The Singularity

My comments on the Singularity are limited to this Time magazine February 2011 article. I recommend you read it, first. I have no reason to ridicule or otherwise dismiss as fantastic or foolish the plausibility of the Singularity: the moment, projected as 2045, when computers and technology (specifically, biotechnology and nanotechnology) will surpass human intelligence. I have neither the science nor the mathematics background to speak to this subject, but I am also neither alarmed nor concerned about the future and the Singularity. So, my comments on the Singularity are limited to my reading and understanding of this article. It features Ray Kurzweil as champion of the Singularity and as such I understand that unless there is an indication to the contrary the views expressed in the article, such as concerning death, represent Ray Kurzweil’s own views.

let’s talk

Kurzweil and his colleagues’ talk about the Singularity is not new. Yes, that statement flies in the face of precisely what is highly exalted by Ray Kurzweil and Singularitians. Specifically, it is the knowledge on which the Singularity, the veritable child conceived of technology to be birthed in the near future.

The transformation of humankind, circa 2045, into immortal cyborgs or something other than what was once recognized as human will mark the of the human era. (Vernor Vinge) Kurzweil brushes aside the controversy which the idea of significant changes to human longevity evokes in some people. Those are the people, according to Kurzweil, who have invested much personal effort in certain philosophies on the issues of life and death and to whom he defers dismissively:  I mean, that's the major reason we have religion. Really? As in, talk among yourselves about religion? This reply seems disingenuous because the reality is that the human experience of life and death do not occur on the basis of an individual’s knowledge, philosophy or religion. So, lets talk.

an open door

The quest for immortality, that coveted cache of the Singularity, does not concern itself with life, that wonderfully unique and extraordinary sentient experience of humans. Actually, the Singularitians’ quest is to bypass death through a download of consciousness unto hardware where, those who choose not to die, can live as immortal, functionally. I am not interested in scenarios of potential natural disasters which could possibly affect, incapacitate or destroy that hardware. What does interest me is that Kurzweil either unwittingly, dismissively, or mockingly, opens the door to religion. Although the term religion, given how it is commonly misunderstood and misused, is not a term which I prefer or care to use I can lay that aside as a matter of minor significance.

bypassing death

So, the Singularity purports to overcome or bypass death through the excellence of knowledge?  Kurzweil has done much work to measure and track the exponential pace of technological progress, present, future and backward to 1900. Given such thoroughness and his glib pronouncement about reverse-engineering the human brain and humans saturating all the matter in the universe in a few centuries why stop there? Why not apply a similar method to determine the cause of death?

Kurzweil’s mistaken view concerning the problem of death is, first, to cast (or at least intimate) death as a problem of old age and nothing more than an illness, and second, to solve that problem through some manipulation of DNA.

the first Singularity

Although I fully expect the ridicule and dismissal by Singularitians and others that would be no different than Singularitians themselves receive concerning the Singularity. The Singularity is not only inevitable but it is imminent, according to Kurzweil, and there’s really not much we can do about it. This is about where I would expect the ridicule, mockery and dismissal of Singularitians should kick in.

The truth is even the self-descriptor of the Singularity and Singularitian, as in singular, single or one, fails to distinguish it from the age-old story of mankind in the book of Genesis in the Bible, and _ the first Singularity. (see, Genesis chapter 3) That first Singularity also involved man and knowledge. Unfortunately, that first Singularity in the garden was not when man became immortal, but when he became mortal; that is, when he became like God. The pairing of man and technology, that is knowledge, by Singularitians is not only present in the biblical narrative, but the narrative relates the convergence of man and knowledge. There is nothing new under the sun, said Solomon.

knowledge and death

What was it that God declared made man like God? It was the knowledge of good and evil.

Even then, the desire of the woman and the man was not so much to be like God, but to be God: singular, one, capable of determining and controlling their own destiny.

This is nothing less and no different than the Singularitian Kurzweil’s expectations of the Singularity of the future. However, the concept (that is the desire of the woman for what she saw before her eyes) and reality (that is, the convergence of man and knowledge) in the first Singularity in the garden did not result in immortality. It marked the beginning of the end, of death in the entirety of creation. This same demise is reflected throughout the universe. Things, both for man and his world, are not getting better. The are in deterioration and decline. The inception of death, in the simplest terms by way of an analogy, involved the convergence of the fruit (hardware) followed by knowledge (software) which transformed the woman and the man. Pressing that analogy further, even the casual computer user knows that software can be corrupted through willful or negligent changes which affect the original software. Even more, there are viruses which can cause physical damage to computer hardware. Yet, it is the nature of man to boast his genius and knowledge as being far greater and superior than all previous generations and master of his destiny, whether in the garden of Eden or in 2045,  _ or so he thinks.

escape

Singularitians may well snicker on hearing that disobedience was the root, or cause of death; but the somber nagging reality of death persists. The Singularity as an answer to death is merely to stretch and push back the parameters of death farther out. The inevitable and imminent occurrence much like Kurzweil states about the Singularity is no less true of death. Kurzweil’s hard, calculated response on the inevitableness of the Singularity holds equally true of death. Death came about as the result of defiance to the One who knows good and evil. It is not surprising that the Singulartians’ escape from death should be through knowledge, because knowledge was what opened the door for death to come into the world for the ruin and destruction of man.

technospeak

Is a record of antiquity to be rejected merely because it is not new, definitely not hi-tech or in the familiar shape of manufactured products or shrouded in the vernacular of technospeak? Especially, when that record relates the vital relationship between knowledge and death? The irony is that the Singularitians’ enlightened, knowledge-filled, linear, chemical, animal brain does not seem to acknowledge the omnipresence of both death and knowledge in the universe. Downloading one’s consciousness unto some hardware does not alter that reality. The notion of escaping death is as mistaken as the notion in the garden that the man and woman would not die.

The newness of technology and technospeak is as much an allure today as a fruit was for Eve. The relative newness of knowledge is the gauge by which some, such as Singularitians, value intelligence. There is no room, no place for what is old, whether it is knowledge or technology. Others value the size; bigger equals more intelligent. I am reminded of the line by a character in Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek: “Size is not a measure of intelligence.” (Spock) Even Stephen Hawking when sounding the alarm about alien visitors to Earth, friendly or hostile, says they will arrive in enormously large ships.

conclusion: reversing the first Singularity

The first Singularity in the garden of Eden resulted in death when man acquired the knowledge of good and evil through something as seemingly harmless and innocuous as a fruit. (You may amuse yourself as you wish as to that fruit. It is one of those matters of small significance for myself.) So, whatever prospects of reversing the effects of that first Singularity must necessarily address, both, knowledge and death and why it continues to affect man.

There is something to be said for Ray Kurzweil’s audacious claims about the Singularity. It is not a little secret. It is not obscure. It is plain. Those who have an open-mind to it as well as those who are close-mind to it have heard it. He has proclaimed it and promoted it aggressively. All of which has yet to be fulfilled.

Jesus made audacious claims concerning his death, burial and resurrection. It was not a little secret. His claims were not obscure. They were plain. Those claims were heard by friend and foe alike. He proclaimed and promoted this message aggressively. He fulfilled it.

This, not the death or the burial, but the resurrection of Jesus is the reversal of the first Singularity. The resurrection is not merely an escape or avoidance of death, but a triumph and defeat over death; a transformation from the perishable and corruptible to the imperishable and incorruptible. The resurrection revealed the Creator, giver and sustainer of life who took on the form, that is, the outward appearance of man in order to lay down his life and take it up again. Thereby, his resurrection was a declaration that death has no power over him. (Is the resurrection any less plausible than the Singularitians’ vision of immortality on hand-made hardware?) This was the God of the knowledge of good and evil who came into the world two thousand years ago.

And, like those claims he made and fulfilled two thousand years ago, he has declared he will come again at an undisclosed time.

(I refer adherents of the Torah as well as unbelievers who cannot fathom the idea of the sacrifice of Jesus to read: Human Sacrifice at Moriah and Egypt)

Jesus said to her, “I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in me will still live, even if he dies. 26  Whoever lives and believes in me will never die. Do you believe this?” (John 11)

But this I confess to you, that after the Way, which they call a sect, so I serve the God of our fathers, believing all things which are according to the law, and which are written in the prophets; 15 having hope toward God, which these also themselves look for, that there will be a resurrection of the dead, both of the just and unjust. (Acts 24)

 Behold,‡ I tell you a mystery. We will not all sleep, but we will all be changed, 52 in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised incorruptible, and we will be changed. 53 For this perishable body must become imperishable, and this mortal must put on immortality. 54 But when this perishable body will have become imperishable, and this mortal will have put on immortality, then what is written will happen: “Death is swallowed up in victory.”✡

55 “Death, where is your sting?

Hades,§ where is your victory?”✡

56 The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law. 57 But thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ. 58 Therefore, my beloved brothers, be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the Lord’s work, because you know that your labor is not in vain in the Lord. (I Corinthians 15)

Inasmuch as it is appointed for men to die once, and after this, judgment, 28 so Christ also, having been offered once to bear the sins of many, will appear a second time, without sin, to those who are eagerly waiting for him for salvation. (Hebrews 9)

“Behold, I come quickly. My reward is with me, to repay to each man according to his work. 13  I am the Alpha and the Omega, the First and the Last, the Beginning and the End. 14  Blessed are those who do his commandments,† that they may have the right to the tree of life, and may enter in by the gates into the city. 15  Outside are the dogs, the sorcerers, the sexually immoral, the murderers, the idolaters, and everyone who loves and practices falsehood. 16  I, Jesus, have sent my angel to testify these things to you for the assemblies. I am the root and the offspring of David; the Bright and Morning Star.” (Revelation 24)

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Transcript: Nearing the End - A Conversation with Theologian Stanley Hauerwas

These are just a couple of my comments on this interview by Al Mohler with Stanley Hauwerwas. I have copied the entire interview or you can go to the interview directly. gt

For all of Hauerwas' admiration of the evangelical church for her great energy to the faith and his concern about her backwards prioritization of things important his concern seems misplaced. Evangelicals, according to him, claim their personal relationship with God, but the expression of that personal relationship is in the church; the gathering of the saints in Christ, presumably. Yet, what is the net result of what he calls a great problem: It is that it will make it, "very hard to maintain disciplined congregations." Really?

The comment by Hauerwas on meditation brings to mind a current discussion I have been engaged in with a Hindu who commented :

The path prescribed by sages is chanting the name of God with attention. As you immerse yourself more into it like a meditation you will have full realization of Krsna gradually.

Meditation, or morning prayers to be specific, coupled with repetition is Hauwerwas' strategy for saving the church from extinction: "a way that will form Christians to survive in a world that constantly tempts us to always think we have to do something new."

According to Hauwerwas the temptation of always wanting something new is really what the church should concern herself with through meditation and prayer much like Hindus with chanting and meditation? I can think of a more pressing concerns for the body of believers: Stirring the minds of the saints towards a fuller understanding and conviction of the indwelling of deity in them, the deity of Jesus, of the Father and the Holy Spirit especially in the light of an increasing Muslim presence in America.*    *   *   *   *MONDAY • April 28, 2014

Thinking in Public with Stanley Hauerwas

April 21, 2012

Mohler:            This is Thinking in Public a program dedicated to intelligent conversation about frontline, theological and cultural issues with the people who are shaping them. I’m Albert Mohler, your host and President to the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky. 

Stanley Hauerwas is the Gilbert T. Rowe Professor Emeritus of Theological Ethics at Duke University where he holds appointments in the Divinity School and Law School. He has written an entire library of articles and books dating from 1969 to the present. He is a board member of the society of Christian ethics. He is associate editor of a number of Christian journals and periodicals and a frequent lecturer at campuses across the country. He holds his PhD from Yale University and a Doctor of Divinity from the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. His most recent work is Approaching the End: Eschatological Reflections on Church, Politics and Life.

Mohler:            Professor Hauerwas, you have been in an ongoing conversation partner with me, perhaps without even knowing it. I read everything you write and always find a great deal in it that makes me to think. Sometimes, quite frankly, that aggravates me; other times that pleases me. You are one of the most unusual writers and thinkers that I engage with quite regularly. You’re newest book is entitledApproaching the End: Eschatological Reflections on Church, Politics and Life. How in the world did you get there?

Hauerwas:       Well, eschatology has always been at the center of my work and I thought it was time to try to make that as explicit as possible. Plus, I am seventy-three. I am approaching the end and I am realizing death is not a theoretical possibility, even for me. So, I thought that the title had a double entendre, in a way that would show the interrelationship of those themes.

Mohler:            Well, the themes of your life are so well documented in your writing and the major streams of your thought. And there are so many of them that I would like to pursue with you a bit. But in this book, I’ll tell you, the most interesting essay to me is the one entitled “Church Matters on Faith and Politics” because in this essay, and the book is actually a collection of very, very pointed and perceptive essays, you make a stunning point. That is that the church in the western world is losing its ability to maintain any identity. You write that the church is in a buyers’ market that makes any attempt to form a disciplined congregational life very difficult. Is this just part and parcel with the modern age or is this a characteristically American moment?

Hauerwas:       I honestly don’t know how to answer that, Al. I think it’s certainly the case that America is the prismatic example of it. But I suspect its true in most places because basically a buyers’ market, that very description, reproduces the presumption that you live in a demand economy that says that the buyer is supreme and they get to buy what they want and therefore… I tell my students for example, if they are to sustain their life in the ministry without self-hatred there are two things they should not do: They should never have the Christian funeral in a funeral home. It is to be in the church. And they should never marry someone off the street. And they say well if we try to do that, they will just go to the church down the street and be buried in a funeral home or to marry people off the street. And I say “yeah, but that’s why they’re a bad church and you’ll be a good one!” We won’t have many members. So that’s the way I think that it works, namely that the consumer gets to consume the kind of faith they want.

Mohler:            The very next essay in this book you write about the end of Protestantism and that leads me to ask a very personal question: as an American evangelical Christian, do you think that Evangelicalism is in many ways the quintessential representation of the American faith and do you think that even as you write about the church in general – I actually don’t want to put a message in your mouth, I’d rather here it from you, but I get the impression that when you look at American Christianity in general, and American Evangelicalism in particular, you appear to see a church that is looking less and less like the church.

Hauerwas:       That’s true. I have great admiration for evangelicals for no other reason than they just bring such great energy to the faith and I admire that. But one of the great problems of Evangelical life in America is evangelicals think they have a relationship with God that they go to church to have expressed but church is a secondary phenomenon to their personal relationship and I think that’s to get it exactly backwards: that the Christian faith is meditated faith. It only comes through the witness of others as embodied in the church. So I should never trust my presumption that I know what my relationship with God is separate from how that is expressed through words and sacrament in the church. So evangelicals, I’m afraid, often times, with what appears to be very conservative religious convictions, make the church a secondary phenomenon to their assumed faith and I think that’s making it very hard to maintain disciplined congregations.

 Mohler:            I have to tell you that one of the statements in one of your books that aggravated me was a statement in which you said that conservative evangelicals should read this book, but they won’t because they don’t read this kind of book. Actually, it aggravated me because I was reading it at the time. But I understood the point you were making, and I want to come back and just press you on this just a bit because, as an evangelical concerned with many of the same things, I just want to come back and ask: When you look at evangelicalism and you look at evangelical churches, what do you see as the particular moment that now presents us with a completely different set of challenges? In other words, be a prophet for a moment. You can do that. In other words, where is evangelicalism going to be given the increasing secularization and the hyper-modernity of our culture? 

Hauerwas:       I think evangelicalism is destined to die of its own success and it will go the way of mainstream Protestantism because there’s just—it depends far too much on charismatic pastors, and charisma will only take you so far. Evangelicalism is constantly under the burden of re-inventing the wheel and you just get tired. For example, I’m a big advocate of Morning Prayer. I love Morning Prayer. We do the same thing every morning. We don’t have to make it up. We know we’re going to say these prayers. We know we’re going to join in reading of the psalm. We’re going to have these Scripture readings. I mean, there’s much to be said for Christianity as repetition and I think evangelicalism doesn’t have enough repetition in a way that will form Christians to survive in a world that constantly tempts us to always think we have to do something new. 

Mohler:            Well you are well-known for arguing that spirituality is practice and that ethics is virtue; just to put it in, perhaps, too short a compression there. But when you look at American spirituality in general, there doesn’t appear to be much practice or much on emphasis upon practice. And is that because our congregations have lost that set of habits?

 Hauerwas:       It’s hard for me to generalize. I can’t pretend to be someone that has studied these matters from a sociological point of view—not that I particularly trust sociology—but I do think that Hagel made the comment at one time, “Christians arose in the morning and said their prayers. Now they read the newspaper.” Of course, that’s changing too. They probably look at their smartphone now. But I think that the fundamental habits of the faith have been in decline and that leaves us with insufficient resources to sustain our lives as Christians in a world in which we find ourselves. I think, again, it has to do with the loss of fundamental practices, such as reading the Bible, but reading the Bible, I don’t trust necessarily to me as an individual. I need to read the Bible with other people. And that has pretty much been lost. Let me say in that regard that one of the other things that worries me about evangelicalism is I’m afraid it’s got the Bible and now, and exactly how it is that you reconnect evangelical life with the great Catholic traditions, I think is part of the challenges for the future because you need to read the fathers reading Scripture as part of our common life if we are to sustain a sense that we don’t get to make Christianity up. We receive it through the lives of those who have gone before and that just becomes crucial for us to be able to survive in which we find ourselves.

Mohler:            I find it very difficult to predict sometimes where you’re going to go when you begin an essay or a book, for that matter, or a sermon. And I’ve also read your most recent collection of sermons entitled Without Apology: Sermons for Christ’s Church.

 Hauerwas:       Thanks again. 

Mohler:            But, as you surprise me, you always make me think, and in your essay on the end of Protestantism—and, by the way, written at the same time that so many others are arguing the case or analyzing the situation from different perspectives—I had this question: Are you suggesting that Protestantism was a failed experiment or that it’s basically been—well, as you said of evangelicalism, it’s died of its own success. In other words, mainline Protestantism, the big brands of Protestantism now famously in decline in the United States. How do you explain that? What do you say about that? 

Hauerwas:       Well, Protestantism, by the very name, protest, was a protest movement within the church catholic that never was meant to be an end in itself, but a reformed movement for the church catholic to criticize where it had gone wrong. It has been successful. I think Roman Catholicism has responded fundamentally to many of what the Protestant revolt was about, but when Protestantism becomes an end in itself, rather than a reform movement that looks for and desires Christian unity—and that can come in many different ways—then, as a matter of fact, we become unintelligible to ourselves. And so—I’m going to die a Protestant, let me very clear, because I think I owe my Catholic brothers and sisters that continuing witness and, therefore, I am determined to remain Protestant. Though, after I taught fourteen years at Notre Dame, certainly Catholicism leaves a mark on you. But I, nonetheless, hunger for Christian unity in which, and at the very least that means that Christians learn not to kill one another in the name of being Christians or the name of certain national loyalties, etc. Because Christian unity isn’t just the bureaucracies getting together where no one loses their job, but it is the fundamental recognition that in this brother or sister I see Christ for me. 

Mohler:            I think it was George Lindbeck who pointed out as a word of critique that you seem to have no interest whatsoever in institutional ecumenicalism. 

Hauerwas:      Yeah, I’ve tried to respond to that, but I’ve never been terribly taken up with the ecumenical movement, particularly among the Protestant churches. In fact, the buyer’s market has meant that denominational identities have become less and less interesting. And so it’s very unclear—I mean, what good would it be for Presbyterians and Methodists to become united today? I mean, basically, all we’ve got a certain kind of emphasis they try to find that makes them somewhat distinctive in order for them to get their buyer-share of the diminishing market. 

Mohler:            When Stanley Hauerwas talks about the buyer’s market for religion in America, he’s onto something that evangelicals ought to notice and notice very carefully. And that is in fact that that is indeed an apt metaphor for our society at large, but it also, if we’re not very careful, a dynamic that is experienced by many churches and denominations, not only in the Protestant mainline, where he mentions all those brand-named denominations jockeying to retain their membership and a declining membership base, but it’s also the case that there are many in American evangelicalism who basically think of the gospel as something to be packaged and sold. The problem with that, of course, it that it is the same pattern as that which was the besetting sin of Protestant liberalism. Protestant liberalism sought to accommodate the message of the gospel to the larger and secularizing culture in order that it would be, well, saleable. It would be acceptable. But the Bible and the gospel can’t be reduced to a product and that’s a warning that evangelical Christians had better heed and understand very carefully. Because just as there was that temptation amongst the Protestant liberals and perhaps the jockeying for position among the brand names of mainline Protestantism today, we can be involved in the same kind of strategizing in which we betray the fact that somehow we think the gospel’s a product to be sold as well. And if it’s a product to be sold, then, like any other product that’s successful, it has to meet the demands of the marketplace, and that is the antithesis of evangelism. 

In your writings, you also make another very interesting case that has direct reference to mainline Protestantism and perhaps an indirect reference to evangelicalism as well. You argue that Protestant liberalism followed the apologetic strategy of trying to make the Christian faith rational in the aftermath of the Enlightenment. And, yet, as you in conversation with several others have remarked— Alasdair MacIntyre, I’m thinking of here, in particular—that when liberals made the Christian faith rational, they made the Christian faith irrelevant and unnecessary. 

Hauerwas:       Right. Well, I want to be careful with that word rational because I think nothing is more rational than Christian Orthodoxy. I think the Nicaea account of Trinity is an extraordinary development that is a tradition thinking through its fundamental commitment in a manner that is intellectually compelling. So the rationality that I was criticizing was the kind of rationalizing that presupposed that there was some kind of reason that didn’t reflect a tradition-determined mode of investigation. So I want to say that the problem with the response to the Enlightenment was it accepted the Enlightenment’s account of reason as reasonable, which was a deep mistake. 

Mohler:            Well, I appreciate that clarification because I certainly emphatically agree that there is nothing more rational than Christian Orthodoxy in terms of the right exercise of reason. But the attempt to make Christianity rational in Enlightenment terms with the autonomous reason, I just have to say, I think you make that point very compellingly, and it leads me to wonder sometimes if evangelicals aren’t methodologically sometimes following the same kind of trajectory that the mainline Protestants did, but just a century late. You know, perhaps many evangelicals are arriving at a new form of liberalism just about a century late.

 Hauerwas:       Well, I think pietism and rationalism went hand-in-hand because each privilege the individual presumed capacity for rationality in and of itself. And so in so far as evangelicalism has reflected that pietistic background, it interestingly enough is the most determinative exemplification of rationalism. I mean, I know evangelicals are not necessary fundamentalists, but I can’t imagine a more rationalistic account of the Christian faith than some forms of how scriptural inspiration is understood. So I think that is exactly right that a good deal of contemporary evangelicalism has a kind of rationalism to it that is reproducing what Lindbeck identified in the nature of doctrine as the experimental expressive form.

 Mohler:            Well I hope not to be guilty of that, but I speak as one who clearly as an evangelical feels the necessity to defend the faith once for all delivered to the saints and to do so in the contemporary moment and to make very clear that, indeed, Orthodox, biblical Christianity is the most rational worldview imaginable, so in thinking about the challenge on the other side of the Enlightenment where evangelicals, as much as Protestant liberals, we find ourselves. So let me just ask you. Rather than wonder what would Stanley Hauerwas have us to do. Let me just ask you: So what should we do? 

Hauerwas:       Well I think the first thing we need to do is confess our sin; that we have pridefully tried to make our faith a faith that suits us, and, in particular, underwrite the American experiment as central to the Christian faith. So one of the things I think that we desperately need to do is recover the ecclesiastical center of the Christian faith in a manner that unites us with Christians around the world, in a manner that frees us from the kind of nationalistic presuppositions that have gone hand-in-hand with American Protestantism. That’s called becoming catholic.

 Mohler:            Well I certainly appreciate the critique. I often, though, in reading your works, come to this question: Okay, so what if we handed everything over to Stanley Hauerwas, what would he do with it? In other words, where would you have us to go? 

Hauerwas:       Well, let me say one of the things I would have us to go is a much richer, liturgical life than I think is the case in many evangelical and Protestant mainstream churches. I think a recovery of the centrality of Eucharistic celebration and why it is so central is just crucial for the future of the church. 

Mohler:            Okay, now that really intrigues me. I’m not surprised by that. But in terms of the shape and substance of the congregation, of the church of an ecclesial center, how does one become a Christian? In other words, that’s another question I had in reading your works from beginning to end. There just isn’t much reference to conversion.

 Hauerwas:       Ah. Yeah, I guess I stayed away from that term because it has been so associated with Billy Graham’s football-field evangelism. Billy Graham’s football-field evangelism and conversion is not without value, but to be a Christian means that from baptism forward you are living a life of constant transformation in a manner that you are able to have the sinfulness of our lives located in a manner that through the good graces of others I have some hope of living a life that is more, to use Wesley’s phrase, perfect. And so I think that conversion is the name of an ongoing process from birth to death that we as Christians are invited to live. 

Mohler:            Well, again, looking at your writings, and even preparing for this conversation, and feeling the weight of your critique at many points and just very catalytic thoughts, I came back to another question, and that is, for Stanley Hauerwas, what is the gospel? What is the good news that is at the center of the Christian faith? Because I think I could hypothesize several answers, but I would just love to hear you to respond to that. What is the gospel?

 Hauerwas:       That through Jesus Christ, very God and very man, we Gentiles have been made part of the promise to Israel that we will be witnesses to God’s good care of God’s creation through the creation of a people who once were no people that the world can see there is an alternative to our violence. There is an alternative to our deceptions. There is an alternative to our unfaithfulness to one another though the creation of something called church. That’s salvation. 

Mohler:            What about the forgiveness of sins? How does the cross and atonement play into your understanding of the gospel?

 Hauerwas:       Well, I think that what it means to have our sins forgiven is you’ve been made part of a narrative that you do not have to justify the path in a way that means the past continues to haunt you because you’re determined to live righteously. Interestingly enough, forgiveness of sins does say you do not have to be determined by the path because you’ve been given a future that is so compelling you don’t have to constantly try to renegotiate a world in which you are trying to be righteous even though you’re not. 

Mohler:            Very interesting. Once one understands the gospel on those terms then becomes a part of the faith and practice of the church and is then shaped by the congregation’s life and those regular practices in what you describe as a rich liturgical life, what difference does it make for that individual as a citizen of this world? To use Augustine’s dichotomy—to be in the earthly city—what is the role of that Christian and the church in this earthly city? 

Hauerwas:       To tell the truth. Very simple. Just tell the truth and see what kinds of tensions that produces. I think Augustine’s “Two Cities” have too often resulted in an apology for Christians not really being Christian because the church is really made up of sinners and non-sinners or at least people who are not quite as sinful and therefore you can’t tell that much difference between the church and the world. Well, we are sinners and that is a great achievement. That and the world doesn’t know that it is possessed by sin in the way that Christians do. So, there is a truthfulness to being able to be a Christian in a world that knows not God. This is our gift to the world, to be able of truth. 

Mohler:            Here is another one of the tension points. I try to resolve in thinking about your proposal and the larger fabric of your though. You did teach at Notre Dame and you speak with incredible respect for the Roman Catholic Church and of its tradition. And clearly, even as you speak of your determination to die a Protestant, you speak of the fact that you have a Catholic identity. You warn about the dangers of “empire” and to such an extent that one of your critics says that “for Stanley Hauerwas, the original sin was desire for empire.” So, I cannot find any example in the history of the Christian church better than the Catholic church in terms of making peace with that empire. Is that not the problem? 

Hauerwas:       I celebrate the fact that the church is a Catholic church is losing its control of the earth but remember one of the things that is so impressive about the Church Catholic is that it is the church of the poor. We Americans cannot imagine being a church of the poor; we can imagine being a church that cares about the poor but we cannot imagine the poor being Christians but Catholicism has done that in a way that is interestingly enough a very deep critique of empire. 

Mohler:            You offer a penetrating critique, that’s one of the reasons why I never let one of your books pass by before it is fairly quickly read. Just in terms of social location, you have taught at Notre Dame and then for years now you have been teaching at Duke University. The last time I saw you I think was in the Gothic book store there at Duke, which has now been reduced, and I mourn that with you, but you are there at Duke. And if there is any institution, especially in the south, that represents the empire of reason and frankly the empire of wealth when it comes to this. . . so I have to wonder, Does Stanley Hauerwas’s thought exist mostly within an Academic world represented by the institutions that are basically the enemy of everything he talks about? 

Hauerwas:       Well, institutions like Duke are many-sundered of things and so I try to serve it as best I can without . . . I don’t have to lick the hand that feeds me. I hope that Duke University, somehow through accidental reasons, has a Christian theologian in its midst and many other good Christians around. This is an indication that it may be incoherent but it nonetheless is an institution that may have the possibility of making the world just a bit better. 

Mohler:            Back in 1989, you and your colleague William Willimon, now and once a retired Methodist bishop, wrote a book entitled “Resident Aliens” in which you argue based upon New Testament evidence and your own theological analysis that this is the proper way to view the church and always has been. And if I could summarize this book it seems that you are saying that liberal Protestantism was coming to a rather reluctant and perhaps inevitable understanding that the church is made up of resident aliens in a culture where we once felt at home but no longer do. And it seems to me that it might well be that evangelicals are discovering this same thing again, in this case about a generation after you wrote that book. 

Hauerwas:       Yeah, the book has just come out with its 25^thanniversary edition, in which Will has a forward and I have an afterword to it. So, if evangelicals would find that useful, we would be very happy.

 Mohler:            Well, I think you will probably find it widely read and much quoted. By the way, Dr. Willimon’s second book on that issue, I wrote a review on it in Preaching Magazine and you won’t remember this but more than two decades ago you wrote me a very nice letter thanking me for that review. Again, not only do we love bookstores, letters still matter. And I still have that letter from you today. 

Hauerwas:       I am not much of an “e-mailer” but I do write letters. 

Moher:             Well, they will survive when the emails do not and the historians will appreciate that.

But when I think about the state of the church and of Christendom in this post-Christian age, just to stress the point a bit further, it is clear that many of the things that trouble most Christians you seem actually to celebrate the end of Christendom and the collapse of a Christian worldview and Christian influence in the society. Just play that out a bit. 

Hauerwas:       I think isn’t it wonderful, we are free! The idea that now that now somehow or the other, America has to be a Christian nation is gone and we are free. Now all that we have left as Christians is to say the truth and I think that is a great thing God has done for us. 

Mohler:            Where, then, does that take us? In other words, what should we be thinking about as we anticipate the next twenty years of Christian existence in America? And even though you are writing about eschatology in your early 70s, I am hopeful that you will be here for the next twenty years. What do you expect to happen in that time? 

Hauerwas:       I think that the church will be leaner and meaner and that will be a very good thing. I think that we will discover how much we need one another for survival and that is a very good thing. I hope that the world in which we find ourselves will be not as violent as it has been but I don’t have much confidence in that. I think the humanisms that prevail in our world today are tempted to murderous forms of life that there is little control over. 

Mohler:            I want to give you an opportunity here in closing to speak to a largely evangelical audience, that is a listenership of at least a good many evangelical Christians and many of them young and thinking about the future. As someone who watches us and knows us and lives in a center where evangelical culture is all around you there in North Carolina, as you think about these things, what would be your word, if you were to write a letter right now to a young evangelical what would you say to him or her? 

Hauerwas:       I would say . . . I wrote a letter fairly recently to young people going to college in which I said, “we need you, so you must acquaint yourself with the great literature of our culture, which is a Christian literature, in a way that you become articulate for the world in which we find ourselves so that we will not lose our ability to be people of substance in a world filled with superficiality. That’s what I would tell young evangelicals. 

Mohler:            You ended your book that is actually focused upon eschatology entitled Approaching the End without ending it. It is just stops. 

Hauerwas:       Yes, that’s just about how all my works end. 

Mohler:            But on eschatology that sort of begs a certain kind of closure, so if you did anticipate a final word, what would that be? 

Hauerwas:       Be a person of joy because you are God’s good creature who was created for the glory of God which is joy. 

Mohler:            Professor Stanley Hauerwas, thank you for joining me for Thinking in Public. 

Hauerwas:       Oh, thank you, Al. It has been lovely talking to you again. 

Mohler:            A conversation with Stanley Hauerwas is never boring. It can’t be because he is simply one of the least boring human beings who have ever lived. As a matter of fact, in his books and there are so many of them, he is often, at least in places, seemingly in conversation if not in contradiction with himself. And yet there are some persistent themes. He is a critic of American Christianity, both modern and western Christianity. He is a severe critic of the kind of Christianity that makes peace with the empire, whether it was the Roman Empire in the time of Constantine or the American empire in terms of late modernity in the late 20^th and early 21^st centuries. He is also a man who very clearly, as a Christian critic, wants to accuse the church of reducing all of the truth claims of Christianity and the gospel itself to a form of product marketing. And he points out that this was indeed what the Protestant liberals did when they sought to make the Christian faith rational on the grounds of a purely secular reason. And he pointed out, very perceptively, that when the liberals did that, they succeeded in making Christianity unnecessary and irrelevant, because if all you need is autonomous reason in order to come to terms with Christianity then you can live on that autonomous reason alone. But one of the most perceptive of his arguments is that modern Christianity has lost an understanding of the necessity of certain practices in terms of Christian formation. And this is something that particularly afflicts contemporary evangelicalism. It afflicts us because we often treat these things as if they are merely means by which the Christian can move into a deeper and deeper faithfulness. We actually do not treat them often with the same seriousness we see them discussed in the Scriptures where they are discussed as necessary means of grace and as necessary means of being authentically Christian. In other words, in the New Testament you simply can’t envision a Christian who isn’t reading the Scripture and isn’t gathering together with fellow Christians, who isn’t involved in Christian service, and isn’t deeply devoted to prayer. You have the entire New Testament that is witness to this and certainly something like the book of James. 

And so along comes Stanley Hauerwas who is not an evangelical and has described himself as something like a High-Church Mennonite, a person who is largely famous for trying to resuscitate the Anabaptist tradition in terms of the understanding of the church and especially the church in relation to the culture. And many evangelicals would wonder, how exactly do we involve ourselves in conversation with such a thinker? And the answer is, we read him on his own terms. This is a good example for how evangelicals need to read someone who is not an evangelical. We read him on his own terms. We understand who he is; we understand his basic worldview—how he sees the world, how he understands the church, how he engages the Scripture; and then we allow him to speak on his own terms and this gets to a second point that evangelicals particularly in this generation need to understand very clearly: We desperately need critics outside evangelicalism to help us understand not only the world outside but also the temptations within. And that is where someone like Stanley Hauerwas is a very invaluable partner in terms of thinking through so many of the issues that evangelicals now face. We are living in a post-Christian age. Stanley Hauerwas celebrates that. Many of us find great reason for grief and tragedy in that. But we see the inevitable loss of so much human flourishing and the descent into so much darkness abandoning light. But at the same time we have to be chastened by Stanley Hauerwas, not to miss empire too much, not to miss that kind of cultural influence too much, because he is exactly right, if we have to trade one for the other we must retain faithfulness and gospel witness and let the cultural influence go.

That gets to another one of my vexing issues when I read Stanley Hauerwas.  What if he were in control?  What if he actually got what he wanted?  How would this High Church Mennonite, this resuscitator of the Anabaptist tradition, this enemy of empire, this one who has taught at Notre Dame and Duke Divinity School, how would he reshape the church and its beliefs, practices, and understanding of its place in the world?  The answer is that I am profoundly unclear about the answer to those questions.  A conversation with Stanley Hauerwas doesn’t necessarily clarify them much because one of the things we have to keep in mind while we’re reading him is that he is writing in an academic world in which he is actually located at Notre Dame and at Duke University, very privileged places, and he is able to see things from that very privileged viewpoint.  Yet, I don’t think he is able to see how they might be seen outside those social locations.  That’s not just a critique of Stanley Hauerwas.  That’s a critique of all of us.  We see only what is possible to be seen from where we are.  That’s why I’m in agreement with him that we need to have an ongoing, substantial conversation with the Church, the Church through the centuries, with the democracy of the dead, with those who have gone before us, with the Apostles, with the Fathers, with the schoolmen, with the Reformers, with the Puritans, and with so many others coming down to the present age.

Yet, if we do so, it will be a different conversation than the one that Stanley Hauerwas envisions.  In all honestly, I think it would be a different conversation than what I would envision.  I think there will be much conversation about the necessity to hold on to certain theological verities of the faith once for all delivered to the saints in order that the Church would have the right beliefs that would then be validated and supported by the right practices.  I think Stanley Hauerwas is exactly right.  You can’t have disembodied truth.  That is antithetical to the biblical worldview.  Disembodied truth, in terms of the Church’s understanding of the faith once for all delivered to the saints, doesn’t exist.  That’s why we have the Church.  That’s why it is the Church which is to confirm and defend that faith.  After all, it’s delivered to the saints.  That is the Church.  Yet, there are definite truth claims that are made there.  There are definite truth claims that are the focus of that command given to the Church.

It seems to me that as we learn to hear the critique of Stanley Hauerwas in terms of how we so often reduce the Gospel to a marketing plan and a consumer product, how we so often try to divorce spirituality from practice, how we so often want to talk about ethics as some theological formula rather than the assertion of the centrality of the virtues, how we so often want to have the power of empire behind us in order so that we can have influence and in order that we can shape the lives and worldviews of individuals around us in the community around us and the culture around us, as much as we hear that critique, we have to be aware that we have do have to make an issue of truth, the truth revealed in Scripture.  It is the faith, which Paul revealed to Timothy was that “pattern of sound words.”  It has to be very central.  In this post-Christian age, those truths, those verities, those doctrines, and those revealed realities are under sustained subversion.  Only the Church knows why they are so eternally true and why they are so transformative if the Church is indeed to exist and persist.  The Church will continue to exist and persist, not because of the Church’s energy and determination, but because of the power of Christ, the risen Christ who guarantees that His Church will survive from this age into the kingdom yet to come.

I’m really thankful for that conversation with Stanley Hauerwas.  I think that reading someone like Professor Stanley Hauerwas makes me a more faithful evangelical.  At the same time, and this would probably make him chuckle, it also makes me more evangelical.  When I hear him talk and when I read him in his books, it makes me think, “You know, I really do hold to this evangelical identity and to our understanding of the Gospel as primary and paramount.”  That being said, we have a lot to learn from those who are watching us, and I’m thankful that someone like Stanley Hauerwas is watching us.  I’m thankful that he’s writing, and we get to engage his writing.  I’m even more thankful that today I got to engage him in conversation and to join with him in Thinking in Public.

Once again, I want to thank my guest, Professor Stanley Hauerwas, for thinking with me today.  For more information on The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, go to sbts.edu.  For more information on Boyce College, just go to boycecollege.com.  Thank you for joining me forThinking in Public.  Until next time, keep thinking.  I’m Albert Mohler.

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Real things, unseen things

My purpose in this article is to express some thoughts about some things which are unseen, but which are unquestionably real. Especially, and no less to be included, are those things which are dismissed by some precisely because these things are unseen. I want to focus on some things in nature and in human experience through which we seek to gain an understanding of life around us. Often, nature and human experience are the basis for how we determine whether we will accept what we have learned and understood, that is: If we can see it it must be real or if we can not see it it must not be real. Here is a simple assertion: These unseen things are real. I want to focus on those similarly unseen human experiences such as love which humans express towards one another. Whether we like or dislike, reject and deny things merely because they are unseen it does not change the reality of these things. I want to frame these unseen things as the naturalist responds to these unseen matters.

There are two things which are common to every theist, atheist, man, woman, children, plant and animal alike. It is life and death. What life and death have in common is that they can not be seen. Yes, we can look at a living person or a dead person, but neither of these permit us to touch these with a finger and declare -this is life; this is death, definitively. The span between these life and death is filled with natural and human experiences which can not be seen, but the reality and effect of these remains unchanged regardless of one’s belief and understanding. Our understanding of what we learn may compel us to change in our mind, but it is our acceptance of what we have learned regardless of whether we like it or dislike it which prompts the transformation which begins in our mind.

the flippant dismissal of death

Their self-designated names differ and change from time to time. However, their belief,  (a word which conjures aversion and derision) or knowledge being the preferred term, with scientists, evolutionists, humanists, Darwinists, atheists and naturalists remains the same. It is the belief that there is nothing beyond the threshold of the unseen reality of death. It is the end. finito. nada mas. fin. Of course, naturalists and their brethren do not deny the existence or reality of death, but the flippant dismissal of death could as well be because death can not be subjected to empirical research: a way of gaining knowledge by means of direct and indirect observation or experience. (A close cousin of empirical research in terms of methodology and a bit more cerebral is epistemology. It is the investigation of what distinguishes justified belief from opinion. [It appears belief is an approved, accepted term provided it is qualified as justified.])

Empirical research and epistemology are no more the domain and property of naturalists anymore than faith is the domain and possession of theists.

air, emotions, death and the unseen

The problem with empirical research (itself, an invisible tool!) becomes readily apparent with something as essential to life and survival as air. It is invisible, but it can be felt. Even at that, it can be felt only when pressure causes our skin to feel the sensation in the wind. Water, which is visible, becomes invisible when it is vaporized. Yet, it can return to its liquid state or a solid in the form of ice. There is hardly an argument to any of these simple explanations from either side of the discussion as to the reality of these elements. What these elements reveal is the transformation of energy into different forms as scientists (science, from latin, scire, to know) informed us long ago.

Yes, emotions represent a human experience while air and water represent elements in nature. However, one key reason which might explain the naturalist’s null view of death devoid of any possibility of life beyond death is that death, like the emotions of love, joy and happiness, is unseen. Neither death nor emotions can be weighed or measured in accordance with empirical research. Here again, especially given the nature of emotions there is a quickness to dismiss emotions as totally unscientific. After all, emotions are erratic, fickle and not to be trusted, right?

pressing happiness

Still, there is little point in arguing that the euphoria of being happy (here’s a tune for your happiness) is a wonderful human emotional feeling. While happiness is not to be trusted anymore than any emotion as the basis for decision-making because of its erratic nature, nonetheless it is hard to suppress or deny the reality of happiness. Of course, there is no denying that naturalists can and do experience the unseen realities of death and happiness. But, when happiness is pressed, (not unlike death) like water into vapor to a higher plane a transformation occurs. Happiness transforms into love. It is no more to be dismissed than the transformation of matter.

Do you wonder by what high-level intelligence naturalists tout proudly their conclusion that something as non-intelligent as a water and other matter transforms into another state, but life and intelligence is annihilated completely?

the emotion of love

Love is a human emotion, too. Love, like water with its different forms and states, is a verb (action), but it is a noun, (place, person or thing) also. How can love be verified if it can not be weighed or measured?

If it can not be weighed or measured anymore than death does it, as the naturalist contends about death, cease to exist and slip into nothingness like death or because of death? Human nature reveals that it is sometimes easier for us to see and learn from what we see in other people, but there are things to learn just as well from inanimate nature. It is harder to see it in ourselves and even harder to accept what we learn especially when it raises a conflict with all our prior perceptions and conclusions.

“One, remember to look up at the stars and not down at your feet. Two, never give up work. Work gives you meaning and purpose and life is empty without it. Three, if you are lucky enough to find love, remember it is there and don't throw it away.” Stephen Hawking

If we have learned and have accepted how water, which one moment is visible and next moment is invisible and transforms into various states, - why is it inconceivable if love, or even intelligence, which are both invisible, should transform into another state and not merely cease to exist altogether as naturalists maintain?

We express and give love to a child without the child having to ask for our love. As children grow they too express and give love to their parents and others. So, what is it about the wonderfulness of love which one can express and give others and receive love and yet, a person can say they do not feel loved? Despite mutual, reciprocal love what is it that causes a person to feel the need to long and seek for something more than human love? Is it possible that as great as is love between humans there is a greater love?

One aspect of love which illustrates the development (yes, you can call it evolution) of love is when a child reaches that point in life where the love of their parents can no longer fill their need and desire to be loved. They seek love from and with another human being perhaps one with whom they will walk through life together the rest of their lives. As much as we desire to receive love we have the desire to love another and to love others. We can find ourselves the unwitting recipient (Yes, this can be bizarre, but lets think about this in a friendly, amicable way for the sake of discussion) of love and though the two may elect to to follow their life path separately the fact is love was revealed and made known. It may not have been mutual, but it was acknowledged without further ado.

first love

I have often posed this question to the saints in Christ: Do you know where the first reference to love occurs in the Bible?

2 He said, “Now take your son, your only son, whom you love, even Isaac, and go into the land of Moriah. Offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains which I will tell you of.”

Even believers who may not know the verse may readily recognize the passage concerning the call of Abraham to offer up his son Isaac. (I anticipate and I am not ignorant of the familiar and typically angry reactions to this sacrifice. So, I will refer interested readers to my article on human sacrifice.) The birth of a son which had seemed an impossibility for Abraham to father had been born to Sarah and Abraham according to the promise of God. Now, God was calling Abraham to offer him up as a sacrifice. Long story short: Isaac was not sacrificed, literally, and the lessons are there for the learning of the saints. Those lessons are not in the scope of this article.

greater love

The significance in the sacrifice of Isaac is that it foreshadows the actual, literal fulfillment of love which is contained in a similar verse in the Bible.

For God so loved the world, that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish, but have eternal life. (John 3:16)

Once again, the above verse evokes in some people the urge to run away in a fit of rage, ridicule, anger or hysteria, but this does not negate, as has been said of unseen things, the reality of love. Whether or not we have seen it, as in because I was not there does not invalidate or negate the reality of love.

More specifically, that love to which John referred in the gospel was expressed, unsolicited and freely by Jesus, the Son of God. It may be a good starting point to consider that sacrifice as nothing more than just a man. Would love by just an ordinary man be any less worthy to be prized and valued as to evoke a thought or word of esteem? Even if nothing else, Hawking admonishes,  if you are lucky enough to find love, remember it is there and don't throw it away. The fact that you were not present does not necessarily invalidate that love and here is the test of such love:

Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends.

The sacrifice of love by Jesus was not forced. It was the voluntary act of love with full awareness and full consciousness. It was the love which he pronounced during his entire life. He fulfilled it. There was never any denial of what he had done or accomplished in terms of his resurrection by those living and/or witnesses, friend and foe alike.

conclusion

There are things unseen in nature and in human experience. The essence of air, happiness, life and death are all unseen. Whether or not we are present to see, touch or feel those unseen things in nature or in human experience does not negate or invalidate of those things.

The naturalists’ flippant dismissal of death as the finite annihilation of life is driven by the illusive nature of the unseen, particularly death, to analysis and quantification. Their conclusion that death marks the annihilation of life into nothingness is counter intuitive to the empirical research approach. Scientists long ago noted that matter is not destroyed, but that it is merely transformed. This holds true of water which can transform from a visible state to an invisible state and back to solid or liquid form. Water is not annihilated or destroyed when it transforms into vapor. A thought is not annihilated or destroyed when it is expressed verbally as an idea. Death and life share a uniqueness. They are not repeatable experiences, but then neither are the big bang nor the theoretical stages of evolution.

Love is repeatable. Yet, the greatest prophesied and fulfillment of love as declared by Jesus is not repeatable. But if the big bang which occurred one time long ago with no human being present to observe it commands the scrutiny of human thought then love demands no less because it is the greatest testament of humans created in the image of God.

It is no small irony that God who is invisible and unseen, which is the reason men dismiss Him, took on the form of man to become visible to be seen and understood only to be rejected nonetheless. Why? Only because he looked too much like man, the creation of his own imagination? It goes back to what I stated at the beginning of this article about whether or not we will accept what we understand regardless of whether or not like or dislike it.

Peace in Jesus, Lord and Savior, the Son of God.

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