Learning to Speak Christian. Stanley Hauerwas
now essential to the liberal nation-state. A correlative of such an understanding of religion is that “god” is a word acceptable for use in the public forums of the state because it is a word that does not entail the specificity of a particular tradition. So interestingly enough, just to the extent Christians think they can say “god” more easily than they can say “Jesus” they are underwriting the legitimating violence of the nation-state.
The politics of speech associated with the use of the word “god” that Cavanaugh exposes was wonderfully made concrete because one of the students in my class is a chaplain in the United States Army, who holds the rank of major. He has had a long career in the Army and has served in Iraq. He is a deeply committed Christian who is admirably forthright about the ambiguities of his position as a chaplain. He has been sent to Duke by the Army to study ethics because his next duty will be to teach ethics at one of the Army bases where soldiers are trained in artillery. During our discussion of Cavanaugh’s argument, he reported that his reading of Yoder had put him in a real quandary because he cannot use the name of Jesus when he teaches ethics but he can talk about “god.” One seldom has philosophical and theological arguments empirically confirmed, but that seems to have happened with his report of how “god” is used to confirm the status of the state as an instrument of peace. Such an account seems particularly persuasive when the state so conceived confronts an Islamic world that we do not think has learned the lessons allegedly associated with the Treaty of Westphalia.
I am not a Mennonite, so it would be inappropriate for me to comment on the decision at Goshen College to play the national anthem before sporting events, but I assume what I have said about how Christians should not say certain things has implications for singing the national anthem. Suffice it to say, in the very least, singing the National Anthem is not politically innocent. To speak Christian does not insure we will be faithful witnesses to Christ, but it may not be a bad place to begin rediscovering the radical implications of Christian orthodoxy.
If you are to minister to a church that is an alternative to a nation-state that has co-opted the word “god” as a means of legitimating the violence it calls peace, you should insist that it makes all the difference that when the church says “peace” the peace that is said requires that we also say “Jesus.” I say this even though it may seem like bringing coals to Newcastle. After all, this is Eastern Mennonite Seminary, which at the very least means that John Howard Yoder is read here. Surely this is a place that has not forgotten that when you say “peace” the peace you say is unintelligible if Jesus has not been raised from the dead.
But you can never, or at least you should not ever, take for granted the locution that “Jesus is our peace.” For learning to speak Christian means that what we say requires constant practice because the predominate speech habits that also shape our speech tempt us to not know what we say when we say Jesus. Take for example Yoder’s comment on debates about effectiveness between William Miller and James Douglass in Christian Attitudes to War, Peace, and Revolution. In response to Douglass’s claim that the promise of good effects is integral to nonviolent action’s ethical basis, Yoder observes that such a claim is a mistake.1 If Jesus is Lord, we betray the hope that makes our commitment to nonviolence intelligible if we try to prove it. For if we tried to prove our hope we would have to subject it to some other more fundamental standard. But that would mean giving our loyalty to another Lord. Such a move is analogous to trying to prove one religion is higher or purer than another by using standards external to the religions one is comparing. So our faith in the resurrection sustains a “hope that cannot be destroyed by my failures or jeopardized by my inability to manipulate events.”2
Such a faith, that is, a faith in the resurrection of Jesus, also means that to speak Christian does not mean such speech cannot be understood by others who do not speak Christian. It does mean, however, that like us they will need to undergo training to hear what is being said and hopefully thereby become more eloquent and confident speakers. Moreover, if we are confident Christian speakers we may well discover that there are other languages that have words and grammars we can use. After all, Christian speech has been and will continue to be forged from encounters that have resulted in Christian appropriation of other ways of speaking that help us be faithful to the gospel.
The hope that the resurrection makes possible, the hope that sustains the witness of peace in a world of war, the hope that Jesus names, is a hope that you must have if you are to sustain the slow and hard ministry of word work. To learn to speak Christian and to help others speak Christian means that many of the days you spend in the ministry will seem as if you have not done anything. When your spouse asks you at the end of the day, “How was your day?” you will discover you cannot remember anything you did. If you are looking for “results” to confirm you have lived a life worth living you probably are making a mistake by going into the ministry.
But then the ministry, like a commitment to nonviolence, does not promise success. For as Yoder reminds us, Jesus did not promise his followers they would conquer within time if they did things right. Rather the love that refuses to achieve the good through the disavowal of violence, the refusal to use mechanical models of cause and effect to force history to move in what is assumed the right direction, means the promise of victory can only be found in the resurrection. Victory, moreover, means for those in the ministry the willingness to do the same thing over and over again in the hope that by doing so the Christian people can speak truthfully to one another and the world.
So I hope that when you are asked about your day you might say, “Well I was reading Barth on the Trinity and I think I finally understand why ‘Father’ is in the first article of the Creed.” I assume you will still be reading, and in particular reading Barth, because the reading habits you have developed during your studies here are habits crucial for sustaining your life in the ministry. I am sure you have read many good books in seminary, but that reading is meant to prepare you to spend a life reading. You must continue to read and study even though you may receive little reward for doing so. You must, moreover, help the people you serve recognize that their support of your study is a good the whole people of God have in common.
I hope occasionally when asked for a report of your day in the ministry you will be able to say “I think I wrote one good sentence in the sermon for Sunday.” The sermon is at the heart of our ability to speak as well as sustain speaking Christian. The sermon is not your reflections on how to negotiate life. The sermon rather is our fundamental speech act as Christians through which we learn the grammar of the faith. As my colleague, Richard Lischer, puts it in his book The End of Words, “the preacher’s job . . . is to do nothing less than shape the language of the sermon to a living reality among the people of God—to make it conform to Jesus. The sermon, in fact, is Jesus trying to speak once again in his own community.”3
James may well be right that not many should be called to be teachers, but as one charged with the proclamation of the gospel I do not see how you can avoid being a teacher. For as Lischer observes, preachers are authorized to say things that, if they did not utter them, no one would ever hear the forms of language that require God as their final audience. One sentence may not seem like much, but our lives as Christians depend on your struggle to say Christ.
Finally, I hope, in response to the question about your how your day was, you might be able to say that you hope that you prayed with the dying the prayer that needed to be prayed. Prayer is the heart of Christian speech. Like all Christians you are called to live a life of prayer. As one called to the ministry of Jesus Christ you are called to help those like me learn to pray. That surely is the most important work in the world. I rejoice that you are graduating from seminary, but even more I am given hope that you are called to the ministry. There can be no higher calling.
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Why “The Way the Words Run” Matters:
Reflections on Becoming a “Major Biblical Scholar”1
If we understand deeply enough the way in which the promise of the Holy Spirit is linked to the church’s gathering to bind and loose (Matt. 18:19–20), this may provide us well with a more wholesome understanding of the use and authority of Scripture. One of the most enduring subjects of unfruitful controversy