Space Enough, and Time

Stanley Hauerwas is a theologian who really challenged my thinking this year.  While I find myself disagreeing with some of his conclusions and assertions, I find that he often has a way of pointing to particularly good but hard truths for those trying to live with faithful Christian presence.  His recent thoughts on Christmas in light of the reality of Mary and Joseph is a great example of this.  While reflecting on conservatism and liberalism with Mary as a point of contention in ideologies:

Mary and Joseph are not ideas. They are real people who made decisions on which our faith depends. Christianity is not a timeless set of ideas. Christianity is not some ideal toward which we ought always to strive even though the ideal is out of reach. Christianity is not a series of slogans that sum up our beliefs. Slogans such as “justification by grace through faith” can be useful if you do not forget it is a slogan. But Christianity cannot be so easily “summed up” even by the best of slogans or ideas. It cannot be summed up because our faith depends on a young Jewish mother called Mary.

Mary and Joseph are real people who had to make decisions that determined the destiny of the world. Isaiah had foretold that a Mary would come, but we had no idea what Isaiah’s prophecy meant until Mary became the Mother of God. This is no myth. These are people caught up in God’s care of his people through the faithfulness of the most unlikely people. They are unlikely people with names as common as Mary and Joseph, but because of their faithfulness our salvation now depends on acknowledging those names.

Advent is a time the church has given us in the hope we can learn to wait. To learn to wait is to learn how to recognize we are creatures of time. Time is a gift and a threat. Time is a gift and a threat because we are bodily creatures. We only come into existence through the bodies of others, but that very body destines us to death. We must be born and we must die. Birth and death are the brass tacks of life that make possible and necessary the storied character of our lives. It is never a question whether our lives will be storied, but the only question is which stories will determine our living in and through time.

Stories come in all shape and sizes. Some are quite short, such as the story of a young Texan trying to figure out what it means to believe or not believe in the virgin birth. Other stories are quite long, beginning with “In the beginning.” We are storied by many stories, which is an indication that we cannot escape nor should we want to escape being captured in and by time.

I particularly like Hauerwas’s connection of the biblical story to time, something that has come up a lot this last half of the year (like with Ephraim Radner’s book on mortality).

From there, Hauerwas connects his thinking to that of Charles Taylor, whose tome A Secular Age has been quite influential over the last few years (and “popularized” by the work of James K. A. Smith).

It’s a good piece to end this season of Advent.  It answers some questions while begging others, which is good and fine.  You can read the rest of the article here.

(image from biblestudytools.com)

One of the best books I read this year was Ephraim Radner’s A Time to Keep.  I hope to reflect on it in this space at the beginning of the new year.  Regardless, the book came to mind when reading the Christmas thoughts of Carl R. Trueman over at First Things a few days ago (as both have significant things to say about mortality and the Christian faith).  In his post, gleefully titled “A Merry Pascalian Christmas,” Trueman brings Blaise Pascal’s view of things to bear on contemporary culture, particularly in how we view our bodies and the fact of their frailty.

Above all Christian thinkers, Pascal anticipated and critiqued the spirit of our present age. With his notions of distraction and diversion, he saw both the luxury and the bureaucratic complexity of the French court of his day as driven by a deep psychological need: the desire to avoid facing the reality of mortality. Thus, the French king, who could surely have spent all day merely contemplating his own glory, actually spends every day in busy-ness or occupied with trivial entertainment, for anything is preferable to solitude. Solitude is the context in which our minds move forward to think about our impending deaths.

Death, of course, is not something anyone likes to talk about, even within the horizon of the Christian faith.  Contemporary politics of the body, Trueman asserts, are also made to lead us to believe that our bodies have no final say in things.

If we can pretend that our bodies are of only very subordinate or incidental significance to who we are, then we can pretend that we may ultimately beat their authority. Pascal would no doubt see the psychological turn in our culture as an obvious one: It combines both the therapeutic needs that are met by entertainment and the repudiation of the significance of our bodies.

Yet death is unavoidable and so, when it makes its inevitable appearance, it must be rationalized. This is especially striking with regard to the Immortals of our own day, the celebrities, those High Priests of distraction who serve the most important function of all.

No matter what we declare ourselves to be (or how we view the celebrities around us), though, we can’t get around our mortality.

The metaphysical assumptions of the present age, so perfectly articulated in . . . phrases [like] “You can be whatever you want to be” . . .  are anti-Incarnational at the deepest level. And they are flatly contradicted by our own mortality. Our bodies will have the final word on who we are. No view of reality that denies or marginalizes death can help us to live. That is why Christianity is so important. As Christianity claims, death is overcome not by our pretending it is not there but by God’s going through it. The last temptation of Christ—“If you are the king of the Jews, come down from the cross!”—had to be resisted in favor of the second thief’s prayer, “Lord, remember me when you come into your kingdom!” Christ really had to die that human beings might truly live.

That is why, Trueman suggests, the Incarnation of Jesus and all that it entails for humanity is so significant (and with it, Christmas).  Trueman concludes:

Perhaps the irony of Christmas is that, in its current form, it has become one of the focal points of the culture of distraction, which Pascal so ably critiqued. It is all about consumption, which is just another form of distraction and diversion. It gives us a baby Jesus, helpless and conveniently trapped in a manger, a Christ who is just one more manageable commodity. Ironically, the real message of Christmas is the exact opposite: not to distract us from death but to point us toward death, and then its destruction in Christ. Were death not a reality, Christmas would not be necessary.

The article is a great reflection on the season, particularly as Advent comes to a close and we enter the season of Christmas.  You can read the whole thing here.  Any little thing that can help us remember not just “the reason for the season” but the part that the season plays in the greater story is worth the effort.