Unmasking the differences: Nonviolence and social control

Cross Currents, Spring, 2002 by Gloria Albrecht

Notes

(1.) Kwok Pui-Ian, "Discovering the Bible in the Non-Biblical World," in Lift Every Voice, ed. Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite and Mary Potter Engel (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1990), 272.

(2.) David Tracy, Plurality and Ambiguity: Hermeneutics, Religion, Hope (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1987), 57-58.

(3.) Pui-Ian, "Discovering the Bible," 273. For a similarly compelling analysis of the embeddedness of Christianity in Western paradigms, from the perspective of Native Americans, see Vine Deloria, Jr. God Is Red (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1973).

(4.) Ibid., 274.

(5.) Ibid., 278.

(6.) Ibid., 273, 278.

(7.) Ibid., 281.

(8.) Susan Thistlethwaite, "'I Am Become Death': God in the Nuclear Age," in Lift Every Voice, 99-100.

(9.) Elaine Pagels, Adam, Eve, and the Serpent (New York: Random House, 1988), xxiii.

(10.) Ibid., 105.

(11.) Ibid., 113-14.

(12.) Augustine, De Civitate Dei 14, 15, as cited in Pagels, Adam, Eve and the Serpent, 120.

(13.) Pagels, 147.

(14.) Ibid., 124.

(15.) Susan Thistlethwaite, Sex, Race, and God (New York: Crossroad, 1989], 121.

(16.) And this represents a point at which Hauerwas can (and has been) criticized for having an extremely pessimistic theological anthropology. Whether he believes it or not, he writes as though there is no presence of grace, of the Christ, or the goodness of creation in the "world." Essentially, the world has no revelatory word to speak to the church other than to challenge the church to be faithful despite the world's ongoing display of possible forms of unfaithfulness. While I do disagree with Hauerwas's theology of the fall, my own interest is in showing why that theology makes sense from his social location -- and not from mine -- and the concrete social realities that result from such a "theological" choice.

(17.) Stanley Hauerwas, After Christendom? (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1991), 16, 36-37.

(18.) Hauerwas, Dispatches from the Front (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1994), 25. He says, "I will not apologize for being at war with war."

(19.) Hauerwas, The Peaceable Kingdom (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1983), xvi.

(20.) Hauerwas, After Christendom?, 97.

(21.) Ibid., 180, n. 6.

(22.) Ibid., 105.

(23.) Ibid., 152. Hauerwas puts this comment in the context of recalling the missionary work of Bartolome de las Casas. Therefore, it seems to me that Hauerwas continues to confuse whether he is addressing the liberal Western world or the world.

(24.) There is a particular blindness in the U.S. to the issue of class. And there is great disagreement among social scientists as to how to define this term. Barlett and Steele note that in Washington folk like to identify the top of the middle-class as whatever is being earned in Congress--$125,100 in 1992--or more than 97 percent of all American households! I accept Barlett's and Steele's own definition of middle-class as "those wage-earners who reported incomes between $20,000 and $50,000 on their tax returns in 1989." This is 35 percent of all tax returns. Another 10 percent of returns were filed by those making between $50,000 and $75,000--what Barlett and Steele call an upper extended middle-class. Only 6 percent of all tax returns were from individuals or families making over $75,000. Donald Barlett and James Steele, America: What Went Wrong? (Kansas City, Mo.: Andrews and McMeel, 1992), xiii.