Hauerwas on Christianity as performance
The idea of “faith as performance” comes to the fore in a very blatant way during Holy Week.
On Passion Sunday we reenacted the Passion of our Lord, taking the parts of Pilate, the Pharisees, the crowds, and Christ himself during the liturgy.
Then during the Great Vigil on the following Saturday, several of us presented the night’s readings through creative interpretations: music, fiction, spoken word, and dance. (I’ll post a couple of the pieces here over the next few days.)
Stanley Hauerwas addressed faith as performance in this interview on Homiletics online:
HOMILETICS: Your recent book on Bonhoeffer, Performing the Faith: Bonhoeffer and the Practice of Nonviolence — I thought “performing” was an interesting word. Faith as performance.
HAUERWAS: That was very intentional. One of the things that liberal democratic society has encouraged Christians to believe about what they believe is that what it means to be a Christian is primarily belief![laughter]. So you hold to these 26 absurd propositions before breakfast, you know.
This is a deep misunderstanding about how Christianity works. Of course we believe that God is God and we are not and that God is Father, Son and Holy Spirit but that this is not a set of propositions — but is rather embedded in a community of practices that make those beliefs themselves work and give us a community by which we are shaped. Religious belief is not just some kind of primitive metaphysics, but in fact it is a performance just like you’d perform Lear. What people think Christianity is, is that it’s like the text of Lear, rather than the actual production of Lear. It has to be performed for you to understand what Lear is — a drama. You can read it, but unfortunately Christians so often want to make Christianity a text rather than a performance.
- Wade