Stanley Hauerwas is perhaps the best-known Christian ethicist in America today and most recently the author of Jesus Changes Everything: A New World Made Possible, newly published by Plough with an introduction from writer Tish Harrison Warren. In advance of the book’s release, he spoke with Plough’s Charles E. Moore about the necessity of the gospel, the politics of the kingdom, and the high demands of sanctification.
This interview has been edited and condensed. Watch part of the conversation here.
In her introduction to your latest book, Jesus Changes Everything, Tish Harrison Warren mentions something many Christians are concerned about: that we live in a post-Christian world. She’s wondering if we actually are living in a pre-Christian world and whether that might not be such a bad place to be. What’s your take on the time in which we live and the opportunities in front of the church?
Well, the mainstream Protestant church is dying. And I don’t think that’s a bad thing. It makes us free. I mean, for some time people argued that the world would go to hell if it were not Christian. That may be the case. But being Christian doesn’t mean you need a Christian America.
What I think we’re experiencing is the ultimate working out of nihilism, which so often goes with liberalism. Liberalism is the presumption that you should have no story except the story you chose when you had no story.
The gospel is an alternative to that. I mean, let us tell you the story that makes you who you are that you didn’t choose. You learn to make it your own through discipline, but you didn’t choose it. God created the world. You didn’t choose that. We’re now in a position that we may be able to help people rediscover that the gospel is a story they cannot live without.
The gospel doesn’t need the state either. Many of the critiques of Christian nationalism presuppose a Christian nationalism that is on the progressive side of American politics, because the presumption that you should have no story except the story you chose when you had no story is a presumption that was embedded in many of the progressive views that were backed by Christians of the development in America.
How do you get cooperation between people who share nothing in common other than the story that they have no story? People are dying to have something worth dying for.
You don’t seem too worried about the public square becoming inaccessible to established Christianity, or the loss of religious freedom, or the secularization of our culture, where Christianity is getting increasingly squeezed or pushed aside.
Well, I don’t want to be stupid about it. I mean, as Christians we should be modeling a politics that is otherwise unattainable. So it’s not like I think it would be a bad thing for us to get concerned about appropriate housing for those who have to live in the streets.
There’s no reason that Christians cannot be concerned about secular politics and what the alternatives are. It’s just that it’s not our first priority in terms of what it means to be engaged in the politics of the kingdom.
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Something in your book that seems to be quite contrary to one of the central themes stressed in today’s church is your claim that the church is not about being welcoming and affirming and accepting people as they are. That seems to have become a truism today: Come as you are; all are welcome.
I don’t want you to accept me as I am; I’ve got too many problems. I want to be challenged to be better than otherwise I would be able to be. And so this idea of Come as you are—there are a lot of people who I don’t think should come as they are.
I mean, what is baptism? It’s not coming as you are. It’s being drowned in the water of the faith that makes you a different human being than you were before baptism. So Come as you are is a slogan that might be good for self-help groups, but it’s not a slogan that’s good for the church.
In public you explain quite unabashedly that you’re a pacifist, but the reason for this is that, in private, you’re not.
I don’t like the language of pacifism at all, because it’s so passive. Somehow peace is a much more constructive, positive project.
But I say that I’m a pacifist in public, using the word that I don’t like, because I hope this creates expectations in the people who hear me. I’ve declared that I’m a pacifist so that they hopefully will keep me honest to what I think I should be. I have no hope of being a pacifist without people helping me be what a pacifist should be.
So to claim pacifism in public is to create the kind of community I think the church should be: a community that helps us to live as a Christian when it’s not all that easy. And I need that help.
If Jesus changes everything but doesn’t change us, there seems to be quite a contradiction there. You say that to be rich and a disciple of Jesus is to have a problem.
Well, the Sermon on the Mount clearly sees mammon as a problem. There are many different kinds of problems that mammon produces, but it seems to me the most singular is the presumption that I’m safe. A lot of money and safety so often results in lives of purposelessness. And other than being safe, money is another name for desire. And desires often corrupt. So to have money in a way that assumes it’s mine is always a problem.
Where did Christians get the idea that I can do what I want with my money? It’s not yours. Think about what God did to Ananias and Sapphira. They got knocked off for being unwilling to share.
You state that Jesus is the Sermon on the Mount.
To say that Jesus is the Sermon on the Mount is a way of saying that his life is embodied in every command.
In particular, I think people think that with “Blessed are the poor in spirit,” for example, you’re supposed to try to speculate about what it means to be poor in spirit. Well, each of the Beatitudes are to be determined in terms of how Jesus is portrayed in the Gospels. It is not like you’re supposed to try to be poor in spirit. But by following Christ, you’ll discover that some people are poor in spirit or are the meek and so on.
What I’m trying to resist is independent speculation about those kinds of descriptions or those kinds of commands in a way that makes them separate from the life of Christ.
It’s so easy to separate the teaching from the teacher and live as though we don’t really need Christ, we just need the teachings. Everything is actually embedded in the person and the story of Christ. His story needs to become our story.
I wish I’d have said that as clearly as you did.
Stanley Hauerwas, a theologian and Christian ethicist, is professor emeritus of theological ethics and of law at Duke University. He is the author or editor of more than 50 books, most recently including Jesus Changes Everything.
Charles E. Moore is a contributing editor and author for Plough, as well as coeditor of the Blumhardt Source Series. His published works include Called to Community and Following the Call.
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