5 - Preaching the Gospel in Academy and Society

Preaching the Gospel in Academy and Society
By William C. Placher

"Many academics turn from church or synagogue sometime in early adolescence, and their image of religion remains what they learned in fourth grade Sunday School. It is as if one assumed that the curriculum of a college mathematics department culminated in long division, or that biological research consisted exclusively in gathering the leaves from different species of trees and pressing them flat under three volumes of the World Book Encyclopedia. If those no longer involved with churches want to update their views of religion, they sometimes turn their television dials to the cable evangelists and find most of their prejudices confirmed."

A hundred and fifty years ago, Soren Kierkegaard faced a perplexing problem in his native Denmark. How do you preach Christianity to a country full of people who scarcely understand it at all, but who think they are already Christians? In a non-Christian land, one could say, "Here is something new-let me tell you about Jesus Christ," but nearly all Danes would have responded, "Yes, yes, we know all about it. You see, our whole country is Christian." And yet, they hardly grasped the Christianity of the New Testament at all:

The truth is that Christianity really involves suffering (it invites those who suffer-and in becoming a true Christian you come to suffer). But in "Christendom" it is actually the favored ones who have taken possession of Christianity, the rich and powerful who in addition to all their enjoyment of life also want all their power and might and wealth interpreted as proof of God's grace.¹

So Kierkegaard had to develop the radical strategy of indirection to try to introduce Christianity into Christendom.

Our situation in the contemporary United States is, in one respect, even more complex. Kierkegaard's Denmark was an officially

William C. Placher is Professor of Philosophy and Religion at Wabash College in Crawfordsville, Indiana. His latest book is Unapologetic Theology: A Christian Voice in a Pluralistic Conversation (1989). He is also the author of A History of Christian Theology (1983) and editor of Readings in the History of Christian Theology (1988).

¹ Soren Kierkegaard Journals and Papers, edited and translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1975), vol. 4, no. 4682.

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"Christian" state with a vast majority of officially Christian inhabitants. If he found a dramatic way to call people to true Christian faith, they were hardly in a position to protest; it was the goal they had claimed for themselves all along. We live, however, officially and actually, in a religiously diverse nation. Though most of our citizens are nominally Christians, Kierkegaard would probably judge that very few of them are real Christians, and many of the policies and aspirations of our society hardly seem those to which the gospel calls us. Yet our non-Christian neighbors still think of us "Christians" as a dominant and possibly dangerous force. If we wanted to persuade our fellow Christians to take the gospel's message seriously, and to remind them that it does not concern only some private corners of our lives but every aspect of our existence, then we would dream that a Christian vision might in important ways shape our national life. And some non-Christian fellow citizens, understandably enough, would find that threatening.

After all, in certain obvious ways, we live in a Christian culture. Most Americans remain members of one or another Christian church. Christmas, however secularized, remains the dominant national holiday. The chaplain of the Senate as well as the chaplains of many of our great universities are Christian pastors. Atheists running for political office tend to keep their views quiet. Ask a Jew living in many a small American town, or a Hindu trying to find appropriate food in an American restaurant, or a Muslim exchange student whose final exams fall during Ramadan, the month of fasting, and they will tell you in this culture they are outsiders and Christians are insiders.

On the other hand, it is not just a clever turn of phrase when we speak of our time and place as post-Christian. In their recent book, Resident Aliens, Stanley Hauerwas and William H. Willimon tell the story of the rabbi in Greenville, South Carolina, a friend, who used to challenge the values of the society around him by telling his children, "That's fine for everyone else, but it's not fine for you. You are special. You are different. You are a Jew. You have a different story. A different set of values." What's striking, Hauerwas and Willimon argue, is how many Christian parents today, even in the midst of a Bible-belt town like Greenville, would want to say the same thing to their kids: "Such behavior is fine for everyone else, but not fine for you. You are special. You are different. You have a different story. You have a different set of values. You are a Christian."² When one walks the streets of our cities and sees the homeless hungry in juxtaposition to great wealth, when one considers the foreign and military policies of our nation, when one reflects on the values with which television advertising floods our consciousnesses, the images of success and love

² Stanley Hauerwas and William H. Willimon, Resident Aliens (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1989), p. 18.

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that it fosters, by New Testament standards, ours does not look like a Christian society.³

I

Still, how should one try to introduce a passionate Christian concern into national life? Just because of the residually dominant place of Christianity, we find there are some sorts of things we cannot say. One can call for a Republican nation, or a socialist nation, or say that the values of existentialist humanism or Zen Buddhism ought to come to dominate our culture. But if I call for a "Christian nation," or for the dominance of "Christian values," I sound as if I'm planning to organize a pogrom. I sound that way to any sensitive person who knows some history; I sound that way to myself.

And so, should I remain silent? Should I remain silent in the midst of a culture where materialism and militarism are so powerful, where too many new values turn out to be the merest cloak for selfishness? When I see what I value as a Christian betrayed and ignored, should I say nothing on the grounds that whatever I say can sound to non-Christians potentially oppressive in a culture still nominally Christian?

Perhaps the problem is that I want to carry the day; I want a revived Christian faith to become the dominant voice. Perhaps I ought to be content, instead, that it be one voice among others in an ongoing, pluralistic conversation. But, then, I look at the wealth and poverty, the drugs, the children who are victims of dysfunctional families, and the international adventures; I read again the Gospels with their message of forgiveness and love, and I realize that I do not, at least in part of my heart, want the Christian voice to be simply one among others. I want to persuade those others. The gospel does still feel like it could transform the world. Precisely because the centers of power in our culture retain, in this odd sense, the garments of Christianity, the public advocacy of Christian faith, with all the passion I can bring, seems somehow morally unacceptable. Yet, it is hard to rest satisfied with the view that one can advocate Christianity as long as one is careful not to be too successful.

II

It is often easy for those of us who live in the academic world to discuss such issues of public policy with the relative security of kibitzers on the sidelines. Analogous problems, however, arise on college and university campuses. How should a Christian teach Christian theology in a pluralistic academy?

³ Since television helps shape so much of our lives, maybe this isn't a trivial example: In network television, whether sitcoms or dramatic series, church sometimes plays an important role in the life of African Americans, and there is the occasional Catholic priest, from Father Mulcahy to Father Dowling, but there are no identifiably Protestant white characters.

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The difficulties reach beyond general questions of advocacy in the classroom. One hopes that everyone on a college faculty realizes the evils of manipulating students and the need to give alternative points of view a hearing. Still, if our colleagues teaching libertarian economics or feminist literary interpretation or Zen Buddhism give other points of view an honest shot, but teach with an enthusiasm that wins significant numbers of students over to their own point of view, the institutional ethos congratulates them on their success. If I teach a course on Calvin, fair as I can, pointing out the problems, encouraging dissent, but still inviting students to see Calvin's astonishing vision in all its power, and several Catholic or Muslim or agnostic students turn up at the Presbyterian church wanting to join, then I suspect I'm in trouble-with their parents, with my colleagues, with my own conscience.

Listen to William Scott Green, editor of the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, writing in a recent issue of Soundings:

Faculty in other fields often are glib, ignorant, or hung up about religion and tend to trivialize its study or confuse teaching it with proselytizing about it... Despite its formal presence in curricula and catalogues, religion frequently lacks the neutrality and plausibility of other mainstream and established fields of learning. For very many students and faculty members, religion remains-intellectually and emotionally-a problematic, awkward, sensitive, and volatile topic that seems extraneous to the central educational agenda of secular colleges and universities.⁴

Christian theology, I would add, remains the most problematic, awkward, sensitive, and volatile subject of all. Those who teach it are often themselves Christians, which raises questions about what some of their colleagues will call their "objectivity, " and the nature of the subject-in contrast, say, to the sociology of religion-invites exercises in empathetic imagination that can look, to the suspicious, like calls for sympathy, or even for belief. Moreover, in the contemporary American academy, Christianity itself sometimes seems, in principle, suspect. In much of academia, pluralism and respect for different cultural backgrounds and points of view seem central values, and yet pluralism turns out to have its limits. Ridiculing students of evangelical Christian piety can often be not only tolerated but even encouraged, as if it were part of the mission of an intellectual institution.

Misunderstanding plays a role in all this. Many academics turn from church or synagogue sometime in early adolescence, and their image of religion remains what they learned in fourth grade Sunday School. It is as if one assumed that the curriculum of a college mathematics department culminated in long division, or that biological research consisted exclusively in gathering the leaves from different species of trees and pressing them flat under three volumes of the World Book Encyclopedia. If those no longer involved with churches want to update

⁴ William Scott Green, "Something Strange, Yet Nothing New," Soundings 71 (Summer/Fall 1988), p. 272.

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their views of religion, they sometimes turn their television dials to the cable evangelists and find most of their prejudices confirmed.

But the issue does not always rest on misunderstanding. When some in the academic world mistrust theologians, they justifiably recognize an enemy. For one thing, American higher education is dedicated to producing people who will go on to successful careers in late capitalist society. The Christian gospel does not fit comfortably into such an agenda. Writing of the English public school he loathed, George Orwell remarked that part of the problem was that, at Crossgates, "You were bidden to be at once a Christian and a social success, which is impossible."⁵

Imagine, after all, the admissions literature: "We groom you to success in your careers. Our graduates on average make X thousand a year. We will prepare you for graduate and professional work at the best universities or cocktail party conversation at the best country clubs. And also, we will get you thinking about the service of the crucified son of a carpenter who calls his disciples to give up all that they have and to pick up their crosses and follow." On second thought, perhaps we'd best leave out that last sentence.

III

To this point, many academics will agree with a theologian's suspicions, sharing as we do a certain studied contempt for the industrial and commercial system whose largesse largely pays our salaries. But theology also challenges many of the values of the academy itself. In many ways, after all, our colleges and universities still rest on beliefs about objective truth and disinterested inquiry. We are expected to toss aside our heritage and our history as the price of being accepted in the circle of rational discourse. After all, Descartes began the whole project of modern inquiry by trying to suspend belief on all that he had been taught or grown up believing, so that he could start afresh and, thereby, establish a secure foundation for knowledge.⁶ It is easy to dismiss his project as naive, but contemporary thought often still owes him more than it would like to admit.

For example, in what may be the most influential book written by a living American philosopher, Professor John Rawls of Harvard invites us to think about the meaning of justice. How do you decide what is just, what is fair? The way to do it, according to Rawls, is to imagine yourself in a hypothetical original position behind what he calls the "veil of ignorance." In that odd position, you can't know your own religious beliefs, value preferences, or race or gender or social class. And therefore, Rawls says, you can be objective; you can be fair.⁷

⁵ George Orwell, "Such, Such Were the Joys ..." The Orwell Reader (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1956), p. 443.
⁶ Rene Descartes, Discourse on Method and the Meditations, translated by F. E. Sutcliffe (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1968), p. 95.
⁷ John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971), pp. 137, 139.

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As a number of critics have asked, the question is whether, so defined and limited, you can be a human person capable of rational decisions at all. At minimum, Rawls has to claim that my religious beliefs and the other traditions within which I normally operate are extraneous, irrelevant to my essential self, the "I" that makes moral decisions. Suppose someone says, "Given my religious faith, I think that all human activity ought to aim at the one goal of serving the glory of God. So I just can't make moral decisions in abstraction from my religious beliefs." Such a view, Rawls says in a remarkable passage, cannot be disproven, but "it still strikes us as irrational, or more likely as mad."⁸ Strikes us? The pronoun has no antecedent in the text but presumably refers to the sort of sensible, thoughtful people who go to Harvard and read large books on moral philosophy.

People who are like that, Rawls assumes, share a set of values and assumptions, that derive largely from the Enlightenment and still pervade most colleges and universities.⁹ "The fundamental prejudice of the enlightenment," Hans-Georg Gadamer has written, "is the prejudice against prejudice, which deprives tradition of its power."¹⁰ Put aside all those things your grandparents taught you. Put aside what you have simply fallen into the habit of believing. Dare to think for yourself.¹¹ It is an intellectual vision with its own kind of heroism, and we preach it to the young on our campuses all the time.

The triumph of such values, however, creates problems for the theologian. I am a Christian theologian; I do my theological writing in the context of a particular tradition, that of Reformed Christianity. To do theology in that way presses home the fact of particularity. When you speak, when you think, you always stand somewhere, and the place you stand helps shape what you see. Theologians know that down to their bones.

It might be protested that the contemporary academic world hardly needs to hear the news of the end of the Enlightenment and the triumph of perspectivalism from theologians. Literary critics, artists, and social theorists these days line up, eager to tell us that something called "postmodernism" is carrying the day, that Nietzsche was right and that there is no objective truth. Professor Allan Bloom has even made himself rich and famous with a book decrying the triumph of relativism in the contemporary American academy.¹²

⁸ Ibid., p. 554.
⁹ In his more recent work, Rawls has acknowledged that these assumptions do constitute a particular tradition, rather than representing some universal standard of rationality. See for instance John Rawls, "Kantian Constructivism in Moral Theory," Journal of Philosophy 77 (1980), p. 519.
¹⁰ Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, translated by Garrett Barden and John Cumming (New York: Seabury Press, 1975), pp. 239-240.
¹¹ See Immanuel Kant, "What Is Enlightenment?" translated by Lewis White Beck, On History (Indianapolis: Library of Liberal Arts, 1963), p. 3.
¹² Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (New York: Simon and Schuster,1987).

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And yet I wonder. As I eavesdrop on colleagues when they're not reflecting on methodology but doing their ordinary business as scholars and teachers, I'm struck at how often they seem to act as if they were presenting a body of truth, established at the bar of reason. Even a particular form of cultural relativism, oddly enough, seems to be considered proven once and for all, objectively, no doubt through careful statistical research. Nietzsche hauntingly pictured a world in which God was dead, but life went on exactly as before because no one had noticed. So we sometimes seem to live in an academic world in which objective truth is dead, but life goes on exactly as before. "Your paper, young student," we write in the margin, "did not fully grasp the consequences of a world in which all truth is relative-C+."

Even in the humanities, more buffeted by the winds of particularity and "postmodernism," theology remains a special case. Part of the difference goes back to the concerns with which this essay began. In many ways, the theologian stands, at best, at the margins of the contemporary academy, and yet there's a sense in which the Christian theologian in particular is perceived to represent a threat due to an appeal to a surviving external power base. Maybe it's the residual church affiliation of a college or the survival of an institutional baccalaureate service, but we are often perceived as still holding institutional power. Even if that power does not lie within the college or university itself, there's still a difference. Deconstructionist literary critics can distance themselves from academic norms of rationality, but they have no alternative home outside the academy, no club downtown next to the Burger King where they can go once a week for bingo and discussions of Derrida and Stanley Fish. They may scatter irony around academia from time to time, but we all know that, in the end, they have nowhere else to go. It may all seem a bit silly as seen from over in the school of engineering, but no one thinks it's dangerous.

It is the burden and the glory of theologians that we do strike people as dangerous. Partly that's because we do have another base of power; there are churches downtown meeting once a week, and what we do belongs there as well as here. And that feels, to some of our academic colleagues, threatening. We are not the only folk in such a position. African American scholars and feminists and Marxists, who identify their primary loyalty as resting with a community other than the academy, make the academy very nervous, just as members of any religious community make the academy very nervous when they say that their primary loyalty, even their primary intellectual loyalty, is to church or synagogue or whatever religious institution. We're supposed to be pursuing rational inquiry here, and those who think and live within a particular community that shapes their vision of the world and who don't apologize about the fact raise suspicions about our rationality. Because some form of cultural Christianity still has this odd residual establishment status, Christian theologians seem particularly threatening to our non-Christian colleagues.

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IV

We theologians, like most of our colleagues in other disciplines, are generally a sociable lot, and we dislike feeling ourselves at odds with our friends or out of place in the institutions where we have made our careers. So, we tend to look for strategies that show we do fit in after all.¹³ Let me call the two most common strategies genetic theology and tribal theology.

Generic theology says that what is distinctively Christian-or Buddhist or Jewish-is peripheral to theology's real concerns. Theology, after all, really describes some characteristics of universal human experience or conveys the eternal human quest for the divine. It, therefore, lies quite comfortably in the bosom of the humanities, for it is simply the study of one aspect of human experience among others. In many "religious studies" departments, such assumptions are built into the introductory course, defined as studying a single phenomenon called "religion," which appears around the world in various manifestations. Such a perspective, George Lindbeck writes, understands "all religions as possible sources of symbols to be used eclectically in articulating, clarifying, and organizing the experiences of the inner self. Religions are seen as multiple suppliers of different forms of a single commodity needed for transcendent self-expression and self-realization."¹⁴

This is a generous, tolerant point of view, but it does not represent what most religions have traditionally said about themselves. Listen to the thirteenth-century Zen Buddhist, Dogen: "Those who are lax in their thinking are saying that the essence of Taoism, Confucianism and Buddhism is identical, that the difference is only that of entrance into the way.... If people say such things, Buddhism is already gone from them."¹⁵ Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism, Dogen insisted, are not different ways of saying the same thing; they are saying different things. So it is generally with the world's religions on matters as basic as how many gods there are, whether this world is a good creation or an illusion, how God has been revealed to us, and so on.

If religious faiths so obviously disagree with one another, theologians seeking not to offend their colle agues are tempted to turn to the form of radical relativism I've called tribalism. Yes, they concede, what we believe is different from what those other folk believe, but it is just

¹³ Jonathan Z. Smith was speaking in Santa Barbara at a conference whose prospectus declared, "It was clearly recognized at Santa Barbara that the task was to develop the academic study of religion in a manner appropriate to the letters and science mission of a modern, secular state university." He observed, "Note which party conforms 'in a manner appropriate' to whom. The political distinction was, at heart, a counsel to passivity and integration, not to interesting thought." "'Religion' and 'Religious Studies' No Difference at All," Soundings 71 (Summer/Fall 1988), p. 232.
¹⁴ George. Lindbeck, The Nature of Doctrine (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1984), p. 22.
¹⁵ From the "Shobogenzo" of Dogen, in Phra Khantipalo, Tolerance: A Study from Buddhist Sources (London: Rider, 1964), p. 154.

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what we believe, in our tribe, our particular custom, no judgment of right or wrong implied on anyone else.

Again, a generous point of view, but, again, not what the religions themselves really seem to be saying. In the Bhagavad Gita, the Lord Krishna proclaims:

Of the whole world I am
The origin and the dissolution too.
Than me no other higher thing
Whatsoever exists....
I am the dolphin of water-monsters,
Of rivers I am the Ganges.
Of creations the beginning and the end....
I am the death that carries off all
And the origin of things that are to be.¹⁶

And in the Hebrew Scriptures, the Lord God tells the prophet Amos that he not only brought the Israelites out of Egypt but the Philistines from Caphtor and the Aramaeans from Kir. He is the Lord of all history. Indeed:

He who made the Pleiades and Orion,
who turned darkness into morning
and darkened day into night, who summoned the waters of the sea
and poured them over the earth ...
he who does this, his name is Yahweh.¹⁷

These are not claims about what our tribe believes, how we happen to do things, but claims about the universal order of all creation.

Theology tends to adjust to an academic environment by adopting an odd mixture of genericism and tribalism. This is just a symbol of universal experience, we say, and as for the symbol, well, it's the one we happen to use, but, shucks, pick whatever makes you comfortable.

But that is not what the Gita claims, or Amos, or Augustine, or the Koran. It is not what one says at a deathbed; it is not what inspired John Calvin or Martin Luther King, or what helps Desmond Tutu even now keep his courage up. Religious folk, by and large, believe in their particular religious point of view, and they believe it's true. And yet it goes against so much of what the modern academy stands for to claim truth for conclusions that can only be reached by way of faith. At the founding of the first great modern scientific university, the University of Berlin, in 1809, the philosopher Fichte proposed getting rid of the theology faculty altogether:

If theology insists on a God who wills anything without cause, the content of whose will no human being can grasp through his own capacities but only through direct divine communication by way of special emissaries, if it insists that such a communication has taken place and the result is set

¹⁶ The Bhagavad Gita, translated by Franklin Edgerton (New York: Harper Torch books, 1964), 7.6-7, 10.31-32.
¹⁷ Amos 9:7, 5:8-9 (New English Bible translation, modified).

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forth in certain sacred books ... then a school of the use of reason can have nothing to do with it.¹⁸

Fichte's heirs remain with us; their name is legion, and part of me does not even disagree with them. The Christian gospel may be true, but even Christians, when we are being honest, do not claim that it is reasonable. And perhaps a college or a university ought to be a school of reason.

V

If we turn again to the question of Christian contributions to American debates on public policy, analogous questions arise. Just as, perhaps, a university ought to be a school of the use of reason, so, perhaps, American society ought to be a secular state. Just as the Christian theologian, therefore, has an ambiguous place in the academy, so the Christian, therefore, has an ambiguous place in American political life.

It is comforting for those of us on the left of the political spectrum to think that such problems afflict only Jerry Falwell or anti-abortion activists. They, after all, seem to be the ones trying to impose a "Christian" agenda onto American political life. If the problem arises only in relation to the "Christian right," however, that is a devastating comment on the rest of us. It may be that we have mirrored values and assumptions already widespread elsewhere in our culture so well that nobody thinks of us as the advocates of a distinctively "Christian" agenda. If there were a larger serious "Christian left" in this country, it would have serious and distinctively Christian things to say about peace, justice, and much more. Such Christians' views would, no doubt, overlap with those of many non-Christians on a wide range of particular issues, but their reasons for holding those views, and the way the collection of their views fits together, would be different. To the extent that Christians' views do become distinctive, however, our non-Christian neighbors would raise legitimate questions about our rights as advocates of a religious point of view within American political life.

On these issues, too, one could find "genericists," whose policy positions involve nothing distinctively Christian, and "tribalists," who call for Christian values within the Christian community in a way that could have no application to the wider, pluralistic society. The flaws of unsubtle positions are easy to see. It is more interesting to consider thoughtful, nuanced views that still raise these questions. Robert Bellah and Stanley Hauerwas have developed two of the most thoughtful recent accounts of how Christians might contribute to public debates in contemporary American society, yet the work of neither solves the question of how Christians can advocate a distinctive

¹⁸ Johann Gottlieb Fichte, "Dedusierter Plan einer in Berline Zuerrichtenden hoheren Lehrenstalt," paraphrased in some unpublished manuscripts by Hans W. Frei.

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point of view without justifiably arousing the worries of our non-Christian fellow citizens.¹⁹

In Habits of the Heart, Bellah and his co-authors express deep concern about nothing less than the future of the United States. "The time may be approaching when we will either reform our republic or fall into the hands of despotism, as many republics have done before us. "²⁰ Central to the danger that confronts us is a "reigning ideology of individualism" that "has become almost hegemonic in our universities and much of the middle class." That individualism teaches that we make moral choices on the basis of personal preferences, that we belong to communities only to the extent that, and only as long as, they serve our personal needs. "The right act is simply the one that yields the agent the most exciting challenge or the most good feeling ... the self and its feelings become our only moral guide." A culture dominated by such an individualism, the authors argue, will lack the shared sense of values, purposes, and loyalties necessary to the sustaining of a healthy republic.

Things used to be better, they think. The founders of our republic shared such common purposes and loyalties, and "civic republicanism and biblical traditions" long sustained them. "For a long time, our society was held together, even in periods of rapid change, by a largely liberal Protestant cultural center that sought to reconcile the claims of community and individuality. Rejecting both chaotic openness and authoritarian closure, representatives of this cultural center defended tradition-some version of the civic republican and biblical traditions-but not traditionalism."²¹ It is to these traditions that the book seeks to recall us: "Sharing practices of commitment, rooted in religious life and civic organization, helps us identify with others different from ourselves yet joined with us not only in interdependence and a common destiny but by common ends as well. Because we share a common tradition, certain habits of the heart, we can work together to construct a common future."²²

It is a vision many thoughtful Christians will find attractive. In a culture that often seems to have lost a sense of commonality sufficient to get us to sacrifice for the common good, where "no new taxes" sometimes seems to summarize the national purpose, here is a call to higher aims, and one which sees Christian churches as important to the task at hand.²³ Yet the book raises disturbing questions.

Bellah and his coauthors paint a very positive picture of the

¹⁹ I borrowed the term "tribalist" from James Gustafson's critique of Hauerwas. See James M. Gustafson, "The Sectarian Temptation," Proceedings of the Catholic Theological Society 40 (1985), pp. 83-94. But, for reasons indicated, I think Gustafson is unfair to Hauerwas.
²⁰ Robert N. Bellah, Richard Madsen, William M. Sullivan, Ann Swidler, and Steven M. Tipton, Habits of the Heart (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), p. 294.
²¹ Ibid., p. 155.
²² Ibid., p. 252.
²³ See, for instance, Ibid., p. 247.

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American heritage. Many of the founding fathers they so admire were slave-owners who shared a problematically patriarchal view of the world. It has often been only fighting wars or expanding westward at the expense of the indigenous population that gave our citizens that clear sense of national purpose that the authors of Habits of the Heart would like to recover.²⁴ One can overstate such critiques; the American tradition really does contain much to admire. But adherents of "biblical traditions" cannot in conscience simply join in a critique of contemporary individualism. They have to ask hard questions about the traditions and values that existed before that individualism subverted them. A truly biblical critique might be far more radical than a call for the return to the good old days.

The problem does not concern only particular issues but the very role one assigns to religion. Habits of the Heart properly diagnoses the dangers of a therapeutic culture where religion is valued only as useful to the pleasures of the individual. But it seems to replace that with a still utilitarian view of religion in service of the national good. We need to foster biblical traditions, the authors seem to argue, because, along with civic republicanism, they can help make America a healthier civic culture.²⁵ But biblical religion, taken seriously, may lead not only to a more radical critique of American culture but also to a non-utilitarian perspective in which Christians follow their calling as Christians simply because that is what their faith calls them to do.²⁶ Sometimes that might serve the health of the American body politic, sometimes not, and, when not, then Christians may have to say to hell with fostering the American body politic. We are not Christians in service of something else. Bellah and his coauthors know that, but their book too often seems to lose sight of it.

Stanley Hauerwas, on the other hand, never loses sight of the integrity of the church's mission as a church. In an extensive series of books and articles, Hauerwas has made the case that the primary purpose of the church is not to try to shape the society around it but simply to be the church: "The first task of the church is to exhibit in our common life the kind of community possible when trust, and not fear, rules our lives."²⁷ This has led some to accuse him of withdrawing from concerns for the wider society, but such charges seem unfair. For Hauerwas, the witness the church can provide of a different sort of life,

²⁴ In a volume of essays on Habits of the Heart, Charles H. Reynolds and Ralph V. Norman, Community in America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), see particularly Jean Bethke Elshtain, "Citizenship and Armed Civic Virtue," pp. 47-55, and Vincent Harding, "Toward a Darkly Radiant Vision of America's Truth," pp. 67-83.
²⁵ George Washington, who, "whatever his private beliefs, was a pillar of the Episcopal church . .. a frequent attender ... [who] long served as vestryman, though he was never observed to take communion," comes off as a hero of the story. He was involved in the aspects of religion that serve the civic good.
²⁶ See George Hunsinger, "Where the Battle Rages: Confessing Christ in America Today," Dialog 26 (1987), pp. 264-274.
²⁷ Stanley Hauerwas, A Community of Character (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), p. 85.

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grounded on different presuppositions, is precisely the most useful contribution it can make to the wider society, because it is the one contribution it uniquely can make.²⁸ But the reason to be a Christian is not because the Christian community is socially useful: "The church is too often justified by believers, and tolerated by nonbelievers, as a potential agent for justice or some other good effect. In contrast, I contend that the only reason for being Christian ... is because Christian convictions are true."²⁹

Because Christians believe certain things to be true, they conclude that one ought to live in a certain way, a way that might make no sense to those who don't share their beliefs. For the sake of peace or of justice, those with confidence that God is ultimately in control of history might be willing to take short-term risks that even those of good will who do not share such faith and who, therefore, must depend on the utilitarian calculus of this world, would not take. We might be willing to avoid violence, even at the price of self-sacrifice, in a way that we could justify only given our theological assumptions.

In pursuing such a self-consciously Christian ethic, Hauerwas is not, as his critics sometimes charge, advocating withdrawal from concern with public issues. He is simply saying that Christian churches who care for their members with AIDS or welcome the homeless into their homes or refuse to admit to the Lord's Table "those who make a living from building weapons"³⁰ and, thereby, witness to their neighbors the possibility of a different kind of community, might make a more significant contribution to our general public discourse than those who pass resolutions urging Congress to take action on one or another matter. As a church, they can take actions that follow from their theological convictions. Such actions might then cause non-Christian neighbors to stop and think about their deepest assumptions, and, thus, have a significant social impact.

All that makes good sense, but Christians in the United States today play roles other than as church members. The members of Methodist or Presbyterian congregations may be state legislators or county judges or editors of local newspapers or school superintendents. They have to decide how to perform those other roles, and one might think that their Christian faith would help them. But here Hauerwas gives little guidance. Should Christians in Congress vote for pacifist policies? Should they support radical social reforms? Some of these policies, Hauerwas acknowledges, can be defended only on the basis of theological premises. So non-Christians might reasonably protest if Christians tried to make them matters of public policy, just as they do

²⁸ "I have no interest in legitimating and/or recommending a withdrawal of Christians or the church from social or political affairs. I simply want them to be there as Christians and as church." Stanley Hauerwas, Against the Nations (Minneapolis: Winston Press, 1985), p. 1.
²⁹ Hauerwas, A Community of Character, p. 1. "Our ethical positions arise out of our theological claims." Hauerwas and Willimon, Resident Aliens, p. 75.
³⁰ Hauerwas and Willimon, Resident Aliens, p. 160.

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when the "Christian right" attempts to shape public policy. But what then are these Christians to do? Resign? Advocate one set of policies among fellow Christians but vote for another? Hauerwas will say that what they do as church members is more important to their Christian witness than what they do in these other roles, but, in the meantime, they have to do something in those other capacities, and what should it be?

VI

So the original problem returns, the problem of how to work toward the recovery of authentic Christianity in the midst of a religiously pluralistic society. Bellah's combination of "biblical traditions" and civic republicanism might be inoffensive to our non-Christian neighbors, but it fails to provide a radical and distinctively Christian critique, not merely of contemporary individualism, but of more traditional American values. In Kierkegaard's terms, it risks inviting a return to "Christendom." Hauerwas provides the radical critique, but leaves it unclear how Christians should function in their roles as citizens. If we did succeed in recalling all those nominal Christians to authentic Christian witness, their faith would have some impact on every aspect of their lives. Since most of our citizens are still at least nominally Christian, if so revivified, they might well start to do things that would leave non-Christian Americans feeling understandably threatened.

Both Bellah and Hauerwas have the virtue, to be sure, of facing the problem. Most of our denominations have fallen into the habit of passing resolutions urging governmental action on a range of questions, while continuing to assume that the imposition of Christian values on the wider culture is a problem only for the right wing. We get away with it because we have so lost distinctive Christian witness that our resolutions do not seem to represent a particularly Christian point of view-and, perhaps, because they tend to have so little impact. Bellah and Hauerwas are both more sophisticated than that. They at least call our attention to the problem.

Those of us who are Christians, and perhaps particularly those who teach Christian theology in colleges and universities, have also fallen into avoiding some difficult issues. We cling to very legitimate concerns about the appropriate limits of a teacher's advocacy in the classroom as a way of avoiding questions about our own role as representatives of a particular point of view within the community of scholars. We know there are illegitimate ways of trying to impose a point of view, and we let that be the excuse for not thinking too much about whether there are legitimate ways to stand for something.

As a model for thinking about these problems, I come back to Kierkegaard, who dealt so daringly with the problems of preaching Christianity in a culture that thinks of itself as already Christian. Kierkegaard made himself into an outsider, because it was the only way he knew how to preach the gospel. "To become a Christian in the

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New Testament sense," he wrote, "is such a radical change that, humanly speaking, one must say that it is the heaviest trial to a family that one of its members becomes a Christian. For in such a Christian the God-relationship becomes so predominant that he is not 'lost' in the ordinary sense of the word; no, in a far deeper sense than dying he is lost to everything that is called family."³¹

The strategies of his authorship have become familiar: indirection, pseudonymity, irony. He keeps starting with the assumptions of his audience and then exploding them from within. He preaches the simplicity of the gospel, and, simultaneously, he sets to work with baroque complexity to undercut alternative visions of the world, until there might just be a moment when, by grace, the word of the gospel could be heard.

But for Kierkegaard-and here comes the hard part-the strategies shaped not just his authorship, but his life. He posed as a frivolous young man, he avoided ordination and marriage, he made himself a figure to be ridiculed. He took on the local scandal sheet, the nineteenth-century Danish equivalent of the National Enquirer, setting himself up for its campaign to humiliate him. He ended his life impoverished, isolated, ignored.

If we are to communicate Christian faith with passion in a way that does not become the morally inappropriate assertion of cultural dominance, then, in a culture like ours, we have to keep rejecting the advantages that Christianity's residual cultural status could provide. We have to keep making ourselves into outsiders who could speak with a prophetic voice. I suspect this is one reason that theologians of liberation have been the most powerful recent public witnesses of Christian faith. They do, for social reasons, speak from the outside. It is from the margins, from the underside, that one can speak a prophetic Christian word that does not threaten one's non-Christian fellow citizens.

Some of us, therefore, will find ourselves called to function as Christian outsiders in non-Christian academic settings, consistently reminding our colleagues that we don't quite fit in and, then, living with the consequences, keeping our status and relations a bit uncomfortable. Others will struggle to preserve church-related colleges as counter-cultural enclaves in tension with some of the dominant themes of American academic life, not as bastions of residual establishment respectability, but, on the contrary, as places devoted to certain kinds of risk, to occasional rebellions-polite but firm-against the dominant values of American society and the academic world, which mirrors it in so many ways. For some, such an approach will mean participation in the political process, but always with a bit of irony, always as uncomfortable allies who ask awkward questions just at the moment of victory. For others, it will mean standing radically outside

³¹ Sóren Kierkegaard, Attack upon 'Christendom,' translated by Walter Lowrie (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968), p. 221.

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the ordinary political system, as fundamental critics of the way the United States does its public business, whether our critique is explicit or takes the implicit form of constituting communities founded on different values and different presuppositions. But none of us will make either ourselves or our neighbors very comfortable. That seems part of the job, somehow.

We are often tempted to accept our welcome as, first of all, colleagues in the academy or citizens of the nation. As Christians, we need to recognize the goods that academy and nation serve and participate in that service as we are called. But we need to remember that these are not our first callings. First of all, we live in solidarity with our fellow Christians and with the oppressed of the earth because, first of all, we are who we are, people reconciled with God, people with hope, only in solidarity with the crucified Jesus.