Learning to Speak Christian. Stanley Hauerwas
because it at once makes it possible to bless the Lord and Father yet curse those who are made in the image of God. That we bless and we curse from the same mouth is but an indication of how dangerous the tongue is for those who have learned God will care for his world through patient suffering.
If James is right, and I certainly think he is, then how can I suggest to you that if you are to serve the church well in the ministry you must become a teacher and, in particular, a teacher of a language called Christian? I do so because I think the characterizations of the challenges facing those going into the ministry are the result of the loss of the ability of Christians to speak the language of our faith. The accommodated character of the church is at least partly due to the failure of the clergy to help those they serve know how to speak Christian. To learn to be a Christian, to learn the discipline of the faith, is not just similar to learning another language. It is learning another language.
But to learn another language, to even learn to speak well the language you do not remember learning, is a time-consuming task. You are graduating from seminary, which I assume means that you have begun to learn how to speak as well as teach others how to talk, as we say in Texas, “right.” For as I suggested, there is an essential relation between reading and speaking; because it is through reading that we learn how to discipline our speech so that we say no more than needs to be said. I like to think that seminaries might be best understood as schools of rhetoric where, as James suggests, our bodies, and the tongue is flesh, are subject to disciplines necessary for the tongue to approach perfection.
That the tongue is flesh is a reminder that speech is, as James suggests, bodily. To speak well, to talk right, requires that our bodies be habituated by the language of the faith. To be so habituated requires constant repetition. Without repetition, and repetition is but another word for the worship of God, we are in danger of losing the grammar of the faith. At least part of your task as those called to the ministry is to help us, as good teachers do, acquire the habits of speech through the right worship of God.
You may have begun to suspect that my call for you to think of yourself as a teacher is an exercise in self-justification. I am not ordained, but I have spent a life, for better or for worse, as a teacher. No doubt I deserve to be judged, as James suggest, with greater strictness because I have surely made many mistakes. Indeed I am sure I still remain in the beginning stage of learning to speak and write Christian. But I am also sure that to the extent I have learned to speak Christian I have done so because I have had to teach others how Christians in the past have spoken.
In truth I have only come recently to understand that what I have been doing for many years has been teaching people how to talk. For example, I was startled by a remark a friend made to me recently. He is a graduate student in anthropology with whom I was writing a paper in which we tried to challenge the presumption that “global Christianity” was an adequate description of what it means for the church to be “catholic.” He told me that when he is asked by his colleagues what it was like to write with me he has to say it is not easy because, in his words, “Hauerwas only knows how to write Christian.”
I confess I found his response gratifying, though I am not sure I think him right that I know how to “write Christian.” I am sure I did not know how to write Christian when I began to teach and write. If I have learned to write Christian it is only because I have learned through imitation. For I think what it means to write Christian is to have a vocabulary sufficient to order the words of that vocabulary into sentences, and the sentences become paragraphs that are meant to form readers to see that what is said cannot be said differently than how it is said. Put differently, the most important part of writing and speaking Christian is what is not said.
Scripture, of course, is the source as well as the paradigm of Christian speech. What we say must be said faithful to the language of Scripture. That is a complex task because it is by no means clear how the many ways of expression in Scripture are to be said coherently. The investigation of that process is called theology. But theologians are often tempted to say too much because the reticence of Scripture, the refusal of Scripture to tell us what we think we need to know, drives us crazy. I sometimes think that the work of historical criticism, essential work for helping us read the Scripture faithfully, is a rage against the silences of Scripture. Why do not the Gospels tell us what Jesus is “thinking?”
Reticence, however, is a hard discipline to learn not only for theologians but for those in the ministry. You also will be tempted to say too much as ministers of the gospel. For example, you will be tempted to use the simulacra of Christian speech in an effort to say more than can be said. Confronted by a sudden and unexpected death of a “loved one,” it is natural to underwrite the phrase, “they have gone to a better place.” It is hard to resist that language because you want to be of help; or put differently, because that language helps you not feel helpless. But it is not the language of the faith. God is not a “place.” Moreover, such language can underwrite the pagan assumption that we possess a soul that is eternal and, thus, fail to gesture our conviction as Christians that our life with God on either side of death is a gift.
To speak Christian is an exacting discipline. It has taken the church centuries to develop habits of speech that help us say no more than needs to be said. But I fear too often those of us charged with responsibility to teach those habits fail to do so in a manner that those in the ministry can make their own. For example, a prominent figure in my church was asked how she understood the Christian faith in Jesus in relation to other religious traditions. She responded by saying that Christians believe that Jesus is our way to God but other traditions have their way to God. It seems to have never occurred to her that Jesus is not our way to God because he is the Son of God. A generous interpretation of what she said might think she was trying to indicate how, given the essential union of Christ’s humanity and divinity, a union necessary for our salvation, Christ as the Incarnate Word is our way to God. But unfortunately she made no mention of the incarnation.
Her response, of course, was the response required by the speech regimes of a liberal culture that before all else demands that we be tolerant. The acknowledgement that others have other ways to God, even though it is not at all clear who the god to whom they have a way is, is a speech act necessarily learned by Christians to insure we are not identified as political reactionaries. Many Christians think being a Christian gives them all the problems they want. In particular, they fear being associated with the Christian Right. I am sympathetic with their desire not to be identified with the Christian Right not because the Christian Right is intolerant, but because the Christian Right has lost the ability to speak Christian just to the extent they identify Christian speech with what Americans call “freedom.”
Yet that a prominent member of the clergy would seem not to know how to speak Christian I think raises profound questions about the kind of training she received in seminary. That she could say that Jesus is but one way to God suggests somehow that she must have missed the class on “Trinity.” How can the second person of the Trinity be the way to God if Jesus is the second person of the Trinity? We not only follow Jesus. We worship Jesus. You can only worship God. So if Jesus is the way to God, he is so only because he is the second person of the Trinity.
This is Theology 101. It does not get more basic than this. But somehow one of the leaders of my church seems to have missed the lectures on the Trinity in her basic theology course. Or she may have heard the lectures, but somehow thinks the lectures to be information about “doctrine” that has little to do with answering the question about other faiths. But if that is the case, then I fear she was not adequately taught the politics of speech, which is crucial to understand if we are to speak Christian. In particular, I suspect she was seduced by the word “god” and how that word can be used to legitimate social formations that ironically tempt Christians to abandon the Christian vocabulary.
I am aware this last remark may strike you as strange, but I think it quite important. I can illustrate what I mean by relating a recent exchange in a class I taught this semester on peace. The class had read William Cavanaugh’s The Myth of Religious Violence. Cavanaugh challenges the oft-made argument that after the Reformation the creation of the modern state became the necessary institution of peace just to the degree the state was able to stop Catholics and Protestants from killing one another. He argues that the very creation of the notion of