Voices In My Head Podcast Episode #286: "The Character of Virtue" with guest Stanley Hauerwas

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Welcome to Voices in My Head, the official podcast of me, Rick Lee James. I'm a recording artist, a singer-songwriter, an author, a worship leader, and an ordained minister in the Church of the Nazarene. The Voices in My Head podcast is your source for discussions on music, literature, movies, pop culture, theology, and more. Now sit back, relax, and listen to the latest episode of the Voices in My Head podcast. And don't forget to let the voices in your head be heard by following me on Twitter @RickLeeJames and sharing your thoughts about today's show. Time magazine once called today's guest America's best theologian. As a longtime professor at Duke Divinity School, Stanley Hauerwas has authored many books, won numerous awards, spoken at many places, and has even appeared on the Oprah Winfrey Show. His work cuts across disciplinary lines as he is in conversation with systematic theology, philosophical theology and ethics, political theory, as well as the philosophy of social science and medical ethics. Today, among some other things, we will be discussing his book, The Character of Virtue: Letters to a Godson. Dr. Stanley Hauerwas, it is a pleasure to welcome you to the Voices in My Head podcast.

I'm pleased to be here.

Well, thank you so much for taking some time in what I know is a busy schedule to be here today. I just have to ask you one question before we get too far into your book today, because I used to live in Burlington, North Carolina, not too far away from the Duke area, and I just have to ask you, in all your years teaching at Duke University, have you ever gotten tired of how beautiful Duke Chapel is?

No, I, I love Duke Chapel. It's an absolutely stunning building. I think the windows are as good as stained glass as there is in modernity.

Yeah, I, I used to go over there on occasion on my day off to do some devotion times, and I, I still find it to be one of the most beautiful cathedrals I've ever seen. Just lovely.

Did you go down to the kind of basement chapel ever? It's right there under the side chapel.

I think maybe I did once when I was there.

It's really lovely.

They just don't build them like that anymore, let's put it that way. That's for sure. It's really amazing. Well, let's get into your writing. I've been enjoying your memoir, Hannah's Child, but I took a little bit of a break from it so I could read The Character of Virtue: Letters to a Godson. And as I was reading both of them, I just thought, you know, I wonder how many people know that you were originally a bricklayer and the son of a bricklayer. And I had to wonder if on some level, if that's not kind of what you're doing with your teaching as well, with your writing. It seems like in many ways you're continuing to build for the church.

And well, I always think of myself, um, to be trained to be a bricklayer, you first of all have to learn to labor. Because you have to learn all the subsidiary skills that the bricklayer needs to be able to do their work. And then once you become a bricklayer, you learn to be a bricklayer primarily through imitation, and it's just— it's hard work, but you develop skills through constant repetition, and I think that theology is not unlike that. You learn to imitate through the acquisition of habits that provide one with powers that one would not have if you hadn't been so habituated.

That's a great way to put that, and a great way, I think, to understand really the art of theology. I really do think there is an art to it as well as a science, and I want to ask you a bit today as we discuss your book, The Character of Virtue, something you touched on in both your memoir and in The Character of Virtue. You talk about the bit of the celebrity status that you sort of gained in the world of theology, and then also things like Time magazine and how you weren't necessarily looking for it. And I loved how you wrote, "I did not intend to be Stanley Hauerwas," with your name in quotes. And I wonder if you might share with our listeners just a bit about what you mean by that, that you didn't intend to become Stanley Hauerwas, so to speak.

I can illustrate it this way. Often when you go to speak at a college, you will be picked up by a young undergraduate who has read a book or so of your work, and they regard you as some kind of reality that they're quite afraid of, almost. And they're not, they're not relating to me. They're relating to something out there called Stanley Hawkeye. That's not me. I mean, I need to remind them I'm just like them. I'm just trying to get through the day. And so So that I did not intend to be Stanley Hauerwas means that I did not intend to be located by Time magazine as the best theologian in America.

And I loved your response when someone came to your office to tell you that you had been given that honor, and I believe your response was, "Best is not a theological category." That's exactly what I said., and that, um, best theologian in America, of course, is a contradiction in terms, right?

If you're, if you're doing your work well as a theologian, America isn't gonna like you.

Well, that's true, and that is kind of interesting, um, all those moments that, that you seem to have been given in the spotlight at particular times, because, uh, you wouldn't have thought— like, I, I believe, I never got to see it myself, but what I've heard is even your time on the Oprah Winfrey Show, it was sort of to be a voice for non-violence in the midst of America's War on Terror, which was really not a popular stance to take.

It certainly wasn't. Yeah, still not.

And how was— I, I really, I have no idea about the context of that interview, but was that sort of a, a time that they wanted to be combative, or was it a time that they really wanted to have a genuine discussion on air about it?

Or— it was so short, and, and I, you know, I didn't go to her studio. It was done here and with producers and that kind of thing. So I never met Oprah Winfrey. I was on the screen. That was all.

Wow, that's very interesting how that all worked out. Well, let's press on into your book. It's, it's wonderful. I actually used a bit of it last night in a Bible study I was leading here at my church. The Character of Virtue, um, it really didn't start out as a book, but it more started out as your friend Samuel Wells approaching you about being a godfather to his son Lawrence, or Laura, as he's referred to.

Yeah, I was honored to be asked, but I said to Sam and Jo, his wife, I never know what to do as a godfather. I mean, you say take God seriously, I mean, it hardly works. So Sam, being Sam, said, well, I'll give you an assignment. Every year at the anniversary of his baptism, you're to write him commending a virtue. I didn't start off thinking this would ever turn into a book. I just tried to think about how to write an 8- to 10-page letter commending a virtue and to relate that to his time in life and what was going on more widely in the world. That's how the book came to be.

That's a wonderful idea, too. What a great idea for him to have. For his son and just to be able to have something for his son to value in years to come. I think of when my son was baptized as a baby and our pastor gave him a letter to be opened on his 18th birthday. And I thought, I wish I would have had the foresight to think of something like this that maybe every year of his life, you know, to keep reminding him of his baptism. But it's a wonderful idea. The virtues that you write about, I just, I found them to be so helpful. And in many ways, I felt like it was a lot of your teaching that I've read in your books over the years or heard of through online lectures and things like that. And a lot of them are distilled down into almost bite-sized chunks for someone who maybe isn't as schooled in theology as a lot of the people that you write for. And I really found it to be very moving. I found it to be challenging at times, and I especially found it interesting, this word godsib that you spoke about, which is sort of the root of where we get this whole idea of Godfather. I wonder if you would be able to talk just a little bit about the godsib.

Well, godsibs were— it comes from early English, like 15th, 16th century English Christianity, in which the godships were people set aside to tell the baptized the stories of the faith and tell the church the stories of the baptized. So they were people in between who helped the community know what the baptized were like and helped the baptized know what the community was like. So the Godzips were intermediaries for the church. It's interesting that the language— that we get the language of gossip from godsibs because they became then women who were to be present at other women's birth pains, and they were trusted people who would not repeat what necessarily someone going through labor might say in great pain. And that's how gossip got associated with women, when in fact men are, men are ever much, if not more, gossips than women.

And that's very interesting that it kind of went from being something that was a very trusted sort of, sort of secret conversation that you didn't share to now gossip is something that seems to be spread everywhere.

Right.

Very interesting how words can change their meanings over time. Well, it's, it's interesting to me that as you take on this, this task of sort of being the god-sib in this situation between you and Laurie, you don't necessarily write the letters as you would because obviously as an infant you're not writing it for an infant to read at that time. But I wonder what your motivation was in picking each virtue to write about at each time, and wondering like when he might read this down the road, or was it sort of so that something that pertained to that stage of his life at that time?

Yeah, I tried to think about it that way. Therefore, the first virtue is kindness, and I looked at kindness primarily because There's a certain sense as very young children, there's a cruelty to them in that they, they don't know what produces pain in others. So I suggested that you don't try to be kind, you become kind by learning not to pull the dog's tail but to pet the dog on the head. So kindness rides on the back of significant practices that he will learn as he becomes more and more rooted in the practices that make us good people. And the next virtue I did was truthfulness because he was 2, he was beginning to talk, and by beginning to talk You therefore have the possibility of lying. So how to learn to talk and not lie is one of the challenges of learning the virtue of truthfulness. I also suggested at that time, of course, once you start to talk, you lose power. Because before— because talking gives you understanding, and before you could talk, you just could go, uh-uh, uh-uh, and point and point and scream until you got what you wanted, because you couldn't be reasoned with. Once you can talk, you can be reasoned with, and that's a loss of power.

Well, in theory, some can be reasoned with when they can talk, right?

Good point. No, good point.

Yeah, no, that I I actually thought that was fascinating. I'm glad you brought that up because that was one of the things I wanted to talk about. I had never thought of that being sort of a loss of power when you begin speaking in that way. But I can remember those days well. My son is 5 years old now, and what a joy and yet a new stage of life when he did begin to learn to talk and learn different things. And now he's learning to read. And it's a very interesting journey. I can see the benefits as I was reading the letters you were writing. I thought, these are things that I need to pass on to my son. I need to pay close attention to these things and the years that he is spending and how these might apply in those moments. And since we just talked about kindness a moment ago, let's talk about kindness for a minute, because in the book you say that you believe kindness is the very character of God. Yeah. And I wonder why you would say you believe that kindness best exemplifies the character of God, um, as opposed to maybe something like— maybe a lot of people would say love, or some people might even say wrath, or, you know, different views of God depending on things. I'd love to know what shapes your view of the— of kindness being the character of God.

Because he became one of us, a kind. So the Incarnation, the very character of the Incarnation is kindness, that God renewed creation through becoming kind as we are kind. A kind. So the very fact that we exist as creatures is God's kindness. Creation is the exercise of God's unwillingness to be alone.

Hmm.

So God's kindness creates us in a way that we otherwise could not comprehend who we are.

Wow.

Now, I mean, when I, when I thought about the various virtues and when, when I would treat them in relationship to his age, didn't occur to me that he would necessarily understand or read them at this time. Joe reads each one of them to him as they are done, but I wanted to think of it as— it's like a shard left over from an archaeological expedition, namely when he maybe 24 or something, he'll find this book on the shelf and think, "I wonder what produced this?" Maybe read some. And so I didn't think of them as letters that would make a big difference in his life now.

Yeah, put something down there. That's a great way to think of that. You know, I was thinking when you were talking about kindness a moment ago. I recently had an author on my show, Michael Long, who wrote a book that you wrote an endorsement for called Peaceful Neighbor: Discovering the Countercultural Mr. Rogers. And I was thinking about, as I was reading about kindness, and I was thinking about sort of the way that Fred Rogers was in the world as almost this embodiment of kindness. And it made me want to ask the question to you, is there a difference in your mind between kindness and being nice?

Oh, absolutely. I don't like nice people at all. Niceness, I say, I mean, if you take Southern civility, is the most calculated form of cruelty the world has ever— oh honey, how you doing? You look kind of peaked. I mean, this is a manipulation.— it turns— niceness is usually passive-aggressive behavior as an art form. It's certainly not kindness. As I say, the great enemy of kindness is not meanness, but sentimentality. Makes a very big difference.

Well, and then you move right into truthfulness. And again, you already talked about that loss and that gain that happens in truthfulness. But one thing that I also found very helpful was in that chapter on truthfulness. And since we're talking about niceness, which is actually masking a meanness of a person, you talk about truthfulness and prayer together. And you talk about prayer being a wonderful exercise in training for truthfulness. I think a lot of people view prayer as simply just maybe talking to God, and not a lot of listening or formation going on. But I wonder if you could talk just a moment about prayer as this wonderful exercise in training for truthfulness.

Well, prayer requires words. That lead us to silence, because our relation to God is finally the kind of silence that awe produces. And words have edges of which silence drips off of. So prayer is the ongoing exercise of learning to be in the presence of God with words that help us acknowledge the silence that is the appropriate response to God's glory. Hmm. Wow.

Man, you just— that's amazing. Appropriate response in silence to God's glory. That's powerful. Well, I— we aren't going to have time to cover all the virtues, so I'm going to pick and choose a little bit today as we continue on. But I think this one bears a conversation about, because in the book you say that there is no virtue more important to me than patience. And I wonder if you could tell our listeners why you feel that patience in particular is so important.

Well, because we're an eschatological people, and if you are, as I think we all should be as Christians, committed to a life of non-violence, then you sure better be ready to be patient because you're going to have to watch oftentimes quite destructive behavior, of which is very hard to stop if you're committed to nonviolence. It doesn't mean that nonviolence doesn't have imaginative alternatives that help you resist the violent, but nonetheless It is a commitment that requires patience in a world of deep impatience.

Hmm. Well, and you're right. I think in talking about that and our call to nonviolence in the middle of that is almost a call to not react too quickly. And to allow ourselves to wait upon the Lord in some ways. And you know, it brings to mind, as I'm just thinking about what you just said, there was an article published in Christianity Today this last week right after President Trump was meeting with a group of pastors, and he said something to the extent of, if you don't vote Republican in the next election, we lose everything. And, uh, and I loved Michael Horton's response in this article to that, and I'd love to have your response on it since we're kind of on this topic. He said, it's not when we're fed to lions that we lose everything, it's when we preach another gospel.

That's good, good for him.

Yeah, I really thought that was, that was good. But I, I feel like that this idea of patience is so important right now in our present context when everything just seems to be, say something negative, respond, do a violent act, respond, respond. And it's— there's not a lot of room for waiting and not a lot of room for being an eschatological people, even in the church at times. And in fact, I feel like at times we've already lost a lot. In your opinion, and this is just totally a your opinion thing, as we're thinking through this and what Michael Horton said about it's when we preach another gospel that we've lost everything. I don't know, how do you feel about the church in America, or the evangelical church in America right now? Do you feel like we've lost—

I think you've become— I think you've become the Protestant mainstream. Yeah, yeah. And the Protestant mainstream's great problem was its inability to distinguish between being the church and being America, and that Evangelicals have underwritten democracy as the form of government that is overwhelming all other considerations about what we must be as Christians is one of the great challenges before us. The response of the evangelical pastors that met with the president, I found an extraordinary exemplification that drove me to despair. I mean, one would hope that evangelicals would hold rulers, whether they're democratically elected or not, to a standard of integrity that these folks just didn't seem to understand at all.

Well, it seems in many ways we live in a time when many pastors would— I think the phrase is— would rather play golf with Caesar or play golf with Pharaoh than say, "Let my people go." I feel like that's, that's a huge problem throughout this. One thing that I have appreciated about you and what you've done for the church over the years, something that I've really admired, and we've seen it in, in a lot of your writings, we see it especially in books like Resident Aliens, is you have relentlessly challenged the church to be more than just a rubber stamp of the culture. You know, and you've really encouraged discipleship in the church. And one thing that's interesting is, as we're in this conversation today, I used to think back in the late '90s when I was in college and I was reading people like you for the first time, and I started thinking, you know, maybe if we just had a leader elected that was so unchristian, maybe the church could finally see there's this distinction, you know, finally see that the kingdom of God is so different than the government of America or whatever, and maybe that'll finally do it. And then we're in this place today, and I thought, I don't know what it would take, you know.

Right.

I'm just not sure. But that being said, I so appreciate your contribution to the church, and I want to—

Thanks very much.

I want to direct everyone that's listening to to please pick up a copy of The Character of Virtue. And really, anything that you've written over the years has been so good. I'm afraid we're just a few minutes away from being out of time today, so I wanted to ask a couple questions that aren't necessarily related to the book, but just some things that I kind of had on my mind. And one comes a bit from a friend. A few years ago, you had been— it was actually during the outbreak of the first Iraq War, and I believe you were in Washington at the Cathedral giving some lectures. And one thing that you have said many times over the years is that the first task of the Church is to make the world the world, not to make the world just, but to make the world the world. And you explained that a bit, saying that you hope if President Bush came over from the White House and wanted to share the Eucharist with him, you wouldn't commune him. And of course their response was, "What? We're a people of grace." And you kind of went on from there, and I wonder if you could just describe a little bit of that, and maybe explain in that context to listeners of what you mean by "make the world the world." Excuse me. Bless you.

I'm fine. All that I meant, on just war grounds, the invasion of Iraq was not just, and so President Bush had blood on his hands. Now, in the Middle Ages, even when a warrior came back from a war that was thought to be just, they would undergo 3 years of penance and not be allowed into the Eucharist because they had blood on their hands and they needed to be reconciled to God. And that's what I was trying to remind the people I was speaking to, namely that this is serious business in a way that Christians think that when we come to the table of the Lord We are to be reconciled with our enemy, and that was not— so how would President Bush know that he had become world at that point, just to the extent that he killed the enemy rather than sought reconciliation? So that, I mean, uh, it's very complex matters about international affairs and all that kind of thing. But it was just a way to try to remind the clergy there that what we're doing as Christians at Eucharist is every bit as political as what happens in the White House.

Truly, truly. And that's exactly what I was hoping you would get at today, the idea that the Kingdom of God is its own politics. And it is something that drives us to be different people, and it holds us all to account. I think what you also were trying to help us see was when the world gets into the church, it needs to be seen as the world. When the darkness is among us, it needs to be revealed. It doesn't need to be covered over and justified, so to speak. That's a hard task. It really is a difficult task and all that. Our time is just about to draw to a close, and so I just want to ask this final question if you have just a moment. I'd love to ask you, is there anything that's bringing you great hope these days?

I think the church is in the process of having God make us leaner and meaner, and I find hope in that. I think increasingly people will discover that being a Christian means that they're not anyone, but they have a very distinct identity that is good for the world and good for us.

Well, that is a great reason for hope. Well, Dr. Stanley Hauerwas has been my guest today here on Voices in My Head. I'd love to encourage all of you listening to go out and check out his book, The Character of Virtue, or his many other volumes that he's written on. He's a wonderful writer. I want to thank you, Dr. Hiwas, for your contribution to the church. I really do feel like in many ways you have been continuing your work as a bricklayer, but you have been doing it for the church. And I'm so grateful for you, and I thank you for being one of the voices in my head. This week.

Thank you so much. Take care, Rick.

Thank you for joining me here this week on Voices in My Head. I hope you'll visit me on my website at rickleejames.com, follow me on Twitter @RickLeeJames, like my artist page at facebook.com/rickleejames, and keep up to date on what I'm writing on my author page on Amazon. There's also the Voices in My Head Facebook community found at facebook.com/voicespodcast. And if you want to follow my alter ego on Twitter, follow my popular Mr. Rogers quote account found at @MrRogersSay. Also, make sure to follow my appearance schedule on my website, and if you would like to have me come to your town to do a concert, a speaking engagement, or a book event, you can book me through my website at rickleejames.com. Com/bookings. And it would mean the world to me if you would write a review of this podcast on iTunes. The more positive reviews we receive, the more visible this podcast is on the internet. And now the benediction: May the God of peace, who raised Christ from the dead, strengthen you in your inner being for every good work. And may the blessing of God Almighty Mighty Father, Son, and Holy Spirit rest upon you and dwell within you this day and forevermore. Amen.