The Crossroads Class meets in the parlor across from the Chapel. Primarily college students, graduate students, and young professionals attend this class. However, anyone is welcome to attend and all who attend are welcomed. Please check out the Crossroads Class whether or not you attend First Church on a regular basis and, especially, if you are interested in this topic of study.
This class is currently studying The Truth About God by Stanley Hauerwas and Will Willimon. The Ten Commandments that a judge from Alabama fought to hang on the wall were not the commandments of God that Christians serve. Those same commandments are not a general call for morality that can save the pluralistic society of the United States of America. According to the authors, these commandments must be understood within the context of the Christian community. This work declares the Ten Commandments to be the way that the worshiping church relates to God and each other. Hauerwas and Willimon seek to explain the commandments from that context so that they may be known “perfectly.”
Only the worshiping church is able to understand the Ten Commandments. They are not, as explained by the authors, “timeless ethical principles that are applicable to all Americans.” This work reclaims another part of the church’s heritage necessary for life as resident aliens. Clearly, Hauerwas and Willimon are working within and driving the trend toward understanding the church as a community. Their attack on American individualism serves to push the church to understanding itself as a holy people. These holy people are the possession of the “God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and the God of Jesus Christ.”
About the Authors
Stanley Hauerwas:
Hauerwas is contemporary theology’s foremost intellectual provocateur. His depth charges are just as frequently aimed within that world as outside it. That “Hauerwasian” has become a common way in theological circles to characterize an argument is an irony, given that the Duke University Divinity School professor set out to place himself at the margin rather than in the center of the theological mainstream.
Hauerwas has been a thorn in the side of what he takes to be Christian complacency for more than 30 years. For him, the message of Jesus was a radical one to which Christians, for the most part, have never been fully faithful. Christians, he believes, are called to be a pilgrim people who will always find themselves in one political community or another but who are never defined completely by it.
Hauerwas is happy to say that his rise to prominence is not the result of any special intellectual gift. He has always said that he is no smarter than other people but that he will “damn well outwork ‘em.” Salty in speech, given to joking about the “ontological superiority of being a Texan,” he has written 25 books and hundreds of essays and articles on dozens of topics. Avoiding highly technical monographs, Hauerwas insists that the best theology is most often found in sermons, homilies, prayers and popular writing. The theologian who is faithful must engage the pressing issues of the culture rather than hide behind impenetrable jargon.
-excerpt taken from a TIME Magazine Article
Bishop Will Willimon:
The Reverend Dr. William H. Willimon was elected in July 2004 as Bishop of The United Methodist Church. He leads the 157,000 Methodists and 792 pastors in North Alabama. For twenty years he was Dean of the Chapel and Professor of Christian Ministry at Duke University, Durham, North Carolina.
He is the author of nearly sixty books. His Worship as Pastoral Care was selected as one of the ten most useful books for pastors in 1979 by the Academy of Parish Clergy. Over a million copies of his books have been sold. In 1996, an international survey conducted by Baylor University named him one of the Twelve Most Effective Preachers in the English-speaking world.
-Excerpt from the North Alabama Conference of the UMC
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