However, I’ve never found that ‘many years ago’ quote.

Kevin Hector’s latest “consolidation” post is great.

After conversations like these, I always feel like I know even less than I used know, and even then, I didn’t think I knew much to begin with! Somehow, if minisculely (is that a word?), I feel like I’ve gotten to know some people better. That’s kinda fun.

Peace,

Eric

2. It seems like you’re assuming that “serve the world” means actions for social justice for H. But it doesn’t. For H, the church serves the world by being the church. And that, for H, means primarily eucharist, pacifism, and truthful speech.

3. “It is to be hoped that such people may provide the conditions for our ability to cooperate with others for securing justice in the world.”: H insists that being a christian involves eucharist, pacificism, and truthful speech. He hopes it involves partnering w/ others in tasks of justice. I’m faulting him for not insisting on all four. Hoping that christians try to affect positive change in the world isn’t going to cut it in a culture (and church) characterized by hedonism, greed, narcissism, and apathy. We need churches that are insistent on this matter.

4. I agree that “justice” and “democracy” function in practice as ideological masks of particular (class and ethnic) interests and I treat what George W Bush means by “democracy” with utmost scepticism, but whereas wolin and west are willing to flesh out a notion of democracy that has substantial content, H is not. I can only refer you back to the passage in PTF that we have both referenced, in which H says he doesn’t no what justice and democracy mean so he tries to ‘talk about justice without talking about justice.’ West talks about justice. West and Wolin talk about democracy. I don’t think its so hard to talk of such things if you want to.

Thanks for your remarks.

During Dr. West’s powerful address, I couldn’t help but think of this conversation and wonder more and more about why you read Hauerwas so differently, why you don’t see what looks to me as a much more compelling account of political responsibility than an “obligation.” The thread I tried to point to in Hauerwas’ stuff seems to me to be an account of the church that must serve the world as a fulfillment of its very nature. For Hauerwas the church exists to serve the world. That is what the last (bold) quote I included in my post communicated so clearly, or so I thought: “[The church] must be a people with a hope sufficiently fervid to sustain the world as well as itself…. It is to be hoped that such people may provide the conditions for our ability to cooperate with others for securing justice in the world.” The church’s being, its constitution, is tied to a flourishing world. This sort of link between ecclesiology and God’s redemption of the world sounds like it runs much deeper than your search for “an obligation.” And before you follow with an accusation of Hauerwas’ stark church/world divide, let me point to another quote: “neither Yoder nor I have assumed the boundary between church and world is impermeable. Not only is it permeable, but something has gone wrong when the church is not learning from the world how to live faithfully to God” (PTF, 231-232). At this point I have a hard time figuring out how you can still say that Hauerwas’ political theology is “monoscopic”—by which I take it you mean that Hauerwas turns the church in on itself in order to figure out what it means to be political. If anything, Hauerwas’ politcal theology fits quite well with what you name as “stereoscopic”—that is, the church must cultivate ways to listen to all that is non-church in order to learn new ways to be faithful.

Now, back to your comment about what you percieve as Hauerwas’ linguistic tribalism. First, I don’t think it holds given that, as we see from those passages I just quoted, Hauerwas thinks that non-churchly things teach the church about faithfulness. That means there is communication going on inbetween the two linguistic cultures. To use Wittgenstein, the distinct language games share a multitude of family resemblances because they operate in the same form of life. Hauerwas cares so much about the way concepts like ‘justice’ and ‘peace’ and ‘democracy’ are emptied of meaning because he worries that these words operate in public discourse as propagandizing slogans that a lot of times paper over important disagreements. It’s at this point that Hauerwas thinks the church should have something quite democratic to offer “democracy”—that is, if the church operates under the “rule of Paul.” He writes, “When I read and began to understand Yoder, I thought I was beginning to see how the church could make a genuine contribution to American political life by being ‘itself’, that is, a community that refuses to come to judgment without hearing the voice of the ‘weakest member’” (PTF, 227). The reason why Hauerwas is skeptical about slogans like ‘justice’ is because he believes every voice must be heard, even the weakest voice. And slogans force an assumed agreement before honest conversation takes place. For Hauerwas, ‘justice’ and ‘peace’ are not static; they are always discovered in the conversation where every voice is welcomed to the table. These are the same sorts of moves Dr. West makes: “Do we now live in a postdemocratic age in which the very ‘democratic’ rhetoric of an imperial America hides the waning of a democratic America?” (DM, 8 ). And echoing Sheldon Wolin, Cornel West writes, “The first grand democratic experiment in Athens was driven by a movement of the demos…. In this sense, democracy is more a verb than a noun—it is more a dynamic striving and collective movement than a static order or stationary status quo” (DM, 68). These are the same moves Hauerwas makes when he says that concepts like ‘justice’ serve to mask our eyes from the realities of injustice. Hauewas calls into question whether or not we can be sure what we mean when we say ‘justice’ or ‘democracy’ because he wants to shake up our concepts enough so that a conversation ensues where we discover from the “weakest voice” what justice looks like. This is not anything close to a “monoscopic” tribalism.

And lastly, the passages I pointed to in Performing the Faith that talk about Dorothy Day and the Zwicks are about their communities. I wonder why this doesn’t count for you as concrete manifestations of the “church” as the sort of politics for which Hauerwas argues? Jesus says, “wherever two or more are gathered.” I think groups of people in their particular houses qualify. And, the argument of With the Grain of the Universe culminates in the Mennonite church that produces John Yoder, and the Roman Catholic Churhc that produced John Paul II and Dorothy Day. Why doesn’t the account of the way a particular church acted as a politcal alternative through Dorothy Day and her house(s) count?