Symposium: The Politics of Discipleship – Part 1

Today we begin our three-part symposium on Graham Ward’s new book, The Politics of Discipleship: Becoming Postmaterial Citizens.  Because our contributions for this symposium are longer than some of our other chapter-by-chapter symposiums, I’m making the papers available as pdfs, with a little teaser below.

Our first contribution is from Ronald Kuipers, Senior Member in Philosophy of Religion at the Institute for Christian Studies in Toronto, Ontario.  He is the author and editor of several books, including Critical
Faith: Toward a Renewed Understanding of Religious Life and its Public
Accountability and Solidarity and the Stranger: Themes in the Social
Philosophy of Richard Rorty.  Churchandpomo readers will also be familiar with him as the interviewer of Charles Taylor and Jeffrey Stout over at The Other Journal.

Here’s a snippet:

Both Taylor and Ward
consider this Christian interpretation of the good (as beyond ordinary human
flourishing) as both different and better than contemporary secular-humanist
alternatives.  For example, there
is an interesting bit in A Secular Age where Taylor compares the virtues of a
secular-humanist motivation for pursuing social justice and solidarity with the
virtues found in a Christian motivation for pursuing the same things.  While he deeply admires the self-giving
service of a secular humanist such as Albert Camus, he nonetheless resists the
temptation to view Camus’ “heroic individualism” as the ultimate in
selflessness; for, according to Taylor, it misses something important about
love that Christianity does not:  “This
is a bond where each is a gift to the other, where each gives and receives, and
where the line between giving and receiving is blurred.  We are quite outside the range of ‘altruistic’
unilateralism.”  Taylor
continues:  “Could it be that, in a
very different way, something analogous lies behind the sense of solidarity
between equals that pushes us to help people, even on the other side of the
globe?  The sense here would be
that we are somehow given to each other, and that ideally, at the limit, this
points us towards a relationship where giving and receiving merge. Taylor
thinks that the Christian understanding of agape, because it takes into account
the sense that “we are somehow given to each other,” and “points us towards a
relationship where giving and receiving merge,” provides a better account of
the good than at least this particular secular-humanist alternative.

Taylor contrasts the
motivations of secular humanism and Christianity with respect to efforts to
attain justice and universal solidarity because he is trying to name an ethos
that can bear universal human respect, but for which he thinks certain versions
of Christianity provide a better account.
He goes on to say that he thinks this understanding of universal human
solidarity can be real for us, “but only to the extent that we open ourselves
to God, which means in fact, overstepping the limits set in theory by exclusive
humanisms.  If one does believe
that, then one has something very important to say to modern times, something
that addresses the fragility of what all of us, believer and unbeliever alike,
most value in these times.”  The idea here is that Christians have a
better way of accounting for something (universal solidarity) that most people,
religious or otherwise, already profess to cherish.  Christianity gets something right here that other positions
do not.  The cultural importance of
this epistemic status lies in Taylor’s claim that “getting it right will help
to strengthen it.”

I think that in this book
Ward shares Taylor’s sense of the importance of “getting it right,” and by “getting
it right” I think both authors mean something more or less akin to a
theoretical account, one that is better able to explain or justify the pursuit
of and longing for universal solidarity than other accounts currently on
offer.  And this is precisely where
I want to insert my question in this closing section.  How important is it to ‘get it right’ here, to have all of
our theological and metaphysical ducks lined up in a row?  I ask this because, in spite of his
affirmation of the importance of this effort, Taylor still warns against a
temptation that arises when we take ourselves to have so gotten it right.  Throughout history, he notices, “[t]he
goodness which inhabits our goal, or our vision of order, is somehow undone
when it comes to struggling to realize it.”  He continues:

The paradox is, that the very
goodness of the goal defines us, its builders and defenders as good, and hence
opens the way to our grounding our self-integrity on a contrast case who must
be evil as we are virtuous….  There
is no general remedy against this self-righteous reconstitution of the
categorizations of violence, the lines drawn between the good and evil ones
which permit the most terrible atrocities.  But there can be moves, always within a given context,
whereby someone renounces the right conferred by suffering, the right of the
innocent to punish the guilty, of the victim to purge the victimizer.  The move is the very opposite of the
instinctive defense of our righteousness.
It is a move which can be called forgiveness, but at a deeper level, it
is based on a recognition of common, flawed humanity.”

Now I am confident that Ward
would affirm most everything Taylor says in this passage, and his book is full
of warnings against precisely such self-righteous presumption.  So I do not want to take this reflection
in the direction of such an accusation.
What I do want to say, in closing, is that perhaps the pitfalls
associated with ‘getting it right’ are a sign that, in insisting on its
importance, we have not taken Christian renunciation far enough.