“World Without War” with Stanley Hauerwas

Show Notes:

What does it take to imagine a world without war? How do we begin to believe that as a possibility? Eddie and Chris begin a series on war with guest Stanley Hauerwas, noted theologian and ethicist. Dr. Hauerwas asks us to contemplate the hard questions of war and nonviolence, but he knows the answers don’t come easily.

Dr. Hauerwas is a long-time professor at Duke Divinity School and Duke University School of Law. He served as chair of theological ethics at the University of Aberdeen and was named America’s best theologian by Time magazine in 2001. 

Dr. Hauerwas has authored numerous books, including Resident Aliens, co-authored by Will Willimon, Living Gently in a Violent World, and 2011’s War and the American Difference. 

Resources:

Find out more about Dr. Hauerwas, his publications, and appearances at stanleyhauerwas.org.

Buy War and the American Difference

Transcript:

Eddie Rester 00:00 I'm Eddie Rester.

Chris McAlilly 00:01

We Chris McAlilly. Welcome to The Weight. We're here today with Stanley Hauerwas, who is Professor Emeritus of Divinity and Law at Duke Divinity School. We're having a conversation about the war in Ukraine.

Eddie Rester 00:15

Today, we talked with him about just war and pacifism and non-violence. We spend some time thinking about how do Christians see this, how do we begin to understand our role in violence, our role in continuing violence or making peace in the world. Stanely was my ethics professor back when I was in seminary, in the 1990s. He has always called out to the church to be the church, to take seriously the calls and the claims of Jesus Christ on our lives. And what happens when you do that, is that often it puts you at odds with the goals of the state or other institutions around the church.

Chris McAlilly 01:04

He was named in 2001 America's Best Theologian by Time Magazine. He's written over 50 books. And he's just one of the people, when you're thinking through how do you think well about war and violence from a Christian perspective, he's just one of the people you have to pay attention to. There's a book that factors heavily in the conversation, "War and the American Difference: Theological Reflections on Violence and National Identity," a book that Stanley published in about 2011. I think for me and Eddie, the difficulty of imagining a world without war is one of the things that came through, and the importance of engaging, whether you are a pacifist or non-pacifist, in an important, theological, robust conversation about how we make war less likely, for the sake of the global good and community, that's kind of what I'm going to leave thinking a lot about. And I wonder about for you, what was the takeaway?

Eddie Rester 02:09

I think that we got to it at the end, is just that the imagination--sometimes we can't imagine anything but the world the way that it is, and we assume, well, there's war, and, and yet, the cross calls us to live in a world where war does not have to be the reality where, particularly for Christians and how we engage the world, we don't have to assume any more that violence is our way forward. And, you know, I think about that right now. I see all of the refugees fleeing across the border in Ukraine. I see stories of the destruction of a maternity ward, and I desperately want to imagine a world where that is no longer a possibility.

Chris McAlilly 03:00

Well, we're glad that you're in the conversation today. Thanks for listening. Like it, share it, leave us a review. It helps other people find the podcast. Thanks for being with us on The Weight.

Eddie Rester 03:13

[INTRO] Life can be heavy. We carry around with us the weight of our doubt, our pain, our suffering, our mental health, our family system, our politics. This is a podcast that creates space for all of that.

Chris McAlilly 03:24

We want to talk about these things with humility, charity, and intellectual honesty. But more than that, we want to listen. It's time to open up our echo chamber. Welcome to The Weight. [END INTRO]

Chris McAlilly 03:39
We're here today with Stanley Hauerwas. Stanley, thanks for being with us today.

Stanley Hauerwas 03:44 Good to be with you.

Chris McAlilly 03:45

We were just talking before we started recording that, you know, we're here in Oxford, Mississippi. You have connections to Mississippi, that go way back

Stanley Hauerwas 03:55 I do, indeed.

Chris McAlilly 03:57 It was...

Stanley Hauerwas 03:57 My mom.

Chris McAlilly 03:58
You said your mother was was from Mississippi.

Stanley Hauerwas 04:01 Yeah, she's from Kosciusko.

Chris McAlilly 04:03
Have you spent much time in Mississippi?

Stanley Hauerwas 04:06

Ah, as a kid, we drove back almost every summer. My mother had run away because her mother had died. And the cousin my grandfather had married didn't take kindly to the children that were there when she came. And so mother and her sister ran off. And that's how we ended up in Texas.

Chris McAlilly 04:38
Interesting. I didn't know that part of your story. I knew that you had a connection to

Mississippi.

Stanley Hauerwas 04:43

Chris McAlilly 04:49 Right.

Stanley Hauerwas 04:49 And it was a tough life.

Chris McAlilly 04:55 Right.

Stanley Hauerwas 04:58
My grandfather was a cotton gin drunk and pretty wild a guy, I think.

Chris McAlilly 05:04

Right. Right. As you left Texas and went into kind of the theological world and conversation, one of the things that's been central to your scholarship and work has been your reflections on peace and war. And I think, you know, one of the things that I noted in kind of reviewing some of that material is that you did not put out a book-length, I guess, monograph on peace and war until 2011, although it had been a part of your work. The book that you released in 2011 was a collection of essays called "War and the American Difference: Theological Reflections on Violence and National Identity." And in that book, you say that you have a commitment to thinking through what a world without war might look like. I wonder if you could just kind of unpack why that's important to you and why you released that series of essays about a decade ago.

Stanley Hauerwas 06:10

Well, ethics of war usually center around just war or non-violence or a crusade time, namely, you fight a war for good causes, in a way that the means of war can be justified by those good causes. That's our main group. The just war is you don't fight a war far a good cause, but for a political purpose, that makes the war limited to the achievement of that political purpose. And the various criteria that make a war moral is that you fundamentally avoid attacking civilians, because they're non-combatants. In just war, you can only attack other combatants. And you can only go to war, or a declaration of war for which the enemy knows when it's appropriate that they can surrender.

Yeah. Yeah, they were they were hard scrabble, dirt poor people.

Stanley Hauerwas 07:17

It's more complicated than that. But pacifism is obviously the denial of Christian participation in war, period. That's been how the discussion has been shaped largely, and its very important reflections go into there. When I was trying to do in "War and the American Difference," particularly in an essay called "Sacrificing the Sacrifices of War," was to show how war, particularly in America, is liturgy. It's where you become part of behavior that creates this justification. So it's very interesting how, currently, the hideous moral discourse in America has to do with all the sacrifices that soldiers take on our behalf. And what I was, and the sacrifice I try to describe is not a sacrifice of their own lives, but a sacrifice of their normal unwillingness to kill. And people forget what an extraordinary sacrifice that means.

Stanley Hauerwas 08:49

And I think it has so much to do with the fact that there is not a richer moral tradition that Christians can draw on that will provide an alternative to that sacrifice, because Christians don't believe that we need to sacrifice in order for us to achieve good, but the sacrifice has already been made that is the good through Christ's cross and resurrection. So that was the kind of structure I was trying to argue in "War and the American Difference," and that's really that Christians are not called to participate in war, exactly because we have a participation in another alternative prize that is disavowal of war.

Chris McAlilly 09:58

Right. I know that Eddie is probably gonna want to jump in here. But one of the paragraphs that I was struck by here was just towards the beginning you say "This book is a modest book with an immodest purpose to convince Christians that war has already been abolished. The grammar of that sentence is important. I don't want to convince Christians to work for the abolition of war. But rather, I want them to recognize that war has already been abolished in the cross of Jesus Christ. So I'm not asking Christians to work to create a world free of war. The world has already been saved from war. The question is how Christians can and should live in a world of war as people who believe that war has already been abolished." And just the structure of that theologically is really important for kind of grasping the starting point from which, you know, you're working.

Eddie Rester 10:56

Stanley, it's interesting, you say that it's not natural for humans to kill. Just last night, I was visiting with a friend who, as a gift, someone had given him, a relative had given him all of his grandfather's letters that he had written home from World War Two. Nobody knew that these letters existed. Someone found them, transcribed them, and put them in a book for the family. And he said that in one of the letters, his grandfather admitted in the letter, he had killed someone for the first time and the only time in war, and that he vowed from that moment to never own a firearm again. It was such a devastating moment for him. And I think that speaks to a little bit of what you're saying there, that the act of taking a life is something that as Christians, we aren't, we cannot do. It goes against who we have become.

Stanley Hauerwas 11:56

Yes, I think that much of the PTSD kind of psychological traumas has much to do with envisioning the possibility of taking life and possibly taking life, it is an extraordinary thing. I do not believe we were created to be killers. But yet, people have such strong commitments that somehow lead to that. I mean, in the South, why do you go to war? Because grandfather did. So you have to show that you are at least as brave as grandfather, and you must do what he did, and that kind of logic.

Stanley Hauerwas 13:11

It's one of the difficulties about these matters, is you never hear them discussed in church. Most Christians in America have never heard of what a just war logic would entail. They think that non-violence is a stringent moral commitment. But try fighting a just war justly that's never been as demanded. I mean, if just fundamental example, if we had invaded Japan in World War Two toward the end, why soldiers storming the beaches, that would have been preferable, even though more people would have been killed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Hiroshima and Nagasaki, on just war grounds, was murder, because you were directly attacking civilians. And that--because we were winners--was never prosecuted.

Chris McAlilly 14:43

I wonder, you know, thinking through, I think you're right, that most Christians have not thought through the logic of just war. And I think, you know, the current conflict in Ukraine, the war in Ukraine, presents, you know, I think it raises in the consciousness of most average news consumers just the reality of war in a way that sometimes it kind of rises and falls from our collective consciousness.

Chris McAlilly 15:08

And I think, you know, I was talking to a friend of mine, who was trying to think this through just in the flow of the last couple of weeks, what it means to be committed to Christian non-violence in the face of what appears to be a, you know, an actor in Vladimir Putin, who has his own set of commitments. And of course, these things get really complex really quickly, because, you know, we've been talking about kind of the American context and American Christianity.

Chris McAlilly 15:41

But he posed the question to me like this, you know, if you read through the Sermon on the Mount, it does say, "offer an evil doer the other cheek." It's a radical ethic that's rooted in the the teachings of Jesus, much less his embodied life and death and resurrection. But it's a question of interpretive debate. He said, one way to frame the question in the current conflict would be what does it look like to practice that ethic of non-violence when Vladimir Putin is bombing your family's house? I just wonder how you would think about that or respond?

Stanley Hauerwas 16:15

Well, the first thing I think is it's too late to have a non-violent witness in the Ukraine, because orthodoxy didn't develop a strong non-violent ethic as part of their development as a Christian liturgical witness. I don't have any solution. I don't have any recommendations about Ukraine. It would be stupid, because we don't know enough about Ukraine to say you guys ought to be for non-violence. But it seems to me that one, I would like it if the Orthodox Church of Russia were more determined to witness against the state sponsored war that Putin is about. Archbishop is not the right title, I don't think.

Chris McAlilly 17:49 Yeah, Patriarch Kirill.

Stanley Hauerwas 17:51

Kirill, yeah. What he has said is extremely disturbing. Namely, that he underwrites and presumption that in fact, the old Soviet Union was a theological development that includes... You're trying to save Crimea by going to war, by making them part of a holy land. That just strikes me as Constantinianism on a stick in a way that is extraordinarily destructive. It doesn't mean then that you say to the Ukrainians, "well, you guys just need to find ways of resisting killing as few as you can."

Chris McAlilly 18:56 Right.

Stanley Hauerwas 18:57
It's not. It's just not for us, I think, to give recommendations to Ukrainians.

Chris McAlilly 19:03

I do think the orthodoxy is an interesting test case for the way in which you've attempted to develop Christian ethics that emerges out of liturgy. One of the things in "The Truth about God," the book that you and Will did together--Will Willman--one of the quotations and that is "Bad liturgy eventually leads to bad ethics. You begin with singing some sappy, sentimental hymn and then you pray some pointless prayer, and the next thing you know, you've murdered your best friend." I think that, you know, the case of Russian Orthodoxy is interesting. It's not sappy, mainline liberalism or sappy evangelicalism. It's a totally different thing, but you would, I guess I would have expected that a rich liturgical tradition like I assume the Russian Orthodox faith to be...

Stanley Hauerwas 19:58

Chris McAlilly 19:59

to have inscribed a liturgy, a liturgical way of being in the world that would have been more robust. But I think it's interesting. I wish you would say more just about the ways in which orthodoxy has not developed a strong tradition of non-violence.

Stanley Hauerwas 20:17

I can't say much more than that. There have been minority voices within orthodoxy that certainly represent a non-violent alternative and its emphasis upon the absolute overriding of Jesus. Why, as an alternative to the world, orthodoxy certainly represented that. There are resources for making a case for non-violence. It just hasn't been used as much as one would like.

Stanley Hauerwas 21:07

One of the issues that we haven't talked about is, that we know what we mean when we say "war." In "War and the American Difference," I have a section in which I say if war is not just, what is it? Why don't we just call it World Slaughter One, World Slaughter Two? World War One and World War Two were only fits and starts just. So if it wasn't just what was it? So I'm trying to press the presumption that we know what we say when we say war, because if people oftentimes say, "Well, I'm a just warrior. Four out of seven criteria isn't bad. So it's not an entirely just war, but I can still have enough meeting of the criteria that I can still go ahead and go to war." Really?

Stanley Hauerwas 22:35

I mean, how do you ever make war just if you think you can fudge all that--commitments to protection of the innocent in war, you should use no more force than is necessary to achieve your political purpose. I mean, those are heady, demanding criteria that people just ignore, and in the ignoring, you forget that the fact that a war is a war, descriptively is a moral achievement, if it is just. That would be the kind of discussion that we ought to have as a people. And I don't know that the Orthodox theologians have had that discussion.

Chris McAlilly 23:52
Right. Eddie is not sitting across the table, so I'm gonna pitch it over to him.

Eddie Rester 23:57

Yeah. I read an article just in line with that, that you wrote. And you said, you know, people call pacifists crazy, but isn't it crazy that this just war thing, it's so hard to check the boxes. It's so

Oh, it certainly is.

hard to actually bend into a just war that pacifism, non-violence become almost less ridiculous in the light of what you've just talked about.

Stanley Hauerwas 24:30 Right.

Eddie Rester 24:31

Say a little bit. You know, for some of our listeners, they may not be familiar with kind of the origins and roots of just war, going all the way back to Augustine. But also how it emerged against, really, a strong tradition of Christian pacifism, even in the Roman Empire. How did it begin? What was the root of that conversation in the Christian tradition?

Stanley Hauerwas 24:59

People usually go back to, as you suggested Augustine, and in "The City of God," there are brief passages that suggest that war must mean you can only go to war as a defensive measure against unjust aggression. So you never have just war start a war. So Augustine said that you can rightly go to war, as a mode of punishment, and punishment is really interesting. It's a mode of punishment against unjust aggression. Then it was often later associated, just war was thought to be the crusade against the infidel to get Jerusalem back. But that is very much disputed as a way to think about just war. Because it's, again, just war is never an aggression against an enemy to start violence, but rather, is always a response to a prior violence.

Stanley Hauerwas 26:41

I mean, these are very complex discussions throughout Christian history. And it was just assumed that through most of Christian history that Christians only used violence as a last resort, and just war was understood as only responding to violence as a last resort. It became associated with the view that if you go to war, more good than evil must come from the war. And that meant that you had a calculation of the political meaning of the war, that wasn't about the complete destruction of the enemy.

Stanley Hauerwas 27:50

And just war was largely lost until World War Two. And John Ford, in a Catholic University, he was a priest, came out in support of just war, condemning American bombings of German cities. And he got roundly criticized for that. But the bombing of Dresden was attack upon civilians that was against just war principles. Ford's analysis was taken up by Paul Ramsey, and Paul put just war back on the map by writing a book, "War and the Christian Conscience," that went back to Augustine and came up through the tradition. And he he focused primarily on what makes a just war just is noncombatant community.

Chris McAlilly 29:07
Did you say noncombatant community?

Stanley Hauerwas 29:10
Non combat, I'm sorry, non-combat community. So and that is kind of the debate has continued

swirl around around those issues.

Chris McAlilly 29:25

Is there anybody else that you would point folks to if they're interested in exploring just war as a moral theology or a political theology within the Christian tradition? I know that Oliver O'Donovan is someone who you have respect for on that end.

Stanley Hauerwas 29:39

Yeah. Ah, James Johnson has some very intelligent defenses of just war. He taught it Rutgers. I think he's retired now. I think Robin Levin has written about just war. There is work by a man who unfortunately died recently, Glenn Stassen, who wants to develop a position called nonviolent justice, where he wants to suggest that you can make non violence achieve justice there in a way that avoids having to go to war. I think it's, I think Glenn's work is--I'm not convinced--but it's a useful imaginitive exercise.

Eddie Rester 31:04

One of the things, I guess, in my mind that gets so tangled up is that so often, we align Christian interests with the nation-state interests. I think that some of what I hear from the Patriarch in the Orthodox Church is that they woven themselves so tightly to the nation-state that they can't have a separate witness, apart from what the nation-state is doing. I think one of the strong threads in your work for decades now has been the Christian community has a witness that must be independent of the nation-state. So how do we, as citizens of a nation, how do we continue to draw on the best parts of our citizenship in the kingdom?

Stanley Hauerwas 32:00

I always say the way porcupines screw--very carefully. There's a chapter that addresses this in a book after "War and the Christian Difference" called "Approaching the End," called "War in Politics," if anyone's interested, you can look there.

Stanley Hauerwas 32:29

One of the developments that makes these matters even more complex is the development of that thing we call the nation-state. When in the Middle Ages, you didn't necessarily--there wasn't a nation-state. There were loyalties through inheritance that meant a knight who has a wasn't a nation-state. There were loyalties through inheritance that meant a knight who has a holding in France, what we now call France, might well fight on the side of an English army, because of their liege loyalty to a prince who isn't in Gaul. So the questions involving these two particular entities, like nation-states, comes at a much later development, cause the nation- state is a relatively new development.

Chris McAlilly 34:06

I wonder, I mean, I think that, you know, part of what Eddie's saying and part of the threads, if you're going to begin a Christian witness, that would be an alternative to war would be the modest proposal. The Christians would refuse to kill other Christians in the name of lesser loyalties are good at something that has come through.

Stanley Hauerwas 34:30 The great Menonite poster.

Chris McAlilly 34:33

Yeah, I wonder, you know, in thinking that through, the implications of that, I think, you know, as a young person, you know, relatively young, young in... I guess I'm not as young as I used to be. I find myself wanting to develop habits of attention that would allow the development of virtue in my own life, much less than the community of faith that I've been entrusted to lead, that would develop the right kinds of character to be able to think about these things well through time. And I guess what I'm thinking about is both in the current context, the ways in which war is elevated in our consciousness through media and news over against habits of prayer, you know, developing the kind of prayer life as an individual or as a community that would allow us to see what is happening through the crucible or prism of the cross and resurrection in such a way that we could become the kind of community that is oriented towards these matters faithfully, and well.

Chris McAlilly 35:49

And I guess I wonder how you think about that for yourself. I mean, how much time you're spending in prayer versus how much time you're reading the news. And then, you know, for pastors, for folks who are looking to be faithful within the context of their community, how would you think about developing the right kinds of habits?

Stanley Hauerwas 36:11

I keep suggesting that prayer is very important. The second thing is having friends that will hold you to account, and where did they come from? I take it that they come from other pastors probably, through which you ask them what you just asked me and you try to respond to one another's queries about how to go on. Remember, one of the first things that we are forced to do as Christians is pray for our enemies. And that's not a bad place to start our recognition that we've gotten. And then directing attention to people who have embodied non-violence, and had an extraordinary social back. Try Dorothy Day. Try Cesar Chavez. Try Martin Luther King. People forget when Martin Luther King condemned the war in Vietnam at Fifth Avenue Church, his aides said, "Oh, Dr. King, you shouldn't have done that. We're a civil rights organization. We're not against war, per se, as part of our public witness." Martin Luther King said, "Before I was a Civil Rights leader, I was a Southern Baptist pastor." "I was a Baptist pastor." I don't think he was Southern. And that's just... Exemplification is desperately needed

Eddie Rester 38:36

As you think about and you write about the symbol, the power, of the cross as defining for who we are and how we see the world and how we engage the world, particularly around violence, and particularly around kind of our proclivity to want to instead of pray for our enemies, destroy our enemies, fight back against our enemies. We see this divisiveness not just in how wars play out, but we see it in our families. We see it in our political culture right now. How does the cross call us beyond all of that kind of desire to fight, to push back to hate?

Stanley Hauerwas 39:19
Be careful. Don't use the word "symbol." It's not a symbol. It's a reality.

Eddie Rester 39:25 Right.

Stanley Hauerwas 39:26

And so it doesn't refer to anything. It is what it is. The battles, it seems to me, within American Christianity is the cross becomes primarily a symbol for the individual's personal struggles of one kind or the other, and what that does is depoliticize the cross as creation through discipleship. How people who follow this strange Palestinian Jew, who is, it turns out, the Son of God. And once you come to terms with, if you can come to terms with, that extraordinary set of convictions, taking on the role of nonviolence is small potatoes compared with what that makes possible. And what that makes possible--that is the cross--is telling one another the truth in a way that truth heals, rather than destroys.

Chris McAlilly 41:11

I think that one of the conversations within "War and the American Difference" that I found fascinating was the proper symbol, or I guess, monument for recognizing fallen soldiers and the debate that was going on within the Supreme Court between Justice Kennedy and Justice Stevens. I wonder if you could maybe just flesh flesh out that story, kind of retell it? Because kind of at the heart of it is, like, what is the purpose and meaning of the cross? Is it a general symbol for all sacrifice? Or does it have a particular kind of meeting?

Stanley Hauerwas 41:51
I don't remember the details of that case. It was about the monument. And was it in the

Mojave? I can't remember.

Chris McAlilly 42:01

I can't remember either, that's why I was pitching it to you. [LAUGHTER] But the point of it is just how perplexing a reality the cross of Jesus Christ is, and the ways in which we try to extend its meaning more generally to encompass all of the moral meaning that we would want to inscribe or impose upon it.

Stanley Hauerwas 42:26

I mean, one of the things is in "War and the American Difference" is my reading of the Gettysburg Address, in which Lincoln promises that we will not let the sacrifices go unnoticed or unavenged, because we want to be worthy of future sacrifices. What that means is we're committed to always thinking that you've got to be ready to kill someone, in order to make sure Gettysburg is not forgotten.

Chris McAlilly 43:15

Right. It's one of the things I've become kind of most sensitive to, given the fact that I, in the American South, it's impossible to be from a family in the deep south without having somebody who's connected to the military.

Stanley Hauerwas 43:33 Right.

Chris McAlilly 43:34

And, you know, there were two paragraphs that I was particularly struck by. One was just, you know, "If you're committed to Christian nonviolence, giving an account of war that acknowledges the real sacrifices of people who participated in war is one of the things that you talked about. One of the reasons why I think it's difficult for many to think of themselves as passivists is that it's a position that seems to dishonor those who have gone to war." And then you work this through and you recognize that "the moral challenge of war is too important for us to play a game of who is and who is not guilty for past or future wars. We're all guilty, pacifist and non-pacifist alike. Guilt is not helpful. What can be helpful is a cooperative effort to make war less likely." I was really struck by that, and I really appreciated it. Because I do think the question is how do you honor the lived experience of folks who've come before while also staying committed to a moral commitment and conviction that we create the possibility for something different?

Stanley Hauerwas 44:40

Yeah, I was trying to respond. When you say to someone that you're committed to non- violence, they say, "Well, that's all right for you, but the only reason you can do that is because of my willingness to kill. My willingness to kill someone where you won't have to." What I'm trying to do is to respond to that and appreciate why I say, one, I haven't asked you to kill for me, but, two, that you have a moral commitment that I think can't be squared with what it means to be a follower of Jesus. But I'm ready to listen.

Stanley Hauerwas 44:48
Eddie, do you have a last question for Stanley?

Eddie Rester 44:59

I don't. I just appreciate that you call us to wrestle with not the easy questions, but you call us to wrestle with the deep, hard questions of how we're shaped by the life of Jesus Christ--the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. And I think that too often we settle for easy answers, and sometimes answers that make us complicit in violence in the ways of the world rather than becoming a Christ-shaped community. And I appreciate that about your work across the decades, since I was at Duke, so thank you.

Stanley Hauerwas 46:24
I know we've come to the end, but can I ask you how you guys are negotiating Methodism?

Chris McAlilly 46:34 I'll pitch it to Eddie.

Eddie Rester 46:35 How we negotiate?

Chris McAlilly 46:36 Go for it, Eddie.

Stanley Hauerwas 46:38
With the change in what's going on and seemingly the church coming apart.

Eddie Rester 46:47

You know, in "The Church's One Foundation," we were singing it in church a few weeks ago, and it talks about "by schisms rent asunder." And there's a deep grief in me about the brokenness in the church, and the very easy willingness of people on both the left and the right to settle for schism. And I have served for 25 years in churches with people who are on the left and the right, in the middle and up and all over the place, and they found a way to live as the body of Christ, just as those early disciples did.

Eddie Rester 47:36

You know, sometimes I remind people when Paul said, "no Jews or Greek, slave or free, male or female," he wasn't just trying to say something nice that we can slap on a card or a bumper sticker. He was talking about the difficult, hard reality of people trying to find their way to peace with one another because they've never, nowhere in history had this happened. That the gospel of Jesus, the cross of Jesus drew people together in a way that was transforming and stunning. And every time we settle for schism, we give up a little bit of, I think, who were called to be. And so for me right now, my approach is lament and grief in this.

Stanley Hauerwas 48:24 Very appropriate.

Chris McAlilly 48:25

I would say, Stanley, that, you know, I think your point about there being it's too late for a Christian pacifism to emerge out of Russian Orthodoxy. I feel similarly just about not just the Methodist church, but just about American Protestantism. You know, I guess my larger question is just what is God doing with American Protestantism? And there at the end of "War and the American Difference," you quote Karl Rahner in an extended quotation about a church in diaspora: "Christianity exist everywhere in the world, and everywhere as a diaspora," and it feels like that. It feels like whatever it is that God is doing with American Protestantism, it does feel like things are breaking apart and coming back together in a new way.

Chris McAlilly 49:20

I think that I have a lot, similar to Eddie, I have a lot of grief for what's breaking apart. But also, I'm probably a little bit more hopeful than I was a couple years ago. Before the pandemic I was freaked out and didn't know what I was going to do with the rest of my life. I don't know. There's something about the pandemic that has reoriented my heart and my hope. At the end of the day, I believe in Christ's life, death, and resurrection, and I believe that the Holy Spirit has been poured out on the Church and I just keep running into... I know that I've seen the real thing, you know, across the ecumenical Christian community, globally, and I have a lot of hope for what might kind of come together over the course of my life and ministry.

Chris McAlilly 50:11

So I'm more, you caught me on a hopeful day, rather than a despairing day. But yeah, I'm grateful to you. I think that what I will take away from this book, and I hope that, I mean, "War and American Differences" is one place to enter this conversation with Stanley. There are many others. But what I'll take away from it is that one of the ways to make war less likely is to attempt to do the hard work, both of moral, theological, ethical reflection, but also of living in community with other people so that you can imagine a world without war. Having the imaginitive capacity to think about that as a reality is something that is incredibly difficult.

Chris McAlilly 50:57

And one of the things that--one of the chapters that I will probably be reflecting on for a long time is the way in which you engage CS Lewis, who was not a pacifist, and who you kind of challenge. If there was ever an imagination that could have imagined a world without violence, he was not capable of getting there, and I think I'm going to find myself going back to that again and again.

Stanley Hauerwas 51:24
Thank you. Well, listen, I wish you well.

Eddie Rester 51:28 Thank you.

Chris McAlilly 51:29
Really appreciate your time. Thanks so much.

Stanley Hauerwas 51:31 Take care. Bye bye.

Eddie Rester 51:32
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Chris McAlilly 51:42
If you would like to support this work financially or if you have an idea for a future guest, you can go to theweightpodcast.com. [END OUTRO]