Category: Books

"Nothing enslaves more than that which we think we cannot live without." (Page 80)

Freedom is therefore affirmed and strengthened by fasting. Fasting is not only a voluntary statement of self-denial, it is a celebration of that spiritual liberty that makes bodily living a joyous valuing of created things -by keeping them in their place.

"Abundance not scarcity is the mark of God’s care for creation. But our desire to live without fear cannot help but create a world of fear constituted by the assumption that there is never enough. Such a world cannot help but be a world of injustice and violence because it is assumed that under conditions of scarcity our only chance of survival is to have more".(Page 82).

This is Hauerwas at the eisegesis again, this time in Matthew 6  – but he stays faithful to the Kingdom meaning of the text, because he has an instinct for those values of the Kingdom that force a revaluation of the values of a culture in which fasting is near sacrilege in the consumer God’s temple. As I read this commentary I am constantly aware of the other ways of writing biblical commentary – historico-grammatical exegesis, socio-cultural analysis, rhetorical and reader response approaches – none of these are all that evident in Hauerwas’ approach. But I am repeatedly finding myself reading the gospel, then reading Hauerwas, and finding that his theologically controlled eisegesis has taken him to the heart of the text – and to the core values of the Kingdom.

How does this eisegesis thing work? It isn’t true that Hauerwas is irresponsibly imposing his views on the text – I don’t sense that at all. In fact the opposite, his is a deeply responsible handling, reverently receptive, an informed engagement in which who he is, and what he believes is brought to the the text. For Hauerwas, presuppositionless exegesis is not only impossible, but undesirable.  His eisegesis is characterised by several qualities, I think:

instinct guided by theologically astute reflection on the meaning and transforming power of Jesus the person.

intuition born of years seeking to listen to, and be changed by, Jesus’ teaching

ethical and pastoral assertion of what this text says to those prepared to hear it today,

docility before a Gospel story whose power wrests control from the careful exegete subverting all attempts to domesticate the text by too much knowledge.

The result, for me anyway, is a reading of Matthew that is informed by serious ethical, theological and political standpoints, and which is compelling in its uncompromising directness – non-directive counselling, objective exegesis, this is not!

Reverence may be the road to the sacred and wisdom may be the natural song of the spirit, but story is the text of God and the groundkeeper of prayer. (24)

The Shaping of a Life is autobiography bent to the purpose of spirituality, story-telling as the medium of theology. And Tickle is alert to the dangers:

Compressing long years of gradual understanding into single epiphanies or even tying revelations to singular events may allow us to organize our spiritual autobiographies, but it certainly does not make us fine historians of the actual. (34).

So her honesty, and the correctives and disclaimers she inserts, make what might otherwise be an exercise in introspection and self-explanation best kept for a private journal, into a helpful example of how to map the way we have come. Glad I read it – but it’s a hundred pages too long. That’s a pity because the other 280 pages both as connected narrative, and as a mosaic of shorter stories where God is encountered in ordinariness, make the book worth the effort. None of us can so stand outside ourselves that, when it is our own story we are telling, we perform as ‘fine historians of the actual’.

What to make of a woman whose father is a celebrated educationist, whose great grandparents on her mother’s side were Jewish, who loves silence and solitude but also the interchange of relationships, who writes of a near death experience in the 1950’s that has left indelible marks on her spirit, whose experience of serial miscarriage did not prevent her having a family of 7 children, who has rediscovered her Jewishness but within a clear Christian commitment, who is now a recognised expert on American religion and religious publishing, and is attached as an oblate to an Anglican monastery, and is now a bestselling writer and compiler of a three volume set of The Divine Hours, the ancient prayer practice of the Church?

I know that is one long sentence-question; feel free to put in any helpful punctuation, copy editing. But the book is also one long question – or rather a meandering account of how a life, like a river, makes its way to the sea – in its own time and never in a straight line. The Shaping of a Life is a mixed read; parts of it are chatty and lightweight in a magaziney (new word?) kind of way; some sections are movingly written describing the evolution of a faith with its wits about it; here and there she clunks a big theological nugget on the wooden floor and you’re left to make of it what you will; some parts are dispensable, adding weightless bulk and perhaps clouding the focus of a book that I have enjoyed reading – except the bits I recognised as skim-worthy.

Brought up within sight of Tennessee’s mountains, and then living in Memphis (in the early days of Elvis fever) she tells of how she ‘walked straight into Western religion’s most ubiquitous pair of twinned metaphors….the mountain and the city’.

I want to think about this – two metaphors that might give us the two handles we need to articulate a balanced spirituality for the 21st century. The lonely bleak thereness of the mountain, there, not built, a place that is given to us, not taken; and the crowded thereness of the modern city, built as human construct, taken and possessed with little sense of it as gift. Yet the urban owned property (real estate) and the isolated grandeur of the mountain each offer clues that might help us live more humanely – it is easy to demonise the city and romanticise the mountain. In Scotland we learn every winter about the inhospitable bleakness, the unforgiving danger, of blizzard blown mountains –

and while urban decay has its own bleakness, the life of our great cities also creates its own kinds of communities where people are cherished, laughter is made and compassion is there to be seen if we look for it.

Isaiah 2.1-5 combines the two metaphors, the mountain of the Lord’s temple and Zion – mountain and city – and the vision is of justice, companionable walking, and the new technology of peace as weapons are recycled into horticultural implements to the benefit of the entire creation. It is one of the great visions – and amongst the key inspirations of my own faith….come O house of Jacob, let us walk in the light of the Lord.

What keeps theology from becoming a theoretical hobby, self-indulgently pursuing abstract concepts and intellectual structures is the rootedness of all good theology in the context of a life.  Some time before McLendon wrote his book on theology and biography, I had already met the kind of theology I enjoy reading best. It’s found mainly in autobiography and biography, written with that combination of self knowledge and life savvy, a willingness to engage in an investigative journalism of the self in relation to God.

In addition to biography and autobiography, there are letters, journals, travel diaries – but each of them seeking to explore and explain the landscape of the spirit, to excavate and examine the rich ore of experience, especially the experience of God. Some of the best church history is in the definitive biographies ( Rack on Wesley, Oberman on Luther, Ker on Newman). But it is the less celebrated writers who often have most to share about their journey, the sights and insights of their travelling, the ways in which theology and faith, doctrine and practice, God and daily life, intersect in surprisingly disruptive and creatively constructive ways. What makes life-story-telling such an effective medium for real theology is simply this; God is the living God, the involved and subversively interested God who is made known in Christ, who became flesh and dwelt amongst us, and whose deepest and defintive statement is made in the life of a person.

So the story of a life is narrative theology. And that is what Phyllis Tickle’s book is so good at. The story of a life growing and unfolding towards God. The title, The Shaping of a Life, indicates a slow process, organic and personal; the subtitle is about context, A Spiritual Landscape. I’ll write more about this book when I’m finished it. For now three random, but significant influences in the shaping of her life – Psalms, pubs and T S Eliot. The chapter (26) on her discovery of a Memphis pub called The Pigskin is a beautifully observed narrative of community – here’s just one sentence:

A pub presupposes not just any neighbourhood, but a particular  one of some density which it serves not as a private home or a public husting would, but is "that third good place" of satisfactory human intimacy.

Made me wonder about church as "that third good place" of satisfactory human intimacy. Discuss.

The Sermon on the Mount is a text which is definitive of Hauewas’ entire theological and ethical project. Jesus is not simply teaching an ethical code, but incarnating the Kingdom, which when lived, looks something like the Sermon on the Mount. The Sermon is addressed, not primarily to individuals, but to the community of Jesus who as disciples, are called into a Kingdom where Jesus Rules, OK!

I like his emphasis on the communal intentions of the Sermon – not each lonely struggling individual disciple struggling to live up to each Beatitude. No, but a supportive community of the gladly needful and willingly dependent, in all their diversity, discovering and displaying and disseminating – peace, comfort, hunger for justice and so on. The Beatitudes are about us rather than me; about grace given rather than virtue achieved.

Hauewas’ take on virtue ethics, as they come into conversation with the Sermon is this: ‘For Christians the virtues, the kind of virtues suggested by the Beaititudes, are names for the shared life made possible through Christ’.

Virtue – community – Christ – a community of virtue whose resource and motivation is the presence, example and gift of Jesus. And when it comes to anger and lust, the corrosive antitheses of forgiveness and generosity, the obstacles to peace and gift, Hauerwas’ hard headed spirituality says just what’s needed:

Alone we cannot conceive of an alternative to lust, but Jesus offers us participation in a kingdom that is so demanding we discover we have better things to do than concentrate on our lust. If we are people committed to peace in a world of war, if we are a people committed to faithfulness in a world of distrust, then we will be consumed by a way to live that offers freedom from being dominated by anger or lust…. (Page 69).

Consumed by a way to live – that seems to encapsulate what Hauerwas, and his conversation partners Bonhoeffer and Yoder, are so serious about. Christian discipleship is walking a way in such a way, that it leads to the cross, where God is most fully revealed, and from which the community of Jesus takes it moral and spiritual, and therefore political bearings.

Hauerwas is an interesting and disconcerting companion to walk with through a text. He has his own approach, and clearly loves the liberty the remit of this commentary series gives him to indulge in theologically disciplined eisegesis. His treatment of Jesus’ temptations is informed by Augustine and Dostoevsky, two penetrating commentators on the subtle, persuasive, sweetly reasonable psychology of evil. Here’s his authority for not troubling to ‘go behind the text’. When the devil quotes scripture at Jesus, Hauerwas comments:

Jesus teaches us how to read scripture by refusing to go behind the text to discover what God must have "really meant". When you are in a struggle with the devil it is unwise to look for "the meaning" of the text. (page 53-4)

I must confess to being in considerable sympathy with Hauerwas’ determination to read the Gospel, and in reading the story, enter into it as the drama of Christian discipleship, made real for each disciple and each community, in the encounter with the living Lord. So Hauerwas is able to approach the temptation of Jesus, without reducing the latent menace of the story to a generic pietism in which any half struggling believer finds some clues for spiritual warfare. When Jesus is shown the kingdoms, and invited to bow down in order to possess them, Hauerwas is at his acid best, and sees clearly the political consequences, the cosmic stakes, of Jesus’ responses: "Give the devil his due. He understands, as is seldom acknowledged particularly in our day, that politics is about worship and sacrifice. Jesus refuses to worship the devil and thus becomes the alternative to the world’s politics based on sacrifice to false gods".

All Hauerwas’ reading of Bonhoeffer especially over the past several years,and his interaction with and indebtedness to Yoder, are evident here. So are his own well known strictures on any individual piety that ignores the political edge of ethics and the ethical core of worthwhile politics. And likewise those who have been reading him recognise the justice yearning message he hears loud and clear in the Gospel. These and other strands of Hauerwas’ theology mean he does not come innocently to the text, nor does he want to; he has, and will not surrender, his presuppositions rooted in a Christological hermeneutic of the Gospel, and of the reading of each gospel as the story of the Kingdom of God revealed and realised in Jesus. That this might take him beyond safe exegetical territory probably won’t bother him. So long as Hauerwas is convinced he is following after Christ, seeking the truth of His life and teaching, His death and His living, he clearly doesn’t mind the exegetical risk. Next hauerwas post will be a long quote, without comment from me – it is, I think, spiritual reading of the highest order.

How could Rome know that this man [Jesus] would be the most decisive political challenge it would face? …The movement that Jesus begins is constituted by people who believe that they have all the time in the world, made possible by God’s patience, to challenge the world’s impatient violence by cross and resurrection (Page 37)

Hauerwas’ reading of the early chapters of Matthew is guided not so much by exegetical heavies such as Allison & Davies, and Luz, but by Bonhoeffer, Barth and John Howard Yoder. Intertwined with the nativity themes of promise, mystery, virgin birth and human hopes, Matthew weaves the darker strands of kingship, nationalism, state security, herodian politics, refugees on the move and massacres in the home village – the structures of power guarded by the machinery of terror.

Hauerwas is committed to the idea of the kingdom as an alternative community which embodies anti-imperial praxis.The Kingdom of God is an ‘alternative world, an alternative people, an alternative politics’. As I read Hauerwas’ commentary, unmistakable Hauerwasian themes, like peaceable kingdom, community of character, and against the grain of the universe, emerge in his exposition through a process of eisegesis. Paradoxically, his kind of theological eisegesis seems to expose and articulate the radical political critique and spiritual power of the text, in a way often less accessible to stringent traditional exegesis.

That’s my feeling anyway – there is for me a felt congruence between Hauerwas’ finger-pointing prose as he tells the truth he finds in this trext, and Matthew’s message of cruciform discipleship. His main conversation partners, Bonhoeffer and Yoder, also took Scripture with utmost seriousness. Together they and Hauerwas offer another essential approach to the interpretation of the Bible text – askingthe life disrupting questions, ‘what does this text say to us about following Jesus, about carrying a cross, about who we are, and what that might mean for our own political allegiances’  The kingdom of God and the kingdoms of this world – these are stark Matthean alternatives, presented in black and white terms in this gospel from start to finish – and with the call "Follow me" about to be uttered.

Which is a longish way of saying this is one of the most refreshing, disturbing and (overused word coming) challenging readings of a gospel I’ve read since Ched Myers, Binding the Strong Man (on Mark).

Hauerwas on Herod. You would expect Hauerwas to have some astringent comments about power politics, Herod and the slaughter of the innocents. Two of his comments on Matthew 1 indicate the depth of Hauerwas’ commitment to the politics of Jesus, because he is less interested in Herod bashing than in emphasising the significant alternative that is Jesus, born of Mary, son of David.

Matthew’s gospel is about the "politics of Jesus", which entails an alternative to the power politics of the world. The politics of Jeus, moreover, entails not only the politics in the gospel but also the politics of reading the gospel. A right reading of the gospel requires a people who are shaped by "the oblation familiar to the faithful", that is, a community whose fundamental political act is the sacrifice of the altar – an alternative to Herodian power politics. (Page29)

So a right reading of the gospel is when its story, its plot, its narrative drive, is expressed in self-giving love for the other, sacrifice – and this embodied in a lifestyle redolent of political implication, cruciform in shape, and offered as the only true reading of the gospel – Christlikeness.

To be trained as a disciple is to learn why this Jesus, the son of David, the one true king, must suffer crucifixion. Matthew’s gospel is meant to train us, his readers, just as Jesus had to train his disciples, to recognise that the salvation wrought in the cross is the Father’s refusal to save us according to the world’s understanding of salvation, which is that salvation depends on having more power than my enemies.

When salvation is thought to depend on having more power than my enemies, the only way such salvation is effective is if that power is used – to retain, increase, secure its own survival. The result of herodian politics is, all too often, the slaughter of the innocents.

I read Bible commentaries. This doesn’t mean most commentaries are readable – it’s just that I regard a commentary as a conversation partner, and reading it is a form of listening to another voice, a different take on the text, and often a far better informed one than me.

But this one is by Stanley Hauerwas, on Matthew. This is Hauerwas turning his assertive, perceptive, – at times infuriating and at times utterly convincing – take on things, to the Gospel – by commenting on a gospel. It is in a series which is unembarrassed by being a theological commentary. Which is why Hauerwas, who makes no claims to being an expert textual exegete,(see page 21), took on the task believing that this most theologically ethical of gospels might yield a different kind of treasure if cultivated by one asking different questions, or asking the same questions in a different way. Here’s his apologia for assertiveness as a pre-requisite of the theological exegete!

I discovered that writing a commentary is an invitation to indulge in assertions. I have not tried to resist asserting what I know to be true. But assertions are not meant to end the conversation. Rather, assertions are intertwined in a manner that hopefully illumines why, faced with the reality of God, all we can do is proclaim the reality of what we have been given. Assertions are the grammar required by the story being told, but the story being told should illumine why the assertions are required if what we say is to be considered true. In short, assertions are reports on judgements that require further enquiry.

More on Hauerwas now and again, as our conversation continues.