About half way into After Christendom, Stanley Hauerwas is posing questions about a “justice” whosae defintion is being set by, as he tells it, a sense of natural revelation that imparts to any in the world a common “shared” sense of what justice is, and this is grasped by Christians as a form of power-play. Certainly likely that there is an abstract like this which people can claim and laud for its relevance and impact, but do so out of a desire for Christian thought to have a place in the mainstream.
And of course, this starts putting me on the defensive about how he is going to implicate the “Peace and Justice” Christians. As I would say (and have written, ad infinitum) in response to Jamie Smith’s treatment of this topic, there is here an issue of giving a more charitable survey of the kind of thought from which this RO type perspective derives, for it is just those educated, progressive, Christians who would and in some cases have represented the most open and receptive hosts for the elements of RO theology to take root. But the way to this dialogue is not in what must come off as a paternalistic attitude toward “activist types”. And thus far, there are far more academic theologians floating RO ideas than there are people throuroughly engaged in just those types of communities their theology would envision.
I adore the writings of Hauerwas (that’s probably too “cute” a word for it). I “relish” it and simultaeously “brace myself”, knowing that in my present state of “churchlessness” (other than the loose connecitons with “ecclesia-based” folks I have developed, mostly online, but beginning to see some various opportunities for “meet-ups” of various local bloggers such as Jonathan (who has a great thread going on his blog, and like me, has gotten himself a Vanderbilt Divinity School Library card to get hold of some of these RO books to pore over)——-sorry for the long parenthetical comment —–to continue:
in my present state of “churchlessness” I am “super-sensitized” to the yearnings for church embodiment that I read about in Hauerwas and Smith, and also Cavanuagh, whose “Theopolitical Imagination” I am also reading.
