Does Love Supplant Justice?

For my birthday I took the liberty of ordering two books that have been bouncing around theology blogs for the past month or so. I started Justice: Rights and Wrongs by Nicholas Wolterstorff, which seeks to ground, to the exclusion of any other narratives, the idea of inherent human rights within theism. I'm struggling through it for several reasons, the main being that I'm not adept enough in his fields of interest to know whether he is pulling a narrative over my head or not. This is not a case of the unreliable narrator but a case of the unreliable reader. I have little knowledge with which to judge his claims so I have to read suspiciously lest I be convinced of ideas that I don't want to, or that I'm not supposed to be convinced of. Ahh the life of a lay-anything feels so unrewarding at times.

(For critics who can offer a more authoritative analysis of the book, check out The Immanent Frame blog)

Regardless, I carry on.

The title question arises from this Wolterstorff analysis:

There has long been a powerful strand of thought in the Christian tradition that de-justicizes the New Testament. The New Testament, so it is said, is about love, not about justice. Justice is the theme of the Old Testament; love, the theme of the New. The Christian puts considerations of justice behind her. Love is her motive and guide. Many non-Christians have gone along and accepted that love supplants justice in the New Testament (96).

Obviously he is going to argue that this should not be the case, and I'm not there in his text yet, but I wanted to proffer the question before I get his answer to explore if we have experienced or assumed this to be true. In thinking on this, I keep coming back to a line President Obama said in his Call to Renewal speech in 2006 that seems to reinforce a similar interpretation of the New Testament. Describing a hypothetical Christian nation, Obama asks which scriptures should guide public policy and ends with this thought: "Or should we just stick to the Sermon on the Mount - a passage that is so radical that it's doubtful that our own Defense Department would survive its application?" Now Obama is not advocating such a move, but his interpretation of the Sermon on the Mount as so radical that any rights or obligations to defend oneself cannot be justified seems to judge the words of Jesus as having little to do with justice and a whole lot to do with the idea of love. Of course the matter is not settled merely by Obama's interpretation of a single passage in the New Testament, but it serves as one example of how I and others view the relationship between love and justice in the New Testament.

My thoughts on this matter have been shaped by the prevalent idea of the Kenotic Christ as example for the Christian and the Church. The well weathered chapter, Philippians 2 serves as the starting point to find the Kenotic Christ:

"5 Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, 6 who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, 7 but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, 8 he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death-- even death on a cross."

I have always related Kenosis, or self-emptying, to a relinquishment of power. With lit crit as my first introduction to theory, I've often viewed the sum of human relations as a vast network of Foucautian power dynamics. If we are to view Christ as the figure who willingly empties oneself of power, and if that is to be our example, than it does appear that a kenotic love supplants justice. (caveat: I play fast and loose with the scriptures)

This is clearly an idea that we cannot build a legal system on. The early Christians recognized that, and faced with the choice of either going down in a kenotic flame or developing a strategy to somehow instill order and justice, chose the latter and thus the saculem, or secular for all of us who don't read Latin was created. (I'm not quite making this up as I go along. Most of this analysis comes from theology books I didn't make adequate notes on.) Or, as Augustine puts it, there is the City of God and the City of Man. They have different ideas of time and different ideas of justice. If we view the Secular as the time before the eschatological event of Christ's return, than we can develop an idea of worldly justice immune to the radical kenosis of Christ. Which is what we kind of have. Although it makes the example of the kenotic Christ a little tough to apply.

Does that subsume the call of Christ into a form of private pietism while Secular Justice becomes the watchword of all humanity? Or does the New Testament have a lot to say about Justice? I get the feeling that a lot of theologians these days feel like secular logic and justification is in the process of collapsing on itself. There are some, like Rowan Williams who argues that Justice and Human Rights can be adequately grounded without the support of Christianity (listen to his fabulous LSE podcast lecture), but for others like the Radical Orthodox troop and Stanley Hauerwas, Secular understandings of Justice cannot substantiate the worth or rights of a human without eschatology. If I'm not totally off base here, I think they suggest that Christians should start infusing the public square with the kenotic ethic of Christ. What that does to Justice I have no idea, but I take it to mean that Christians should use that ethic as an example and follow it to its logical conclusion by adopting non-violent persuasions and learning how to, not fight for them, but die for them.

I realize I've been a bit too free-wheeling in my attempt to describe how I feel how the idea that love supplants justice might be true, or at least still finds some expressions in current theology. In order to adequately flesh this idea out it is clear that I need to do some work and fill in some holes with references and clearer thought, but after all, this is a blog, and I'm not quite there yet. But I do hope I have described a cogent, if not reputable narrative concerning the demands of justice and love. I do ask those of you who wade in the theological waters more deeply than myself to offer advice and admonishment as needed, especially if I have incorrectly characterized some thinkers/texts.

They'd Advertise--You Know!

A Pact

I make a pact with you, Walt Whitman -
I have detested you long enough.
I come to you as a grown child
Who has had a pig-headed father;
I am old enough now to make friends.
It was you that broke the new wood,
Now is a time for carving.
We have one sap and one root -
Let there be commerce between us.

Ezra Pound



Through the usual channels in which I find interesting things, I came across a blog post from one Brett McCracken entitled: "Are You a Christian Hipster?", a cleverly written piece describing and defining the parameters of just who fits into the category of Christian Hipster.

Here is the prognosis:

Things they don’t like:
Christian hipsters don’t like megachurches, altar calls, and door-to-door evangelism. They don’t really like John Eldredge’s Wild at Heart or youth pastors who talk too much about Braveheart. In general, they tend not to like Mel Gibson and have come to really dislike The Passion for being overly bloody and maybe a little sadistic. They don’t like people like Pat Robertson, who on The 700 Club famously said that America should “take Hugo Chavez out”; and they don’t particularly like The 700 Club either, except to make fun of it. They don’t like evangelical leaders who get too involved in politics, such as James Dobson or Jerry Falwell, who once said of terrorists that America should “blow them all away in the name of the Lord.” They don’t like TBN, PAX, or Joel Osteen. They do have a wry fondness for Benny Hinn, however.

Christian hipsters tend not to like contemporary Christian music (CCM), or Christian films (except ironically), or any non-book item sold at Family Christian Stores. They hate warehouse churches or churches with American flags on stage, or churches with any flag on stage, really. They prefer “Christ follower” to “Christian” and can’t stand the phrases “soul winning” or “non-denominational,” and they could do without weird and awkward evangelistic methods including (but not limited to): sock puppets, ventriloquism, mimes, sign language, “beach evangelism,” and modern dance. Surprisingly, they don’t really have that big of a problem with old school evangelists like Billy Graham and Billy Sunday and kind of love the really wild ones like Aimee Semple McPherson.

Things they like:
Christian hipsters like music, movies, and books that are well-respected by their respective artistic communities—Christian or not. They love books like Resident Aliens by Stanley Hauerwas and Will Willimon, Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger by Ron Sider, God’s Politics by Jim Wallis, and The Imitation of Christ by Thomas a Kempis. They tend to be fans of any number of the following authors: Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy, Wendell Berry, Thomas Merton, John Howard Yoder, Walter Brueggemann, N.T. Wright, Brennan Manning, Eugene Peterson, Anne Lamott, C.S. Lewis, G.K. Chesterton, Henri Nouwen, Soren Kierkegaard, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Annie Dillard, Marilynne Robison, Chuck Klosterman, David Sedaris, or anything ancient and/or philosophically important.

Christian hipsters love thinking and acting Catholic, even if they are thoroughly Protestant. They love the Pope, liturgy, incense, lectio divina, Lent, and timeless phrases like “Thanks be to God” or “Peace of Christ be with you.” They enjoy Eastern Orthodox churches and mysterious iconography, and they love the elaborate cathedrals of Europe (even if they are too museum-like for hipster tastes). Christian hipsters also love taking communion with real Port, and they don’t mind common cups. They love poetry readings, worshipping with candles, and smoking pipes while talking about God. Some of them like smoking a lot of different things.

Christian hipsters love breaking the taboos that used to be taboo for Christians. They love piercings, dressing a little goth, getting lots of tattoos (the Christian Tattoo Association now lists more than 100 member shops), carrying flasks and smoking cloves. A lot of them love skateboarding and surfing, and many of them play in bands. They tend to get jobs working for churches, parachurch organizations, non-profits, or the government. They are, on the whole, a little more sincere and idealistic than their secular hipster counterparts."

I am uncomfortable with such a biting analysis, because a great many of my interests, hobbies, and authors are considered to be things Christian Hipsters like. I don't want to be labeled. Or, I don't want the real me, the me that feels like my pursuits and interests matter to be labeled. But why?

Possible reasons:
1. The "likes" have not been fashioned, attached to my clothing, or put into my iPod for style points, but instead are the sincere results of my desire for there to be "commerce" between Christianity and myself. I think many of those now labeled Christian Hipsters are attempting the noble art of recovering Christianity from the "Pig-headed" version of Christianity best exemplified in the "Things they don't like" category. Whether the experiences of our youth have so stalwartly affixed Christianity to our identity, or whether we are convicted by its story, or whether we are just trying to give the religion a fair shake, we do so with convictions and reasons, having very little to do with the apparent coolness of our texts. Does anybody really read Annie Dillard because she is cool? (Although, judging from the picture I can see why, apart from her excellent talent, why she was published so early in her life.)


I realize I might have hit a snag with reason #1 in that I'm assuming that a label functions as an attempt to explain like interests common among a subset of the population as a product of popularity or group think. I don't think that this is usually the case, but I do think that the post tries to establish the connection.

2. Although the post is clever, it strikes me as engaging in the same type of commentary as shows like South Park. No matter how striking, apt, or well done a piece of social commentary is, if it is not in someway productive or redemptive, I have no use for it. Commentary is easy, theology is hard.

[288]
I'm Nobody! Who are you?
Are you--Nobody--Too?
Then there's a pair of us?
Don't tell! they'd advertise--you know!

How dreary--to be--Somebody!
How public--like a Frog--
To tell one's name--the livelong June--
To an admiring Bog!

-- Emily Dickinson

3. In identifying with what Brett considers a Christian Hipster to be, I realize I have allowed the description of the group to apply too directly to myself. Hawthorne, in "The Blithedale Romance" has a nice short applicable quote:

"It is not, I apprehend, a healthy kind of mental occupation, to devote ourselves too exclusively to the study of individual men and women...if we take the the freedom to put a friend under our microscope, we thereby insulate him from many of his true relations, magnify his peculiarities, inevitably tear him into parts, and, of course patch him very clumsily together again. What wonder, then, should we be frightened by the aspect of a monster, which after all--though we can point to every feature of his deformity in the real personage--may be said to have been created mainly by ourselves!" (69).

There is a sense in which our identities can only be pegged when we are not insulated from our "true relations". We are social creatures. Our religion, race, and style cannot properly define who we are. We are known through our environment of friends and relationships. And while many of the things listed in the post correlate with my identity, they do not describe me. Labels tend to efface the social and relational aspects of identity. The Dickinson poem points to this idea. Although both parties in the poem claim nobody status, we can interpret their claim as a preservation tool from commodification. The admiring Bog will brand you. But what can a Bog know about the livelong June? The answer is that it can't know anything about the livelong June. But it will advertise nonetheless. It will break down the beauty until only a frog remains.

That's why I'm uncomfortable with the Christian Hipster label. I don't know where all of the American Lit came from, I suppose I'll have to proudly wear my P.O.E.M. shirt to bed (Professional Organization of English Majors). I guess I can live with that label.

Betting On a Losing Horse (Church Hunting pt. 3)

I’ve always been a fan of George Will. It is probably because my Dad reads George Will and the fact that George Will likes baseball and has written an excellent book about it doesn’t hurt either. While I don’t subscribe to his conservative views, I appreciate his perspective and opinion on the broad range of issues he decides to tackle. I genuinely believe that his voice enriches the debate over nation and politics regardless of what he advocates.

His latest editorial, you can find it here, assess the current state of the Episcopalian denomination. It is a good quick read that rings true on many accounts. The Anglican faith in general is imploding on itself because of a number of issues, but of main import is homosexuality. Funnily enough, my faith journey has led me to the Episcopal Church as the starting point in my church hunt. We will see if it is still around by the time I find a church community.

The problem centers around the question of: With whom may we have fellowship? The Episcopal Church (the U.S. branch of Anglicanism) might have jumped the gun a little early and stated that homosexuals may be ordained and married and have fellowship in the Church. It looks like most of the African Anglicans, and now Pittsburgh have answered the question with a resounding no, they may not have fellowship on those terms. Their answer of no, at least for now, bears the implications that all those who condone the Episcopal Church cannot share in their fellowship either. Church divisions, especially ones as massive a scale as this one should not be treated lightly. Katie and I were troubled by a church we had hoped to attend shamedly and a matter of factly stated on its website, “church splits are a dime a dozen”. Surely we can do better than that.

Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, has managed to change the question from “with whom may we have fellowship”, to “how can we best negotiate our differences and still call ourselves the body of Christ?” Unfortunately, the question is slowly being answered outside of such a context. For to locate our differences with doctrine in a context that places emphasis on unity does not resolve any differences at all. I think that is the point. We must learn to live in the buffer between question and answer, at least in the context of a multinational movement. As a body, we must always seek understanding of those that fall on other sides of issues, we must learn how to befriend and take communion with those who differ from us, not in the hope of changing belief or opinion, but to simply keep talking because the Church, as the approximation of the future Kingdom of God can never ultimately become the Kingdom of God. It is out of our purview and scope, and therefore, the barometer for “with whom may we have fellowship with” must be tuned to the virtues and actions that make us Christians and not who we declare may become Christians. Admittedly, that can only take us so far. And on those issues in which, centuries later, the answer has been resolved slowly, we must take heart in the belief, made famous by the Martin Luther King quote that: “The arc of the moral universe is long, But it bends toward justice”. Of course, if that is all that we’ve got, then we are in a very messy state indeed. But the Church is not a democracy; it cannot be governed by an oppressive majority or a progressive minority. It sometimes feels like, no matter if the denomination is Episcopalian or not, membership in a Church is like picking the wrong horse.


I keep going back and forth with these problems, and I don’t seem to be coming to any viable conclusions or even an agreeable state of mind. Have patience with this current attempt to broach a complicated issue, and keep in mind that I am still thinking and praying about these things.

The Elusive Ecclesiological Jaguar Shark (Church Hunting pt. 2)

So how does the belief that the Church is an always approximation of God’s Kingdom, or at best, a “key actor” in the drama of God’s salvation for the world affect which Church we belong to?

For starters, we can flesh out what God’s Kingdom should be up to, and then observe how well the churches we attend create ways to express God’s Kingdom. For me, God’s Kingdom begins with a great deal of localism and ends with everyday life lived in community. I applaud public works and acts of charity, but I don’t think that it is enough to simply give time and resources to the widows and orphans of our society, simply for the fact that they have very real and awkward, most definitely painful gifts to give to me. The poor do not exist so I can assuage the guilt I feel whenever I squander my paycheck and therefore throw some money their way. They exist because life is not fair. We must learn how to love the poor, to know the poor as something more than an ambiguous “the poor”, we must know the poor as the people on our streets. We must learn how to live with the poor and learn how to break bread together and share the all too private information concerning our salaries and jobs, and therefore indebt ourselves one to another. I don’t think that I participate in God’s Kingdom if I don’t have everyday relations with the poor and oppressed. God’s Kingdom is more about loving the poor instead of hating poverty. So what church embodies such a community with the poor?

We live a few blocks away from the crown jewel of Denver’s park system, Washington Park. It is an absolutely gorgeous and stunning huge sprawl of land in the middle of the city. We have the occasion to walk the park most nights, and we can’t help but feel as if it is the best part of the city. It is not in a gated community, but I can safely say that the area around it has become gentrified. A 1500 square foot bungalow in the area easily goes for $650,000 dollars. As much as I want to live in the serenity, whether real or imagined, of the park, I know that the poor do not live there. The churches in the area do good work, but I get the feeling that they contribute, most decently, to the surrounding community, which happens to be families in need of their pet’s being blessed more than anything. Sure there is struggle and strife within this community, there are terrible lives and sadness, but there seems to me to be an absence of the gift of the poor. The temptation to use the church as a community to round out an already happy life is too great there. As much as I am committed to the prospect that Church must be done within one’s immediate surroundings, this place just doesn’t seem to have all the right pieces to do church.

I am challenged by this. I don’t want to commute to church. I don’t want our church to be something we get to “go into” instead of “be a part of” if that makes any sense. As long as the church is missing the vital community of the poor, I fear that it is destined to quibble about worship style and convenience instead of dealing with the real meat of Christian life lived in community. Perhaps churches should subsidize housing in aim of a quota of impoverished or something like that. I don’t know. Maybe I’m not looking hard enough for the poor around me. Or maybe I’m unwilling to move, commute, or subsidize, but all I know is that I need to live and receive the gifts of the poor as much as they need to live and receive the gifts that I can give. The search continues.

Church Hunting pt. 1

“Church and world are often more prescriptive rather than descriptive terms; in practice, the church is full of the world. This is as it should be; the dialectical drama of sin and salvation implies a dialogical relationship between the church and its others, which include the world and God. Indeed, the Holy Spirit blows where it will, and the activity of the Spirit is not limited to the church. The church is therefore a relational body, and not a closed system. The church is not a polis; ekklesia names something closer to a universal “culture” that is assembled from out of the particular cultures of the world (Healy 2000: 159–75). The church is not only crossed by nonchurch elements; it also contains anti-Christ elements. The church is a corpus permixtum, full of both saints and sinners. As Nicholas Healy reminds us, ecclesiology must maintain both poles of Paul’s dictum in Gal. 6: 14, “far be it from me to glory except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ.” On the one hand, we must not boast of the church, as if the church were already the answer to all the world’s social ills; on the other hand, we must glory in Christ, and regard the church as a key actor in the unfolding of the drama of salvation which Christ’s cross has won (Healy 2000: 1–24). The eschatological “not yet” means that the history of the drama so far needs to be told hopefully but penitentially, with room for marginal voices and conflicts. The story is not told in an epic manner, as if the church were made to rule. As the embodiment of God’s politics, the church nevertheless muddles through. God is in charge of all of history. The church’s job is to try to discern in each concrete circumstance how best to embody the politics of the cross in a suffering world” (Cavanaugh “Church” in Blackwell’s Anthology of Political Theology 405).

In Katie and I’s search for a church home, I have kept this passage in mind to help us discern exactly where we should commit our time and resources to. Our search has not been easy, indeed we have to struggle against the temptation of sleeping in and going to the farmer’s market down the street instead of attending churches. I have found that my enthusiasm waxes and wanes in this attempt. When we do decide to go and then we discover how a place doesn’t feel right, or a theology is a little too out of whack for our liking, it seems to set the search back for a week or so. In this post I want to unpack this Cavanaugh passage and help shed some light on just what we are looking for.

I am fascinated and convicted by the thought that the church does not have a monopoly on the workings of the Holy Spirit. I don’t take this idea to necessarily mean The Holy Spirit, but a more general idea of God’s exertion of grace upon our world. I have been guilty of thinking that the Church is the super-structure end all of all ends for the World’s ills before, but I think that ultimately leads to an impoverished community of believers. I still believe that, I think, but the idea needs to be prefaced with the very important “not yet”. As Christians we must struggle with the knowledge that we are paradoxically already transformed into the new creation, while at the same time we are the broken and hapless community in need of much grace and patience. If we are indeed not so hapless, I would think that this whole eschatologic moment would have come a lot sooner. So if the church must negotiate with other voices, and perhaps even contain voices that can carry the whispers of God’s grace in our world, what does that look like? Surely there must be a very bare-bones sub-set of beliefs that one must in some way subscribe to in order to bear the witness of Christian. I don’t like muddled pluralism, but I don’t like rigid sects either. Can the church contain anti-Christ elements? Does the church incorporate the Truth’s of God’s grace outside of it in the same manner as the plundering of Egypt’s riches? Or perhaps the idea that the church is made of the world is very important here. Perhaps subscribing to Christianity is a continual act that can never stick for good. Perhaps there is so much of the world in those who profess the witness of the Church that our subscriptions and memberships are never enough to fully separate ourselves from even the world inside of us. If I interpret that passage as something to be applied personally and inter-church, it can certainly work, although it does sound as if the hope the Church has to offer the world is very muddled indeed.


This reminds me of the idea of Carnival. The saints are always sinners of a sort, and the sinners are always saints of a sort, and in the Carnival revelry, we are exposed as the “already-but-not-yet” hope of for the World. Although we are exposed as the corpus permixtum that we are, our hope is also reified by the act of switching places. When the Kings are made into fools, and the fools into Kings, when the Sinners are made into saints and the saints into sinners, we are reminded, by the sinners who play saints, that we are actually saints of a sort, and we must bear witness as best we can.

The Way, The Truth, and The Etc. Etc.

Last Wednesday, I visited the local Church of Christ in Sidney, Nebraska. I was out on business, and well, what else is there to do besides play shuffleboard in the local bar? Don’t get me wrong, I love shuffleboard, but had already frequented the “Silver Dollar” the previous night. It was a medium size building, which gave me hope that I could probably make some connections through the ACU network. When I walked into the auditorium, I was greeted by no less than fifteen to seventeen people filling up one aisle of the church. I knew I was taking a risk by attending, and viewing the sparse faces in the crowd confirmed that I had lost my bet with fate, and could not simply pop in and maintain a relative sense of anonymity. After much explaining and easing of fears as to why a young person would grace their assembly, I was soon welcomed into the small life of the church. They wanted me to lead singing, and while, I love to sing the old songs, I have never been graced with a confidence of pitch to actually lead worship. Where’s Daniel Wheeler when you need him?
The irony of the situation is that I have great confidence in my speaking/preaching ability, but judging from the lesson of that night, I could in no good faith offer up words of exhortation, exegesis, or worship that would gel with the firm convictions in Biblical authority and inerrancy, not to mention a wonderful assurance that interpretation of the Bible is straightforward and is not mediated by any whims of culture, intelligence, or history that the Church holds. This realization made me feel like a voyeur, or a PhD candidate in rhetoric studying the “heuristics” of a small time denomination in a small town. I felt more a sense of the sovereignty of the community than a sense of an impoverished theology bent solely on getting to Heaven. Which in turn, made me feel like the typical liberal, forever tolerant and a respecter of persons. To their delight, I told them that I would return next Wednesday night, which I am still planning to do, barring a hankering for shuffleboard. I didn’t want to change them, or explore ways in which, as a community they could broaden their definition of fellowship to include more people than showed up that night. For starters, it is not my community. I don’t feel like it is appropriate to engage in theological discourse where there is a lack of accountability between individuals and communities. To do so would be to come across as foolish as the swindlers (the Prince and Dauphine?) in Huckleberry Finn when they put on mock spiritual revivals. The members of the Church eke out an existence from the ground or at the Cabella’s outdoor headquarters. They solidify their community, not by what they believe, but by simply making the time to show up and be with each other. And although I tell their story in a light that makes Grace abound to all of our foolish human searching, (which reifies my own positions), I do not tell their story in a manner that trivializes what they do when they show up. I do not know where the boundaries of the Church end and begin. I withhold my judgment, at least to their faces, on their quite virulent theology. It just doesn’t seem to be my place to discourse with them.

I tell this story to confess how much our community means to me. Perhaps we are like minded, perhaps we are monolithic in our theology, but I don’t think so. We have diversity, and more importantly, accountability that allows us to engage in discourse. We should never take this for granted, because community is a hard thing to form. I hope we grow together in faith and good works, whatever that means. I hope we build communities with those we see face to face on a regular basis. I hope we are transformed, and I hope we figure this whole thing out, at least for the time being. I’ve started a sermon I want to present the preacher of the Church of Christ in Sidney. When I finish, I’ll post it up here.
Bryce

The Case for Virtue Ethics

After reading over my comment on Nic’s post, I realize that I might be drawing his post into the sphere of my pre-occupation with virtue-ethics without due warrant. That kind of discussion is not very fair to Nic and the work he put into his argument; however, I genuinely believe that virtue-ethics has a place at the table, and my introduction to the topic is probably more a matter of kairos, or poor timing rather than irrelevance (That’s what she said). Let me give it another go, since I’ve already opened my imouth.

Daniel, your remark about the desirability of a middle ground seems apt. I generally lose excitement when the obvious answer to a problem begins to look like something in between to divergent opinions. I’m not sure where to go either, and we will probably have new and different lenses with which to ask the question within the next 20 years or so, so I’m not ready to subscribe to an answer to the whole foundation problem (The fact that I make that statement though, puts me in the layers camp. I still haven’t found out how to get out of my own situatedness). I can’t wait to read what you’ve got on that Eagleton lecture. I loved it and made everyone around me listen to it (much debate in the Doty household).

As a proponent of virtue-ethics, I must briefly touch on the idea of Wisdom, especially as articulated by theologian David F. Ford. First, let me define my terms so as to keep me honest, at least in my own system. When I think of virtue-ethics, I think of the body. I think of material and matter. One of the most hopeful promises I hold for virtue-ethics is that it is, or can be, a great destroyer of abstraction. Directly, it is the branch of ethics that is concerned with the development of practices and forms of living that shape a human life in such a way so that the whole of the human’s life becomes an example of the virtues he/she is striving for. Commitments are grounded in actions, and indeed the very body of the human. There are probably limits to what could constitute a virtue in this sense, but that I take to be a good thing. “Don’t listen to what it says, look at what it does” is a simple phrase that is a good example of what I’m trying to describe. If I claim to care about the plight of HIV victims in Africa, but my behaviors cannot corroborate this claim, then I in fact do not care about such matter. Right, right? Anyone care to critique/expand/narrow my definition thus far?

Wisdom, as I see it, is one of these virtues, which, as people who claim Christianity, should find expressions in our behavior and intellectual practices. Allow me to quote an extended passage from David F. Ford’s Shaping Theology:

[Wisdom] tries to embrace the imaginative, the intellectual, the passionate and the practical; it refers to the wisdom of God as well as to fallible human searching. Wisdom need not be competitive with the various other terms that describe theology, such as understanding, thought, knowledge, truth, reflective practice, dogma and doctrine. Yet it seems to me the most inclusive. While encouraging rigorous inquiry and thorough understanding it is also hospitable to the ethical and the aesthetic. Wisdom traditions are concerned with the long-term shaping of life in many dimensions, including the common good and the formation of the whole person (xvii).

Judging by this description, seeking wisdom is about asking different questions than those that create dichotomies and oppositions. When we seek wisdom, we entertain different consequences than just getting something right or wrong, we take heed of the common good and the consequences to our body and community. A good way to think of wisdom is as an inclusive theological category.
Nic’s post reminded us about the painful inaccessibility of our tradition; although he was quick to show us that our tradition is inaccessible only to those questions and pursuits that try to get it right and try to find an impervious ground to stand on. I introduced virtue-ethics to the conversations because I feel like the development of virtues is an appropriate way to do theology post-foundationalism. And here, more specifically, wisdom as an appropriate theological pursuit in this context, because the search for wisdom takes into account our fallible human searching and seeks to connect our theological pursuits to the way we live and the people and communities we form. That’s my case for virtue-ethics. Keep in mind that these thoughts come from a shameless dilettante, but that doesn’t give me the right to be lazy or make those who know more about this do my work for me. Any thoughts or reactions?