Reforming Reformation: Non-coercive witness

Church ruins at Heptonstall;

photo by David Sykes via Flickr

In a review for what looks to be a fascinating book, The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society by Brad Gregory, reviewer Kathleen Crowther summarizes a segment of Gregory's argument:

[In the wake of "sola scriptura"], the only way Protestant groups (and Catholics) were able to command assent to their particular readings of scripture was to back them up with political force; the "magisterial" reformers and Catholics managed to do this while the "radical" reformers did not. This led to "the coercive, prosecutory, and violent actions of early modern confessional regimes" (p. 160). Where caritas had once reigned as the central virtue in European Christianity, it was replaced in the early modern period by "obedience" to both divine and secular authorities. (Inner quote is from Gregory's book.)

Looking at the index, I know that Gregory makes use of Alasdair MacIntyre's work on the loss of the virtue tradition in Western societies after the Enlightenment, so his reference to the loss of caritas caught my eye, but so did the reference to confessional coercion, even violence, by Protestants and Catholics. Radical reformers, especially the early Anabaptists, were often the target of such coercion.

Now check out this working definition of "evangelical" by John Howard Yoder from The Priestly Kingdom:

I take the term in its root meaning. One is functionally evangelical if one confesses oneself to have been commissioned by the grace of God with a message which others who have not heard it should hear. It is angellion ("news") because they will not know it unless they are told it by a message-bearer. It is good news because hearing it will be for them not alienation or compulsion, oppression or brainwashing, but liberation. Because this news is only such when received as good, it can never be communicated coercively; nor can the message-bearer ever positively be assured that it will be received. (p. 55, emphasis added in bold)

Tales from the Enlightenment: "religious freedom"

Gather 'round, kids; grandpappy Kant has a story to tell!

For a few weeks now I've been avoiding any news media outlets - which for me are entirely online. As election season has ramped up, I noticed how even my go-to-guys - Stewart and Colbert - have become almost exclusively fixated on the ugly vetting process for the Republican presidential candidate. It's become a sort of interpretive black hole, whereby all issues are sucked into its inescapable pull and "read" in light of that incredibly nasty public spectacle. So I've switched off...kind of.

I'm still regularly on Facebook, so I continue to hear about this stuff through the various news pages that I "like" and from my friends who are following the news. A decent number of my friends are leftish peaceniks, so last week I heard a collective liberal wail of moral outrage against Rush Limbaugh for some reason or another (I happily don't know why). And the week before that it was Catholics, insurance companies, and birth control, with pictures posted of a bunch of men on a congressional panel talking about women's reproductive rights (the ironical outrage!). This issue was connected to a particular contemporary Catholic candidate for the Republican ticket and references back to a speech from an earlier Catholic candidate seeking the Democratic ticket in the early 1960s, each having various things to say about "religious freedom."

So it's that notion - religious freedom - that I want to talk about, particularly how it gets used in modern political discourse and processes. I'm riffing off a fantastic post from Saba Mahmood at the Immanent Frame blog - Religious freedom, minority rights, and geopolitics (part of a whole series of posts they have running about religious freedom) - but mostly my current reading project, Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue and past reading of William Cavanaugh's The Myth of Religious Violence. With these folks, I'll argue that "religious freedom" is a particular story told this side of the Enlightenment, with particular definitions given to the constituent terms "religion"and "freedom." Much like I argued last fall about the creation myth of human rights, things such as "religious freedom" and "human rights" are far from self-evident, timeless truths available to all people in all places for all times. They are, rather, contingent constructs that purport to provide something that current, dominant forms of geopolitical ordering and organizing (nation-states) are ultimately unable to deliver.

Wringing Out Saturated Selves: Christian Education in a Secular Age

This morning I gave my senior capstone presentation at Eastern Mennonite Seminary, which was based on a paper I wrote with the same name as this post. I've embedded the paper below, but let me make a few comments about the concerns animating this paper/presentation, the paper's major flow and points, and where it leads from here. I take the upcoming #Occupy Empire conference I'm helping organize as one particular project within my broader process of ministerial-vocational discernment.

In some ways, this paper and presentation marks the "philosophical turn" in my graduate studies.  This turn was precipitated by the existential and intellectual angst of being the first dual degree student at EMU's seminary and its Center for Justice and Peacebuilding. Philosophy eventually became extremely helpful in trying to adjudicate - both in terms of overlap and difference - the distinct "embodied rationalities" in those two programs. This led me to the philosophy of Charles Taylor, James K.A. Smith, and most recently, Alasdair MacIntyre.

But I've also been compelled by the biblical hermeneutic of John Howard Yoder as a way to keep me grounded in the biblical narrative as the primary "script" for my life as a ministering Christian in the body of Christ.

In my ministerial-vocational discernment these past years at grad school, I've come sense the call to being an educator in/for the church, putting the intellectual gifts which God has imbued within me to work for the sake of God's reconciling mission in the world. In testing this, I've been able to teach the same class in two radically different cultural contexts. In this paper, I try to weave all these threads together in a very short space (12 pages, 20 minute presentation). No small task.

In responding to my presentation this morning, my advisor, Mark Thiessen Nation, quipped: "What you've really done here, Brian, is lay out a research agenda for yourself." Likewise, my district executive in the Church of the Brethren described this as the start of a life-long journey. I think those assessments exactly right. There are hints in this paper to most of the influential work I've picked up and how I've been starting to assemble that toward a constructive vision for my developing vocation as a ministerial educator.

The creation myth of human rights

For as much as I gripe about nationalism in the U.S., I want to be fair in representing the fact that the myth of "nation as savior" is not unique to my own nation, as this video about universal human rights makes plain. Especially of interest to my argument is minutes 2 through 5...

Sink deep roots

From: Building Peoplehood and Peace

My first encounter with sociologist Robert Bellah came just last week when I read this excellent interview with him: The Roots of Religion, conducted by the folks at Big Questions Online.  The ways in which he describes religion have to be some of the best I've heard from a secular social scientist.

Most appealing to me is that he describes religions as wholly embodied, story-driven traditions that take acts of imagination and practice to understand. In other words, religions aren't primarily sets of rational claims about "absolute truth." As Bellah states, "while understanding the theoretical achievements of the great traditions is important we will not really know what they are about unless we make the imaginative effort to see how the world might seem if we lived in the embodied practices and narratives of these traditions, a difficult but not impossible task." (Emphasis mine, read on for why...)

The "Jewish State" revisited

Sari Nusseibeh, professor of philosophy at Al-Quds University in Jerusalem, has a fascinating op-ed piece up at Al Jazeera...

Why Israel can't be a 'Jewish State'

Nusseibeh makes a number of points which resonate with the theopolitical literature I've been absorbing over the past year or more, found mainly in the work of William T. Cavanaugh.

The article highlights the complex nature of ancient traditions in late Modernity. Cavanaugh has convincingly shown that the characterizations of "religious" and "secular" are constructs of the modern nation-state, the ascendant and still-prevalent form of organizing people and power within territorial boundaries. Nusseibeh is right to point out that calls for a "Jewish state" are incoherent based on present political arrangements, not to mention the slippery nature of "Jewishness" in our secular age.

Riffing on David Brooks: Sociality, virtue, and vocation

David Brooks;
Photo: Josh Haner/The New York Times

David Brooks intrigues me. He is considered a social and political conservative but he speaks in such a way as to set himself apart from most commentators of that ilk. He published a book this year - The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement (also see his TED talk) - that uses contemporary neuroscience to make the case that humans are not primarily rational beings. We are thinking, feeling, yearning, and always-already social creatures. Promoting such a perspective puts him at odds with pretty much the entire post-Enlightenment Western world in its social-political manifestations, which all assume a very individualistic and overly rational view on human nature. (Encapsulated in Descarte's dictum, "I think, therefore I am.")

One of my favorite Christian thinkers - philosopher, James K.A. Smith - has taken note of Brooks' recent work, going so far as to defend Brooks from those who seem to be missing his point. Plus, Brooks' work comports well with Smith's own, especially his book, Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation. One of Smith's biggest beefs with American evangelicals is that they've been duped into the individualist-rationalist view of human nature and so only seem to explicitly care about Christians' beliefs. To counter this Smith dusts off pre-modern, classical views of human nature and virtue that account for the whole being and restore a sense of work or vocation to the Christian life.

For Christian formation to do its work, it needs to operate on our (the Church's) entire personal and collective body as well as our desires...as in desiring the kingdom of God. Smith argues that we are shaped and pointed toward certain ends (such as the fulfillment of the kingdom) by liturgies - worship, work, or just simply practices. Smith contrasts sacred liturgies (Christian worship) and secular liturgies (eg. going to the mall). To not allow the former to operate in a holistic sense allows the latter to swoop in to fill in the gap, and eventually take over as the primary formational liturgy. So well-meaning evangelicals can (and do) become functional consumerist atheists with their bodies while purporting to be Christian in terms of their beliefs. Such split-being as we've inherited from the Enlightenment is ridiculous because, after all, the mind is part of the body and knowledge also exists outside the brain, even outside our corporeal bodies (eg. social consciousness).

[This post was subsequently picked up by the Mennonite Weekly Review blog: David Brooks, John Howard Yoder, and the sociality of virtue. Thanks again to Sheldon C. Good for his editorial work!]