Why Sectarianism is Required « Inhabitatio Dei
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Hauerwas has consistently denied that he is sectarian. “I do not see why the position for which I have argued forces the church to withdraw from public policy matters”, Hauerwas consistently claims. For him, there is no reason to assume that the church’s priority as a polis of peaceableness should prohibit Christians from participating in the machinations of states “unless you think that public policy always involves questions of violence and/or coercion.”
The Hauerwasian Mafia « Tony Jones
Tony talks about the Hauerwas mafia and the Constantinian dilemma of being a police chaplin.
Tags: hauerwas, pragmatism on 2008-10-26 -All Annotations (6) -About
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the Christian faith is a self-enclosed system of language and practice—one that cannot necessarily be understood by those who stand outside of the system. Aristotle was the granddaddy of this thinking when he said that those who live inside of one polis (city-state) cannot pass judgment on the laws and morals of those inside another polis. That’s because the moral system in a polis has developed around a certain set of virtues that is intrinsic to that polis.
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MacIntyre’s solution is a return to a virtue-bound society, one in which we come to consensus on the virtues that bind us and then work out a group of practices that facilitate those virtues
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Yoder continued in this pacifist tradition and argued that the church itself is a political stance in society. The church’s problems, he argued, are a result of “Constantianism,” a reference to the Roman emperor who made Christianity the de facto religion of the Empire in 313. A church in bed with government, according to Yoder, is a church that’s lost its nerve and forgotten who it’s supposed to be
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Don Stanley saw this and marshaled the forces of Don Yoder and Don MacIntyre to develop a new way forward for the liberal tradition. Instead of watering down their distinctives to the point of meaninglessness, the church should close ranks and develop an internal coherency that would serve as an example to the world.
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I think it’s these very experiences that have led me to appreciate philosophical pragmatism more than the neo-Artistotelianism of the HM (although pragmatism is also rooted in the thought of Aristotle). The pragmatists argue that there can be no uniform rule that dictates actions in all endeavors. Instead, we must become as wise as possible and then make the best decisions that we can.
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don’t have any grand strategy to protect my Christian particularity. I know who I am.
Interview with Stanley Hauerwas
Jim Wallis interviews Stanley Hauerwas (sometime in 2002) on his response to 9/11, terrorism, and global police forces.
Tags: hauerwas, nonviolence, politics, theology on 2008-10-15 -All Annotations (19) -About
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Is "pacifist" a word that you use to describe yourself?
Hauerwas: I oftentimes say in public that I'm a pacifist, but I don't like the word for two reasons. One, it's just so passive, and I think Christian nonviolence is very active confrontation with violence. Second, I think the word pacifism sounds like you have a position that is somehow separate from your worship of the crucified Savior. Christian nonviolence is entailed in the very heart of what it means to worship a crucified God. So I don't like the idea that pacifism has some further implication for my belief in Jesus.
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Tonto principle of Christian ethics.
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it for the long haul
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I don't like calling it "terrorism" because it's completely uncontrollable -- it doesn't do work that you need it to do for moral discrimination. I think you need to call it murder -- and insofar as it's murder, you want to arrest the perpetrator.
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B52s turn out to be very crude police officers
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My best hunch right now is that the allies of nonviolent people are political realists. Political realists have a sense that bombing a Stone Age country back to the Stone Age is exactly what bin Laden wants us to do.
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How could you have had the Civil Rights movement without the patience of the black church? You've got to have people schooled in the gospel to say, "We would rather lose than fight wrongly."
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I think a police force is the best institutionalization of what just war should be about. But then the arresting agent is not the same as the judging agent. In war, those two are the same.
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"What would you do if your grandmother's going to be raped and you need to kill somebody?" Given the alternatives, of course I can support it! (Laugh.) Yes, that's certainly the least violent alternative we have, and I would think that's good
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We want to support those who would rather die than murder. If you take Hiroshima and Nagasaki -- if you call the World Trade Center terrorism, Hiroshima and Nagasaki were terrorist acts. And I've had people say, "Well, that was war." And I say, "Well, you murder in war, too." The question is, would the American people have been ready to have more American soldiers die and more Japanese soldiers die on the beaches of Japan rather than to commit the murders of Hiroshima and Nagasaki? That's who we want to be: a people that would rather have more people die than to have to do a murderous act. I think that's who the military is, by the way. I think the military was profoundly embarrassed about the bombing in Yugoslavia. They're honorable people. I think there are probably some of them who are embarrassed about the bombing we're doing in Afghanistan, because they understand that part of what they're about is that they would rather die than murder. I give high credence to that.
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we're not running the world. But in a world we're not running, we want to be an alternative that forces imaginative possibilities that wouldn't be there otherwise
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You've got to be really embedded in a different set of practices to force a different imagination.
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Pacifism, Christian nonviolence, is a commitment to vulnerability. We have to put our lives in one another's hands, because that's the way God created us -- to be vulnerable.
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I don't want to be terribly judgmental about people rediscovering their patriotism, because I think it's a sign of how deeply lonely the American people are that suddenly they feel together. And that's very frightening, because a rootless consumer society suddenly deciding it has something to kill for is a very frightening reality.
CNN/TIME - America's Best
Stanley Hauerwas argues that many Christians aren't actually following the teachings of Jesus
Tags: hauerwas on 2008-10-14 and saved by 3 people -All Annotations (1) -About
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He urges people to be faithful Roman Catholics or Orthodox Jews or Evangelicals or Muslims. It is faithfulness to a complex tradition that forestalls being overtaken by majoritarianism or convention.
stanley hauerwas on sin
3 quotes from stanley on sin
Tags: hauerwas, theology, soteriology on 2008-10-14 -All Annotations (2) -About
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“Another hallmark of Christianity is that salvation is not individualistic—it’s not something one person receives for himself or herself. Salvation is the reign of God. It is a political alternative to the way the world is constituted. That’s a very important part of the story that has been lost to accounts of salvation that are centered in the individual. But without an understanding that salvation is the reign of God, the need for the church to mediate salvation makes no sense at all.” (The Hauerwas Reader, p. 533).
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“I don’t have any faith in myself of living a virtuous life; but if I am surrounded by other people who are also formed by the same commitments, then we’ve got a better chance. We need one another to live up to the wonderful invitation we’ve been given to be other than we are.” (534).
ABORTION, THEOLOGICALLY UNDERSTOOD
Article from 1990. Hauerwas shares a sermon on abortion then offers ethical commentary.
Tags: abortion, ethics, theology, hauerwas on 2008-09-06 -All Annotations (21) -About
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We cannot simply throw the issue of abortion in the faces of women and say, 'You
decide and you bear the consequences of your decision.' As the church, our response to the
abortion issue must be to shoulder the responsibility to care for women and children. We
cannot do otherwise and still be the church. -
Christians in America are tempted to think of issues like abortion primarily in legal
terms such as "rights." This is because the legal mode, as de Tocqueville
pointed out long ago, provides the constituting morality in liberal societies. In other
words, when you live in a liberal society like ours, the fundamental problem is how you
can achieve cooperative agreements between individuals who share nothing in common other
than their fear of death. In liberal society the law has the function of securing such
agreements. That is the reason why lawyers are to America what priests were to the
medieval world. The law is our way of negotiating safe agreements between autonomous
individuals who have nothing else in common other than their fear of death and their
mutual desire for protection. -
We
Christians do not believe that we have inalienable rights. That is the false presumption
of Enlightenment individualism, and it opposes everything that Christians believe about
what it means to be a creature. -
We do not believe that we have a right to our bodies because when
we are baptized we become members of one another; then we can tell one another what it is
that we should, and should not, do with our bodies. -
Here is the way it works: you can only act in the world that you
can see, and you must be taught to see by learning to say. -
One of the crucial issues here is how we learn to be a people dependent on one another.
We must learn to confess that, as a hospitable people, we need one another because we are
dependent on one another. The last thing that the church wants is a bunch of autonomous,
free individuals. We want people who know how to express authentic need, because that
creates community. -
We, as church, are ready to be challenged by the other. This has to do with the fact
that in the church, every adult, whether single or married, is called to be
parent. All Christian adults have a parental responsibility because of baptism. Biology
does not make parents in the church. Baptism does. Baptism makes all adult Christians
parents and gives them the obligation to help introduce these children to the Gospel.
Listen to the baptismal vows; in them the whole church promises to be parent. In this
regard the church reinvents the family. -
I often remind my right-to-life friends that Christians took their
children with them to martyrdom rather than have them raised pagan. Christians believe
there is much worth dying for. We do not believe that human life is an absolute good in
and of itself. Of course our desire to protect human life is part of our seeing each human
being as God's creature. But that does not mean that we believe that life is an overriding
good.
To say that life is an overriding good is to underwrite the modern sentimentality that
there is absolutely nothing in this world worth dying for. Christians know that
Christianity is simply extended training in dying early. That is what we have always been
about. Listen to the Gospel! I know that today we use the church primarily as a means of
safety, but life in the church actually involves extended training in learning to die
early. -
Honestly, I cannot imagine anything worse than
people saying that they have children because their hope for the future is in their
children. You would never have children if you had them for that reason. We are able to
have children because our hope is in God, who makes it possible to do the absurd thing of
having children. In a world of such terrible injustice, in a world of such terrible
misery, in a world that may well be about the killing of our children, having children is
an extraordinary act of faith and hope. But as Christians we can have a hope in God that
urges us to welcome children. -
Even Christians now think that we ought to marry people simply because
they are "in love." Wrong, wrong, wrong! What could being in love possibly mean?
The romantic view underwrites the presumption that, because people are in love, it is
therefore legitimate for them to have sexual intercourse, whether they are married or not.
Contrary to this is the church's view of marriage. To the church, marriage is the public
declaration that two people have pledged to live together faithfully for a lifetime. -
Christians witness to wider society first of all not by
lobbying for a law against abortion, but by welcoming the children that the wider society
does not want. Part of that witness might be to say to our pro-choice friends, "You
are absolutely right. I don't think that any poor woman ought to be forced to have a child
that she cannot afford. So let's work hard for an adequate child allowance in this
country." That may not be entirely satisfactory, but that is one approach.
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