2 Quotes

Another intro post from a side project I’m letting go of or subsuming into this one.

Before I get too far into this work I want to share two quotes, one from the theologian Stanley Hauerwas and the other from Wittgenstein.

The first is one of those quotes that altered my life. I remember first hearing when listening to sermons delivered by Dr. Hauerwas from Duke Chapel. Hearing it read in his raspy Texan voice made me pause and rewind several times for I knew within it came something deep. Long before the quote was published in a collection of his sermons I committed into memory. (Funny enough the audio also blew out the speaker in my car when I shared it with my wife) At first, I just loved that we are people of witness over argument. But as with most powerful pieces of prose when you commit them to memory, they become deeper. Over time I hope to blog through each line of the quote in both how it challenged me and calls the church to greater depth. But below here it is:

Christians are often tempted, particularly in this time called modern, to say more than we know. We are so tempted because we fear we do not believe what we say we believe. So we try to assure ourselves that we believe what we say we believe by convincing those who do not believe what we believe that they really believe what we believe once what we believe is properly explained. As a result we end up saying more than we know because what we believe — or better, what we do — cannot be explained but only shown. The word we have been given for such a showing is “witness.”

The second quote is one of the most famous from Wittgenstein. I had known it for some time but had never placed it alongside the Hauerwas quote. As I’ve already said my early knowledge of Wittgenstein was too colored by the logical positivist error. For instance, in this quote I assumed if one must be silent, he meant it can’t exist. Reading the biography by Monk it’s clear that for Wittgenstein the silence had more to do with the need to be shown more than spoken.

Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

I had long known that Wittgenstein was a deep influence on Hauerwas but until recently the link between the work of both had eluded with his church ‘showing.’

For now, I just want to leave this here but ‘witness’ will be one of those driving themes of these notes.