The folllowing sentence from a previous quote I pulled from a Hauerwas book (the post url is the link at the start of this quote) gives me an additonal flash of something like an insight into the discussion Eric and I had last week over the issue of what I called then “abaondoning the world to the chaos” (which, at the time, was a bit of an overstating on my part of the possible implicaitons of “too radical a distance”)

Proxy-ing the Mission at Theoblogical
The church, we are told, should maintain a “critical distance” from all kingdoms of this world, but we have little idea of what basis and how that critical distance should be embodied.

What Eric may have intially reacted to was an implication I mistakenly made to his elaboration on Jamie Smith’s:

But what about another possibility? What about setting aside participation in a state and politics which requires such bifurcation? What about opting out of a democratic rationality which demands ultimate allegiance?
—from James KA Smith, at Fors Clavigera

which he does with this:

from Eric’s post:
Dr. Jamie Smith’s last question is, “What about opting out of a democratic rationality which demands ultimate allegiance?” To many a modern mind, such as my own, my first inclination is to think that “Well I guess the Church demands my ultimate allegiance, but putting it that way makes it sound ‘authoritarian’ and leading to a theocracy, the very thing modern forms of goverment were supposedly put in place to prevent! Right?” Wrong (see the Cavanaugh essay below). That’s the clincher about the Church, though, that isn’t a clincher at all: it doesn’t demand anything, it merely asks for one’s own allegiance by submitting oneself to Christ and participating in Christ’s body called the Church. If the Church actually demanded anything, then it would have to use coercion to require people to (unwillingly) submit to it, causing us individuals to be automatons. But to do so would be to refuse the gift of Jesus Christ who was given freely out of love (as God is Love) to show us how to live, how to be obedient, even unto death on a cross.

As Jamie ended in few questions, so will I. Are we so quick as to assume the Church is authoritarian and believe that the state is the “best we’ve got” until Jesus returns? Or is there really another way to live here and now that doesn’t involve the demands of a democratic tyranny (hah!) but the exhortations of the life of love in Christ? Is there a way to even articulate this so that people don’t think an answer to this must somehow equate to a bizarre ‘sectarianism’ like living in a cave, or living in mansion in Rancho Santa Fe waiting for Hale-Bopp to return? I know we can never control others’ knee-jerk reactions, but is there a way to articulate the Christian life in such a way that overcomes these misrepresentations in love?

The bolded phrases (I bolded them to point out something here) actually highlight something which Eric rightfully protested that I totally missed in my reaction to his “agreeing too much” (for my own tastes) with Jamie. Here Eric was asking a similar question to that of the Hauerwas quote above. The question of “HOW that critical distance should be embodied” is an extremely nuanced one, much as the entire issue of even having the intellectual/philosophical wherewithall to even grasp the importance of a critical distance. I’m not saying at all that “we who know” are smarter or more faithful. I’m saying that some of these sociological-linguistic-philospohical-political distinctions being drawn here, as much as I agree with them, are a tough sell up front, and I think that this “resistance” with which it is often met may well be more a sign of “established patterns of thinking in the Progressive world” that is also absorbed without much filtration into a Progressive theology that senses an ally in the political movement. And by saying that, I do not deny that such an ally exists in some of the shared concerns for certain issues perceived as being a matter of justice (in the Biblical sense, as well as we can understand it).

So I post this as yet another forward step I feel I have taken in understanding yet another corrective from the “ecclesial” side of what Jamie identified as “ecclesiocentric politics and progressive Christian politics” (from Jamie’s comment on my post last week where I was calling for some form of dialogue and engagement)—- this “distance” is indded something important,  and has been argued since Augustine penned “The City of God” (if not all the way back to Jesus himself,  as Yoder might indicate). BTW,  I have to get into that City of God work sometime soon.

And this question asked by Hauerwas has honed in a clarifying way to point out just how hard this “critical distance” is to articulate without seemingly challenging too harshly the engagements of others who are seeking a faithful engagement with players that they think matter greatly in moving toward —–uhh…..now what words to use here? —- a faithful embodiment of God’s purposes. (?)

So thanks Eric, for your thoughtful and provoking (in a good way) post.  I hope you can see from how I’m looking at it here that you’ve won over just  a bit more of me to the understanding of the dilemma of distance.