Will the Gadfly rise again? Maybe, but not today. In the meantime we hope you enjoy what’s here.

—The editors

Today I was asked to speak about the “vision” of The King’s College. The obvious, cliche way to start such a speech would be to tell you what that vision is. I suppose I should rattle off some stuff about strategic institutions and biblical worldview. The trouble is, there’s more to the vision than that, or there should be. I propose that instead of talking about “vision” we should be talking about “identity.” Instead of just trying to do something, we should aspire to be something: a particular kind of institution, a place that knows what it does because it knows what it is.

King’s has been a lot of different things: a traditional Bible college training pastors and missionaries, a junior college with a “holy hip-hop” admissions pitch, a degree completion opportunity for adult learners, a certification program for future teachers, a leadership college for would-be politicians and businessmen, and a nascent liberal arts college. Few things have been constant since The King’s College was re-established in Manhattan after its bankruptcy in the late ’90s, but certainly the vision has been, despite changes in wording and subtle shifts in meaning. The King’s College wants to do something big, to change the culture of a country, to educate a new generation of national leaders. Ambitious, right? That’s good. We love that about King’s. Many of us are here because that vision was attractive to us.

Administrators are wary of “vision drift,” the phenomenon that turned once-evangelical institutions like Princeton and Yale into secular universities hostile to the Christian faith. Yet it should give us pause to consider the drastically varied ways in which the one vision of The King’s College has been expressed in a mere ten years. How can the vision guarantee that the King’s of 2050 will look like the King’s of today, when it didn’t keep the King’s of 2000 from completely remaking itself into the King’s of 2010?

This is why I say we should be talking about our identity, not just the vision. Vision tells us where we want to go. Identity tells us who we are, and who we want to be. A vision is a roadmap, a compass to navigate our way to achieving our goals. An identity will ground us and make sure we pick the right paths.

So what is The King’s College? Well, I think she’s a little like my Jack Russell Terrier, Ginger. Ginger is a feisty, small dog with a serious attitude. She always wants to wrestle with Blazer, the muscular 100-pound black lab our neighborhors own. A lot of the time, 12.5 pound Ginger gets her tail whipped. But every once in a while she gets the best of big, bad blazer.

I love that dog. I admire her persistence, her show-me-what you got bravado, and her eternal optimism. Come to think of it, that’s what I like about King’s too. We might be new to this game (and we know it’s not a game) but we’re going to play for keeps, even when the whole world is ready to tell us we don’t have a shot.

Of course, pure precociousness isn’t why Ginger gets the best of Blazer on occasion. No, she works hard. Damn hard. She’s, to put it in terms all of you who have had Prof. Corbin’s American Political Thought class will appreciate, a hustler.

To educate students, to influence strategic institutions, to be an effective college, The King’s College has to work hard too. The King’s College isn’t a pedigree. An employer will not look upon your degree and count you intelligent. You’re going to have to prove it to them. Because of that, we’re going to have to be better than, not just “as-good-as”, the institutions your peers elected to attend. That means we should be reading more books, writing more pages, engaging in deeper conversations, than our friends. This has always been a part of the vision. The best Interregnum theme the College has selected was “Difficulty.” It wasn’t just about doing hard things for the sake of doing hard things (thought, believe me, there was plenty of that). “Difficulty” was about the creation of a culture; a culture that valued hard work to understand hard ideas.

Crassly put, the vision of The King’s College is to be better than everyone else. That might sound brazen. It is brazen. And we should remember, as a caution that if we seriously want to achieve our ambition, we have to acknowledge that there is still work to be done. Otherwise, we’ll become complacent with where we are now. We’ll become sycophantic advocates of the status quo.

We’re not the best. Yet. But the vision is that one day we will be. It’s foolish to be haughty about an aspiration. Rather, the unfinished, ongoing nature of our task should instill in us a sense of humility. There are smart, savvy people out there that we’ve got to go up against.

This summer I was telling a friend of mine who’s a Rabbi about the mission of The King’s College. He told me that even though we’re a Christian College, we’re realizing the Jewish roots of our faith. He reminded me that the word “Hebrew” means “other.” The Talmudic tradition speaks of Abraham standing on one side of the river and the world assembled across from him. You, as a student of The King’s College, are different. That’s part of our vision; that we are different and have different answers to the defining questions.

But we’re not called to be merely different. Even though our citizenship is in Heaven, we are also called to live lives in the world. There’s a whole vocabulary to describe this tension, that, being good King’s students, you’re probably aware of. Prof. Innes taught us about the “theological-political problem.” We’ve read Augustine’s account of the City of God and the City of Man. We’ve discussed what it means “to be in the world, but not of it.” These too are hard questions. And we’re not the first people to think about them. The greatest minds of the Christian tradition have attended to them: St. Paul, Augustine, Boethius, Bonaventure, Aquinas, Luther, Calvin, Kierkegaard, Newman, and Barth.

But we’re not just interested in what it means to be the City of God. We engage with thinkers across the river from us. We read and interact with Plato, Aristotle, Quintillion, Cicero, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Kant, Nietzsche, Sartre, to give an abbreviated bibliography. And we approach these thinkers not as enemies to be vanquished, but as thinkers, despite how much we may disagree with them, who’ve had profound insights into what it means to be a human being. And their insights have influenced countless people, people that we’ll have to interact with when we all have jobs in “strategic institutions.” If we want to be persuasive, we’ll have to convince them that we know what we’re talking about. We’ll have to give them the impression that we’ve read and thought deeply into these ideas. And we’ll give them that perception, not because we’ve mastered a sophistical skill, but because we have read and thought deeply.

Ironically, the audacious nature of the vision should lead us to posses a great degree of humility. I don’t think that’s surprising. Socrates, whose ambition was to know himself, said the he knew that he knew nothing, and that’s what made him wise.

So if our vision is to be the best, what’s the identity of our college that will help us achieve that? Recently, President D’Souza has reaffirmed our commitment to the liberal arts tradition and has invited us, as students, to consider what kind of institution King’s is. I think for the most part, we all agree about the effect we want to see King’s have, but there’s a lack of clarity about who and what we are. So, in this speech about vision, I end by asking you to consider who we are.

What is The King’s College?

That’s another tough question. On the eve of his inauguration, I hope you’ll take President D’Souza up on his offer add you voice to our conversation about how to be part of the great conversation.

In “The Liberalism of John Paul II,” Richard John Neuhaus pointed to “the swashbuckling Stan Hauerwas” as one of several theologians who oppose all liberalism — ranging from free-market classical liberalism to contemporary welfare-state liberalism with abortion rights — as deriving from an un-Christian elevation of the autonomous sovereign Self. (Unlike Hauerwas, Neuhaus distinguishes that sort of liberalism from a Christian liberalism founded on the God-given dignity of the human person.) Hauerwas is not a leftist, even though he does use some leftist arguments against contemporary capitalism. Indeed, Hauerwas is in some ways even a traditionalist conservative.

More basically, Hauerwas opposes any accommodation of the Christian gospel to the world’s ideologies and values. As a result, he is highly sensitive to the possibility that Christians may deceive themselves when they attempt to combine their faith either with a belief in capitalism or with the possession of wealth. He views John Wesley’s conception of stewardship of wealth, for example, as a modern accommodation to culture, not as a truly biblical principle. For myself, I quite agree with Luther and Hauerwas that we always face a danger of self-deception in our possession of power and wealth, but I also agree with Wesley that stewardship is biblical. I would be interested in seeing what a biblical counterargument to Wesley would look like. 

I applaud Hauerwas’s focus on the biblical ideas that “greed is idolatry” and that “you cannot serve both God and mammon.” Those ideas should challenge us all, and on those issues we surely read from the same Bible. Where I think that Hauerwas goes wrong is mainly in his use of non-biblical social analysis to expand upon his biblical themes. Most importantly, he misunderstands capitalism, thinking that it necessarily runs on greed and unbounded acquisitiveness. I don’t entirely blame him for this, because many apologists for capitalism (including some Christians) say the same, some even making a virtue of greed. If capitalism were like that, then capitalism would indeed be morally problematic.

Obviously, we all necessarily combine biblical understandings with non-biblical social analysis. The problem with Hauerwas, as I see it, is that he too quickly latches onto ideas that support his basic stance that contemporary society is deficient. He pays attention to moral arguments against markets, but not to moral arguments for them.

Thus Hauerwas mentioned but quickly dismissed the argument of economist Deirdre McCloskey, in The Bourgeois Virtues, that capitalism runs not on greed but on prudence and other virtues. I suppose it’s excusable that Hauerwas neglected the less well known argument of theologian-economist Paul Heyne: “The pursuit of one’s net advantage is not a synonym for greed, selfishness, or materialism. All purposeful human action is self-interested, in the crucial sense that it aims at goals accepted by the individual, using means evaluated by the individual. Greed or selfishness, by contrast, is a matter of claiming for the self more than is due.”

More broadly, Hauerwas showed little appreciation of what it takes to make any economic system work tolerably well at providing for people’s very real needs. He can offer no real alternative to capitalism as we know it. Hauerwas spoke vaguely of an alternative community shaped by the virtue of temperance, distributing goods according to desert. Was Hauerwas speaking of a large-scale economic system or only of a small community? Does he understand how market prices convey information about relative scarcity — about human needs — to unknown people who can meet those needs? Does he understand how prices also convey incentives that reliably motivate people to respond to those needs? Does he understand how only very small communities — families, for example — can know their members well enough to distribute goods fairly according to desert? Hauerwas appears to long for a tolerably productive economy that is also a face-to-face community, something like his ideal local church. It is a utopian ideal. Fortunately, however, we can pursue community in our local churches while at the same time reaping the benefits of participating in large, productive, impersonal markets. And if Hauerwas wants to pursue redistribution according to desert within his church, I have no objection.

References: 

Paul T. Heyne, “The Concept of Economic Justice in Religious Discussion.” In “Are Economists Basically Immoral?” and Other Essays on Economics, Ethics, and Religion by Paul Heyne. Geoffrey Brennan and A.M.C. Waterman, editors. 2008. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund.

Richard John Neuhaus,“The Liberalism of John Paul II.” First Things, no. 73 (May 1997), pp. 16-21. http://www.firstthings.com/article.php3?id_article=3693

On April 8, I saw the same Hauerwas traumatize and dismay a group of conservative Christians. When Hauerwas addressed the problem of being a Christian in a culture that has abandoned the virtue of temperance, he said some memorable things. “Another name for loneliness is money.” “If in giving alms, you think you are giving what is yours, you are possessed by greed.” “The Eucharist is the way the church learns to understand why generosity, rather than greed, must and can shape our economic relations.”

But then he started talking about business and economics, he said some things that were quite alarming. He said that Adam Smith promoted the division of labor because he had an aversion to begging; that business majors at Christian schools are so corrupted by greed that they can’t learn ethics; that capitalism is synonymous with avarice. He also used Marxist categories and language for a critique that he could have readily found in Scripture and tradition (“money is a fetish, and it abstracts people’s labor”). This immediately discredited  him with a big part of his audience, and it led people who don’t know him to conclude that he is a Marxist.

My biggest disappointment with the lecture is that Hauerwas gave no constructive alternative to avaricious capitalism, except monasticism, which he mischaracterized as “begging.” In the Christian tradition, monks work. [We are not Buddhists.] I know from his books that Hauerwas does have a constructive alternative to modern society: something akin to the Quaker/Mennonite Society of Friends. Over dinner Hauerwas talked about the good work of the Mennonite Central Committee in Iraq (which takes no public money), and he contrasted it to the incompetence and corruption of NGOs and government agencies. I wish he had given some of these positive examples in his talk.

Theologically, Hauerwas stands in the Anabaptist/Mennonite tradition that is deeply suspicious of government and instructs Christians  not to rely on government for anything at all. Anabaptists are un-Kingsian in that they do not seek to transform strategic institutions but  to withdraw from strategic institutions. The goal of the Anabaptists is to form a counterculture that testifies against the status quo, no matter how good that status quo is. In this way, Anabaptists are like monks.

I am not an Anabaptist, and I doubt that Hauerwas succeeded in converting The King’s College to this movement. Hauerwas himself is not a consistent or thoroughgoing Anabaptist. He lives large, works for a well-endowed school, and takes advantage of the comforts and freedoms of modern America. I would be loath, however, to condemn a committed (and consistent) Mennonite or monastic withdrawalist as sub-Christian. The Mennonite/Anabaptist/ Franciscan traditions have limitations, but they are biblical and honorable, and we can learn a lot from them about the virtue of temperance. God calls some Christians to be mayors, others to be monks. An institution that trains mayors need not disdain monks. Monks should not disdain mayors, either.

At The King’s College, is there room at the table for Anabaptists? Ten years ago, when The King’s College reopened, our very best students were Mennonites. We did not try to wrest these students away from their distinctive Christian tradition or yoke them to a political or economic ideology. We were a deeply flawed institution, but we never strayed from our Christian identity as expressed in our mission statement. In 2006, with the introduction of “God Money Power,” this changed. “God Money Power” yoked Christianity to a very narrow political and economic ideology, and it reinterpreted the Bible to conform to this ideology. The parable of the talents, for example, was no longer a parable of the Kingdom of God but a program for secular political and economic control. In 2007, Darian Lockett and Peter Wood resigned from The King’s College because of what they saw as an ominous shift away from our mission statement. This caused a lot of grief and anger at the school, especially for the Class of 2010. I suspect that much of the activism now being expressed by the upperclassmen is  an expression of this grief and anger.

I went to the drug store recently and discovered that choosing a cold medicine is not as simple as it sounds. My first mistake was asking the pharmacist for help. Do you prefer pills or syrup? Lozenges or spray? Is it a sore throat that’s bothering you? Or perhaps a cough? We have something for either or both. Not sick yet? No problem, we have preventative treatments too. And don’t forget to pick your favorite flavor: grape, cherry, mango, lemon, honey, orange….

If your illness hasn’t given you a headache, choosing a medicine might. But in the end, it’s hard to argue that quick relief at a low price is anything but good. Still, did you ever wonder why we have so many options to treat something as simple as a cold?

In his keynote address on the topic of avarice at The King’s College’s 2010 Interregnum, Dr. Stanley Hauerwas suggested that the engine of capitalism is consumption. The more we buy, the more we grow. We turn appetite into a virtue, and the more insatiable that appetite the better. Greed isn’t the problem in capitalism–it’s the sine qua non.

But let’s think back to the drug store. Does an uncontrollable desire to consume explain why we have so many medicines to choose from? Or does capitalism have to begin with something else?

We take for granted that cold medicine can be chewed or sipped, that it tastes like grapes or cherries, that it knocks us out or keeps us awake. And we take for granted that it more or less works. But at some point, not all that long ago in the grand scheme of human history, nobody had any idea that any of this was even possible. Sure, many people wished (perhaps greedily) that they could rid themselves of a headache or a sore throat. But somebody had to figure out how.

The fact that we enjoy such a well-stocked medicine cabinet is the result both of our desire to fill it, and, perhaps more importantly, our discovering how. It’s this risky, uncertain, messy discovery part that critics of capitalism often forget or assume away. And it’s this discovery part that capitalism is so good at making possible.

Humans were made to work creatively—to tend a garden, to name animals, and even after The Fall to find ways to scratch the ground so that it might yield fruit. The virtue of capitalism, when combined with a political system that safeguards individual liberty, is that it provides space for the creative process of trial and error. You don’t discover penicillin without first producing a bunch of useless mold.

Of course, with our God-given capacity to create comes the freedom to do so in ways that dishonor Him. The genius of capitalism governed by the rule of law is that it usually channels selfish action into beneficial outcomes. Even greedy people have to keep contracts and respect your property, which means that if they want your money, they’re obliged to do something that pleases you.

But the real beauty of capitalism is the enormous potential it creates to do good things for one’s neighbor, like discovering a life-enhancing medicine, producing it cheaply, and selling it to people who could really use it. I wish Dr. Hauerwas had a greater appreciation for this potential, because he seems uniquely gifted to help others capitalize on it. But his vision is unlikely to change until he’s able to recognize capitalism as a fundamentally creative enterprise.

Thankfully, none of us has to go far to see capitalist creativity in action. The medicine counter at the local drug store will do. I hope I don’t see you there anytime soon, but if we do run into each other, let’s say a prayer of thanks for those creative souls who make our choosing so wonderfully difficult. And let’s not forget the economic system that makes their creativity possible.

OLASKY: Stanley, I appreciate your coming here, and I enjoyed your speech, but I have to say that in answering some of these questions you seem to be reading from a different Bible than the one I’m familiar with. [Applause.] And we could go book-by-book-by-book through the Bible, but let me just give a couple of examples.

Sure, there’s charity for widows and orphans, people, let’s say, who weren’t physically capable of helping themselves, but the classic biblical poverty-fighting device was gleaning in the fields. Gleaning was hard work. The corners of the fields were left ungleaned so people who were poor could go in and work very hard, and get food for themselves and their families and probably if they worked very hard enough food so that they could sell in the marketplace and begin earning some capital. The fruit from the trees was picked from the lower branches, but the upper branches were there for the poor people to get to. It was hard work; it was doable, people could achieve, but it was hard work. You look at the narratives like the story of Ruth, and she’s working very hard through the day, she’s very commended for that.

When we get to the New Testament, we hear, and it can’t be any plainer than this, the Apostle Paul’s telling the Thessalonians “if a man does not work, he shall not eat.” And we could go through book after book after book of how this works out. Now, when there’s a famine, when there are people in great need, as the people in Jerusalem were at some point, then there’s charity, but the normal poverty-fighting process was not begging. The normal poverty-fighting process was hard work. And if you look at the early church, in the first few centuries, churches typically had what they called the “three-day rule.” When a person came, was poor and helpless, they’d provide shelter and food for the person for three days, but after that, again, if the person was able-bodied, had to work. All through Scripture, book after book, you see this through much of the history of the Christian church.

Now you do see at some time in the Middle Ages a deviation from that where begging was prominent, but that’s a deviation. That’s something different from the biblical pattern, and that’s something different from the pattern of the church through most of the centuries.

HAUERWAS: I didn’t say that every Christian has to be literally a beggar. But every Christian is a beggar vis-á-vis our relationship with God——

OLASKY: Absolutely. God’s grace is supreme.

HAUERWAS: ——and that that has to take material form. There is nothing I said, I hope, that implied that what it means to be part of a good community is to participate in the common good of that community through the kinds of work that serve that common good. But that kind of work itself is part of the sharing of the community. That’s the reason why it becomes quite disastrous to only aid the poor in a way that they become dependent without ever sensing a contribution they make to the community. So I want to think that work is part of that, but some people, you know, the work they give the community is primarily receiving. They receive. And that makes us who we are. They’re not asked to do anything other than to receive, and in the receiving, they do it without regret.

What I’m thinking of in that regard is a Jean Vanier L’Arche community, where the core members receive, and they return what they receive by giving us joy. And that is a kind of work that we all depend upon. So, I want to be careful about underwriting a “work ethic” in and of itself. Look, I was raised a bricklayer: I know work. And I work as an academic. But if you want a place where we are very tempted to idolatry, it’s work, where I cannot live without it. [Applause.] And that is part of what I was trying to say.

OLASKY: Well, I appreciate that. So we’re agreed that there are temptations to idolatry all over.

HAUERWAS: Sure.

OLASKY: There are temptations to greed everywhere. The community you spoke of is a wonderful example of Christian charity. I think we’re agreed that when there are people who are less physically or mentally capable and they need help, then this is a wonderful thing to be able to offer that help. But I guess are we also agreed that the common pattern for able-bodied Christians most of the time is work and not begging?

HAUERWAS: Sure, it’s to work. But——

OLASKY: Well, that’s good.

HAUERWAS: ——but Vanier doesn’t understand what he does as charity. He understands what he receives from the people who allow him to bathe them is charity, not what he does. And that that’s very important, because what we fear in the face of the people he bathes is their weakness, because they expose our weakness, and that that is the most fearful thing that we possibly confront.

OLASKY: Well, I agree, in a sense we allow God to bathe us, and so we learn about God’s mercy by being merciful to others, and this is a great thing. So, again, thank you for the clarification, thank you for coming here.

HAUERWAS: Sure. It’s good to be here. [Applause.]

The most famous example of anti-mendicant satire is the Pardoner from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales–a deliciously nasty picture of a greedy, lying, effeminate friar.  John Wyclif, the 14th-century reformer, also loathed the mendicants, and argued repeatedly that the King should simply repossess their lands and force them to become “honestly” poor. Those who took “vows of poverty” in medieval England were often openly corrupt and ostentatious about displaying their wealth.

To Prof. Hauerwas’s credit, he acknowledged the historical failing of the orders to live up to their lofty ideals, with a quote from William Langland’s Piers Plowman, a satirical poem written around the same time as Wyclif and the Canterbury Tales.  What’s a little confusing, though, is why, after reciting such a bitter and effective attack against the mendicants, Prof. Hauerwas would continue to insist that America’s only hope is “a community that exists as the monks existed …”  (In fact, the direction of his talk became somewhat confusing in general at that point.)  I would argue that history shows us abundant evidence–including the Langland quote Prof. Hauerwas himself cited–that such communities ultimately become corrupt.  They may have had admirable ideals, and may have performed good works (in the Middle Ages, friars fed and clothed the poor and built hospitals), but they also bred an especially pernicious form of greed mixed with religious hypocrisy.

But what’s most interesting to me about Prof. Hauerwas’s romanticizing of the mendicants, and Provost Olasky’s response to the lecture in the terms of II Thessalonians 3:10, “If a man will not work, he shall not eat,” is just how old and endlessly recurring these arguments are.  In a passage from a 14th-century text I’ve been studying recently, the Defensio Curatorum, a priest named Richard FitzRalph uses that very same biblical passage to argue that the Franciscan order is non-apostolic and should be dissolved.

In the medieval English church, conventional wisdom held that ”involuntary” poverty was a sign of sin, but that voluntary poverty and begging were holy.  Thanks in part to Wyclif and others, including Reformers who rejected monasticism altogether, most Americans from the Puritans to the modern day have believed exactly the opposite–people in poverty against their will deserve help from society, either through charity or government assistance, and those who make a choice to be poor are viewed with suspicion, even hostility, especially if they take limited resources away from those who truly need them.

With this historical context in mind, we might imagine last Friday’s Q&A as a medieval disputation, with Provost Olasky in the role of John Wyclif. These academic disputations between professors at Oxford were known to collapse sometimes into fistfights and riot.  As controversial as the Interregnum event has been for our college, at least we haven’t reached that point … yet.

A transcript of the exchange is also available.

There’s been a lot of buzz about Stanley Hauerwas’s talk Thursday night and my reaction to it. Here are some thoughts I put down over the weekend and some that Dr. Innes offered this morning.

Cordially,
Provost Olasky

Saturday, April 10

James Madison learned to think Christianly at the College of New Jersey, later renamed Princeton. His biblical thinking was evident in the most famous sentence he ever wrote: “If men were angels, no government would be necessary.” His point in the 51st column of what became The Federalist Papers was that men are not angels, so “ambition must be made to counteract ambition.”

Our free market system, now under sharp attack, emerged from a similar understanding — men are not angels – and the corollary question: How can we act less selfishly than is our tendency?  Adam Smith in 1776 wrote, “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.” The baker bakes bread, another person works to provide a good or service the baker wants, they trade the results of their effort, and both are better off.

Men are not angels but lemons: Some societies rue that fact but others make lemonade. As Madison put it, the “policy of supplying, by opposite and rival interests, the defect of better motives, might be traced through the whole system of human affairs, private as well as public.” Our system of government relies on self-interested departments and individuals checking and balancing others also self-interested. Our economic system also runs on self-interest, but that’s different from greed.

Markets are particularly beneficial in the world of scarcity that man has lived in ever since the Fall recorded in chapter three of Genesis. Free enterprise in some countries during the past two centuries has significantly reduced scarcity, but since people have different needs and wants we’ll always need markets. (Given that in most of human history most people have been poor and on the brink of famine, the spectacular story now is not that some are poor but that more and more people in much of the world are on the brink of abundance.)

Market systems rely on exchange, not greed, but since men are not angels greed can emerge. Redeemer pastor Tim Keller points out in his recent book, Counterfeit Gods, that an idol derives its power from our tendency to take something that is good and make it our ultimate desire, thus depriving God of His rightful place in our thoughts.

Applying this to economics, we can see that hard work is good but if we abandon our family in the process of working hard, we’ve turned good into bad. Earning money and stewarding it wisely is good, idolizing money is bad. And this brings us to the lecture by Prof. Hauerwas last Thursday evening, and particularly the question and answer session following it. During that session he struck at two biblical concepts that are also at the heart of what we teach at King’s: the value of hard work within a market economy and the importance of stewardship, which he called “self-deception.”

You heard what he said so I won’t give a recap here but I did not want to leave unchallenged Prof. Hauerwas’s direct opposition to biblical teaching. It doesn’t matter that he is popular in some spheres of academia and media because he gives a religious gloss to the left’s fundamental hatred of free markets. He just doesn’t grasp the simple truth that markets force people to think about what someone else wants. He denigrates stewardship, even though King’s and Duke both exist only because some individuals have worked hard and then given away what they earned.

Why, then, given his reputation, did King’s invite him? Two reasons: First, Interregnum is a wonderful example of student initiative, and it’s a King’s tradition to have students choose the speaker. Second, it’s good to hear directly what people on the left think. I’ve invited many of them to the Distinguished Visitors Series, but since DVS does not offer an honorarium to interviewees and in almost all circumstances does not even pay travel expenses, only a couple have come. The Interregnum speaker, however, receives a hefty honorarium.

Given the controversial nature of Prof. Hauerwas’s remarks, though, another tradition came into play: No one gets a free ride. At major colleges and universities, the tradition is to offer vigorous challenge to someone who gives a speech. Questions and comments are supposed to be tough. When a speaker neglects important evidence, others are supposed to point out for the benefit of the audience what he has omitted. This is standard academic practice, and a pro like Prof. Hauerwas has encountered it often.

Besides, as Christians, which most of us are, we are charged to honor God and not fear men. On Thursday night I heard two students asking challenging questions, but most of the audience response was docile, and that concerned me.  It was almost as if we were in awe of Prof. Hauerwas’s designation by Time as America’s top theologian, or we desired too much for Prof. Hauerwas to love us or love King’s. Yet this emperor had no clothes, and it was important to say so.

I take seriously the concern of some that, by saying Prof. Hauerwas was reading from a different Bible and by noting some of his omissions, I was being inhospitable. It didn’t seem that way to me, because I’m used to the academic tradition of challenging and correcting speakers, but I can see how some might feel that way, and that’s a good concern to have.

I do think, though, that we should keep this in mind: Prof. Hauerwas was not volunteering his time and doing King’s a favor, the way a Distinguished Visitor or a Commencement speaker is. Prof. Hauerwas was more a well-paid contractor than a guest, and it may not be inhospitable to critique poor workmanship in such a situation.

The other concern I’ve heard is that my remarks seemed angry. I’m sorry that they seemed that way: I did not want to take up much time and was speaking fast. I didn’t feel personal animus toward Prof. Hauerwas, and spoke with him amicably as we walked back to midtown afterward. But I guess I was angry about some of the things he said, perhaps because I’ve heard them so often for so many years, and believed them in the early 70s when I was a Marxist and parroted speakers very much like him.

So, do I want you to imitate what I did? No, do better than I did. If I spoke too intensely and came off as angry, learn from that and be winsome. But do not be passive when anyone, no matter his plaudits, distorts what the Bible teaches. Build the reputation of King’s as a place that invites in all kinds of people yet challenges them and all of us through our loyalty to God’s Truth. Be zealous for Christ.

And, as many of you know, if you want to talk my office door is open, except maybe when I’m in a meeting, or eating peanut butter and an apple for lunch.

Late Sunday evening, April 11

At Redeemer this evening we had a prayer of confession based on 1 Corinthians 13. We read statements such as “Love is courteous” and “Love delights in truth and righteousness,” and after that last verse were supposed to meditate on this question: “Do I put obedience to God first in my life?”

Was I courteous to Prof. Hauerwas? Some students have told me I was, some told me I was not. Did I put obedience to God first? In this situation, yes. I don’t want to fall into religio-speak, but I felt the Spirit of God coming upon me as I only rarely have before; I had to speak up. Some might mock that, and as an historian I’ve sometimes wondered about such reports, but I felt that to remain silent would dishonor God. Did I speak well? It seems that I could have done better.

But pastor Tim Keller drew our attention to the central part of the chapter, where it describes the love that “is not rude, it is not self-seeking,” and also notes that “Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth.” He said it’s vital to remember that this passage is not about us: It’s about Jesus.

Christ knew when it was right to overturn tables and shoot scornful words at Pharisees, and when it was not. We all err. Christ took upon himself all the sins of omission and commission that occurred on Thursday evening. If Prof. Hauerwas twisted Scripture or if I was rude, Christ’s blood covers that. Christ died for those who didn’t ask hard questions and for the person who yelled at Hauerwas, “You’re an idiot.”

At the end of the service tonight we sang what may be the only modern hymn that really gets to me, “The Power of the Cross.” You may be familiar with it, but for those who aren’t, here are the lyrics:

“The Power of the Cross”
Words and Music by Keith Getty & Stuart Townend
Copyright © 2005 Thankyou Music

Oh, to see the dawn
Of the darkest day:
Christ on the road to Calvary.
Tried by sinful men,
Torn and beaten, then
Nailed to a cross of wood.

CHORUS:
This, the pow’r of the cross:
Christ became sin for us;
Took the blame, bore the wrath-
We stand forgiven at the cross.

Oh, to see the pain
Written on Your face,
Bearing the awesome weight of sin.
Ev’ry bitter thought,
Ev’ry evil deed
Crowning Your bloodstained brow.

Now the daylight flees;
Now the ground beneath
Quakes as its Maker bows His head.
Curtain torn in two,
Dead are raised to life;
“Finished!” the vict’ry cry.

Oh, to see my name
Written in the wounds,
For through Your suffering I am free.
Death is crushed to death;
Life is mine to live,
Won through Your selfless love.

FINAL CHORUS:
This, the pow’r of the cross:
Son of God-slain for us.
What a love! What a cost!
We stand forgiven at the cross.

Last Thursday night Stanley Hauerwas, the Gilbert T. Rowe Professor of Theological Ethics at Duke Divinity School, addressed the student body of The King’s College on the subject of avarice. He was the the keynote speaker for the 2010 Interregnum, the college’s annual three day recess from classes when we explore a fruitful theme and a related great book.Stanley Hauerwas is an odd man, but the sort of oddball that is good to know. He is an Anabaptist Anglican from Texas, now living in North Carolina. He is too conservative to be acceptable to liberals (he believes the Bible and thinks sodomy is sin), but he is too liberal for the comfort of conservatives (he’s a pacifist and he’s married to a Methodist minister). He is pleasant company, and a stimulating thinker.Over the course of the day with Prof. Hauerwas, between a morning conversation, a lunch discussion, the evening address, and the question and answer time that followed, I gleaned these nuggets of insight and provocation. (These are either quotations, or, more likely, fairly reliable near-quotations.) For another brief exposure to the man, you can read Marvin Olasky’s 2007 interview with him, “A Playful Mind.”
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Evangelicals know the Bible and they know today…and nothing in between.

Evangelicals are people who have a relationship with God, and attending church worship services is just how they express that. [If you don't see the point, the joke is on you.]

We don’t hear sermons on greed (which is odd given that it’s such a prominent theme in the New Testament.) We know what lust looks like–but greed?

There was an increase in attention to greed by theologians after the rise of the money economy in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

America can never have enough power.

America runs on fear.

We cannot imagine anything but an endlessly growing economy–that says something about our greed.

People have always been greedy, but now we have made it into a moral quality necessary for economic growth.

Whether or not we are possessed by our possessions is measured by our willingness to give it away.

We want to be forgivers, not forgiven, because we want to remain in control. Learn to accept forgiveness without regret.

If in giving alms you think you are giving what’s yours, you are possessed by greed.

Greed is a deadly sin because it prevents faith.

What would New York City look like if it were shaped by the virtue of temperance?

Another name for money is loneliness.

You should not have a personal relationship with Christ. You should share him.

No monasticism? No Christianity. The Protestant rejection of it explains why we have no resistance to being bourgeois.

Jesus never worked a day as far as we know. He must have begged. We need to learn how to beg. If you get money, you must always get it as a beggar. (He meant you must view it, even as you are making it, as a gift from God, from outside of your control. But he also spoke highly of actual begging.)

American democracy is a plutocracy. …The middle class doesn’t care who rules as long as they don’t lose their stuff.

Every American has a sign around his neck that says, “Notice me!” (but I don’t have to notice you). It’s a form of greed.

********************

I was impressed by the breadth of his learning, and the fertility of his mind. (Why should I be impressed? He’s a prominent theologian of high reputation.) His discussion of the moral management of prosperity, being possessed by our possessions, the ease with which we justify and even sanctify our avarice, and the many forms this sin can take when concealed within other sins as well as within virtues like generosity was a feast for reflection. But I was struck with how injudicious his judgments were in applying his learning

Professor Hauerwas finds greed in all human business like dust in a rug, but he uses this exposure as a basis for condemning modern life itself. Of course modernity has serious problems. That’s why it spawned post-modernity. But a more sober use of his considerable research and original insights would have been to recognize what good there is in modern liberty, and then caution us against the many and subtle forms of greed for which modern life gives such historically unprecedented opportunity. It is one of the blessings of modern political and economic liberty that the sons of bricklayers, people like Hauerwas, can become great theologians. Yet, necessarily alongside that and deceived by what our hands have done, we feel we are masters of our own fortune in the making of it, the spending of it, and the giving of it away. But Hauerwas seems angry that the eschaton has not come more quickly, and he seems to blame us for the delay.

It is true that we are all too comfortable in our wealth and all too blind to our greed and the extent to which we are possessed by our possessions. Hauerwas was good at exposing the finer roots of this sin in our hearts. But he went beyond that. His condemnation of all things modern and middle class was sweeping. It was irresponsible. He tossed an intellectual hand grenade into the crowd of people’s thoughts to shatter their way of thinking about work, possessions, prosperity, and giving. But he put nothing in its place. At the end of the lecture, he seemed to prepare us for “an alternative to a world shaped by greed.” But then he just said something vague about Jesus. When a student pressed him for a suggestion as to how then we should live, he threw up his hands and complained that we have no idea how to live any other way, and that this itself indicates how possessed by greed we are.

At the end of the question period, he eventually suggested that instead of walking around with a sign around our necks saying “Notice me!”, as he said all Americans do and which is a form of greed, in its place we should learn how to live as friends. Lovely! Aside from being a hideously unjust caricature of American life–there is a great deal of friendship and community in America, and even fellow feeling toward strangers, even in New York City!–it is an almost comically unhelpful suggestion, both institutionally and theoretically. A healthy political community will be knit together by ties of affection among people that resemble those of friendship, and the more like friendship they are (remembering that you cannot be literally “friends” with 100,000 people), the healthier the community will be. Iraq in the aftermath of Saddam’s fall and New York City in the 1970s and 1980s are notorious examples of political friendship deficits. But to suggest that friendship replace the market economy, perhaps along the lines of universalized monastic life or the separatistic Anabaptist communities of rural Pennsylvania, lies somewhere between philosophical fantasy and over-realized eschatology.

If he is genuinely flummoxed over how we might organize and conduct our life together in a way that is not fundamentally avaricious, he should be much gentler in his rebukes and humbler in his accusations.

People’s understanding of property has profound political implications, and gifted thinkers should be cautious in what they say about these things. One is quick to remember the degrading and bitter sting of near universal poverty before what Hauerwas reminds us was the rise of the money economy in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. But we should also call to mind what politics looked like at that time, i.e., how power was distributed and used. Hauerwas told us that American democracy is plutocracy–the rule of wealth–in which the middle class doesn’t care who rules as long as they don’t lose their stuff. But a populace of beggars and the materially indifferent would soon be once again under arbitrary government. It would soon return to the government of men in their unrestrained, unmediated greed and glorious domination, rather than the government of laws that is the limited, constitutional government of a commercial republic like ours. Yes, a commercial republic, with all its attendant spiritual pitfalls. Anyone who thinks that poverty under tyranny is the better choice because it is better for our souls should move to North Korea or Zimbabwe. They are still taking applications.

But Prof. Hauerwas was not suggesting that we revert to medieval peasant life under the indifferent hand of hereditary lords because it would free us from such culturally pervasive and institutionalized avarice. Actually, it’s not clear that he wasn’t. He celebrated begging. As he pointed out, the Franciscans begged. The Franciscans begged and so should we. He even claimed that we have no evidence that Jesus ever worked, so he must have begged. Thus, Christians should follow in his steps. The experience cultivates in us a recognition of our poverty and of our material dependence on God. To round out the judgment, he criticized Adam Smith for redirecting our economy, and with it our hearts, in a way that would clear the beggars from our midst. A rising tide lifts all paupers. But he says we need beggars forour sakes, i.e., to give us occasion to give. The beggars might consider that an overly selfish view, perhaps even greedy, and opt for Adam Smith. Nonetheless, there will always be helpless people among us, the disabled for example, who give us occasion to give.

Hauerwas went far beyond suggesting that Christians pick up the habit of quitting their jobs and adopting the mendicant ways of Franciscan monks. He condemned the very foundations of the modern economy. “We cannot imagine anything but an endlessly growing economy–that says something about our greed.” “People have always been greedy, but now we have made it into a moral quality necessary for economic growth.” But you cannot separate the modern hope of prosperity, both personal and shared, from modern economic liberty. And you cannot separate economic liberty from property rights. And you cannot separate security in one’s property from security against arbitrary government, which is political liberty. To desire one without the other is like saying you want modern life, but without the invention of nuclear weapons. The one entails the other. You cannot maintain a society-wide medieval attitude toward possessions and acquisition in isolation from an otherwise modern attitude toward nature (conquerable), one another (equal politically), and political power (accountable to the people). These attitudes are all part of a civilizational package.

If Hauerwas wants all the benefits that come with widespread begging, he has to take filth, plague, crib death, famine, and oppression along with it. You cannot have the conquest of nature by science (consider penicillin) and the attitudes of personal assertion over fortune that underpin it, without also the ambitious creation of wealth by countless entrepreneurs, great and small. In other words, you cannot have Francis Bacon’s New Organon without his essays “Of Riches,” “Of Usury,” and “Of the True Greatness of Kingdoms and Estates.”

It’s easy to get well meaning Christians stirred up with calls for a purer heart with respect to riches. Following through on the implications of your revolutionary call for a society of friends and an economy of temperance would surely expose, however, both the impossibility and the horror of your brave new world. It would also sober your audience into considering a more temperate critique of modernity and a less monkish view of prosperity.