An online place for some friends to get together and argue about what they care most about.

The "b" is silent.


At the seminar table:

Stephen Webb
Rodney Clapp
Trevor Bechtel
David Cunningham
Margaret Adam
A. K. M. Adam

Gentlemen (and lady),

I have been thinking about some of the ways in which Stanley Hauerwas and Reinhold Niebuhr are similar, not just the obvious ways (they are both the theologians of their day even though neither is a theologian, for example, they both are on the margins of the academy, both are occasional writers, not systematic, both obsessed with working out the implications for Christian faith in terms of living in the modern world, etc. etc.) Below find some of my reflections. They are part of an article I am working on. I'd be curious to your reaction. Also, I wanted to pass along something I found in Jane Bingham's book on Niebuhr, Courage to Change: She notes how Niebuhr later admitted that An Interpretation of Christian Ethics (ICE) was deeply flawed and unclear at points. In a speech to the graduating class of Union Seminary in 1957, Niebuhr said that the phrase "impossible possibility" was not the best way to define the pinnacle of Christian love. It would be better to say of such love that it is "the perfect good which is not beyond our possibilities, as the history of Martyrdom proves, but which is certainly not within the conventional possibilities of our existence." This seems to me about right: to be a pacifist is to invite and prepare for martyrdom; within the conventions of everyday existence, Christian love is very difficult to implement. Nevertheless, what Niebuhr should have gone on to say is that our conventions can be transformed by such love. In any case, I'd be curious about any reaction to the below:

Just as Niebuhr made it safe for atheists acknowledge the value of the church, Hauerwas has made it possible for theological evangelicals and conservatives to find a place in the secular academy. Atheists for Niebuhr could use Christianity to support their political beliefs without sacrificing their secular presuppositions. Evangelicals for Hauerwas are able to shun liberalism without sacrificing their intellectual credibility in that most liberal of institutions, the academy. Hauerwas has also made it possible for mainline Christians to sound as angry and alienated as evangelicals or fundamentalists without actually having to inhabit those particular subcultures. In fact, there are two groups of readers that Hauerwas attracts: evangelicals who want to have a more critical edge to their engagement with secular culture, and mainline Christians who want to position themselves outside of secular culture without having to become evangelical. Indeed, it is rare to meet a Hauerwas student who is not in the mainline churches; most of the ones I know seem to be Episcopalian.

Moreover, just as Hauerwas thinks that Niebuhr secretly legitimates the coercive features of liberal democracies, Hauerwas himself is often accused of inadvertently encouraging the more conservative elements of the Christian churches. Niebuhr is no more liberal than Hauerwas is conservative. Yet when Niebuhr criticizes the optimism of liberalism or when Hauerwas criticizes the nationalism of conservatives, each thinker ends up being much more implicated in the assumptions of their opponents than they would like to admit. Niebuhr himself was a kind of optimist, who though Christianity could be cleaned up and made acceptable to modern liberals. And Hauerwas is a kind of conservative who thinks the Christian church can stand against decadent secular culture by providing an alternative to liberal forms of socialization. Niebuhr never sheds his optimism or his belief that the American democracy is the best, even though limited, vehicle for the achievement of the Kingdom of God. Likewise, something of the nationalism that Hauerwas rejects comes back to haunt his ecclesiology, wherein the church becomes an entity set apart from all other institutions and has no obligation to enter into reciprocal relationships with them that might compromise or imperil its more superiority.

Much of my article, by the way, compares Hauerwas's use of hyperbole with Niebuhr's use of irony and argues for the need for a combination of both theological rhetorics, on theological grounds.

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posted by Margaret Adam at 6:17 PM

Dear Steve,

I'm sure you didn't mean to drop me off the cc list of the last few--David added me on again anyway. .  

I suppose this seems just too obvious to say, but I will go ahead:  much of the disagrement this time around (and earlier) seems to have to do with what we think about language and interpretation. (Yes, I am studying Wittgenstein now, and no, I will not refer to him here.)

Another piece of the frustration is that AKMA and I only entered into serious conversation with you somewhat recently, and, although we have begun to read what you have written over the years, we are not through, and it may be possible that you have not read what we (mostly AKMA) have been writing.

I do recognize that it would be presumptous of me to say, "Read all this and then we will talk," and I am not saying this. I will, however append a list of some things that, if you were to glance at sometime, might clarify some of our conflict points. And, even if you don't have a chance or the inclination to read any of it, at least the list might indicate that biblical interpretation, biblical theology, and interpretation in general are topics of interest over a long time here--and topics in which you and we seem to be formed very differently.

These are offered in the hopes that, at some point, we might come to some basis of agreement on something, and then move from there, rather than having to spend all our time of points of extreme difference.

For what it's worth:

From AKMA:

"Twisting to Destruction," Perspectives on New Testament Ethics: Essays in Honor of Dan O. Via,  Perspectives in Religious Studies 23/2 (1996), 215-222.

"Matthew's Readers, Power, and Ideology," SBL 1994 Seminar Papers (1994), 435-449.

"The Future of Our Allusions," SBL 1992 Seminar Papers (1992), 5-13.

Making Sense of New Testament Theology, (Macon GA: Mercer Univ. Press, 1995).

What Is Postmodern Biblical Criticism? (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995).  

From Steve Fowl:

"Texts Don't Have Ideologies," in Engaging Scripture

And, from me:

"This is My Story, This is My Song... . : A Feminist Claim on Scripture, Ideology, and Interpretation," in Escaping Eden: New Feminst Perspectives on the Bible (eds Washington,l Graham and Thimmes.

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posted by Trevor Bechtel at 6:17 PM

The text is absolutely an agent. But it is a strange agent like a chemical in a reaction or the script in a play.

The chemical in a reaction analogy is a good one because it emphasizes how changed people are by reading the text. I totally agree that this happens in the main in communities, in narrative, in biographies ... but, people get convicted by the text. Is something else going on in Augustine's Confessions? Higher criticism and modernist individualism wrecked this for the most part, and maybe beyond recognition, but conviction happen(ed)(s).

That's why I like the script in a play analogy better. If you take the actors away you have a problem(Hauerwas is pretty concerned with this problem). If the audience doesn't show up you have a problem (its a very different one, and I think it is one that Niebuhr was concerned with). But while friends of performance art/improvisation might want to disagree with me, I think that if you take the script away you have a problem that removes the possibility of even getting to either of the previous problems. Isn't all of Christianity based on a faithful, spirit-filled, reading of scripture?

The careful among you will note that I just slipped a whole category into the discussion - the spirit. As a mennonite I'm going to want the spirit pretty soon in this discussion because tradition is only meaningful for me if I can discern the spirit at work there. The radicality of the Anabaptist vision makes sense only if the spirit prompted people to read scripture and if their reading was full of the spirit. I think this is true of tradition in general, although I'm interested in a more E(e)piscopal read of this. That is, we trust tradition because we can discern the spirit there. Tradition is reliable because it consists of the spirit-filled performances/readings/interpretations of scripture by the christian community stretched out over time.

So I think that this means that Hauerwas is unabashedly right in saying that the Sermon on the Mount can only be understood by pacifists. I'm ready to say that a reading of the Sermon on the Mount that tries to make Jesus into something other than a pacifist is guided by a different agenda than the one the spirit is prompting. I mean to say this humbly, but it is my position. This read is possible because, whether or not Hauerwas is a high church Mennonite, his "church as polis" is not church as state but church as primary community for the Christian. I don't think that Hauerwas can be made into a liberal just because he thinks the church should be allied with the church and not allied with the state.

But as Dan Liechty has pointed out earlier in this discussion, pacifism is much broader than church/state, violence/non-violence issues. When Jesus' pacifism is read as purity the reader is guided by a different agenda than the one the spirit is prompting. Mennonite communities have been particularly prone to this. In fact, pacifism may often be too difficult to discern accurately. However, neither this difficulty nor the eschatological not-yetness of the church means that our attempts to be faithful performers of the story of the sermon on the mount are any less crucial. Dan is probably more aware of the shadow side of Mennonite pacifism than anyone, yet he is a pacifist.

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With this, the comparison of Stanley Hauerwas with Reinhold Niebuhr transmuted itself into the discussion of biblical interpretation and textuality, which appears on the first page of the blog.