Learning to Speak Christian. Stanley Hauerwas
that is unparalleled in the Matthew’s Gospel. “For it has been given over to me, and I give it to anyone I please” (Luke 4:6–7). The ramifications of Luke’s political theology, as it were, could not be more conspicuously displayed: the emperor possesses authority because it has been given him by the devil.61 The powers of this world, the world of the imperium, are said to emanate from Satan. So it is that when we move to Acts, we find the disciples portrayed, not as revolutionaries in any ordinary sense, but as emissaries of an emergent order in which Jesus has totally reconfigured kingship to reflect the inversion prophesied in Mary’s song at the outset of the Gospel: “He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly” (Luke 1:52).
To turn again, then, to the tension Rowe perceives to be running throughout the book of Acts and, thus also, to the fundamental question of whether the charges leveled against the Christians in Thessalonica—in contrast to the charges leveled against Luke by the New Testament scholars—are warranted: they are false, Rowe says, inasmuch as they attempt to place Jesus in competitive relation to Caesar, as well as to the forms, presuppositions, values, and sensibilities that “Caesar” represents. To posit such a relation would be an ontological mistake. The accusations are true, however, “in that the Christian mission entails a call to another way of life, one that is—on virtually every page of the Acts of the Apostles—turning the world upside down.”62
Church is the name of this form of life.
A Brief Concluding Postscript
“That’s it?” some readers may ask. “You’ve taken us through all this only to conclude with ‘Church is the name of this form of life’?” But we ask the reader, frustrated though you may be, to think again. Description is everything. And by calling attention to Luke’s account of the birth and spread of what came to be referred to as “the church,” we have tried to suggest that knowing how to describe that reality is anything but a straightforward process. Christianity did not spring from the head of Zeus readily identifiable. Indeed, as Luke makes clear, followers of Christ were first simply known as those who followed “the Way.” It was their detractors who labeled them “Christians.” The label turned out to be a useful description but, as we hope our brief rendering of Luke’s account suggests, “the church” names an ongoing narrative which is itself a politics and a habit of sight. In an odd way the story Luke recounts allows us to see that Christians are a people who may never quite know who and where they are. That means descriptions are never settled. We hope, therefore, that our attempt to help readers see Christianity through Acts has made it apparent that any Christianity abstracted from flesh-and-blood manifestations of the lordship of Christ embodied in concrete communities of witness would, in fact, no longer be recognizable to those whose lives Luke sought to narrate—that is, to Christians.
It is our contention that, far exceeding the precision or plausibility of a specific argument, at stake in the current preoccupation with Christianity is a deeper, more intractable problematic having to do with how we perceive, name, appraise, possess—in short, create—that which we endeavor to know; and also with recognizing when the objects of such endeavors cannot (or perhaps should not) be known in quite the manner we wish to know them.63 Here we have merely wanted to raise the question of what it might mean for those intellectual currents whose scholarly energies have been directed at enumerating the lineaments of various renderings of Christianity, “global” or otherwise, to grapple with the existence, so far as Luke has shown us in Acts, of a people whose attitudes and behaviors, passions and disputes signal the ineluctably specific after-effects of having been woven into a story not of their own design. In fact, what Acts shows us is that to “see something as something” is, in large measure, already to have been made by it—or, at the very least, to find oneself journeying down a path where the potentiality for such reordering is ubiquitous. Yet aspect-blindness might well be our normal condition.
This takes us to a final thought. Is it possible, or desirable, that an encounter with the life-worlds that comprise the focal points of our inquiries might make a claim not only on the certainties by which they are apprehended but on the life of the student who apprehends them? That retaining “what may be a discomforting—even scandalous—presence within our receiving languages” might reveal as slightly more tentative or provisional the assumptions that subtend them?64 We cannot pretend to have avoided the tendencies that militate against such a possibility. We only hope that a semblance of what we have learned from Wittgenstein and Hadot has been made manifest in the preceding pages.
4
God and Goodness:
A Theological Exploration
Setting the Problem
Then someone came to him and said, “Teacher, what good deed must I do to have eternal life?” And he said to him, “Why do you ask me about what is good? There is only one who is good. If you wish to enter into life, keep the commandments.” He said to him, “Which ones?” And Jesus said, “You shall not murder; You shall not commit adultery; You shall not steal; You shall not bear false witness; Honor your father and mother; also, You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” The young man said to him, “I have kept all these; what do I still lack?” Jesus said to him, “If you wish to be perfect, go, sell your possessions, and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come and follow me.” When the young man heard this word, he went away grieving, for he had many possessions.
Then Jesus said to his disciples, “Truly I tell you, it will be hard for a rich person to enter the kingdom of heaven. Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.” When the disciples heard this, they were greatly astounded and said, “Then who can be saved?” But Jesus looked at them and said. “For mortals it is impossible, but for God all things are possible.” (Matt 19:16–26)
Jesus does not answer the question as posed. The young man asked him about what good deed he must do to gain eternal life. He seems to be asking a question we might identify as “ethical.” Jesus, however, restates the question in a manner that suggests metaphysical issues are at stake, that is, “Why do you ask me about what is good?” Jesus’ response to his own question, however, makes matters even more confusing because he suggests that the question is not about the “what” but “who.”
I confess I find this exchange between Jesus and the young man, a young man who will turn out to have many possessions, puzzling. But that is probably the way it should be. Iris Murdoch’s observation that “goodness appears to be both rare and hard to picture” certainly seems right.1 Was Jesus trying to help the young man understand how difficult it is to “picture goodness”?2 It is tempting to think Jesus was trying to make a philosophical point, but something more seems to be at stake. For Jesus tells the young man if he wishes to enter into life, which seems a more inclusive concept than the young man’s question about “eternal life,” he should keep the commandments. There must be some relationship between goodness and the keeping of the commandments, but it is not immediately clear what that relationship might be.
The young man reasonably responds by asking which commandments he should keep. Given Jesus’ reframing of his question we might have expected Jesus to begin with the first commandment of the Decalogue. For surely God is “the only one who is good.” But instead Jesus names the commandments of the Decalogue that deal with our relations with one another.3 If the only one who is good is God, why does Jesus not begin with the commandment that we should have no other God than the One who brought Israel out of Egypt?
Even more puzzling, Jesus adds to the list derived from the Decalogue that we are to love our neighbor as ourselves. Paul writes to the church in Rome (Rom 13:8–10) suggesting that the same commandments Jesus commends to the young man are summed up by “Love your neighbor as yourself,” but that was Paul and this is Jesus. Later Jesus is asked by a Pharisee to identify the greatest commandment. Jesus answers with the commandment that we should love God with all our heart, soul, and mind and our neighbor as ourselves (Matt 22:34–40). And so it seems strange that he makes no such linkage in his reply to this young man.