Daily Archives: January 27, 2010

McCarraher at TOJ, ctd.

Posted by on January 27, 2010 20 comments

The final, and in my opinion the best, part of The Other Journal’s interview with Gene McCarraher is live now. Definitely check it out. The stuff on Herbert McCabe is really worth your time. Especially if you have committed the grave sin of not reading Herbert McCabe.

This section of the interview also includes Gene’s evisceration of the Manhattan Declaration. Here’s just one quote from him on the folks behind this rather lazy and windbaggy document:

If they want to be the intellectual shock troops of a counterrevolution, they’re going to have to amass a better arsenal than what’s on display in the Manhattan Declaration. David Fitzpatrick’s hagiography in the New York Times Magazine made it appear that Robert George is a real intellectual juggernaut, but this document is really lame. (Having met George once, I can attest that he is indeed a learned and gracious man.) The preamble, for instance, is a farrago of half-truth, untruth, and middlebrow history. We’re told in the very first sentence that Christianity has a two-millennium “tradition” of “resisting tyranny” and “reaching out with compassion to the poor, oppressed, and suffering.” Not a mention of the two-millennium tradition of sanctifying tyranny—imperial conquest from the Romans to the Americans, monarchical rule from the Dark Ages to the twentieth century, dictatorships from Francisco Franco to Ríos Montt. Not a mention of the many blessings showered on feudal and industrial squalor, the oppression of slaves with the authority of the Bible, the infliction of suffering on Indians and other non-Christians. Later, we’re regaled that Christians “challenged the divine claims of kings,” but nothing about how Christians also, and more forcefully, sustained those claims. We’re reminded that Christians liberated “child laborers chained to machines,” but we’re left unenlightened about Rev. Thomas Malthus, Rev. Thomas Chalmers, and later evangelical apologists for laissez-faire and wage labor, often the very same evangelicals who fought for the abolition of slavery. And that’s not to mention the impact evangelical thinking had on exacerbating the Great Famine in Ireland. (Those interested in early 19th-century evangelical social thought must read Boyd Hilton’s The Age of Atonement.) We’re informed that Christian women “marched in the vanguard of the suffrage movement,” but not that Christians of both sexes also barred the door to the franchise for women, bolstered, I might add, by centuries of tradition. The authors think they’ve covered their backsides by writing that they “fully acknowledge the imperfections and shortcomings of Christian institutions and communities in all ages,” but the survey they offer betrays no sign of humility or contrition.

Yeah. Humility and contrition never seem to go with conservative Christian sloganeering, does it?

JPII and Self-Flagellation

Posted by on January 27, 2010 12 comments

Interesting stuff about the late pope’s ascetical practices from a forthcoming book by the Monsignor who’s promoting his candidacy for sainthood:

Pope John Paul II whipped himself with a belt, even on vacation, and slept on the floor as acts of penitence and to bring him closer to Christian perfection, according to a new book by the Polish prelate spearheading his sainthood case. . . .

At a news conference Tuesday, [Monsignor] Oder defended John Paul’s practice of self-mortification, which some faithful use to remind them of the suffering of Jesus on the cross.

“It’s an instrument of Christian perfection,” Oder said, responding to questions about how such a practice could be condoned considering Catholic teaching holds that the human body is a gift from God.

In the book, Oder wrote that John Paul frequently denied himself food — especially during the holy season of Lent — and “frequently spent the night on the bare floor,” messing up his bed in the morning so he wouldn’t draw attention to his act of penitence.

“But it wasn’t limited to this. As some members of his close entourage in Poland and in the Vatican were able to hear with their own ears, John Paul flagellated himself. In his armoire, amid all the vestments and hanging on a hanger, was a belt which he used as a whip and which he always brought to Castel Gandolfo,” the papal retreat where John Paul vacationed each summer.

For a fellow so deeply known for his book Theology of the Body, I can’t help but find this at least a bit odd/interesting. I certainly think there is plenty of good and fitting modes of ascetical practice (like fasting, vigils, etc.), but I find something deeply incongruous between the act of self-flagellation and the affirmation of the body’s goodness and dignity.

When does bodily discipline simply degenerate into bodily denigration?

H/T: Sully

Why can’t Hauerwas just be a witness?

Posted by on January 27, 2010 105 comments

In the final chapter of of With the Grain of the Universe, Hauerwas reaches something of an apogee in stating his view of the importance of the church’s witness in relation to the truthfulness of the Christian message:

Does the truth of Christian convictions depend on the faithfulness of the church and, if so, how do we determine what would constitute faithfulness? Am I suggesting that the ability of the church to be or not to be nonviolent is constitutive for understanding what it might meant [sic] to claim that that Christian convictions are true? Do I think the truthfulness of Christian witness is compromised when Christians accept the practices of the “culture of death” — abortion, suicide, capital punishment, and war?

Yes! On every count the answer is “Yes.” (p. 231)

Meditate long and hard on what’s being said here. As far as I can tell Hauerwas is saying outright that the truth of Christianity, the truth of the gospel depends on the church’s own faithfulness. This, to me seems like a crazy statement. Its one thing to say that we have no way to talk about the gospel’s truth apart from listening to witnesses (whether they be apostolic witnesses, historical witness, or ecclesial witnesses). But it is quite another to say that the truth of the gospel depends on us being nonviolent.

Or, simply put, if Hauerwas is right then the gospel simply cannot be true because “the church” no matter what sort of content we try to fill that term with is manifestly violent and unfaithful.

Even when I was at my most sympathetic towards Hauerwas, I still couldn’t get behind what was being said in this book. Because what’s going on here is a fundamental redefinition of the very meaning of “witness.” Hauerwas’s attempt to get beyond Barth’s allegedly faulty ecclesiology (see p. 193) actually runs completely contrary to Barth’s whole understanding of witness. For Barth a witness is, well, a witness, someone who reports what they have seen.  Witnesses point outside of themselves to a reality fundamentally other than they. Thus, the truth of the reality witnessed to is in no way dependent on the witness. The credibility of the witnessing account may well be dependent on the life and word of the witness, but the object witnessed to is not.

For some reason (and really, I’m not sure what), Hauerwas will not content himself with saying that the credibility of the church’s message depends on its faithfulness (which is obviously true and right). He is bound and determined to go further and say that the truth of that message itself is at stake in our own moral performance. If we perform badly, somehow the gospel isn’t true anymore. The very truth of the gospel has found itself inextricably internal to our own moral effort and achievement (though of course Hauerwas uses the language of gift for the church’s nonviolent witness).

So why? Why does Hauerwas want not merely the gospel’s credibility, but its very truth to depend upon our faithfulness? What does making that move accomplish? Why is this better than simply making the far more plausible and intelligible argument that the gospel’s credibility rather than its truth is at stake in our faithfulness or lack thereof? Why is it so important that, at the most fundamental level everything must depend on us?

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