be quite wrong, but it does deserve a response if we are to avoid begging the question.

And, at the very least this post does expose what lies at the heart of Nate's argument with Hauerwas here. Nate's construal of Christ's apocalyptic singularity and the ecclesiology appropriate to that is a distinctly "Protestant" approach (hence the affinity for Yoder). Hauerwas, by contrast, despite his anti-Constantinianism, is fundamentally a "Catholic" theologian especially in the way he configures the church's participation in the person of Christ. It seems to me that theological differences having their genesis in the Reformation regarding the relationship between Christ's action and the church's action go all the way down in this debate.

[Joshua Davis]

I am not completely sure I follow Pastor Wright's argument. It seems that his response assumes an equation such that Protestant = liberalism and Ressourcement (not “Transcendental Thomist”) ecclesiologies = Christian fidelity. There is certainly no reason to allow this assumption to go unquestioned, but I am confused as to what bearing this has on the chapter in question.

It seems to me that Nate’s argument presupposes a more complex relationship between political and theological liberalism than Pastor Wright here assumes. But this is perhaps beside the point insofar as that argument is focused on ecclesiology and not political theory. His complaint is with a way of conceiving the church that cannot escape determination by liberalism inasmuch as it renders opposition to it integral to Christian self-identification. (That this is Pastor Wright’s position is clear in his questioning why Christianity is not defined as anti-liberal.) I read him as suggesting that proceeding in this fashion, while achieving a certain distance from political liberalism, repeats what he labels the “idealism” of the liberal Protestant vision, especially as reworked by Troeltsch.

With regard to this particular claim, Pastor Wright's argument would seem to include certain unintended consequences. If this point still stands (and Pastor Wright does not defend againts it), is it not true that Pastor Wright's argument does not so much exonerate Hauerwas as implicate Ressourcement?

[Joshua Davis]

Not, that is, for repeating the mistakes of political but of (Protestant) theological liberalism.

[Adam Kotsko]

I don't see how it's so questionable that Hauerwas is included in the genealogy, nor that he's included where he is. For Nate, Hauerwas represents an appropriation of Barth's apocalypticism that still remains within the liberal frame, and Yoder represents an appropriation of Barth that goes beyond Barth's own limitation. It seems petty to ask him to go in strict chronological order here since Yoder and Hauerwas are contemporaries and have been in consistent dialogue. He's finishing with Yoder because he thinks Yoder takes things in the most productive direction, and he includes Hauerwas because Hauerwas has been so influential on the reception of Yoder -- it'd almost be bizarre to omit him. Treating them separately also allows Nate to highlight the fact that they are, you know, different.

And as an added bonus: most of this is established within the first two pages of the chapter. Saying it's a helpful question is like saying it'd be helpful to do a blog response to Genesis 1-3 and ask, "Okay, so where did Adam and Eve come from in the first place?"

[Tim F.]

Perhaps I missed it, but I don't see where Wright actually says Nate intentionally affirms liberalism as his own position. He says he subtly affirms it through his genealogy, but this is meant as a criticism (from what I can tell), which wouldn't be one if Wright didn't see Nate as also arguing with forms of liberalism. Thus, he tries to turn the tables on Nate in the same way Nate does to Hauerwas. Of course, this is debatable, but I don't see it as a failure of imagination or ability to understand. From where I stand, it's the beginning of an argument worth having.

Moreover, one could make the case that we always get defensive for our friends, no matter who they are and especially if they are the author of the book being reviewed and criticized.

Finally, I think Josh's comments here are likewise interesting. I think Josh has Nate correct regarding Nate's continual polemic against any form of idealism, but this would raise the issue that Wright mentions regarding the place of Hauerwas in Nate's book with Troeltsch being the first and (foremost in my opinion) foil. In my reading, the chapter on Hauerwas is there for two primary reasons. First, simply the amount of influence he has on theology in our context. Second, and this is the most important I think, is to pry Yoder out of Hauerwas's reading of him. In other words, in order for Nate to have the Yoder he wants (which is an accurate reading), he must divorce the couple who are often seen as married in our contemporary theological parlance.

Blessings,

Tim

[Adam Kotsko]

Tim, I didn't say that Wright said that Nate was directly affirming liberalism -- I questioned Wright's assumption that a critic (i.e., enemy) of Hauerwas must therefore be privileging liberalism. That's the only way I can make sense of the weird insinuations like "Oh, you think liberalism's so great and we shouldn't be opposed to it, huh? Well, sometimes liberals are mean to me when I try to teach Hauerwas!"

[Tim F.]

Thanks for the clarification, Adam.

It seems our previous posts were being written at the same time and we were thinking similar things. Is that first? :-)

Blessings,

Tim

[Adam Kotsko]

I guess they probably were cross-posted. I've noticed that sometimes you have to explicitly refresh to see new comments on TypePad blogs -- no idea why that would be.

We do seem to be basically in agreement on the place of Hauerwas in the book.

[Dave Belcher]

First of all, on the place of Hauerwas in this "genealogy"...

Nate is clear that the political ideology of Troeltsch's social teaching grounds the 20th century "Christian realism" (especially in the Niebuhr brothers), and that both Hauerwas and Yoder are utilizing Barth's "apocalyptic Christology" as a way of responding to that movement...the whole genealogy is caught up in response to that movement, and thus the Troeltschian appropriation by the Niebuhr brothers provides the adequate link in this genealogy (even if a kind of subtle pedal point running underneath). So, I just don't see how Hauerwas is only introduced as a foil...he is an essential component in the genealogy Nate is telling!

But, more to the point (to repeat some of what Tim and Adam have said above), Nate is equally clear that a certain reading of Yoder that has been passed down by Hauerwas must be loosened to make his performative moves that he begins in chapter 5 with Yoder, and brings to a head in the concluding chapter. As, for example, on p. 18: "[T]he too easy assimilation of Yoder's project to that of Hauerwas has skewed interpretation of the former. Once the narrative, postliberal 'church-as-polis' optic has been abandoned as the primary lens through which to read his work, Yoder provides some powerful insights into the nature of Christian apocalyptic, history, and the ecclesial political and missionary vocation. [And note especially this very important, and I would say ignored in Prof Wright's reflections, sentence:] Only in light of these insights do some of the insights and contributions of Troeltsch and Barth also show new promise, in spite of the flaws in their political thought which Hauerwas and others have so forcefully brought to the fore."

Secondly, I would note that really Nate's main criticism of Hauerwas is simply expanding on Yoder's own critique of Hauerwas! See the Yoder block quote on pp. 113-114: "One reason Hauerwas does not do text-based Bible study is that he is overawed by the notion of community-dependency and underawed by the objective reality of salvation history. Also underawed by the study of real (unsaved) history. He would rather read novels." Nate's emphasis on Jesus Christ's "independence," gleaned from Yoder, is meant to be drawn out precisely against those places where Hauerwas claims to be most Yoderian, and where the former has in fact profoundly abstracted from the historicity of Jesus Christ by universalizing him into the church's narratival existence. It is in this manner, as Josh pointed out above, that Hauerwas in Nate's reading evades a political liberalism only to collude with a Protestant liberalism indebted to Troeltsch (and hence Nate's comments about ideology and Schmitt, which I find to be fundamentally right).

[Steve Long]

I find Nate Kerr's book helpful in its excellent critique of Troeltsch's 'historicism.' I also think he might be on to something about the problem in the (early) Hauerwas about a reactionary logic that needs the state to be construed in a particular way for Hauerwas's position to work. I think there are better moments in Hauerwas's work, especially With the Grain of the Universe.

I do not see how John Wright's post could be dismissed as a defensive, Hauerwasian who cannot think outside the Hauerwasian framework simply because he raises a legitimate question about 'liberalism.' In particular, Kerr seems to have a strong place for the Kingdom, but not for the church. The church is so 'dispossessed' that it seems to be apocalyptically deferred. I know he is working against that assumption, but I'm not sure he pulls it off. If he doesn't, and there is even a hint that we are left with a Kingdom without a visible church, then the question of yet another version of Protestant liberalism has to be raised.

I am surprised by the strong critique of the supposed subordination of Christology to ecclesiology in Hauerwas. This seems to suggest that the church is not one of the three forms of the body of Christ, which both the Bible and the tradition affirm. If you adhere to this threefold form of Christ's body then it makes no sense to speak of one being subordinated to the other. Can Christ be subordinated to Christ? Perhaps I've misread Nate, but it seems like the church gets rather 'evacuated' in his account. I appreciate the importance of 'mission,' and even the call for a missional ecclesiology, but I would like to see more what this means. Might this be similar to Loisy's famous account of Harnack -- "Jesus proclaimed the Kingdom and what we got was the church instead."

What originally brought Hauerwas over to Yoder's position was the ecclesiology. He regularly says that the first time he read Yoder his thought was -- 'this position would work if the church was what Yoder claimed it to be' (expletives deleted). Eventually Hauerwas believed it was. He originally got his ecclesiology from Yoder. I would therefore express caution in distancing Stanley from Yoder too thoroughly. (At the risk of being cheeky -- let me suggest that this seems to be a 'Vanderbilt' strategy. Frei is to Lindbeck what Yoder is to Hauerwas? I reckon the friendship and collaboration of both sets suggests things are a bit more complex)

Moreover I think John is correct about the questionable assumption of a "narrative ecclesiology" in Hauerwas. What does that mean? And if I may -- one cannot really charge someone with being a closet Carl Schmitt and not expect some push back. So I don't understand some of the reactionary tone of the response to John.

I also think the comments have not yet addressed John's fundamental question -- Yoder seems to have had very little time for a 'catholic' church in the sense of a sacramental Eucharistic communion that participated in something that transcended history. He did have a 'radical catholicity,' and so I don't want to separate him too far from any sense of 'catholicity.' But I do think John, Gerald Schlabach and Paul Martyns have made some important points about this. Yoder's "Sacrament as Social Process" came as a surprise to many of us. It was the basis for his Body Politics. It did seem to reduce the sacraments to an immanent sociology, and to an 'ethics.'

One more thing before I close this rambling post. I'm not sure I always understand why Nate uses 'metaphysics' as a pejorative, even when he also constantly uses the term 'beyond.' If Christ comes to us from 'beyond,' then isn't some kind of meta-physics inevitable?

Thanks Nate for the book and John for your decisive -- and incisive -- response.

[Halden]

I think the question of Yoder and catholicity is important, as Steve hints at here. However, I think that Wright's claim above that Yoder does not live in a "sacramental universe" is quite clearly incorrect. For Yoder, "'cross and resurrection' designates not only a few days' events in first-century Jerusalem, but the shape of the cosmos."(PoJ, 160) Likewise we must contend with Hauerwas's favorite quote from Yoder, that "people who bear crosses are working with the grain of the universe."

Throughout Yoder's writing it is clear that his Christology is fundamentally determinative of a theological cosomolgy that centers on participation in God through Christ. Now, to be sure it must be acknowledged that Yoder does not develop a Eucharistic theology that would be well at home in a narrowly-defined "Catholic" setting. However, I think the claim that his work in Body Politics constitutes a reduction of "the sacraments to an immanent sociology, and to an 'ethics'" is not necessarily the only, or best reading of Yoder.

Yoder's work in "Sacrament as Social Process" should not, I think, be read as reducing the sacramental to the sociological or the ethical, but rather as an attempt to point out the inherently social and ethical dimensions of sacramental existence and practice. In other words, I don't think we should be squeamish about looking at the sacraments as social and ethical because what alternative is there? To look at them as non-social and non-ethical? What underwrites Yoder's close identification of the sacramental practices of the church with the church's own ethical and political life is a "thick" ecclesiology which understands the wisdom of God to be manifested through the church to the powers (Eph 3:10 - note, also an important verse in Kerr's book).

In other words, for Yoder "ethics" and "politics" are the form of life that rightly participates in the agape of God revealed in Christ. The sacramental practices of the church are understood in light of this Christological cosmology. The only way we can construe this as reductive or immanent is if we posit "the ethical" a sort realm that is extraneous to our communion in the body of Christ. I think Yoder's whole point is that participation in Christ is not separable from the life of discipleship and cross-bearing. Likewise the sacramental life is not separable from the communal and political life of the body of Christ. It is precisely in the life of being conformed to Christ's cross and resurrection that we participate in God's very own life and live "with the grain of the universe." This is not reductive to my reading, rather it is the refusal to understand metaphysics and the doctrine of deification without reference to Jesus and the life of discipleship.

[Hill]

Cross posting this from Halden's blog (edited):

Halden, I’m still not sure this gets at the question. I think everything you’ve said is more or less accurate, but as I understand the issue, the question is “in what sense are baptism, the Eucharist, etc. sacraments for Yoder” or “does the word sacrament mean anything other than signifying an a set of ritual practices within Christian life” or "are baptism, Eucharist, etc. incidental aspects of the (more primary) communal life of the Church or are they constitutive of it." I think one can affirm the "centrality" of “the sacraments” to the communal life of the Church and vice versa (and amen to that) without giving any account of what it means to be sacramental.
My question would be: why does it matter? Why would one want to be sacramental? It is an intrinsically mediatory concept, which as it has been explained to me, is at odds with the direction Yoder’s theology is moving. The criticism I perceived in professor Long's post is that in his “reduction” of the sacramental life to a kind of ethical practice, the particular meaning of “sacramental” is lost or the concept evacuated, remaining only as a name for a certain set of practices.

[Nate Kerr]

First of all, I want to begin by thanking John Wright for taking the time to read and to engage my work and my chapter on Hauerwas. I know that John has done this as much out of friendship as anything, and I am grateful above all for that friendship. At the same time, I trust he will also understand when I say that he knows, precisely on the basis of that friendship we share, that my appreciation for Stanley Hauwerwas' life and work, as well as my understanding of his oeuvre as articulated in my book, is indeed quite more complex than as portrayed in his response. And if I would ask anything of him in response to his post, it would only be that he would join me in exploring that complexity in more depth as we go forward with the conversation from here. Else, you will forgive me for thinking that what John has done is rather to construct a straw-man of my reading of Hauerwas to burn in lieu of having actually to address the challenges that I have put to Hauerwas' ecclesiology, particularly as it relates to the questions of Jesus Christ's lordship, his relation to history, the church's mission, and political ideology. And that, quite to the contrary of what I have come to know and expect of John, would be to forego the complexities involved for the sake of a set of ideas -- a manifestation of ideological thinking, indeed.

Secondly, the comments that have been made, the rejoinders offered on my behalf, as well as the critical questions that have been put to me about my own thought and work have helped me to understand better my own work as well as to think towards those questions that I might yet address as my work goes forward from here. I take all of these comments and questions as well to be made out of a gesture of friendship, a friendship rooted in a shared concern for faithfulness to the theological task.

Yet if I thus recognize this friendship, that does not hinder me, rather it compels me, to point out that for the most part these questions – put to me in this medium, especially by one of Hauerwas’ students – are obfuscatory and an evasion of the issues raised by not only this chapter, but the book as a whole. You will understand if I do not feel obliged to respond to questions and criticisms that are put to my work or to supposed implications of my work (not to mention gross insinuations as to the academic and institutional "strategies" behind the work and my choice of figures) when those questions pertain to issues of no direct concern to my argument. This is especially the case insofar as that argument has yet to be adequately discerned, acknowledged, or addressed by my questioners. Indeed, if I did not know better I would think that such critical questions were more strategic diversions of my concerns since neither Wright nor Long have even sought to address them directly.

So, while I am more than happy to address these questions in turn and in due time, so far as this medium allows (and I think I have shown myself so far in this conversation quite willing to address questions concerning implications of the work but that nevertheless extend beyond the bounds of my book itself and move in the direction of further work in progress), I think I must ask my friends first to acknowledge and then to account a bit more carefully for the complexity of issues that are at stake for me in my argument. For the sake of clarity, let me reiterate that argument. I have claimed that Huauerwas proffers an account of Jesus Christ's lordship and of the church's mission that is irreducibly bound up with an ideological ecclesiology of the church-as-polis. I ask my friends, John Wright and Steve Long, to show me how this is not so.

(Incidentally, as regards the question of Hauerwas' "narrative ecclesiology" and John Wright's claim that for Hauerwas the church is "never a story," cf. pg. 107 of my book, where I actually quote Hauerwas' affirmation that the church itself is "the story being told.")

[Jeremy G]

Nate, (if I may be so informal), From the very quotation you make, however, there is more going on...
"like Israel, the church has a story to tell in which God is the main character. But the church cannot tell that story without becoming part of the tale. The church as witness to God's work for us in Israel and Jesus of Nazareth means that here the teller and the tale are one. ...the story of the world. cannot be told rightly unless it includes the story of the church as God's creation to heal our separateness." p. 149-50 in the Hauerwas reader.
And later in the same article, in the 'methodological' commentary on the earlier section which was a sermon (or sermonic exhibit?):
"I have suggested that the church is the community that is at once the storyteller as well as a character in the story that is required by Christian affirmation of God's redemption of the world through the people of Israel and the cross and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth." 161. [note the words 'part' and 'character' in the quotations]

The context of the Hauerwas quotes would seem to challenge the claim you make in the book that "With the latter essay...Hauerwas seems to be moving progressively towards identifying Jesus' 'story' with the ongoing narrative that is the church..." You may be able to demonstrate Hauerwas' development towards this (reductive?) identification, but I don't think it is a sustainable reading of the text you ended up using. To me it seems that Hauerwas at least still can slip out of your charge, and claim priority for Christology over ecclesiology.

Is the 'one' in Hauerwas more of a reference to the unity of the church with God in Christ (through the Spirit)? The church is not the sole/autonomous teller, but an agent in union with the 'author' and subject of the story? Would this not make the church's ongoing telling both apocalyptic (since it springs from God's action in history) and doxological? That's how I read what he is saying, (at least as it relates to your own project).

That's a long response to something I'm afraid you might think of as continuing to fail to address the thrust of your argument, but I did think it was worth pointing out since it didn't read quite so convincingly. Perhaps you can persuade me with a different Hauerwas text?

(For what it is worth, I give you major points for even attempting what you have; no sane person should engage, in one project, such notoriously prolific thinkers. Well done!)

Peace,
Jeremy

[Joshua Davis]

This is not a hermeneutical issue, as far as I can see. I would suggest that it is beyond dispute that Hauerwas intends to speak to, about, and from the concrete, historical church. It is also clear that he intends to retain the priority of Christ over the church. All that can be conceded without it making a difference at all to Nate's argument. What is at issue is whether Hauerwas' approach, method, logic is adequate to his intentions.

Is that not the rationale for treating Hauerwas alongside Barth and Yoder: specifally, that each is trying not to do what Nate says they are doing? That is the historicist problem!

As has been reiterated, the question is whether it is possible for this particular outcome to be avoided by this way of doing ecclesiology.

[steve long]

Nate,

I've been pondering your question. At first blush my answer would be straightforward -- no Hauerwas' 'church as polis' is not ideological, any more than Yoder's is. I always thought they used the term because Scripture does. From Genesis 11 when, by God's judgment, the people leave off building the city, throughout the OT with the question of 'what form God's people should take' (Lohfink)' to Pentecost on to revelation -- a central theme in Scripture seems to be the expectation, participation and construction of the 'city of God,' which finally is Jesus' very body.

I assume we agree on this, and your work nicely reminds us that the city we wait for cannot be anticipated by virtue of some universal account of it that avoids the "singularity of Christ." With Jews we still hope -- 'next year in Jerusalem' -- the city of peace, the city of God.

If I understand your argument, Hauerwas shifts in his doctrinal locus from Barth's apocalpytic Christology to ecclesiology via a postliberal philosophy of how language works. In so doing, he subordinates the singularity of Jesus to an overarching framework, which even though it is narratival and historical, is nonetheless "reductive of Jesus' historicity or 'independence' as a singular event of God's apocalyptic action" (93). This then produces an ideology because Hauerwas then gives the Church a fixed linguistic identity. This fixed identity will inevitably require a 'territoriality' and with that it will be "structurally imperialistic."

I recognize that you agree with Hauerwas that there is a "ecclesial dimension" to Christology (105). And you are correct that he makes this something more than a "dimension." You are rather concerned that Hauerwas makes the "subject" and "agency" of the church to "constitute" Christ's identity (106). I think you are correct that he does this, and it should be worrisome. He frequently says, "The church makes Jesus possible." (One of the best criticisms I've heard of Hauerwas was from the barthian Bob Osborne, who said in response to this statement, "Stanley that may be true, but that is not how lover's talk.") I think your work rightly raises two questions about this central theme in his work:
1. Has Hauerwas reduced Christology to ecclesiology, or subordinated Christ to the Church (something Barth could never have done given his insistence that this was to 'lay hands on God').
2. Does such reduction produce an ideology where now the church has a stake in "survival" and therefore "territoriality" and a "fixed identity" that it will have to defend, as well as a reactionary logic against particular construals of state sovereignty that are necessary for the church's 'counter-polis' to survive.

Is this a proper and charitable interpretation of your position?

If so, I think you may be right. After all, the church has claimed the kind of territoriality you are concerned about in its history. The Crusades and the Latin states were certainly bad practice, as was the Reformed consistories. Is this the fear, that another version of this would arise?

But I would still raise these questions. First with respect to q. # 1 above:
1. I think H can be defended in the claim that the church makes Jesus possible a la something like de Lubac's claim: "The Eucharist makes the church when the church makes the Eucharist" (we could replace Eucharist with Word as Scripture as well for those of a more Reformed orientation).
2. The apocalyptic interruption that occurred/occurs has a crucial Mariological element. Mary literally "makes" Jesus and she is the symbol for the Church. Every disciple is now called to do the same.

Both of these defenses can still benefit by your helpful critique not to somehow think that the Subject and Agency of the Church are therefore identical with that of Christ without reserve. But I think they might also allow for a stronger relation between the agency of the Church and Jesus than the term "ecclesial dimension" allows. And here I would cite von Batlhasar's critique of Barth on just this issue: "But we reply: Does the Church -- knowing as she does that she has been founded by Christ -- not have the right to regard herself as true? Can she relativize herself without abrogating her obedience to her Lord? And where would such a self-relativization ever come to an end? The 'absoluteness' that the Catholic Church must claim for herself really represents her obedience, her refusal to countenance any detriment or constriction to the sovereignty of the freedom of God's grace. The Church has never equated the place of her visibility with that of the elect and justified. And the certainty that she possesses depends entirely on her mission and charge. For every member of the Church, even for the infallible Pope, the essence of the Church is the promise of salvation and not its 'guarantee'" (Theology of KB 54).

When I hear Hauewas, I hear something akin to VonB here.

Now wrt the all-important 2nd question: Is this ideological?
It certainly can be. When we were in Rome at the very confused private audience with Benedict, when he appeared, one of the RO crowd said, 'this is great -- just like the emperor returning to Rome.' Hauerwas, of course, cringed. I too worry about this. That makes me sufficiently worried that I cannot (yet) cross the Tiber.

Nevertheless, I think the Incarnation -- where God is fully given in truth and goodness in the humanity of Jesus -- requires that we must say something like what von B said. That, along with the ongoing relativization of ecclesiology in the mainline and evangelical Protestant traditions, makes me want to cross the Tiber. I simply don't understand why a 'fixed' language of the church must somehow be ideological. That sounds to me like Tanner's critique of the postliberals. I've learned much from her and value her work, but I do think we have a consistent logic in the Incarnation that is universal, common and can give us an identity to Christianity synchroncially and diachronically that is not dependent upon cultural borrowings from a specific time. Is her concern similar to yours? Have I misunderstood?

Finally, de Lubac and Cyril O'Regan's work show how Joachim's apocalyptic influenced the Radical Reformers (and Hegel), espeically with its assumption of an 'epoch' where structure is overcome and the apocalyptic freedom of Christ now given through the Spirit produces something new. Clearly this can be seen in Troeltsch. Is your concern about Hauerwas that he is "structurally imperialistic" because of his fixed identity and language of the church at all another version of this Joachimite apocalyptic concern about structure per se? I am not making an accusation, only raising a question. 'Apocalyptic' no more frees us from ideology than narrative identity demands it. I'm sure you would agree. Yoder and Hauerwas (following Barth) righly remind us of the central importance of eschatology and apocalyptic for Christology. But because of the monumental influence of Joachim in the modern era, it too will always need to be carefully elaborated, as you certainly do in your work

I reckon I owed your book a more thorough analysis than my first post. I hope you and the readers of this blog will recognize how much I appreciate it and honor it to give it this much time. I'm so pleased it is in our series and that you have raised these questions for us in our common mission.

Peace,
Steve Long

[d barber]

Steve Long: "Yoder seems to have had very little time for a 'catholic' church in the sense of a sacramental Eucharistic communion that participated in something that transcended history."

For Yoder, though, the need to participate in something that transcends history is simply not a properly Christian need. It is a need, rather, of the "cult," or of "philosophy" (Platonic philosophy, let's say, though certainly not all philosophy). But Jesus's mission, Yoder would say, is not cultic, it is secular, and it is historical (note that this historical character is a point of commonality between Judaism and (free church) Christianity).

I see Nate as working against this Yoderian background -- and I do not see how this background should be equated with liberalism. Nor do i see any reasons yet given for why a Catholic/cult-of-the-transcendent-to-history is necessary. At least not in a way that takes seriously Yoder's claims (obviously, reasons for the Catholic cult have been mentioned by advocates of the Catholic cult).

Furthermore, for what it is worth, I'd say that there is a genuine homology between the Catholic position and the liberal-secular position -- in each case, one claims "absoluteness," but does so in virtue of the need to actualize/be-obedient-to the ahistorical truth (whether dogmatic or rationalist). What makes Yoder so interesting, for me, is that he is able to oppose the Catholic/liberal-secular model precisely because of his theoretical-existential commitments.

(Let me also be clear: certainly Hauerwas is not to be identified with the Catholic tendency Long affirms -- let's not confuse these two positions!)

[Halden]

I would like to thank Steve for such a long and thorough response to Nate here. I won't preempt Nate in his response, and I look forward to it. But, I do think that this dialogue is now becoming quite interesting and I am excited to see where it might go, now that it has taken this turn.

[Hill]

I wanted to echo Halden's comments and mention that the amount of high-quality, helpful dialogue that Nate's book has generated in the theological blogosphere is without precedent in my experience (and hopefully just beginning). Regardless about where one comes down on these questions, it is something for which to be thankful.

[Nate Kerr]

Steve:

Thanks for this helpful response; I agree with Halden about its helping to turn the conversation in a very constructive direction. I am extremely grateful for and honored by your willingness to devote this time and effort to my work. I am in class until 3:00 today, but my plan is to sit down and post something that begins at least to address some of your questions this afternoon. I thank you all for your patience. But I also encourage the continued dialogue in the meantime. Do not worry about preempting anything I'd say -- I'd rather grateful that this conversation is coming less and less to belong to "me" as the book gets discussed in the blogosphere. I just want to record the matter of the fact that I have learned and am learning immensely from this continued engagement.

I will say more substantively later. But for now, thank you for the continued and gracious conversation.

[d barber]

As a quick followup to my comment above: The Catholic (VonB, etc) position is ideological precisely because of the circularity involved in Jesus makes the church and the church makes Jesus -- this is the nature of ideology, no? Long says that this shouldn't be done without reserve, ok, but: where's the reserve? In what does the nonidentity of circulating concepts (Jesus, church) consist?

If one makes them circulate apocalyptically, then you have "reserve" (indeed you have the nonidentity of synchronic and diachronic), but if one justifies the absoluteness of the church because it is based on the fact that it is founded by Christ -- then where is the nonidentity, or the reserve?

[Halden]

I second D. Barber's point here. This also bears on Steve Long's gesture above toward the "Mariological element" of Christ's apocalyptic singularity. The invocation of Mariology here is once again indicative of the fundamental nature of this debate, namely between a self-consciously Protestant versus Roman Catholic iteration of the relationship between Christ, the Church, and the world.

In attempting to make a constructive response to this Mariological issue, I would say that we cannot get from Mary's fiat to the idea that she somehow "'makes' Jesus" without doing some extreme hermeneutic gymnastics. Even from a broadly Catholic perspective, it seems to me that Mary's fiat cannot in any way be construed as an act of "making." Rather it is is the pure passivity that does not make an "active" contribution to the incarnation in any way.

Mary is archetypal of the church for precisely this reason--the church does not actively determine or constitute Christ in any way, rather the church receives Christ as pure gift, a gift to which it contributes nothing whatsoever. Mary's (and the church's) action is not one of contribution, but solely one of affirmation. The task of the church is not to extend, or complete the work of Christ, but rather to affirm it in doxology and witness.

[Halden]

Also, to hit on one other point from Wright's post, that hopefully will shed some light on the disagreements here: Wright claims that Hauerwas "is a Ressourcement theologian who attempts to up-date the thought of the church to address the current age by re-stating its normative past."

It is the final phrase, namely, "normative past" that I would call attention to. For Kerr (and Yoder) the church does not possess a "normative past" that is immanent within its own history, as if somehow the normative rule of the church's life and faithfulness is simply "there" in the past to be re-appropriated. Indeed this sort of talk sounds much like crude Baptist historiographies about the "fall" of the church from some paradisaical past.

The only thing that is normative for the church (according to Yoder) is "the very particular story of Jesus" that is attested in Scripture, which is taken in faith that the apostolic "testimony, however intimately integrated with the belief of the witnesses, is not a wax nose, and will serve to illuminate and sometimes adjudicate our present path". This is where the issue of Christ's singularity vis a vis the church's reception of Christ becomes the major issue.

This is also where Kerr's critique of Hauerwas's ecclesiology as ideological becomes quite clearly intelligible. To claim a that a community possess its own standard of normativity within its own practices and history is one way of describing the very definition of ideology. What Kerr and Yoder are insisting on is the positing of Jesus's own singular independence vis a vis our attempts to follow him as the church. Insofar as we collapse the distinction between Jesus (who is, as Rowan Williams describes, "a stranger") as our center, and the church's history of attempting to faithfully follow Jesus we lapse into an ideologically affirmation of our own sort constructed ecclesial status quo.

[isaac v]

Halden, doesn't Jesus receive his flesh from Mary's body? Sure, her act of faith is passive. But it's a strange sort of passivity--a passivity that involves giving your very body for another to grow. The materiality of her body constitutes Jesus' body. For some reason Barth doesn't like to acknowledge this material dependency of Jesus. I think I remember that Rowan Williams teases this out in his essay on Barth and the Trinity.

One time I quoted a line from Barth in Hauerwas' class: "The world would be lost without Jesus Christ; but the world would not necessarily be lost without the church." Hauerwas responded without missing a beat: "Yeah, but Barth's afraid of materiality." I didn't quite know how this solved the problem.

[Nate Kerr]

Dear Steve:

Thank you so much for your careful summary of my position. While I would of course want to nuance it at points, I think it is indeed "proper and charitable," and I am grateful for it. And thank you especially for your probing questions, and while I do not have the time to address all of them right now, I want to take some time to at least begin to do so through a series of points.

1.) First of all, as regards the question of ideology in Hauerwas. This has to do with what I take to be Hauerwas' tendency to ally the church's existence (which is so often for Hauerwas a matter of its "survival") with the perdurance of a given narratival and linguistic identity. That is what I mean by the term "narrative ecclesiology" (a term that Hauerwas does not use, of course). The problem here is not with "identity" so much as it is with the way in which the identity for the church is narrativally transcendentalized, in a universalizing move that is analogous to Barth's resurrected Jesus. And this is "ideological" in that the church exists for the sake of the perdurance and extension of this metanarratival perspective. This runs the risk of ideologically determining the mission of the church, insofar as the church exists, as Hauerwas puts it in With the Grain of the Universe, to produce witnesses whose witness just is "their committed assent to a particular way of structuring the whole" (214). And so mission is, as Hauerwas puts it, a way of "keeping the story straight," and thus must on one level at least be about the propagation of this metanarratival, universalizing perspective on the whole. So for all his talk about embodiment (as John Wright correctly points out), I worry that embodiment itself becomes a means of production for this universalizing narrative, which precisely as a "counter-narrative" must work to "out-narrate" and "resituate" the contingencies of the world's history vis-a-vis the false "universality" of liberalism. It is at this point that Hauerwas' position turns out to be an inversion of Troeltsch's own ideologically driven account of mission. Whereas for Troeltsch mission is a matter of the church aligning itself with those movements in society that procure the expansion of Christian universality, Hauerwas rather appears to identify the church itself as that social movement.

2.) I would also want to say, secondly, that whereas I want to combat the idea that the church "has" an identity in-itself prior to mission, such that mission has still to do with the "universalizing" of that identity and so with extension of its narrative as a mode of servival, I would equally want to combat the idea that the church "comes into being" through its mission, such that it is in mission that the church is "given" an identity (what I hear Halden articulating at times), or even that it is through its (secularizing) mission that the church's identity is "produced" (which is what concerns me about Dan Barber's immanentist reading of Yoder). Both of these two positions, if read in a certain way, could be seen as versions of the Troeltschian position, one being that it is at the point of encounter with the world that Christianity is given its content, the other being that Christianity's content is produced through its re-fabulation of the world. It may very well be that this is not directly the position of either Halden or Dan Barber, but I would want to distance myself from such interpretations of what they are saying nevertheless (as they may very well like to as well).

My point is not a disavowal of "identity," but rather a disavowal of the idea that the church has an idenity "in-itself," as such, prior to mission. There is for me neither a content which the church possesses prior to the movement of mission, nor is the church given a content through the mission. Rather, the church "is" the mission; the content is the mission, and that is the singular agape of God in Christ. Mission occurs as our participation in Christ's singular history by the power of the Spirit -- and so it is in mission that the Church "is," has its identity in Christ, for it is Christ in his singular historicity that is the content of the mission, the "sent one." In other words, my point is that the church has no identity "in itself" prior to its encounter with the world because the church's identity is what is found in what is always-already "prior" to it -- Christ's apocalyptic inbreaking into and transformation of the world. It is in terms of this "priority" that I will articulate an apocalyptic notion of transcendence that sets what I am doing at an angle with Barber's purely secularizing and immanentizing move, as we will see in the discussion of the Yoder chapter. (Dan and I also have essays in the forthcoming issue of Political Theology that mark of these differences in our positions.) Furthermore, you are right here, Steve, that "apocalyptic" as such is no more a guarantee against ideology than any other "category" taken in itself. It is our participation in the singular historicity of Jesus Christ that frees us from the ideological game, and Hauerwas' deployment of narrative does not thereby fail to escape ideology as narrative, but rather in the universalizing, metanarratival moves by which he at points obscures that singular historicity, to (unintended) ideological effect.

3.) Finally, I would suggest that the "consistent logic of the Incarnation" is not one of "universality" as such. This association of universality as both synchronically and diachronically constituted, as you put it, is as I said above with regards to Hauerwas, an inversion of the Troeltschian logic. Whereas for Troeltsch this occured through "cultural borrowings," for the Hauerwasian this occurs simply through the solidification of the church-as-culture, in-itself. The logic of the Incarnation is indeed a logic of "catholicity," but I do not want to associate catholicity with a "commonality" identified as "universality." The "commonality" that occurs, as Leontius of Jerusalem understood it, is one of koinoinia, which St. John of Damascus further articulated as humanity's paradoxical participation in Jesus Christ's particularity. Catholicity occurs not by way of relating particulars to a universal, but rather by participating in Christ as the singular love of God for the singular other, the singular love of all as the singular love for each one in her singularity. This, I would say, is charity, and therein lies our geniune catholicity. That charity is the church-as-mission, as it is our participation in the singular historicity of Jesus that is God's perfect agape.

Steve, I have not done near enough to address all your questions, but I hope I have begun to in a way that can keep taking this conversation forward. I will try to say more with regards to other issues raised in your post (particularly the Joachimite question) as the conversation unfolds. For now, however, I'll leave it at what I've said, with the invitation to clarification from yourself and others. I am grateful and learning much.

[Nate Kerr]

It appears as if Halden has already addressed some of my concerns about what he was saying in his latest post!

[Halden]

Isaac, I appreciate the probing there. Certainly Jesus's physical body was derived from Mary, and that should never be denied. However, I think this must understood not as a statement of ontological dependency, but rather as one of election. In other words, from the standpoint of the doctrine of election God in Christ eternally elects to be the Son of Mary. This is not to say, however that Jesus somehow ontologically "depends" on Mary--his physical derivation from Mary the result of divine election, not an ontological dependency of Christ on humanity. Does that make sense?

[Halden]

Yes, Nate I was not, in any way, trying to imply that the church in "acquires" a putative identity in the process of mission. And I definitely agree with the claim that "the church 'is' the mission; the content is the mission, and that is the singular agape of God in Christ."

In essence, it seems to me that your ecclesiological proposal is something like the following:

1.) The church is mission.
2.) Mission is participating in the singular agape revealed in Christ.
3.) Thus, the church "is" insofar as it practices the love that Jesus practiced--the poltics of Jesus.

I definitely agree with all of this, and I think it leads us toward the next important question, namely more explication, specifically biblical explication of what participating in the singular agape of Christ--what being the mission--looks like.

[John Wright]

Dear Nate and Others:

Thank you for your responses to my post. I was simultaneously writing a response while Steve Long was on Friday, but in my attempt to post it quickly before class, I lost it. The dialogue has progressed since then, for which I am thankful. I hope that my “re-chiming in” does not inhibit this progress. I think this response will end where Halden's helpful ends immediately above.

I seem to have an art of offending people; surely it was not my intent to offend Nate by my response, neither to build him into a straw-man nor to ask questions that do not pertain to Nate’s work. I did take it on as a task of friendship; I am very disappointed that I have disappointed Nate. It is not good to be a manifestation of ideological thinking – “foregoing the complexities involved for the sake of a set of ideas”; but at least I join Professor Hauerwas in this company! I certainly regret if I gave the impression that I reject the contributions that Nate has made in his work, or the creativity of Nate’s own thought and person. I have not mastered the art of criticizing work that cannot be taken as a criticism of a person. I apologize.

If it is even worth going back to my original post, I would like to highlight several points:
(1) My understanding was that I was only responding to Nate’s chapter 4 on Hauerwas, not Nate’s overall project. I tried to be very limited in my response. I’m sorry if I did not sufficiently engage all Nate’s work. This was not to dismiss him or his overall project, but to do what I thought was a very specific assignment. My response is grossly inadequate to the whole of Nate’s work, and does not broach the fundamental issues with which he struggles.
(2) I know and tried to affirm Nate’s deep affinities with the Hauerwasian text and the complexity of his relationship to it. If I didn’t indicate sufficiently strongly Nate’s “for” with his “against,” and the complexity that ensues, I apologize.
(3) As noted, I never called Nate a “liberal” – I merely stated that by defining Hauerwas by what he criticizes (liberalism), this seems to me conceptually, in this chapter, to privilege liberalism for his interpretation of Hauerwas. Now, there is no doubt that Hauerwas is “anti-liberal.” Yet the stream of life (Wittgenstein) from which Hauerwas speaks is not the anti-liberal stream or a Barthian stream primarily, I would argue, but an Augustinian-Thomistic stream. If Hauerwas began his writing in the old Soviet Union, I am sure that his writings would profoundly differ (if, of course, that setting would provide the social contingencies necessary for Hauerwas to write as American liberalism has); but I do not see it as essentially modifying Hauerwas’ task. I see him as picking up a tradition that precedes the liberal/Marxist/nation-state divide and re-articulating it within this new context, using ad hoc philosophical categories to continue this more conservative task. I was making a limited point about Nate’s reading of Hauerwas, not describing or critiquing his program. I think Nate and I disagree at this point, but that is not to dismiss Nate's reading for how it opens the Hauerwas text. Obviously Hauerwas interacts with the strand that Nate analyzes so well. I just think that a different, more fundamental tradition is at work in the Hauerwasian text.
(4) I tried to say that I think that Nate’s reading of Hauerwas was not wrong, but incomplete. I tried to say Nate rightfully criticizes certain readings of Hauerwas that exist, by friend and foe alike, when the Wittgensteinian/Augustinian Thomistic tradition is neglected in reading him -- and the particular type of realism that Hauerwas espouses. Yet I do think that this very incompletion is problematic for reading Hauerwas (probably not for Nate’s whole agenda). I am curious about the implications of this for Nate’s whole program.
(5) Nate’s concern that my response is “obfuscatory and an evasion of the issues raised by not only this chapter, but the book as a whole” is valid, both from within his reading, and, as noted above, intentionally so – I had a much narrower task in my response than that by which it was received. I did not intend to be rude or dismissive as I raised the issue about this other tradition. It is clear that Nate and I read the Hauerwas text as part of related, but profoundly different, language games. I was trying to write within time and space constraints, and I obviously did not successfully negotiate either.

Let me directly respond to what Nate rightfully sees as his main concern: that Hauerwas “proffers an account of Jesus Christ's lordship and of the church's mission that is irreducibly bound up with an ideological ecclesiology of the church-as-polis.” I think that I agree with Nate here except for the one word – “ideological.” Nate has helpfully in this conversation defined what he means as “ideological” (I did not find an explicit definition in the book, not that I looked thoroughly for it) – “foregoing the complexities involved for the sake of a set of ideas;” for Hauerwas, I would replace “ideological” with “biblical” or a “communion of saints”. This is minor, but a very significant difference.

Let me speak of the what I am contemplating about the great creativity of Nate’s project – though I must speak very tentatively and hesitantly for fear of mischaracterization. I speak even more tentatively as I do not have Nate’s book here with me.

If I read Nate correctly, he has engaged the problem of political theology after “the liberal subordination of the gospel to a colonial economic program” and the “Marxist subordination of the gospel to a colonial program” (liberation theology). He wishes to keep the witness of the church alive and moving in the fullness of Christ without getting co-opted by others forces so that the agape that is God may freely be witnessed in Jesus Christ in the world – “the singular historicity of Jesus that is God's perfect agape.” He fears that Hauerwas’ emphasis on the linguistic formation of the church provides a stability that forecloses the constant messianic in-coming of this singular history of Jesus that is God’s perfect agape, and this results in a colonial triumphalism. If it does, Hauerwas endangers the very movement of agape, God's constant in-coming, by closing it off by the very language that seeks to sustain it. In this way, Nate seeks to keep the witness of Jesus as the agape of God so that the church may constantly be freed to re-constitute the world in God’s very in-coming without being made captive to human sin that would twist it to its own end. Nate has written a post-liberal, post-Marxist, Christologically-based liberation theology.

Again, with all tentativeness, I read that Nate has done this by very creative, surprising, complex, and fertile moves: he has taken Yoder’s apocalyptic of the politics of Jesus and read it through Benjamin’s/Derrida’s apocalyptic structure of messianicity. Barth/Yoder allow him to affirm the particularity of “singular history of Jesus” and Benjamin/the later Derrida allow him to always keep this revelation “on the move,” always in-coming, never fixed, stable, or co-optable. It is apocalyptic Christianity as always/never present, always calling forth from a particularity to an eschatological presence that is always absent. The church is mission as it lives in this very instability, vulnerability for the Other, particularly the poor, in which its very witness is tied to its refusal to either accommodate to the structures of the world or withdraw from it. This way the church as mission can live for justice without become law; live for the world without regard for its own future; live out of its particularity without concern for identity, and thus witness in its very embodied life, the particularity of Jesus constantly anew, being remade always by the power of the Spirit who brings the eschatological future to life even as the Spirit withdraws to keep the church looking to the future eschaton. To “close off” the gospel via a particular linguistic formation is to slip into ideology -- violate the messianic structures of existence -- and bring about all sorts of moral malformations.

If this is so, need I say the power, creativity, and helpfulness for the church in a church fixated on “identity” as it struggles in a liberal free-market of choices that renders the catholicity of the church void and opens the churches witness to subordination to other powers of Nate’s thought? Need I say how important that I think that it is to hear Nate?

Yet I also wonder. I wonder whether the correlation of Yoder’s messianic Jesus apocalypticism with Benjamin’s/later Derrida’s notion of messianicity does not ultimately subordinate the gospel to this universal “structure of un-structuring" and thereby discipline the gospel by something more fundamental than it – the messianic structure which is then fully manifest in Jesus as the particularity of God’s agape. This, to me, is very illusive and delicate and complicated matter. Is the politics of the church a version of the more universal politics of deconstruction, of the always in-coming-yet-never-present Other? I don’t know. My concern is that the Gospel becomes subordinated to a more universal logic, even if that logic is a logic of messianicity, drawn from the life of the synagogue and the church, purified through philosophical analysis, and returned back to us. Theology becomes primarily a practical task rather than having its practical arising out of its speculative nature. The issue of the “true,” I’m afraid, becomes rendered less significant than “the good.”

This is why I objected to the criticism that Hauerwas makes the church “a story” – again, I have not scanned the Hauerwasian text to see if he does so. If he does, I am with Nate; it annuls whatever good Hauerwas is trying to accomplish. My reading of Hauerwas is that this would not represent a consistent theme in his work even if it is present. I have never heard nor read to my recollection that Hauerwas says that the church makes Jesus possible; if he does, Nate’s concerns are very important if for no other reason of the imprecision of the statement. I have heard Hauerwas say, “I do not believe in the church; I believe in a God who can even use an accommodated church to accomplish God’s good end.” I have read Hauerwas as possessing an understanding of the church as a character within the narrative that the Scriptures are, which, of course, the church is also to tell, but never “is”.

I am a Scripture scholar. I read Hauerwas’ appeal to the narrative-formed church as a reference of God’s gift of Scripture to the church to upbuild and keep the church faithful as read within worship in preparation for baptism and the Eucharist – in other words, I don’t read Hauerwas as protecting a church through ensuring identity via a cultural-linguistic abstraction, but as calling the church to the concrete material, textual reality (the Scriptures) that the Spirit uses to keep the church faithful as mission. Read through the rule of faith (which describes the underlying narrative deep structure of Scripture as it is for the church in the material reality that emerged at least by the late third century AD), “narrative” is only significant because it names the form of the Christian Scriptures. Any other “narrative” than the Scriptures, any other logic than that provided by the Scriptures, makes me concerned. In the Scriptural narrative, the church names those gathered from the world through the faithful of Christ by their own faith/allegiance to Jesus, crucified and risen. The church must look to the witness of the Scriptures; it seems to me, not a messianic logic, to keep it unsettled, repentant, living to receive, inherit, and never bring or accomplish the kingdom. Perhaps that does make Christianity ideological in the sense given by Benjamin. Only the Scriptures completely render Jesus intelligible as God’s unique, particular, unrepeatable, insubstitutable, particular revelation of Jesus Christ as the agape of God.

I have droned on way too long. Again, I hope that Nate will accept my apology if my initial tone sounded dismissive and hurtful.

I can't resist one final question: I wonder if some of this tension isn’t a different trajectory of Benjamin/Derrida and Wittgenstein and the different relationships at work between the philosophical and theological in these works as both try to overcome/reconstrue the idealist/realist overdetermination of thought within the Western culture.

Peace,
John

[Dave Belcher]

John,

I just wanted to submit one thing for the purpose of clarification:

Nate is most clearly not espousing the later Derrida's understanding of apocalyptic, but precisely trying to account for a Christian vision of apocalyptic over against Derrida's understanding. So, the only three places that Derrida is mentioned in the book -- to my estimate -- are couched in Nate's clear distanciation from Derrida's "Messianic ideal."

So, p. 11: "A central conviction of this book...is that at a time when 'apocalyptic' has taken on the status of what Jacques Derrida calls 'a certain tone' in contemporary culture and thought, some account must be given of the difference that Christian apocalyptic makes for how we see and live in history today" (Nate's emphasis; it should be pointed out also that Derrida's understanding of apocalyptic is decidedly not that of a Christian apocalyptic but one that is indeterminate!).

And, p. 61: "That is, if Christian apocalyptic is to resist and to move beyond the postmodern and theoretical temptation to reify apocalyptic according to a new 'Messianic ideal,' in terms, for example, of what Derrida calls 'the universal structure' of a historical, 'quasi-transcendental' messianism of infinite deferral, and is rather to insist that apocalyptic has to do with the singular act of God's decisive transformation of history in the historical reality that is the Messianic arrival of Jesus of Nazareth, then Christian apocalyptic must be able to take up the challenge of historicity and in doing so must give way to its own distinctively theological historicism, a historicism no less rooted in and committed to the complexities, contingencies, and disaccord of historical 'reality' than that of someone like Troeltsch" (again Nate's emphases, and note the first one specifically with Derrida's understanding of l'arrivant in Aporias, for example, or in Given Time, where the arrivant does not and cannot arrive).

And finally, p. 159: "At the same time, this apocalyptic historicity 'holds open' history in a way that is irreducible to the kind of transcendental-historical 'opening to the future' that Derrida and postmodernism assume as the 'given' 'universal structure' of apocalyptic/messianic experience" (my emphasis that time).

So, there is no ultimate subordination of the gospel to "this universal 'structure of un-structuring'"...Nate's use of Benjamin is meant to decidedly overcome precisely that move just as it overcomes the universal historicism of Troeltsch.

[John Wright]

Dave:

Thank you. I obviously missed these points. Maybe you could help me understand the difference between Benjamin and Derrida at this point. I tended to see the connection, but not the difference (no pun intended!).

John

[Dave Belcher]

John,

Nate describes his use of Benjamin as a "philosophical propaedeutic" to what he will do with the distinctively Christian understanding of apocalyptic in the singular historicity of Jesus of Nazareth....so in my understanding, Benjamin is being used only heuristically for his helpful criticism of precisely the kind of universalism (and thus ideology) espoused by Troeltsch. Derrida falls under that same criticism because of the way in which he "reifies" apocalyptic as another sort of Troeltschian universal structure -- the "universal structure of experience," as Derrida puts it in Specters of Marx, which is very close, note, to Troeltsch's understanding of the universal structure of the soul as Nate describes it....Benjamin is simply used, then, as a helpful way of reorienting us beyond the Troeltschian propensity to fall into a universalist logic that is ineluctably bound to abstractions from the real complexities and exigencies of historicity (though I am sure Nate would want to eventually place some distance even between the distinctively Christian project he is engaged in and Benjamin here...Nate does not "land" with Benjamin, in other words).

So, it seems quite clear to me that Nate's project is simultaneously and decidedly distinguished from either Derrida/Troeltsch or Benjamin in the sense that the "enactments" of apocalyptic interruption (pace Benjamin) is constituted by the apocalyptic interruption in the historicity of Jesus, but also in the "excess" of that historicity by the "more" of the Spirit who empowers the dispossessed ecclesia to give gratitude for God's singular act in neighbor love, in short, in doxology.

Peace.

[d barber]

John says: "Yet the stream of life (Wittgenstein) from which Hauerwas speaks is not the anti-liberal stream or a Barthian stream primarily, I would argue, but an Augustinian-Thomistic stream."

It's worth remembering that Wittgenstein is not Augustinian-Thomistic. I say this not to be sarcastic, but because it calls attention to the fact that Hauerwas, in my opinion, is a pluralist. Whereas Augustine and Thomas are committed to showing that the Christian form of life is identical to the nature of being, I don't think that's the case for Hauerwas. Not that Hauerwas would necessarily wish to deny that, but that he would refuse -- and this is a substantive refusal -- to present such a claim (hence the discussion of witness and nonviolence).

(In other words, the Wittgenstinian lesson: there are many forms of life in the world, and this plurality is irreducible.)

In this regard, Hauerwas is far closer to Yoder than he is to Augustine/Thomas. In fact, the liberal universalism Hauerwas opposes is much closer (than Hauerwas is) to the theo-ontological universalism espoused by Augustine/Thomas.

[Nate Kerr]

John:

Thank you for your lengthy response and for the real care and concern for a shared friendship rooted in theological faithfulness that it shows. I am grateful for it and for its graciousness; your comment came as a kind of grace to me. Thank you. I am sorry not to have gotten to respond to your post earlier, and even now I am going to have to be too brief. Thankfully, Dave Belcher and Dan Barber have helped to address some of your concerns about Bejamin/Derrida and "the stream of life" from which Hauerwas speaks.

I'd like to be a bit more broad in my response here, especially as regards two things, viz., the understanding of Hauerwas' ecclesiology as ideological vs. biblical and the relationship of the truth to the good.

1.) As for the question of "ideology," I mean by this that Hauerwas' ecclesiology is ideological in relation to the Constantinian ideology I outlined in pages 6-11 of the book. If there is a definition of ideology that I am working with throughout the book, it is to be found there. Among those points is that "the ordered structures of a given society" become determinative of political action in history (7); the Kingdom of God is "idealized" in such a way as to make of the work of mission a kind of articulation of the "universality" of Christianity (8-9); and the already-not yet tension of biblical eschatology is immanentized by way of a certain teleology, and instrumentalized as a means of socialization (8-10). For reasons I have articulated in the Hauerwas chapter, I think that Hauerwas' ecclesiology cannot avoid the risk of repeating these moves; his church-as-polis risks becoming a kind of ecclesiological mirror image of the "Constantinianism" he, along with Yoder, wants to critique. And this is the case, in a sense, because of the way his apocalypticism works, and because of the way he "ecclesiologizes" apocalyptic. And this is in part where I think Steve's question about Joachim of Fiore is so interesting. One of the ironies of the influence of Joachim on the strands of thought which Steve mentions is the way in which its interpretation of history ended up buttressing certain chiliastic accounts of church and society, as representative of the freedom of (the) Spirit and the telos of history. To my mind, Hauerwas' Sittlich-like account of the church runs the risk of just such a chiliasm.

At any rate, to return to the point of ideology and Constantinianism: When he gave his keynote paper in Rome, Stanley parenthetically complained that he is "sick and tired of being called an anti-Constantinian." I couldn't help but think his remark was directed at someone like me. And yet, the more I think about it, he's right: his ecclesiology may not be so much anti-Constantinian as Constantinianism's obverse -- Constantinianism turned inside-out.

This leads me to address the question of the extent to which Hauerwas' ecclesiology is "biblical." I agree with what you say to a great extent that the biblical narrative is what shapes the church, for Hauerwas, and yet I worry that Hauerwas' understanding of Scripture as the gift (as you put it) "to upbuild and keep the Church faithful" is emphasized at the expense of "rendering Jesus intelligible as God’s unique, particular, unrepeatable, insubstitutable, particular revelation of Jesus Christ as the agape of God." I think these two are inseparable (as I'm sure you and Hauerwas would agree), and Scripture is a sacrament of the church precisely as it witnesses to the singular identity of Jesus Christ. But here is where I do not follow Hauerwas in his critique of Frei in "The Church as God's New Language." This is because, for Frei, the point of speaking of Scripture as narrative is to render for us the identity of God, of the irreducibility of Christ's singular existence as God and of the mysterious work of the Spirit as God, to our telling of the story. And so Scripture is sacramental in precisely this way: as a "sign" of what it is not in-itself; and it is formative for the church in precisely this way, as rendering its "telling the story of Christ" as sacramental as a "sign" of what it "is not" in-itself as church, which renders its telling missionary from the outset. When Hauerwas speaks as he tends to do at points of the narrative identifying the church alongside Christ in relation to "a story that subsumes both" (a quote that comes from Milbank but that Hauerwas cites approvingly), then he runs the risk of rendering the church constitutive of Jesus' identity in a way that I just do not find to be biblical at all.

And this, finally, is where Hauerwas fits into this whole scheme as regards the genealogy I'm tracing. What I am doing with apocalyptic is a way of affirming what I understand that Barth was seeking to do with his actualism and Hauerwas with his deployment of narrative, that is, to render an account of the Lordship of Christ that refuses abstraction from the concrete historicity of Jesus of Nazareth. The problem for me with Barth and Hauerwas is that Jesus himself in his singular, apocalyptic historicity ceased at key points to be determinative of the account of God's being-in-act (Barth) or the narrative (Hauerwas) that is constitutive of the meaning of this Lordship. Apocalyptic for me is just that way in which I am seeking to articulate the truth of Jesus Christ's lordship in his singular historicity in a manner that I take Barth's actualism and Hauerwas' narrativalism to be inadequate to. In this way, I am really seeking to be faithful to a certain theological impulse and intent which drives the work of Barth, Hauerwas, and Yoder, all three. "Apocalyptic" would cease to be adequate to this task as well were the logic or mode of apocalyptic deployed not itself Christically determined by this singular historicity from beginning to end.

2.) Now, as to the second point, as regards to the privileging of the "good" vis-a-vis the "true," I will only say for the sake of brevity that my account of the apocalyptic singularity of Jesus Christ is meant precisely to support an account of the way in which such realities are united, and truly thought without the privileging of the one over the other (or without placing them in a relation of dialectical polarization), in the person of Jesus Christ. So the apocalyptic event of Christ is that event for me in which alone occurs the genuine coincidence of the true and the good, of intellect and will, of being and act, of knowledge and wisdom, etc. That I have not accounted for how this is the case in the book is simply because to do so would exceed its bounds and its intended scope. However, I would point out that the work of Josh Davis and Travis Ables in their dissertations currently being completed at Vanderbilt will go some way towards helping us to think through these issues in new ways. And while their work is in no way to be read as dependent upon mine or as flowing out of what I'm doing, I do think that what they will do may shed some significant light upon what I'm trying articulate, and will I'm sure no doubt even change how what I'm saying needs to be read.

Anyway, I'll leave it at that for now. Thank you again for this engagement, and for the continued conversation. And thank you, John, especially, for your graciousness. I am truly grateful.