563 - Knowing How to Go On When You Do Not Know Where You Are: A Response to John Cobb, Jr.

Knowing How to Go On When You Do Not Know Where You Are: A Response to John Cobb, Jr.
By Stanley Hauerwas

I must confess that I just do not know as much as John Cobb. I do not mean I am less knowledgeable than Cobb, though I may well be, but humility has never been my long suit. Rather, I mean that I simply do not have the basis to know what he seems to know, since I have learned to distrust the practices that produced the knowledge he professes.

Put differently, I think Cobb would like to be a postmodernist, but he remains caught in the discourse of modernity-discourse, for example, that would have us talk of "Christ events" in preference to Jesus Christ. Of course, that is not just his problem but may well be the problem of anyone caught in a time waiting for a world to be born.

Let me try to explain these obscure remarks by calling attention to the title of Professor Cobb's article, "The Christian Reason for Being Progressive." One should not make too much of titles, but this title implies, at least, that he has some idea of what it means to be "progressive." Moreover, it seems that it is a good thing for Christians to support, since being progressive seems to put one on the side of the "good guys." But if you already know what the goods are on grounds different from Christian practice, then I remain unclear why one should worry too much whether being Christian makes much difference one way or the other.

Of course, Cobb starts with the confession that he really is deeply conservative since he belongs to a community that shapes its life in faithfulness to norms derived from ancient events. As he puts it, "To submit oneself to the meanings and norms inherent in such ancient events is surely a conservative stance." I must admit I am not so sure. I am not so

Stanley Hauerwas is a member of the Editorial Council of  THEOLOGY TODAY and Professor of Theological Ethics at Duke University. Among his recent books are After Christendom? How the Church is to Behave if Freedom, Justice, and a Christian Nation are Bad Ideas (1991), Unleashing the Scriptures: Freeing the Bible from Captivity to America (1993), and Dispatches from the Front: Theological Engagements with the Secular (1994).

564 - Knowing How to Go On When You Do Not Know Where You Are: A Response to John Cobb, Jr.

sure because I am unclear where Cobb thinks he is standing to decide to submit or not.

By raising this question, I am not, at this point, questioning Cobb's account of the Christian tradition-though I will raise some questions about that later. Rather, I am wondering on what grounds he believes he can take a position for or against the tradition to decide to submit to it or not. Just to the extent that seems to be supposed, he certainly knows more than I know.

Moreover, the knowledge that allows him to assume such a position, I take it, is that characteristic of modernity and modernity's faith in progress or, perhaps, more accurately put, modern peoples' presumption that progress names a good thing. As Christopher Lasch suggests in his The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics, what is so original about modernity's conception of history is "not the promise of a secular utopia that would bring history to a happy ending but the promise of steady improvement with no foreseeable ending at all. " ¹

Thus, Cobb, while acknowledging their ambiguity, celebrates the development of "modern democracy, human rights, science, technology, and historical consciousness and criticism." I suppose such a litany is more or less required if you want to appear to be on the side of the good guys, to

"Cobb would like to reject the economic character of modernity while preserving the cultural, theological, and political character of modernity. It is nice work if you can get it. . . . "

say nothing of "history," but I must confess I am less than sure I know what such terms mean or, even more, if they are a good idea.

I need to be candid, as my doubts about these matters derive from a quite different set of theological presuppositions than those of Cobb. His is a theology shaped by the attempt to make Christian convictions amenable to the epistemological conventions underlying the modern project. The very confidence he has in knowing where he is betrays his indebtedness to modernity. By modernity, I mean that project to create social orders that would make it possible for each person to have no story except the story you choose when you had no story. One of the main engines of that project was the division of labor that is intrinsic to those economic systems that Cobb now finds so destructive. Cobb would like to reject the economic character of modernity while preserving the cultural, theological, and political character of modernity. It is nice work if you can get it, but I think such a strategy fails to see the close relation between the political systems that Cobb seems to favor and the correlative economic

¹ Christopher Lasch, The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics (New York: Norton, 1991), p. 47.

565 - Knowing How to Go On When You Do Not Know Where You Are: A Response to John Cobb, Jr.

systems that require constant growth. Indeed, the very presumption that we can distinguish between economics and politics is a liberal invention.

The primary goal of those societies we identify as progressive is freedom. Correlatively, equality and justice are thought to be sufficient moral norms to determine social and political arrangements. ² Egalitarianism thus becomes the opium of the masses as we assume we are free, since, by definition, we must have chosen who we are. Of course, the irony of this project is that most who fail to notice that they did not choose the story that they should, have no story except the story they choose when they had no story. Correlatively, democratic ideologies operate to hide those powers that hold us captive.

This is not to deny that Cobb is right that most Christians, whether they are theologically conservative or liberal, assume that Christians should be on the side of history that favors such social systems. They do so in continuation of the project of Constantinian Christianity that assumes Christianity is a civilizational religion .³ Of course, they profess to believe in freedom of religion, the importance of keeping religion out of public policy decisions, and so on, but because they are socially conscious-

"...one of the things that bothers me about Cobb's God is that she is just too damned nice. "

which is usually expressed as the need to be responsible-they must try to infuse our social order with the Christian spirit. Thus Cobb assumes he writes for everyone, that is for all good democratic liberals.

Accordingly, Christian theology is assumed to be a discourse available to anyone. This is particularly true when it comes to God. In this respect I am struck by how much Cobb knows about God. For example he "believes that God is working to save the creation and especially the human species, but I do not believe that God is Lord of history in the sense that God will unilaterally intervene to save us from the consequences of our actions." I must confess, I wonder how he knows that. As Paul Ramsey was fond of saying, "God intends to kill us all in the end." I assume that also means the human species. I see no reason to believe that God's salvation through Jesus' cross and resurrection was about insuring that all of this is going to come out all right in the end.

I am aware that this appeal to cross and resurrection may suggest that I am one of those who, as Cobb puts it, cling to past embodiments of Christ in a manner that blocks the present working of Christ. I may be willing to

² For a wonderful account of how liberalism must work with afar too thin account of moral vocabularies, see Ronald Beiner, What's the Matter with Liberalism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), pp. 39-97.
³ For my general perspective on these matters, see my After Christendom? (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1991).

566 - Knowing How to Go On When You Do Not Know Where You Are: A Response to John Cobb, Jr.

plead guilty to that, except I find it hard so to characterize my position since I am a pacifist. I believe that anyone professing to worship God revealed in the life of Jesus, his death and resurrection, can only do so faithfully as a non-violent disciple. Therefore, I must say that those Christians who thought they were following the "present working of Christ" through their acceptance of violence made a disastrous mistake. The reasons for that acceptance were various but certainly, for many, it represented the attempt to be on the progressive side of history.

I have to confess, moreover, that I believe that Christian non-violence is unintelligible if Jesus was but an exemplification of "creative transformation. " I am always curious how those that would so construe Jesus' life account for the fact he got himself killed. If all Jesus was about was helping us see that God is that "factor in the world that introduces freedom, novelty, spontaneity, life, creativity, responsibility, and love," I cannot see why anyone would think it worth their time to kill him.

"The often-made claim that those who have had an abusive father have trouble calling Godfather may be psychologically true, but it is theologically uninteresting. "

I need to be quite clear that I am not disagreeing with Cobb's suggestion that any interesting tradition is involved in constant change, even when it is its most conservative. As Stanley Fish suggests in his essay "Change" in Doing What Comes Naturally.

Change is not a problem if one posits independent agents who can check their accounts and descriptions against an equally independent reality; for then change is easily explained as a function of the constraints placed by reality on our interpretations of it. But the neatness of this picture is sacrificed if one conceives of persons not as free agents, but as extensions of interpretive communities, communities whose warranting assumptions delimit what can be seen and, therefore, what can be described, for then the describing agent, the object of description, and the descriptive vocabulary are all transformations of one another and there would not seem to be enough room between them to make change a possibility. This impasse can be negotiated by demonstrating that neither interpretive communities nor the mind of community members are stable and fixed but are, rather, moving projects, engines of change, whose work is at the same time assimilative and self-transforming. The conclusion, therefore, is that change is not a problem and, indeed, to the extent that there is a problem, it would seem to be one of explaining how anything ever remains the same. Even more precisely, how, given the vision of a system and of agents continually "on the move," can one even say that a change has occurred since the very notion of change requires, as Robert Nisbet has pointed out, "some object entity or being the identity of which persists through all the successive differences"? ⁴

⁴ Stanley Fish, Doing What Comes Naturally (Durham: Duke University Press, 1989), pp. 152-153.

567 - Knowing How to Go On When You Do Not Know Where You Are: A Response to John Cobb, Jr.

Fish answers the problem of how we can account for continuity by observing that not everything ever changes at once. "Interpretive communities are no more than sets of institutional practices; and while those practices are continually being transformed by the very work that they do, the transformed practice identifies itself and tells its story in relation to general purposes and goals that have survived and form the basis of a continuity." ⁵

I call attention to Fish's account because I think it makes clear that the question is not whether to change or not to change but, rather, how one accounts for continuity sufficient to tell an intelligible story. I have a problem, for example, accounting for continuity as a Christian committed to non-violence, since it is usually claimed most Christians have thought killing permissible, if not a positive good. Of course, as one of my feminist students points out., non-violent Christian's are not a minority if you recognize that most Christians, because they were women, were not allowed to fight. That this was perhaps "nonvoluntary" makes it no less significant.

What I find unclear in Cobb's attempt to "claim the center" in Christian theology is how "creative transformation" works to do that. Indeed, once that is seen as the norm of the tradition, I see no reason why one needs the Jews or Jesus for any account of that tradition. I see no reason, for example, to believe that God dwelt in Jesus in a "peculiarly intimate way." That sounds too much like Jesus had some kind of experience, which is a very Methodist thing to think, but then American Methodism is surely only quite incidentally related to Christianity, (That is not to say Methodists are without any convictions. Now that I am back among the Methodists, I have discovered they do have a conviction: God is nice. Moreover, since we are a sanctificationist people, we have a correlative-we ought to be nice also. I must admit one of the things that bothers me about Cobb's God is that she is just too damned nice.)

How one understands the significance of Jesus obviously has implications for one's understanding of God. In that respect I cannot resist commenting on Cobb's criticism of male images for God. I wish to be clear that I have no objection to feminine imagery for God, but I do not believe that the trinitarian Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is an image, Rather, Trinity is a name. Christians do not believe we know something called God and then further identify God as Trinity. Rather, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is God.

I am deeply sympathetic with feminist critiques of generalized fatherhood language for God though some feminists might object to my reasons for being sympathetic. The only possible reason I can think to call God Father is because Jesus is the Son. That means that fatherhood is not analogous to the cultural presumption that men define the nature of fatherhood. The peculiar presumption that God as father derives its intelligibility from anthropological assumptions about men as fathers was

⁵ Ibid., p. 153.

568 - Knowing How to Go On When You Do Not Know Where You Are: A Response to John Cobb, Jr.

a development possible only after Protestant liberalism gave up the conviction that Jesus is the messiah. The often-made claim that those who have had an abusive father have trouble calling God father may be psychologically true, but it is theologically uninteresting. If one sees that fatherhood is a grammar controlled by christological convictions, then those who have a troubled relation with their biological father are perhaps in the best condition to worship Trinity.

It is hard for us to understand this point because of current Christian sentimentalities about the family. I confess I again am not nearly as confident as Cobb that Christianity has always been as patriarchal as he suggests. My doubts about that involve problems with the essentialization of gender that seem Intrinsic to such claims. I do think, however, that the familization of Christianity since the Reformation has had disastrous results for everyone. By that I mean the presumption that the first way of life among Christians is marriage and family.

Forgotten in that presumption is the Christian practice of singleness as the necessary form of the church's eschatological convictions. For the single remind us that the church, by necessity, grows by witness to the stranger rather than through biology. That is not because, as Cobb suggests, Christians had a negative attitude toward sex but because, by becoming Christian people, they understood that their true family was now the church. Your first loyalty is to church, not family or nation.

I must say, in this respect, I find Cobb's praise of "covenantal relationships" as the best place for the "expression of sexuality for homosexuals and those heterosexuality inclined" to be rather charming, but unconvincing. That seems to underwrite romantic conceptions of sex and marriage that I take it are creating many of our current problems. I have always assumed that one of the hardest aspects of Christianity is the admonition for Christians to love one another even if they are married. The assumption that marriage is primarily a relation between two people for their mutual fulfillment represents the depolitization of marriage in the interest of the politics of liberalism.

Again, one of the disastrous aspects of this emphasis on the family as the hallmark of Christianity is what it does to our understanding of the cross. If you want a clear case of child abuse, there it is. What it means for Jesus to call God father surely means that in this man's life more is at stake than spontaneity, creativity, and love. What is at stake is a battle with powers that would have us kill in the name of protecting the family.

If one believes that we are engaged in that kind of battle, then it makes sense that you need all the help you can get to survive. In particular, you will need a community of people who have the ability to transmit across generations the skills necessary for survival. That community is called the church, and it cannot be incidental to being Christian but rather is constitutive. In short, that is why there is no salvation outside the church.

I am aware such claims sound imperialistic, and they certainly have been when the church has been associated with Constantinian social policy. But when you remember that I assume the church, at most, is a

569 - Knowing How to Go On When You Do Not Know Where You Are: A Response to John Cobb, Jr.

struggling minority quite unsure where it is, then such a claim appears quite different. For example, I take it such a church, while not opposed to dialogue with other religions, assumes that its first task is to witness to what we know rather than to seek agreement about creative transformation.

Accordingly, I do not desire, nor would I know how to give, Christian reasons for being progressive. Rather, I seek to know how to go on when I do not know where I am. I assume that is not a new condition for Christians to be in because being a member of the church becomes necessary exactly because the claims of Jesus are meant to put us out of control. However, once we Christians get over the need to run the world, to pretend that we know not only where we are but where everyone else is or should be, maybe we will be able to live lives so joyful others may actually be attracted to the celebration we, call worship.