While I love reading Hauerwas’ (the man who wants Protestants to be more Catholic and Catholics to be more like Mennonites) critique of American Christians idolatrous devotion to the nation-state and its war machine, there are a few things about his underlying theology that continue to puzzle me.
First of all, given our tendency to think of the U.S. as God’s chosen nation, I appreciate his desire to clarify the gospel from the world or larger culture. However, I am a bit worried about his decision to speak of the world as divided between “Christians” and “pagans.” It is not that I disagree with his critique of the un-christlike (and even antichrist-like nature) of the role of war as secular ecclesiology and soteriology. Instead, I believe that to speak this way is to engage in a type of supersessionism. It seems that, biblically, the world is divided up between not “Christians” and “pagans,” but “Israel” and “Gentiles.” To speak of Christians and pagans as Hauerwas/Pinches does reeks of a type of triumphalism associated with the worst aspects of Christendom—a fact which is especially problematic for Hauerwas who, as evidenced by his admiration for Yoder, is otherwise opposed to such post-Constantinian ecclesiologies. Recently, scholars such as Willie James Jennings in his The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race and J. Kameron Carter in his Race: A Theological Account have chronicled the deep connection between supersessionism, even when not accompanied by overt anti-Semitism, and the colonial origins of white supremacy and racism in the West. I am not charging Hauerwas/Pinches with racism here, I am only pointing out that the dangers of supersessionism extend beyond anti-Semitism—there is growing evidence that supersessionism is a betrayal of the gospel itself.
Secondly, the authors make a claim that I find very strange, especially given their reliance on Aristotle: “As a religion of happiness, Christianity becomes a general form of religiosity that is so useful the question of whether it is true hardly makes any difference” (3). If the authors want to distance Christianity from utilitarianism or from corrupted notions of happiness based upon consumer-capitalist desire, then I applaud them. But this does not seem to be what they are doing here. They seem to be making a deeper philosophical claim that truth is something that is unrelated to practice/praxis. This seems to be a claim that not only needs to be justified (rather than casually asserted), but also seems to imply a type of ethical voluntarism. It’s almost as though there is no ethics only speculative truth. Such a claim seems to suggest not just that Christians should conform their lives to the Christian story, but also that we should not expect such conformity to have any type of practical coherence.
Similarly, the authors claim that God is not “primarily concerned with our happiness” (14). Again, it seems as though God wants obedience for obedience’s sake. When the authors’ claim “we are happy only to the extent that our lives are formed in reference to Jesus of Nazareth,” it seems not only that the authors are guilty of equivocation, using the word happiness to signify several different things, but also they have evacuated happiness of any content. My main problem with the authors’ theology lies in the following claim: “we suggest that reading Aristotle in this way makes it easier for Christians to remember that the moral life does not derive from some general conception of the good, nor even from an analysis of those skills or excellences that allegedly allow human nature to flourish. Rather, the moral life of Christians is determined by their allegiance to a historical person they believe is the decisive form of God’s kingdom” (29). First of all, it is easy to dismiss flourishing when you are flourishing. Second of all, such a view that the kingdom of God revealed in the person of Christ has nothing to do with human life and flourishing severs redemption from creation. In this view, there is only God the redeemer; if God the creator exists, She is certainly not the same person as God the redeemer (again, here a type of Israel-denying, Marcionite-like supersessionism creeps in…). It is clear that the authors think Christ saves us from sin, but what is not at all clear is what they think Christ is saving us for! Given their idealized portrait of the church (we could also ask what it means to speak about obedience to a church that has never existed), it seems as though the Church has replaced not only Israel, but also the Kingdom of God.
The authors’ claim that God is not primarily concerned with our happiness seems to contradict with their later claim that “the God of the Universe desires that we exist” (51). Why would God desire we exist but not desire our happiness, understood as our true good?! Similarly, why would it be a good thing for a Christian to die for her friends (48) if her death failed to bring about something good for these friends? Similarly, why would Christ die for us if not out of love, understood as a desire for our flourishing?
Hauerwas is most effective when he is pointing out the difference between the gospel and the American empire. He is also excellent when speaking about disabled persons. However, I am not sure that his ethical critiques necessitate the type of theological moves he makes.
WIT 
Katie, a very interesting post. Thank you. I don’t have much time at the moment, but let me address a couple things quickly.
You write, “It seems that, biblically, the world is divided up between not “Christians” and “pagans,” but “Israel” and “Gentiles.”” Actually, biblically, that’s not the case. Galatians 3 specifically reconciles Jew and Gentile (Greek), while Paul elsewhere differentiates between these Christians (Jews and Gentiles reconciled) and the pagans (1 Cor 10, 12; Eph 5). So the Christian-pagan distinction is valid, at least from a biblical standpoint. And this is not to mention the point that if the world is Israel-Gentile, then we as believers would be Israel, not Gentiles (Gal 3:7, contra your title).
Secondly – and I say this having not read the article in question (I don’t think), so forgive me for possibly speaking out of turn – I’m don’t see from what you present that they’re saying human flourishing doesn’t matter. They seem to be saying its mislocated or misdirected. They would see flourishing located in allegiance to Christ. So their the emphasis of their suspicion is arguably on “general” conception of the good and attendant general “skills or excellences,” contra the very specific ones of Christ’s kingdom. This goes back perhaps to comments in the earlier thread about Hauerwas not being a universalist.
I’m in a rush, so I probably haven’t articulated that very clearly, but there it is for now.
Geez, I garbled up that comment pretty badly, grammar/syntax/punctuation-wise. Apologies.
Hey Brad,
Thanks for your comments.
A quick response to your first point, specifically that “if the world were divided up into Israel and Gentiles, then we would be Israel not Gentiles.” That is precisely what I am trying to argue against–Jesus was a way of making it possible for Gentiles to be “artificially grafted” onto Israel (Romans 11:24). The God of Jesus remains the God of Israel–God’s covenant with Israel remains and is not surpasses or replaced by the Church. To be baptized in Christ is to be baptized into Israel…to be unnaturally grafted, to use Paul’s phrase.
If you look at 1 Corinthians 10, while Paul may be speaking about pagans, he has not stopped speaking as an Israelite. It is Israel, not the Church, that judges idolatry. If there are Gentiles included in Paul’s “we,” it is only in the sense that they have been grafted onto the body and history of Israel…notice he speaks of “our ancestors” as those who were “baptized into Moses.”
and we might have a different translation, but I don’t see any reference to “pagans” in Ephesians 5…only a bunch of patriarchy. Could you clarify your reference to Ephesians 5?
Also, with regard to “In Christ, there is no Jew or Gentile,” I think this should be read not as an obliteration of Israel, but as a recognition that, now, because of Christ, Gentiles can be in Israel by being in Christ.
As to your second point, I agree this is what the authors want to maintain (that happiness is conformity to Christ) but they also want to claim that such happiness is unlike a general sense of happiness or flourishing and even go so far as to say that “God is not primarily concerned with our happiness.” We could of course debate what is meant by the word “primarily,” but I also have a hard time thinking of what God could desire more than the happiness/flourishing of all creation, rightly understood. I still maintain that in their use of “happiness” they equivocate so much that the happiness we receive through conformity to Christ is evacuated of any recognizable content.
As Jennings and others points out, when non-Jewish Christians read the Bible, we should remember that we are the outsiders…we should not put ourselves in the place of Israel. Instead, we are the Canaanite woman begging for the scraps of meat that fall from the table of their masters. We are the centurion, etc.
If it’s a matter of humility and appreciation for being ingrafted to Israel, or called into the banquet of the rich man, than I completely agree with you, Katie. It’s good to other ourselves as well in Jesus’ parables (to see ourselves as the one who passed by the man robbed and dying on the side of the road, as the greedy older good son, as the man thanking God that he wasn’t made like this other man). In fact, it seems like the need for this sort of humility on the part of the Gentile Christians is (at least partly) the inspiration for Paul’s letter to Rome.
But I think there’s a lot more nuance to Paul then just simply saying that we are now Israel. To begin with, the fact that someone could become part of Israel through following Jesus (rather than the provisions for aliens given under the Law) demonstrates that Paul is radically reconfiguring what “Israel” means–not just extending it. He is likewise reconfiguring what it means to be gentile.
In fact, I think the argument against supersessionism can cut both ways here. I’m happy to be corrected by someone who knows more about second temple Judaism than I do, but I don’t think his non-Christian Jewish brothers and sisters would have accepted Paul’s idea of “Israel” as being consistent with their own.
If we don’t recognize that Paul is engaged in some creative and metaphorical thinking, we run the risk that people think we mean the same thing when we say “Israel” as a modern-day Jew might mean, or what a second-temple Jew might have meant. And we don’t. Just as it’s inappropriate to think that what God has done in Christ obliterates the covenant, it is also inappropriate for us to proclaim ourselves unequivocally grafted into “Israel” in the same sense that the word was used before Christ. To do the latter would be to fail to recognize the Jewish right to interpret what “Israel” means.
Perhaps it would be more helpful to speak about the fact that we are latecomers to an ongoing relationship between God and humanity.
No doubt Israel is changed by its being opened up to Gentiles. I agree with you on that point.
I would, however, want to resist any move which makes the scandal of God’s love for Israel any less scandalous by diluting it down to “the ongoing relationship between God and humanity.” I think this is a form of universalism we should reject. I think we should sit with the scandal of God’s preferential choice of Israel–at least for a while–and not try to make it any less scandalous. I’m not sure exactly how to talk about this yet, I”m really not sure what it means to talk about Israel (I’m honestly completely in the wilderness here) but I do believe that we haven’t yet fully understood just how deep of a problem supersessionism is.
I think I’ve been misunderstood. What I’m proposing is, I think, sitting with scandal more so than what you initially suggested in your post.
I’m not saying that Israel (in itself) has been changed, I’m saying that Paul in employing the term used it in a different way–and it’s this understanding of the word that we’ve inherited, where “Israel” means somewhere between descendants of Abraham by blood and by faith (I’ll defer from saying anything more precise).
I’m not attempting to be universalist in using the term “humanity” but to engage in a certain amount of apophaticism with regard to my right to say what “Israel” is. Whatever Paul meant, and whatever we mean by this ingrafting, it doesn’t allow us to show up at seder and say “don’t worry, I’ve been invited in by Jesus.” I’m pointing to a certain co-opting of the term “Israel” by Christians (that could also be accused of being supersessionist) that I think is problematic and I’m choosing, instead, to read the message to the Gentile Christians in the letter to Romans as mainly a smackdown to their arrogance in thinking they were somehow better than the Jewish Christians. I think the letter works much better to destabilize gentile arrogance than it does to provide a picture of a proper contemporary relationship between Christianity and Judaism. (I mean, Paul also talks about branches of the original tree being cut off on account of unbelief, so I think it’s an open question of whether or not “Israel” in the book of Romans would include non-Christian Jews or whether this metaphor wouldn’t also count as supersessionist in your view).
oh yea. ok. i get what you are saying. I think you make a much needed point when you say “it doesn’t allow us to show up at seder and say “don’t worry, I’ve been invited in by Jesus.” I’m pointing to a certain co-opting of the term “Israel” by Christians (that could also be accused of being supersessionist) that I think is problematic and I’m choosing, instead, to read the message to the Gentile Christians in the letter to Romans as mainly a smackdown to their arrogance in thinking they were somehow better than the Jewish Christians.”
I think this is excellent and I want to apologize if I seemed to suggest that this is what I think we should be doing. So thank you, I think what you say is crucial.
No apologies needed (and certainly I’m sorry if I was being belligerent)!
it’s all good!
*feminist group hug* SLASH do you want to go to seder with me this Spring?
Katie, to be honest, I usually find myself on the other side of this discussion, arguing for continuity between Israel and Jesus and church against supersession or against pictures of Christ utterly discontinuous from the life of Israel. So I admit to feeling odd here, but I don’t think we’re that disparate in our views on this point.
To the question of Christians and Israel, I am in complete agreement on the engrafting point, and I think if we have differences, they’re mostly (perhaps not all) semantic. When I say “we’re Israel,” I mean it precisely in the sense that we’re engrafted onto Israel through Jesus, who incarnated Israel in a way logically prior to incarnating the rest of humanity. However, if we’re baptized into Israel, then “we’re Israel.” It doesn’t mean we replace or displace or dominate; it just means we’re joined to and a part of. That’s all I had in mind there.
But I also don’t think we’re less than Israel. We are Abraham’s heirs, and although we are engrafted on, it doesn’t mean our “membership” (understood in organic terms) is “artificial.” It’s quite real, though understood to come through other means than blood, and in a manner that Paul himself seems at times to consider superior (though I’m not on board with the way that interpretation is used dismissively toward Israel). I understand what you’re saying on the Galatians point, and in no way do I think it obliterates Israel; rather, it obliterates any substantive difference between Israel and non-Israel that would cause barrier or division between disciples of Christ. So in a sense, while I certainly share the sensibility and appreciate the sensitivity of views like Jennings’, I don’t think that claim is quite correct. We are co-heirs, all of us, Jew and Gentile alike; differentiating among the disciples within the faith seems to me to undermine that reconciliation.
As to Paul himself, he is speaking as Israel in a sense, but also in a sense where he considers his Jewish pedigree to be rubbish for the sake of Christ, and to in no way merit God’s favor in any way that precludes the Gentiles. Since he goes out of his way to make this point at times, I’m not sure I’d be comfortable saying that he ever speaks in the NT as an Israelite while not also as a Christian in full fellowship and solidarity with Gentile Christians.
On your response to my second point (happiness), I think I’m probably with your concerns there. I need to read this piece myself sometime.
Oh, and the Ephesians 5 point was an error on my part – please disregard.
Many of the points you raise, Katie, remind me of a horrific note which Flannery O’Connor–that darling of Catholic grad students–once penned on artificial contraception. “The Church’s stand on birth control is the most absolutely spiritual of all her stands and with all of us being materialists at heart, there is little wonder that it causes unease. […] I will rejoice in the day when they say: This is right, whether we all rot on top of each other or not, dear children, as we certainly may” (The Habit of Being, p. 338). To divorce the Christian understanding of flourishing from all other conceptions of flourishing might suit Hauerwas, but it won’t suit others who insist on some rationality being located in God’s will. Even Benedict might part ways with dear Flannery here.
Yet I feel uneasy about just leaving it at that, because it seems to me that there aren’t many conceptions of human flourishing that are going to encourage us as Christ did to take up our cross and follow him. I guess the question would be how we understand flourishing in terms that measure up to Christ but are recognizable as flourishing to others as well.
Michael,
I think you raise a great point…and I think this is where some sort of concern for “the common good” comes in. I think you are right to suspect that the problem is not “flourishing” per se, but the fact that, in actuality, human flourishing becomes an excuse to “flourish” at the expense of others.
I think this is also where (to reference Nichole’s post) we need to be accountable to and in solidarity with “the poor” (to oversimplify for the sake of brevity). I think this is also why a theology that takes human flourishing seriously, both as a goal and a criteria, must also be one that takes privilege seriously. So it seems to me that “virtue ethics” as well as natural law have not yet found an adequate way of reckoning with the persistence of various forms of social privilege and attendant manifestations of structural violence.
I’ve tended to think that both Jennings and Carter have incredibly good things to say – I learned a lot from Willie Jennings about how to think about Genesis and creation – it shows up in nearly all the courses I teach now. Working with him was a good way to think through questions about race and gender while I studied at Duke.
That said, Jennings (at least in lecture) seemed to me to be quite essentialist gender-wise and that tends to be troubling for many feminists – though I admit that I’d probably be classifed mostly as an essentialist, but with some contructivist tendencies when it comes to gender roles (especially since I think most of the ways we conceive of gender roles are idolatrous). I’d be interested in some discussion of his work in relation to gender in this forum if there’s the chance.
Hi Jana,
I’ve only read The Christian Imagination but, in that work there is no mention of gender, sexual oppression, or the interlocking nature of sexism with racism. I would love to read his other work, especially that which deals with gender. Could you recommend some good titles?
Here are my [long] thoughts:
(1) I agree that, at least in Paul, Israel vs. Gentiles is the main way of dividing up humanity, so I would differ with Brad and maintain that in 1 Cor 10, Paul is thinking within the Israel-Gentiles category, not a Christian-pagans category. That said, as someone who does New Testament, I try my best to avoid ever talking about “the biblical view” to begin with. That’s not to say that you shouldn’t or that theologies that do so are necessarily problematic, but that when used by biblical scholars, such phrases pin you very clearly in a certain school—in this case, the biblical theology movement.
(2) I agree that the Christians vs. pagans mode of speaking that Hauerwas adopts does “reek of a type of triumphalism associated with the worst aspects of Christendom,” historically speaking. [BTW, Jeremy Schott’s book, Christianity, Empire, and the Making of Religion in Late Antiquity (Penn, 2008), is a fascinating study of some of the issues involved in the creation of “Christian” as a category.] On the other hand, I feel like this is unintentional. Hauerwas hasn’t written terribly much about Judaism itself, just as he hasn’t written terribly much about homosexuality itself, so I get the sense that even he knows it’s not his strong point. He has one point to make—that Christians have their own language that dictates their reality—and he often makes it by trying to tell them what they are not, or as he says, “who their enemy is.” In this case, it’s the “pagans.” I think he’s banking on the fact that the word “pagan” has zero currency for most Christians today, and so the mere use of it likely to jar those Christians into actually contemplating whether they oughtn’t act differently because of who they are. I read him the same way when he talks about “heresy,” e.g. in his foreword to Heresies and How to Avoid Them. Now that book is just silly from a historiographical point of view; it is utterly absorbed in the most obsolete rhetoric you could imagine. But the concern of that book is not actually to give you real info about “heresies” but to shock you by suggesting that beliefs matter and that there is such a thing as dangerous theology.
(3) Re: Hauerwas evacuating the term “happiness” of any content. I think this is deliberate. I haven’t read this particular piece, but I’ve read a lot of Hauerwas, and this whole move of using words in counterintuitive ways is something he’s getting–I’m 99% sure–from Herbert McCabe, whose Wittgensteinianism was most evident from how he would use commonplace words in what seemed to be totally nonsensical ways precisely to show us that we in fact don’t know what we’re talking about when we talk about God. McCabe, ironically, was never really into narrative theology, at least not in a way that would oppose it to metaphysical theology (to which he devoted much of his brain power).
(4) is in my next response, because this response is already obscenely long.
Sonja, your first point is quite helpful and good for me to know, especially since I’m not a biblical scholar and I know I can use “the bible” in naive and unsophisticated ways. So thank you–it is definitely sloppy of me to speak of a “biblical view.”
I also really agree with your second point. I appreciate Hauerwas’ use of “pagan” as a strategy to jar us. I think that’s brilliant–but, I think, for us moving forward, we have to find new ways of exposing the “otherness” to the gospel of American empire that do not (admittedly unintentionally) reaffirm supersessionism of any kind.
And yea, I again agree with your third point and think it’s very helpful. I don’t disagree with his ultimate objective (I don’t think), I just think he throws the baby out with the bathwater. I think he mislocates the cause of our current ecclesial dysfunction.
No, it is not necessarily sloppy! The “biblical view” can and has meant all kinds of things, since “the bible” means all kinds of things depending on how it is functioning in any argument, work of art, hymn, creed, treatise, apocalypse, psalm, or blog post. I was just trying to explain why the majority of my response was not going to deal with Paul and the Israel/Gentile question.
(4) Re: the moral life flowing from “some general conception of the good [or from an] analysis of those skills or excellences that allegedly allow human nature to flourish” versus it flowing from “an allegiance to a historical person [Christians] believe is the decisive form of God’s kingdom,” and re: your claim that this “severs redemption from creation.”
I both agree and disagree with you here. Disagree that this view necessarily severs redemption from creation. What it does–or is meant to do, I think–is to make everything (including creation and the kinds of reasoning that derive from a contemplation of nature) irreducibly Christological. I have never read Barth, but people who have tell me that Barth’s problem with natural theology and natural law was that it made Christ superfluous. (Please correct me if I’m wrong, or I’m just going to keep saying that.) I think that’s what Hauerwas is trying to address here. Whether this conflates the Father and the Son to the point of eclipsing the Father (I’m purposely avoiding Creator and Redeemer as titles here) is a good question, but it’s also the case that Jesus is the “image of the invisible God,” “en morphe theou,” “one with the Father,” and only “does the will of him who sent me,” such that if you wanted to argue for a “biblical view,” you certainly could make the claim that no one has seen the Father except the Son, and if you want to know what creation actually looks like, you have to do it through the lens of redemption. My first NT professor (who was not a theologian by any means) used to quip that the radical thing about Christianity was not the claim that Jesus was like God, but that God was like Jesus.
(Digression: I wouldn’t identify “Marcionism” with anti-Semitism or even anti-Judaism. I know you’re not writing history and so –isms are fair game for making strong points, but there’s no good *historical* evidence that Marcion didn’t like the Jews; what he didn’t like was unethical deities, which is what the god of the Jewish scriptures looked like to him.)
On the other hand, I agree with you that Hauerwas’s version of the two rival “first principles” of the moral life is “off” in a fundamental way. It’s off because having “a historical person who is the decisive form of God’s kingdom” as the first principle of Christian ethics is, *in effect*, possibly no different from having “some general conception of the good [or an] analysis of those skills or excellences that allegedly allow human nature to flourish” as the first principle. *Neither* of those first principles will necessarily play out in different ways; any application of them to our lives in the 21st century (or any century) requires tons of interpretation, tons of analogy, tons of agency, and tons of contingency. The ethical implications of a portrait of Jesus are *no more obvious* than the ethical implications of an “abstract” model of a flourishing human being.
Further, the insistence that Christians do ethics from the standpoint of allegiance to a historical person obscures the fact that our construction of that “historical person” *is just that*: a construct that involves just as much abstraction and reasoning from outside premises as does a “general” account of human flourishing. What I’m trying to say is that the claim that we follow a particular historical person does not actually amount to anything when we consider the fact that we have no tools with which to “get at” or “recover” that–or any–historical person as he or she was. What we have is a hagiography of Jesus that has been built up over two millenia, but which is for that reason no less true.
Ok, I’m loosing my train of thought here. My point is that narrative theology and Christology are not inherently more obvious or ethically useful than metaphysical theology is.
yea. i like it. 🙂
Sonja, with regard to your final two major paragraphs here, I’d be interested in your take on the recent “apocalyptic” moves of Nate Kerr and others. How do you think your claims here would compare to theirs?
Brad, to be honest, I have no take on the recent apocalyptic moves of Nate Kerr and others because I haven’t read them. (My excuse is that I don’t do real theology; my program is NT.) But I would be very, very interested to read up on anything related to my last two paragraphs, because I’ve only recently started to think about this stuff and I have no idea where to go from here. Could you make some recommendations as to where to start?
I seriously wonder which century you people live in? Perhaps the 18th or 19th.
It is as though none of the entirely necessary twentieth century deconstructions of the multi-various Christian cultic mythologies never occurred.
And a denial of the fact that all of the Sacred Scriptures of the entire Great Tradition of humankind are now freely available to anyone with an internet connection. And every aspect of the histories of all the Traditions too. Especially in your case, the inevitable blood-soaked history of the Christian Tradition.
Sue,
Could you please re-state your critique in a more constructive way? So far, all I can get from your critique is that you are angry with me for still being a Christian?
Also, I’m not sure you have actually read our blog, since much of it is devoted to pointing out the tragedies and evils of our past.
Sonja, have a look both at Kerr’s book *Christ, History, and Apocalyptic: The Politics of Christian Mission” as well as the theses (and subsequent discussion) on this collaborative post (which is about to be put into a book): http://www.inhabitatiodei.com/2010/06/08/kingdom-world-church-some-provisional-theses/
My sense, given your paragraphs, is that there might be some discomfiture. But I’d be interested in seeing some dialogue, hence my question.
Thanks for the recommendations, Brad. Maybe I’ll be able to read Kerr’s book over break. To give some context for my paragraphs: When I say that I’ve only recently begun thinking this way, I mean within the last four months, which is when I finally got around to reading some poststructuralist stuff in NT studies as well as some historiography after the linguistic turn stuff (e.g., Elizabeth Clark’s “History, Theory, Text,” Hayden White’s stuff on narrative, and especially Wayne Meeks’s “Christ is the Question”). Were I to speak for my own life, there certainly was a huge difference between “metaphysics” and “narrative,” the latter being what really got me going. But since having the idea of “history=the past” destabilized somewhat, I’m not sure how or whether to continue prioritizing narrative/history over “metaphysical” approaches.
I should have added that the blogpost might provide a nice summary overview of the book, since it gets to the core claims being asserted. The two sources are very much in continuity, though the Kerr book (published earlier) obviously provides a more substantive background for those claims. Do take a gander at the subsequent discussion as well, if you get the chance.