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    A Better Hope: Resources for a Church Confronting Capitalism, Democracy, and Postmodernity
    A Better Hope: Resources for a Church Confronting Capitalism, Democracy, and Postmodernity
    A Better Hope: Resources for a Church Confronting Capitalism, Democracy, and Postmodernity
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    A Better Hope: Resources for a Church Confronting Capitalism, Democracy, and Postmodernity

    By Stanley Hauerwas

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    By his own admission never one to duck a good fight, Stanley Hauerwas has in the past three decades established himself as one of our most important and most disputatious theologians. With A Better Hope, he concentrates on the constructive case for the truth and power of the church and its faith, "since Christians cannot afford to let ourselves be defined by what we are against. Whatever or whomever we are against, we are so only because God has given us so much to be for."

    Hauerwas here crystallizes and extends profound criticisms of America, liberalism, capitalism, and postmodernism, but also identifies unlikely allies (such as Chicago Archbishop Francis Cardinal George) and locates surprising resources for Christian survival (such as mystery novels). Interlocutors along the way include Reinhold Niebuhr, John Courtney Murray, and, in a significant and previously unpublished essay, social gospeller Walter Rauschenbusch.

    Never boring and often telling, A Better Hope demonstrates how a thinker so often accused of being "tribal" and "sectarian" is at the same time one of few contemporary theologians read not just by other theologians, but by political scientists, philosophers, medical ethicists, law professors, and literary theorists.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBaker Publishing Group
    Release dateDec 1, 2000
    ISBN9781585586011
    A Better Hope: Resources for a Church Confronting Capitalism, Democracy, and Postmodernity
    Author

    Stanley Hauerwas

    Stanley Hauerwas is professor emeritus of ethics at Duke University where he held the Gilbert T. Rowe chair for more than twenty years. Among his numerous publications are Sanctify Them in the Truth: Holiness Exemplified (1998) and Living Gently in a Violent World, with Jean Vanier (2008). His latest publication is Fully Alive: The Apocalyptic Humanism of Karl Barth (University of Virginia Press, 2023).

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      A Better Hope was my first introduction to Stanley Hauerwas, and I'm sure it will prove to be the start of a long fruitful journey. In this audaciously subtitled book, Hauerwas has collected 14 of his essays in one place.If you haven't read Hauerwas before, he's an American theologian with a reputation for never backing down from a fight—which is mildly ironic given his devotion to pacifism. In these essays, though, he has set out to provide hope instead of just tearing down. Like the prophets Isaiah and Ezekiel, you can only write so much judgment before you must present a new vision.This was a great introduction to Hauerwas because many of the essays are surveys of or reactions to other scholars he's interacted with. It's like a buy-one-get-one-free deal. You learn Hauerwas' views while in the process discovering people like Rauschenbusch, Niebuhr (both of them), Yoder, and Jenson.My only criticism of this collection is its randomness. In the Introduction and Table of Contents he tries to provide a framework to relate the diverse essays, but the topics are too diverse to wrap up so neatly. It would be better to understand this as a simple Hauerwas miscellany.While I enjoyed and learned a lot from every essay, one in particular stood out: "Worship, Evangelism, Ethics: On Eliminating the 'And'". In it, Hauerwas laments the dumbing-down of modern corporate worship. One moment I was chuckling to myself: "'I come to the garden alone' are not appropriate words to be sung in corporate worship, no matter how meaningful some people may find the hymn."Then immediately following that I was humbled and convicted: "Part of the difficulty is that Protestant Christians, evangelical and mainstream alike, have lost their ability to make such judgments. They have done so, moreover, because they debased their worship in the name of evangelism and moral uplift."That's the sort of depth you get when you read Hauerwas. I can hardly wait to dive deeper into his works.

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    A Better Hope - Stanley Hauerwas

    © 2000 by Stanley Hauerwas

    Published by Brazos Press

    a division of Baker Publishing Group

    P.O. Box 6287, Grand Rapids, MI 49516-6287

    www.brazospress.com

    Ebook edition created 2013

    All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—for example, electronic, photocopy, recording—without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.

    ISBN 978-1-58558-601-1

    Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

    Unless otherwise noted, Scripture is taken from the Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright 1946, 1952, 1971 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the USA. Used by permission.

    CONTENTS

    Cover

    Title Page

    Copyright Page

    Preface

    Introduction

    PART 1. THE CHURCH IN THE TIME CALLED AMERICA

    1 On Being a Christian and an American

    2 The Christian Difference: Or, Surviving Postmodernism

    3 Resisting Capitalism: On Marriage and Homosexuality

    PART 2. CHRISTIAN ETHICS IN AMERICAN TIME

    4 Christian Ethics in America (and the Journal of Religious Ethics): A Report on a Book I Will Not Write

    5 Walter Rauschenbusch and the Saving of America

    6 Not Late Enough: The Divided Mind of Dignitatis Humanae Personae

    7 Only Theology Overcomes Ethics: Or, What Ethicists Must Learn from Jenson

    8 Why The Politics of Jesus Is Not a Classic

    PART 3. CHURCH TIME

    9 Why Time Cannot and Should Not Heal the Wounds of History, But Time Has Been and Can Be Redeemed

    10 Worship, Evangelism, Ethics: On Eliminating the And

    11 Enduring: Or, How Rowan Greer Taught Me How to Read

    12 Captured in Time: Friendship and Aging (with Laura Yordy)

    13 Sinsick

    14 McInerny Did It: Or, Should a Pacifist Read Murder Mysteries?

    Appendix: The Ekklesia Project: A Declaration and an Invitation to All Christians

    Notes

    Index

    PREFACE

    I WOULD LIKE TO BLAME THIS BOOK on Rodney Clapp. He certainly deserves part of the blame, but unfortunately I had begun to imagine the book before Rodney imagined Brazos Press. I had told myself that Sanctify Them in the Truth would be the last book I would publish until I had finished the Gifford Lectures. But then I began to think that some of the essays I had written over the past few years were interconnected. Alex Sider and Richard Church helped me think through those connections. This book is the result of our combined efforts.

    I have dedicated this book to those who have thrown in their lot with The Ekklesia Project. Most of you reading this have never heard of The Ekklesia Project, which is one of the reasons I have dedicated this book to them. I want what we are about to be better known, so I have appended the Declaration of The Ekklesia Project to this book. Yet I would not want anyone to assume that The Ekklesia Project and what I am about are one and the same. Those who constitute the Project come from quite different ecclesial backgrounds, some are academics and some are not, and we bring quite different agendas to the work of the group. Yet as the Declaration makes clear, we are united in our commitment to reclaiming the church as an alternative people for the good of the world. At least for me The Ekklesia Project is a reminder that theology is not just another set of ideas to be considered by bored intellectuals.

    I am honored that this book is one of the initial publications of Brazos Press. Over the years I have learned the importance of editors. Rodney Clapp is not only a wonderful editor but a friend. The venture he and his friends have begun with Brazos Press is a sign of hope. Another sign of hope for me are the extraordinary graduate students who continue to come to Duke to become theologians. Alex Sider and Richard Church, who helped me with this book, are but representatives of these wonderful people.

    Sarah Freedman, the most interesting secretary in the world, did the hard work to get this book ready for publication. She never fails to surprise me. Her observations often make my work harder, but the results are worth the extra effort. The divinity school at Duke is a better place because of Sarah Freedman.

    I know I am a better theologian because of Paula Gilbert. God has never been just there for me. God is there for Paula. Her willingness to share that thereness with me makes all the difference. God is great.

    INTRODUCTION

    ON BEING HOPEFUL

    I HOPE A BETTER HOPE will be read as a hopeful book. John Howard Yoder observed that I have maximized the "provocative edge of the dissenting posture with titles like Against the Nations or Resident Aliens."[1] I do not deny that I love a good fight, but I also know that it is a mistake, at least if you are a Christian, to have your life or theology determined by who you think are your enemies. Christians know we will have enemies because we are told we must love our enemies. That we are commanded to love our enemies is not a strategy to guarantee that all enmity can be overcome, but a reminder that for Christians our lives must be determined by our loves, not our hates. That is why Christians cannot afford to let ourselves be defined by what we are against. Whatever or whomever we are against, we are so only because God has given us so much to be for.

    A Better Hope is my attempt to make the for more determinative than the against. Of course I should like to think that books like After Christendom? and Against the Nations, polemical though they may be, are so only because of what I have been for. I have, of course, mounted what I hope are crushing criticisms of political and theological liberalism. I have done so, however, not because I think political liberalism is peculiarly perverse in comparison to other political options. My problem has never been with secular political liberals but rather with the widespread assumption shared by many Christians that political liberalism ought to shape the agenda, if not the very life, of the church. My attacks on liberalism, and in particular the results of liberal practices for the church, but reflect—or at least I hope they reflect—the love that God has made possible in and through the church.

    I am not suggesting that the reader will find in A Better Hope a kinder, gentler Hauerwas. I am getting older, but I do not think my increasing age is making me more mellow. A Better Hope is not without polemics. Nor do I think the anger that shapes not only what I write about but how I write is missing from this book. I am still mad as hell at Christians, which certainly includes myself, for making the practice of the Christian faith so uninteresting. Yet I do hope the reader will find in this book, as the title indicates, resources for resisting the powers that threaten our lives as Christians—resources as simple as knowing how, as we grow older, to be friends with ourselves and with one another. To the extent I am able to show that such resources are still available, A Better Hope may appear less polemical and more positive than some of my past work.

    In truth, as I indicate in the first chapter of this book, I have simply grown tired of arguments about the alleged virtues or vices of liberalism. In the first chapter I again criticize John Rawls’s account of liberalism, even though I know my criticisms will only invite the normal response from defenders of liberalism: that is, I have not got Rawls right, or even if I have, he does not represent the most defensible liberal position. That the argument for or against liberalism is interminable does not mean that we cannot learn much from its various mutations. Arguments about liberalism, however, can become a distraction for Christians just to the extent that our agenda is first and foremost set by the church.

    We learn from the Book of Hebrews that the church is a better hope.[2] Our hope as Christians is in an altera civitas of which we believe we already have substantive intimations in the church. Unfortunately, many Christians in America have confused the light that comes from the church with America. They have done so because many of the main cultural and political symbols that have shaped American life were borrowed from the church. America becomes the intercessor that determines our relationship to God and accordingly shapes our understanding of God. Yet the better hope by which we draw near to God is Jesus, who has become the guarantee of a better covenant (Heb. 7:18–22). That is why the most determinative criticism of America must be theological. Accordingly I hope the criticism that I mount in this book reflects the great hope that is the church.

    THE ARCHBISHOP SPEAKS

    I hope the positive character of this book will at least make those who are convinced I am a sectarian, fideistic tribalist think twice. I confess I do not expect that hope to be fulfilled. However, it does give me hope that the kind of critique I have tried to mount over the years is now showing up in some quite surprising places. For example, Francis Cardinal George, archbishop of Chicago, gave a speech entitled Catholic Christianity and the Millennium in the series Frontiers of the Mind in the 21st Century sponsored by the Library of Congress; it exemplifies what I think a theological critique of America should entail. George, and the office he holds, is not usually identified as a representative of sectarian Christianity. Yet what he says about America and the church’s relation to America is quite similar (or at least it seems so to me) to arguments I have made in the past and continue in this book. So I cannot resist rehearsing the main outlines of George’s argument: his speech provides a wonderful introduction to what this book is about.

    George begins by noting it is fitting that a representative of the church—which traces its history back to Jesus Christ—should have a place on the program of the Library of Congress. It is fitting because the millennium is not a neutral measure of time but rather is a moment in history that is unintelligible without the decisive and momentous influence of Jesus Christ.[3] George therefore declares his task to be nothing less than to hold up the icon of Christ and to show the unique understanding of the world that flows from this picture.[4] George is either oblivious of or chooses to ignore those Catholic theologians who, drawing on modern theories of natural law, argue that if Christians are to speak in the public arena they must do so using a third language that avoids the particularities of the faith.

    Without apology George observes that a provocative claim lies at the heart of Christianity: In Jesus Christ, God has become a creature, without ceasing to be God and without compromising the integrity of the creature he becomes.[5] Chalcedon and Nicea are names of the process by which the church thought through the implications of what it means for God to be present in Jesus Christ. The church rejected all attempts to understand Christ as quasi-divine and quasi-human in favor of his being fully divine and human such that the former enhances, without excluding, the integrity of the latter. The condition for the possibility of such a claim requires that we understand that God is not a being alongside others, God is not in competition with nature, but rather God and God alone can be in Christ, fully human and fully God, without overwhelming created and finite nature exactly because God is not finite.

    This understanding of God, rooted in the Jewish faith, is the basis for the peculiarly Christian understanding of creation. "Because God is not one being among others but rather the sheer energy of to-be itself, God does not make the world through manipulation, change or violence, as the gods of philosophy and mythology do. Since there is literally nothing outside God, he makes the entirety of the finite realm ex nihilo, through an act of purest and gentlest generosity."[6] All things therefore participate in the power of God’s being, which means all that is is related through bonds of ontological intimacy. From this perspective, when St. Francis of Assisi spoke of brother sun and sister moon he was not being poetic but rather was making a sober and metaphysically realistic remark. All that is exists in communion because all that is is rooted in a more primordial communion with God.

    George begins his lecture by rehearsing these christological claims of Christianity to prepare his listeners for his contention that anything Christians have to say about the political and economic realm must flow from this Incarnational metaphysics. Augustine in City of God worked out the politics commensurate to such a christological vision. Refusing to dialogue with the representatives of Roman polity who challenged the legitimacy of Christianity, Augustine is interested neither in accommodating nor in compromising with the Roman system. Rather than turning to Rome to find a social theory or political arrangement compatible with a privatized or interiorized Christian spirituality, he excoriates Rome as an unjust society and, even more outrageously, argues that Christianity is the only basis for a just form of social arrangement. Indeed from Augustine’s perspective, Rome—like all the cities of men—is not even a society because there can be no justice in it. There can be no justice in Rome because such societies are but collectivities based on self-love rather than on the shared love of God. Rome’s violence and injustice therefore are but correlatives of the false metaphysics on which it is based—a "denial of a metaphysic of participation and communion leads to the phony justice of the City of Man."[7]

    In contrast, George reminds his hearers, Christians believe in the God of Jesus Christ, a God of non-violent and creative love, who, unlike the false gods of Rome, enters into competitive relation with no one or nothing. The worship of this God makes possible a society based on love, compassion, and nonviolence because it is based not in the libido dominandi but in the love preached and embodied by Jesus. Accordingly Augustine refuses to place his analysis in anything resembling a church-state context. There is no distinction in Augustine between a secular state that takes care of the public life and the church that takes care of the spiritual good of people. Rather there is simply the dramatic difference between the false worship (and hence flawed social arrangement) of the City of Man and the proper worship (and hence life-giving social arrangement) of the City of God.[8] Without romanticizing the past, George suggests that for all their ambiguity the late antique and medieval periods can be characterized by the attempt to find the relationship between worship and social life.

    Whatever else the term modernity may describe, George argues, what marks the modern consciousness is a breakdown of this classically Christian participation metaphysics and the consequent emergence of a secular arena at best only incidentally related to God.[9] The impoverishment of discussions surrounding the relation of religion and politics in America is but a reflection of how national feasts and ceremonies have replaced the liturgical calendar of the church, whose feasts cannot help but become private observances. According to George the end of the modern era, however, is signaled by the inability of the secular calendar to call people out of their private concerns into the rhythm of a shared public life. National holidays have become primarily occasions for private recreation. Time itself becomes a field to be personally scheduled, a function of private purpose.[10]

    Drawing on the work of John Milbank, Catherine Pickstock, and William Placher, George believes these results are rooted in Christian theological mistakes that repudiated the Thomistic understanding of the analogy of being. The result is an overdetermined distinction between nature and grace: God is no longer understood as the generous power in which all things exist but rather that supreme being apart from whom all things exist. Modernity names that time that assumes a fundamental split between the divine and nondivine, which stands in opposition to the participation/communion metaphysics of the incarnation.[11]

    The social and political implications of this change soon manifested themselves in the work of Thomas Hobbes. His famous description of the state of nature as solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short is but an indication that once the worship of God has been lost, natural man is left with no other option than to fight a war of all against all. The role government plays in such a world cannot help but become what it was in ancient Rome, that is, the maintenance of a temporary and ersatz peace on the basis of coercion and violent control.[12] Because debates about ultimate ends, particularly in theology, are disruptive of peace, the church must be kept under tight control, which means whatever role religion may have it must be subordinated to political ends. Locke softens the essential structure of Hobbes’s thought, but like Hobbes he derives individual rights from antagonizing passions. Given his understanding of the human situation, for Locke the primary role of government is limited to the protection of individual prerogatives.

    According to George this is the tradition that shaped the minds of the founders of America. The self-evident truths concerning unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are not and cannot be correlated to moral ends outside of themselves. Government is instituted among men to protect these prerogatives and thus ensure some level of peace and order, but government so acts because it is assumed that social and political relations are fundamentally agonistic. The framers of the Constitution seem to distance themselves from Hobbes when they insist that no one religion will be officially established as well as maintaining that the state should neither sanction nor prohibit its exercise. But this understanding of the role of religion is only superficially non-Hobbesian, for it is based on the assumption of the distinctively modern creation of a secular space untouched by religious concerns and finalities. America, therefore, is but the institutionalization as well as celebration of what Augustine describes as the City of Man.

    Reinhold Niebuhr and John Courtney Murray are often identified as successful attempts by Christians to respond to the challenge of modernity in its American form. George, however, thinks neither Niebuhr nor Murray successfully challenged the metaphysical and social pathologies that constitute America. Niebuhr claimed that he was following Augustine, but George argues that Augustine would have found Niebuhr’s distinction between love and justice problematic precisely because what determines the justice of the City of God is nothing but the quality of its love. The City of God is just only in the measure that it remains a collectivity that loves God (and hence human beings) according to the pattern of Jesus.[13] Moreover, Augustine would have found Niebuhr’s privatization of love to be a denial that every Christian claim has a social range and implication.

    Catholic attitudes toward the distinctively American polity have been shaped by an immigrant church. Faced with fierce opposition from the Protestant establishment, American Catholics tended to lie low by muting the political dimension of their faith. Instead of asserting themselves in the public realm with a vengeance, they turned their attention to building a vibrant and institutionally powerful subculture. The American environment seemed so favorable to this Catholic strategy that some Catholic bishops actively promoted the American-styled separation of church and state to the Vatican. Worried that Catholics might be secularized or Protestantized by the nonestablishment clause of the First Amendment, Pope Leo XIII condemned the Americanist heresy at the end of the nineteenth century.

    Murray’s attempt to reconcile the Catholic faith with the modern political experiment called America must be understood against this background. Murray’s insistence that the two articles of the First Amendment are but articles of peace was his attempt to show that their purpose is to avoid arguments about ultimate ends in the hope of providing conditions for a peaceful and civil dialogue. He argued the ideological agnosticism of the American solution is one Catholics can accept exactly because they are agnostic. So Murray provided a philosophical justification for the pro-American sentiments of many American Catholics just to the extent he was able to show that a reconciliation between the Catholic and the modern is not only possible but welcome.

    George, however, without denigrating Murray’s contribution, is not convinced Murray is the way forward. First, Murray assumed a two-tiered conception of nature and grace that is in tension with the communion metaphysics of the patristic and medieval periods. Indeed a strong distinction between nature and grace cannot help but underwrite the modern attempt to establish a secular realm untouched by ultimate finalities. The distinction between the political in which ultimate ends are bracketed and the religious in which such ends can be proclaimed and sought is impossible in the context of a participation metaphysics in which all finitude is grounded and touched by the divine.

    Perhaps even more damning, Murray’s understanding of nature and grace implicitly accepts the relentless modern view of the person. If the political or social dimension is essentially untouched by the sacred then the human being is by nature agnostic, even atheist. Whatever is religious in him is added as an extrinsic superstructure to a religiously neutral substructure.[14] Of course American liberalism is not overtly atheistic, but one could argue, Archbishop George suggests, that it is implicitly or covertly so. Liberalism is atheism inasmuch as the peace gained by the articles of the First Amendment is bought at the price of a secularized understanding of the world that assumes the loss of communion.

    Indeed, George judges that Murray’s defense of liberty cannot be made consistent with John Paul II’s understanding that liberty flows from the thought world of incarnation and communion metaphysics. John Paul II refuses to separate liberty from truth because he rightly thinks the latter is essential to the former. When liberty is separated from love, liberty cannot help but become license, an improperly directed love, a mere pursuit of happiness. What the pope criticizes in the Western democracies born of the Enlightenment is just this divorce between freedom and truth. When truth is bracketed in the interest of peace, freedom cannot help but be undermined.

    And what indeed are the fruits of this great divorce? When we look at the moral landscape of America at the turn of the millennium what do we see? We see, again to invoke the Augustinian hermeneutic, ample evidence of the triumph of the City of Man. In the millions of abortions annually, the divorce of human reproduction from the embrace of human love, the increased application of the death penalty, the practice of euthanasia, the conviction that hopelessly handicapped people are better off dead, the seemingly indiscriminate and sometimes disproportionate use of the military, the gun violence in the streets of our cities and the corridors of our schools—in all of this we see the fruits of what the Pope has called the culture of death, a society which allows for the destruction of its weakest members owing to the simple will of the strong. The culture of death is none other than that world generated by the separation between freedom and truth; it is a result of the unfortunate compromise between the City of God and the City of Man that stands at the heart of the modern experiment.[15]

    George asks what might follow from his critique of modernity. Some, he observes, might think he is advocating a theocracy or confessional state. He denies any such advocacy, noting that the church is opposed to theocracy on two basic grounds: (1) the faith is never to be pressed on anyone through coercive means, and (2) the church should not seek to establish itself officially or juridically outside its own structures. The community of Jesus Christ does not seek political power but rather to create a culture. It does so simply, boldly, and unapologetically by being itself. That is why the liturgy is the church’s most decisive political act. "The liturgy on earth is an iconic display of the heavenly liturgy of the angels and saints, that community gathered around the throne of God and united in praise. In the way we gather, the way we pray, the way we behave liturgically, we act out the paradigm of the heavenly communion, seeking to re-make ourselves in its image. Then, as a liturgical people, we endeavor to shape the world according to this icon, bringing love where there is hatred, forgiveness where there is resentment, compassion where there is animosity and violence."[16]

    THE SHAPE OF A BETTER HOPE

    This book is but a footnote to Cardinal George’s address. Some may, with some justification, think it disingenuous for me to claim George as an ally. George, after all, represents a Constantinian church. He is, in spite of his appeals to nonviolence, as far as I know not a pacifist. I am not as convinced that you can draw as clear a distinction between culture and politics as he seems to think you can. Indeed I fear that very distinction may but reproduce the liberal politics he otherwise so acutely criticizes. Yet, I think, it is instructive that in this strange time of the church’s existence in America I find an ally in Cardinal George—an alliance he may not welcome. I claim him as an ally, however, because he sees so clearly how our fundamental Christian convictions, what he calls our Incarnational metaphysics, puts Christians at odds with the presumptions of American democracy. Moreover, he rightly diagnoses how the moral confusions that beset our lives are correlative with the Christian attempt to be at home in a society that has made its peace with the presuppositions thought necessary to make America work.

    The way I have organized this book, an organization that came to me before I had read Cardinal George’s speech, mirrors the way his argument works in Catholic Christianity and the Millennium. The first chapter, On Being a Christian and an American, is an attempt to show that the most disastrous result of Protestant attempts to make America work has been an attenuated understanding of God. As a result, Christians who believe they are orthodox inevitably end up living lives that make sense even if God does not exist or is no more than the god of deism. This essay and the other essays in The Church in the Time Called America are diagnostic—they are my attempt to describe, as George does, why the project to make Christianity at home in America cannot help but domesticate not only the church but the God we worship.

    In On Being a Christian and an American I note MacIntyre’s observation that the anti-Americanism characteristic of many in the democracies of the West fails to recognize that you cannot reject America because, if you are honest, you must recognize that America is now the fate of the world. In other words, America is not simply the name of a country but rather names how liberal practices, particularly through the agency of capitalism, now seem to be global. The Christian Difference: Or, Surviving Postmodernism, drawing on the work of Nicholas Boyle, is my attempt to show how postmodernism is but the outworking of the logic of capitalism. In other words, the time that is America is a time no longer shaped by the hope made possible by God but rather is the time shaped by quite different presuppositions. As Christians confuse our time with American time we lose the ability to be patient in a world of injustice and war.

    Resisting Capitalism: On Marriage and Homosexuality is my attempt to make concrete the argument of the first two essays. The capitalist reconstitution of family as individual emotional units devoid of any tradition and thus without duration is one of the fundamental ways our sense of time has been changed. Why we have children as well as how we raise them has accordingly become a matter of subjective preference which makes the activity of child-having increasingly unintelligible. Resisting Capitalism tries to show why the capitalist understanding of the family is the background for why arguments over homosexuality are so frustrating. I could have well put this essay in the third section of A Better Hope, but I thought it would make more sense to the reader if it followed the essay on The Christian Difference.

    I confess I am haunted by the question I know some will ask about the essays in this section: what do they say that Hauerwas has not said before? I think it silly to believe that what you write must somehow be new. Stanley Fish observes that one of the objections about the essays collected in his Doing What Comes Naturally: Change, Rhetoric, and the Practice of Theory in Literary and Legal Studies is that every essay in the book is the same; no matter what its putative topic each chapter finally reduces to an argument in which the troubles and benefits of interpretive theory are made to disappear in the solvent of an enriched notion of practice.[17] Fish acknowledges the truth of this objection but notes that he can only repeat himself if in fact the argument that doing what comes naturally requires no higher theory to be intelligible. In like manner I hope the essays in the first part of this book, if they repeat arguments I have made elsewhere, do so because, given the entrenchment of the position against which I am arguing, I can only say again what I have said before in the hope of establishing new habits that can help us forget what I hope we can learn to leave behind.

    The essays in Christian Ethics in American Time correspond to George’s reflections on Niebuhr and Murray. Though I do not have a separate chapter on Niebuhr, the story I tell in these essays provides evidence that George is quite right to think that Protestant Christian ethics was and continues to be theologically inadequate.[18] Christian ethics was and remains a discipline developed largely by Protestant liberal theologians to make America Christian but ended up, at least from my perspective, making Christianity American. I explain in "Christian Ethics in America (and the Journal of Religious Ethics): A Report on a Book I Will Not Write" why I abandoned the project of telling the story of the rise and fall of the attempt to make Christianity an ethic to make America Christian. I wrote the chapter on Rauschenbusch for the book I will now not write, but I have included it here not only because I admire Rauschenbusch but because I think the account I give of his life and work documents the argument I develop in chapter 4.

    "Not Late Enough: The Divided Mind of Dignitatis Humanae Personae is my attempt to show how the Catholics unfortunately accepted Murray’s account of how Catholicism could be reconciled with America. In Catholic Christianity and the Millennium" Cardinal George acknowledges Murray’s insistence on the centrality of religious liberty was affirmed in Vatican II but argues that the Council’s defense of religious liberty owes more to the Christian personalism born in France than to Murray’s historical and social analysis.[19] George may well be right; but if he is, his account but explains why Dignitatis is very close to being an incoherent document.

    In the next two chapters on Jenson and Yoder I hope make clear why I think the very development of Christian ethics as an alleged scholarly field divorced from theology has been a mistake. Jenson and Yoder, to be sure in quite different but I hope complementary ways, call into question any attempt to make ethics a field that somehow comes after we have done basic theological work. At the very least I hope these essays make clear how much I have learned from their work.

    The essays in the final section, Church Time, are not meant to build on one another, though I hope the reader will find connections between them. Each of them has been written to suggest the kind of practices the church makes possible if we are to be a people capable of witnessing to God’s time. Yet I hope it will be clear that I believe that the practices of forgiveness, peace, praise, enduring, friendship and aging, being sick, and reading mysteries are not the exclusive possession of Christians. Rather I believe what God has graciously called Christians to be makes it possible for those who are not Christians to find that they have the ability to claim such practices as their own. The essays in Church Time are meant to show us that these fragments and pieces for recovering moral discourse—be they fragments of memory, sickness, or even reading murder mysteries—still exist as resources that beckon us to a fuller life together.[20]

    Why Time Cannot and Should Not Heal the Wounds of History, But Time Has Been and Can Be Redeemed is not only about the time forgiveness makes but also about what is required if Americans are to come to terms with slavery. In this essay I return to some of the questions raised in the first chapter of this book. The argument of this essay is crucial for the position I take in chapters 11, 12, and 13, just to the extent those essays deal with our ability to endure in a world out of control. That we suffer from growing old, sickness, and death offers us the opportunity to develop the skills to know how to endure and, by enduring, discover gifts otherwise unavailable.

    Worship is the practice that sums up or gives direction to all we do as Christians. It is the fundamental performance of faith that, for example, shapes what we talk about and how we talk as Christians. So, Worship, Evangelism, Ethics: On Eliminating the ‘And’ is my attempt to remind Christians that something has gone wrong when we think that worship is something different from evangelism, or ethics, or our politics. Really, all the essays in this section are my attempt to make clear that theology does not just entail a politics but is a politics—even when that politics is unacknowledged.

    I have included McInerny Did It: Or, Should a Pacifist Read Murder Mysteries? just for the hell of it. I wanted to end the book with an essay that I hope many readers will find fun. I do not mean to suggest that the essay is devoid of serious purpose. Indeed it may be one of the more serious essays in the book. Nonetheless my primary purpose in ending the book with this essay is to provide an example of how an activity as insignificant and entertaining as reading murder mysteries can raise quite interesting theological questions. I am not suggesting that everything we do must have some theological significance. Such a view would be at the very least tiring. I only want to illustrate how our most secular literature may help us think about the challenge of what it means to see our world as God’s creation.

    GROWING OLD TOGETHER

    Four of these essays were written to honor friends whose work has made my work possible—Robert Jenson, Rowan Greer, Don Saliers, and Ralph McInerny. I suppose it is an indication that I am growing old that I am now asked to write essays for friends who are not that much older than I am. A festschrift article often seems burdensome because you think you will have time to do it, but as the time draws near you discover you do not know when you will be able to write it. But I am not complaining. To write an article for a festschrift at the very least reminds you of the gifts others have made that make your life possible.

    1

    ON BEING A CHRISTIAN AND AN AMERICAN

    ON BEING A SECTARIAN, FIDEISTIC TRIBALIST

    I have a well-deserved reputation for being an unapologetic Enlightenment basher. I do not believe something called ethics can be shown to exist or to be justified on Kantian-like grounds of reason alone. I have no use for moral or political liberalism in any of their guises. I do not believe in inalienable rights. I tire of the ongoing futile project to show that freedom of the individual can be reconciled with equality. I do not even believe that a good society can or should be egalitarian if that means all hierarchical considerations bear the burden of proof. Accordingly many of my colleagues in that strange field called Christian ethics suggest I am a sectarian, fideistic tribalist.

    By this they mean I am trying to convince Christians that we do not have a stake in the wider world. My oft-made claim that the first task of Christians is not to make the world more just but rather is to make the world the world is interpreted as a call for Christians to withdraw from the world, or at least America. That I should be so understood by those working in Christian ethics is quite intelligible if, as I have argued elsewhere, the subject of Christian ethics in America has always been America. Christian ethicists no longer think, as Walter Rauschenbusch did, that their task is to Christianize the social order, but they continue to share Rauschenbusch’s presumption that America is the appropriate subject for Christian ethical reflection and action. My refusal to accept this

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