Radical democracy, radical ecclesiology.

In March 2005, it seemed like every newspaper and news magazine in Europe and the US was talking about "Beirut Spring," asking "Was Bush right?" and cheerleading the glimmers of "democratic" transformation in Iraq, Palestine, Lebanon, Syria and Egypt. Perhaps you had to be among the jaded cynics to not find the crowds in the streets of Beirut inspiring. But you didn't have to be a cynic to think that more people should have been asking, "If this is democracy, what was going in the spring of 2003?" Similar crowds gathered in the streets of cities across the Western "democracies." But they had no effect on the governments in the US, Great Britain, Spain, Italy and Australia, among others, who were not deterred from invading Iraq.

George Orwell had this sort of irony in mind when, almost sixty years ago, he argued that the word "democracy" had become meaningless, and, moreover, that its very meaninglessness was what made it so useful. Its elusiveness, coupled with the aura of congratulation that accompanies it, made it too important to discard and too important to define. Since "political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible ... political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness." (1)

We also resist an attempt to provide a "definition," but for different reasons than the ones Orwell worried about. Our reasons are coupled to hope in addition to cynicism-hope that "democracy" may be elusive in part because it bristles with promise, cynicism because we are aware that promises too may be made "useful" as ideology.

As the keystone of his argument with John Rawls, Stanley Cavell offers the closing scene of Ibsen's A Doll's House as one image of a democratic moment. Perhaps a democratic moment whose promise is squandered or denied, but a democratic moment nonetheless. The play closes with Nora leaving her husband, Torvald. In a scene of frightening intensity, Nora comes to see that her marriage to Torvald has never been the relationship of openness, mutuality, trust and generosity that she had led herself to believe it was. Shortly before she leaves him she says,</p> <pre>

NORA: (After a short pause.) Doesn't something strike you, sitting

here like this? HELMER: What's that? NORA: We've been married for eight years now. Hasn't it struck you that this is the first time that you and I, husband and wife, have talked seriously to each other? HELMER: "Seriously"?--What does that mean? (2) </pre> <p>Torvald's incomprehension of Nora's protest is evident throughout the scene. She articulates her reasons for leaving as best she can: not only have they never had a serious conversation until today, but he has treated her like a doll-wife, just as she was "Papa's doll-child at home"; they are strangers to each other; she has yet to become human. The bewildered Torvald responds by calling her "unreasonable," "ungrateful," saying, "You're ill," and "I almost believe you are out of your senses." He reminds her of her "most sacred duty" as wife and mother. (3) Because Nora is unable to speak in terms that Torvald understands, you might say that he identifies her, correctly, as outside of a particular moral consensus of reasonable adults. And, Nora herself admits as much: "I know that most people will say you're right, Torvald, and that it says something like that in all the books." Furthermore, Torvald identifies her out-sideness as stupid, childish, irrational and even mad. (4) For Torvald, marriage is an institution governed by specific rules. If he does not cheat on her, provides for her food and shelter, does not beat her, and so on, he is beyond reproach. It isn't simply that Nora's complaints are wrong, but that they don't fit his terms. Therefore, they have never, as she puts it, "exchanged a serious word on any serious subject." (5)

Democracies, liberal and radical, like friendships and marriages, are filled with Torvalds and Noras. Cavell argues that the guardians of liberal democracy--in Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome the guardian is Rawls--function as Torvald's equivalent. Rawls doesn't use words like "stupid" and "monstrous." His prose matches the decorum of his politics. (6) His favored epithet is "unreasonable," a word that carries enormous weight in his texts. "Public reason," on Cavell's reading, is Rawls's phrase for the consensus Torvald represents. As opposed to reason merely exercised in public, "public reason" for Rawls functions as a limiting concept and answers two related questions: To what kinds of reason giving can we (reasonably) hold others accountable? What happens when another's reason giving fails to measure up to the standard of reasons to which we can hold others accountable? Apart from the specific answers to these questions that Rawls's concept of public reason gives, its purpose is to set boundaries on what constitutes the political. Outside those boundaries, speech will seem "mad" and "irresponsible"; it will (in Rawls's terms) have become "metaphysical not political." Just as Torvald represents more than the refusal to talk with Nora, to see and treat and take her as a person, so also Rawls's public reason represents more than a delimited political sphere. More than this, both refuse to talk in a way that demonstrates a self-expanding willingness to transgress the limits of the project they take themselves to be engaged in. For both Torvald and Rawls, the problem lies in the other, not also in the self.

Yet, Cavell insists we recognize that Nora and Torvald's story does not have to end here. Throughout their final encounter, Nora exhibits a capacity to look truthfully and critically at herself, perhaps for the first time. It is a capacity that enables Torvald to make a first tentative step away from impenitence and toward transformation: (7)</p> <pre> HELMER: Nora,--can't I ever be anything more than a stranger to you? NORA: (Picking up her bag.) Ah Torvald, for that, the most wonderful thing of all would have to happen-- HELMER: Tell me what this most wonderful thing is! NORA: Both of us would have to change so much that--. Oh Torvald, I don't believe in anything wonderful. Not any more. HELMER: But I want to believe in it! Tell me! Change so much--? NORA: That our life together could become a marriage. Goodbye. (8) </pre> <p>Cavell does not make it clear, but he at least suggests, that this initial refusal must be read as provisional if it is to be a picture of democracy. Nora's parting words, after all, express the hope "that our life together could become a marriage." (9) Her remarks should thus be read as offering Torvald a gift, the chance to see himself anew and to be confronted with his sin (without which there is no opportunity for confession, forgiveness and reconciliation). (10)

Cavell's interpretation of A Doll's House resonates powerfully with much recent discussion of political theology, which centers on the church's relationship to democracy--as if there were a "church" or a "democracy" to which one could simply point; as if, moreover, the conceptual boundaries that the very words "church" and "democracy" create were self-evident and reliable. It has become widely acceptable to cast that conversation in terms that echo Nora and Torvald, with political scientists representing the consensus of reasonable political agents and theologically inflected voices representing the idiosyncrasies of the ungrateful and immature. On the one hand, political theorists like Rawls have been joined by philosophers such as Richard Rorty in arguing that the church's influence on democratic polities should be severely circumscribed. (11) On the other hand, theologians like Stanley Hauerwas issue harsh warnings about how the church in the United States has too uncritically identified itself with "liberalism." In so doing, he fosters skepticism about democracy's potential for creating a social climate in which the church can "be the church."

A reading of Hauerwas that paid attention to the character of his arguments against the likes of Rawls and Rorty would have to be uncomfortable with casting Hauerwas in the role of Nora. This is not simply because Hauerwas occupies a position of social prominence for which there are no analogies in Ibsen's Nora, but also because, as Cavell makes clear, it is Torvald and not Nora who sees his interlocutor as morally incompetent. Yet, Hauerwas thinks not only that liberal theory is morally incompetent, but that its incompetence is culpable. We have in the case of Hauerwas's antiliberalism one Torvald arguing with another, and it is often difficult to see how the ways each of them blocks the other can be envisioned as provisional pauses in the conversation that might be the occasion for discovering in the voice of the other potentials for the transformation of self.

We do not claim to see beyond the opposition between Rawls and Hauerwas; rather, we think, with philosophers like Jeffrey Stout and Romand Coles, that we might do better to examine its middle, for there is a surprising similarity in the "conditions of possibility" for Rawls's and Hauerwas's inquiries. The most fundamental agreement is this: each argues that his respective public or "people" needs to be educated (by him). (12) Moreover, each thinks that apart from such education the people's judgments cannot be trusted. To this extent, Stout's "new traditionalists" repeat the syndrome they diagnose, at least if Cavell is right when he says:</p> <pre> It is my impression that in established academic moral philosophy the question of moral standing, if it comes up at all, is grounded in one's conviction that one knows what is good or right for the other to do, so that the philosophical issue is essentially how to provide convincing, rational reasons for one's conviction; put otherwise, the point of the conversation is getting the other to agree to, or to do, something. This is one feature of what I sometimes refer to as the risk of moralizing morality. The point accordingly assigned to moral conversation is that of rationally persuading the other to agree to, or to do, something that you are, independently of the conversation, persuaded that she ought to do.... In the case of what I call Rawls's conversation of justice, one is given ground too easily, as I see it, for dismissing the confrontation by another. My counter proposal is that in

confronting another with whom your fate is, by your lights, bound

up ... you risk your understanding of the other as of yourself. (13) </pre> <p>We know, as Rawls and Hauerwas know, that "the people" is not a straightforward category. Alexander Hamilton wrote that "the streams of national power ought to flow immediately from that pure original fountain of all legitimate authority," the people. (14) According to Sheldon Wolin, for the Federalists this meant that the power that once belonged to a loose confederation had flowed out of the people to be consolidated in the hands of the emerging federal government. He writes, "The power of the people was identified with a primal act of consent that legitimated the subsequent exercise of authority by officeholders. Thus it stood for a formal principle rather than a material one." (15) This is repeated in the work of Rawls, where the citizen is virtually non-existent, while the judge and legislator are ubiquitous (or where the demos is identified as such precisely by its capacity to imagine itself as legislator). (16) A similar repetition occurs in the work of Hauerwas as well, where the role of the discerning ekklesia is repeatedly invoked but often eclipsed by the offices of pastoral authority. In order for the power of the people to be deployed in this fashion, any power claiming to be democratic will be forced to exert its power in constructing a "people" to its own advantage. Forging an unum out of the pluris will require careful education of the people, largely in terms of normalizing a set of exclusions (as in Rawls's exclusion of "comprehensive doctrines"), which are calibrated to reinforce state power.

If we notice this common ground between Hauerwas and Rawls, we might ask how democracy and the church look if we do not begin by assuming that the people need to be educated, if instead we begin by nurturing an ability to see and hear differences smoothed over by the reigning mythos. A central difference between liberal and radical democracy is, therefore, its understanding of conflict. To put it briefly, for liberals such as Rawls, conflict means threat. For democrats like Wolin, conflict means opportunity. We wonder, and we elaborate on this below, whether their conceptions of conflict did not also remain a central difference between Hauerwas and Yoder.

In Democracy and Tradition Jeffrey Stout explores many of these issues. He argues not only that political liberalism needs a more robust account of democracy, one capable of recognizing the importance of religious voices. He also argues that whatever the merits of the "new traditionalist" critique (Hauerwas, Alasdair MacIntyre, and John Milbank) of political liberalism, it both fails as a critique of the Emersonian pragmatist account of democracy that he proposes and impoverishes the democratic dialogue that he wants to cultivate. In large part, the new traditionalists have not nurtured an ability to hear the multiplicity of different voices in our culture. While Rawls refuses to listen, it can seem as if the new traditionalists don't even recognize that they are there.

This is what is at stake in Stout's insistence that new traditionalism takes its "idea of America from academic critics and philosophical theorists of procedural liberalism." (17) Rawls overestimates the extent to which his public reason is shared. The amount of overlap he is convinced exists both justifies and makes possible his exclusion of "comprehensive doctrines." His account of the public reduces the play of forces outside political liberalism and renders the territory "within" uncontested. The irony that Stout is concerned to point out is that new traditionalism largely assumes the adequacy of important aspects of this picture. That is, they assume that Rawls and other liberal theorists are basically correct about a shared culture--"modernity" or "liberalism"--that is monolithic enough to smooth over internal difference and preclude the possibility of diverse forms of coalition politics. (18) What is important here is that despite their enormous differences with political liberalism, the new traditionalism's vision of modernity blurs into Rawls's public precisely at the point of exhibiting a striking blindness to the Noras.

In effect, Stout and Coles have suggested that religious people, among others, do often stand in for Nora in the "conversation of justice." We emphasize "among others." While it is true for Rawls that religious people occupy a space analogous to that of Nora, we worry that Christian readers, capitalizing on the space created by Stout and Coles, will focus too intently on the space they create for religious voices, forgetting the many others excluded from liberal democracy. In this way, the Christian embrace of democracy becomes a new form of defensiveness. In contrast, Coles and Stout go on to suggest that the present theological task is to get beyond the debates between political liberalism and new traditionalism, and attend to the myriad of other voices equally shortchanged by Rawls. Like Cavell, when Stout and Coles say "democracy," they imagine a conversation that emphasizes "the opacity, or non-transparence, of the present state of our interactions, cooperative or antagonistic--the present seen as the outcome of our history as the realization of attempts to reform ourselves in the direction of compliance with the principles of justice. The virtues most in request here are those of listening, the responsiveness to difference, the willingness for change." (19) This is to say that, as Dewey understood better than anyone, democracy is about education, a particular vision of education that both Rawls and Hauerwas miss.

In criticizing Rawls and Hauerwas for the assumption that the people need to be educated, we mean to criticize the idea that the people need to be educated by the theorist's monologue. If education is required it consists of communities in conversation, where there is an unscripted openness to the flexibility of the unforeseeable. (20) While this might sound suspiciously like a "pooling of ignorances" approach to education that could easily devolve into the unaccountable and emotivist melee that MacIntyre and Hauerwas reject, perhaps it is time to refigure such conversations as enacting a generative risk for the nonviolent introduction of newness into the activity of education. Such concern for the pacific inbreaking of newness, Robert Gibbs maintains, distinguishes Socratic maieutics from many other forms of education: "maieutics preserves the integrity of the learner from the violence of a force exercised against the learner, [and] teaching ... teaches the possibility of an otherness that does not stand on the same plane with me, does not contest me, but opens me and in so doing founds me." (21)

However, the educative potential of communities in conversation does not depend upon Stout's case for the existence of a democratic political culture. Stout may be right, but if the argument for democracy is dependent upon a cultural vitality overlooked by the new traditionalists, then if it turns out that the new traditionalists are right the case for democracy is commensurately weakened. With regard to Stout this means understanding his argument for democracy and his argument against new traditionalism's understanding of our political culture as two distinct and separable arguments (if not actually separate in his texts). Similarly, with regard to the new traditionalists, it means that even if they are right about the extent to which our culture is debased, that is by no means an argument against democracy. Here both Emerson and Wolin are important. Unlike Stout, both have as gloomy a view of American culture as the new traditionalists, yet both think that is a reason for more democracy, not less. Emerson does not demand conversation because he thinks there are enough virtuous people around to converse with. Quite the opposite. His denunciations of Americans are just as shrill as any new traditionalists's. "Most men have bound their eyes with one or another handkerchief, and attached themselves to some one of these communities of opinion. This conformity makes them not false in a few particulars, authors of a few lies, but false in all particulars.... Every word they say chagrins us, and we know not where to begin to set them right." (22) In contrast to Stout's confidence in "the civic nation," Emerson laments that "America has not yet been discovered." (23) But because Emerson thinks democratic conversation is creative and generative, he thinks democracy is the way out of our conformity.

What is Democracy?

But what is democracy? What is "radical democracy" as opposed to liberal democracy? Democracy, in Stout's vision, is about the giving of and listening to reasons in conversation, argument, and negotiation about common goods. Here Coles insists, as does Stout in his best moments, that reasons may come in stories, songs, poems, shouts, screams, tears, laughter, stammering, and silence. Coles assumes that reason givers in democratic engagements often sound more like Nora than like Rawls's ideal legislator or judge. (24) The democrat attempts to cultivate an ability to seek out and listen to others who seem out of their senses, who don't understand the world we live in. If the democrat finds him or herself in the position of Torvald, he or she hopes to learn to treasure those voices because democracy is the hope that unforeseen possibilities may emerge through listening to them. If the democrat finds him or herself in the position of Nora, he or she hopes for courage of voice in the face of opposition.

Power infuses each of these conversations, enabling and delimiting or even disabling them. Because every conversation occurs as a manifestation of power, the voices most often silenced, most often excluded from the argument, are those of "the least of these." Radical forms of democracy are committed to acknowledging that power is personal and thus creates patterns of responsibility for the shape, direction, limits, exclusions and openings of various conversations. At his best moments, Sheldon Wolin acknowledges the irreducibly personal dimensions of power, yet his genealogy of the transition from modern to postmodern forms of power still presents power as something that is constituted primarily externally (one might say, echoing Foucault, that it isn't microcapillary in anything but its effects). (25) It is certainly the case that one of the major tasks with which democratic institutions today are presented involves uncovering the extent to which technologies of power regularly make its pathways unaccountable and abstract, negating the body, repressing and suppressing its concrete representations. (26) Thus, Superpower, megastates, and corporate transnationalism all appear to be omnipresent, nearly omnipotent, and basically impersonal configurations of power with which we have to find ways of coping. But, hand in hand with the task of diagnosing the multiple flows of power that constitute such institutions must go renewed reflection on the way that the individual, that is, each of us, is the product of these powers. By beginning with the frank acknowledgment that power is personal, radically democratic movements, such as the Industrial Areas Foundation, have moved toward constituting a deliberative democracy that is also, one might say, a set of "spiritual exercises": the cultivation of techniques for reflecting on the extent to which those of us who want to see past/through/into the ideologies of megastates and transnational corporations also feel and embody the "noetic effects of sin," or rather of power (the two are not to be equated), all the way down. By habituating ourselves to the knowledge that we too, local communities too, grass-roots activist movements too, are all shot through with lived equivocations concerning the very forms of power we decry, we can learn to see movement and fluctuation, intensifications and displacements of power where before we saw only sedentary and external uniformities.

Moreover, because power is essentially dynamic (never static, and it is often necessary to remind ourselves of this when we refer to abstractions such as "the state" or "democracy") it is also most often imbalanced, directing attentions away from otherwise salient features of democratic engagements. As Nora prepares to leave Torvald, he forgives her:</p> <pre> HELMER: You must have been in agony, and not seen any way out except--No, we won't even think of anything so horrible. We'll just rejoice, and repeat: it's over, it's over! But listen to me, Nora; you don't seem to grasp it: it's over. Why don't you react? Oh poor little Nora, I see what it is; you can't bring yourself to believe that I've forgiven you. But I have, Nora; I swear; I've forgiven you everything. I know what you did, you did because you loved me. (27) </pre> <p>Here, as Cavell sees it, Torvald has become so habituated to the particular pathways and conduits of power that have characterized his relationship with/to Nora that he has become insensitive to its fluctuations, to her newly acquired capacity to see herself as a participant in producing the power of this conversation. (28) Radically democratic conversation, by contrast, refuses to smooth over the discovery of such inequities, but brings them to the fore, making them part of the argument and making their effects on the argument part of the argument.

Because they focus on the dynamism of power relations, radically democratic powers bring to light how they are both created and creative. Created, because power is not just lying there waiting to be gathered up, but is forged in the deliberation among the people. Creative, because it does not so much deliberate over goods known in advance, but discerns hitherto unforeseen goods in the deliberation as well as imagines new modes of achieving those goods. It is also where individuals are created, selves are formed, humanness is achieved. When Torvald reminds Nora of the responsibilities that come with her role as wife and mother, Nora responds, "I believe that first and foremost I'm a human being just as you are,--or at least ... I must try and become one." (29) "The imperative to conversation," writes Cavell, "is meant to capture the sense that, even when the veil of ignorance is lifted, we still do not know what 'position' we occupy in society.... The idea of conversation expresses my sense that one cannot achieve this perspective alone, but only in the mirroring or confrontation of what Aristotle calls the friend." (30)

A framework of rights and liberties with attendant institutions is indispensable to any democracy. But for the radical democrat that framework must be understood as a site of contestation, not as a set of fundamentals preserved beyond debate. Moreover, democracy cultivates that contestation and insists the framework remain perpetually exposed. For decades now, Wolin has repeatedly argued that a central characteristic of liberal democracy is that it works to shield that framework from exposure. For Wolin, liberal democracy is democracy contained by constitutionalism. (31) Its key words, alongside "freedom," "reasonable" and "fairness," are "harmony," "concord," "stability." Liberalism fears the discordant and unruly demos and so works at maintaining and protecting the institutions that contain that unruliness. It is, in Stout's words, "a program of social control." (32)

Democracy exists as a "multiplicity of modest sites." Like many ancient Greeks, Hamilton, Montesquieu and many others, it recognizes that democracy is ill-suited to government on a scale as vast as most modern nation-states. Yet unlike Hamilton and like Montesquieu, they see that as an argument for a carefully tended multiplicity, not as an argument for sacrificing aspects of democracy in favor of a centralized power better suited to the large scale. (33) Democracy seeks those moments when that dispersed multiplicity coalesces into national or global movements, but it knows that it is no less democratic, and no less political, in dispersion. If there is hope for the bureaucracies of federal government, it lies in what is learned and unlearned locally. Democracy refuses to despair over the way those modest sites are under increasing colonization by global corporate power.

Democratic communities have much to fear; yet fear is perhaps democracy's greatest internal threat. Fearing for their survival, democracies as we often find them institute undemocratic measures to guarantee their stability. Democracy fears entrusting the goods it achieves to the processes which made them possible. Instead it seeks to possess the good and institute defensive measures which overrule emerging conflicts and tame dissenting voices. Examples abound: the fear-driven arguments of the Federalists against the anti-Federalists; the arguments of the monarchists against the judges in 1 Samuel 8; Rawls's repeated invocation of the 16th century religious wars; or the more recent arguments for the Patriot Act. (34) Of course democracies legitimately want to survive, but in order to survive as democracies they must refuse to forget that fear is "the basic principle of despotism." (35) Perhaps the species of fear most common in the democracies we know today is a "fear of freedom" concerning the deliberation required for genuinely human moral agency. (36) We know that democracy involves moral deliberation, yet we also know that moral deliberation can go badly awry. In consequence, we would often rather limit the ways in which we institutionalize the freedom to be wrong than we would have to face not merely the consequences but more fundamentally the fact of our wrongness. Rowan Williams articulates something of this fear in The Truce of God, where he writes:</p> <pre>

For all the talk about ... freedom, or indeed of the "free world,"

we seem to be taking it for granted in several ways that we are

not free at all: our decisions are constrained by the violence of others, and our governments cannot be relied on to deliver what we really want. And to feel removed from effective decision-making in such ways is risky for any population: it breeds the politics of do-it-yourself extremism (the far right, trading always on the perception that government has subverted a nation's "real

identity"), which flourishes still more when the rest of the

population feels alienated from the whole process. The greatest

danger is when extremism begins to set the pace and decisions at a high level are moulded by this sort of pressure; democratic

governments can end up carrying through policies that in the cold light of day a population would not and could not morally endorse; and the schism at the heart of modern politics becomes worse and worse. (37) </pre> <p>Proceduralism is always one way to ward off the fear of freedom, but it comes with a high cost, namely, a real incapacity to own responsibility for decisions taken within (or on behalf of) the demos, as perhaps the recent confusion about the extent of corruption and corresponding limits of blameworthiness in the Abu-Ghraib tortures suggests. Yet, embedded within Williams's discussion of freedom is a sense that the fear of death promoted by those in power is not only often self-servingly constructed or at least magnified by them, but that it also speaks to a widespread feeling of political disenfranchisement that bolsters a fantasy of collective innocence. By way of contrast, we think that an argument for democracy today needs to begin by recommending practices of unillusionedness within the demos, practices that embody (at least) a dual imperative: first, to "free political action from all unitary and totalizing paranoia" and, second, to "believe that what is productive is not sedentary but nomadic." (38) A democracy we consider worth defending wagers that survival comes through dispossession. Its achievements are always provisional because democracy is always becoming. As Coles puts it, democracy is a "practice in search of itself." Or, "democracy is democratization." (39)

Christianity and Democracy

There is of course more to be said about democracy. But we hope this account, while brief, will be enough to pose the question of the relationship of Christianity to democracy. Not that the question has not already been posed countless times; we hope merely to reframe it in a way that might allow new affinities and qualifications to show themselves.

In his initial reply to Stout, Hauerwas claimed that if Stout means by "democracy" what radical democrats like Sheldon Wolin mean by it, then he affirms it. (40) He thereby acknowledged that there is a democracy that is not "liberal democracy," and that this other democracy is perhaps not only compatible with the church but essential to it.

It is true that Hauerwas has famously asserted that democracy is a bad idea for Christians. Stout isn't sure Hauerwas means this. Rather, Stout sees it as part of Hauerwas's penchant for rhetorical excess. While that is true, Hauerwas does mean it, and it isn't excessive, if we insist that when Hauerwas wrote that democracy is a bad idea, "democracy" meant "liberal democracy" as represented primarily by John Rawls. And when he entitled an essay, "The Democratic Policing of Christianity" he also meant liberal democracy. Stout agrees with that, though he would surely put it more carefully, as he does in chapter 3 of Democracy and Tradition. The real problem is not that Hauerwas thinks liberal democracy isn't all it is cracked up to be, but that he rarely takes the opportunity to give an alternative account of democracy. Unlike Wolin, Yoder, and Stout, Hauerwas seems unable to imagine another democracy, in particular, what is frequently called radical.

"Rarely," because there are points at which such an account does emerge in Hauerwas's work. Most clearly, if only briefly, in an interview with Mike Quirk. There he frequently adds the qualification "liberal" to his remarks about democracy. Moreover, he says things like,</p> <pre> I am not unsympathetic with those who are trying to develop some accounts of deliberative [as opposed to procedural] democracy. But then when you start thinking about deliberative democracy what I'm always curious about is, institutionally, where can that be found? It sure as hell can't be found in Washington, D.C. I think of it as at home, for example, among members of my congregation in Aldersgate United Methodist Church, when we have to make decisions

about our new pastor's housing and the like. We have a Pastoral

Staff Relations Committee where we hammer all that out. That's

deliberative democracy! (41) </pre> <p>So, while Hauerwas is certainly aware of other accounts of democracy and "not unsympathetic" to them, it remains true that developing such an account has never been important to him. Here is the most significant contrast between Yoder and him, which goes to their differing conceptions of conflict. A thick description of a democratic polity (that Yoder simply called "free-church ecclesiology"), based on I Corinthians 12-14 among other texts, was Yoder's over-whelming concern, as much in fact as pacifism. (Though that is a misleading way to put it, since pacifism and ecclesiology are impossible to disentangle in Yoder's work.) Part of the reason that Yoder thought it so important to develop that account of the church's "body politics" was that he never assumed the most fundamental conflicts for any existing church would be with the "outside." Rather, and as is evident in essays as early as those that make up The Original Revolution, "[T]he appeal to Christ represents a particular type of confession of truth, a criterion whereby to evaluate faithfulness (and unfaithfulness) within the Christian community." (42) Because Hauerwas draws heavily on claims like this in order to spell out what is involved in his own aphorism that "the first social ethical task of the church is not to make the world more just, but to be the church," it is clear that he wants as distinct and radical a church (or maybe distinct and radical communities) as Yoder does. Tellingly though, whether it is Yoder's church or John Paul II's doesn't matter to him. What matters is that it resist liberalism. (43) At stake are divergent theologies of conflict. The dominant (though by no means the only) mode of imagining conflict in Hauerwas's writing is as an insinuation into the church's life, one that originates elsewhere and, as such, is essentially foreign to the gospel. (44) For Hauerwas, as for sources as diverse as Milton and the early Jewish text, The Life of Adam and Eve, the devil has got to get into the garden somehow. Hence, the practices most in demand are ones that reinforce the church's unity by expunging conflict, eucharist being the prime example in Hauerwas's work.

There are reasons for this. New traditionalism's hesitance about democracy springs from worthy concerns. Hauerwas's now explicit openness to democracy is a promising turn, but before simply affirming it, it is worth pondering just what it requires. Can the new traditionalism simply inhabit this space without significant transformation? Is Hauerwas's affirmation of democracy a concession or an explicit, if overdue, acknowledgment of his great debt to Wolin's seminal work on political theory? But while Wolin was just as suspicious of liberal democracy as Hauerwas, it is not clear that he was suspicious for the same reasons. What would an account of democracy look like when married to the new traditionalism? Is a radical democracy really compatible with an orthodox theology? If so, how? The issue is a complex one. The ambiguities of Hauerwas's position may be inherent in the attempt to hold together an orthodox theology and a distinctive church with an appreciation for democracy. As we have noted, central to the claims of the radical democrats has been a refusal of those mechanisms by which the democratic engagement among diverse and conflicting constituencies is contained in the name of order and security. For political liberals the mechanism is the Constitution. For the new traditionalists the mechanism is a particular account of tradition. But for the new traditionalists, without that account of tradition and a (non-democratic) authority to maintain it, the church loses its distinctive shape and ends up having nothing to contribute to the dialogical process Stout wants it to join. The church will often have to expunge conflict in order to avoid the slide into a debilitating acculturation.

A dialogue is democratic when the terms of the conversation are not settled in advance by a framework given prior to the dialogue. A dialogue is democratic when no telos forecloses emerging conflicts. Democracy sheds all guarantees and takes the risk of keeping nothing safe. But it is not immediately clear how theology can also take that risk. For example, aren't the creeds, by definition, that which must be kept safe from the vulnerabilities of democratic engagement? And isn't the finality of Christ and the church's eschatological hope a telos that becomes a guarantee releasing the church from the messiness of the sort of conflict cultivated by democratic practices? Something like that is what Rawls and Rorty seem to think. One of the ironies that Stout has identified is that it is also what the new traditionalism seems to think. (45)

If there is a way out of these dilemmas, it is to ask whether the extreme of vulnerability displayed on the cross demands that the disciple enter into the vulnerabilities of dialogical engagement with the stranger and the enemy in a way that might be a model to radical democrats. Put another way, might not the sort of pacifist politics articulated by someone like John Howard Yoder go hand in hand with a radical democratic politics?

Yoder seems to have expected that conflict would arise within the church as a part of its way of being in time. One might take, for instance, the conflicts that regularly arise in the church concerning Eucharistic practice. Since at least the earliest canonical account of the institution of the Lord's Supper, found in Paul's first letter to the Corinthians, Christians have had difficulty eating together. Notably, in 1 Corinthians 11 Paul does not seem to have supposed that the problem the Corinthians faced was primarily an external matter of their having retained pagan patterns of affiliation in the church. (One evidence of this is that the topic of food sacrificed to idols was not at issue.) Rather, if there was a problem, it had to do with the how their factionalism--which Paul said was necessary "so that it will become clear who among you is genuine!"--caused some to go hungry while others became drunk (11:19-21). The conflict seems to have been about nothing more or less than the quotidian but nevertheless painstaking work of making sure that everyone got to eat. Thus, it was not accidental that Yoder thought the practice of Eucharist needed to be first and foremost about "economic sharing." (46) Conflicts in the church arise over how to share; they are to be disciplined by the practice of partaking of food together as a proclamation of "the Lord's death until he comes" (1 Cor. 11:26). (47) We might expand on this by noting that sharing (unlike gift-giving) is a democratic practice in two respects. First, because sharing requires real division as its condition of possibility--one does not share with someone from whom one is not in a significant sense separate, and to this extent, one should never allow imagery of the unity of the body (or of the loaf) to overwhelm the givenness of the gesture involved, namely, that of breaking bread. Second, and perhaps more importantly, sharing is non-hierarchical; that is, for a resource to be shared, there may not be a pyramidization of power that dictates how it is distributed.

But even while these practices are not oriented toward external threats they are oriented towards "outsiders" as well as "insiders." Moreover, they are so because they are oriented towards Jesus. Yoder "understands the church's relation to Jesus as the very incarnation of practices of becoming vulnerable to encounter the otherness of history." (48) The differences that the new traditionalists have consistently read as threats to be avoided are understood differently by Yoder. "From the Gospel perspective, modern pluralism is not a set back but a providential occasion for clarification. It may enable us to see something about the Gospel that was not visible before." (49) The significance of these lines is not primarily the contrast to the new traditionalism's understanding of "modern pluralism." The significance is "the uncanny element in the way 'the Gospel' breaks forth in these sentences." (50) The Gospel perspective is incomplete (but is still Gospel, in fact would cease to be so if it understood itself to be complete). It is in constant need of clarification through--and in some sense more importantly as--encounter with otherness. Moreover, the Gospel that is incomplete and in need of clarification is the product of prior clarification through vulnerable encounters made possible by such providential occasions down through history. This Jesus, on whom we have some kind of grasp, is there as the driving force behind the church's evangelical heralding of Christ's Lordship in word and deed. But this Jesus is also out in front, outside our clutching fingers, waiting to be rediscovered differently in each and every encounter to which our mission brings us. (51) Martin Luther King Jr.'s attentiveness to "the outsider Gandhi" and "the loner Tolstoy" brought Jesus' message about non-violence back into the churches. The liberation theologians' attentiveness to Marx enabled (parts of) the Western church to hear good news for the poor that had been hidden for centuries. (52)

There is no way to know in advance whether or how each particular encounter will be revelatory. Hence, the church cultivates dispositions of patient listening. Instead of the fear that openness to outsiders might ruin the church, Yoder exhibits the awareness that deafness to outsiders will ruin the church. That is, he rephrases the "dilemmas" between the church's security and distinctiveness and democracy's vulnerability. The church's distinctiveness is its vulnerability. The church's receptive encounters with others are constitutive of its otherness, so much so that Coles could write, "Few today offer as compelling a vision for pursuing justice and political engagement in heterogeneous societies." (53) Coles makes this argument while almost never raising the sorts of questions about church and democracy that we presented a few pages ago. The argument is not that Yoder does admirably well in getting some democracy into his church, or that Yoder does admirably well in sacrificing some "church" in order to make room for "politics," thereby making him appealing to radical democrats. Rather, Coles claims:</p> <pre> It is precisely and paradoxically more church (than Stout and even Barth recommend) that Yoder takes to be a condition for Christians calling for, cultivating, and practicing more receptive

vulnerability through which boundaries are rendered permeable,

surprising, and dynamic with non-Christians. Less the former would

likely lead to less of the latter. (54) </pre> <p>In the final pages of his essay, Coles moves into a more questioning mode, elaborating on a certain jealousy that he detects at the heart of Yoder's theology. Coles asks, "Could it be that the jealousy of Jesus as Lord--not just as a concept, but as stories, dispositions, habits, practices--is entwined with and works in spite of itself toward the closure of the church's generous and receptive participation in historical generativity?" Coles is well aware that this jealousy is the root of the possibility of the vulnerability he has spent the previous twenty pages describing. Yoder relentlessly insisted that "the judgment of God upon this renunciation and defeat [the cross] is the declaration that this is the victory." (55) He is most famous for going on to insist that the victory of the cross creates space for, and demands, a refusal of violence. Because Christ is Lord, sitting at the right hand of the Father, in charge of history, having overthrown the principalities and powers, we are freed to renounce the violence which would be required if we had to control the course of history, if the powers had not been broken. Coles's reading unpacks an obvious aspect of this renunciation, one too often overlooked by readers of Yoder preoccupied with the question of war. The triumph of the cross makes possible the sort of receptive generosity necessary to radical democracy. This is what it means to say that Yoder's refusal of war is inextricably tied to his refusal of anti-democratic mechanisms to guarantee the survival of the church. War is one way, perhaps the most obvious and certainly the most horribly destructive way, that the idolatrous demand for control manifests itself, but it is not the only way. That knowledge is front and center in Yoder's ecclesiology, and it cannot be divorced from Christ's Lordship.

But, Coles asks, even in its pre-constantinian forms might not this jealousy exact a "certain gravitational pull against the future" resulting in "a stinginess that erodes its generativity and generosity from within?" (56) The neo-Nietzschean atheist comes up against the jealousy of the Lordship of Christ. Instead of despising and rejecting it or moving, predictably, into Derridean remarks about transcendental signifiers, skeptical questions start to proliferate. They must proliferate. There is "a (un)certain suspension, a (un)certain patience" seen in "the unrelenting tenacity of Yoder's efforts to negotiate the complexities and risks at this point." (57) The pages that end the essay exhibit a similar (un)certainty, so that what the reader thought was going to be a retraction turns out to be both a challenge to "Mennonite Christians" and a long essay in questioning and qualification. "I know of no generosity that is not 'peccable in fact'." "If these questions get at something persistently real, they are by no means devastating nor intended as such." "'Should haves' always have a weak and pretentious ring in cases like his." (58) Moreover, Coles makes clear that his criticisms are not of "Christ as Lord" as Yoder's limit, but of the way that limit occasionally works in Yoder. "It needs to be inflected differently and reshaped not only for the radical democratic coalitions in which I am most invested, but for the work that Yoder calls Good News." (59) That is, Coles thinks he is inviting Christians to be more Christian, not less, and he thinks that in doing so, he is being more Yoderian, not less. Coles discerns tension and conflict here, but Yoderians and radical democrats are, on Coles and Yoder's grounds, persons who see tension and conflict as creative if inhabited well. They are persons who have cultivated the virtues and practices necessary to negotiating complexity and risk.

This is not to minimize the depth of Coles's suspicions. He is right to note that Yoder's ecclesiology, tethered as it is to the non-negotiable Lordship of Christ is not the same as "the radical democratic coalitions in which I am most invested." Still, insofar as Yoder's account of the church depends on a capacity to texture its life together in patterns of practice that have at their heart interpersonal reconciliation, it works on the assumption that there is no way of knowing now what kind of edges the body of Christ might finally be found to have. While this is not to call the lordship of Christ negotiable, it is nevertheless to acknowledge that any honest proclamation of that lordship will have to be thoroughly penitent of its capacity to render Christ as lord in inflexible ways. (60) Rowan Williams has put this point as well as anyone:</p> <pre> The Church proclaims that there is one human destiny and that it is found in relation to one focal figure, Jesus; but also that what this human destiny means cannot be worked out without 'communion', a relation of profound and costly involvement with each other and receiving from each other. This and this alone is what saves the proclamation of Christ's uniqueness from being a piece of ideological tyranny. (61) </pre> <p>Yoder's work should be read as an extended series of reflections, among the most profound we have, on how to "institutionalize" relations of "profound and costly involvement with each other and receiving from each other" both inside and outside the church. Yoder's pacifism shows just how costly such involvement might have to be, shows just how radical democracy might have to become today.

Notes

1. George Orwell, "Politics and the English Language," in The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters of George Orwell, vol. 4: In Front of Your Nose, 1945-1950, ed. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, Inc., 1968), 127-140. The quotation is from p. 136.

2. Henrik Ibsen, A Doll's House, trans. Joan Tindale (Oslo: Solum Forlag, 2002), 102.

3. Ibsen, A Doll's House, 102-106.

4. Ibsen, A Doll's House, 105.

5. Ibsen, A Doll's House, 102.

6. Rorty's prose is much more similar to the excesses of Torvald's language.

7. Cf. Rowan Williams, The Truce of God (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005), 11.

8. Ibsen, A Doll's House, 110.

9. Ibsen, A Doll's House, 110.

10. See Cavell, Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome: The Constitution of Emersonian Perfectionism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 114.

11. See, e.g., Richard Rorty, 'Pragmatism as Romantic Polytheism,' in Morris Dickstein, ed., The Revival of Pragmatism: New Essays on Social Thought, Law, and Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), 21-36, and cf. Rorty, 'Religion in the Public Square: A Reconsideration', Journal of Religious Ethics 31:1 (Spring 2003): 141-149; John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), xxiii-xxix, 29-35, 220-222.

12. Nicholas Healy writes of Hauerwas among others, "Much contemporary ecclesiology and ecclesial ethics is earnest, methodical and educational in tone. The church is described as if it must have a priestly or pedagogical character, rather than the 'prophetic character' Barth thinks is more appropriate, and this pedagogical character often persists even when theologians go on the offensive against the evils of the age." "Karl Barth's Ecclesiology Reconsidered," Scottish Journal of Theology 57:3 (2004): 297.

13. Stanley Cavell, Cities of Words: Pedagogical Letters on a Register of the Moral Life (Cambridge, MA: Belknap/Harvard, 2004), 235.

14. Quoted in Wolin, The Presence of the Past: Essays on the State and the Constitution (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 8.

15. Wolin, Presence of the Past, 11.7.

16. As Wolin suggests, A Theory of Justice fails to distinguish administration from politics. See Politics and Vision: Continuity and Innovation in Western Political Thought, expanded ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 551.

17. Stout, Ethics After Babel: The Languages of Morals and Their Discontents, 2 ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 346.

18. By contrast, Wolin's "modernity," unlike the new traditionalism's, always includes figures he deeply appreciates such as Tocqueville, Montesquieu and Dewey, all of whom are often called "liberals."

19. Cavell, Cities of Words, 173-174.

20. Cf. John Howard Yoder, Body Politics: Five Practices of the Christian Community Before the Watching World (Nashville: Discipleship Resources, 1992), 68-70.

21. Robert Gibbs, Why Ethics? Signs of Responsibilities (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 33. The exemplary text in the Christian tradition that explores Socratic maieutics is Augustine's De Magistro.

22. Ralph Waldo Emerson, 'Self-Reliance,' in Essays and Lectures, ed. Joel Porte (New York: Library of America, 1983), 264 (emphasis added).

23. This is how Cavell reads the passage just quoted from 'Self-Reliance.' Cities of Words, 24.

24. There is reason to be suspicious of over-reliance on the term "conversation," because it is often biased towards Torvald's sense of the rules. (See Iris Marion-Young in Democracy and Difference.) We remain with it here because Cavell's introduction of Nora keeps the account of conversation sufficiently capacious.

25. Wolin, Politics and Vision, 393-405, 581-582.

26. Cf. Michel Foucault, "Truth and Power" in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 66.

27. Ibsen, A Doll's House, 100.

28. Cavell, Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome, 111.

29. Ibsen, A Doll's House, 105.

30. Cavell, Cities of Words, 174.

31. While Wolin frequently promotes the virtues of the Articles of Confederation, he is not against the constitution so much as against The Federalist Papers and the theory of constitutionalism they established. Even there he carefully distinguishes between the arguments of Hamilton and Madison. Presence of the Past, 114-115.

32. Stout, Democracy and Tradition, 81.

33. Wolin, Presence of the Past, 94, 111-2.

34. John Allen Jr. of the National Catholic Reporter recently suggested this about Joseph Ratzinger. "Ratzinger today believes that the best antidote to political totalitarianism is ecclesiastical totalitarianism." (Quoted in the New York Times, April 20, 2005.) Whether or not this is an accurate characterization of the new Pope, it is an accurate characterization of the views of many Christians, Protestant and Catholic, in reaction to secularism. In contrast, Barth once wrote, "The church is apostolic and therefore the true Church where its external order--what is called Church government--is made so loose by respect for the direction of scripture that all encroachment on the lordship of the One who is alone Lord is either avoided or so suppressed and eliminated in practice that there is place for His rule. Whether this will be done better by a monarchical or an aristocratic or a democratic form of constitution is a question which has to be considered, but it is only secondary." Church Dogmatics IV/1 (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1958), 723.

35. Wolin, Presence of the Past, 108.

36. Not that such fear is either new or peculiar to democratic movements. In The Fear of Freedom: A Study of Miracles in the Roman Imperial Church (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1989), Rowan A. Greer argued that the transition to a public cult of the saints in fourth and fifth century Christendom had in large part to do with regulating a similar "fear of freedom" in order to "balance the individual's importance as a moral agent with the power of the community and God's gracious working through the community" (182).

37. Williams, The Truce of God, 18.

38. These are but two of the elements Michel Foucault identified as essential to the "art of living counter to all forms of fascism" in his preface to Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus. See now, Michel Foucault, "Preface to Anti-Oedipus," in Power: Essential Works of Foucault 1954-1984, vol. 3, ed. James D. Faubion (New York: The New Press, 2000), 106-110.

39. See the introduction to his Beyond Gated Politics: Reflections for the Possibility of Democracy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005).

40. Stanley Hauerwas, "Postscript: A Response to Jeff Stout's Democracy and Tradition," in Performing the Faith: Bonhoeffer and the Practice of Nonviolence (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2004), 225-241. Hauerwas's essay grew out of his panel presentation at the annual meetings, in 2003, of the American Academy of Religion. There, Hauerwas, Richard Rorty, Jeffrey Stout, and Cornel West participated in a discussion of Democracy and Tradition. And, Hauerwas made the claim we reference above at that discussion. Unfortunately, he has edited out the chapter in Performing the Faith.

41. Michael J. Quirk, "Stanley Hauerwas: An Interview," CrossCurrents, 2002. Quirk follows this by helpfully adding, "Interestingly, this seems to be John Dewey's conception of democracy, especially in light of his critique of what he called the 'old' liberalism--an individualistic, procedural doctrine that left deliberation of 'ends' to the 'private' sphere. If I am hearing you correctly, you're saying that folks like Dewey were looking in the wrong place for democracy. You won't find it in legislatures or polling places. You're more likely to find it in, say, the National Conference of Catholic Bishops debating war or the economy, or Torah scholars debating the fine points of the Law, than in the secular politics of the nation-state. Quite an irony for Dewey, the unabashed secularist." Quirk's point is a good one, though the idea that Dewey was only looking for democracy in polling places and legislatures is odd. Moreover, Quirk's examples remain less than democratic just insofar as those "deliberating" are elites. In Hauerwas's example, it is the members of the congregation deliberating about decisions concerning the person in power. In Quirk's the bishops and the scholars, those in power, deliberate about what decision to hand down to the members. Cf. Hauerwas's essay, 'Peacemaking: The Virtue of the Church,' in The Hauerwas Reader, ed. John Berkman and Michael Cartwright (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001), 318-326.

42. John Howard Yoder, The Original Revolution: Essays on Christian Pacifism (Scottdale, PA: Herald Press, 1971), 133. Emphasis added.

43. There seems to be an interesting parallel with Stout here. He also has rather little to say, at least in Democracy and Tradition, about what kind of "internal" politics churches should have aside from some general denunciations of hierarchical arrangements. What matters to him is that it be democratically engaged with "outsiders."

44. This is perhaps most importantly the case when Hauerwas claims, as he does in his reply to Stout, that his concern has never been with liberalism as such, but rather with liberalism insofar as Christians have confused it with the gospel. See Performing the Faith, 232.

45. Teleology is front and center in both Hauerwas's thought and MacIntyre's, yet it is important to note that MacIntyre's First Principles, Final Ends and Contemporary Philosophical Issues (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1990) significantly complicates the way appeals to both archai and teloi are made within an ongoing inquiry: "[I]t is a mark of all established genuinely Aristotelian modes of enquiry that they too are open to defeat; that is, what had been taken to be adequate formulations of a set of necessary, apodictic judgments, functioning as first principles, may always turn out to be false, in the light afforded by the failure of its own Aristotelian standards of what had been hitherto taken to be a warranted body of theory" (39-40). Interestingly, John Milbank gets less attention in Democracy and Tradition than Hauerwas or MacIntyre. Moreover, the attention he receives from Stout is less sympathetic than that extended to the other new traditionalists--and yet Milbank is the only one of the three to have worried in print about the anti-democratic effects of excessively teleological frames in theology and ethics. See his criticism of MacIntyre's dialecticism in Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), 326ff, as well as his more recent reflections on Nicholas of Cusa's theological hierarchies in Being Reconciled: Ontology and Pardon (London: Routledge, 2003), 105-137.

46. See John Howard Yoder, "Sacrament as Social Process: Christ the Transformer of Culture," in The Royal Priesthood: Essays Ecclesiological and Ecumenical, ed. Michael G. Cartwright (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994), 364-366.

47. The pattern repeats itself in each of the practices Yoder detailed in "Sacrament as Social Process" and Body Politics: none of the practices are oriented toward external threats to the community's life.

48. Romand Coles, "The Wild Patience of John Howard Yoder: 'Outsiders' and the 'Otherness of the Church,'" Modern Theology 18:3 (July 2002), p. 310.

49. "Meaning After Babble," Journal of Religious Ethics. There is a remarkable essay in Rowan Williams's On Christian Theology titled "Resurrection and Peace" that enacts this in an exemplary way.

50. Coles, "Wild Patience," 316.

51. Cf. Rowan Williams, "Revelation ... is essentially to do with what is generative in our experience--events or transactions in our language that break existing frames of reference and initiate new possibilities of life.... Revelation decisively advances or extends debate, extends rather than limits the range of ambiguity and conflict in language. It poses fresh questions rather than answering old ones." On Christian Theology, 134.

52. For the Nations, 93.

53. Coles, "Wild Patience," 307.

54. Romand Coles, "Democracy, Theology, and the Question of Excess: A Review of Jeffrey Stout's Democracy and Tradition," Modern Theology 21:2 (April 2005), p. 317. The reference to Barth is, presumably, to Barth as presented in Democracy and Tradition.

55. The Politics of Jesus, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1994), 235.

56. Coles, "Wild Patience," 326.

57. Coles, "Wild Patience," 324, 323.

58. Coles, "Wild Patience," 326, 327.

59. Coles, "Wild Patience," 326. By "inflected differently," Coles seems to mean primarily that Yoder's work would have benefited from a wider conversation with feminists, postcolonialists, race theorists, ecologists and others (327).

60. Yoder complicates this non-negotiability by writing, "We are all 'nominal' adherents, No one's faith is final in this life. It may be the Islamicist Kenneth Cragg who for our time has made most poignant the insight that I have only really understood another faith if I begin to feel I could be at home in it, if its tug at me questions my own prior (Christian) allegiance." The Royal Priesthood, 255.

61. Williams, The Truce of God, 27.