Fragmented Foundations — Kyle Stoltzfus — Ep. 113

Welcome back to another episode of Anabaptist Perspectives. I'm here with Kyle Stoltzfus again. Now, Kyle, as we all know, there are a lot of challenges that our society is facing, that we're all facing as individuals that our communities are facing.

What is this revealing about our culture, our communities, our society? What is it going to take for us to come out the other side of all these difficulties? Oh, wow. These are really big questions, complex ones too. So anything that I can offer here, I mean, you're stepping into what's really fragmented territory. It's hard to offer just one simple answer.

Crises that we're facing, I mean, there's—we have to talk about COVID. Starting off in March, it's just a little bit of an awareness of something in the air in Wuhan, and that's early. But coming to March, things get serious here in the States.

It could feel like there's about maybe one or two weeks in March where there's this coming together, this solidarity in American culture that actually felt kind of good. It's like there's this unknown threat. We don't know what's going to happen, but we're going to be in this together, alone, but together. And then that lasted about two weeks. What I noticed about that crisis, and then there's been repercussions, there's been race, really inflammatory conversation about race that's still unresolved and continues to be an issue.

What I've had to notice through my training as an ethicist is not so much the crises themselves, but our culture's response to those. And so some of the things that I notice is the sorts of resources that are available to a nation in a time of crisis like this.

Here in America, we're incredibly wealthy. We have the resource of wealth. We have a lot of natural resources. We have a good many allies in other Western cultures who can help us out. There's some mutual exchange happening. These are all resources that we have. There's the professional resources we have, healthcare. We've got excellent engineering, all of these things that kind of work for us. But what I get most interested in are the social and the ethical resources that are actually available to us. And what I mean by that are these large social networks that we have as a country, the sorts of bonds that we have with each other that I can say that I know that you've got my back and that you can say to me that I've got yours as well.

And that's a huge resource that in a lot of ways is much more significant than the kinds of resources that we attach to like wealth or our professionalization or our allies. So there's where I tend to notice these bonds, the social bonds that we have, and how those bonds are all kind of connected and oriented towards some kind of common purpose. Okay.

So two things that I think this crisis reveals, or the COVID crisis, the race crisis, two things that they tend to reveal are, well, first, it calls into question the sorts of resources that we have available to us to rise up and meet at a national level some kind of thing like COVID with solidarity. There's been a lot of fragmentation after those first two glowing weeks or so. Things very quickly polarized. And that, it happened so quickly. I mean, you could look at the Democrat-Republican polls that this has tended to orient around, the left and the right. You could say, but I think it's actually even more complicated than that. There's a lot of fragmentation that's revealed.

So it calls into question the sorts of bonds that we have as a nation. The second thing that I'll notice is that our response to crises like this have, and this is connected to the first, our response here actually has very little to do with political ideology, whether you're red or blue.

What I found in my own experience of shutdown and things is that it was, I was caused more anxiety, right, by the political spectrum and how that conversation was happening at the national level. And what was actually helpful to me were things like sourdough bread, roasting and giving out coffee and receiving gifts and giving gifts to people and actually being available to each other and letting each other that we were available. Yeah. So expressions of personal connection. Yeah. Yeah. The actual bonds that, for me anyway, let me know that there's something of resource and substance here. Yeah. That even in this difficult time, I am still part of a community that is still there. Yeah.

Even in this difficulty where we can't physically be together, the community still exists. Yeah. That's right. And that community is what I'm saying is what actually gave me the resources that I needed, at least, to get through a time which is very ambiguous and continues to be as it develops.

It's very ambiguous. It's very kind of open-ended. And then this national discussion about where we should go in a lot of ways just makes things even more ambiguous and was somewhat unhelpful. So I'm calling into question there, the sorts of resources we have at the political level to actually meet a challenge like what we've been facing over the last number of months. Yeah. You know, and it's interesting what you said about you don't think that these divisions are ideological. It's not that we've sorted ourselves according to the political or other types of beliefs we have. Is it maybe almost more that there is an underlying disconnectedness and that the polarization, the red team and the blue team and all that, that has not created the disconnectedness so much as it's an expression of it, would you say?

Well, I think you're onto something that to the level that these local communities have somewhat disintegrated, it's become more difficult to make these sorts of bonds. But there's also the sense, at least in my experience, where some of what we see, say, really publicized in the narratives that are pushed in the political spectrum, in my encounters with everyday people, it just doesn't ring true. The reality is that people tend to be very approachable. Sometimes they're even open to having tough conversations, say, about things that matter to us, provided that we bring the sorts of character and virtue we need to have those conversations. So there's something of an extreme that seems to be painted out, say, in the media that, in my experience on the ground level, it's not really reflected there very well either.

You just said something about bringing the needed virtue to these difficult conversations that we might find ourselves in. Can you say more about that? What is that virtue that we need? Where does it come from? Where does that virtue come from? Well, I need to back up just a little bit.

And I get the chance here to talk just a little bit about Alastair McIntyre. Okay. I just sprang a name out there. Let me just say why I think he matters. Well, he offers something of a diagnosis, which I think has gained a lot of credibility through some of our experiences here in the last number of months and will probably continue to gain credibility as we go forward. What he does in his book, and he's talking about virtue, he says we're living after virtue. Okay. That's the title of his book. He begins with his allegory of a fragmented world that reflects the fragmented moral conversation, the fragmented moral landscape that we're living in, especially as a Western post-Christian culture.

And he gives us this allegory of how some kind of catastrophe has come into the world and all of the sciences were just suddenly dismantled. And now, instead of there actually being a coherent sense of science, all we've got is these fragments that are kind of laid out. So we're in the future and we're trying to reassemble these fragments and make some kind of coherent science come out of this again. And all we've got, say, is here's a label from a prescription bottle of Prozac, and we've got that. And over here, we've got a sixth grader's introduction to stargazing with a couple of maps or something like that. And then over here is a page from 1986, National Geographic.

And we've got all this stuff. It introduces us to certain kinds of language, and we can kind of pantomime our way into being scientists. But the reality is that we're not really doing the discipline of science anymore. It's something else. We're just looking at some disconnected pieces. Yeah. And yeah. And if we try to assemble those pieces, it's never going to—it can't even approximate the whole. It's almost like a parody. Yeah. Some of the same language, maybe even a few of the same methods, but it's lost touch with its overarching goals.

And because of that, we're going to have a really hard time assembling that thing again. And what he does with this allegory then, he says, well, that's what science could be like if we imagine that future. But this is the reality of moral or ethical conversation in the United States and in many Western cultures these days.

There's this quote, and I'll just say, he says that this in the actual world which we inhabit, the language of morality is in the same state of grave disorder as the language of natural science in the imaginary world, which I described. So he's talking here about the art of ethics, which is the art of living and discerning and living this good life. Okay.

And he's saying that it's lost its moorings. And because it's lost its moorings, we as a culture just have a really hard time having these moral conversations that we need to have to navigate what are really complex and difficult and painful circumstances.

And that's what it means to live after virtue. Yeah. So it's like all we have are leftover pieces of good and evil and right and wrong. Yeah.

Without the concept of how they truly fit together and with a lot of the pieces missing. So we just have these disconnected fragments, incomplete fragments, and they just don't go together. And because of that, if you can't really have a common picture, if you can't paint on a common landscape with somebody, the best you can do is beat them over the head or get really shrill. Yeah. And then you have people who are really talking right past each other, and the intensity of the conversation and the shrillness of it, he's saying, is just helping them to see like, I don't think we're actually having the same conversation anymore. We just got fragments. Yeah. And taking the fragments and throwing them at each other instead of being able to assemble them.

Yeah. Yeah. I think a good example of what you're talking about is seen in, I don't think you can even really call it a debate or a discussion, but the rhetoric around abortion. What really, in my mind, I think what really is at issue with abortion is what is a human being?

And under what circumstances, if any, is it permissible to take a human life? That is what is going to answer the question. Or, well, maybe a better way to say it is you need to answer those questions. What is human life? Can human life be taken?

You need to answer those questions before you can make any statement about abortion. But I don't feel like I have noticed any real attempt to have a conversation about those underlying questions. It seems like instead people think what they think about what a human being is and then don't even address that any farther than that and then just put forward their conclusions, throw their conclusions at each other. And it ends up not even really making sense. Yeah. In many ways, it just kind of galvanizes the opposing viewpoint many times.

They're hammering each other, but all it's doing is strengthening some of the opposing views or how they could see as opposing views the camp that they're in. I like what you're saying here about some of these fundamental issues. And I think it's true that, say, until we have some kind of common understanding of what a human life is and what a human life is good for, until we have some kind of understanding of that, we're never going to be able to actually come together and talk about, say, beginning of life. Is abortion ever okay? Or end of life. Or end of life. Exactly. Is euthanasia ever permissible? But much less, you know, these middle of life things.

I mean, our culture, it's the caught of youth. We love choices. We love resources. We love new experiences. And in a lot of ways, we hold this up. The caught of youth, it's rampant. It's idolatrous. That's what the human good is.

That's the accumulation of resources and wealth and of choice, the capacity to be basically this autonomous individual, right? There might be alternatives to that. And I should hope so. Well, I'd suggest here, I think, that in the middle of all of this fragmentation that's happening, if you're following after McIntyre anyway, the suggestion is it's going to be that the church actually has something to say about these things.

The common moral discourse that we can assume that we're having is in many ways broken down. There's an insolvency in our culture and our ability to actually make moral decisions together. So there's been something of a response to that and saying, yes, that may be true of our culture. You may differ in how thoroughly you agree with McIntyre and folks like that, but the church actually has something to offer us here.

The church is a place where we can pick up the pieces and restore and maintain these missing fragments and assemble an account of what is really true and what good and evil are. Yeah. Yeah. And what the church has to offer then to the society that's fragmented and confused is its own integrity as in its own account, the true account, the true narrative of what actually makes, say, for example, human life worthwhile. And you can look at Jesus and the dignity of his life and the dignity that he gives to the people around him, to children, to the aged, to the people outlined to the community, to the people in the community.

For him, it's all very much the same. It takes him to the cross, right? And we actually have that to offer. And that's something that our culture today, even though you have some really abstract notion of, say, human dignity and human rights. And self-sacrifice and things like that. Those can be kind of noble sometimes, but they've been distorted in a way that's hardly even recognizable of Christian in a lot of ways.

And that's something that the church actually has to offer, a much stronger basis for what human dignity means. But it's based in Christ. It's not just this general notion of these truths are self-evident. Yeah. Yeah. The church can offer a basis for belief and for action that's not rooted in myself. Right.

And my own implicit rights, say. Yes. Yeah. And my own authority to do what I decide is good for me. But instead to hold up and follow the example of Jesus, who made himself of no reputation, like it says in the book of Philippians, and took the form of a servant on himself when he, of all people, had every right to autonomy and to be exalted.

It takes tremendous courage to try to live that way in this world. I mean, we'd much rather, I think, find refuge in either our own inherent rights, which is where many folks go. I have my rights. And if that's all you've got, you're going to hang on to those pretty hard. But to live in that self-abased, self-giving way that could possibly lead to the cross, right? It takes tremendous courage. And you've got to draw on resources that are broader than just me as an individual. Yeah. So I'll pick up the trail a little bit further with McIntyre. I just got to like talking about McIntyre.

But what I found is that there's an entire branch of ethics that's being erected and that's growing in some of its influence that's drawing inspiration both from men like McIntyre who say there's something wrong in our society. We need to return to other ways of understanding doing ethics and community and what that's like. So they're drawing inspiration from McIntyre. They're drawing inspiration from the Anabaptist tradition as well. This is what Samuel Wells, the Christian ethicist, he calls this tradition ecclesial ethics. Okay. And it's an ethics of the church, in other words. Yeah. An ethics by and for the church. And that's how the church is actually doing its ethical work is by being the church.

That doesn't mean to be ingrown. It's missional, but its integrity is found in the claims that are peculiar to the church itself.

And it's just an approach to doing ethics, an approach to choosing and living the good life that emphasizes that the church gives her best to society by simply being the church. Okay. And it means, in other words, that the church has her own integrity. She has her own practices. She has her own texts, scripture being one of the really significant of those texts, right? She has her own sources of authority. She has her own heroes, her own stories, her own traditions. And some of these are, as the culture continues to go, it's fragmented and atomized in an increasingly tribal way.

The difference of some of these things that are peculiar to the church is going to become more and more apparent. And I think here, as Christians become increasingly aware and increasingly recognized that we're living in this post-Christian culture and as some of the pretenses of our unity are stripped away by crises like we're going through right now, as that becomes increasingly apparent, this approach to ethics of ecclesial ethics is gaining more traction. So it's like I tell my students in the ethics class that I teach here, like, this is a really interesting time to be an Anabaptist.

Or some of the formal alliances between church and state are deteriorated. Cultures increasingly go in a direction that many Christians are leery of. And by and large, Christianity, at least in a lot of Roman Catholic and the main Protestant, kind of the leading Protestant circles, that that's in decline. There's just a growing awareness like, well, we need to think about other ways of doing church. And there's been that turn toward a more ecclesial approach.

So there's this fragmentation that's becoming more and more apparent. And I think some of what you're saying is that the Anabaptist point of view that always did see an underlying fundamental break between the church and the rest of society, that break that we have always seen was kind of papered over or it was masked. I hate to bring up masks right now, but anyhow, in the past, by what we would have always considered as Anabaptist to be an artificial union of the church and the rest of society, that that's being shown to have been false in a lot of ways.

The times that we're living in, and I think if you read the barometer, the times that we're going to continue to live in and maybe increasingly so, there are times that are there are times that can kind of suit the hand of what we've traditionally, the place we've traditionally tried to hold in society as the Anabaptists, which is to say, well, culture does things that are unpredictable and savage and chaotic sometimes, what you'd expect of a culture that's out and doing its cultural thing. Yeah. It's like what James says about the wisdom that is of this world versus the wisdom that is from above. Yeah. Yeah. That's right. Yeah. And to be born into this community, to be reborn into it, to be baptized into it is to begin to live in a different mode of life.

But it's not just expected.

There's something about the church's approach to this, which isn't just intuitive. It's not just something that every reasonable person is just going to be able to be persuaded. You actually have to die. You have to die to yourself and enter in this. Yeah. That's right.

And by entering this, you're kind of sowing yourself like that kernel of wheat that's going to die and then something sprouts. But these are not intuitive ways of influencing a culture. And they need to be entered into by choice. They need to be decided and committed to when we take up that cross.

It's the cross that the Lord gives us. And it's peculiar to us. And to join into a body of crossbearers isn't something that just everybody's going to want to do. So I think there's. I'm not sure if I want to do it. No. Sometimes. No. That's right. Yeah. Even though I know I should, I know it's right. And this is important. I mean, you could become hopelessly idealistic and just say, like, well, in this bubble, we're going to get it. But the reality, I mean, the cross penetrates all the way through the church as well.

And there's a lot of crossbearing to do within the community of believers. It's not just something we get to decide and hold up as a standard and say, well, this is a crossbearing community and that one's not.

I mean, that's the way of the Lord with us. But there has been that sensibility in Anabaptism just not to expect the world to behave in ways that would make it just an extension of the church. It's like there's something of a disconnect there. And as our culture continues to move in the direction that it has, there's at least a growing appreciation, in my experience, for the contributions of Anabaptist traditions. Yeah. You're saying an appreciation among other Christians that are outside of our own Anabaptist tradition. Yeah. That's correct. Yeah. So obviously, there's always questions. There's reservations, but at least a certain respect and sometimes a kind of solidarity of saying, you all have something to contribute here.

We want to hear what you have to say. And an appreciation for some of the riches that the Anabaptist heritage of, say, nonviolence and of a kind of community that's pretty tightly integrated and has some resources to resist some of the woos of the culture that we live in right now. And they're recognizing you all have something to say to us. And they have some things to say to us too, I think. But in my experience, the conversation isn't just one direction anymore. There's a lot of Christians realizing that they need something more. I think we have to recognize that it's become more and more clear that there's just a lot of confusion these days about what we even mean when we talk about something like a common good, some kind of national fireplace that we can all kind of gather around and we're making our s'mores together.

We're not actually even sure what that common good is like. We're not sure if we even want to do that. No. You know, actually, we're not. We're not anymore. And things get more tribalistic and militaristic even. It seems less likely. There's not just a campfire to gather and say kumbaya.

Because the fact is there's a lot of goods being sought in our culture. There's a lot of smaller interest groups and fragments that are out there, and they're seeking their own goods. So what we're witnessing today is a disagreement about those goods. And they're not lining up very well. They're not very common.

And in an environment like what we have, I mean, anybody who talks about the common good, I mean, increasingly, it just feels nostalgic. I'm not sure what that actually means. Yeah. Is that like something from the good old days that may or may not even have existed? Even then, yeah, even then, not sure. But there have been resources, at least as an American culture, we've had in the past that it felt good to say the common good. And I think there was more to it. Now there's just less.

It's almost incoherent. We don't even understand what that means. Except, I guess, maybe the common good is that it's mine. It's my good. And I get to pursue that. And yeah. And if you don't recognize that what's good for me is what's good for all of us, then that's obviously your problem. Typically. Yeah. Yeah. They may have to hammer you over the head to help convince you that my good is actually your good as well.

So the rhetoric is getting really inflammatory and shrill. So what I'm suggesting here, I think just to put this in a nutshell, is that as we have less clarity of the supposed common good, there's just going to be continued interest in the church pursuing its own goods, its own traditions, developing its own practices, continuing to challenge itself and its culture with the heroes and the texts and the stories, the commitments, the beliefs, all of this stuff that comes together and gives the church as its body, its integrity, there's going to just be continued to be more and more attention given to that.

And when people join the church, increasingly, I think it's just going to be apparent that it's not just through coercing people through some kind of program of political ideology, but it's through baptism. That's how people join themselves to this body. Yeah.

The choices that they're making to join themselves to the church and not the church exercising power in a carnal way over others. Yeah. Which, you know, that kind of brings me to something I was sort of thinking. What can we do to make sure that we are standing apart and offering an alternative as opposed to engaging in a struggle that we hope to win in a carnal way?

Well, great question. And I think if I'm hearing the question right, there's two possible responses. The one response might be to retreat so far into some kind of Christian tribe that you harden the boundaries and you just internalize the resources and you refuse to allow access to people outside who may be in desperate need of some of those resources. I mean, the social resources we have, the ability just to have a conversation with somebody. To the point where we're not offering an alternative. It's like we're on another planet that no one else can even get to. Yeah. Yeah. My kingdom is not of this world, right? So I might as well just go there. Yeah.

I don't think that's quite what Jesus meant. No. I don't think he did. I don't think it means we have to move to Mars necessarily. I mean, it does mean we have to have our own integrity as kind of a counter witness to the fragmentation that our world is in. Or else our—excuse me—or else our alternative isn't even an alternative anymore. It loses its saltiness. Yeah. Yeah. So we do need to maintain that alternative. But I'm saying I don't think we need to just build a ghetto off to the side of the culture somewhere and retreat into that. Need those resources, okay? Hear me right. We need to preserve our own integrity. And our Lord, actually, he encourages us to do that, okay?

But the purpose of that isn't just for the sake of its own integrity. The purpose of it is to have a kind of a certain porousness on the boundaries so that we can be extending the resources into our culture and also winsomely inviting them in.

The other thing I'd just suggest is that Jesus tells us, "Blessed are the peacemakers." And in a culture that's shrill, that's really kind of baseless and in many ways adrift, and it's unable to have the difficult conversations that it needs to have, I think there's just going to be a continued space for there to be peacemakers.

People who can actually have the virtues they need to have tough conversations with people who have opposing viewpoints to themselves, but who can also kind of get in the thick of things sometimes and adjudicate differences, which are just helping people to understand where they're coming from without just having this huge bias toward their own interests, right? That's something that Christians can do. Yeah. So paradoxically, perhaps, to enter a conflict as peacemakers.

It's kind of a paradox, isn't it? To engage, not just to be present, but to engage in conflict as peacemakers. Well, thank you very much for what you've shared. It offers a healthy challenge to all of us to be part of the church as God intended for us to be, as his ambassadors in this world. Thank you, Peter.