Tony Jones wonders what Hauerwas would think of him being a police chaplain
Tony Jones, national coordinator of Emergent Village, a Ph.D. student at Princeton Theological Seminary and a friend of mine, has a post today called "The Hauerwasian Mafia." He describes Stanley Hauerwas and his theological connection to Alasdair MacIntyre and John Howard Yoder. Tony then describes his own role as a police chaplain and wonders if Hauerwas would frown on this close involvement with the state.
Related resources:
- Does Tony characterize Hauerwas, Yoder and MacIntyre fairly?
- Would Hauerwas (or would you) discourage someone from being a police chaplain?
- Are there people here at Duke Divinity School thinking about how MacIntyre, Yoder and Hauerwas might be deployed into the emerging church conversation?
Related resources:
- David Fitch author of , also notes Tony's post: Why Emergent Needs the Hauerwasian Mafia.
- Steve Knight at the Emergent Village blog also notes Tony's post: Tony Jones Takes on the "Hauerwasian Mafia"
- There is also a lecture by Stanley Hauerwas on medicine, death, and the Christian community at Emergent Village podcasts.
- In a later post on this blog, there are links to Socratic Audio Files. At that link there are talks by: Allen Verhey on Richard Niebuhr, Amy Laura Hall on the Yale School (George Lindbeck, etc.), Curtis Freeman on Karl Barth, Mary McClintock Fulkerson on Friedrich Schleiermacher, Stanley Hauerwas on himself, and Richard Hays on Biblical Studies at Duke. These talks explore various influences on the strain of theology found at Duke Divinity School.
- Th.D. student Andrew Thompson notes the Hauerwas on Hauerwas lecture last week.
- There are more Duke Divinity School audio recordings at iTunes U / Duke / Religion / Divinity School. (This link will only work if you have iTunes, a free downloadable program, installed on your computer). See for example Wendell Berry, Stanley Hauerwas and Ellen Davis at "Our Daily Bread 2007: 2007 Convocation and Pastor's School" (iTunes link).
- My blog Andy Rowell | Church Leadership Conversations has Jürgen Moltmann and Stanley Hauerwas Audio Recordings from Society for Pentecostal Studies and the Wesleyan Theological Society joint meeting
posted by Andy Rowell at 11:49 PM
8 Comments:
Andy,
I am not Hauwerwasian scholar. I haven't had any classes with him and have read only one article of his while here at Duke. Our lecture with him was some of the most I've heard him speak. Sorry I can't engage this thread.
On another note, are you interested in helping Socratic Club plan events for next year? I'd love to see us expand some into Doctoral interests. We meet every Tuesday and are currently in the midst of planning next year. We'd love to have you join us.
Peace,
Tom
Andy et al,
As is not unsurprising, this is not a terribly good reading of Hauerwas and his mafia. These remarks are in no way systematic, proceeding chronologically through Tony's text.
1) The missing element in Tony's genealogy is Wittgenstein. Hauerwas, as a non-systematic thinker uses Yoder and MacIntyre in a particular way. To simply name these two as sources does not say nearly enough. (Brad Kallenberg's book on this is excellent. I also have an essay if anyone is interested.)
2) The point is NOT that the Church (or any other collectivity) is a "self-enclosed system" that is incommensurable and unintelligible from without. Traditions are well-ordered and highly integrated, but never wholly self-enclosed. The claim is simply that there is no objective, neutral, or external set of criteria for making judgments between traditions. It is NOT that one "cannot pass judgment," but that judgments are executed from within a tradition. (See Jeff Stout's "Virtue Among the Ruins" for an elegant display and evaluation of these claims.)
3) Similarly, Tony's adverting to "dirty hands" considerations misses the point. The issue is not the moral and/or eternal purity or culpability of Christians who somehow would be sullied by participation in the rough and tumble world of politics. The issue is that of Christian intelligibility and visibility. Namely, if the Church is a transcultural, transnational, and transhistorical communion, that is it it is catholic, it is incoherent for Christians to kill one another in the name of a lesser community (i.e. the nation-state). When a Catholic priest blesses a largely Catholic crew to drop the first A-bomb on Japan's largest Catholic city, then something incoherent and contradictory is going on (cf. Lindbeck's crusader).
4) In point of fact, Yoder thinks a Christian can be a cop, so long as she has a reasonable expectation of never having to use lethal force. So, she could not do so in NYC or LA. Barth is interesting on this issue. He thinks the point is to "religiously starve" the state of theological underwriting of its enterprise. Thus, he thinks you can be a soldier, "but never a chaplain" (sic).
5) Summarily: The questions, to me, concerning police chaplaincy are these. And they are not idle as my father is a former cop and now serves as PD Chaplain in my home town.
1) Do you need to work for the City & PD? Why
not just be "on call" without formally being a
member of the department?
2) What sort of habituation does this involve?
That is, what sort of Christian and pastor
does this make you? Pace Tony, it is not the
case that one can cognitively decide who and
how to be a CHristian, though that is a part
of it. Doing certain things makes you a
certain kind of person. This is a fundamental
part of the Hauerwas picture that Tony
overlooks. Part of the contestation of virtue
ethics is to dispute the very criteria by which
Tony explicates and justifies his role. This is
not to say he cannot do so. It is to say that
his criteria and account are no more
straightforward, obvious, or transparent than
the virtue account that he critiques.
3) To my lights, Tony evades the critical issue.
It is not how to be a Christian chaplain for
Jews or Muslims when notifying them of a
fatality. File that under the sheep and goats
and cup of water rubric. Kindness and
compassion in Jesus's name, either implicitly
or explicitly prompt no Hauerwasian
objection. Indeed he has solid Barthian
grounds (see The Christian Life). The same
goes for helping cops deal with what the see
every shift.
The real issue is what happens when a cop
shoots someone dead - kills for the state.
What if a Christian cop kills a Christian perp?
In so doing the community of the state and
identities of cop and perp become more
determinative and fundamental than
Christian and Church. If Tony's town is such
that its all traffic citations and noise
violations, perhaps he has good Yoderian
grounds. If it's "the mean streets," then
perhaps his soul is in danger.
4) What Tony, and most commentators, miss
is that while the church/world distinction
is fundamental for Hauerwas via Yoder and
Barth, it is not at all clear or foreclosed. In
fact, Liberal Protestantism and Christian
Realism have a far more settled
determination than Radical Protestantism.
It's just that they have a well-developed
theory of how to transgress that
distinction so as to allow, if not compel,
full participation in the world vis a vis the
nation-state.
Wow. Thanks dwl. I hope you put that comment on Tony's blog as well so that it gets pondered by others. I will be coming back to this as I think about Hauerwas in the future.
andy
Andy Rowell
Doctor of Theology Student
Duke Divinity School
Durham, NC
Blog: Church Leadership Conversations
Andy,
I did/will not post this to Tony. I don't blog myself and don't post comments to other blogs. This blog, so I am told, is not really a blog but a blog site used as a semi-private discussion group/bulletin board.
That said, if you or Tony want to link his post to this blog/post, that'd be great. It'd also be interesting to invite the outside world into our quirky little domain.
DWL and I have corresponded over email a bit. I can't really link people to this conversation from Tony Jones's blog because his blog doesn't allow hyperlinks. By the way, though there are lots of interesting comments there on Tony's site in the comments - including many from Duke Ph.D. students, Rodney Clapp, and Jason Byassee.
See Comments on Tony Jones's Blog Post: The Hauerwasian Mafia
By the way, also I do not know too much about the Duke Socratic Club Blog so don't know how the line between private discussion and public conversation goes except that one needs to email wep7@duke.edu in order to be cleared to comment.
Here are my brief comments about dwl's comment:
I think you represent Yoder and Hauerwas well and your writing here is quite clear and precise.
One question:
Which Kallenberg book? I found the following on Amazon.com:
- Virtues & Practices in the Christian Tradition: Christian Ethics After Macintyre by Nancey Murphy, Brad J. Kallenberg, and Mark Thiessen Nation (Paperback - Jan 2003)
- Ethics As Grammar: Changing the Postmodern Subject by Brad J. Kallenberg (Hardcover - Sep 2001)
- Live to Tell: Evangelism in a Postmodern Age by Brad J. Kallenberg (Paperback - Nov 1, 2002)
The only argument that I find unpersuasive is the distinction that you borrow from Yoder that makes most police work appropriate except for lethal force.
You write:
In point of fact, Yoder thinks a Christian can be a cop, so long as she has a reasonable expectation of never having to use lethal force . . . The real issue is what happens when a cop shoots someone dead - kills for the state . . .If it's "the mean streets," then perhaps his soul is in danger.
It seems to me force is on a continuum. Allen Verhey mentioned this in Scripture and Ethics this semester. One the one hand is someone who pushes a child out of the way to keep them from getting hit by a car. This is force of course but not lethal force. In the middle, there is someone arresting or detaining someone who might commit another crime. Finally, there is lethal force used by a police officer which has a set protocol. It seems to me this lethal force is (ideally)almost entirely consistent with the other lesser forms of force just mentioned. In police work, lethal force is intended to keep a person from imminently killing someone else. Otherwise lethal force is inappropriate. It seems to me that police officer protocol includes the just war criteria of “last resort.” Thus, I am not persuaded that Yoder and your distinction between doing police work but not killing anyone is the place to draw the line between what a Christian can and can’t do.
I just thought I would note that I found that part of your argument unpersuasive. But then again, this is blog comments and the use of force is a huge theological issue which many monographs are dedicated to! Still, I deeply appreciate your great understanding of this issues. Throughout almost all of your comments, I was saying to myself – YES!
Andy,
The line for public/private is pretty fuzzy. Some thoughts:
1. We don't allow anonymous posts (that has gone poorly in the past)
2. The primary participants generally know each other and see one another daily. But then again, we're all about to graduate! (We do have some over-seas participants who've found their way to the blog.)
3. Derek's thoughts about blogging are his own, not necessarily the group's.
Hope that makes Socratic Club's rather fuzzy boundaries on the blog more fuzzy.
Peace,
Tom
Andy,
Sorry man. I thought the Ethics as Grammar subtitle named Hauerwas. That's the one. Hauerwas teaches the text approvingly in his Theology, Modernity, & the Character of the Church and Theology After Wittgenstein courses.
To clarify, the policing caveat is Yoder's and not mine. I do not think it holds. Though on paper, both war and law enforcement have "last resort" protocols, actual exercise thereof comes nowhere close to approximating these. Moreover, I have reservations about the habituation of police and especially soldiers, inasmuch as it necessitates a kind of subjectification that is patently unChrisitian, and I think in modern warfare violates the Augustinian criterion of not making an eventual just peace possible.
And as always, these comments, observations, and contestations do not reflect those of Tom Arthuer, the Socratic Clus, or saraharthur.com
Thanks Tom and dwl.
I am now signing up to received follow up comments to this post so I won't be so slow to respond in the future.
Thanks for the tip on the book. I didn't take Anglican Social Ethics with Hauerwas this fall and so haven't had a chance to have him yet.
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