Nathan Hershberger

May 7, 2013

“Suffering Toward Pernicion? Church, World, and Theory

in Empire and A Theology of Public Life”

Christianity is best understood as providing a structure to our passion and suffering, not a solution to it.”—Charles Mathewes1

Once again…we find ourselves in Francis’s situation,posing against the misery of power the joy of being…that no power will control….This is the irrepressible lightness of being communist.” ––Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri2

On the face of it, Charles Mathewes’ proposal for Christians

to participate more openly as Christians in public life, and to

view that participation as a kind of suffering that refines them,

seems to provide a way forward within recent discussions in

political theology. Such a proposal seems well suited to moving

beyond debates between “public theology” and charges of 1 Charles Mathewes, A Theology of Public Life, (New York: Cambridge University Press,2007), 15. Mathewes here paraphrases Franz Rosenzweig.2 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire, (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard UniversityPress, 2000), xi.

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“sectarianism.” But Mathewes work may not stand up well beside

certain forms of social criticism. In particular, Michael Hardt

and Antonio Negri’s Empire, a Marxist grand analysis of politics,

culture, and economics, suggests that contemporary power

structures, perhaps more than at any other time, now operate in

such pervasive, decentralized, and mystifying ways as to render

exceedingly difficult any attempts to operate at counter

purposes. If this analysis holds any water, then Mathewes’

understanding of Christian life as passive and formative

endurance might threaten to become unwitting training in

destruction.

However, there is no reason that Mathewes’ project cannot

accommodate a thickened account of Christian communal life. Such

an emendation cannot render Christians impervious to the

influence of “Empire,” but it could produce sites of encounter in

which Christians not only renew themselves in joyful discovery of

the goodness of the created world, but also comes to see and

experience with ugly clarity the systems of domination around and

within us which so often, as we still need to learn from the

Marxists, remain hidden from view.

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Two Projects in ViewFrom the outset “unapologetically particularistic,” Charles

Mathewes attempts in A Theology of Public Life, to persuade Christians

that participation in public life will make them better

Christians.3 Building on a robustly Augustinian account of the

self as always drawn further into the knowledge of God through

its engagement with the world and itself, Mathewes calls for

Christians to participate unabashedly as Christians in the public

life of the world as an ascetical practice which will both refine

their loves and constitute an act of proleptic participation in

God’s final transformation of all things.4 The basic Augustinian

scheme of sin and redemption defines Mathewes’ theology of

engagement. Sin, here, is a privation, a lack of some necessary

quality rather than something ontologically real. Playing up the

etymological connection with “privacy,” Mathewes states,

“conversely, redemption is, in a way, publicity, presence to

3 Mathewes, A Theology of Public Life, 2. 4 Ibid., 2. “This theology of public life takes as its primary audience Christian believers unsure of the religious fruitfulness of civic engagement; and it argues to them that they can become better Christians, and their churches better Christian communities, through understanding and participatingin public life as an ascetical process of spiritual formation.”

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others, and most fundamentally to God—a turning back to God, the

neighbor, creation.”5

The whole first half of Mathewes’ book, in which he lays out

a theology which receives more explicitly political meanings in

the second half, can indeed be summarized as “encouraging an ever

deepening attachment to our created condition,” an attachment

which always already draws us into deepened attachment to God.6

Even in self-reflection—that strange encounter with the

multifaceted self—“God’s primordial presence” is ultimately

found.7 This basic Augustinian dynamic of transcendent

participation runs through Mathewes’ entire work. He is

constantly opposing “immanentism” and “escapism” in favor of a

deepening participation that at the same time constitutes

deepening knowledge of God. However, this participation is always

construed as more about graceful, unearned discovery than moral

effort. It is also always partial, and is thus always also

productive of “increasing recognition of our frailty and

sinfulness.”8

5 Ibid., 32.6 Ibid., 31.7 Ibid., 548 Ibid., 64.

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Because this process is not an act of moral heroism, but

fundamentally a reception of grace, Mathewes consistently

construes it as a type of enduring, indeed, a kind of suffering.9

But because escapism is ultimately an attempt to escape God, we

cannot avoid this suffering.

…We should resist our persistent attempts to retreatfurther into ourselves… But this resistance cannot ever expect to make us happy…we and the world remain fallen…Sowe should come to be ever more fully open to the sufferings that mark our lives during this world, most fundamentally as a mode of being in time, indeed of receiving the gift of time from God.10

While there might be a temptation here to see suffering as a

tool with which Christians refine themselves, Mathewes carefully

maintains that suffering is always something that forms us, that

acts on us. Mathewes states, “This picture presents the self as

fundamentally a sufferer, more passive than active, whose being is

‘given’ to it as a gift.”11 We thus receive even our selves from

creation, from our communities, and ultimately from God.

9 There is of course something problematic about white North American Christianity wanting to understand its existence as suffering. However, I think this descriptive move may be fruitful today just insofar as it might enable, say, retired Episcopalians living in the D.C suburbs to connect their lives to the lives of Anglicans in the Congo who suffer in more obvious ways. This connection would, I hope, produce both more action and more ownership of privilege than the self-flagellatory alternatives that accomplish so little and tend to obscure continuing realities. 10 Ibid., 32.11 Ibid., 75. Emphasis original.

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It is in this sense that Mathewes tries to articulate the

Augustinian notion of “using the world.” We are not properly to

enjoy the world as a good in itself, but as something which draws

us further into confession of God. In the same way, Mathewes

suggests that the “use paradigm” can actually be understood as a

kind of exegesis. That is, the world trains us and is to be

“used,” in the same sense that the Bible is to be “used.” He

states, “The fundamental liturgy of the church is this practice

of communally using Scripture as a device for transforming

vision, a tool to help us see and speak aright.”12 Thus “the

ultimate aim is not to get the Bible “right” in some sort of

representational manner, but to find ways to use it.”13 However,

we ought not think of ourselves primarily as “using” these things

to purify ourselves, but rather realize that we too are caught up

in God’s purposes—we are being used. 14

Mathewes understands our part in this transformation as

“proleptic participation” in God’s providential ordering of the

world. In doing so he walks a fine line between affirming the

12 Ibid., 99.13 Ibid., 98.14 Ibid., 91. “We do not do the changing; we are changed, by God, made vesselsof caritas, which we should have been all along.”

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permanence of the created order and emphasizing Christian

activity as, in a limited way, a foretaste of life to come.

Human community, Mathewes writes, is “fully realized only

eschatologically.”15 However despite this fundamental

incapacity, the human community may at the same time understand

its life “even now as a proleptic participation in the true

kingdom of God.”16 That is, he says elsewhere, “this love in

public” can actually be considered, “not just a rehearsal, but a

distant, partial, and proleptic participation in God’s love for

creation” even if such community is not “regularly and ‘normally’

achievable in this dispensation.”17

Interestingly, Mathewes’ call does not seem primarily

intended to get American Christians more involved in politics, or

less, or in specifically different ways, but rather to ask them

to locate more confidently the source of their already political

actions in their understanding of Christian faith. He is asking

Christians first to speak differently. Doing so, Mathewes hopes,

will in fact make them better Christians just insofar as it will

15 Ibid., 106.16 Ibid. 17 Ibid., 287, 107.

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help Christians understand that what they are already implicated

in as suffering on the way to glory—but, “during the world.”

“Empire is materializing before our very eyes.”18 With

these words Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri begin their

exploration of that “new form of sovereignty” which, they argue,

increasingly dominates contemporary life. Sovereignty has not

disappeared in the wake of the apparently declining nation-state,

but has rather “taken a new form, composed of a series of

national and supranational organisms united under a single logic

of rule.”19 It is this decentralized form of rule to which their

use of the term “Empire” refers, not the previous form of Western

imperialism. Whereas colonial rule relied on the policing of

strict boundaries and a centralized relation of power, Empire

“progressively incorporates the entire global realm within its

open, expanding frontiers.”20 Unlike a strictly hierarchical

nation-state with clear interiority and exteriority, “Empire

manages hybrid identities, flexible hierarchies, and plural

exchanges through the modulating networks of command.”21

18 Hardt and Negri, Empire, xi. 19 Ibid., xii.20 Ibid. 21 Ibid.

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Hardt and Negri rely heavily on Michel Foucalt to describe

power as a series of flows in this system of Empire. The

“disciplinary society,” in Foucalt’s work, denoted the network of

institutions and apparatuses—prisons, mental health institutions,

and patterns of sexuality—that instill and form the habits of

inclusion and exclusion in society.22 In Empire, Hardt and Negri

argue, “mechanisms of command become ever more democratic” and

indeed become “interiorized within the subject themselves.”23

This interiorized discipline produces the decentralized

flexibility of Empire.

In Empire the function of the state is to maintain a just

balance of power in the interests of the flexible field of

capital. Hardt and Negri note that in the First Gulf War the

U.S.—the chief of police, we might say—exercised power as a

manager of international justice “not as a function of its own

motives but in the name of global right.”24 The American claim to

22 Ibid., 23.23 Ibid. 24 Ibid., 180. Emphasis original. Despite arguments to the contrary, the Second Gulf War could also be understood in this way. At the very least, one could argue that the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq beginning in 2003succeeded insofar as the U.S. exercised power as a police force and failedinsofar as it did not. The 2001 invasion and subsequent occupation of Afghanistan more obviously resembled an international police action, in the sense used by Hardt and Negri, but its failures too could be understood along

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have acted in this way may be immediately false, in the sense

that the U.S. government had ulterior motives, but Hardt and

Negri note, “it is false in a new way” insofar as American power

does indeed effectively also act in the general imperial interest,

rather than “imperialist” interest.25

More than anything else, however, Empire is simply the most

recent construction of the restless movement of capital. The

emergence of Empire as the new form of global organization after

colonialism can be understood as the outworking of capital’s

breaking down of barriers and subsumption of all external to it.

European colonialism, in turn, was under this view a temporary

and necessary period in the accumulation and spread of capital.

Indeed, in consistent Marxist fashion, Hardt and Negri affirm

Empire as a kind of improvement over the previous forms of

perhaps more overtly oppressive imperialist capitalism.26 the same lines. Also instructive is the difference of Western opinion—most importantly, President Obama’s opinion—between Iraq and Afghanistan. Afghanistan is—or at least, was—the “good war.” The recent U.S. intervention in Libya fits neatly within this framework, as does the intensification of C.I.A. drone strike campaigns under President Obama. There are no borders anymore, only criminals everywhere. 25 Ibid. 180. 26 Ibid., 43. “We insist on asserting that the construction of Empire is a step forward in order to do away with any nostalgia for the power structures that preceded it …We claim that Empire is better in the same way that Marx insists that capitalism is better than the forms of society and modes of production that came before it.”

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But the power of Empire remains a power of oppression and

distortion even as it masquerades as a force for stability and

progress. Empire requires, and even produces, a series of

conflicts in order to justify its own existence and “the

expansion of Empire is rooted in the trajectory of the conflicts

it is meant to resolve.”27 That is, the negotiation of “a

flexible network of micro-conflicts” strengthens Empire,

understood as the flow of power exercised by states,

corporations, international governing bodies and internalized by

the masses.28 The crises re-enforce the authority. Perhaps the

best example of this dynamic—and thus the workings of Empire as a

whole—is the dynamic of “subaltern nationalism,” that is, the

efforts of the colonized to achieve both peoplehood and

statehood. While the state- and nation-building achievements of

colonized groups seem to be causes for celebration, and are

indeed a “powerful weapon for change and revolution in the hands

of the subordinated,” that very achievement is itself a

replication, reiteration, and extension of the power that

27 Ibid., 15.28 Ibid., 201.

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perpetuated the oppression.29 “Precisely the structures that

play a defensive role with respect to the outside…are the same

that play an oppressive role internally, negating the

multiplicity of the community itself.”30 At this moment “we have

our first real glimpse of Empire,” for Empire thrives on the

production of a multiplicity of identities.31 “The imperial

solution will not be to negate or attenuate these differences but

rather to affirm them and arrange them in an effective apparatus

of command.”32 Flexible, hybrid subjectivities are exactly what

the economy needs. “Postmodernism is…the logic by which global

capital operates.”33 There is no outside, no protected locality,

and to pretend otherwise is to play, once again, into “the

capitalist imperial machine.”34

However, the account does not end with this all-subverting

Empire. The real engine in Hardt and Negri’s depiction here is

not Empire, but Multitude, the vital creative masses of humanity.

Empire is, in some sense, not even really real. It does not

29 Ibid., 106.30 Ibid., 108.31 Ibid., 134.32 Ibid. 33 Ibid., 151, 331.34 Ibid., 45.

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possess creative power, not even the creative power of a cabal.35

Hardt and Negri’s aim to aid this Multitude in the construction

of a counter-Empire, one which is no less interconnected and all-

absorbing, but one which directs its “technologies and production

toward its own joy and its own increase of power.”36 To this end,

Hardt and Negri call for the Multitude to achieve global rights

of movement, guaranteed wages, and the ownership of the means of

production (though this last item mostly seems to mean self-

determination, as Hardt and Negri construe humanity itself as the

means of production under contemporary technological and economic

structures).37 The victory of the Multitude would be the

production of a new form of sovereignty, one that finally

resolved the tension introduced in the Renaissance between

transcendent and humanist notions of sovereignty decisively in

the humanist direction. Empire concludes with an invocation of

St. Francis as the champion of the Multitude. In adopting the

“poverty of the multitude” Francis discovered “the ontological

power of a new society.”38 Assisi’s disposition, write Hardt and

35 Ibid., 359.36 Ibid., vi, 396.37 Ibid., 396-407.38 Ibid., 413.

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Negri, “knows only an inside, a vital and ineluctable

participation in the set of social structures, with no

possibility of transcending them.”39 And this, they conclude, “is

the irrepressible lightness of being communist.”

Training in Pernicion?

Marxism and Augustinianism are, for the most part,

traditions with fundamentally opposed views of history and

humanity. I intend, nonetheless, to conduct a conversation

between these two representatives. I attempt this not as a

neutral observer (if not thoroughly Augustinian, I am at least

broadly sympathetic to Mathewes’ position here) but as one

looking to derive from this conversation useful insights for the

church about how best to go on “during the world.”

The central problem posed to Mathewes’ proposal by Hardt and

Negri is this: if the decentralized workings of capital

discipline human subjects so thoroughly into its rhythms of

inclusion, exclusion, and sovereignty, how can Christians expect

to “suffer” the world in such a way as to be formed by the

virtues of faithful, hopeful, and charitable citizenship? Or

39 Ibid.

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better: are Christians not already so implicated in this system

as to render any orientation that is “fundamentally… more passive

than active”40 completely impotent?

To begin with, Mathewes has little patience for the work of

Hardt and Negri. He argues, in short, that Empire typifies much

of contemporary cultural critique insofar as it consists mostly

of “fundamentally reactionary spectatorial sneering.”

Specifically, he concludes, Hardt and Negri have founded both a

hopeless pessimism and a wild optimism on “events that have not

yet occurred.”41 That is, “Their history and the narrative gain

their meaning wholly through an understanding of history as

determined totally from a projected future. There are no events

of eschatological anticipation; no Christ event provides a

foretaste, epistemologically and ontologically.” Further, “the

abstractions are for them more ultimately real than the empirical

realities they inhabit” and so Empire is simply “one more version

of modernity’s imminent apocalypticism, the belief that we have

finally cracked the code of history.”42

40 Mathewes, A Theology of Public Life, 75. 41 Ibid., 221. 42 Ibid., 220.

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Instead, Mathewes calls for cultural critique that is both

more and less critical. Prophets must remind society, he argues,

that our social structures are inescapably fallen—but “not

utterly lost.”43 Such critique must not be “spectatorial,” it

cannot assume to have cracked the “true code of history,” but

must rather contribute “committed proposals,” proposals which

will most appropriately emerge “from a context of vibrant

religious community.” 44

It is not my goal here to defend Hardt and Negri from

Mathewes. I agree with the force of much of Mathewes’ critique—

just insofar as the hope of Empire is indeed founded on a

“promissory utopia.”45 Cracking the code of history is indeed an

irksome pastime of modern Western philosophy, if one we cannot

escape so easily as Mathewes supposes. However, I do maintain

that the analysis of Empire is cogent and immediately relevant

enough to merit attention on its own terms. At least it merits

testing against the experience of Christians suffering “during

the world.” In what remains of this exploration then, I will—

43 Ibid., 217.44 Ibid., 217. 45 Ibid., 238. Something about which I am undecided.

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provisionally, and in the face of obvious disagreement—assume

that Hardt and Negri have usefully described a picture of power

as exercised today. Assessing Mathewes’ proposal alongside the

world of Empire reveals that Mathewes’ proposal—somewhat

elaborated—can serve to guide church communities to sites of

encounter in which those communities will be confronted with the

abuses of power outlined so chillingly in Empire.

So, how might Christians living by Mathewes’ proposal make

sense of the world of power relations described by Empire in

light of their Christian convictions? First, Christians, under

this proposal, assume that the world has already been redeemed—

and it is anyway out of our hands. Indeed, I certainly believe

Mathewes’ correctly declares that “Our fate is secure, the

victory is won; we are simply waiting for the final

consummation.”46 This would both deepen the condemnation of the

power relations of the world and, perhaps, affirm the proper

exercise of power—though this could be done in very different

ways. Second, as Christians suffer through the world, their

reflection on the structure of their suffering can result in a

46 Ibid. The character of that “waiting” is the crucial question here.

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more truthful naming of the way things are. Here I broaden

somewhat Mathewes’ affirmation that Christianity is more “a

structure for our passion and suffering” than a solution to it.

As Christians reflect on their lives as suffering they sometimes

begin to see their involvement in the world, and the world

itself, in new ways that clear away the mystifying hazes of

capitalism and all the other usual suspects.47

However, a problem emerges in the way Mathewes’ relates

these two claims. Mathewes’ strenuous disavowal of any sense

that Christians can control the present age is, in his view, at

odds with the elaboration of his claim that Christianity is

indeed a “structure” for suffering. Because of this, Mathewes

fails to articulate that structure—in social terms—with

sufficient clarity such that his project does threaten to become

training in pernicion. But properly clarified, there is no

reason that Mathewes’ disavowal of control need obstruct an

account of Christian social existence—that is, an ecclesiology.

Such an account would powerfully narrate the Christian life

“during the world” in such a way as to refuse instrumentalization

47 This is the thrust of Mathewes notion of “Hopeful Citizenship.”

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and othering of “the world,” while retaining an animating telos

extrinsic to our current experience—exactly what Mathewes’

account, at its best, accomplishes.

Church and Empire

Mathewes’ account relies on the existence of a community of

practice about which to theorize, but he does not make the

character of that community explicit. Mathewes’ contends that

critiques of society emerge, for Christians, “from a context of

vibrant religious community” and that “hopeful citizenship

requires a certain kind of community to sustain it.”48 As a key

historical example of this, Mathewes cites the creation of the

social category of “the poor” by “various Christian bishops” in

the “fourth and fifth centuries.”49 The bishops achieved this

redescription through the use of scriptural resources in public

sermons only through the “church’s practices of caring for all

who need help.”50 That is, the church saw the poor, and

proclaimed the poor as poor in public, only because the bishops 48 Ibid., 217. What I insist on is further elaboration of the phrase “certain kind of community.” 49 Ibid., 252. “Before the bishops did this there was no sociological category of the poor in late antique cities, but only the crowd’; whereas oncethey created this category ‘the poor’ emerged as a real cause of social concern and interest.” 253. 50 Ibid., 252.

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reflected on the practices of the church using scriptural

categories—and only, I would add, because the church was, in

part, the poor.

Mathewes suggests that there are similar “concrete

practices” to be found even among Christians in the United States

today “that might serve as the anchor from which a systematic

hopeful critique can emerge” and highlights just-wage campaigns,

and various forms of activism on behalf of the powerless as

locations in which Christians can renew their sense that “people

are more than their place in the systems they inhabit.”51 All

these modern practices are motivated, Mathewes argues, by the

“recognition that our world is more than these systems

[capitalism, consumerism, etc.] allow it to be.”52 Christians,

then, can critique social structures, and their own involvement

in them, through reflecting on the practices in which they are

already engaged, and in so doing, become aware of the

disciplining force of Empire. 51 Ibid., 253. This is what Mathewes means in saying, “if we have hope at all, it springs from prayer, prayerful action, and prayerful reflection upon such action.” 252. 52 Ibid. It is not insignificant that all Mathewes’ contemporary examples are externally motivated campaigns, whereas the bishops concern for the poor originated—by Mathewes’ own narration—out of the internal practices of the church.

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This strategy of locating Christian social critique in

Christian social practice comes quite close to an account of the

church as a distinct political body, yet Mathewes refuses this

move decisively, and this refusal endangers the integrity of his

account of Christian self-reflection. Mathewes does acknowledge

the sociological importance of the church for the formation of

individuals capable of sustaining the practices he outlines. He

states, “Christians cannot be the sorts of individuals they

should be outside of some church. To put it more strongly and

perhaps more accurately, even on a sociological level, churches

remain among the few cultural institutions that can still help us

become the sort of people we should be.”53 Elsewhere, Mathewes

speaks about the church mostly as a gathering of individual

Christians, and in that sense a dim glimpse—a proleptic peek—of

what God has in store in the future. While Mathewes mentions

“church” at several points throughout the book, there is only a

single reference in the index—perhaps it is the only time it

receives the definite article. He states at that point,

The church is that structure wherein we try to liveout this habitus of natality [The process of

53 Ibid., 209.

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transformation through engagement]. While our inhabitation of it is provisional, we do see in it (or in our understanding of it) some intimations of this most proper mode of our being. The church, as Augustinesays, seeks the end without end. And it does so fundamentally musically…in the sense that music is the fundamental experience of receiving the gift of time. The church is the singing society of the redeemed, in pilgrimage during this life, towards that time when it will join in the full choir of the saints, its song finally…unrestrained.54

All this suggest that Mathewes views the church in more or

less the same way he views the world, that is, as something to be

“used” by Christians in the re-ordering of their loves toward

God. But a construal of the church as merely sociologically

useful to Christian formation cannot produce the occasions for

social reflection that Mathewes’ own account demands as a part of

“hopeful citizenship.” However for Mathewes to speak of the

church as being more than this—to speak of it as embodying an

alternative politics—is, in Mathewes’ view to engage in dangerous

apocalypticism and escapism. Yet what is the difference between

54 Ibid., 316.

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“proleptic participation” and “apocalypticism?”55 Can the church

not proleptically participate, as church?

What holds Mathewes’ back, more than anything else, is the

sense of closure and achievement he associates with accounts of

the church as a politics. This tension between the “structure”

of suffering in Mathewes’ account and his refusal of “control”

surfaces clearly in his short dismissal of John Howard Yoder.

For Yoder, politics as an immanent project must be simply renounced, for we have a better vision of politics modeled for us by Jesus, and this politics is not really about organizing life in this world, but it is instead a matter of already living, albeit adventally, in the kingdom….The public activity…is best understood finally as witness, being salt and light, a leaven to society (but to what end?)….Ultimately it recapitulates the “church versus world” dichotomy that we should transcend, as captured in its implication of rebellious powers or demonic structures standing over against God....It does not confront the conditions of our lives during the world so much as suggest that Jesusoffers us a way to avoid those conditions.56

Yoder, Mathewes might say, has arrived prematurely at the end of

time, and in so doing has made it impossible for Christians to

55 Given how hastily Mathewes trots around the charge of apocalypticism I am somewhat skeptical of its analytical usefulness. Can it really apply to Yoder, Hardt and Negri, and the Left Behind series? See Mathewes, A Theology of Public Life, 220, 240, 312. The more sweepingly he uses the term, the more I begin to suspect it could apply to his own position. 56 Ibid., 240-1. This, it must be said, is of a piece with many casual misreadings of Yoder.

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deal with the world as it is. Mathewes insists that the faithful

alternative to such “apocalypticisms” is living as though

Christians were not in control—because the final outcome has

already been determined and in a way completely beyond our

imagining. Back among the virtues of “Hopeful Citizenship” near

the end of his book, Mathewes states, “Hope is about not being in

charge. It does not promote political zealotry, fanaticism, or

any of the other apocalypticisms which constantly tempt us. It

resists our longing for closure.”57

However, both Mathewes’ and Yoder’s approaches to the issue

of control and closure bear remarkable similarities—similarities

which open both up to the insights of external criticism like

that of Empire. Consider the following from Mathewes in his

section on Christian teaching:

57 Ibid., 256. While this sounds an awful lot like Stanley Hauerwas or John Howard Yoder, Mathewes’ contention about living out of control here is no doubt intended also to cut against just such a robust ecclesiology, which, I take him to be saying, is just another way to be “in charge.” For insightful—and mostly appreciative—critiques of Yoder on the issue of control, closure, and overdetermination as regards his reading of history and scripture, see Peter Ochs, Another Reformation (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Brazos Press, 2011), 127-163, and J. Alexander Sider, To See History Doxologically: History and Holiness in John Howard Yoder’s Ecclesiology, (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 2011), 97-132. Also, mostly on the appreciative side, Romand Coles, “The Wild Patience of John Howard Yoder: ‘Outsiders’ and the ‘Otherness of the Church,’” Modern Theology, (18:3 July, 2002).

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“Exegesis…is fundamentally a practice of the whole church…indeed the activity of exegesis is in a way what the church most fundamentally is. Furthermore, the internal structure and external boundaries of the church are profoundly unstable…the practice of exegesis involvesall the possible readers of the church. Any interpretation that can advance the rule of charity is legitimate, and so all believers are properly full participants in the communal exploration of God’s word: as Gerald Bruns puts it…“The Scriptures are a public rather than a secret text”…This is part of why Augustine affirms the church’s reality as mixed; there are saints living outside the ecclesia, and there are citizens of the earthly city present in the visible church.”58

In this passage, Mathewes first locates the exegetical task as

the most fundamental definition of the church’s existence and

then opens up the task to all within and all without the church.

Mathewes proposal here ensures, ideally, a continual testing of

the church’s teaching, both internally and externally. Compare

this to a strikingly similar passage from Yoder.

Th[e] hermeneutical role of the community is thus primordial; i.e. we have to talk about it first. It is however by no means an exclusive possession…When the empirical community becomes disobedient, other people can hear the Bible’s witness too. It is after all a public document. Loners and outsiders can hear it speaking especially if the insiders have ceased to listen. It was thanks to the loner Tolstoy and the outsider Gandhi that the churchman Martin Luther King, Jr. ...was able to bring Jesus’ word on violence back into the churches. It was partly the outsider Marx who

58 Ibid., 96.

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enabled liberation theologians to restate what the Law and the Prophets had been saying for centuries, largely unheard, about God’s partisanship for the poor.59

Fascinatingly, not only is the basic pattern of these passages

the same—the church’s existence as fundamentally interpretive and

the extension of the rights of interpretation to all—some of the

very terms and phrases are nearly identical (“public document”

and “public text”).60 One might charge that Yoder specifies

that only when the “empirical community becomes disobedient” can

“loners” and “outsiders” hear the word, and that Mathewes does

not specify this. However, for Yoder, the church is in fact

always disobedient—as becomes clear from his reading of church

history—and in this Mathewes agrees with him, for he says that 59 John Howard Yoder, “‘Is Not His Word Like a Fire?’ The Bible and Civil Turmoil,” in For the Nations: Essays Public and Evangelical (Grand, Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 1997), 93.60 Additionally, Mathewes ventures the idea of “play” as the primary way that individual Christians “risk their belief” without presuming too much control. He states, “play is actually a form of risky engagement, one that reveals the vulnerability of love, implicit in play’s necessary openness to the other.” Further, “What this ‘riskiness’ means is being willing to put one’s beliefs ‘into play,’ that is, to offer them to the other as a means of shared understanding.” A Theology of Public Life, 279, 280 There is no reason that the church—rather than, as here, individual Christians—could not articulate its social witness playfully, as it were. If this is the case, there are, once more, remarkable similarities between the way Mathewes talks about play here and Yoder articulates the way the church risks its belief—see Yoder’s essays on epistemology recently gathered together in A Pacifist Way of Knowing, (Euguene, OR: Cascade Books, 2010) , especially “‘But We Do See Jesus’: The Particularity of the Incarnation and the Universality of Truth” and “On Not Being Ashamed of the Gospel: Particularity, Pluralism, and Validation” in thatvolume.

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the reason that the interpretive task is now open to all is the

“the body of Christ is now wounded at its side and is not now

seamless.”61 The key issue is that both accounts posit the

church as first and foremost a hermeneutical community which

occupies that role only through the participation of outside

voices—such as the critical gaze of Marxism.62

Given all this, it seems the main issue between Yoder and

Mathewes here is not apocalypticism or the temptation to closure—

for the same dynamics that restrain Yoder’s temptation to closure

are also present in Mathewes’ account—but rather the act of

naming the church as an alternative politics. This is indeed a

serious division, perhaps the most serious in ecclesiology today.

However what I have been trying to suggest is that Mathewes has

61 Ibid., 96.62 Indeed, Yoder is much more appreciative of interpretive diversity than Mathewes, and sees such plurality as “good news” rather than an inescapable fact to be tolerated “during the world.” See Yoder’s reading of the Biblical story of Babel in “See How They Go with Their Face to the Sun,” in For the Nations: Essays Evangelical and Public (Eugene: Wipf & Stock, 2001) and also “Meaning after Babble: With Jeffrey Stout Beyond Relativism,” in Journal of Religious Ethics (2001), 132. Radical democratic theorist Rom Coles, in his appreciative summary of the way that diversity is intrinsic to Yoder’s ecclesiology, restates that “vulnerable relations with outsiders are integral to the otherness of the church, and…when this understanding of caritas is forgotten and unpracticed, the church loses its otherness, it assimilates to the violence of the world.” Romand Coles, “The Wild Patience of John Howard Yoder:‘Outsiders’ and the ‘Otherness of the Church,’” Modern Theology, (18:3 July, 2002), 307.

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already arrived at some minimal account of gospel as politics,

just insofar as he takes seriously his suggestion that

Christianity is and provides a “structure to our passion and

suffering.” This is not to erase the deep differences between

Mathewes and Yoder but it is to suggest that they may be

disagreeing about the same things. More pertinently, however,

this exercise with Mathewes’ account of the church shows not only

the ways that Mathewes’ account might accommodate a more

satisfactory account of the church—which is necessary for the

kind of self-reflection that would keep the church’s suffering

from turning into training in oppression—but also demonstrates

the reasons that Mathewes might want to listen to the insights of

Empire. It is thus to the similarities between the two works,

and to the possibilities of Mathewes’ Theology of Public Life in a world

of Empire that I finally turn.

Aside from the more obvious and fundamental differences

between the projects, the two accounts share some fascinating

resonances. First, though Hardt and Negri do not make this

explicit, their account of Empire as fundamentally parasitic and

Multitude as fundamentally creative harmonizes with Mathewes’

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Augustinian depiction of sin and evil as privation. Empire

really is a “paper tiger” of sorts, as Mathewes has it.63 Empire

is not ontologically “real,” just as evil, in the Augustinian

tradition, is not ontologically “real.” In the same vein, both

Mathewes and Hardt and Negri emphasize a particular kind of

immanentism. Empire has made clear that there is now no

“outside” from which we can struggle against Empire; we must

instead rely on the increasing coming-to-be of Multitude within

the world. Similarly, Mathewes argues strenuously for a proper

acknowledgement of our temporal location. We exist, he argues,

“during the world,” and while we can hope to relate properly

during the world only because we know what came before and comes

next, there is no access to those times now, only a kind of

anticipation.

Additionally, both projects attempt to achieve for their

respective audiences a kind of redescription of the existing

struggles and suffering in which they are already engaged and to

generate out of that redescription a broader vision of formation

63 Ibid., 219. Hardt and Negri write that the “frustration and continued instability suffered by imperial right…are all symptoms of a properly ontological lack.” Empire, 62. Emphasis original.

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and transformation. Mathewes states this more explicitly than

Hardt and Negri. His project is clearly aimed at a specific

subset of North American Christianity—mainline Protestants and

similar-minded Catholics, in short. He seeks to encourage a more

open participation of such Christians in public life, and more

importantly, Mathewes argues that such Christians ought to view

their public lives as an acetic Christian practice. Doing so,

moreover, actually opens up new possibilities for community—

recall Mathewes’ discussion of the creation of the category

“poor”—though Mathewes guards such suggestions carefully. In a

similar though perhaps more vague way, Hardt and Negri seek to

redescribe the current situation so as to further the struggles

of the Multitude. In a similar way, Hardt and Negri seek to

redescribe the current situation so as to further the struggles

of the Multitude; they labor at the enduring Marxist task of

helping the working classes come to consciousness of their

collective interests, identity, and power—and the corresponding

realization that Empire is “an empty machine.”64

64 Ibid., 62.

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If Christians have a task “during the world,” a task which

can be described as the corporate interpretation of scripture,

then it needs the insights of Hardt and Negri’s redescription of

our current struggles if it is to suffer well. Certainly these

insights cannot simply be blessed and translated into Christian

terms. The divide between various Marxist and various Christian

understandings of what it means to be human in the world, of what

future we are being pulled into, continues not to be trivial.

But if Christians are suffering poorly, we might need the

Marxists to tell us how. If Christians are not, as they were

however imperfectly in the fourth and fifth centuries, living

among, caring for (and being) the poor, so as to be able to see

the poor as poor, precisely in scriptural terms, then we might

need the Marxists to tell us about them, who they are, how they

came to be, and where they are going in scripture. If Christians

are not inhabiting prisons and mental health facilities, and

reflecting on the disciplining force of such institutions, and

thus society as a whole, then we might need Foucalt. In short,

if the scriptures are a public text, as both Mathewes and Yoder

have argued, then Christians need the public.

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As one specific example, Mathewes would do well to listen

more sympathetically to Hardt and Negri’s analysis of U.S.

diplomatic and military power. In 2011, Mathewes’ wrote a

decisively affirmative article about President Obama’s rationale

for U.S. military action in Libya. Obama, in Mathewes’ view,

demonstrated how “complicatedly intertwined the political and

moral realities are” and how “acts” must be “calibrated not for

their ‘moral clarity’ but for their precision in anticipated

consequences.”65 Certainly there are complicated questions about

the state at stake here—questions which would not be adequately

addressed without an exploration of Mathewes’ appropriation of

Reinhold Niebuhr66—but it seems reasonable to suggest that

Mathewes needs to pay more attention to the reality depicted by

Hardt and Negri, especially because the intervention in Libya is

65 Charles Mathewes, “Obama on Libya: ‘A Cold-Hearted Realist and Warm-BloodedMoralist,’” Religion and Ethics Newsweekly. March 29, 2011. 66 In a review of A Theology of Public Life, Daniel Bell described Mathewes’ approachas an “updated, sophisticated Nieburhianism” but ventures that Mathewes’ “polemic with apocalyptic…feels like an updated version of the old ‘sectarian’charge” and concludes that “Those who are not persuaded that the “already” of the classic eschatological vision is adequately described in terms of a motivation, changed perception and self-understanding, and promise, all of which preclude the church from being a political community (p. 208), are not likely to find this updating or his answer to the opening question particularly compelling, especially since Mathewes does not engage…alternatives deeply.” Daniel Bell, “Review of ‘A Theology of Public Life,’” Modern Theology (25/1, January, 2009), 144.

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illuminated so clearly in their analysis of world politics. I

fear that Mathewes, in so eagerly divesting Christian thought of

a sense of control and closure has simply transferred a large

measure of that sense of control to the American state (in, no

doubt, a qualified Niebuhrian fashion). I fear also that

Mathewes has failed to properly interrogate what it means for the

world that, as President Obama declared in his Libya address,

“For generations, the United States of America has played a

unique role as an anchor of global security and as an advocate

for human freedom” and, just as importantly, what it means for

the church to attend to, let alone support, such a claim.67

I return, finally, to the quote from Mathewes that opened

this exploration. “Christianity is best understood as providing a

structure to our passion and suffering, not a solution to it.”68

My main contention has not been to blunt the force of this

statement, but to strengthen it, and to suggest, indeed that

Christianity does have a structure—a structure which is

experienced within and also is, the church. Moreover, self-

67 Barack Obama, “Remarks by the President in Address to the Nation on Libya,”The White House Office of the Press Secretary. National Defense University, March 28, 2011.68 Mathewes, A Theology of Public Life, 15.

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reflection on that structure, the church’s corporate “proleptic

participation” in the coming kingdom can, perhaps more than

anything else, aid the church in discerning those social

categories which have been obscured by our being disciplined by

capital. Mathewes’ ascetic suffering motif strikes the perfect

balance necessary for this reflection. It allows Christians to

“step back” back and see the world “as a whole” and thus know it

as contingent, or at least not as the final word, while also

“disabus[ing] us of believing that the world is what we make of

it.”69 It rightly chastens the expectations of Christians, but

in so doing it actually forces closer attention to the world that

Christians are “suffering.” In speaking of using and being used

by the world Mathewes clears a space for reflection on that

suffering. This balance calls to mind a similar key struck by

G.K. Chesterton, who argues that,

What we need is not the cold acceptance of the world as a compromise, but some way in which we can heartily hate it and heartily love it. We do not want joy and anger to neutralize each other and produce a surly contentment; we want a fiercer delight and a fiercer discontent. We have to feel the universe at

69 Ibid., 17.

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once as an ogre’s castle, to be stormed, and yet as ourown cottage, to which we can return at evening.70

The world cannot be made “safe” for Christians, either

through Christians being “in charge” or through Christians having

a church that finally gets its politics “right.” It is Mathewes’

great insight to the contrary that Christians suffer through the

world and that they may do so joyfully. But precisely how

Christians suffer “during the world” makes all the difference in

the world.

70 G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1995 [orig. 1908]), 77. Adding a putatively stuffy old English Catholic to an already dangerously scattered paper right at the end does not suggest authorial prudence. But I hope, if nothing else, it may also point to the ecumenical possibilities of the proposals I seek to further.