Honoring 9-11 Raises a Key Issue: Should Christians Only Think through a Religious Filter?

How to Interpret World Events Raises a Key Issue for Christians and Devout People of any Religious Persuasion

by Max J. Havlick, Villa Park, Illinois, September 15-18, 2011

1. The current weekly newsletter of a prosperous church in Villa Park opened with a comment and quotation no doubt intended for devotional use, but it also happened to raise one of the most important issues in contemporary philosophy of religion: Is it legitimate, or even possible, for Christians, or devout people of any religious persuasion, to think critically and objectively about anything of significance to the world at large without relating it first to the most significant aspects of their own particular religious faith?

2. Here is the comment including the quotation from Stanley Hauerwas, professor of theological ethics at Duke Divinity School (originally from a long interview November 8, 2001 with Jim Wallis, editor of Sojourners magazine, covering all aspects of appropriate Christian response to violence, available at www.sojo.net):

A parting thought regarding last Sunday's 9/11 observance:
"When people say, 'the world changed on Sept. 11, 2001,'
we have to say, 'No, the world changed in 33 A.D.'
The question is how to narrate what happened on Sept. 11
in light of what happened in 33 A.D."

3. Prof. Hauerwas, teaching securely in one of the most highly respected American divinity schools, considers it his job, his profession, to urge Christians to say, "No!" to the world-changing significance for anything outside the context provided symbolically and theologically for Christians by the expression "A.D. 33." [The abbreviation A.D. stands for Latin anno Domini, "in the year of our Lord," hence should stand before the number, not after it (Chicago Manual of Style, 15th ed., 2003, p. 390).]

4. Prof. Hauerwas thus does not want Christians to consider the world-changing significance of 9-11, or presumably anything else, without giving priority to A.D. 33, and he wants them to narrate their account of any important event only in the context of what happened in A.D. 33.

5. Does not such a requirement discourage any thinking Christian from trying to participate meaningfully in the wider public world of analysis and critical discussion of any event or any subject with possible world-changing significance?

6. It is well known that you can defeat any objective discussion of any event, any subject, no matter how important to the world in general, by injecting considerations from your personal religious beliefs. Public disagreement on religious subjects quickly redirects everyone's attention to the subject of religion itself and thus raises intractable difficulties that no public group can possibly resolve in time to allow full assessment of key events (like 9-11) for purposes of public policy, not to speak of their practical implications for individual lives.

7. The edict of Prof. Hauerwas, in effect, declares inappropriate and illegitimate the whole enterprise of modern critical scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and physical and natural sciences (as in the disciplines of history, sociology, anthropology, linguistics, languages and literature, philosophy, religion, etc.) which cannot possibly refer first to what happened in A.D. 33 before assessing the meaning of each and every event and idea that might have world-changing significance.

8. Such a procedure would not only render invalid 90 percent of all scholarly work published in the journals of Europe and America for the past 200 years, but would make it impossible for Christians to pursue any further the worthy ideals of critical, objective scholarship (which first decisively emerged in Western Judeo-Christian culture, and still primarily resides there today).

9. This refusal to consider the significance to 9-11 outside A.D. 33 unfortunately resembles the logic of those much more conservative clerics who insisted 9-11 was not so much an event of geo-political conflict as it was God's judgment on America for tolerating homosexuality, or indeed, the view of the current candidate for president who claims a recent hurricane and earthquake prove that God dislikes current American political culture!

10. This kind of exclusivistic intellectual tribalism, a clever rhetorical way of making everything else in the world seem secondary to one's own theological interpretation of one's own religion, has increasingly today become anachronistic as public policy, and even counter-productive to the church's own goals (including survival!), in the complex new world situation now emerging (whether anyone happens to like it or not, and of course, many people do not).

11. For starters, from a Christian perspective, it contradicts many known teachings of Jesus who (along with many other divinely inspired teachers before and after him) seems to have recognized world-changing possibilities in everyone and everything, irrespective of A.D. 33, and taught people to look for significance in all manner of ideas and events.

12. Matthew's Jesus, for example, taught assembled crowds of peasants such things as, "Ye are the light of the world," and "Ye are the salt of the earth" (Mt 5:13-16), and even John's more theological and self-oriented Jesus ("I am the light of the world!") taught his students that he would leave soon and that they, the students, would do even greater things than he had done (Jn 14:12, etc.).

13. But it is simply inaccurate for Christians to act as if only Jesus, whether in ancient or modern times, taught the importance of human events on earth, including disasters, and even taught people to look for the significance in such things and yearn for it. Anyone ministering in a church today can learn that fact by browsing through any textbook on comparative religion, or by browsing through the self-help section of any local book store or public library!

14. The New Testament, the church's traditional source book, does contain many such exclusivistic statements, and some put on the lips of Jesus (esp. in John's gospel), but all of them were selected, edited, and recorded in the first century when small groups of Christians, a deep minority with a dynamic new faith, struggled to understand and express that faith so they could survive in the Roman Empire which comprised their world (because they had little or no knowledge of advanced Far Eastern civilizations or anything else in the world at large).

15. I have no desire to rattle the uncritical faith of most Christians, or for that matter, the members of any other religious tradition, because each group, and each person, must work out their beliefs from their own full lifetimes of personal and social experience, and no one outside can do that for them. Many people, if not most, understandably prefer to retain beliefs they had in their childhood or adolescent years, so the traditions do not change rapidly.

16. Any thinking person entering a serious discussion of a public issue will naturally take into account every detailed aspect of background and experience, including religious and political beliefs, and every other influence. Certainly I do so myself, but not to the point of revisiting each important factor in my life before entering discussion of serious current events.

17. As a native-born American, for instance, I have 1492, 1607, 1620, 1776, and 1789 to think about, and 1861-65, 1914, 1941, and so on, but in assessing every new world-changing event, it would rarely be practical or helpful for me to stop first and rethink my deepest ideas about 1776, Alexander Hamilton, Abraham Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson, and so on, much less to inject my particular beliefs about these past eras into every discussion focused elsewhere.

18. So I consider it fully legitimate for Prof. Hauerwas, or any church, or any particular Christian, minister or otherwise, to claim on the grounds of their own personal faith and experience that they themselves do not assess anything without reference to their religious faith (A.D. 33), because that procedure is their right (if not their responsibility).

19. But that differs by far from issuing a general pronouncement that theologically restricts other Christians from participating in public discussion of important events and issues until they can re-evaluate how those events and issues were influenced by their particular beliefs on what happened in A.D. 33. I submit that not only the readers of Sojourners, but the readers of local church newsletters deserve better than that.

20. We hopefully are not yet ready to abandon the Christian Enlightenment and return ourselves to the medieval habit of letting eminently fallible theologians and priests dictate that we may only think in the context of their particular theological insights. Otherwise the life-work of Galileo and hundreds of thousands of other noble pioneers of intellectual freedom in the last 500 years of the Christian West will be diminished to the detriment of all humanity.

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Copyright (c) September 2011 by Max J. Havlick, 16 W. Vermont St., Villa Park, IL 60181-1938, all rights reserved.