Last weekend at Nazarene Theological Seminary in Kansas City, MO, I attended the conference entitled “Is the Reformation Over? A Conversation Among Friends.” Inspired by the question asked by a recent book by Mark Noll, Rev. Dr. John Wright set up a series of interviews with George Lindbeck, David Burrell, and Stanley Hauerwas.
My comments are coming a little late onto the scene, but admittedly, I have been swamped with coursework until now. In the meantime, however, some reports have been blogged:
With that stage already set, I think the most important theme I heard in John’s questions and in the responses to them by Lindbeck, Burrell, and Hauerwas, is one of friendship. All three of these guys have either attended or taught at Yale, and in one way or another over the years have deeply influenced each other through their work. And, while Burrell is (I think) the only one who has ever published a whole book out of these three on the topic of friendship, it was clear that this was a theme that pervaded the entirety of the discussions. Friendship, defined in an Aristotelian sense, has more to do with what friends share as common ends/goals, as opposed to mere agreement on issue X or Y.
George Lindbeck was the first to be interviewed on Friday morning. He retold some of his profound adventures as a Lutheran observer at the Second Vatican council in the early 1960′s. He told some wonderful stories about the friendships he developed with the Catholics there and the other Lutheran observers. The story that stands out for me is one where Lindbeck and his wife were over at a priest’s house for dinner during the time of the council, and afterwards, the priest offered Lindbeck’s wife a cigar, and she took it! They had an after-dinner smoke, and this was just one of many gestures of friendship that continued over the years.
Before moving on to Burrell’s interview, I did want to touch on Lindbeck’s response to the reaction to his most popular book, The Nature of Doctrine: Religion and Theology in a Postliberal Age. The image he associated with its reception was on-the-mark: Nature of Doctrine has been much more of a “rorschach blot” than anything else, as seen by the myriad interpretations that people have read into the book, most of them not having much to do with Lindbeck’s original intentions. He expected ecumenists who were well-read in theology to read it! Also, of importance was that whenever he waxed [Clifford] Geertzian, he was always thinking of Thomistic/Aristotelian habitus. Furthermore, he affirmed that Chrisitan theology should always be built upon Biblical foundations, but he does admit that he contradicts himself a bit in his own book. Lastly, he also confirmed that what he is doing in The Nature of Doctrine and in much of his other life’s work, especially as found in the Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification, is in the form of Thomas Aquinas’ quaestionis.
These last points were very helpful for me (and hopefully others as well), especially because I had just finished a paper last semester attempting to tease out these ideas with the main idea being that The Nature of Doctrine cannnot be rightly interpreted apart from the ecumenical telos in Christ, which has been the main goal of the work of Lindbeck both proceeding that book as well as after.
George Lindbeck left us with the following: “One mistrusts entirely predictions of what the future will be.” It was meant both as a warning to not trust our own predictions and as a hopeful reminder to trust in the providence of the Triune God.
David Burrell immediately established himself not only as a guy who loves to tell stories, but also as one who tells them well. The beginnings of the discussion around Burrell began with some early autobiographical information, and quickly worked its way toward his relationship with his teacher Bernard Lonergan. Lonergan taught him the distinction between those who need certitude, and those who search for understanding. We are a people who tend to always search for something graspable and certain, yet the great theologians are actually those who are not expounding upon the right answers, but are those who ask the great questions. Through this search for understanding, Burrell continued the friendship theme by further describing theology as usually done between a master and apprentice. Maybe George Lucas got some things right in the end, after all.
An important point that Burrell raised was the difference between a division and a distinction. For thinking theologically, this is paramount. For instance, the Trinity is one God having one essence but three distinct persons; also the distinction between nature and grace is an important one: if grace is a gift, then what is nature? — a given? No, both are gifts, and one completes the other and brings it to its fullness in the Triune God.
The last bit I want to touch upon in regard to Burrell and friendship is his inter-faith work on Thomas Aquinas, Moses Maimonides, and Avicenna (Ibn Sena). Burrell has shown in some of his books that Thomas Aquinas, in addition to Aristotle, is quite indebted to both Maimonides and Avicenna — indeed, Burrell said that on five key issues, Thomas is indebted to Maimonides.
Burrell’s final words were to remind us that the central task of theology is that faith in Jesus is central as well as to be Christian community as the body of Christ that is always welcoming and understanding as opposed to fearful of others (a kind of certitude).
Stanley Hauerwas was as interesting, hilarious, and profound as ever, and also said things that surprised many. Somehow, he was able to recall a list of all the books he had ever read at Yale under each professor that assigned them. In this telling, some of his formation around Thomas Aquinas and Wittgenstein emerged early on. Something that resonated with Burrell’s earlier statements was when Hauerwas said that most people tend to miss the investigative enterprise of Thomas’ work. Similarly, friends have told me that the thought of Thomas cannot be grasped by getting to a ‘pure Thomas’ but upon a more careful reading, one will find that his thought is much more of a labyrinth and not nearly as systematic as we think it must be.
Likewise, Hauerwas said that his own work has always intentionally been non-systematic; instead, it has been much more engaged in the task of “theological journalism,” attempting through never-ending re-descriptive articles to show how things really are. Thus, theology is fundamentally teaching speech in an attempt to not let language “go on holiday.”
“It’s one thing to read Aquinas, it’s another thing to pray with somebody who reads Aquinas,” said Hauerwas. Later on, he said that friendship and the life of prayer are internally related to each other. In this vein he pointed to Jean Vanier and the L’Arche communities to teach how how to be as Christians.
Hauerwas’ closing words were to be not afraid, because Jesus is Lord! He went on to say that another of our primary tasks is to defeat the speech-act of “Jesus is Lord, but that’s just my opinion.” And perhaps surprisingly to some, Hauerwas told us that we can never read the bible enough, because it teaches us the grammar we need to live the Christian life.
After the three main interviews, there was a panel discussion between John Wright and the three guests. I didn’t really take any notes at this point, but it was a good conversation as well, which was further followed up by a Q&A session. For now, unless somebody took some better notes, we will just have to wait on the content of this conversation until this conference hopefully gets transcribed and edited into a book, which John Wright plans to do.
I am not entirely sure how I missed this, but I only found out last night over dinner with my wife Tiana and some really good friends of mine that in the month of January, the week of 18-25th is “On Christian Unity Week.” The 18th is also the day the conference started, which, though perhaps providential, is a humbling reminder that this conversation is not only happening at seminaries in Kansas City, but also across the world.
[In closing, here is my Flickr gallery of the pictures I took of the conference. Enjoy! Cross-posted to the church and postmodern culture blog]
I’m all for ‘shopping local’, but isn’t there a bit of irony about ordering a 
My friend 
