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Preface

In Hannah’s Child: A Theologian’s Memoir I suggested—or is confessed the better description?—that I write because writing is the only way I know how to think.¹ That is not quite true. I am able to write, or I find I feel I have to write, because I read. Reading is also one of the ways I learn how to think. I am often asked how I have written so much. The only explanation, and it is not clear to me that it is an explanation, is that my writing is determined by my reading. Which means that I hope others will write about what I have written about because they have read what I have read.

I open with these remarks about the relation between my writing and reading to justify yet another book by Hauerwas. The world probably does not need another book by me. Yet I have generous readers who tell me they benefit not only from what I write about, but also from the way I write about it. In his memoir, Little Did I Know: Excerpts from Memory, Stanley Cavell, in reaction to those philosophers who find his work “unpalatable,” asks, “What choice does one have over the way one writes?”² Cavell suggests that the way one writes “will have to create its own public,” which he goes on to say, “may never be exactly public.”

I have never written or tried to write with the studied style of a Cavell, but my work now has a “public.” “My public” has a name. They are called Christians. Thank God that public does not depend on or wait with baited breathe for the next installment of “my work.” But I am aware that I now have many readers who are interested in what and how I think. That they exist is the only justification I have for putting this rag-tagged book of essays together.

Learning to Speak Christian is a “kitchen sink” book. These essays, sermons, and opinion pieces were not meant to, nor do I think they add up to, anything so grand as “an argument.” I have the hope, however, that the reader will discover that I have only been able to preach this sermon because I had written that essay. In other words, I hope the reader will see how everything I write is interdependent. This collection of essays and sermons—and some may think all my books are but collections—makes no pretence that by being collected they are more than the sum of their parts. But I think the reader will also discover that they are not less than the sum of their parts.

What I offer the reader in this book is my explicit reflection and exhibition of what it means for theology to be work and, in particular, work with words. For it is my conviction that the work of the theologian is word work, or, as John Howard Yoder would have it, the task of theology is “working with words in the light of faith.”³ Accordingly, Yoder describes the approach he takes in Preface to Theology as inductive and historical—that is, he invites his students (and readers) to watch Christians at work doing theology to see what they can learn from those who have tried to do theology in the past.

“Tried” is a crucial word, because the theological task requires that we speak of God, but the God to whom and about whom we must speak defies the words we use. This defiance seems odd because the God about whom we must speak is, we believe, found decisively in Jesus of Nazareth, very God and very man. Yet it seems the closer God draws near to us the more we discover that we know not how to say “God.” The same is true even when we invoke the Holy Spirit who draws us into God’s very life.

According to Yoder, theology has a double function: (1) to transmit the heritage of the faith without deforming it; and (2) to speak to questions that arise in a new context.⁴ There will always be a new context, however, not only because the world cannot be kept still, but because the very character of God requires that those who worship God be witnesses. The missionary character of the church, therefore, means that the testing of the words we use as well as their grammar can never be finished. Rather the words we use, the relation between the words we use, and the character of the speaker who uses the words must be continually tested for their faithfulness to the Gospel.

Yoder observes that one of the characteristics of our times is the presumption that theology no longer has a dictionary adequate to its task. But Yoder argues, rightly I think, that an adequate dictionary has never existed. Yet some under the illusion that such a dictionary once existed lose confidence in our language because they are forced to recognize that there is no single correct grammar. Rather than despair about our linguistic limits, however, Yoder agues that we should take this as an opportunity to stop asking what we take to be a timeless philosophical question. Rather than ask, “How can we have perfect knowledge that would free us from finitude?” we should be inquiring as to how “God has chosen to use our human weakness, including the weakness of our linguistic and literary tools, for God’s purposes.” For whatever the philosophical inadequacy of language as a tool may be, “there still remains the historic usefulness and indispensability of language as a tool.”⁵

When theology is done well the reader should be led to think, “This is true.” Recognizing claims that are “true” enables readers to identify an honest expression of life’s complexities. The trick is to show that the theological claims, the words that must be used to speak of God, are necessary if the theologian is to speak honestly of the complexities of life. The worst betrayal of the task of theology comes when the theologian fears that the words he or she must use are not necessary. The result too often is a desperate shouting. One of the reasons I so enjoy Barth is that there is nothing desperate about his theology; rather it is a joyful celebration of the unending task of theology.

But is that what we really mean when we say, “This is true”? Did I not say that theology is speech about God? How can theology at once be about God and about the complexities of human life? Has it not been one of the besetting problems of modern theology to try to split the difference between speech about God and the complexities of human life, too often resulting in most theology being more about “us” than about God? Is not speech about God less about God but rather speech in praise of or prayer to God? How can it really be true that some words are necessary if we are to speak truthfully about ourselves and God? Does that not give the theologian unwarranted power in the life of the church?

These are all good questions making it difficult to know where to start. But it is a good place to begin, as I hope many of the essays in this book suggest, to remember that there is no place to start. We can only begin with what we have been given, and the “givens” come in all shapes and sizes. This does not mean we are at the mercy of the “givens” because the givens are too various, contradictory, and ambiguous to determine us without a fight. The word “God” is among the givens, but it is also true that God cannot be taken for granted, which requires us to rethink the givens.

“God” is a necessary word, but its necessity makes it subject to misuse. Those who believe in God and those who do not believe in God too often assume that they are using the same word. But if they happen to do so that would be a great achievement because as I try to show in a number of the essays and sermons learning to use the word “God” requires that one learn to use the words that surround the use of the word “God.” For Christians, we learn to use the word through our worship and prayer to the one called God, and this requires a lifetime. Thus the process of learning entails a transformation so that we can hear rightly before speaking rightly; our pride must be humbled and our impatience tempered if we are to hear the storied words that enable us to speak of God.

Furthermore, the matter of rightly learning to speak of God becomes more complicated because “God” is not the first word Christians have to say when we pray. Rather Christians pray to the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. “God” is the name we use to indicate the love that constitutes the relation Jesus and His Father share through the work of the Spirit. “God” is the word, the description, used to celebrate the Father’s sending of the Son and the Son’s obedience to the Father’s will so that the work of the Spirit might be fulfilled by judging the world in truth. We only know what it means to say “God” because we have been taught by Jesus to pray to the Father.

It is my hope that these essays and sermons exhibit the training necessary to say “God.” Learning to say “God,” as I suggested at the beginning, is hard but good work. It is good work because the training necessary to say “God” forces us to be honest with ourselves about the way things are. We are creatures destined to die. We fear ourselves and one another, sensing that we are more than willing to sacrifice the lives of others to sustain our fantasy that we can get out of life alive. The widespread confidence that medicine will someday free us of the necessity of death exemplifies what I mean by “fantasy.” The attempt to create a medicine aimed to get us out of life alive, moreover, depends on the creation of wealth as an end in itself. A people constituted by such wealth are by definition unable to learn to use the word “God,” because wealth cannot help but make us dull.

I need to be clear. I am not suggesting that the individual wealthy person is dull. Rather I am suggesting that a social order bent on producing wealth as an end in itself cannot avoid producing people whose souls are superficial and whose daily lives are captured by sentimentalities. They ask questions like, “Why does a good god let bad things happen to good people?” Such a people cannot imagine what kind of people would write and sing the Psalms.

Learning to say “God” requires that I learn to acknowledge that I am a “dependent rational animal.”⁶ It may be possible to acknowledge that we are rational dependent animals without learning to say “God,” but to learn to say I am dependent without regret at least creates the space the practice of prayer can occupy. To be human is to be an animal that has learned to pray. Prayer often comes only when we have no alternatives left, but prayer may also be the joy that comes from the acknowledgment of the sheer beauty, the absolute contingency, of existence.

So this kitchen sink of a book hopefully provides examples of my writing, my work, and, in particular, my attempt to work on myself so that I might be a more adequate Christian speaker. I do not intend to make a long book longer by “explaining” why I have included this or that essay or sermon. This is a collection, not a book, though I am not sure I know how to control that distinction. What is here is here because it is my work. I make no apologies.

I have followed the good suggestions of Father Nathaniel Lee about how the essays might be grouped, but I am sure many readers may think after they have read the book that they know better than me how I should have organized the book. If you do come to such a judgment all I ask is you let me know. God knows I need all the help I can get.

I do ask, however, that readers remember that this is a collection and that there is a rationale for the grouping of the essays. For example, the essays and sermons in the first section of the book try to address questions of learning to say “God.” The essays and sermons in the middle section, “The Language of Love,” can be characterized as those that deal with more “normative” matters. The last section of the book is about people and movements (Methodism and Roman Catholic Social Encyclicals) that have taught me how to do theology.

I have included the Appendix, “On Learning to See Red Wheel Barrows,” because Carole Baker recently discovered a way to reclaim it from the misbegotten attempt to make the Journal of the American Academy of Religion an online journal. I have been asked so many times for a copy of the essay, a copy I did not have, I thought I would include it so that those determined to read what I write, a category of human beings for whom I am very grateful, would finally have it in an accessible form.

I confess that I have included a number of the essays in Learning to Speak Christian because I hope they might counter some of the mischaracterizations of my work. You would think by now that I would recognize that the more I publish, the more misunderstandings I encourage, but I am a stubborn person. It is my fondest hope that by making these essays and sermons available some may find by reading them that they have learned better how to speak Christian.