The Sin of Original Sin's Sin

The Sin of Original Sin’s Sin James Callahan (2019) Strategy and Tactic This distinction, of strategy and tactic, needs our attention; not because it is new but because we routinely assume strategy (who wouldn’t want to master - as in understand - the territory we inhabit) and dismiss the significance of tactic. I learned to struggle with this distinction from reading Michel de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life; Certeau offered: I call a strategy the calculation (or manipulation) of power relationships that becomes possible as soon as a subject with will and power (a business, an army, a city, a scientific institution) can be isolated. It postulates a place that can be delimited as its own and serve as the base from which relations with an exteriority composed of targets or threats . . . can be managed.1 Strategy is the “calculus of force-relationships” which exists when institutions, for example educational and ecclesial bodies, are thought to exist in autonomous place (what Certeau refers to as “a triumph of place over time”). “As in management, every ‘strategic’ rationalization seeks first of all to distinguish its ‘own’ place, that is, the place of its own power and will, from an ‘environment.’” Still too thick? Let’s try this: a strategy is the way of making or determining relationships with the outside (i.e. exterior interests such as government, science, other institutions). Integration becomes the key word to explain how a strategy toward knowledges is undertaken. And it overcomes time (historical particularity or environment) by asserting its own place (a unified knowledge untouched, above and relatively unaffected by time). Certeau explains: It would be legitimate to define the power of knowledge by this ability to transform the uncertainties of history into readable spaces. But it would be more correct to recognize in these “strategies” a specific type of knowledge, one sustained and determined by the power to provide oneself with one’s own place. . . . In other words, a certain power is the precondition of this knowledge and not merely its effect or its 1 Trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1984/88?), 35-36. I was made aware of Certeau by Stanley Hauerwas, After Christendom? (Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 1991). attribute. It makes this knowledge possible and at the same time determines its characteristics. It produces itself in and through this knowledge.”2 Integration is the language of both metanarrative and strategy. That is, successful strategies integrate other knowledges in totalizing ways. Educational achievements within strategic institutions are evaluated as integrative rather than isolationist in nature because they wield rather than surrender the place of power. In theological construal successful strategies systematize discordant sources, applying consequential judgments to present circumstances, offering justification for summary validations of what might count as Christian. The popular assertion of metanarrative within theological circles is attributable to the development of Reformed influences, occasionally known as a Reformed “takeover,” within Protestant academia.3 This has relied upon an Augustinian-Reformed notion of metanarrative as essential to intellectual justifications and ascendancy coupled with an assertion of totalizing notions of sin and salvation - what Clark Pinnock refers to as “theological determinism.”4 The role of theology within Protestant academic institutions is to link specific Christian doctrines with a manner of conceiving the world - justifying the premise of the Christian faith as academically credible and not simply a scientific study of Christian faith as a religion. 2 Certeau, Practice, 36. Gary Dorrien offers a healthy critical evaluation of evangelical identity in The Remaking of Evangelical Theology (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1998). “The irony of evangelicalism is that while it contains an essentially contested family of theologies, is has been poorly suited to affirm pluralism of any kind. The evangelical impulse is to insist that only one religious tradition can be true, but evangelicalism itself contains several disparate traditions.” (3) 4 Clark H. Pinnock, “From Augustine to Arminius: A Pilgrimage in Theology,” in The Grace of God and the Will of Man, ed. Clark H. Pinnock (Minneapolis: Bethany House Publishers, 1989), 27. I also am convinced that the so-called Arminian option isn’t a genuinely different alternative to the theological determinism of Reformed theology within Protestant circles; on this argument, Carl Bangs, “Arminius as a Reformed Theologian,” in The Heritage of John Calvin, ed. John H. Bratt (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1973), 209-222; Arminius: A Study in the Dutch Reformation, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids, MI: Francis Asbury Press, 1985); and Richard A. Muller, God, Creation, and Providence in the Thought of Jacob Arminius: Sources and Directions of Scholastic Protestantism in the Era of Early Orthodoxy (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1991). 3 Theological ‘original sin’ A prime example this “theological determinism” would be the Augustinian notion of original sin, attributing to all human beings the influence of a singular act of Adam; in Augustine’s words: “the deliberate sin of the first man is the cause of original sin.”5 Whether hereditary, biological or metaphysical, theological or philosophical - however original sin’s spread is depicted, it is universal, it is totalizing. The narrative of original sin is easily told: Adam (and Eve), the first historical human(s), acted representatively and uniquely in an active capacity regarding God's instructions for the 'good' which is actually a state of perfection. Adam 'sinned' by eating of the forbidden fruit and plunged the human family into an deadly and perpetual state of sin; Adam sinned and became a sinner - a state of existence perpetuated through the passive capacity of a genetic and traducian surrogacy. To be human offspring of Adam (to be in Adam's image and likeness as well as God's; Genesis 5:1-3), is to participate in inherited guilt of Adam's original sin and demonstrate this second nature in actual sins. This second nature is the shared, universal story of human existence, with Jesus' human life as the one miraculous exception (actually, two if Catholic theology includes Mary's immaculate conception). Original sin truly is the Western metanarrative that offers the rationale for the mission of the Church as ultimately merciful rather than abusively totalitarian, salvific precisely because of the assertion of universal corruption, totalizing from the origins of human life excluding none from its creation to consummation narrative, and ultimately the Christian church’s justification for triumphalism. Debating whether beings are 'human' is not simply dismissiveness and pride, but an effort to determine liability to receive the gospel, baptism in the life of the church, and the prospect of salvation itself. If human, then subject to the metanarrative of original sin and the object of God's attention in salvation. Augustine, “On Marriage and Concupiscence,” A Select Library of the Nicene and PostNicene Fathers of the Christian Church, vol. 5 (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1987), 293. 5 It is not that Augustine of Hippo created the doctrine of original sin, but he did articulate how integral the notion of original sin is to early Western theology. The alternatives were many but all equally untenable to Augustine –whether so-called Pelagianism (as an – ism, it was genuinely a creation of Augustine’s own mind and troubled the African bishop because the ideas of Pelagius tended to undercut the teaching of Catholic baptism) or a more personal version of the same in the accusative indictments of Julian of Eclanum (who ridiculed Augustine’s attribution of evil to infants as a remnant of Augustine’s Manichaeism as a grand narrative of universal fall and discriminate restoration).6 To deny original sin the way Augustine envisioned the subject is not to deny the notion of sin itself, but it is to deny the metanarrative that original sin provides. It was Adam’s primitive transgression that was the cause - the prototype - of all subsequent human experience, from the source of mortality itself to the rationale for all manifestations of evil and misfortune, according to Augustine. As a reader of Genesis, Augustine obviously views the narrative as both historically real and implicit commentary on the human condition (although Augustine did assert the literary quality of Genesis, he subsumed the literary trope under a historical-theological strategy). It is one thing to say there is sin in human experience (sin as the unique description vocabulary addressing human condition) and quite another to say how and why the narrative of Genesis functions for further understanding. Let me explain: the alternative to Augustine's prototypical reading of Adam (and Eve?) in Genesis is not the denial of sin, but the demurral of original sin. What then of the early chapters of Genesis? The stories of these chapters may also be read as archetypal - stories that are illustrative of typical behaviors without supposing a theory of cause-and-effect as in prototypical readings.7 Simply said: Hebrew Scripture does not refer back to the Garden of Eden and Genesis to explain the persistence of sin, transgression, evil, immorality, or even For a healthy account of Augustine’s views on original sin, especially in his conflicts with Pelagius and Julian, see Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo: A Biography, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 340-399. 7 Carol L. Meyers, Discovering Eve: Ancient Israelite Women in Context (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991). 6 the distortion of human relationships. Adam is not blamed, and the 'good' of God's Garden pronouncements persist, as does the image and likeness of God in humans. This is a traditionally weak argument from omission, but we note the persuasive force of this silence in contrast to the volume of the Augustinian assumptions regarding Adam and sin (i.e. the silence is deafening). But what of Romans 5:12, "just as sin came into the world through one man, and death came through sin, and so death spread to all because all sinned"? Many, many have noted the Latin translation of that "because" denotes "in whom" as in, in Adam, which led Augustine (and Western Christian theology) to regard Adam as the prototypical cause of death because of Adam's sin. That Adam in Romans 5:12 is typical of human behavior and theologically anticipates (Barth), or is illustrative of the occurrence of sin but without causation and necessity (Pelagius), or is demonstrably socially systemic (Reinhold Niebuhr), or that the self and the whole of humanity are mutually construed (Kierkegaard), are all lively options; while Augustine's prototypical reading is untenable (as are Luther's notion of the will's bondage, Calvin's assertion of inherited and corrupted will, and universal evil disposition according to Jonathan Edwards - all versions of Augustine's argument). What may be said of Romans 5:12 is sin happens, Adam sinned, all are involved in sin, we are like Adam in this; the relationship of Adam and Christ (in Romans 5 and 1 Corinthians 15) is analogical and not causative. But how is the cause-and-effect relationship of Adam's original sin and human life employed in theology? Adam is the cause of all variety of human misfortune, physical and spiritual, and explicitly buttresses the acceptance of paedo-baptism for the remission of original sin in the fifth century in many Christian regions, and especially in Augustine's quarter century effort to influence the liturgy of African Christians. When infants are baptized…they are incorporated into the church, in other words, that they are united with the body and members of Christ, unless this benefit has been bestowed upon them, they are manifestly in danger of damnation. Damned, however, they could not be if they really had no sin. Now, since their tender age could not possibly have contracted sin in its own life, it remains for us, even if we are as yet unable to understand, at least to believe that infants inherit original sin. 8 No resource was left untapped in Augustine’s effort to portray the necessity of paedobaptism, including stories circulating about a child who died as a catechumen, but without baptism. Despairing her son’s eternal damnation, the mother took the corpse to the shrine of Stephen and the child was raised from the dead, summarily baptized, and then just as quickly died again, but now with the certainty of avoiding the damnation of hell.9 What makes such stories sensible in the fifth century are the accusations leveled by Julian, not against the notion of paedo-baptism, but against Augustine’s notion of a God who would inflict the innocent and ignorant with a pessimism that destroys any hope of a virtuous life. So Julian said, You ask me why I would not consent to the idea that there is a sin that is part of human nature? I answer: it is improbable, it is untrue, it is unjust and impious; it makes it seem as if the Devil were the maker of men. It violates and destroys the freedom of the will…by saying that men are so incapable of virtue, that in the very wombs of their mothers they are filled with bygone sins. You imagine so great a power in such a sin, that not only can it blot out the new-born innocence of nature, but, forever afterwards, will force a man throughout his life into every form of viciousness.10 Whether Julian offered extreme caricatures or healthy characterizations, his concern was unmistakably shared by those confronted with the Augustinian tradition of Western Christianity. It is not an uncommon to read such grand (and wrongheaded) statements as this: “the most serious challenge to theism was, is, and will continue to be the problem of evil.”11 Why is this so, and so generally accepted as an accurate characterization of the necessity of theodicy? Augustine, “On Forgiveness of Sins, and Baptism,” A Select Library of the Nicene and PostNicene Fathers of the Christian Church, vol. 5 (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1987), 71. 9 Ibid., 387-388. Brown accurately describes how anecdotes such as this, as well as Augustine’s appeal to the growing frequency of paedo-baptism were his ‘trump’ against Julian’s indignation over the assignment of such great, accumulated evil, to each and every infant. 10 Ibid., 390. 11 Ronald Nash, Faith and Reason (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1988), 177. 8 It is because of the negative insinuation regarding the reputation of God that is most distressing to Christians (likewise it is what the Christian idea of God means for any sense of human success, misery, evil and justice, or lack thereof if the Christian notion of a sovereign God prevails).12 That reputation is about God as not only the good, sovereign creator, but as the Christians’ own justifyingly validation for their efforts in the current world. And long before the term ‘theodicy’ was coined by Gottfried Liebniz in 171013 to account for a justification of God’s good identity as inexplicably mired by evil, efforts abounded among Christian theologians to supply an account of God that not only renders faith believable but also justifies the interpretative character of those with aspirations of cultural ascendancy.14 So, while most Christian theologians are still trying to pry an acceptable answer from Jesus to the question “Who sinned…that this man was born blind?” (John 9:1), the presumption is that a certain view of the world explicitly justifies such questions. The popularity of the notion of a Christian worldview is obvious in Christian academia –a seemingly unassuming presumption that a view of the world is obviously necessary to As illustrative of the pervasiveness of theodicy, we refer to the famous opening of Milton’s poem: “Of man’s first disobedience, and the fruit/Of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste/Brought death into the World, and all our woe/With loss of Eden, till one greater Man/Restore us, and regain the blissful seat/Sing, Heavenly Muse, that, on the secret top/Of Oreb, or of Sinai, didst inspire/That shepherd who first taught the chosen seed/In the beginning how the heavens and earth/Rose out of Chaos: of, if Sion hill/Delight thee more, and Siloa’s brook that flowed/Fast by the oracle of God, I thence/Invoke thy aid to my adventurous song/That with no middle flight intends to soar/Above th’ Aonian mount, while it pursues/Things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme. And chiefly thou, O Spirit, that does prefer/Before all temples th’ upright heart and pure/Instruct me, for thou know’st, thou from the first/Wast present, and, with mighty wings outspread/Dove-like sat’st brooding on the vast Abyss/And mad’st it pregnant: what in my is dark/Illumine, what is low raise and support/That, to the height of this great argument/I may assert Eternal Providence/And justify the ways of God to men. John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book I, Lines 1-25. 13 Gottfried W. Leibniz, Theodicy: Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man, and the Origin of Evil (LaSalle, IL: Open Court Publishing, 1985); and the better discussions of the influence of Leibniz include Kenneth Surin, Theology and the Problem of Evil (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986); Terrence W. Tilley, The Evils of Theodicy (Washington: Georgetown University Press, 1991); and 14 As McClendon offered, “Theodicies are arguments put forward by academic philosophers who with to abjure all standpoints, but who nevertheless want to make judgments about God, the world, and evil from their (impossible, mid-air) position.” James Wm. McClendon, Jr., Doctrine: Systematic Theology, vol. 2 (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1994), 173. 12 function as a Christian amidst the examination of knowledge and legitimacy (in a Protestant and Calvinistic version of how German intellectuals employed the term weltanschauung, a term coined by Immanuel Kant in the late eighteenth-century and employed to speak of beliefs shaping thought and conduct without rational construction). Among Protestant Evangelicals the notion of worldview has been described as “a theistic system exhibiting the rational coherence of the biblical revelation,” and “conceiving of Christianity as a worldview has been one of the most significant developments in the recent history of the church.”15 Worldview16 is a significant term within twentieth-century Protestant circles, to say the least, and is used to capture a desire to unify, totalize and make all of life submissive to a sovereign God known by a redeemed people –the anecdotal justification for the assertion of a Christian worldview being the perceived disharmony in modern life, the increasing fragmentation of intellectual life and disciplines, and attended by a marginalization of Christian influences.17 Consequently, a renewed interest in the integration of faith and learning assumes a distinctly Augustinian-Reformed version of strategy, or what has been called “the integrative mandate” and “integrative thinking” as alternatives and correctives to Carl F. H. Henry, “Fortunes of the Christian World View,” Trinity Journal, n.s., 19 (1998), 163; and David K. Naugle, Worldview: The History of a Concept (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002), 4. 16 For instance, James W. Sire, The Universe Next Door: A Basic Worldview Catalog (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1988); Brian J. Walsk and J. Richard Middleton, The Transforming Vision (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1984); Arthur F. Holmes, Contours of a Worldview (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1983); Ronald H. Nash, Worldviews in Conflict (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1992). 17 A helpful discussion of a modern, Reformed worldview is found in Peter S. Heslam, Creating a Christian Worldview: Abraham Kuyper’s Lectures on Calvinism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998), 88-95. Heslam quotes Kuyper’s assertion that he had found among “the descendants of the ancient Calvinists a stability of thought, a unity of comprehensive insight, in fact a worldview based on principles which needed but a scientific treatment and interpretation to give them a place of equal significance over against the dominant views of the age” (90). 15 “postmodernity and perspectivist epistemologies.”18 Truth is objective, know-able, and simple (but not simplistic); and since “all truth is God’s truth,’ the assertion runs, Christian faith does not simply belong as an equal within the academy; it exists to complete and unify, or correct and curtail, all intellectual inquiry. 19 There is no acceptable dichotomy of sacred and secular, and nothing is acceptably labeled secular.20 A Christian worldview is, in a word, a strategy, as Nietzsche recognized, “Christianity is a system, a whole view of things thought out together.”21 Tactics – an alternative A tactic, in contrast, is to Certeau a “calculated action determined by the absence of a proper locus. No delineation of exteriority, then, provides it with the conditions necessary for autonomy. The space of a tactic is the space of the other, thus it must play on and with the terrain imposed on it and organized by the law of a foreign power.”22 It does not attempt to overwhelm and replace prevailing strategy, instead it “insinuates itself into the other’s place, fragmentary, without taking it over in its entirety, 18 Duane Litfin, Conceiving the Christian College (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004), 127-180; also Richard T. Hughes, How Christian Faith Can Sustain the Life of the Mind (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001); and Cornelius Plantinga, Jr., Engaging God’s World: A Christian Vision of Faith, Learning and Living (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002). 19 Arthur Holmes, All Truth is God’s Truth (Grand Rapids: Eermdans, 1977). From this perspective we also hear much about the Judaeo-Christian worldview; for example, Francis Schaeffer, “People are unique in the inner life of the mind – what they are in their thought world determines how they act…. People have presuppositions, and they will live more consistently on the basis of these presuppositions than even they themselves may realize. By presuppositions we mean the basic way an individual looks at life, his basic world view, the grid through which he sees the world. Presuppositions rest upon that which a person considers to be the truth of what exists. People’s presuppositions lay a grid for all they bring forth into the external world. Their presuppositions also provide the basis for their values and therefore the basis for their decisions.” Francis Schaeffer, How Shall We Then Live? The Rise and Decline of Western Thought and Culture, (Crossway Books, 2005), 19. 20 The volumes on Christian worldview are numerous; of particular influence see David Dockery and Gregory Alan Thornbury, eds., Shaping a Christian Worldview: The Foundation of Christian Higher Education (Broadman & Holman, 2002); J. P. Moreland and William Lane Craig, Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2003); and a series entitled Developing a Christian Worldview, edited by Charles W. Colson, published by Tyndale House. 21 From Twilight of the Idols, in The Portable Nietzsche, ed. And trans Walter Kaufmann (New York: Penguin Books, 1988), 515. 22 Certeau, Practice, 35-37. without being able to keep it at a distance.” Because it makes do and struggles to survive without being able to define itself (i.e. its place proper), a tactic depends upon time. Its resources are not ‘here’ or ‘there,’ but ‘other.’ Certeau offers: Whatever it wins, it does not keep. It must constantly manipulate events in order to turn them into “opportunities.” The weak must continually turn to their own ends forces alien to them. This is achieved in the propitious moments when they are able to combine heterogeneous elements. . . . [T]he intellectual synthesis of these given elements takes the form, however, not of a discourse, but of the decision itself, the act and manner in which the opportunity is “seized.”23 Tactical practices include wit, cunning, tricks, possibly even deception.24 Such practices are employed when reading, talking, shopping, and even cooking and eating.25 Instead of winning the right to occupy a certain space or place, tactic pursues its own ends by other (maybe almost, any) means.26 The discipline of rhetoric is often employed to understand differing types of tactics (especially the significance of the Sophists). Inasmuch, the advantageous character of tactic bears the stigma of needlessly challenging objective calculations of the good or the truth. So, Certeau: “Strategies . . . conceal beneath objective calculations their connection with the power that sustains them from within the stronghold of its own ‘proper’ place or institution.”27 It is not just that strategies are institutionalized versions of individualized and incidental tactics; tactics are analogous but contrary to the strategies they seek to deflect. Tactics - the practices of everyday life - are discerned within the strategic structures that seek to totalize. As such the practices of everyday life indirectly display the totalizing tendencies of dominant disciplines or socio-political strategies, but are properly the loosely and 23 Ibid., xix. For example, “‘See, I am sending you out like sheep into the midst of wolves; so be wise as serpents and innocent as doves. Beware of them, for they will hand you over to councils and flog you in their synagogues; and you will be dragged before governors and kings because of me, as a testimony to them and the Gentiles. When they hand you over, do not worry about how you are to speak or what you are to say; for what you are to say will be given to you at that time. . . .’” (Matthew 10:16-19) 25 And, “We are no worse off if we do not eat, and no better off if we do.” (1 Corinthians 8:8) 26 The art of tactic is to “run in such a way that you may win [the prize]” (1 Corinthians 9:24). 27 Certeau, Practice, xx. On the significance of the Sophists, especially as rejected by Plato, see W. K. C. Guthrie, A History of Greek Philosophy, 6 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962-81), 3:136-283. 24 non-necessitated connection of “ways of operating” that may be understood as the “clandestine forms taken by the dispersed, tactical, and makeshift creativity of groups or individuals already caught in the nets of ‘discipline.’”28 Do these “ways of operating” constitute a discipline or might they simply replace the strategic forms they seek to deflect? It would appear so to the strategically minded, until they come to realize that the makeshift creativity of everyday circumstances are not necessitated and make no presumption to the place or space of strategies; and practically speaking everyday practices do not make good on their promise. One may summarize theories of “such practices” - the “mixtures of rituals and makeshifts (bricolages), manipulations of spaces, operations of networks” - much like an anthropologist may observe ‘other’ communities that are both legitimate (in their own) an illegitimate (in another). “This kind of research,” as Certeau observes from the perspective of those who philosophize about such things, “is complicated by the fact that these practices themselves alternately exacerbate and disrupt [such] logics.”29 These “operations - multiform and fragmentary, relative to situations and details, insinuated into and concealed within devices whose mode of usage they constitute, and thus lacking their own ideologies or institutions” - do not seek to thrive together. Instead, such tactics are “poetic ways of ‘making do’ (bricolage).” Certeau summarizes: “Pushed to their ideal limits, these procedures and ruses of consumers compose the network of an antidiscipline.”30 Practitioners are “as unrecognized producers, poets of their own acts, silent discoverers of their own paths in the jungle of functionalist rationality.” They are as “consumers [who] produce through their signifying practices something that might be considered similar to the ‘wandering lines’ drawn by . . . autistic children.”31 Such ‘lines’ are likened to “indirect” or “errant” “trajectories obeying their own logic.” Although they “are 28 Certeau, Practice, xiv-xv. Ibid., xvi-xvii. 30 Ibid., xv, emphasis added. 31 Ibid., xviii. 29 composed with the vocabularies of established languages . . . and although they remain subordinated to the prescribed syntactical forms . . . the trajectories trace out the ruses of other interests and desires that are neither determined nor captures by the systems in which they develop.” Lest even these “indirect” or “errant” trajectories be viewed as more than their particular enactment(s), Certeau offers that while trajectory “suggests a movement” it simply must not be conceived of as aspiring to a programmatic or strategic “graph” that “is substituted for an operation.”32 It is readily apparent that we have come to think of theology in terms that are at least as comprehensive as are the thought forms of our prevailing cultural circumstances; and this it seems must be accomplished in the effort to justify theology’s continued existence as a vital contributor to our prevailing cultural circumstances (or the only genuine contributor if one is a fundamentalist). So Dietrich Bonhoeffer offered: It is not Christ who must justify himself before the world by the acknowledgement of the values of justice, truth and freedom, but it is these values which have come to need justification, and their justification can only be Jesus Christ. It is not that a ‘Christian culture’ must make the name of Jesus Christ acceptable to the world; but the crucified Christ has become the refuge and the justification, the protection and the claim for the higher values and their defenders that have fallen victim of suffering. 33 32 Ibid. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics, ed. Eberhard Bethge (New York: Macmillan, 1955), 181. Stanley Hauerwas echoes Bonhoeffer: ‘Christians in modernity thought their task was to make the Gospel intelligible to the world rather than to help the world understand why it could not be intelligible without the Gospel. Desiring to become part of the modernist project, preachers and theologians accepted the presumption that Christianity is a set of beliefs, a worldview, designed to give meaning to our lives.’ Stanley Hauerwas, Sanctify them in the Truth: Holiness Exemplified (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1998), 193. 33