Relevancy22: Contemporary Process Christianity: Post-Evangelic Topics and Theology: Mar 22, 2012

Wikipedia: Stanley Hauerwas (born July 24, 1940) is a Christian theologian and ethicist. He has taught at the University of Notre Dame and is currently the Gilbert T. Rowe Professor of Theological Ethics at Duke Divinity School with a joint appointment at the Duke University School of Law.

The System vs. The Kingdom

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"Being a Christian should scare the hell out of us"

Prayer is part of the training, part of the preparation for the afterlife. As is being together in community on a regular basis. Going to church is a good place to go to. To worship God with other people. It is essential to helping us live as a Christian. It makes us part of an ongoing history that we cannot make up. Christianity is received. It cannot be done alone but only with others. Having a faith cannot be a private thing. It is all public. And must be shared with others. “Jesus as Lord” makes our lives quite dysfunctional. Being a Christian must make us rush together for protection to discover that, “Oh, I’m not crazy! God IS real!” “God in Christ reconciling the world” makes our lives really weird and gathering together on Sunday pulls us back into the reality of God’s Kingdom lest we lose sight of it. Through baptism, through proclamation of the Word, through communion (Eucharistic celebration), through fellowship.

Stanley Hauerwas on Prayer

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Dr. Stanley Hauerwas, a widely acclaimed Christian theologian, discusses his understanding of prayer.

If prayer has taught me anything it has taught me to wait. The world’s sense of time is based upon speed. Efficiency. The ability to get things done quickly. But God’s sense of time is based upon patience. Faithfulness. Dependence. Prayer has also taught me a sense of humor. That it all doesn’t depend on me which is a deep truth that gives to me a perspective that gets around my foibles and frailties. That God is God and I am not. A truth that gives me both humor and patience and allows me to rest in God’s time.

Stanley Hauerwas On His Evangelical Audience

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Considering that Evangelicals have produced some of the realities that Dr. Hauerwas has spent a career resisting (pietism, 'personal relationships with Jesus, church growth, etc.), he discusses his Evangelical audience with Wunderkammer Magazine.

Evangelicals bring to us “Jesus and energy” both of which I admire greatly insofar as Evangelicals keep a high regard of Scripture, a Christological center, and a great desire to tell people of Jesus as the great joy of their lives. However, the church is not a secondary reality to the Christian’s immediate relationship to God. It is a necessary part of a Christian’s reality because the Church’s function in the Christian life is one of mediating God to the world. The Christian faith is not done alone through pietism and a private relationship with Jesus. Church growth does not mean that we make God up, or that we make Christianity up. It is received through the gifts of 2000 years of Church history. Tradition matters. One of the reasons it matters is because it teaches us of error. And one of the ways that we know error is through remembering and studying the Christian tradition through historical event and occurrence.

Stanley Hauerwas: What only the whole church can do

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Theologian Stanley Hauerwas discusses the term leadership and how he prepares his students to provide it. Leadership cannot be abstracted from the communities that make it possible, says Stanley Hauerwas, a Duke Divinity School professor considered to be one of the nations most influential theologians.

What is Leadership? It’s always persuasion. All the time. All the way through. So much of the time real, creative, authority works through articulating to one’s community what needs to be done in a way that defies limits. Their limits. Your limits. The limits of the system. Leadership reframes issues so that we may discover ways of who and where we are in terms that do not reproduce the necessities of the past. That circumvents them and gives newer methods of formation to one’s present.

Sadly, leadership can be perverted and subverted. We know what leadership is abstracted from communities that make leadership possible. Part of the issue is the usage of power. A gift that God has given us for the formation of community. A gift that makes it necessary for us to discuss amongst ourselves those individuals who give can lead ethically, benevolently, fairly. But this is also the language of leadership that can be perverted. These are matters that must be discussed within communities for the correct apprehension and usage of “power” lest it go awry and is misused and abused.

What do you teach students so that they may make a difference in the world? Don’t lie. Be honest. If you do not know what the truth is then discuss it. Don’t make it up and say that you do. Politics is people. Any person who works with people in a leadership position must be involved with people and be honest with people through their involvements.

How do institutions make space for innovation? One of the elements of producing creativity is the process of “habit” in the sense that creativity is carried through habit. Though we think we are doing the same thing over and over again, in reality we are not. We just think we are. Why? Because we change day-to-day. As does the world. As do events in-and-around our lives. As example, the church’s history of liturgy is constantly evolving through innovation to society. But in a way that we recognize continuities through time. “Habits” evolve. They are familiar. They are repetitive. They are helpful in placing us with others in the larger communal sense of event and time participation. This is how institutions make space for innovation.

People who are called to administrative development have to undergo a deep, aesthetical discipline to help you emotionally deal with people who you recognize as having both possibilities and limitations. Each of which can drive you crazy if these are taken personally. This type of personal discipline will then provides space for communities to develop the diversities of their gifts with one another which is the administrator's charge to discover, and encourage, for community utilization. This is part of the responsibility of an administrator - the gift of recognition and encouragement to the goal of community development.

Overall, leadership recognizes how fragile the gift of power is. A quality that you wouldn’t have be otherwise. A quality that gives to the leader a confidence that you do not need to win all the time. It is a true ascetic discipline in that it disciplines the ego to accept, and promote, the occurrence of consensus among others without the necessity of the leader's will injected into all matters of the community at all times. And that when one wins we all win. But it cannot be limited simply to one person in the dictates of their own spirit over others. For it is absolutely necessary that the leader disciplines his will, his determinations, and his guidance. It is a personal quality that is absolutely crucial to allowing any organization to grow within itself, within its dictates and formations, so that once the leader is no longer there the organization may function independently. And continue to grow in a healthy relationship to itself, its community and to others. This kind of quality, or structure, makes the community want to serve one another with their gifts, their abilities, their contributions and will. It is a quality that can encourage aspirations and goals.

What’s remarkable is not what the community should be, but that there is community at all! This is the remarkability of the organization of men and women to an entity. And in the church’s case, to the Person of the Living Lord Jesus Christ to whom the Church follows after in obedience to His will, His authority, His desires and example. It is definitely a great work of God through the Holy Spirit to form men and women unto the Lordship of Jesus Christ. And into community with one another. A community that serves both one another as well as the world around itself.

Hauerwas on Language and Ethics