Accommodation

Having nearly finished Hannah’s Child, Stanley Hauerwas’ memoir, I’m finding all sorts of things to think about. Whatever one might think about Hauerwas, what you can’t say is that his writing style doesn’t provide lots of opportunities for thinking. While I would never suggest that he gets everything right as I would see right, he never fails to make me think and I’m often thinking something like “I wish I had said that first!”

Near the end of Hannah’s Child, he is writing about the nature of the church, which he deeply believes to be an important witness to the world of God’s love and grace. One of the comments that he makes and that falls into the category of “I wish I had said that first?” has to do with the idea of the church as “answer.”

Here’s what he says: “When Christianity is assumed to be an ‘answer’ that makes the world intelligible, it reflects an accommodated church committed to assuring Christians that the way things are is the way things have to be.” The last thing we should want to be is “an accommodated church.” And right behind that would some sort of idea that “the way things are is the way things have to be.”

It all reminds me of the power and potential impact of biblical texts like 1 Corinthians 1:18-25. Paul is unwilling to accommodate the theological idea of a “miracle a day” or the philosophical idea of an “acceptable worldview” in his preaching of the Christian gospel, which he brilliantly summarizes as “we preach Christ and him crucified.” In a world that was demanding their self-defined ideas of power and wisdom, that had to sound like a lot of weakness and foolishness. He would not accommodate.

At Mount Carmel Christian Church where I have been serving as interim minister for a while, our Wednesday night studies have been focused on “how things ought to be” in the church of the 21st century. I am pretty confident that I don’t fully understand all the implications of thinking about “how things ought to be,” but I am confident that it isn’t “the way things are” and equally confident that the gospel has power that is greater than “the way things are.” So I don’t have to give in to my culture and assume that is the “way things have to be.”

The simple truth is that the gospel isn’t a magical pill that we swallow and all of a sudden the world makes sense. The gospel actually stands in stark contrast to the kingdom of the world. Do you remember the conversation Jesus and Pilate had in Pilate’s courtroom? Listen again to Jesus: “My kingdom is not of this world. If My kingdom were of this world, then My servants would be fighting so that I would not be handed over to the Jews; but as it is, My kingdom is not of this realm.” (John 18:36, NASB) If Jesus is telling the truth here, then in what way could we arrive at some sense in which the gospel is the answer that makes the world intelligible?

Hauerwas goes on to say in this section of Hannah’s Child that “for me, learning to be a Christian has meant learning to live without answers. . . faith is but a name for learning how to go on without knowing the answers.” Oddly, or actually not so oddly, in 1 Corinthians 1:18-25, Paul declares “for those who are the called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.” For Paul, to be called at least suggests that we have responded in faith the message of “Christ and him crucified.” Faith. Learning how to go on without knowing the answers.”

So while I may not know exactly what the church in the 21st Century has to look like, I do know in faith that you and I must “go on without knowing the answers.” That won’t be accommodation to the theological and philosophical demands of the world. But where Christ is truly proclaimed, something very important will happen.

That “something” could very well be “how things ought to be.”