Review of Barry Harvey, Can These Bones Live?:
A Catholic Baptist Engagement With Ecclesiology,
Hermeneutics, and Social Theory. Grand Rapids:
Brazos Press, 2008. 318 pages.
David Dault
Christian Brothers University
At the close of the 1990s, Emory professor Walter
Lowe suggested that, in Barth's 1919 Commentary on
Romans, "Christianity has had a postmodernism of
its own."[1] Lowe characterized this
Pauline postmodernism as distinct from, but by no
means allergic to, its secular twentieth-century
counterpart. Lowe places the locus of this Christian
postmodern turn firmly in apocalyptic, and sees his
reading of Paul's apocalyptic theology as an antidote
to "modernity's self-understanding" of unified
narrative and individualism.
Lowe is certainly neither the first nor the last
to entertain such notions. Indeed, if we consider
solely the disciples of John Milbank and Stanley
Hauerwas, the question of how Christianity,
qua religious faith writ large, should best
engage and critique the modern project has been a
preoccupation of an entire cottage industry of
theological writers for the last three decades.
Expanding our scope to include the breadth of
Abrahamic thinkers, we can find a clear line in this
set of questions to Franz Rosenzweig and the German
Lehrhaus movement of the early twentieth
century, and through this lineage back to our own
present-day attempts to practice Scriptural Reasoning
together.
With his book, Can These Bones Live? Barry
Harvey leaps into this strange maelstrom of voices.
This formidable and well-written book functions, not
so much as an argument, but as a meditation which
focuses on the questions of faith and modernity.
Notably, however, Harvey shows much less patience
with the postmodern than Lowe or the latter-day
disciples of Rosenzweig in SR. For Harvey, a
"postmodern" Christian can only be a contradiction in
terms, a product of a mistake in thinking that
confuses a heavenly and apocalyptic goal for an
earthly and political one: "The difference has to do
with how women and men come to terms with the
inextricable and inescapable sense of contingency,
particularly and mystery that circumscribes not only
the whole of human existence but also our attempt to
deal with it," Harvey writes late in the book.
"Simply put, those who embrace this way of naming the
world [and thus undermine the modern project in the
name of "the postmodern"] seek to transform the
nothingness into yet another proper place, while
those who seek to prop up the modern project continue
in a state of self-deception."[2]
Christians, according to Harvey, should agree to
neither of these options. Each of the options are, in
their own way, a misguided "attempt to identify a
convincing replacement for God in the narrative
progress of history."[3] In other words, both
those who would hold onto modernity at all costs and
those who seek to abandon it at all costs do so in
the name of the "promise and possibility of a new and
more perfect Christendom,"[4] a hubris that, for
Harvey, infects both the present form of the Catholic
Church and its Protestant counterparts. The result is
a fractured landscape of church-like structures that
long for the "good ol' days" of Constantinianism,
even as "the so-called mainline churches that once
dominated the American social landscape have been
pushed to the periphery of a culture of aimless
production and narcissistic consumption, where they
continue to make periodic pronouncements, as if they
still enjoyed a monopoly in American religious life,
while at the same time constantly adapting themselves
to a world they still think they control."[5] The
self-delusion has led the church(es) down a path of
accommodation, and Harvey's characterization of the
path is so fully realized that it deserves to be
quoted at some length:
In our time...the sacramental sinews that bind the
members of Christ's ecclesial body together have
largely been supplanted by the institutions and
practices regulating the transactions of a
state-centered, market-driven society. Comfortable
in the well-worn ruts of conspicuous consumption,
comparatively few Christians see their faith as
anything other than a private, inward matter that
makes their lives more fulfilling. They have been
trained to regard the church as another vendor of
goods and services, providing for their spiritual
consumption and enjoyment, and thus are incapable
of mounting a serious challenge to the sway of the
global market's cult of productivity and
consumption. For the most part the church has
acquiesced in this matter, relegating "spiritual"
questions to a realm beyond the everyday world
where goods are bought and sold, rewards and
punishments are meted out, and the young are raised
and the elderly cared for, and in the process it
has supplied religious justification for the global
republic of production and consumption. Ecclesial
practices have been reformatted to underwrite the
individual in the role of consumer, encouraging
each to choose from a vast inventory of religious
symbols and doctrines, to select those that best
express his or her private tastes and sentiments.
Some like white bread while others prefer whole
wheat; some like the majesty of the Orthodox
liturgy, while others are partial to the
informality of Baptist services; some are drawn to
the orderliness of the Reformed tradition, others
the ecstasy of Pentecostal revivals; some prefer
the wide range of spiritual goods and services
offered by the suburban megachurch, yet others the
eclectic mixture of ancient and postmodern in the
so called emerging church.[6]
The language is exquisite, and the
meaning is clear. The varieties of Christian faith
available to the contemporary worshipper are fully
"of this world," and reflect the comforts and
preferences of economic superstructures rather than
the will of God. Harvey is certainly not the first to
make this claim of "consumerist" Christianity, but
the poetry with which he makes his case throughout is
stunning. From the first pages of the first chapter,
the problem that Christian believers face is
startlingly clear.
Harvey's suggested "solution" to this dilemma
resembles a Hauerwasian one and remains unclear—which
leads to the most frustrating aspect of his book. I
believe Harvey's proposal amounts to the following:
1) imagine a different world; 2) take the eucharist
regularly; and 3) under no circumstances engage in
political action. If the church has become
irrelevant, in other words, the proper
counteroffensive is not to try to win the relevance
battle in (post)modernity's playing field, but rather
to imaginatively live into another game entirely.
After Harvey's articulate characterization of the
Christian dilemma, his suggestions for navigating the
problem sounded remarkably like quietism and
capitulation. Citing Augustine, Harvey suggests that
"good uses may be found for professions not typically
associated with Christian ministry. Bankers, for
example, could use their skills and positions to help
low-income families rise above subsistence levels,
which in turn would allow them to contribute to the
common good."[7]Why not, I wonder, work
to eliminate the system under which the usury that
pays the banker's salary is allowed? Harvey's
response is that this sort of political solution
would be "part of a social order that humans enact
for themselves" and, thus, prey to the will to
dominate, the libido dominandi.[8] Rather,
for Harvey, the true “alternative...takes form around
Christ's table [and] undercuts the monopoly that
exchange ordered by the lust for mastery holds in the
present age."[9] This alternative,
Harvey goes on to claim, "will need to be formed
according to a different faith, a different hope, and
a different love"[10] than the world
currently understands, even in the (present)
church.
This alternative reality is formed through a
process Harvey calls "scriptural reasoning." His use
of the term, however, is somewhat different from that
of the practitioners of Scriptural Reasoning who
frequent the pages of this journal. For Harvey, this
reasoning is the active imagination of the Christian
believer, informed by biblical prophecy and story,
speaking an alternate truth in the face of the
present age. Fannie Lou Hamer, naming the Jim Crow
South as Pharaoh, exemplifies “scriptural reasoning.”
How? Because she testifies to "the apocalyptic
incursion of God into human history, between her own
time and circumstances, and those of the children of
Israel in bondage three millennia ago."[11]
Like the form of SR practiced by the readers of
this journal, Harvey's scriptural reasoning "cannot
be acquired apart from participation in a community
that has learned over countless generations how to
reason about their world using biblical images and
stories."[12] However, "[this]
'world of scripture' is not a clearly demarcated
territory to be occupied, an esoteric code to be
deciphered, a set of facts to be systematically
arranged, or an alternative to life in the 'real'
world, but a historical world of action and
encounter, the meaning of which is discovered and
recovered in analogous patterns in our own time and
circumstances."[13] It is here that
Harvey comes closest to the tenuous and provisional
practice that constitutes SR, gesturing toward the
possibility we glimpse when reading together across
traditions. It is unfortunate that no explicit
connection is made in the text to SR practices beyond
these gestures.
I remain deeply divided about Harvey's book. On
the one hand, it is an undeniable achievement. There
is a problem dwelling at the root of Christian life
in the era of late capitalism, and Barry Harvey
identifies it and interrogates it with vigor. On the
other hand, I am unable to see how a Christian
response can possibly avoid being political; the
political option is simply not one that Harvey
offers. This dilemma runs deeper than Harvey's work,
of course, and speaks to difficulties stemming back
to John Howard Yoder's The Politics of Jesus
and the followers of Stanley Hauerwas’ work. That
Harvey is unable to think beyond the limits of
Hauerwas and Yoder on this point, in the form of
concrete and revolutionary action, is perhaps
forgivable in light of the strength of his
articulation of the problems of Christian
modernity.
Notes
[1] Lowe, W. J. (1999),
“Prospects for a Postmodern Christian Theology:
Apocalyptic Without Reserve.” Modern Theology,
15:17-24.
[2] Harvey, p. 284-285.
[3] Harvey, p. 39.
[4] Harvey, p. 39.
[5] Harvey, p. 41.
[6] Harvey, p. 218.
[7] Harvey, p. 281.
[8] Harvey, p. 281.
[9] Harvey, p. 281.
[10] Harvey, p. 286.
[11] Harvey, p. 152.
[12] Harvey, p. 152.
[13] Harvey, p. 160, echoing
Rowan Williams, On Christian Theology (Malden,
MA: Blackwell, 2000), p. 30.
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