Learning to Speak Christian. Stanley Hauerwas
as an object of study, be it as the site of ethnographic investigation or as the source of a critical register. But in doing so it is necessary to ask: What kind of Christianity are we dealing with? After all, it is one thing to study a Christianity whose theology tells us that it can be studied unproblematically, that is, by recourse to the same methods and conceptual discriminations that would be employed in the examination of any social fact. But it is, we imagine, quite another thing to study a Christianity whose theology asks us to consider the possibility that what we find in Acts might actually be true. It is a commonplace among anthropologists that taking the questions that concern their subjects “seriously” is a vital means of gaining access to the cultural-discursive milieus to which that subject belongs. What Acts shows us is that there may be questions that, in order to ask them, or to ask them competently, might well require a transformation of the agent of investigation. A disquieting thought: that attending the current “turn to Christianity” might be a problem involving not so much how we make our objects of inquiry, as how—and if so, in what ways—our objects of inquiry make us.
Involved, we want to suggest, in seeing Christianity otherwise, in “get[ting] rid of the conventional and routine vision we have of things,” must be a willingness to submit ourselves to the training necessary to acquire the ability to read felicitously its defining texts; as his framing of Acts in the above paragraph attests to, Rowe’s defamiliarizing study is as good a place as any to initiate such a training. For it is in Acts, according to Rowe, that the appearance of the church as the novum of God’s apocalypse testifies to the contingent nature of all that is, thereby conferring upon the world, coterminous with the reality of resurrection, the possibility of a people in whose deeply specific language, “full to bursting with meaning,” the world itself is both refracted and made afresh.24 But it is also in Acts that the learning of such a language, and the seeing of such a world, is revealed to be indistinguishable from an ongoing habituation into the emplaced yet perpetually dislocated community of the radically dispossessed: dispossessed not simply of land and money, prestige and so forth, but of the requisite knowledges by which we could explain and thereby manage the world around us; what, for lack of a better term, we might call epistemological dispossession; or, better still, humility.25 If Acts has anything to teach us it is that the world to which such a condition gestures cannot be known, indeed does not exist, absent the lives of the people who enact it. The theological politics that emerges from Acts, therefore, is decidedly not one of a “plurality of viewpoints on the same world or object”; instead it is a matter of “each viewpoint . . . opening on to another world that itself contains yet others.”26 This is a world that must be believed in order to be seen; in the terminology of Acts, it is a world that must be witnessed to.27
Becoming Witness, or, Luke: Anthropologist of Christianity?
All of us, even when we think we have noted every tiny detail, resort to set pieces which have already been staged often enough by others. We try to reproduce the reality, but the harder we try, the more we find the pictures that make up the stock-in-trade of the spectacle of history forcing themselves upon us. . . . Our concern with history, so Hilary’s thesis ran, is a concern with preformed images already imprinted on our brains, images at which we keep staring while the truth lies elsewhere, away from it all, somewhere as yet undiscovered.28
To be sure, it was not the interpretation of Scripture that W. G. Sebald had in mind when he penned these remarks—the “Hilary” alluded to is André Hilary, a secondary school teacher in the Welsh countryside, and the impetus for his thesis is an inability to adequately recount a particularly gruesome battle in the Napoleonic Wars—but it may as well have been. They are, after all, literally set pieces that Alain Badiou resorts to when, taking a cue from Pier Pasolini’s unfinished screenplay Saint Paul, he juxtaposes what he considers to be the radical temperament of the latter’s epistles with “the pro-Roman benevolence harbored by the author of the Acts.”29 Apart from the sheer novelty of Pasolini’s transposition of Paul into contemporary Europe, which finds the Pharisee-turned-apostle now portrayed as a leader in the antifascist Resistance, what is especially pertinent for Badiou’s purposes is the fact that it is not the tyrannical dictator that is figured as the villain in Pasolini’s script but instead the internal enemy who would write history in such a way as to eradicate from the Movement any trace of genuine revolutionary potential. Thus, against the militant “saintliness” exemplified by Paul and his comrades, Luke is exposed as a traitor, an agent of the devil, bent on domesticating the Resistance and therefore on making of Paul “a man of the institution,” a “saint erased by the priest,” or, closing the analogical gap entirely, “not so much a theoretician of the Christian event as the tireless creator of the Church.”30 To a large extent, it is this contrast effect—between Luke and Paul, accommodation and fidelity, sanctioned discourse and singular truth—that will supply the dramatic thrust of Badiou’s own study. Indeed, one could suggest that Badiou’s “startling reinterpretation” of Paul, and Pasoloni’s as well, premised as they are on an explicit disavowal of what Badiou will elsewhere refer to as Luke’s “retrospective construction whose intentions modern criticism has clearly brought to light,” finally end up reproducing what, among New Testament scholars at least, has been a three-hundred-year-old habit of reading Acts as little more than an apologia for political quietism fashioned to appear as “uniform, organizational, and ‘Roman’ as possible.”31
Such is the hermeneutical consensus that Kavin Rowe’s World Upside Down: Reading Acts in the Graeco-Roman Age sets out to unsettle. And yet, as Rowe makes clear from the outset, the counter-reading he undertakes to provide cannot proceed merely by way of a more precise exegetical style, but must concurrently take stock of the numerous, often inchoate ways in which the concepts and classifications endemic to modern life have imposed themselves on the social vocabularies of the ancient world—and that involves breaking not only with interpretations of Acts that view it as politically “conformist” but also from those that consider it “revolutionary” as well. Tempting though it may be to read Acts through the later vicissitudes of Constantinianism, Luke’s portrait of the early church—he calls it “the Way”—is emphatically not that of a people whose desire it is to take the state.32 Christians do not want to replace the Emperor, nor do they want a Christian to be the Emperor. That would be a far too conservative politics. Instead, recounted in Acts is the ceaseless, exuberant, often grueling dissemination of a “good news” that, resting as it does in the affirmation of a break between God and the pagan cosmos, the peace of Christ and the Pax Romana (the former constituting a “subversion and rearrangement of the very notion of peace”33), threatens to unravel the very fabric of the entire order of things—or so Rowe wants to suggest. Displaying a methodological acuity reminiscent of that advocated by R. G. Collingwood, whose “logic,” as he called it, of “question and answer” held that a proposition can be properly grasped only when the question to which it forms an answer is first identified and articulated, Rowe begins with the basic observation that “Luke does not have a different opinion on the question of religion and politics from many modern thinkers, he has an entirely different question.”34 We need not go far in Acts to discover what that question is. After his crucifixion, we are told, Jesus ordered the disciples
not to leave Jerusalem, but to wait there for the promise of the Father. “This,” he said, “is what you have heard from me; for John baptized with water, but you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit not many days from now.” So when they had come together, they asked him, “Lord, is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?” He replied, “It is not for you to know the times or periods that the Father has set by his own authority. But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.” When he had said this, as they were watching, he was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight.35
What does it mean to be a living body of witnesses to the reality of the risen Christ? This, above all, is the question that animates Luke’s account. Yet it is exactly this question that seems to have escaped several generations of New Testament scholars, whose uniformity of opinion as to (what Badiou calls) the “pro-Roman benevolence harbored by the author of Acts,”