Christ on Trial

Rowan Williams’ Christ on Trial is an illuminating commentary on the trial of Christ in each gospel. A trial, in general use, is the method we use to investigate truth and trustworthiness. Job, for instance, put God on trial begging the question why he suffered so, but was answered by God that there is no common language shared between Creator and created. Instead God has proven his faithfulness over time and does not need to use words to defend himself when silence is a more appropriate form of speech. The trial of Jesus before Pilate is an equally important event because Christ is once again asked to identify himself in defense of the accusations against him.

Christ’s trial in Mark plays like a rapid film with an intense sense of urgency to it, yet borders on the absurd leaving readers in the dark about what is fully happening or why. On trial in Mark, Jesus is reticent throughout until the very end. He does not attempt to compete on the same level of his accusers who are powerfully in control but let’s the world be and do its own thing. It is not until the world has decided his fate by sentencing him to death that Jesus identifies himself. Stripped of all traces of power, Jesus cannot be mistakenly identified with power. Jesus overturns our expectations by identifying himself as God when he is a prisoner awaiting death. He is neither impressive nor significant. Therefore we are forced to withdraw our projected standards and aspirations upon him. Perhaps this is the place where we might hear God most clearly. Jesus does not guarantee rescue, success, assurance, or results. Even in our faithfulness, we often make choices that make no difference in the world and have no effective outcome. The very things we wish to pair God with in order to make him look like good news to the world, such as security and success, are the very things that Jesus overturns. Jesus simply does not attempt to justify himself on the world’s terms but gives us only silence followed by a concluding “I Am”. Mark does not give us a coherent story so we are left trying to figure out how to respond. But we know that story ends with resurrection, not death, which Mark was well aware of. Even though Jesus does not invite domestication, there is hope in the resurrection.

Matthew identifies Jesus as the one who the prophets spoke of. Matthew is a coherent, orderly, large-picture story that makes connections for us that were always there but had just failed to see ourselves. What is particularly difficult about reading Matthew is that our personal stories do not align with God’s. Jesus, in his trial according to Matthew, holds the High Priest accountable to the history and Wisdom he had inherited from his forefathers and asked to judge for himself if it is God who stands before him on trial. The priest condemns Jesus, thereby choosing the power which excludes wisdom. The trial of Christ in Matthew therefore is not a pronouncement of suffering and destruction on those who are guilty of crucifying Christ, but on the clergy who are the guardians of faith. Often we work against God when we assume that we are working for him which means that we never fully sure whose side it is that we are on. Of course Christians can and should speak about Jesus through the articulation of faith, but this often leads to silence and stillness before him. We can never gain mastery or ownership of God’s Wisdom. It is often the guardians of the history of faith who are most guilty in assuming they have religion right and close themselves off from truth that might come from improbable sources. It is interesting that Matthew would begin his story with a genealogy of Jesus that includes insignificant and strange persons. God’s presence is scattered through all of creation, which God’s people are used to provide coherence to, but we are prone to exclude certain parts of creation in doing so; especially what and whom we consider insignificant. Jesus on trail teaches us that God’s Wisdom is found in a beggar. Matthew 25 further teaches us that Jesus is found quite literally in the “lesser of these”. This requires a proper letting go or dispossession of the language of faith often used as a weapon in order to coerce people into bending to our positions. This is why the crusaders, even though bearing the cross of Christ on their shields, could hardly be true to the cross. Christ’s trial teaches us to listen to the words and intelligence of victims who have been excluded by society rather than secure a place for ourselves within it. Taking solidarity with a victim challenges the very society that did the excluding.

The Gospel of Luke is written for those who are not Jews for the purpose of elucidating the boundary-less inclusivity of the Gospel. The main characters of the story therefore are outsiders such as shepherds and tax collectors. Through the narrative of Luke Jesus is continually coming into contact with these “insignificant” characters of society thereby relocating where the “center” of things is perceived to be located. By associating ourselves with the marginalized of society we join and become the unheard people of society. This of course has no “useful” outcome, but that is exactly the point. We correctly associate ourselves with the marginalized of society not because they are superior or morally pure, this would only flip right side up the upside down politics of Jesus, but because they represent that which we do not have control over or can “effect.” Rather than placing ourselves in liminal places, it is our constant temptation and anxiety to situate ourselves with the “insiders” of society and suspend present reconciliation. To be silent and listen to others on the other hand is to allow God to make the kind of connections we cannot make on our own. Listening to the stories of others is often an unsettling encounter since it is our desire to have others see eye-to-eye with us. By allowing strangers to remain “strange” rather than converting them to the same mind as us is to learn from the stranger, unsettling our sense of control. By creating boundaries of what God deems normal ethics we inevitably exclude others. Conversation beyond proselytizing is the opportunity given to us to listen to others and enlarge our world. This of course begs the question of whether or not we are in a place, literally, where we can listen to the outsider. The startling presence of the powerless reminds us that we do not live in a world that is nicely organized. Jesus is radical for us because he doesn’t compete in a competitive market, but becomes the outsider himself. As Christians, we not only seek solidarity with the excluded of society but also recognize the poverty and helplessness in ourselves that we fear and hide from others. To adhere to Jesus’ advice that we should become like children therefore might mean our need to recognize our own helplessness and lack of control.

John’s Gospel was written in condemnation of the Jews for having the right story but failing to recognize Jesus. Since those present at Jesus’ trial are those of the priestly caste the response Jesus gives when questioned about his identity is, “you should already know by now”. Contrary to the priests of power and security that Jesus was confronting, truth is a matter of receptivity and vulnerability that frees us from defending our own views when we share in Christ’s own persecution and death. Therefore, to fight for and defend Jesus is a contradiction in principle. We can never identify violence with God’s will (Williams adds a helpful qualifier to this statement, ala Augustine, noting that conflict may be inevitable in the world and a lesser of two evils in defending a right cause, but such action can never be identified with the message and life of Christ). There is a sense in which protecting Jesus makes “Jesus” untrue. If we are tempted to defend Jesus it is more likely that we are motivated by frustration and the desire to secure success for ourselves. In fact, we are not even guaranteed that we are in the will of God despite the risk and vulnerability we might put ourselves through in the attempt to represent Christ accurately. We instead find ourselves placed in the uncomfortable present of accepting the tragic nature of fallen creation and, still harder, the present unreformed church. Discipleship therefore begins by being at home with the disavowal of control. Our temptation is to remove ourselves from the present by distracting ourselves with fragments of information believing that by doing so we are making a difference. It is difficult to be with Christ in the present because being with Christ is less about knowing him and more about vulnerably letting him gaze into our lives and tells us who we are which disrupts our sense of self- security and confidence.

The Church shares stories between faith communities that testify to the embodiment of vulnerability and risk for Christ. Specifically, martyr records historically had the ability to draw scattered Christian communities together in solidarity by sharing in similar struggles. On average Christians appear to be good citizens based upon secular standards. This is not because we believe the laws of the world are intrinsically divine but because we adhere to a different order and are subject to a different king. Therefore at other times our actions look quite frantic and mad to the on looking world. The sort of alien allegiance that showed gratitude to Christ’s gift of life by obeying him to death was distorted in the early church when martyrdom and suffering became coinage for spiritual glory. This was further distorted through the exclusion of those who turned away from the faith when faced with persecution. The alternative to glorified suffering was the attitude of revenge that was sparked through persecution. Both approaches end up making God’s kingdom of this world. The temptation of all trials is to make Jesus out to be a competitor and user of power, control and glory after all. Comparing ourselves to martyrs can easily engender the sentiment that Christianity can never look anything like that in the relatively stable environment that we inhabit today unless we travel to a region of persecution or take the path of monasticism. This is the real trial: to stay content where you are and deal with the annoyance of the ordinary. We want the heroic life. We want a clear sense of good and evil and certainty in knowing that we are insiders, but Jesus blurs those lines repeatedly. We live in fear of being perceived as failures and insignificants in life, but Jesus frees us of this fear. This is not to say that Christians ignore the public, in fact the exact opposite. We are called to keep politics accountable to the wellbeing of all people and undergo the unpopular task of speaking truthfully to the world. In the face of tragic situations it is our temptation to take control in order to make God’s plan turn out alright, but the trial of Christ does not console us with power and security. Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection teach us that we must travel through pain and suffering if we follow in his footsteps. Primarily, the trial of Jesus calls us to encounter our own vulnerability in meeting strangers; the outsiders and victims of society. These are not the kind of encounters we seek out, which is to revert to the dramatic, but instead meet in our quotidian lives.

Performing the Faith

Once again, in his typical fashion, Hauerwas elucidates the distinctiveness of the church in society and its witness as an alternative community. Many cite Hauerwas as a proponent of Christian withdrawal from the world, but Hauerwas does not believe these criticisms are valid of himself. Rather, Hauerwas believes that Christians should engage the world but should do as Christians rather than allowing the world to set the terms and agenda in which Christians participate. The specific theme of Performing the Faith is how the church is a gift in and for the world as a political body that is able to speak truthfully to one another. This does not mean that Christians have a corner on truth above the rest or that there is a stark dividing line between world and church for the reason that the world runs through every Christian. Truth also often comes to us in the form of strangers, Jesus Christ being the ultimate stranger to us, which means that we will meet truth often in those who are not Christians. With that said, the complete dismissal of a church/world distinction has made the church effectively invisible in society through the baptism of the whole world order. It is at this point that Hauerwas introduces Bonhoeffer who, over his entire life including prior to Hitler, was committed to recovering the visibility of the church. For Christians, according to Bonhoeffer, truth and justice (truth telling and truth living) are inseparable from each other and begin with the remembrance and confession of past wrongs, rather than justifying them as necessary, which is the only grounds for peace. We come to know truth as Christians by attending to the ongoing historical tradition that we are embedded in the midst of. Theology is the ongoing and unfinished task of making connections between that story and how we live. Holiness is the process by which the church is made visible and should not surrender its visibility by accepting the privileges the world offers on its own terms. This is partly because the orders of creation are not intelligible apart from redemption. Therefore the gift of the church to the politics of the world is the proclamation of the gospel. Bonhoeffer noted during his lifetime that America was much more concerned about community fostered through fairness rather than truth. In like manner, churches were prioritizing cordiality above confrontational truth telling. It was assumed that if harmony was realized in community then truth and justice must also be present. Unfortunately, we know all too well that this kind of peace is generally established through violence rather than forgiveness. Students of theology at that time, and to this day, were abandoning theological studies for politics and economics in order to contribute to secular society. With truth claims cast aside tolerance was elevated as a virtue, ironically leading to indifference and ultimately to cynicism. For these reasons, Bonhoeffer was devoted to truth seeking and speaking his whole life and went through much schooling in that pursuit. For Bonhoeffer, to speak truthfully was to speak in such a way that contained the most truth or that accorded with reality the most and did not carry cynicism which disdained the truth. This kind of truth-telling was something that Bonhoeffer believed must be learned since telling the truth is a skill of description. Bonhoeffer ultimately faulted the church for its inability to confront Hitler because it had not been trained to speak truthfully to one another and to the world.

After this visitation with Bonhoeffer, Hauerwas continues with an essay on how Christianity might be thought of primarily as a performance, with the caveat that while performance illuminate aspects of the faith, it should not be reduced to it. Within performances the performers explore, wonder and improvise on the script they have been given yet stay “close to home” in the process of doing so. In this sense theology might also be though of as a rhetorical performance where theologians are concerned with “getting things right” by remaining sensitive and alert to their particular situation and to the scripted tradition that performs them. The danger is that theologians can make this pursuit an obsession as an end in itself, the equivalent of getting things “just right”, and take on the project of rigid system building. This replaces the performative character of theology which is “timely” in speech and requires a commitment of ongoing practice and rehearsal. In addition, performative theologians are vulnerable to poor articulation and therefore have to pick themselves back up where they left off and go through multiple attempts in order to get it right whereas system-builders have to start all over again if they mess up since their system topples with them. Our performance has to do with acting “into our createdness” or imitating God’s original performance which requires us to look to the Trinity. According to John Milbank, differences (notes) are set within internal (musical) harmony where differences are not erased but integrated and reconciled within God’s body, which is an abstracted way of making Christian peace intelligible. God has already finished the story and it is not our task to make sure it turns out right in the end through tight-fisted control, but to live by faith and hope above sight. This sort of hope requires patience and peacefulness since Christians cannot claim to know what finally happens in the end. To master the performance of faith requires a great deal of time and patience by the process of submitting oneself to the instruction of a community. This is done over a long period of time through continual practice, rehearsal, performance and improvisation which is done in the church in the form of worship. To live eschatologically rather than conforming to the status quo places a great deal of importance on imagining a bigger story than the one that surrounds us, which happens to be more an act of memory and remembrance for Christians rather than creativity and originality.

Following up his book With the Grain of the Universe, Hauerwas adds a few more comments to his take on natural theology since he claims that in that work he forgot to reference his deep indebtedness to Preller’s Divine Science and the Science of God. The gist of Hauerwas’ appreciation of Preller is how the man is able to go on believing when our beliefs cannot ultimately be proved. Even if God can be proved, ontologically for instance, we are still not able to prove things about the character of that God, which happens to be the more important things needing of proof. Therefore, natural theology is unintelligible apart from a full doctrine of God. God is known by revelation, not by nature and reason. Even though God cannot be proved, or at least it is unhelpful to do so, that does not mean that speech about God, or making claims about the way things are, is unbeneficial. At this juncture Hauerwas moves onto Wittgenstein to show how our speech is action that makes connections between the contingencies of our existence that reveals its beauty, meaning philosophical inquiry has no end. For Wittgenstein, comprehending the world ultimately fails because theories dull us to the wonder of the particulars in life. Our explanations only go so far and we are left ‘wondering’ at a world that exists with or without our explanations. Since we must learn a language prior to reflecting on the world, pride hinders our ability to see the world correctly because in doing so we deny our dependence on others to give us speech before thought. Therefore, for reality to be known rightly the agent who is looking at nature at least must be transformed in a certain way.

Hauerwas’ next move is a criticism of narrative theology, which happens to be quite surprising given that he implicitly speaks of narrative so often in his writings. His argument is that narrative has become an apologetic strategy used to convince the modern world that Christianity is cool because it has a story in an age when story has become a popular way of talking. The problem with penchants for narratives in the abstract is that doing so neglects discernment on whether or not stories are truthful. For Christians it is truth that makes our story important rather than the other way around. Hence, the importance of Christianity precedes the importance of narrative. In some sense, appeals to narrative qua narrative relativizes Christianity as just another biased story as any other. In After Virtue MacIntyre, who Hauerwas has been heavily influenced by, showed that virtue is intelligible only in connection with a narrative, but shifted his thought in later books, like Whose Justice? Which Rationality? and Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry, to consider tradition worthy exemplification rather than narrative. Milbank is also an advocate of thinking of Christianity in terms of tradition and notes how creation is only intelligible in connection with its creator. Apart from recognizing this connection unbelief has only two tools; that of explanation, which cannot account for itself, and understanding, which is perpetually differed and leads to the only remaining mode of existence which is nihilism and the “will to power.” Christians are alternatively able to describe existence because it is given to us as a gift which allows for truthful story telling (although this certainly does require continuous revision and reappropriation). The church is the name of that community which continues the telling of the story of Christ by being the story of Christ. To deny our past or history (our tradition) was the goal of the Enlightenment, which was perhaps articulated best by Kant (or take John Rawls’ ‘original position’ for instance).

As an ethicist, Hauerwas has repeatedly tried to show that theology includes ethics and does not have an abstract casuistic relation. It is a misconceived endeavor for Christians to try and articulate a relation between liturgy and ethics. By placing this “and” between the two, worship is privatized and liturgy simply becomes a motivational tool to achieve justice. Christianity in turn becomes characterized with divided specializations stereotypical of the modern university, adding to the fragmentation of disciplines. As an alternative understanding, the transformation of our imaginations begins and ends with liturgy, which includes poetics and art – something sadly missing from the church for a long time now. Virtue requires habituation through the repetition of liturgy which forms selves in such a way that we not only “do” the right act but “think” rightly as well since, for Christians, action is not separable from the acting agent. Of course this doesn’t work the other way around; adultery cannot be committed with the right intentions. If we have been habituated rightly in a community then it would be appropriate to say “that is the way we have always done things,” but we must also be able to make the connections between our practice and thought so that our actions make sense to us and our children.

This creates the perfect transition for Hauerwas to speak of his commitment to pacifism and its inseparability from what it means to be a disciple and worshiper of Christ. This is of course typically how pacifism is thought of post-Constantine when we started to look for knowledge of how to live morally outside of Scripture, tradition and church since the whole world has been baptized. This does not mean that those who have disavowed alliance with the state, like the radical reformers, are impenetrable to having their lives implicated in violence, meaning that all disciples of Christ remain vulnerable to the mutual correction of one another. One of the reasons people are hesitant to become pacifists is because those who claim to be such generally do not have an adequate account of how to punish those who engage in crime. Due to the lordship of Christ over the whole world, as Christians we are obligated to call into question the practices of public authorities rather than allow a distinction between the orders of creation and redemption. Excommunication or “binding and loosing” is the practice that the church has for correcting others. Punishment is something that is considered self-inflicted that estranges us from ourselves, others and God. Suffering therefore is a gift that helps us identify our sin and our need for penance which offers us the hope of reconciliation. Excommunication names the process of helping others understand that they have isolated themselves from the community and is an invitation for return. In this way, Christians don’t offer society just another theory to choose from but rather embody an alternative practice that can be imitated.

In a well-need postscript, Hauerwas answers the criticisms directed at him in Jeffery Stout’s Democracy and Tradition. In his book Stout identifies John Milbank, Alasdair MacIntyre and Stanley Hauerwas as the “new traditionalists,” and is most critical of Hauerwas because he perceives him to have the most influence and sway out of the three. Stout’s challenge of the new traditionalists, specifically Milbank, is that they oversimplify the complexity of society by giving an account of secularization that is “determinatively anti-Christian and violent” and have convinced Christians to give up on liberal democracy. According to Stout, liberalism, modernity and the secular are to various to be given a single over-generalized identity. In fact, the situation of modernity is not as bad as they, specifically MacIntyre, make it out to be. Stout believes that if these three were to read and pay attention to others they have previously ignored, like Emerson, then the stories they tell would be more complex than present. Hauerwas was evidently off-the-hook on these criticisms when he was sticking to the exemplification of the virtues but went wrong when he fell under the “unholy alliance” of Yoder’s church/world distinction and MacIntyre’s criticism of liberal modernity and effectively called Christians away from participating in efforts to make our society more just. Stout is equally skeptical of proceduralism politics based upon managerial rule which squelches conversation in favor of pragmatic harmony and admits that democracy should not be the denial of tradition but is a tradition in its own right. Hauerwas is not opposed to Stout’s project of democracy which goes beyond state theory and is willing to do business with him, which makes it all the more important for Hauerwas to show what differences set them apart. Hauerwas agrees that liberalism can give an account of virtues through tradition but does not support the kind of virtues that it might uphold; cynicism being one of them which is the virtue of keeping thought and action separated from the self. Hauerwas is also unsure that liberalism has lost descriptive ability in its complexity since the dominance of “capitalist modes of life” can and should still be criticized. Hauerwas also does not negate making society more just but does not want to lose that term into abstraction since it is Christ that gives content to that term. Additionally, the virtue of justice for Christians has always been connected to the other virtues, such as patience, charity, faith and hope. While Hauerwas still believes there is a difference between church and world, he does not, nor has ever, believed that that boundary is impenetrable. And finally, Hauerwas’ ire has not been directed primarily at liberalism as such but at Christians who have fallen under the temptation of allying themselves with public authorities to secure safety for themselves.