Learning to Speak Christian. Stanley Hauerwas
in the rationality and structuring order of modern bureaucratic states, such that the abnegation or at least domestication of contingency—the “taming of chance,” as Ian Hacking would have it—becomes the critical precondition for a range of legal and administrative capabilities.10 “Could there be,” Wittgenstein queried, “human beings lacking in the capacity to see something as something—and what would that be like? What sort of consequences would it have?—Would this defect be comparable to color-blindness or to not having absolute pitch?—We will call it “aspect-blindness.”11 Enabling human populations, their potentialities and pathologies alike, to be managed with unprecedented efficiency—and, when deemed unmanageable, to be efficiently discarded—aspect-blindness turns out to encompass more than a debased ethical disposition;12 it turns out to name an indispensible modality of effective governance.
Seeing Christianity
It is no doubt strange that we should begin our contribution to a volume entitled “Global Christianity, Global Critique” by calling attention to the insights of Wittgenstein and Hadot. What, after all, might the awakening to wonder that their writings persistently beckon us to undergo, and the impediments they identify as recurrently preventing us from doing so, have possibly to do with the problematics with which the present volume is concerned? How might the ideas of two figures whose aim it was (and, in the case of Hadot, continues to be) to reorient philosophy toward the acquisition and enactment of a distinctive lifestyle and sensibility bear upon the intellectual developments we have been asked to address? Ours, admittedly, is an oblique way of approaching these concerns. Yet we want to suggest that the vocabularies by which the objects of our inquiries are conceived and apprehended are themselves manifestations of historically specific pedagogies connected, so Wittgenstein might say, to “how one sees things”—and, in seeing them, intuiting how properly to live with them.13
Of course, the “thing” in question here is Christianity: on the one side a Christianity whose rapid proliferation throughout the Southern Hemisphere has brought it under increasing scholarly as well as public scrutiny (“global Christianity”), and on the other a Christianity now taken by a heterogeneous grouping of philosophers and social theorists to contain within it resources that might revivify political projects once animated by avowedly non- or even anti-religious political desires and teleologies (“global critique”).14 Needless to say, given our own disciplinary itineraries we certainly have a stake in how such developments play out and are understood. Yet while it is indeed noteworthy that so many academics have thought it worthwhile to take Christianity as a topic of research—or even, as it were, a prototype of political militancy—we recall that the secular university, much like the secular state, has tended to be less concerned with banishing “religion” from its domain than with probing, circumscribing, recalibrating, and at times reactivating and mobilizing it (be it an abstract “religion” or specific “religions”) to its various purposes.15 So although it has become common among anthropologists, for instance, to narrate the emergence of an anthropology of Christianity in terms of a return of the repressed,16 where Christianity—or a “fundamentalist” version of it—stands as the apotheosis of that “repugnant cultural other” through which the anthropologist’s own sensibility has in no small measure come to be constituted,17 it is not at all evident that such a repression ever took the form of any but the most superficial of absences. In fact, one might proffer a history of anthropology in which the discipline’s energies were from the very beginning galvanized in an attempt not simply to distance itself from but to reflect on and, more significantly, rearticulate Christianity—and then “religion”—in ways commensurate with the moral and political determinants of a given moment.
Is positing the current preoccupation with Christianity as something new a means of evading that history? Perhaps not. But to the extent that scholars have failed to confront the myriad ways in which the Christianity they now seek to take seriously has itself been inscribed in, read through, and thereby refashioned as the result of such processes, there is no reason to suppose that these latest objectifications of Christianity will not similarly yield images of a religiosity made uncannily legible to the logics and circumscriptions of the disciplinary formations—and not only professional formations but political and economic ones as well—occupied by those who study it. Put somewhat differently, our worry is not (or not only) that this burgeoning interest across a range of scholarly orientations will inevitably engender explanations of Christianity foreign to the self-understandings of Christians themselves; it is that a long series of contingently linked intellectual, legal, and political developments have already rendered Christianity, as with everything else, translatable into a lexicon—what Alasdair MacIntyre once referred to as an “internationalized language”18—in which the conditions for explaining, repudiating, or, as the case may be, instrumentalizing it, have been firmly secured. (That some strands of Protestantism played no small part in shaping that lexicon is surely cause for further consideration.19)
Thus, judging from the title of the present volume, it is not Christianity in and of itself that we are being asked to address. It is something called “global Christianity,” which is to say, a purportedly historical-empirical phenomenon locatable in time and space (i.e., the time-space of a globalized world) that social scientists, religious-studies scholars, and others can identify and interpret as an object of theoretical analysis. So that Christianity, as we understand it, has already been converted into a particular idiom: the idiom of the global.20 Whether and to what extent the notion of a “global Christianity” captures something real is beside the point, as are the panoply of questions—regarding the disparate archives from which this category emerges, its historical and conceptual antecedents, its relation to a discourse on “world religions,” and so forth—that one might easily pose of it. Likewise, although an explication of what exactly “global Christianity” does (or is taken to do) for those scholars who invoke it—the avenues of debate and research it occludes and opens up, the assumptions it fortifies and contests, the constraints it responds to and reproduces—would undoubtedly prove instructive, our intention here is to pursue something of a different route. We want to ask what it would mean to approach Christianity otherwise: to work, following Hadot, at seeing it, if not “as though one were seeing it for the first time,” then at least in such a way that the questions we have grown accustomed to asking of it, and the words with which we have grown accustomed to answering those questions, might be subjected to the shock of other questions, different words, ones arising from the materiality of life-worlds not easily made available to the insatiable, ever appropriating curiosity typical of our regnant intellectual practices.21 And so, in the spirit of unpredictable outcomes (and perhaps ill-advised beginnings), we have decided to make our entrée into this terrain via a confrontation with what Kavin Rowe, whose recent book we will be dependent upon in the following pages, refers to as “a highly charged and theologically sophisticated political document that aims at nothing less than the construction of an alternative total way of life”: namely, that composed by Luke in his Acts of the Apostles, the first effort at depicting authoritatively the birth and character of the early community of Christians.22
Why Acts? Why, of all places, turn to a biblical text, and a notoriously contentious one at that? Our engagement with Acts may well seem arbitrary and misguided, a cheap shot that, not unlike the philosophical aloofness that appears to have provided a tacit impetus for the present volume, willfully ignores the messiness and ambiguities of “real” (we ask again: “global?”) Christianity in favor of a biased and idealized, even pristine account. Furthermore, we could rightly be accused of facilitating the collapse of the anthropological into the theological (here leaving aside the irony that it is only recently that theologians have begun to rediscover the value of Scripture), and thus of blurring the line between interpretation and assertion, dispassionate analysis and motivated confession.23 It is our contention, however, that a descent into the rough texture of Luke’s narrative, a narrative that has long instructed Christians as to what it looks like to be sent out into the world as witnesses to the reality called gospel, might at the same time provide a model of—or failing that, a way of exposing the limits to—what, on the one hand, is increasingly being taken up as an anthropology of Christianity, and, on the other, what has in recent years become an effort to envisage