Title: Many Hands Working: A Response to Charles Mathewes
Abstract: I hope Charles Mathewes's Appreciating Hauerwas: One Hand Clapping may indicate a new day for those working in that strange little field called Christian Ethics. Of course, not much depends on what happens or does not happen in the field of Christian Ethics, but much depends on how we as Christians discover we must live in service to God and neighbor in our time. To the extent that Christian Ethics may be an aid to that task, I think Mathewes's way of presenting as well as criticizing work is extremely hopeful. Mathewes, for example, does not spend time in the fruitless task of trying to decide whether I am or am not a sectarian. That he does not may suggest that a new generation is coming forward that has finally broken the conceptual hold that the Niebuhrs' way of thinking has held over those in the field of Christian Ethics. The oft-made criticism, for instance, that work makes it difficult for Christians to act responsible in the world as we know it reflects a position that requires further justification; i.e., claims that we must act responsibly reflect liberal political arrangements that cannot simply be accepted as a given. Mathewes is quite right that I've never been interested in abstractions like and liberalism. Rather, I have used characterizations such as modernity and liberalism to try to show how foreign narratives and practices have insinuated themselves into Christian living that have made impossible the contributions we as Christians have to make in and for the world in which we find ourselves. I have spent a great deal of time reading liberal social and political theory and have tried to offer internal and external critiques of that theory and its practice. I have done so, however, with the hope of helping Christians rediscover our voice as Christians so that we may live in the world peaceably and at the same time identify the violence that claims to be peace. That is why I find so welcome Mathewes's stress on the importance of memory as at the heart of concern with liberalism and modernity. He rightly notes that one of the aspects of liberalism I have found problematic is its inability to deal with the memory of a past which is so often constituted by wrongs that are so wrong we can do nothing to make them right. Accordingly liberalism too often becomes a strategy for forgetfulness exactly because liberals lack an account of forgiveness that makes memory possible. The ability to remember such wrongs without them becoming occasions for self justifying actions has everything to do with the right worship of the true God. I simply try to help Christians recover that essential connection between truthful worship of God and our ability to remember our sins. Mathewes suggests that I owe those who take suggestions about ethics seriously a more determinative account of the doctrine of God. I have no doubt he is right, but part of strategy is never to be caught doing theology in a straightforward fashion. I admire, for example, Robert Jenson's Systematic Theology, and if requested for my doctrine of God, I would simply refer anyone to Jenson's presentation. The problem with accounts such as Jenson's, however, is not that he is in any way wrong, but that his account might be taken as thought separated or abstracted from Church practice. Jenson of course does not wish for that result and indeed he provides powerful reminders against that possibility. But in the intellectual culture in which we live I have steadfastly tried to let own so-called doctrine of God emerge from within presentation of issues as basic as why we continue to have children or how we are to account for our care of the mentally handicapped. Such a strategy may lack the kind of systematic presentation that Mathewes desires, but I fear it is the best I can do. Mathewes suggests I need to say more about the concept of eternity. I have tried, particularly in Wilderness Wanderings: Probing 201h-Century Theology and Philosophy (Westview, 1997), to distance how I think about these matters from the way, especially, liberal theologians have tried to secure a timelessness, a transcendence from history, to ensure the possibility we have an unproblematic starting point. …
Publication Year: 2000
Publication Date: 2000-04-01
Language: en
Type: article
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