We continued our discussion of Stanley Hauerwas’s essay from The Christian Century (1991), “Discipleship as a Craft, Church as Disciplined Community.” We spent most the time talking about our culture’s infatuation with autonomous individualism and how that infatuation shows up in church. Hauerwas uses the conclusion of Dead Poets Society to make his point.
He says,
Such a view of ethics [what we see in our culture, circa 1991] can appear quite anticonventional, but even the anticonventional stance gains its power by appeal to what anyone would think upon reflection. This can be nicely illustrated in terms of the recent movie, The Dead Poets Society. It is an entertaining, popular movie that appeals to our moral sensibilities. The movie depicts a young and creative teacher battling what appears to be the unthinking authoritarianism of the school as well as his students’ (at first) uncomprehending resistance to his teaching method. The young teacher, whose subject is romantic poetry, which may or may not be all that important, takes as his primary pedagogical task helping his students think for themselves. We watch him slowly awaken one student after another to the possibility of their own talents and potential. At the end, even though he has been fired by the school, we are thrilled as his students find the ability to stand against authority, to think for themselves.
Our culture assumes there are two options: either we “think for ourselves” or we “mindlessly give in to authority.” The first is obviously the right thing in our culture. That we should think for ourselves is true; that thinking for ourselves means thinking by ourselves, is a profound mistake.
The ethic of “thinking for ourselves” is related to the ethic of “being countercultural.” The culture, or to use a word we see in scripture, the “world,” is something we Christians differentiate ourselves from. We resist its guidance. There are two big challenges with this. First, all of us are in the world, being formed by the world. Second, the world is not monolithic. We can be counter to one part of culture while in complete captivity to another.
He continues:
This movie seems to be a wonderful testimony to the independence of spirit that democracies putatively want to encourage. Yet I can think of no more conformist message in liberal societies than the idea that students should learn to think for themselves. What must be said is that most students in our society do not have minds well enough trained to think. A central pedagogical task is to tell students that their problem is that they do not have minds worth making up. That is why training is so important, because training involves the formation of the self through submission to authority that will provide people with the virtues necessary to make reasoned judgment.
Hauerwas stomps on cultural orthodoxy here. How can we as Christian leaders have our minds formed – and contribute to the forming of others – so our minds can be relied upon to think well for ourselves? What he says here about “training” is essential – and we know it’s essential in other domains of life. Hauerwas is going to want to make these same claims about students in church, in Christian settings.
The church’s situation is not unlike the problems of what it means to be a teacher in a society shaped by an ethos that produces movies like The Dead Poets Society. Determined by past presuppositions about the importance of commitment for the living of the Christian life, we have underwritten a voluntaristic conception of the Christian faith, which presupposes that one can become a Christian without training. The difficulty is that once such a position has been established, any alternative cannot help appearing as an authoritarian imposition.
The simple “decision to follow Jesus” is a good starting point. That alone, however, won’t result in our being Christian disciples.
HERE’S the audio of our discussion.
Bandits No More 