How to be the church: 5-25-10
May 25, 2010
Time and again as I have written here and elsewhere about the crucial importance in our age of interfaith dialogue and understanding I also have insisted that followers of particular religious traditions must continue to maintain their commitment to those traditions. That is, just for the sake of harmony, we cannot give up our distinct religions and settle for some syncretistic mishmash.
That point became even clearer to me the other evening when I was privileged to hear Duke theologian Stanley Hauerwas (pictured here) speak at St. Michael and All Angels Episcopal Church here.
Hauerwas is not just a worthy academic -- once labeled by Time Magazine as America's best theologian (to which Hauerwas objected that "best" is not a theological category). He is, more importantly, a Christian who seeks to take his faith seriously and to get others to understand the gifts Christianity has to offer to the world.
Over the next several weeks you may find me returning to quote Hauerwas on this or that here on the blog and in my various columns, and I hope soon to offer you a review of his compelling new memoir, Hannah's Child.
But for today I'd like to focus on what he had to say about why the Christian church must be true to itself. He said this:
"Christians will do ourselves and our neighbors little good by trying to convince those who do not share our story that we also are liberal cosmopolitans. Rather, we must be what we are -- the church of Jesus Christ. For if that church is not the anticipation of the peace God wills for all people, then we're without hope. To sustain that peace, to care for the stranger when all strangers cannot be cared for, to know how to go on in the face of our suffering -- the suffering of those we love and the sufferings of those we do not know -- is possible because we believe God finally abandons no one."
And this:
"The very presumption that there's something called the world that can be identified depends on people who have separated from the world so that they can be of service to the world. . .What we Christians have to offer is patience and humility learned from the story called the gospel that teaches us how to live in peace. . .If the church is rightly understood to be God's new language, it is crucial that we not misplace our particular language. . . The language the church must speak is not that which forces uniformity but rather is shaped by the practices of love. . .necessary for the required patience that enables us to tell one another our different stories."
In other words -- my words -- the church must adhere to its self-understanding as a community that God calls out of the world just so that it may return to the world to do the work of love as a channel of God's grace. If the church is simply part of the culture -- or, worse, undifferentiated from the culture, which is to say warp and woof with the culture -- it has lost its court-jesterish way and has no hope to offer anyone.
Similarly, every religion must find its core identity and then seek to live out that identity in full and wholesome ways. Only then can it enter into authentic dialogue with other religions.
(I'm going to give you here about a 10-minute audio clip of the start of the talk Hauerwas gave the other evening, though it doesn't include the part I quoted above. You may want to crank up the sound on your computer for this clip because the sound system in the church wasn't all that good. Click on this link: Download Hauerwas-I)
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IGNORING FOLKS IN THE PEWS?
Are national Democrats backing away from their interest in attracting people of faith as voters? This analysis in the Washington Post suggests exactly that. Any party in America that doesn't try to appeal to religious adherents by offering values and programs in some harmony with the values of those adherents is sunk.
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THE BOOK CORNER
The Naked Anabaptist: The Bare Essentials of a Radical Faith, by Stuart Murray. In some ways the timing is good for me to be bringing this book to your attention on a day when I'm writing about Stanley Hauerwas, for Hauerwas is quick to acknowledge that he draws quite heavily for his own theology on Anabaptist theology. It turns out that there quite a growing interest in the Anabaptist tradition in England and Ireland, and this book is an attempt to describe what it is about this branch of Christianity that is appealing to people now in ways it hasn't in those countries before. In the U.S., of course, the Anabaptists are represented by the small but well-know Amish, Mennonite and Hutterite churches. What The Naked Anabaptist seeks to do is to strip away the cultural traditions that are part of those churches and see what's left. You can learn more about the Anabaptist growth in Europe, by going to the Anabaptist Network site. While you're there, you can find a list of seven core convictions that characterize essential Anabaptist thinking. There is much in Anabaptism that is in harmony with thinking coming out of the Emergent Church Movement, too, which is why you'll find Emergent leader Brian D. McLaren writing a blurb about this book on the back cover. And don't miss the excellent foreward by Gregory A. Boyd, who puts all of this in a post-Christendom context.
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