In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

187 = 12 “The Play of the Lord” On the Limits of Critique Roger Lundin Stanley Hauerwas and Ralph Wood have written a trenchant critique of American culture. Their thesis is clear, vivid, and pointed. It is that Christians in America have come to equate American opportunity with the human good and “have made American opportunity virtually coterminous with Christian freedom.” From this, it follows that Christianity in America has what they call a distinctly “Constantinian” form, and “American churches have enjoyed a cultural establishment that, for being so subtle, may be far more pernicious than the old-style conflation of realms.” For Hauerwas and Wood, this indictment of American culture and the Christian churches in it connects with American literature by way of the tacit question to which their chapter serves as an extended answer. Why has America “produced so few writers who are Christian in any substantive sense of the word?” Why have “nearly all of our eminent writers [been] heterodox at best, atheist or even nihilist at worst?” Their answer focuses upon three authors—Emily Dickinson, Flannery O’Connor, and Willa Cather—and seeks to account for the heterodoxy of the first (Dickinson) by placing the blame squarely on the Constantinian cooptation of the church, which “has become virtually invisible in America. It has so fully identified itself with the American project that our artists have had little cause to heed any unique and distinctively Christian witness in the churches.” This is a large argument that makes broad and forceful claims on a number of fronts, and by the nature of the sociological, ecclesiological, and theological vision that informs it, it does not lend itself well to being quibbled with here or qualified there. It has the undeniable virtue of providing a sheltering , comprehensive perspective upon our modern theological confusion 188 Roger Lundin and political conflict. But at the same time, that very comprehensiveness may make one feel that there are only two options available in regard to this argument , that is, either accept the invitation to clamber aboard the Anabaptist ark or face the whelming flood alone. Whether or not that is the case, to shift to a more intimate and manageable , landlocked frame of reference, like the speaker in Robert Frost’s “Birches,” “I should prefer,” in this case, to believe it possible to differ with Hauerwas and Wood on certain details even as I resonate with their larger argument about the oblique relationship of Christianity to many of America’s finest writers. With its impressively tight fusion of Anabaptist ethics and Barthian theology, the thesis put forward by Hauerwas and Wood may be as indivisible as the “Truth” and “all her matter-of-fact about the ice storm” in Frost’s poem. Nevertheless, I would prefer to play like the boy on the branches in that poem, climbing their argument, so to speak, “Toward heaven,” bending it in places, but never seeking to break it. I begin by pressing against the argument with a two-part questioning of the category of the Constantinian. To be certain, Hauerwas and Wood raise important questions about the “complacency endemic to moralistic American innocence;” they tellingly criticize the nineteenth-century rise of a bland pietism that sets no challenges for the established order; and in a critique of voluntarism that draws upon the work of Timothy Smith, Nathan Hatch, others, they have their finger on the pulse of the American practice of preferential self-construction. Hauerwas and Wood are right: this is a farrago of cultural compromises and personal excesses. But does it constitute a Constantinian state of affairs? The extended justification for the use of this term comes at the close of the first section of their account. Drawing on the work of William Cavanaugh, the argument here is concise, tight, and coherent—perhaps too coherent. This compressed yet intricate rereading of the history of tolerance and democratic liberties tacitly relies so strongly upon the categories of the latent and the hidden that accepting it might require a quasi-gnostic acquisition of key insights, before the uninitiated can begin to see how modern democracy is “far more pernicious than the old-style conflation” that originally marked Constantinianism. On this point, I am inclined to regret the idea of an either-or choice, vis- à-vis the question of Christendom and the Church, and to agree instead with Charles Taylor’s suggestion as to how Christians might avoid falling “into one of...

Share