Friday Miscellanies

Here are a few notes that might interest you. Consider it suggestions for weekend reading! I wanted to highlight a few articles that touch on important issues in faith and discipleship -

Steve Rankin, the university chaplain at Southern Methodist University, has a great article in the United Methodist Reporter looking at the doctrine of Christian perfection, character formation, and contemporary higher education. As Steve rightly points out, higher education that aims only at increasing the knowledge of students and does not nurture formation in moral virtues is both impoverished and un-Wesleyan.

Two articles on leadership have caught my eye recently. One is this interview with Stanley Hauerwas which is available from Faith & Leadership. Hauerwas comments on whether "leadership" can be understood as a theological category, and he also makes some interesting insights into the role of leadership in institutions and the role of institutions in leadership.

The other article on leadership comes from Covenant Discipleship Connection, where Steve Manskar connects Wesleyan leadership with the deep Wesleyan understanding of faith in Jesus Christ and the ongoing process of sanctification. Steve wants to invite folks into an ongoing conversation about the character of Wesleyan leadership, and he has started a new blog to facilitate that.

Finally, after a writing sabbatical of several months, I'm back in the pages of the United Methodist Reporter. My new column - available at this link - starts a series on the means of grace in Christian practice. This is the subject of my academic research at Duke Divinity School. So I'm excited about presenting some material related to it in my regular column. I believe - as John Wesley did - that our growth in holiness of heart & life is impossible apart from disciplined participation in the means of grace. And I'll be explaining that conviction column by column over the coming weeks.

Our Independence Day

The Fourth of July was always one of my favorite holidays growing up. The City of Paragould hosted a municipal fireworks display on the grounds of Paragould High School, and we'd always head up there with the rest of the town to wait until dark so the show could begin.

Like any other holiday, the traditions surrounding the day itself could sometimes obscure the reason you were celebrating in the first place. But all it took was one replay of Lee Greenwood's "God Bless the U.S.A." to remind me that I should be "proud to be an American, where at least I know I'm free."

I take seriously the liberty that we enjoy living in American society. I've had the opportunity to travel some in my life, and I admit I wouldn't want to live anywhere else - at least not on a permanent basis. And I think there's some truth to the old saw by Churchill that democracy's the worst form of government, except for all the other forms of government. As a pastor, I particularly appreciate the way I am able to gather my flock for worship and preach the gospel as I am called to do without any fear of government persecution. Not all Christians have that same privilege.

But then, I also agree with theologians like Stanley Hauerwas, who argue that liberal democracy is dependent on an essentially violent mythos. It defines a peace-loving and democratic "us" over against a depraved and totalitarian "them," which must occasionally be engaged militarily in order to remind "us" both why we need to stick together and why our way of life is superior.

But on an even more intimate level, liberal democracy also posits property rights as one of the fundamental liberties on which society is based. This means that consumer capitalism has to be allowed to flourish in as unfettered a form as possible, which as an economic philosophy encourages us to disregard the good of others in our own individualistic "pursuit of happiness." And if you doubt the violence of that particular modus vivendi, you only have to look at the suffering of hardworking people at the hands of large corporate employers, the suffering of unborn children in the womb at the hands of abortionists, and the suffering of the environment at the hands of all of us in our chronic overconsumption.

So, is there a way we can celebrate a kind of freedom that is not freedom against tyranny, but rather freedom for something good and holy? We see evidence of such a freedom in Galatians, where the Apostle Paul says, "It is for freedom that Christ has set us free" (Gal 5:1). This freedom teaches us that we are neither bound by our sinful nature nor by the law that would serve ultimately to convict us in showing us a holiness that we cannot achieve.

But it is also more than a freedom from these things. It is also a free for something wonderful.

"The only thing that counts," Paul says, "is faith working through love" (Gal 5:6). And to that end, he encourages us to "live by the Spirit," which we can know we are doing when our lives - as individuals and as the church - are bearing fruits of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.

Such a life is a life of freedom.

And that life was offered to us on our true Independence Day, which didn't occur in 1776 but rather in 33 A.D.

Yoder on the Church

I'm serving as a graduate assistant in a Christian Ethics course this semester, and the instructor (Dean Sam Wells) has got perhaps the best reading list I've ever seen for a survey course. It's going to be a great semester.

One of the theologians we'll be dipping into is John Howard Yoder, who I studied in a seminar with Stanley Hauerwas a couple of summers ago. [If you'd like to read Hauerwas' eulogy to Yoder after his death in First Things, click here.] I've been pulling my Yoder texts of the shelf, and it hasn't taken me long to remember why I love reading him so much - I don't know of another theologian who challenges me down to my core while filling me with an almost inexpressible hope at the same time.

If you ever want to be reminded why the church is centrally important to history, read Yoder. Describing the societal temptation toward Constantinianism in The Original Revolution, he writes:

"All [the] efforts to defend the cause of the church before the bar of secular analysis have in common the same basic axiom. This is then what is really important; the true meaning of history, the true locus of salvation, is in the cosmos and not in the church. Then what God is really doing He is doing through the framework of society as a whole and not in the Christian community" (p.146).

As Yoder could point out with an insight few others have possessed, the Constantinian tendency we all have is exactly that we place our trust in Caesar rather than in Christ, in the governments of nation-states rather than in the church. After all, governments have power while the church is weak - right? Yoder counters:

"Why then is it reasonable that we should continue to obey in a world which we do not control? Because that is the shape of the work of Christ" (p.155).

To embrace his ecclesiology is madness, on the surface of things. But it is also to place one's full faith that Jesus is who he says he is, and that God's promises will surely be brought to fulfillment. There is hope in this, brothers and sisters, and Yoder gives it to you:

"We are not marching to Zion because we think that by our own momentum we can get there. But that is still where we are going. We are marching to Zion because, when God lets down from heaven the new Jerusalem prepared for us, we want to be the kind of persons and the kind of community that will not feel strange there" (p.159).

Those are beautiful words. And they're words of hope.

Veni, Domine Iesu!

Hauerwas, Milbank, and the pope

The photo above comes courtesy of Ben Myers' blog, Faith and Theology. It was taken at a conference in Rome last week and shows Pope Benedict XVI greeting theologians Stanley Hauerwas and John Milbank.

Wouldn't you love to have overheard that conversation?

Hauerwas on Hauerwas

Last month, I posted on an ongoing lecture series here at Duke where professors are invited to speak on various aspects of what constitutes "Duke theology". This afternoon it was Stanley Hauerwas' turn, and he did not disappoint.

Dr. Hauerwas is currently on sabbatical, and one project he is working on during that time is a planned memoir. He read for about 35-40 minutes from the manuscript of that memoir, and then fielded questions. The entire session ended up being about 1 hr 25 mins. If you'd like to have a listen, here's the audiofile: Hauerwas on Hauerwas.mp3.

If you are not familiar with Hauerwas either as a person or through his work, this lecture is a great introduction. If you are familiar with him, the lecture is still really good because he reads stories about his religious upbringing and about significant mentors in his life.

Oh, and if you're not familiar with his generally salty language, be forewarned. There are a few four-letter words thrown in here and there. Naturally.