Thomas Jay Oord - Pathways to Open and Relational Theologies

Pathways to Open and Relational Theologies
http://thomasjayoord.com/index.php/blog/archives/theological_traditions_as_paths_to_open_and_relational_theologies/#.U3Tn-vldX9z

by Thomas Jay Oord
May 13, 2014

Introduction

As part of the book I’m currently writing, I’m suggesting four paths people take on their way to embracing open and relational theology. I’m looking for help in developing my discussion of one of those paths: Christian traditions.

The four paths to open and relational theology I identify are these:

1. following the biblical witness,

2. following themes in some Christian theological traditions,

3. following the philosophy of free will, and,

4. following the path of reconciling faith and science.

In this blog essay, I address some Christian theological traditions through which some people have come on their way to embracing open and relational theologies. I am hoping to add resources, ideas, bibliographical references, or figures to this essay (and the book). So please respond in the comments section with your thoughts and suggestions.

Christian Theological Themes

A number of theological traditions – or at least themes dominant in those traditions – have encouraged some people to embrace open and relational theologies. Most of these traditions reside in Christianity, and they include Adventist, Arminian, Lutheran, Mennonite, Pentecostal, Restorationist, and Wesleyan.*

*Some might add Latter-Day Saint [Mormon] theology to this list, but scholars debate whether the Latter-Day Saint movement is rightly considered part of the Christian tradition. I will not weigh in on this debate here.

This does not mean, of course, everyone who identifies with, or works from, these Christian traditions embraces open and relational theology. Rather, particular themes in these traditions have inspired some to embrace open and relational theologies.

For example, some contemporary Lutherans have been influenced by Martin Luther’s theology of the cross – especially his emphasis upon the weakness and suffering of God. Consequently, they have rejected classic views of omnipotence and non/relationality and embraced open and relational notions of God’s power and relationships.

Some contemporary Anabaptists draw from Menno Simons’s emphasis upon pacificism, freedom, and peace. These Anabaptists find these themes congruent with the emphasis upon non-coercion re God’s persuasive activity as emphasized in open and relational theologies.

Some contemporary Baptists extrapolate from their view that believers must freely choose to be baptized. This extrapolation leads them to embrace open and relational theology, because of it emphasis upon genuine creaturely freedom.

Some Pentecostals believe we must cooperate with God when exercising the gifts of the Spirit. This concursus or synergy of God and creaturely activity fits well with cooperation themes in open and relational theologies.

The Stone-Campbell Restorationist movement emphasizes Christian freedom and freedom in the Spirit. This emphasis fits well with the emphasis upon freedom found in most open and relational theologies.

And, of course, many attracted to Jacob Arminius’s theology, especially his denial of predestination and his emphasis upon creaturely cooperation for salvation, often find themselves drawn to open and relational theologies. While Arminius retained a more traditional view of God’s omniscience, many of his other themes are identical to themes typical of open and relational theologies.

Theologies of Love

Perhaps the strongest reason some Christians embrace open and relational theologies is their belief in the centrality of love for Christian thinking and living. In their own ways, many Christian traditions say God’s primary attribute is love and God lovingly gives to and receives from creatures. Many say we must cooperate with God by living lives of love if we are to find full salvation.

The Wesleyan tradition is a good example of a Christian tradition whose themes fit well with open and relational theologies. Wesleyans typically follow John Wesley’s efforts to understand divine sovereignty in light of God’s love. Wesley preached that God “strongly and sweetly influenc[es] all, and yet without destroying the liberty of his rational creatures.” He understood God’s power, says Randy Maddox, “fundamentally in terms of empowerment - rather than control or overpowerment.” This means, says Maddox, that Wesleyans believe “God’s grace works powerfully, but not irresistibly, in matters of human life and salvation.”

Many contemporary Wesleyan theologians follow John Wesley’s lead in emphasizing love as the center of Christian theology. Mildred Bangs Wynkoop, for instance, wrote her book, A Theology of Love, as an attempt to understand holiness through the lens of God’s relational love. “When each doctrine of the Christian faith is identified and defined by [Wesley],” argued Wynkoop, “the basic meaning invariably comes out ‘love.’”

Using an analogy, Wynkoop says, “Wesley’s thought is like a great rotunda with archway entrances all around it. No matter which one is entered, it always leads to the central Hall of Love…” Love “creates freedom and achievement,” she argues. And love “serves to link every doctrine together into one dynamic architectonic and to show the theological stature and integrity of John Wesley.”

God’s Foreknowledge

Many members of these Christians traditions have wrestled with how to understand God’s knowledge. While most believe God doesn’t foreordain or predestine all things, many think God foreknows all things. For them, God knows with absolutely certainty what we will do tomorrow and yet we are free to do otherwise.

But some in these Christian traditions reject the traditional view of God’s foreknowledge. Because they start with God’s love and creaturely freedom, they believe God experiences time in a way similar to the way creatures experience it. And this means God cannot foreknow - with absolute certainty - the future that will actually come to pass. Their understanding of God’s omniscience does not mean God foreknows all things.

A significant number of theologians in the 19th and early 20th centuries argued that God does not have exhaustive foreknowledge. For instance, Methodist theologian, Lorenzo D. McCabe (1817-1897), extensively defended the view that God’s omniscience doesn’t entail exhaustive foreknowledge. “In the divine omniscience,” said McCabe, “there must be an element of growth.”

Lutheran theologian, Isaak Dorner (1809-84), said that a consistent view of God working with us in history requires that God knows future free acts of creatures as possibilities, not actualities. “We cannot be satisfied with the assertion that for God there can be nothing past and nothing future as such,” argued Dorner. God’s knowledge “presupposes a movement, a change, even in the [very] knowing activity of God himself.”

Roman Catholic theologian, Jules Lequyer (1814-1862), followed what he believed the logic of free will should imply about God’s foreknowledge. “I believe that God has only a conjectural knowledge of the acts determined by human activity,” said Lequyer.

Stone-Campbell Restorationist thinker, T. W. Brents (1823-1905), believed God voluntarily chooses not to know some things. Brents says God “saw fit to avoid knowledge of everything incompatible with the freedom of the human will.”

Major Methodist theologians in the 19th and 20th centuries rejected exhaustive divine foreknowledge. One of the best known, Edgar S. Brightman (1884-1953), put it this way: “God cannot be said to have complete foreknowledge. Although a divine mind would know all that was knowable and worth knowing, including the consequences of all possible choices, it would not know what choices a free mind would make.” God cannot know, said Brightman, because God’s “consciousness is an eternal time movement, the soul of the ongoing of all reality.”

Process Theology

Some have followed process theology as their path to embracing open and relational theologies. Process theology is notoriously difficult to define, and scholars debate how best to describe the essence of process thought, if there even is one. But most Christian process theologians have affirmed the centrality of love, genuine creaturely freedom, chance and necessity, values, and the idea that God’s current knowledge does not include all future occurrences.

Many process theologians agree with Charles Hartshorne, for instance, who argues for “growth in God’s knowledge.” Hartshorne says that “the creative process produces new realities to know.” This means “God does not already, or eternally, know what we do to tomorrow, for, until we decide, there are no such entities as our tomorrow’s decisions.”

It’s important to emphasize that open and relational theologies come in many forms. Process theology is merely one form among others. Disagreements exist among those who self-identify with open and relational theology. But the various forms share enough in common to coalesce and promote a particular way of understanding God and the world God creates.

Conclusion

I could list other theological traditions and other theologians. Those who embrace open and relational theologies have taken different theological paths to their common affirmations. But my main goals here are two.

First, because of the ideas central to some Christian theologies, some of their members followed what they saw as the logic of those ideas and ended up embracing open and relational theology.

Second, although open and relational theology, as a general theological emaphasis, is a fairly recent phenomenon, one can find voices in the past championing even its the more controversial ideas. Some championed even the controversial idea that God’s omniscience does not include God currently knowing with certainly all that will occur in the future.

Your thoughts?

- Tom Oord

[1] I am grateful to friends and scholars on Facebook discussion groups for helping me think through ways the themes in some Christian traditions have been used by members to come to embrace open and relational theologies. In particular, I thank David Cole, Chris Fisher, James Goetz, Simon Hall, Randy Hardman, John D. Holloway, Curtis Holtzen, William Lance Huget, Jacob Matthew Hunt, Dave Huth, Richard Kidd, Richard Livingston, Jay McDaniel, T. C. Moore, Quinn Olinger, Bryan Overbaugh, Matt Perkins, David Saleeba, Neil Short, Rod Thomas.

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Addendum

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Tom, my Baptist and Reformed traditions saw open and relational theology as man-driven and not God-given. It taught a closed system with known and expected human failures as anticipated result with divine judgement as necessary outcome.

As such, when discovering open and relational theologies, I approached it in two ways: One, through process theology that immediately made sense to me in terms of the openness of the future and the necessity of God's relational love. And secondly, through Arminianism. But to accomplish this latter I had to first lower Calvinism's stark bleakness by raising Arminianism gracious hopefulness in order to discover divine promise coupled with divine meaning.

When taking these separate paths I immediately found that my orthodoxy began to focus on orthopraxy with a resultant theology of goodness and suffering mandating the necessity for a theology mediated by a very willful human response all in the power of the Holy Spirit of God. But to simply sit on the theological sidelines casting aspersions upon everyone unlike myself or my (evangelical) dogmas was not a viable missional response. Nor did it anticipate recreating the Lord's world by not doing anything except preaching the Word and waiting for heaven.

As such, God's love required acknowledging the legitimacy of both divine, and human, weakness and suffering as the only proper response whereby both man and God were each the means (or solution) for the other's salvation (in the sense of completeness or wholeness with self and with creation).

Too, with the aspect of both God and man working willfully together with one another became the divine means to providing a multi-variable re/creation as a viable outcome  that would be inclusive to redemptive foreknowledge and divine sovereignty. That this divine/human cooperative was a co/dependent process each upon the other actively charged with the redemption, renewal, reclamation, resurrection, and rebirth, of creation. A creation that would heal both the divine self and the human self now broken by a creaturely fellowship of sin and (spiritual) death.

Without the presence of redemptive process coupled with divine/human actors working synergistically together toward salvific outcome, goodness-and-suffering had no legitimate eschatological teleology. Nor meaningful redemptive purpose. Nor even meaningful completion between divine trinity and divine(d) creation.

- R.E. Slater

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Comments

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Keith: "Tom, as part of your effort to not enter the debate on whether LDS is part of the Christian tradition but at the same time describe the varied paths people follow to reach a relational theology, it might be useful to add an LDS paragraph (what elements of Mormonism have lead some to a more open understanding of The Divine?)."

Thomas Jay Oord: "Good idea, Keith. Among those elements in LDS thought that are congenial to open and relational theologies I’d include the LDS emphasis upon free will and its emphasis upon divine relationality. Many Mormon theologians reject exhaustive divine foreknowledge too. There may be other elements. Given the way LDS theology is done, however, I think the statements from the prophets are considered ultimately authoritative. And I don’t know what the current leaders think about these issues."

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Graeme: "The Adventist tradition, stemming from Wesleyan trunk, has taken relational theology a long way. I would say that it has become the dominant discourse in area ministries (women’s, youth, health, foreign missions) and by and largely eclipsed forensic and purity metaphors in theology. All the church’s distinctive teachings (sabbath, second advent, sanctuary, health, trinity ) have been recast in relational terms, even if the formal theo-logy appears traditional. Human freedom and divine foreknowledge have been balanced in the church’s eschatology and Judgment theology, so that coercion as a spiritual force is eliminated from the cosmos."

Thomas Jay Oord: Graeme, Thanks for your report on Adventism. I’ve been corresponding with Rick Rice on this subject, and he suggested I look into the work of Uriah Smith. After doing so, I added this paragraph to the ones above I will use in the book:"

Influential Adventist scholar, Uriah Smith (1832-1903), could write commentaries on the prophecies of Daniel and Revelation and yet deny exhaustive foreknowledge. “God made [humans], as he must make all intelligences who are to serve him,” argued Smith, “a free moral agent, that such service may not be mechanical and constrained, but voluntary and free…” Smith says that humans “being free, God knew of course that [humans] might sin; but this would be a very different thing from saying he knew that [humans] would sin.”

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Bryan: "Tom, I think you could also add that Pentecostals also have a very real sense of divine love. Amos Yong in his book Spirit of Love: A Trinitarian Theology of Grace, goes to great lengths to show that the Pentecostal emphasis on divine power often overshadows the role that divine love plays in the individuals transformation. In short, he posits that divine love is as the heart of the Pentecostal experience."

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Ben: "Hi Dr. Oord. In the readings of theology this can be an interesting discussion. Open and classical theology. Perhaps, the 4 reasons listed may have led some to considering the open view. While quoting theological virtues, such as free will, the reconcile of faith and science, traditions of theology, and the biblical witness-it seems that these same themes can lead one to deliberate classical and traditional theology as well. Of course we can quote various theologians and philosophers of several Christian traditions, either in support, or in opposition to open theism. However, among the 4 reasons listed, why not allow theology motif (scripture-biblical witness) to commence?"

Objection 1

“Psalm 139:4 - Even before a word is on my tongue, behold, O LORD, you know it altogether.”

As an honest question, how does open theism describe this verse? It seems that the author of this verse insists that God “knows”- “before” human action takes place. Before he speaks “a word is on my tongue” ‘O Lord, you know it altogether’. Here, it seems that the future (before human action occurs) can be known by God.

Objection 2

Another example set forth in the bible is when Jesus forecasts his own death and resurrection (Matthew 20:17-19). He speaks of what humans in the future will do.

Objection 3

The LDS should not be considered for this theology hypothesis- The LDS Church is not Christian. From the very beginning, Mormon worldview condemned all Christian Churches and Christian theology:

“My object in going to inquire of the Lord was to know which of the sects was right, that I might which to join…..…..I was answered that I must join none of them, for they were all wrong….all their creeds were an abomination…..those professors were all corrupt” –Joseph Smith Jr. (Joseph Smith- History 1:19)- (This is an LDS standard work).

Contrary to the nature of Christian theology (monotheism-(Isaiah 43:10)- (Protestant, Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodox)-LDS theology is polytheistic.

19 And again, verily I say unto you, if a man marry a wife by my word, which is my law, and by the new and everlasting covenant, and it is sealed unto them by the Holy Spirit of promise, by him who is anointed, unto whom I have appointed this power and the keys of this priesthood; and it shall be said unto them—Ye shall come forth in the first resurrection; and if it be after the first resurrection, in the next resurrection; and shall inherit thrones, kingdoms, principalities, and powers, dominions, all heights and depths—then shall it be written in the Lamb’s Book of Life, that he shall commit no murder whereby to shed innocent blood, and if ye abide in my covenant, and commit no murder whereby to shed innocent blood, it shall be done unto them in all things whatsoever my servant hath put upon them, in time, and through all eternity; and shall be of full force when they are out of the world; and they shall pass by the angels, and the gods, which are set there, to their exaltation and glory in all things, as hath been sealed upon their heads, which glory shall be a fulness and a continuation of the seeds forever and ever.

20 Then shall they be gods, because they have no end; therefore shall they be from everlasting to everlasting, because they continue; then shall they be above all, because all things are subject unto them. Then shall they be gods, because they have all power, and the angels are subject unto them. (D&C 132:19-20)

“Here, then, is eternal life-to know the only wise and true God; and you have got to learn how to be Gods yourselves, and to be kings and priests to God, the same as all Gods have done before you, namely, by going from one small degree to another, and from a small capacity to a great one; from grace to grace, from exaltation to exaltation, until you attain to the resurrection of the dead and are able to dwell in everlasting burnings, and to sit in glory, as do those who sit enthroned in everlasting power” (Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith, 346-347) Joseph Smith Jr. taught this as living Prophet of the LDS Church-he is also the founder of the LDS Church.

I will note that the LDS appear as good people. Having lived in Idaho for several years among LDS folks, it was enjoyable. They make great neighbors. However, their theology and worldview is not Christian.

Reply by R.E. Slater to Ben: I would take the psalmist's description of God's knowledge more as a knowledge of personal initimacy than one of perscriptive foreknowledge of act and will.

Secondly, as pertaining to Jesus' prophecy of His death and resurrection I would understand this proclamation by the One who was fully acquainted (and fully informed) of His own divine mission. A redemptive mission that was sovereignly enacted before the decrees of creation were put in place. And inasmuch as this is true, than Jesus' proclamation was one of forth-telling as much as it was one of fore-telling. Since God knows His own will He does so "proclaim and predict" with all rightness and authority. But as much as He decrees creation's freewill by divine fiat, He will wait upon creation's response even as He works out His own redemptive will in keeping with His eternal councils of grace and wisdom.

Thirdly, the LDS "church" does have elements within it that behaves towards open and relational theology whether a Christian faith or not. That was the point made and not one of debate of whether it is a Christian faith or not, sectarian or not, or even cultic or not. This is another matter for another day. For those Christians working intimately with the Mormon faith they see aspects of all of these outcomes within the diversity of this people group. Peace.

What will the Post-Evangelic Church Look Like?

 

Why Is Postevangelical Christianity Important Today?

by R.E. Slater
May 9, 2014

Today I am posting two articles (the latter is quite lengthy but insightful). The first is on whether evangelicalism will survive the next 20 years (this was written in 2009) and the next is a transcript of the recent Q&A between Albert Mohler and Stanley Hauerwas ("Nearing the End," April 2014). What I'm most interested in this second posting is the understanding of evangelicalism from within itself as versus a discussion of the same by non-evangelic "outsiders" familiar with evangelicalism.

To both these articles it is the viewpoint here at Relevancy22 that evangelicalism in its current forms has been both good and harmful to the spirit of Christianity. Good, in that there is a faithful devotion to Christ Jesus as Savior and Lord accompanied by a lively practice of that faith in personal, ecclesiastical, and community life, witness, and mission.

But harmful in that evangelicalism as a religion - or as a religious expression of the Jesus-faith - has become particularly dogmatic and vexed with inappropriate teaching and understanding of the fundamentals of the Bible. Specifically of the message-and-meaning of salvation for today's postmodern, post secular, post-evangelic era of the 21st Century.

In response to these observations we have steadily written these past three years of the pros and cons of a meaningful evangelical practice of the Christian faith while also learning when to warmly say "goodbye" to its many dithering dogmas and religious folklores that have steadily been replacing good, sound, orthodox Christian doctrine with its own view of things.

The Dilemma of an Evolving Christian Faith

Let me explain. Consider the example of purchasing a 100 year old dilapidated home. When considering the cost of purchase do you raze it to the ground and then rebuild it from foundation to roof line? Or do you pick-its-bones by meaningfully renovating it in accordance to its original construction design while at the same time expressing the owner's more contemporary tastes?

Christian orthodoxy is presently challenged in this same way. By way of personal insight I have felt that there have been far too many post-evangelic Christians more willing to burn Christianity all the way down to the ground to begin again (and the more especially, I think, to repeat its gnostic errors and heresies). While others, like myself, have become the more determined to pick-through-the-bones of evangelicalism in order to retain its truer orthodox (and catholic) doctrines but at the same time expressing these orthodoxies within a meaningful postmodern, post secular, post-evangelic spirit and insight.

What this means is that we are the more willing to let go of evangelical dogmatisms and nonbiblical religious folklores while at the same time updating Christian orthodoxy's necessary - and corollary - doctrinal expressions. For instance, what might those expressions be on the positive side of things? Such things as creating postmodern (and post-evangelical) creedal confessions. Or, integrating various theologic forms of relational theism, process thought, and open theology with current classical expressions of the faith. Or even, involving contemporary scientific findings such as evolutionary creationism and science in general to help inform this newer view of the Bible. Or perhaps, we might better explore more meaningful worship and prayer services purposefully seeking an intimacy of fellowship and missional ministry. Or even more intentionally reach out through various church ministries to the poor, the destitute, and unempowered of society. On the negative side of things we could also create quite a list but will defer and leave it to the reader to explore this website to glean from within those areas previously expressed rather than go into it at this time.

Hence, the purpose and direction of this referential website here is to put a new face on evangelical Christianity. One that both accepts postmodernism and post secularism but will also be the more able to discern and decry its abuses and instances of disregard for the historic Christian faith.

As such, a post-evangelic Christian (more popularly described as a "progressive evangelic Christian") seeks to uplift and redescribe what a postmodern, post secular, post-evangelic Christian orthodoxy may look like using all the latest tools at hand pertaining to biblical study, the philosophies, and the sciences, in order to accomplish the goal of refitting a care-worn Christian faith with the deepest yearnings of this present global society. To train the next generation of Christians to know-and-understand that the Christian faith can no longer simply reside in its classical forms but must be rebuilt and updated using the best of today's more discerning insights from a plethora of capable resources both academic and non-academic.

Declarations of a Post-Evangelic Christianity

We must also declare that the four defining evangelical points of the 20th century evangelical church will also hold true for the 21st century post-evangelic church. However, they will be significantly re-expressed differently from its evangelic forebearer. Those four points are:

1 - The Bible is God's revelation to man of His salvation, presence, and work.

2 - Jesus is the incarnate Christ and resurrected God-man glorified. Who is both

      the lamb of God and ruling King of the nations of this sinful world.

3 - To uphold a Christian faith that is both personal and social with all its ramifications.

4 - And a practicing faith in all its pieties, liveliness, and missional meanings for society.

Nonetheless, within these four basic definitions lies a wealth of interpretation and expression which should not be subsumed under the one general heading of Christian evangelicalism as a cultural and/or ecclesiastical expression. But one that must transcend itself to reach a mosaic of people groups spread across global districts, times, cultures, and societal understanding. Hence the great need to expand evangelicalism's "perceived institutes of orthodoxy" with that of a post-evangelic orthodoxy that is the more relevant to today's very secular societies.

The Breadth and Width of God's Love

It should also be noted that within the second article its evangelical speaker Albert Mohler believes and teaches a limited form of salvation for mankind based upon his understanding of God's election of salvation not to all - but for only those who are predestined to be saved by God. He gets this teaching from the more popular doctrines of Calvinism as stated in its 5 points known as TULIP (see Wikipedia here or links on this site).

In Roger Olson's most recent discussion this week (May 7, 2014) he capably refutes this doctrinal mindset and describes why-and-what the election of God must mean in his posting entitled "My Response to Al Mohler's Defense of Limited Atonement."

To me the gospel necessarily includes that God loves all people and wants all to be saved. Preaching the gospel necessarily includes the truth that Christ offered a sufficient sacrifice for all people’s sins such that I can indiscriminately declare to everyone “God loves you and Christ died for you.” And by “Christ died for you” would mean, and insist that anyone preaching the gospel alongside me mean, he provided by his death everything necessary for reconciliation with God except their own personal acceptance of that sacrifice by faith [(thus avoiding charges of universalism) - res]. To me, any other “gospel” is only  a partially true gospel - if not a false gospel. And many, many Reformed Christians agree with me about this against [the] so-called “five point Calvinists.” - Roger Olson

What is Meant by the "Church Catholic"?

I should also state when reading the transcript of the Q&A below that by the term "Catholic Church" is meant the "church universal" rather than as a reference to Roman Catholicism. This was the old and proper meaning of the term "catholic" up until the time of the Reformation when protesting churches left the church catholic to become a reformed body of churches that later developed into the many streams of Protestantism.

Hence, in the New Testament Scriptures the church was "universal" or, using the older slang of the early church fathers, the church was "catholic" in the sense that all believers in the Lord Jesus Christ formed one universal body of believers. That this fellowship of Jesus formed the "family" of God and "body of Christ." That this fellowship of believers was the church universal by blood-and-brotherly ties to Jesus - and to one another - through salvation and conversion.

What is not meant by this term is some form of soteriological universalism whose outcome sees all sinners come into this catholic fellowship without faith and repentance. Though Jesus' atonement covers all of mankind - not all men and women will willingly submit to Christ's atonement and be covered by His redemption. This is a personal issue. A free will issue. And thus God's salvation is to all but received only by those willing to bow their knee to their Savior Redeemer.

Thus, all have been elected by God to receive Jesus' atonement. And all have been predestined to be covered by His salvation. These are statements pertaining to Christ's atonement and not to God's foreknowledge or predestination of those who will come and those who will not (sic, the Calvinist's sheep and goat arguments). These terms refer to the kind of salvation God has provided to man - that it is sufficiently effectual to all men everywhere. And not to the way that men are called by divine appointment. This latter would interfere with God's original decree of free will and make that decree illogical.

But with the choice (and covering) may a true Christian fellowship occur in Jesus through the power of the Spirit of God. That in Jesus' resurrected body is the Christian symbol for the spiritual body of the church. A body that is formed of all other believers as a universal body of blood-bought penitents. Penitents who desire God's power of redemption and healing within their very lives of sin and destruction, hate and vice, murder and death.

That the believer in Christ is the one most often found on his or her knees in penitence seeking God's grace to share from within the new center of their renewed lives to those about. This is what is meant by the church catholic. It is the older definition of the term before the Reformation and the much later occurring councils of the Vatican in the 1960s.

R.E. Slater

May 9, 2014

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Will Evangelicalism Survive?

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/jesuscreed/2009/03/16/will-evangelicalism-survive/

by Scott McKnight

Mar 16, 2009

Comments

Mark Galli, senior managing editor at Christianity Today, has just responded to Michael Spencer’s (iMonk) colossal prediction of the imminent collapse of evangelicalism. I’d like to shift this conversation a bit to two other questions to see if we might further the conversation a bit.

Who are the evangelicals and what makes up an evangelical? (For Michael’s opening salvo, see below.)

I’m confident Galli and I are on the same page here [(re evangelicalism's definition) - res]. David Bebbington’s book that details the four features of evangelicalism is the place to begin - see his The Dominance of Evangelicalism: The Age of Spurgeon And Moody (History of Evangelicalism).

My question today is this: Do you foresee an imminent collapse of evangelicalism?

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Now on to the four features of an evangelical — and to one degree or another, all evangelicals are characterized by these four features:

First, all evangelicals are committed to the primacy of Scripture for shaping faith and practice. All Tradition, however respected, will have to answer to scriptural warrant. All Praxis will have to answer to scriptural warrant. This approach to faith and practice characterizes evangelicals.

Second, all evangelicals are committed to the saving power of the cross. The cross, tied as it is both to the incarnation and to the resurrection, is the act of God that not only unmasks injustice but restores — via substitution — humans to God by dying our death [(sic, the penal substitutionary theory of Christ's atonment) - res].

Third, all evangelicals are committed to new birth as a personal experience. Indeed, the necessity of new birth, of the need for life in the face of death. Evangelicals believe the Christian life begins with new birth, and it is here that most evangelicals tie the power of the Holy Spirit to the saving power of the cross (and resurrection). Evangelicals have always worried about the liturgical and liberal approaches to conversion through sacramental or nurturance processes.

Fourth, all evangelicals are committed to an active Christian life that involves personal pieties like prayer and Bible reading, corporate fellowship like church attendance and participation, and social activism like justice efforts of all sorts, both locally and globally.

These four are what it takes to be an evangelical and all it takes to be an evangelical. Nothing less, nothing more. Evangelicalism is orthodox and it is Protestant.

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Now to you: Do you see a collapse of these?

Here’s how I see things: while I complain about the Neo-Reformed [movement], I have no fear of the collapse of evangelicalism with that segment of evangelicalism. I do fear the theologically weak, intellectually vapid, and pragmatically oriented faces of many segments of evangelicalism. The efforts for coalition among evangelicals in the last fifty years have sometimes led to such a minimal common theological core that very little theology remains (for some).

Here is Michael Spencer’s opening salvo:

I believe that we are on the verge- within 10 years- of a major collapse of evangelical Christianity; a collapse that will follow the deterioration of the mainline Protestant world and that will fundamentally alter the religious and cultural environment in the West. I believe this evangelical collapse will happen with astonishing statistical speed; that within two generations of where we are now evangelicalism will be a house deserted of half its current occupants, leaving in its wake nothing that can revitalize evangelicals to their former “glory.”

The party is almost over for evangelicals; a party that’s been going strong since the beginning of the “Protestant” 20th century. We are soon going to be living in a very secular and religiously antagonistic 21st century in a culture that will be between 25-30% non-religious.

This collapse, will, I believe, herald the arrival of an anti-Christian chapter of the post-Christian west and will change the way tens of millions of people see the entire realm of religion. Intolerance of Christianity will rise to levels many of us have not believed possible in our lifetimes, and public policy will become particularly hostile towards evangelical Christianity, increasingly seeing it as the opponent of the good of individuals and society.

The response of evangelicals to this new environment will be a revisiting of the same rhetoric and reactions we’ve seen since the beginnings of the current culture war in the 1980s. The difference will be that millions of evangelicals will quit their faith - quit their churches, quit their adherence to evangelical distinctives, and quit resisting the rising tide of the culture.

Many who will leave evangelicalism will leave for no religious affiliation at all. Others will leave for an atheistic or agnostic secularism, with a strong personal rejection of Christian belief and Christian influence. Many of our children and grandchildren are going to abandon ship, and many will do so saying “good riddance.”

This collapse will cause the end of thousands of ministries. The high profile of Christian media will be reduced, if not eliminated. Hundreds of thousands of students, pastors, religious workers, missionaries and persons employed by ministries and churches will be unemployed or employed elsewhere. [ ]. Visible, active evangelical ministries will be reduced to a small percentage of their current size and effort.

Nothing will reanimate evangelicalism to its previous levels of size and influence. The end of evangelicalism as we know it is close; far closer than most of us will admit. My prediction has nothing to do with a loss of eschatological optimism. 

Far from it. I’m convinced the grace and mission of God will reach to the ends of the earth. But I am not optimistic about evangelicalism, and I do not believe any of the apparently lively forms of evangelicalism today are going to be the answer. In fact, one dimension of this collapse, as I will deal with in the next post, is the bizarre scenario of what will remain when evangelicals have gone into decline.

I fully expect that my children, before they are 40, will see evangelicalism at far less than half its current size and rapidly declining. They will see a very, very different culture as far as evangelicalism is concerned.

I hope someone is going to start preparing for what is going to be an evangelical dark age.

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Albert Mohler

Nearing the End:

Thinking in Public with Stanley Hauerwas

http://www.albertmohler.com/?p=31352

April 21, 2012

TRANSCRIPT

Introduction

Mohler: This is Thinking in Public a program dedicated to intelligent conversation about frontline, theological, and cultural issues, with the people who are shaping them. I’m Albert Mohler, your host and President to the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky.

Stanley Hauerwas

Stanley Hauerwas is the Gilbert T. Rowe Professor Emeritus of Theological Ethics at Duke University where he holds appointments in the Divinity School and Law School. He has written an entire library of articles and books dating from 1969 to the present. He is a board member of the society of Christian ethics. He is associate editor of a number of Christian journals and periodicals and a frequent lecturer at campuses across the country. He holds his PhD from Yale University and a Doctor of Divinity from the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. His most recent work is Approaching the End: Eschatological Reflections on Church, Politics and Life.

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Let the Church Be the Church

Mohler: Professor Hauerwas, you have been in an ongoing conversation partner with me, perhaps without even knowing it. I read everything you write and always find a great deal in it that makes me to think. Sometimes, quite frankly, that aggravates me; other times that pleases me. You are one of the most unusual writers and thinkers that I engage with quite regularly. You’re newest book is entitled Approaching the End: Eschatological Reflections on Church, Politics and Life. How in the world did you get there?

Hauerwas: Well, eschatology has always been at the center of my work and I thought it was time to try to make that as explicit as possible. Plus, I am seventy-three. I am approaching the end and I am realizing death is not a theoretical possibility, even for me. So, I thought that the title had a double entendre, in a way that would show the interrelationship of those themes.

Mohler: Well, the themes of your life are so well documented in your writing and the major streams of your thought. And there are so many of them that I would like to pursue with you a bit. But in this book, I’ll tell you, the most interesting essay to me is the one entitled “Church Matters on Faith and Politics” because in this essay, and the book is actually a collection of very, very pointed and perceptive essays, you make a stunning point. That is that the church in the western world is losing its ability to maintain any identity. You write that the church is in a buyers’ market that makes any attempt to form a disciplined congregational life very difficult. Is this just part and parcel with the modern age or is this a characteristically American moment?

Hauerwas: I honestly don’t know how to answer that, Al. I think it’s certainly the case that America is the prismatic example of it. But I suspect its true in most places because basically a buyers’ market, that very description, reproduces the presumption that you live in a demand economy that says that the buyer is supreme and they get to buy what they want and therefore… I tell my students for example, if they are to sustain their life in the ministry without self-hatred there are two things they should not do: They should never have the Christian funeral in a funeral home. It is to be in the church. And they should never marry someone off the street. And they say well if we try to do that, they will just go to the church down the street and be buried in a funeral home or to marry people off the street. And I say “yeah, but that’s why they’re a bad church and you’ll be a good one!” We won’t have many members. So that’s the way I think that it works, namely that the consumer gets to consume the kind of faith they want.

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Why the Church Is Important to Faith

Mohler: The very next essay in this book you write about the end of Protestantism and that leads me to ask a very personal question: as an American evangelical Christian, do you think that Evangelicalism is in many ways the quintessential representation of the American faith and do you think that even as you write about the church in general – I actually don’t want to put a message in your mouth, I’d rather here it from you, but I get the impression that when you look at American Christianity in general, and American Evangelicalism in particular, you appear to see a church that is looking less and less like the church.

Hauerwas: That’s true. I have great admiration for evangelicals for no other reason than they just bring such great energy to the faith and I admire that. But one of the great problems of Evangelical life in America is evangelicals think they have a relationship with God that they go to church to have expressed but church is a secondary phenomenon to their personal relationship and I think that’s to get it exactly backwards: that the Christian faith is [a shared] meditated faith. It only comes through the witness of others as embodied in the church. So I should never trust my presumption that I know what my relationship with God is separate from how that is expressed through words and sacrament in the church. So evangelicals, I’m afraid, often times, with what appears to be very conservative religious convictions, make the church a secondary phenomenon to their assumed faith and I think that’s making it very hard to maintain disciplined congregations.

Mohler: I have to tell you that one of the statements in one of your books that aggravated me was a statement in which you said that conservative evangelicals should read this book, but they won’t because they don’t read this kind of book. Actually, it aggravated me because I was reading it at the time. But I understood the point you were making, and I want to come back and just press you on this just a bit because, as an evangelical concerned with many of the same things, I just want to come back and ask: When you look at evangelicalism and you look at evangelical churches, what do you see as the particular moment that now presents us with a completely different set of challenges? In other words, be a prophet for a moment. You can do that. In other words, where is evangelicalism going to be given the increasing secularization and the hyper-modernity of our culture?

Hauerwas: I think evangelicalism is destined to die of its own success and it will go the way of mainstream Protestantism because there’s just—it depends far too much on charismatic pastors, and charisma will only take you so far. Evangelicalism is constantly under the burden of re-inventing the wheel and you just get tired. For example, I’m a big advocate of Morning Prayer. I love Morning Prayer. We do the same thing every morning. We don’t have to make it up. We know we’re going to say these prayers. We know we’re going to join in reading of the psalm. We’re going to have these Scripture readings. I mean, there’s much to be said for Christianity as repetition and I think evangelicalism doesn’t have enough repetition in a way that will form Christians to survive in a world that constantly tempts us to always think we have to do something new.

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Spirituality is practice - Ethics is virtue

Mohler: Well you are well-known for arguing that spirituality is practice and that ethics is virtue; just to put it in, perhaps, too short a compression there. But when you look at American spirituality in general, there doesn’t appear to be much practice or much on emphasis upon practice. And is that because our congregations have lost that set of habits?

Hauerwas: It’s hard for me to generalize. I can’t pretend to be someone that has studied these matters from a sociological point of view—not that I particularly trust sociology—but I do think that Hegel made the comment at one time, “Christians arose in the morning and said their prayers. Now they read the newspaper.” Of course, that’s changing too. They probably look at their smartphone now. But I think that the fundamental habits of the faith have been in decline and that leaves us with insufficient resources to sustain our lives as Christians in a world in which we find ourselves. I think, again, it has to do with the loss of fundamental practices, such as reading the Bible, but reading the Bible, I don’t trust necessarily to me as an individual. I need to read the Bible with other people. And that has pretty much been lost. Let me say in that regard that one of the other things that worries me about evangelicalism is I’m afraid it’s got the Bible and now, and exactly how it is that you reconnect evangelical life with the great Catholic traditions, I think is part of the challenges for the future because you need to read the fathers reading Scripture as part of our common life if we are to sustain a sense that we don’t get to make Christianity up. We receive it through the lives of those who have gone before and that just becomes crucial for us to be able to survive in which we find ourselves.

Mohler: I find it very difficult to predict sometimes where you’re going to go when you begin an essay or a book, for that matter, or a sermon. And I’ve also read your most recent collection of sermons entitled Without Apology: Sermons for Christ’s Church.

Hauerwas: Thanks again.

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The Need for an Orthodox Christian Unity

Mohler: But, as you surprise me, you always make me think, and in your essay on the end of Protestantism—and, by the way, written at the same time that so many others are arguing the case or analyzing the situation from different perspectives—I had this question: Are you suggesting that Protestantism was a failed experiment or that it’s basically been—well, as you said of evangelicalism, it’s died of its own success. In other words, mainline Protestantism, the big brands of Protestantism now famously in decline in the United States. How do you explain that? What do you say about that?

Hauerwas: Well, Protestantism, by the very name, "protest," was a protest movement within the church catholic that never was meant to be an end in itself, but a reformed movement for the church catholic to criticize where it had gone wrong. It has been successful. I think Roman Catholicism has responded fundamentally to many of what the Protestant revolt was about, but when Protestantism becomes an end in itself, rather than a reform movement that looks for and desires Christian unity—and that can come in many different ways—then, as a matter of fact, we become unintelligible to ourselves. And so—I’m going to die a Protestant, let me very clear, because I think I owe my Catholic brothers and sisters that continuing witness and, therefore, I am determined to remain Protestant. Though, after I taught fourteen years at Notre Dame, certainly Catholicism leaves a mark on you. But I, nonetheless, hunger for Christian unity in which, and at the very least that means that Christians learn not to kill one another in the name of being Christians or the name of certain national loyalties, etc. Because Christian unity isn’t just the bureaucracies getting together where no one loses their job, but it is the fundamental recognition that in this brother or sister I see Christ for me.

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What Does the Term "Catholic Church" Mean?

Mohler: I think it was George Lindbeck who pointed out as a word of critique that you seem to have no interest whatsoever in institutional ecumenicalism.

Hauerwas: Yeah, I’ve tried to respond to that, but I’ve never been terribly taken up with the ecumenical movement, particularly among the Protestant churches. In fact, the buyer’s market has meant that denominational identities have become less and less interesting. And so it’s very unclear—I mean, what good would it be for Presbyterians and Methodists to become united today? I mean, basically, all we’ve got a certain kind of emphasis they try to find that makes them somewhat distinctive in order for them to get their buyer-share of the diminishing market.

Mohler: When Stanley Hauerwas talks about the buyer’s market for religion in America, he’s onto something that evangelicals ought to notice and notice very carefully. And that is in fact that that is indeed an apt metaphor for our society at large, but it also, if we’re not very careful, a dynamic that is experienced by many churches and denominations, not only in the Protestant mainline, where he mentions all those brand-named denominations jockeying to retain their membership and a declining membership base, but it’s also the case that there are many in American evangelicalism who basically think of the gospel as something to be packaged and sold. The problem with that, of course, it that it is the same pattern as that which was the besetting sin of Protestant liberalism. Protestant liberalism sought to accommodate the message of the gospel to the larger and secularizing culture in order that it would be, well, saleable. It would be acceptable. But the Bible and the gospel can’t be reduced to a product and that’s a warning that evangelical Christians had better heed and understand very carefully. Because just as there was that temptation amongst the Protestant liberals and perhaps the jockeying for position among the brand names of mainline Protestantism today, we can be involved in the same kind of strategizing in which we betray the fact that somehow we think the gospel’s a product to be sold as well. And if it’s a product to be sold, then, like any other product that’s successful, it has to meet the demands of the marketplace, and that is the antithesis of evangelism.

In your writings, you also make another very interesting case that has direct reference to mainline Protestantism and perhaps an indirect reference to evangelicalism as well. You argue that Protestant liberalism followed the apologetic strategy of trying to make the Christian faith rational in the aftermath of the Enlightenment. And, yet, as you in conversation with several others have remarked— Alasdair MacIntyre, I’m thinking of here, in particular—that when liberals made the Christian faith rational, they made the Christian faith irrelevant and unnecessary.

Hauerwas: Right. Well, I want to be careful with that word "rational" because I think nothing is more rational than Christian Orthodoxy. I think the Nicaea account of Trinity is an extraordinary development that is a tradition thinking through its fundamental commitment in a manner that is intellectually compelling. So the rationality that I was criticizing was the kind of rationalizing that presupposed that there was some kind of reason that didn’t reflect a tradition-determined mode of investigation. So I want to say that the problem with the response to the Enlightenment was it accepted the Enlightenment’s account of reason as reasonable, which was a deep mistake.

Mohler: Well, I appreciate that clarification because I certainly emphatically agree that there is nothing more rational than Christian Orthodoxy in terms of the right exercise of reason. But the attempt to make Christianity rational in Enlightenment terms with the autonomous reason, I just have to say, I think you make that point very compellingly, and it leads me to wonder sometimes if evangelicals aren’t methodologically sometimes following the same kind of trajectory that the mainline Protestants did, but just a century late. You know, perhaps many evangelicals are arriving at a new form of liberalism just about a century late.

Hauerwas: Well, I think pietism and rationalism went hand-in-hand because each privilege the individual presumed capacity for rationality in and of itself. And so insofar as evangelicalism has reflected that pietistic background, it interestingly enough is the most determinative exemplification of rationalism. I mean, I know evangelicals are not necessary fundamentalists, but I can’t imagine a more rationalistic account of the Christian faith than some forms of how scriptural inspiration is understood. So I think that is exactly right that a good deal of contemporary evangelicalism has a kind of rationalism to it that is reproducing what Lindbeck identified in the nature of doctrine as the experimental expressive form.

Mohler: Well I hope not to be guilty of that, but I speak as one who clearly as an evangelical feels the necessity to defend the faith once for all delivered to the saints and to do so in the contemporary moment and to make very clear that, indeed, Orthodox, biblical Christianity is the most rational worldview imaginable, so in thinking about the challenge on the other side of the Enlightenment where evangelicals, as much as Protestant liberals, we find ourselves. So let me just ask you. Rather than wonder what would Stanley Hauerwas have us to do. Let me just ask you: So what should we do?

Hauerwas: Well I think the first thing we need to do is confess our sin; that we have pridefully tried to make our faith a faith that suits us, and, in particular, underwrite the American experiment as central to the Christian faith. So one of the things I think that we desperately need to do is recover the ecclesiastical center of the Christian faith in a manner that unites us with Christians around the world, in a manner that frees us from the kind of nationalistic presuppositions that have gone hand-in-hand with American Protestantism. That’s called becoming catholic.

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What Does a Catholic Church Practice?

Mohler: Well I certainly appreciate the critique. I often, though, in reading your works, come to this question: Okay, so what if we handed everything over to Stanley Hauerwas, what would he do with it? In other words, where would you have us to go?

Hauerwas: Well, let me say one of the things I would have us to go is a much richer, liturgical life than I think is the case in many evangelical and Protestant mainstream churches. I think a recovery of the centrality of Eucharistic celebration and why it is so central is just crucial for the future of the church.

Mohler: Okay, now that really intrigues me. I’m not surprised by that. But in terms of the shape and substance of the congregation, of the church of an ecclesial center, how does one become a Christian? In other words, that’s another question I had in reading your works from beginning to end. There just isn’t much reference to [personal] conversion.

Hauerwas: Ah. Yeah, I guess I stayed away from that term because it has been so associated with Billy Graham’s football-field evangelism. Billy Graham’s football-field evangelism and conversion is not without value, but to be a Christian means that from baptism forward you are living a life of constant transformation in a manner that you are able to have the sinfulness of our lives located in a manner that through the good graces of others I have some hope of living a life that is more, to use Wesley’s phrase, perfect. And so I think that conversion is the name of an ongoing process from birth to death that we as Christians are invited to live.

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What is the Gospel?

Mohler: Well, again, looking at your writings, and even preparing for this conversation, and feeling the weight of your critique at many points and just very catalytic thoughts, I came back to another question, and that is, for Stanley Hauerwas, what is the gospel? What is the good news that is at the center of the Christian faith? Because I think I could hypothesize several answers, but I would just love to hear you to respond to that. What is the gospel?

Hauerwas: That through Jesus Christ, very God and very man, we Gentiles have been made part of the promise to Israel that we will be witnesses to God’s good care of God’s creation through the creation of a people who once were no people that the world can see there is an alternative to our violence. There is an alternative to our deceptions. There is an alternative to our unfaithfulness to one another though the creation of something called church. That’s salvation.

Mohler: What about the forgiveness of sins? How does the cross and atonement play into your understanding of the gospel?

Hauerwas: Well, I think that what it means to have our sins forgiven is you’ve been made part of a narrative that you do not have to justify the path in a way that means the past continues to haunt you because you’re determined to live righteously. Interestingly enough, forgiveness of sins does say you do not have to be determined by the path because you’ve been given a future that is so compelling you don’t have to constantly try to renegotiate a world in which you are trying to be righteous even though you’re not.

Mohler: Very interesting. Once one understands the gospel on those terms then becomes a part of the faith and practice of the church and is then shaped by the congregation’s life and those regular practices in what you describe as a rich liturgical life, what difference does it make for that individual as a citizen of this world? To use Augustine’s dichotomy—to be in the earthly city—what is the role of that Christian and the church in this earthly city?

Hauerwas: To tell the truth. Very simple. Just tell the truth and see what kinds of tensions that produces. I think Augustine’s “Two Cities” have too often resulted in an apology for Christians not really being Christian because the church is really made up of sinners and non-sinners or at least people who are not quite as sinful and therefore you can’t tell that much difference between the church and the world. Well, we are sinners and that is a great achievement. That and the world doesn’t know that it is possessed by sin in the way that Christians do. So, there is a truthfulness to being able to be a Christian in a world that knows not God. This is our gift to the world, to be able of truth.

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Original Sin Means Empire Building. But the true Chruch Catholic wishes to lose its "control of the earth" and be the church of the poor

Mohler: Here is another one of the tension points. I try to resolve in thinking about your proposal and the larger fabric of your though. You did teach at Notre Dame and you speak with incredible respect for the Roman Catholic Church and of its tradition. And clearly, even as you speak of your determination to die a Protestant, you speak of the fact that you have a Catholic identity. You warn about the dangers of “empire” and to such an extent that one of your critics says that “for Stanley Hauerwas, the original sin was desire for empire.” So, I cannot find any example in the history of the Christian church better than the Catholic church in terms of making peace with that empire. Is that not the problem?

Hauerwas: I celebrate the fact that the church is a Catholic church is losing its control of the earth but remember one of the things that is so impressive about the Church Catholic is that it is the church of the poor. We Americans cannot imagine being a church of the poor; we can imagine being a church that cares about the poor but we cannot imagine the poor being Christians but Catholicism has done that in a way that is interestingly enough a very deep critique of empire.

Mohler: You offer a penetrating critique, that’s one of the reasons why I never let one of your books pass by before it is fairly quickly read. Just in terms of social location, you have taught at Notre Dame and then for years now you have been teaching at Duke University. The last time I saw you I think was in the Gothic book store there at Duke, which has now been reduced, and I mourn that with you, but you are there at Duke. And if there is any institution, especially in the south, that represents the empire of reason and frankly the empire of wealth when it comes to this. . . so I have to wonder: "Does Stanley Hauerwas’s thought exist mostly within an Academic world represented by the institutions that are basically the enemy of everything he talks about?"

Hauerwas: Well, institutions like Duke are many-sundry things, and so, I try to serve it as best I can without having to lick the hand that feeds me. I hope that Duke University, somehow through accidental reasons, has a Christian theologian in its midst and many other good Christians around. This is an indication that it may be incoherent but it nonetheless is an institution that may have the possibility of making the world just a bit better.

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A Vision of the Future

Mohler: Back in 1989, you and your colleague William Willimon, now and once a retired Methodist bishop, wrote a book entitled “Resident Aliens” in which you argue based upon New Testament evidence and your own theological analysis that this is the proper way to view the church and always has been. And if I could summarize this book it seems that you are saying that liberal Protestantism was coming to a rather reluctant and perhaps inevitable understanding that the church is made up of resident aliens in a culture where we once felt at home but no longer do. And it seems to me that it might well be that evangelicals are discovering this same thing again, in this case about a generation after you wrote that book.

Hauerwas: Yeah, the book has just come out with its 25th anniversary edition, in which Will has a forward and I have an afterword to it. So, if evangelicals would find that useful, we would be very happy.

Mohler: Well, I think you will probably find it widely read and much quoted. By the way, Dr. Willimon’s second book on that issue, I wrote a review on it in Preaching Magazine and you won’t remember this but more than two decades ago you wrote me a very nice letter thanking me for that review. Again, not only do we love bookstores, letters still matter. And I still have that letter from you today.

Hauerwas: I am not much of an “e-mailer” but I do write letters.

Moher: Well, they will survive when the emails do not and the historians will appreciate that.

But when I think about the state of the church and of Christendom in this post-Christian age, just to stress the point a bit further, it is clear that many of the things that trouble most Christians you seem actually to celebrate re: the end of Christendom and the collapse of a Christian worldview and Christian influence in the society. Just play that out a bit.

Hauerwas: I think isn’t it wonderful, we are free! The idea that now - somehow or the other - America has to be a Christian nation is gone and we are free. Now all that we have left as Christians is to say the truth and I think that is a great thing God has done for us.

Mohler: Where, then, does that take us? In other words, what should we be thinking about as we anticipate the next twenty years of Christian existence in America? And even though you are writing about eschatology in your early 70s, I am hopeful that you will be here for the next twenty years. What do you expect to happen in that time?

Hauerwas: I think that the church will be leaner and meaner and that will be a very good thing. I think that we will discover how much we need one another for survival and that is a very good thing. I hope that the world in which we find ourselves will be not as violent as it has been but I don’t have much confidence in that. I think the humanisms that prevail in our world today are tempted to murderous forms of life and that there is little control over it.

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Conclusion

Mohler: I want to give you an opportunity here in closing to speak to a largely evangelical audience, that is a listenership of at least a good many evangelical Christians and many of them young and thinking about the future. As someone who watches us and knows us and lives in a center where evangelical culture is all around you there in North Carolina, as you think about these things, what would be your word, if you were to write a letter right now to a young evangelical what would you say to him or her?

Hauerwas: I would say . . . I wrote a letter fairly recently to young people going to college in which I said, “we need you, so you must acquaint yourself with the great literature of our culture, which is a Christian literature, in a way that you become articulate for the world in which we find ourselves so that we will not lose our ability to be people of substance in a world filled with superficiality. That’s what I would tell young evangelicals.

Mohler: You ended your book that is actually focused upon eschatology entitled Approaching the End without ending it. It is just stops.

Hauerwas: Yes, that’s just about how all my works end.

Mohler: But on eschatology that sort of begs a certain kind of closure, so if you did anticipate a final word, what would that be?

Hauerwas: Be a person of joy because you are God’s good creature who was created for the glory of God which is joy.

Mohler: Professor Stanley Hauerwas, thank you for joining me for Thinking in Public.

Hauerwas: Oh, thank you, Al. It has been lovely talking to you again.

* * * * * * * * * *

Approaching the End

by Stanley Hauerwas

In this book Stanley Hauerwas explores the significance of eschatological reflection for helping the church negotiate the contemporary world.

In Part One, "Theological Matters," Hauerwas directly addresses his understanding of the eschatological character of the Christian faith.

In Part Two, "Church and Politics," he deals with the political reality of the church in light of the end, addressing such issues as the divided character of the church, the imperative of Christian unity, and the necessary practice of sacrifice. End, for Hauerwas, has a double meaning -- both chronological end and end in the sense of "aim" or "goal."

In Part Three, "Life and Death," Hauerwas moves from theology and the church as a whole to focusing on how individual Christians should live in light of eschatology. What does an eschatological approach to life tell us about how to understand suffering, how to form habits of virtue, and how to die?

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After Reflections

by Albert Mohler

Mohler: A conversation with Stanley Hauerwas is never boring. It can’t be because he is simply one of the least boring human beings who have ever lived. As a matter of fact, in his books and there are so many of them, he is often, at least in places, seemingly in conversation if not in contradiction with himself. And yet there are some persistent themes.

He is a critic of American Christianity, both modern and western Christianity.

He is a severe critic of the kind of Christianity that makes peace with the empire, whether it was the Roman Empire in the time of Constantine or the American empire in terms of late modernity in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

He is also a man who very clearly, as a Christian critic, wants to accuse the church of reducing all of the truth claims of Christianity and the gospel itself to a form of product marketing. And he points out that this was indeed what the Protestant liberals did when they sought to make the Christian faith rational on the grounds of a purely secular reason. And he pointed out, very perceptively, that when the liberals did that, they succeeded in making Christianity unnecessary and irrelevant, because if all you need is autonomous reason in order to come to terms with Christianity then you can live on that autonomous reason alone.

But one of the most perceptive of his arguments is that modern Christianity has lost an understanding of the necessity of certain practices in terms of Christian formation. And this is something that particularly afflicts contemporary evangelicalism. It afflicts us because we often treat these things as if they are merely means by which the Christian can move into a deeper and deeper faithfulness. We actually do not treat them often with the same seriousness we see them discussed in the Scriptures where they are discussed as necessary means of grace and as necessary means of being authentically Christian.

In other words, in the New Testament you simply can’t envision a Christian who isn’t reading the Scripture and isn’t gathering together with fellow Christians, who isn’t involved in Christian service, and isn’t deeply devoted to prayer. You have the entire New Testament that is witness to this and certainly something like the book of James.

And so along comes Stanley Hauerwas who is not an evangelical and has described himself as something like a High-Church Mennonite, a person who is largely famous for trying to resuscitate the Anabaptist tradition in terms of the understanding of the church and especially the church in relation to the culture. And many evangelicals would wonder, how exactly do we involve ourselves in conversation with such a thinker? And the answer is, we read him on his own terms.

This is a good example for how evangelicals need to read someone who is not an evangelical. We read him on his own terms. We understand who he is; we understand his basic worldview—how he sees the world, how he understands the church, how he engages the Scripture; and then we allow him to speak on his own terms.

And this gets to a second point that evangelicals particularly in this generation need to understand very clearly: We desperately need critics outside evangelicalism to help us understand not only the world outside but also the temptations within. And that is where someone like Stanley Hauerwas is a very invaluable partner in terms of thinking through so many of the issues that evangelicals now face.

We are living in a post-Christian age. Stanley Hauerwas celebrates that. Many of us find great reason for grief and tragedy in that. But we see the inevitable loss of so much human flourishing and the descent into so much darkness abandoning light. But at the same time we have to be chastened by Stanley Hauerwas, not to miss empire too much, not to miss that kind of cultural influence too much, because he is exactly right, if we have to trade one for the other we must retain faithfulness and gospel witness and let the cultural influence go.

That gets to another one of my vexing issues when I read Stanley Hauerwas. What if he were in control? What if he actually got what he wanted? How would this High Church Mennonite, this resuscitator of the Anabaptist tradition, this enemy of empire, this one who has taught at Notre Dame and Duke Divinity School, how would he reshape the church and its beliefs, practices, and understanding of its place in the world?

The answer is that I am profoundly unclear about the answer to those questions. A conversation with Stanley Hauerwas doesn’t necessarily clarify them much because one of the things we have to keep in mind while we’re reading him is that he is writing in an academic world in which he is actually located at Notre Dame and at Duke University, very privileged places, and he is able to see things from that very privileged viewpoint.

Yet, I don’t think he is able to see how they might be seen outside those social locations. That’s not just a critique of Stanley Hauerwas. That’s a critique of all of us. We see only what is possible to be seen from where we are. That’s why I’m in agreement with him that we need to have an ongoing, substantial conversation with the Church, the Church through the centuries, with the democracy of the dead, with those who have gone before us, with the Apostles, with the Fathers, with the schoolmen, with the Reformers, with the Puritans, and with so many others coming down to the present age.

Yet, if we do so, it will be a different conversation than the one that Stanley Hauerwas envisions. In all honestly, I think it would be a different conversation than what I would envision. I think there will be much conversation about the necessity to hold on to certain theological verities of the faith once for all delivered to the saints in order that the Church would have the right beliefs that would then be validated and supported by the right practices. I think Stanley Hauerwas is exactly right. You can’t have disembodied truth. That is antithetical to the biblical worldview. Disembodied truth, in terms of the Church’s understanding of the faith once for all delivered to the saints, doesn’t exist. That’s why we have the Church. That’s why it is the Church which is to confirm and defend that faith. After all, it’s delivered to the saints. That is the Church. Yet, there are definite truth claims that are made there. There are definite truth claims that are the focus of that command given to the Church.

It seems to me that as we learn to hear the critique of Stanley Hauerwas in terms of how we so often reduce the Gospel to a marketing plan and a consumer product, how we so often try to divorce spirituality from practice, how we so often want to talk about ethics as some theological formula rather than the assertion of the centrality of the virtues, how we so often want to have the power of empire behind us in order so that we can have influence and in order that we can shape the lives and worldviews of individuals around us in the community around us and the culture around us, as much as we hear that critique, we have to be aware that we have do have to make an issue of truth, the truth revealed in Scripture. It is the faith, which Paul revealed to Timothy was that “pattern of sound words.” It has to be very central. In this post-Christian age, those truths, those verities, those doctrines, and those revealed realities are under sustained subversion. Only the Church knows why they are so eternally true and why they are so transformative if the Church is indeed to exist and persist. The Church will continue to exist and persist, not because of the Church’s energy and determination, but because of the power of Christ, the risen Christ who guarantees that His Church will survive from this age into the kingdom yet to come.

I’m really thankful for that conversation with Stanley Hauerwas. I think that reading someone like Professor Stanley Hauerwas makes me a more faithful evangelical. At the same time, and this would probably make him chuckle, it also makes me more evangelical. When I hear him talk and when I read him in his books, it makes me think, “You know, I really do hold to this evangelical identity and to our understanding of the Gospel as primary and paramount.” That being said, we have a lot to learn from those who are watching us, and I’m thankful that someone like Stanley Hauerwas is watching us. I’m thankful that he’s writing, and we get to engage his writing. I’m even more thankful that today I got to engage him in conversation and to join with him in Thinking in Public.

Once again, I want to thank my guest, Professor Stanley Hauerwas, for thinking with me today. For more information on The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, go to sbts.edu. For more information on Boyce College, just go to www.boycecollege.com. Thank you for joining me forThinking in Public. Until next time, keep thinking. I’m Albert Mohler.