The Joy of Responsibility

Some preamble against despairing faith

Strange coincidences can lead us into strange strings of events that are seemingly tied together in tidier packages than we could ever have put together prior to passing through the crucible of experience. No doubt, my reader, your mind might jump to events which are universally recognised as traumatic and character-affecting: a serious injury, a severe and negative involuntary change in lifestyle, or the loss of the other. You would be right, of course; these things certainly change us in ways that we can’t imagine prior to those changes, beating the contours of our ideality with the hammer of reality. However, they are not always so exciting or, at first appearances, so ecstatic—sometimes, just sometimes, these changes are subtle and only noticed by those who are open to noticing them.

I believe such a thing happened this morning as I prepared another coffee and set about attempting not to write anything of any worth. Reading an online conversation that pretty scandalously misrepresented the political theology of Stanley Hauerwas (regarding some matter of pearl-clutching to equate any idea of hell with indolent fundamentalism and “cheap grace” with theological liberalism—a false dichotomy if there ever was one), I took to educating myself a little more: what precisely does this eminent thinker actually think about the role of the church in modernity? What is the role of the individual within the church and what is the role of the church towards the individual? Some idle Googling later, I find a minor thesis for a PhD by a minor scholar named the Reverend J. B. Thomson titled The Ecclesiology of Stanley Hauerwas as a Distinctively Christian Theology of Liberation (1970-2000). “Excellent”, I thought to myself, “I’ll presumably be within the first double-digit collection of people to read this text and, as such, will rightly become a world leader in the topic at hand”—even if the succeeding 25 years where Hauerwas has remained very much alive has caused this particular dissertation to become a little outdated, one can only presume. However, in a preliminary summary of Hauerwas’ ecclesiological musings, I found something which unfolded a little package which I had felt sat on the tip of my tongue for as long as I can remember:

Having a character is not about being a character in the popular sense,but is about living in a particular way in which it is asserted that ‘man is more than that which simply happens to him’. It implies notions of integrity, consistency, responsibility, habit, and accountable willing. It also involves a particularity and sense of integration that distinguishes one agent from another more explicitly than the concept of virtues alone. Character, most pertinently from an ecclesiological perspective, also presumes a context and a community from which moral norms, values and direction are drawn, yet has at its heart the notion of self-agency.¹

Alone, this might not seem to say much which is of critical importance. Firstly, it presumably wasn’t meant to do such a thing as it is a preliminary comment to frame the coming critical analysis; secondly, it is very broad and lacks concrete application which, again, is unsurprising as it is a preliminary comment. However, this paragraph, clear as day, illuminated something which I have wanted to say for a long time—God is concerned with the creation of characters, characters who are held up by their consistent and willing approaches to the law (however that might be understood).

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Christian anarchism against Slavish Theological Liberalism

Wielding the whip against the heretic is a temptation for the would-be crowd—how can we be sure that we cast out money-changers? Is this uncertainty grounds to allow all money-changers onto holy ground?

Theological liberalism is a bit of a tricky concept to pin down, hence why you, my reader, might surmise that I am prone to using the term to mean “theology which I don’t like”. In a sense, I do hold to this habit for two reasons: the particularly modern form of theological liberalism, i.e., demythologization, emerged at once with the American tendency towards uncritical fundamentalism, something noted contemporaneously by notable non-liberal, non-fundamentalist theologian Emil Brunner²; responding to the same threats to church life that would lead to the genesis of the existentialist movement, we see Christianity as a Western phenomenon undergoing a “trousers down” moment where the traditional grounding for meaning had been stolen from the thinkers. As such, the response was either to keep up with the Jonses and take to investigating how little of the bible and the tradition we could believe in without producing bemused smirks on the faces of the quickly secularising mass society or to adopt Hoxhaist approaches to theology, retreating into the bunker and shutting up shop on the possibility of intellectual engagement with “the world” in favour of turning scripture into some kind of extra-scriptural resource.

Like Hoxha’s Albania, many Christians find their scurry to the bunkers has been a movement of vanity—the bunker, a point where one can secure a moment of safety from the world, is redundant in a situation where the world doesn’t care about you, your safety, or your danger.

That’s not to say that these two confused parties weren’t without merit, in some form or other. the liberals, seeing the potential collapse of institutional Christianity as the potential follow-on from the collapse of traditional Christendom, wanted to ensure that Christians still had something of relevance to say to a world which was attempting to leave it behind, regardless of whether that something was necessarily a reflection of what the church had held in the centuries prior to the contemporary moment. The fundamentalists, on the other hand, had become an amusing reflection of the Amish; whereas those humble Anabaptists had attempted to leave “the world” in body, the fundamentalists had attempted to do so in mind—a spiritual parallelism that, while wholly inadequate, did at least emphasize that Christianity ought not to resemble the hustling-bustling descent into nihilism³ and minimal programmes that plagued secularity. However, this “reactive” tendency, of which both parties are guilty, breaks with the broad goals of Hauerwas and Christianity in some severe ways; both fall back into the bourgeois “slave morality”⁴ that attempts to allow individuals to hide from responsibility and, with that, from faith and love for the other as well. One attempts to eradicate the content of the term “love”, so that we aren’t demanded to do anything outside of the demands of contemporary secular “common sense” morality, while the other attempts to find opportunities for the individual to hide behind institutional power, such as a council of elders or the state proper, in a movement which seems to take the “offense” of Matthew 11:6 to be prior and primary over faith instead of co-emergent.

Wielding the rod

Take the statement “gays should be in prison”, for example. A couple of very theologically rigorous and very serious thinkers have taken to using this line in recent years to gather a collection around them to bask in the intellectual insights of the one who would say such bravely untimely things. A “crowd” of sorts, because all good ideas require numbers and having numbers on one’s side is the measure by which we understand the correctness of a particular idea.⁵ In the theological exploration of justice for these figures, there is a certain “not up to us”-ness with the law: the imposition of certain moral boundaries is not something which we can have a choice in as they are divinely commanded, ergo the appropriate punishment for them is maximal and desirable. This is, no doubt, a common reading of the text, my reader, due to the historical prevalence of Constantinian theologies and the rise of the American Right; however, it fails to differentiate the juridical “negativity” of the law from the agapic “positivity” of Christ’s fulfillment. Note: this is not a liberal collapse into the sentimental and sacchrine abstracting of Christ into “God is love” qua unlimited tolerance of the other in accordance with the prevailing ideals of secular society, much in the style of Joseph Fletcher.⁶ It is an altogether different approach that questions why we view love and justice as co-equal.

For these people, who typify the religious nihilism of S. K.’s “Religiousness A”, i.e., a realisation of the combination of the aesthetic and the ethical but without the realisation of ones active role in the world, there is a religious abandonment that comes with receiving the law. This should be no surprise, however, as they are clear representatives of those who suffer under the “curse of the law” (Galatians 3:10-14): the Lord exists in ideality opposite and against the suffering subject in reality, offering only juridical intercession on the part of the good against the sinner. As such, the self-elect (assuming a quasi-Calvinist understanding of such a thing, as is typical of these fundamentalist approaches to the faith, although stopping short of considered theological sophistication) can only recognise God and God’s will as a judgement against humanity that casts the cursed non-believer into the depths of hell—on the face of the earth itself!

Forgiveness and love become alien concepts or completely empty in some semantic gymnastics where forgiveness is shown through the cruel violence of calling the police and prisons into the service of the church, thereby showing total disbelief in the genuinely transformative power of the Spirit in the church by relegating that to a nice side-effect that might come about in some possible world or other. This still remains secondary to the need to punish the sinner to the full extent that we are allowed to do so by the ruling powers—the demand for a blood sacrifice was not lost in the sacrifice of Christ, it appears.

Not only does this perspective relegate the healing power of the Christian faith to a kind of mysticism that is of secondary concern to the would-be social activist type of Christian, but this also makes the church secondary to and contingent upon the power of the state in order for it to do anything. This, my reader, should strike us as a massive problem where the church becomes a fanatical extension of secular law as opposed to the biblical revelation that the Christian will follow the law inasmuch as it does not contradict God’s will (Romans 13)⁷.

Allowing the other to wield the rod

Of course, this problem is only half of the matter at hand. The much more pressing problem with this particularly slavish form of Christianity (which, for the sake of dismissing the naysayer who only wishes to draw us down to their level, we handwave them away into the hands of Nietzsche, ab hoste consilium) is the willingess with which the secular Christian falls away from their responsibility to God and to the neighbour in love at the first “collision”, at the first point of difficulty. Here, almost necessarily, we might wonder that the apparently duplex ease and impossibility of universal love reveals an all the more freeing realisation of the individual’s possibility than we might assume at the first appearance of the apparent dialectical knot.

Let us propose something that one of these potentially dangerous, irreponsible and slavish Christians might say. I’ll let you decide if this nonsense, nonsense, nonsense is an accurate depiction of someone’s views or not.

As a preliminary remark, let’s leave aside the contentious issue of homosexuality in the church—that should turn down the temperature for a moment, to actually address something which really matters. Even if only for methodological reasons, let us assume a level of charity that we would extend to liars, cheaters, and those who swear oaths.

Firstly, our interlocutor begins by saying that Christ died to save this sinful individual and, as such, Christ’s love for humanity extends to everyone regardless of sanctification. Because of this, in an attempt to imitate Christ Himself, we have a duty to love the other “even though he is in sin”. This should be understood as absolutely correct (although we may offer a caveat in a moment) because it identifies not only that the relationship between the moral agent and the sinful individual is one which is exemplified in Christ’s all-forgiving sacrifice, but also that Christ acts as the “middle term” of the relationship⁸: as Christ chose to die in order to share the truth of love, we should endeavour towards the truth of love regardless of what should come our way. The basic fulfilment of the law, the mode by which all law becomes righteous, is that it is speaking the truth with love (Ephesians 4:15) in order to hold to the two Greatest Commandments: to love God and to love the neighbour. These, understood properly, are not separated for a reason: because to love the neighbour is to love the neighbour as God loves both you, my reader, and the individual you are neighbour to. As illustrated in the story of the Good Samaritan, recognising oneself as a moral agent in relation to both God and the other leads to the recognition of one’s duty in love to both God and the other—and this duty is totalising and basic to all actions. By extension, we should also note that these Greatest Commandments are not separated from the law proper either—indeed, that is a position held by the great many liberal theologians who would reduce Christ’s message to a glassy-eyed sentimentality that, unaccountably, led to martyrdom. No, to understand the duty to love God and to love the neighbour is to understand that the law, as expressed in the life of the sanctified individual, is shown through the care of God’s loving “yes!” that holds as a kind of “meta-value” for all other values—morality without love is empty, but love without the law is a secular, relative sentimentality that offers no edifying to the individual.

An error here for our interlocutor, of course, would be to consider that love means simply “sentimentality” or “kindness” as, to love the other, is to will and to do for them that which brings them closer to God in accordance to the softness and meekness of Christ’s example. An excellent beginning to practical theology, in summary. However, then, they instantly recognise that this responsibility leads to hardship and conflict despite the Apostle’s promise that “that we would suffer tribulation” (1 Thessalonians 3:4) and quickly begin to do away with the responsibility to speak truth in love to the other. Ironically, mishearing Paul’s words that no one ought to be unsettled by these trials (1 Thessalonians 3:3), the most minor inconvenience of finding themselves in partial conflict with ruling authorities causes them to become so unsettled that the Greatest Commandments are dismissed—the duty of love to the other must give way to the authority of the state.

God’s Word is instantly dismissed with a sentimental helplessness that overrides the duty of love to the sinner in calling for active penalties from the church and the state. Of course, in the good mind that—regardless of the sin in question—the faithful have a duty to one another to foster love in the life of the other, this does not imply that the church has no role in creating a space where they may “carry and be carried” towards God⁹; that is not our contention, although it is often an accusation that the anti-nationalist Christian might face. My problem here is that this duty is held in dialectical opposition with the duty to love the other in accordance with the Greatest Commandment—regardless of the duty of love, this becomes a matter of handing the sinner over to the relevant authorities and washing one’s hands of the problem. The individual fails before God and falls into “the Crowd” by eschewing their responsibility to carry those who will need to be carried; the sinner is handed over to the state or the church hides behind an elected official¹⁰ in order to do away with the duty to love the neighbour, thereby starting the hand-. It is not clear that Christ ever offered us an example for this kind of slavish hiding in His life nor that the apostles saw that the proper way to live out their faith—as if begging for scraps from the world is the sand on which the Christian shall build their faith in eternal life.

Note that this sentiment is often held in simultaneity with the idea that the church should impose itself upon the state as much as is possible—again, despite the clear bifurcation between the body of Christ and “the world” in scripture (e.g., John 18:36). In a sense, this individual would be wanting to have their cake and eat it: not only is the church different from the world, but it also imposes itself onto the world in order that the necessarily violent practices of the state shall beat faith into the congregants¹¹. The hardships that the Apostle promised us are optional, it appears—we can simply wield those hardships against the Body of Christ itself, these individuals would have it.

Here, what S. K. called “the demonic”¹² becomes clear: the individual recognises their basic duty of love to the other, but quickly dismisses this love because justice is demanded. Incredibly, despite the need to speak the truth in love with the other, the unloveable object of neighbour-love, this individual seems to imply that justice is not and cannot be loving—it is, after all, different from love. Despite calling on His name, this individual places a hard distinction between the justice that loves, i.e., the justice that “carries and is carried” towards God, and the love that Christ requests for us freely to give. By “not accounting for justice among other things”, the individual shows their hand that justice must be secular in its unlovingness, i.e., the reflection of “the world” and its demand for a show of power over the individual, and also that neighbour-love is only as practically useful inasmuch as it allows for weeping in front of the congregation before returning to real life as if there was nothing to weep over. The hands are washed, the blood runs clean off.

By way of preferring or possibly only believing in secular justice, we find ourselves in a situation where the church can offer no religious edification to the individual sinner at all—secular justice is made synonymous with justice and religious justice is an idea that is cast away as a childish fantasy held in an age gone by, before the church had seized the power (or, at the very least, realised that it was possible to seize the power) of the state in order to do its bidding. By extension, the dialectical frailness here, where two concepts are drawn into synonymity without a critical understanding, leads to a case where the church can offer no resource for edification in the task to “carry and be carried” amongst the faithful—either because the church itself is secularised and, as such, offers no religious ground from which to bolster our faith, or the church can only offer secular punishment as it only recognises secular justice and does away with the loving justice of God’s forgiveness. As S. K., standing on Mount Nebo, had warned us, the “Christianity of the New Testament” was swallowed by secular society¹³ and transformed into a simulcra where faith occurs accidentally—a conceptual nightmare.

Our interlocutor is not done, however! This position, by way of proof-texting with the subtlety of a hammer, is then drawn into an erroneous reading of Romans 13 whereby the secular presuppositions are on show: where the Lord God calls for us to follow the state’s laws inasmuch as they are a relative set of practical boundaries which do not cross the eternal majesty of His divine will, the church itself becomes a slave of the state’s law and subjects itself to the judgement of secular officials. The most simple explanation of this is simply the nihilistic demand for blood that comes from “the world”, however the will to do away with one’s responsibility is another problem here: by recognising that the secular law, relative and restrained¹⁴ by God (Romans 13:1), as the law that is paramount, the church is removed from the track that it should walk by where it should grant the state authority as God’s will—not receive authority in place of God’s will!¹⁵ Whereas Paul calls us to “owe no man any thing, but to love one another: for he that loveth another hath fulfilled the law” (Romans 13:8), the would-be Christian nationalist has subverted the church to the state and merely allows the love for the neighbour to enter into the life of the fanatic as an afterthought, a “morality of the gaps” which slips in where the state could never possibly offer such advice because it is more concerned with the very important matters like justice and the spilling of blood. The hands are washed, the blood runs clean off.

But, as with all of God’s actions, the revelation is invisible to those who do not have eyes to see and ears to listen.¹⁶

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It is from this point, my reader, we sojourn onwards—there are theses that need to be expanded and actions that need to be taken. I ask you to use the above as a preamble which frames what is to come, which shapes what has passed, and what illustrates the craggy rocks which we must navigate between. If we end up in agreement with the liberals on certain matters, so be it. But the point of importance, so important to remember when “the world” sets the beat by which the church is ordered to march, is that character, responsibility, and the personal affirmation of love for the other—whether in justice, truth, or any other value that these lives of ours demand we attend to—are central to a genuinely Christian mode of heading forward. If we shall walk in the footsteps in the sand¹⁷, we will have to search further than the power of the state for the fulfilment of the Christian faith; that anyone would believe salvation could be offered from the hands of “the world” that does not know Christ is beyond disbelief, but this does not mean we should fall into an uncritical acceptable of those who would wish to whip us up into their crowds. As S. K. opined:

“The Crowd is untruth, since a crowd either renders the single individual wholly unrepentant and irresponsible, or weakens his responsibility by making it a fraction of his decision.”¹⁸

To emerge from “the Crowd” is to become Hauerwas’ character, to become spirit before God in the joyous responsibility to God and the neighbour in love. For those who can stand this demand and the judgement that comes with it, the joyous idea that one could be judged by the all-knowing in the highest court of all¹⁹, is to become a Christian.

1. The Ecclesiology of Stanley Hauerwas as a Distinctively Christian Theology of Liberation (1970-2000), p. 3-4, the Rev. J. B. Thomson

2. Referenced in Emil Brunner: A Reappraisal, p. 13, A. McGrath

3. “Discourses at the Communion on Fridays” in Christian Discourses, p. 270, S. Kierkegaard

4. An odious phrase and one I don’t encourage you to use, my reader; however, it does serve an illustrative purpose here.

5. Works of Love, p. 160, S. Kierkegaard

6. Famous for his Situation Ethics: The New Morality, a kind of utilitarian approach to neighbour love. For an extended critique of “the New Morality”, see the Wesleyan Theological Journal, vol. 2, no. 1 (1967), particularly essays III-V.

7. “Is the State justified, Christianly, in misleading the people, or in misleading their judgement as to what Christianity is?” from The Instant, no. 3, June 27th 1855, from Attack upon “Christendom”, p. 132, S. Kierkegaard

8. The Sickness Unto Death, p. 38, [Anti-Climacus], ed. S. Kierkegaard

9. Kierkegaard and Radical Discipleship, p. 350, V. Eller

10. Note here that the church in modernity is often a mirror for the state in holding democracy as something which the church body should aspire to, without any real indication that should have been the case in scripture or church history prior to the rise of liberal democracy. See Kierkegaard and the Common Man, Kindle location 120, J. K. Bukdahl

11. “The religious situation” in Articles in The Fatherland, from Attack Upon “Christendom”, p. 31, S. Kierkegaard ; Kierkegaard and the New Nationalism: A Contemporary Reinterpretation the Attack upon Christendom, p. 8, T. J. Millay

12. The Concept of Anxiety: A Simple Psychologically Orienting Deliberation on the Dogmatic Issue of Hereditary Sin, p. 100, [V. Haufniensis]

13. “This Has To Be Said; So Be It Now Said” from Attack Upon “Christendom”, p. 60, S. Kierkegaard

14. The Holy Anarchist, p. 44 M. van Steenwyk

15. “Is the State justified, Christianly, in misleading the people, or in misleading their judgement as to what Christianity is?” from The Instant, no. 3, June 27th 1855, from Attack upon “Christendom”, p. 132, S. Kierkegaard

16. Beyond Immanence: The Theological Vision of Kierkegaard and Barth, p. 296, A. J. Torrance & A. B. Torrance

17. Kierkegaard and Radical Discipleship, p. 392 V. Eller

18. “The Crowd is Untruth”, S. Kierkegaard

19. Repetition and Philosophical Crumbs, p. 69, C. Constantius/J. Climacus, ed. M. G. Piety