Hauerwas on private faith

Hauerwas on American preaching

Preaching does not aspire to truthful proclamation in America. Preaching becomes an edifying narration of examples, a ready recital of the preachers own religious experience, which are not of course assigned any positive binding character. I always say, any time you hear a methodist minister say "... as I just learned from my twelve year old", you can be sure you up for some bullshit.

Burke Lecture - Stanley Hauerwas

Om Kant i Döda poeters sällskap

Via en serie tweets fick jag mig nyligen Upplysningens valspråk av Kant till livs:

"Upplysning är människans utträde ur hennes självförvållade omyndighet. Omyndighet är oförmågan att göra bruk av sitt förstånd utan någon annans ledning. Självförvållad är denna omyndighet om orsaken till densamma inte ligger i brist på förstånd, utan i brist på beslutsamhet och mod att göra bruk av det utan någon annans ledning. Sapere aude! Hav mod att göra bruk av ditt eget förstånd! lyder alltså upplysningens valspråk."*

Det där med "att göra bruk av sitt förstånd utan någon annans ledning" har kanske en lite annan klangbotten idag än vad det hade 1784. Kant exemplifierade då omyndigheten med: "Har jag en bok som har förstånd i mitt ställe, har jag en själasörjare som har samvete i mitt ställe, har jag en läkare som bedömer dieten i mitt ställe osv, så behöver jag inte anstränga mig själv".
Idag väcker valspråket andra sorts frågor: Är mitt förstånd verkligen mitt? Är det möjligt att göra bruk av sitt förstånd utan påverkan och ledning? Har Upplysningen gjort oss till myndiga och mogna människor? Jag kom att tänka på en träffande text av Stanley Hauerwas som problematiserar en oreflekterad tilltro till det fria förnuftet:

"Both Kant and the utilitarians assumed that the task of the ethicist was to explicate the presuppositions everyone shares. Ethics is the attempt to systematize what we all perhaps only inchoately know or which we have perhaps failed to make sufficiently explicit. Such a view of ethics can appear quite anticonventional, but even the anticonventional stance gains its power by appeal to what anyone would think upon reflection. This can be nicely illustrated in terms of the recent movie, The Dead Poets Society. It is an entertaining, popular movie that appeals to our moral sensibilities. The movie depicts a young and creative teacher battling what appears to be the unthinking authoritarianism of the school as well as his students' (at first) uncomprehending resistance to his teaching method. The young teacher, whose subject is romantic poetry, which may or may not be all that important, takes as his primary pedagogical task helping his students think for themselves. We watch him slowly awaken one student after another to the possibility of their own talents and potential. At the end, even though he has been fired by the school, we are thrilled as his students find the ability to stand against authority, to think for themselves.

This movie seems to be a wonderful testimony to the independence of spirit that democracies putatively want to encourage. Yet I can think of no more conformist message in liberal societies than the idea that students should learn to think for themselves. What must be said is that most students in our society do not have minds well enough trained to think. A central pedagogical task is to tell students that their problem is that they do not have minds worth making up. That is why training is so important, because training involves the formation of the self through submission to authority that will provide people with the virtues necessary to make reasoned judgment." **

Själv funderar jag på om det kan vara så att Upplysningens upprop mot traditionsbaserat förnuft parat med dess negativa frihetssyn har gjort oss blinda för en annan sorts omyndighet. John Milbank sätter ord på något av detta:

"I can choose anything anywhere, but these choices will always be for the choices of others, selecting me. Since anything can now be mine, nothing will really be mine. Since I am offered absolute Kantian liberty without the guidance of education of my judgement, I will be perfectly manipulated: absolutely controlled in my important choices (for the exploitative outlet for sub-standard coffee for example, or the exploitative lifestyle website, that some poor individual imagines they have freely invented), and within this allowed a measure of predetermined indifferent laxity (a shot of this or that sickly flavour to disguise the third-rate coffee-blend, the sub-choice of lifestyle that gives me the illusion of interacting with the Internet . . .)"***

Om Kants upprop gällde frigörelse från blind auktoritetstro och självförvållad omyndighet, så är samtidens stora fråga var det finns resurser som kan att leda människan ut ur hennes självförvållade kommersialisering, ensamhet, och vilsenhet. Om Upplysningens valspråk på sin tid var ett stridsrop för frihet, är det idag snarast ett uttryck för konformism. Den viktiga politiska frågan idag är inte så mycket bristen på frihet, utan bristen på gemenskap. 

--
* Ur «Vad är upplysning» Immanuel Kant, Symposion, 1989
** Stanley Hauerwas - Discipleship as a Craft, Church as a Disciplined Community
*** John Milbank. Being Reconciled. Routledge, 2003. s.290

Hauerwas om hälsa

When "health" is thought to name "total well being," as it often is in modernity, and medicine becomes the agent of health, this threatens to make medicine the institution of a secular salvation. I suspect that is why for many today medicine has become an alternative church.

Stanley Hauerwas - At peace with finitude: The body of medicine and the Christian body 

John wants to win, I just want to survive!

I ett fantastiskt samtal mellan John Milbank och Stanley Hauerwas, lett av Luke Bretherton,  tydliggörs centrala skillnader mellan Hauerwas och Milbanks teologi. I utdraget nedan ber Bretherton dem redogöra för hur de uppfattar varandras metod och tillvägagångssätt:

SH: I try to avoid the language of declension exactly because I think the church always finds itself in tension with the world. And so, it is not like we ever got it right. I use broad historical analysis to help me give a diagnosis of the world in which I now have to negotiate being a Christian, but I don´t want to take it over. John wants to take it over!

LB: Do you want to respond there, John? 

JM: Oh no. I definitely want to win, no question. It is absolutely right. There´s nothing wrong with winning. Just because Christianity is about peace, charity and humility, and so on doesn´t mean we don´t want to win. But precisely because we want those virtues to win we want them to prevail and to transform the world. That´s just the program of salvation as far as I am concerned. The church has suffered to long from a sort of false consciousness that turns loosing and the apparent inevitability of loosing into a kind of kenotic following of Jesus. It is not, it is a lie!

SH: I didn´t say I wanted to loose, I wanted to survive!
--

Samtalet i sin helhet återfinns här: "Theological Reflections on Being a Theologian and the Task of Theology". 

... 

Mixed bag

- Vad händer om en präst i Svenska kyrkan hävdar att:

"Det finns ingen fallen skapelse och därför blir hela försoningsläran orimlig! Plocka bort allt tal om synd, skuld, skam, blod, slaktade lamm och annat förfärligt! Det hör inte hemma i modern tid, bland upplysta människor!" 

Kyrkans tidning rapporterar och Marie Demker reflekterar klokt med anledning av domkapitlets beslut.

- En adventspredikan av Stanley Hauerwas.

- Benedict XVI om rättvisans rötter:

"In this world of ours, in which, despite the profession of good intentions, the value of the person, of human dignity and human rights is seriously threatened by the widespread tendency to have recourse exclusively to the criteria of utility, profit and material possessions, it is important not to detach the concept of justice from its transcendent roots. Justice, indeed, is not simply a human convention, since what is just is ultimately determined not by positive law, but by the profound identity of the human being. It is the integral vision of man that saves us from falling into a contractual conception of justice and enables us to locate justice within the horizon of solidarity and love(6).

We cannot ignore the fact that some currents of modern culture, built upon rationalist and individualist economic principles, have cut off the concept of justice from its transcendent roots, detaching it from charity and solidarity: “The ‘earthly city’ is promoted not merely by relationships of rights and duties, but to an even greater and more fundamental extent by relationships of gratuitousness, mercy and communion. Charity always manifests God’s love in human relationships as well, it gives theological and salvific value to all commitment for justice in the world”."

När språket tar semester ...

En hemlös man misshandlades nyligen till döds av fem poliser i Orange County, Kalifornien. Enligt NY Times har FBI nu inlett en undersökning för att utreda om mannens medborgerliga rättigheter har kränkts. Denna absurda detalj fick mig att tänka på en fantastisk föreläsning om språk med Stanley Hauerwas jag nyligen lyssnade på:

I have no difficulty with rights claims that express social and legal duties. But claims of human rights as human rights involves philosophical difficulties that can not be resolved. In particular questions about what kind of human beings we need to be to have rights is very troubling in relationship to the mentally handicapped. Moreover once rights language is legitimized in the abstract, rights seems to multiply faster than rabbits . My deepest worry about rights however is how the language of rights can eviscerate more determinative moral descriptions. (...)

If you think rights are more basic than the description murder, you have an indication that the language has gone on holiday.

Inspirerad av Wittgenstein sätter Hauerwas som så ofta fingret på frågan om vilken berättelse och vilket språk som formar vår verklighet. Är det berättelsen om ett föreställt socialt kontrakt som ger individer vissa rättigheter? Eller är det berättelsen om hur Guds kärlek och nåd omfattar alla människor?

Hauerwas drar det till sin spets: "You can only act in a world you can see, and the only way you learn to see is by learning to say".

Vi är på sin höjd bara medförfattare till våra liv!

"... essential to our learning to act is that we learn to behave in a way that others can construe our actions as intelligible. In other words, the intelligibility of an action depends on the narrative continuities in an agent's life. Yet the ability to narrate my life depends on having narratives available that make my peculiar life fit within narratives of a community that direct me toward an end that is not of my own making. The intelligibility of my life, therefore, depends on the stock of descriptions at a particular time, place, and culture. I am, at best, no more than a co-author of my life."

Stanley Hauerwas redogör för Alasdair MacIntyres syn på handlande i en gammal artikel i First Things.

Hauerwas om tro i allmänhet och sekularism

Nedanstående är ett utdrag ur en gammal intervju med Stanley Hauerwas i The Other Journal. Det första stycket kan med fördel läsas som en kommentar till Broderskaparnas beslut att bli ett förbund som samlar "troende" i allmänhet.
Det andra stycket läses med fördel punkt:





"And I think also, George Bush, his Christian faith, is the Christian faith of Alcoholics Anonymous. You can quite understand that. It never seems to occur to him what it would mean to be a part of a Church and under ecclesial authority, and to have your language tested by ecclesial authority. I mean, I’m sure he’s very genuine in his religious faith, I just don’t think very much of his faith. For someone like me to say that, you think well that’s very arrogant. And its true, it is very arrogant. And I think that one of the things that we suffer from in America is that religious people thinking secularity is such an enemy, that any religious faith is better than no religious faith. That is a deep mistake! There are very perverse forms of religious faith, that, give me a secularist any day compared to some of the forms of religious faith. And I must say, I think that Evangelicalism bares the brunt of a lot of this. I think that it is far to a-ecclesial and Evangelicals tend to turn the gospel in a system of belief rather than a body of people through which we are embraced through God’s salvation that makes us different."

(...)

"TOJ: Now would the imaginative Christian becoming engaged in these issues, would that mean being involved in policy writing…?

Stanley Hauerwas: It could, it could. I have nothing against that. You know I’m accused of being a sectarian fideistic tribalist calling Christians away from involvement in government. No! I just want them to be there as Christians. But you see as soon as you get involved in public policy issues the question starts being raised how then are you able to have a policy that isn’t going to be offensive to secular people because it’s based on some kind of Christian practice, so immediately when you get involved in policy you are asked to give up your Christian speech. And people say well this is a pluralist country and I say, if it’s a pluralist country then why do we have to give up our Christian speech. And so on and so on …"

Råd till predikanter

Never lie. Never lie.

... and you’ll discover that it´s hard work. And part of what it means not to lie is to preach truthfully, and what it means to preach truthfully is to preach in manner that you expect God to show up because the Word has been proclaimed. As soon as you hear a minster say, “As my six year old was saying ...”, you know it´s going to be bullshit. Because it´s going to be insights on the human condition that anyone could have at the Kiwanis club. What it means to preach truthfully and not to lie is to be willing to say when you don’t know what needs to be said…”But that we do see Jesus. We are not sure we know what needs to be said. If I said more than that I would be lying to you. But we do see Jesus.”

— Stanley Hauerwas on Being a Christian in Today´s World

Om toleransens villkor ...

När jag såg det här lysande klippet:

The Daily Show
Tags: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook

via @joelsh

... kom jag att tänka på det här Hauerwas-citatet:

Look what happened to Catholics in the United States. They struggled like hell to make it and finally saw John F. Kennedy elected president. Any Catholic of that generation will tell you how important it was that Kennedy became president. Catholics all over the world rejoiced, but I say it was their day of shame -- particularly when Kennedy told a group of Southern Baptists in Houston that he would follow his conscience and not the Roman Catholic church. Catholics said, “See, it is possible to be American and Catholic.”

Toleransens logik tycks i den liberala demokratin lyda: Vi tolererar den annorlunde om han slutar vara så annorlunda. Viljan att fokusera på det som ses som universellt och förenande resulterar dock ofta i att partikulära skillnader och olikheter ignoreras och/eller göms undan. Men som Jayne Svenunsson skrev i ett delvis annat sammanhang:

"Historien har, när allt kommer omkring, visat att visioner som vet att de kommer någonstans ifrån tenderar att ha bättre insikt om att de är på väg någonstans och inte vart som helst. Sådana visioner tenderar också i mindre grad att förgripa sig på den som till äventyrs inte delar den aktuella visionen."

I ljuset av ovanstående citat blir det viktigt att fråga sig på vems förment neutrala altare som partikulariteten så ofta offras. Vart kommer den (muskulösa) liberalismen ifrån, och vart leder den?

Veckans länkar ...

- Lars Åberg skriver i en läsvärd krönika i Sydsvenskan om etnicitetsbegreppet som samhällsproblem, och påminner mig om att likheterna mellan begreppen "etnicitet" och "religion" är slående!

Jag har ännu inte träffat någon som kan tala om vad etnicitet är för någonting. Ändå lärs det ut på Malmö högskola och skrivs in i svensk lagstiftning. Som få andra begrepp har det förgiftat debatten och krattat manegen för alla sorters reaktionärer, inkrökta nationalister, patriarkala bidragsfixare och religiösa blådårar.

- Den nya teologibloggen Women In Theology innehåller intressanta kommenterar kring ...

- ...nya texter av Hauerwas om krig (1, 2, 3), och av Milbank om sex.

- Arne Rasmusson har börjat blogga hos Cruciform Phronesis.

- Till sist en intressant krönika om vanliga vanföreställningar om ateism:

1) That the term “atheist” has a clear, agreed-upon meaning

2) That there are consistent, recognizable markers of atheist identity

3) That self-described “atheists” share common assumptions about what atheism is

4) That “atheism” and “secularism” are synonyms

5) That being an atheist necessitates a relentless hostility to all forms of theism

6) That atheism and theism are radically distinct, sharing little in common epistemologically, historically and even “theologically,” if you will.

Olika berättelser ger olika liv

Stanley: I think often times the liberal white support of civil rights has forgotten that the under class white (who often times is racist) has suffered oppression that is certainly different from what African-Americans have suffered. And whose going to get into comparing victimization. But I certainly think that class matters are often times ignores when you start talking about sexism and racism and they often forget that the most voiceless person in our society is the low class white male.

Mark: (23:00) Could you say a little bit more about that? Because people are going to say, I disagree with that, because that's not conventional wisdom at all.

Stanley: What it means for them to be voiceless is that they don't have a story that can make their lives intelligible. The only stories around are those that say "you must be lazy because you didn't get ahead." I think that's an extraordinarily destructive story. I come from working class, which is not lower class whites in America. Though many of the brick layers that I worked with were lower class whites who basically live in a hopeless world. So what you do is drink, screw and die.

--
Transkriberad från Jesus Radicals intervju med Stanley Hauerwas

Om amerikanska presidenters tro

"Of course George W Bush was and is a sincere Christian. But that is just an indication of how little being a Christian has to do with sincerity. That is why I find Miliband's atheism more interesting than the "faith" of the American presidents."

Hauerwas jämför amerikansk och brittisk religiositet i en läsvärd krönika i The Guardian.

Hauerwas om Guds namn

"... it should not be surprising that in a culture which inscribes its money with "In God We Trust," atheists might be led to think it is interesting - and perhaps even useful - to deny god exists. It does not seem to occur to atheists, however, that the vague god which some seem to confuse with trust in our money cannot be the same God who raised Jesus from the dead, having before raised Israel from Egypt."

Stanley Hauerwas on Naming God

Om frälsning och hälsa

På temat teologisk skolning, kroppen, och helande, kom jag att tänka på detta lysande stycke av Hauerwas:

" ... when someone goes to seminary today, he can say, "I'm not into Christology this year. I'm just into relating. After all, relating is what the ministry is really about, isn't it? Ministry is about helping people relate to one another, isn't it? So I want to take some more Clinical Pastoral Education courses." And the seminary says, "Go ahead and do it. Right, get your head straight, and so on." A kid can go to medical school and say, "I'm not into anatomy this year. I'm into relating. So I'd like to take a few more courses in psychology, because I need to know how to relate to people better." The medical school then says, "Who in the hell do you think you are, kid? We're not interested in your interests. You're going to take anatomy. If you don't like it, that's tough."

Now what that shows you is that people believe incompetent physicians can hurt them. Therefore, people expect medical schools to hold their students responsible for the kind of training that's necessary to be competent physicians. On the other hand, few people believe an incompetent minister can damage their salvation. This helps you see that what people want today is not salvation, but health. And that helps you see why the medical profession has, as a matter of fact, so much power over the church and her ministry. The medical establishment is the counter-salvation-promising group in our society today."

Är det viktigare för dig att din läkare är utbildad än att din pastor är det?

Festschrift für Stanley

I dagarna har en festschrift getts ut till Hauerwas ära: Unsettling Arguments: A Festschrift on the Occasion of Stanley Hauerwas's 70th Birthday. De ingående texterna är skrivna av flera av hans gamla studenter. Däribland D. Stephen Long, William T. Cavanaugh och Michael G. Cartwright. Cartwrights text handlar Hauerwas förhållande till, och syn på, universitetsvärlden. Det första kapitlet ligger ute för allmän läsning här!

Hauerwas om evangelikalismen

Jag gör ett försök att kompensera bloggens semesterträda med ett fint litet klipp om evangelikalismen förtjänster och brister. Hauerwas varnar för att den evangelika delen av kristenheten tenderar att glömma bort att evangliet alltid är förmedlat, att det är en gåva från Gud som vi får till oss genom tidigare generationer och traditioner. Hauerwas menar att denna insikt tenderar att hamna i skymundan då "den personliga relationen med Jesus" överbetonas.

Om immanens och transcendens

Alltid intressanta Cruciform Phronesis tipsade nyligen om att senaste numret av Modern Theology (26:3) innehåller flera artiklar som diskuterar Charles Taylors monumentala A Secular Age. Av det jag hunnit läsa hittills fastnade jag särskilt för Stanley Hauerwas och Romand Coles artikel, med dess synpunkter på Taylors användning av begreppsparet immenens/ transcendens:

We share Taylor's judgement that when the Christian faith is identified with a civilizational order, Christians loose sight of the full transformation to which Christians should be committed.
...
We worry however that Taylor's use of the immanent/trancendent duality may reproduce the habits of a Christianity that still longs to be a civilizational order. It does so just to the extent such a scheme can tempt us, Christian and non-Christian alike, to think that our primary concern is maintaining a place for trancendence. But that is to make immanence and trancendence free-standing concepts lacking Christological discipline. For Christians immanence first and foremost names that God became man that we might participate in the very life of God. So nothing can be more immanent than God with us. Trancendence, moreover, is not simply another name for William James' "more," but rather the other side of God's immanence. For Christians transcendens first and foremost is the acknowledgement that death could not hold him.

Amen!

Hauerwas om gemenskap

Ett lysande klipp där Hauerwas bland annat förklarar varför han inte är intresserad av en personlig relation med Gud:

Friendship and Community from CPX on Vimeo.