Christian Hospitality

I greatly hope that this topic (or some variation of it) will be the subject of future studies at the doctoral level if I can convince some school to give me a chance. No doubt, a number of my future posts will deal with this topic and may include snippets of previous writings I've done on the subject which have been favorably received by assorted professors (remember though, I'm anti-tekkie).

Hospitality, regretably, has not been a focus of evangelical scholarship. Nor has it been a particularly pressing concern in the church. This is unfortunate. Most evangelicals, I suspect, don't realize the extent to which the cultural conversation around them touches on this subject, and the enormous amount that our faith tradition can contribute to this discussion in a positive way. Pascal's apologetic brilliance did not necessarily lie in his famous Wager Argument. Rather, his apologetic approach of finding common points of contact with larger culture and then arguing that the Christian story best explains realities common to all of us was superb. For Pascal, the accepted reality that humanity is both great and wretched at the same time became a doorway through which Pascal argued that the Christian story of creation, fall and redemption best explains the paradox of man that both Christians and non-Christians recognize to be true. This is brilliant apologetic strategy, though it takes great work and thought to find those common accepted realities from which to work from. I think hospitality is another such area.

It has been suggested that the Christian life can be seen within the grid of hospitality. A number of liberal scholars, following Derrida, believe that hospitality is an overarching ethical value that should drive Christian ethics as a whole. Now in doing this, a number of scholars, predictably, don't interact well with Derrida's vision of hospitality. I have, and Derrida's program is in severe deviation from the Biblical view of hospitality, especially given to us in the Johannine corpus.

Nonetheless, I do think hospitality as a concept is far more central to the Bible as a whole than is often acknowledged, and that there is great wisdom for seeing the relationship between the Church and the world within a grid of hospitality. Now Richard Horner, who I respect tremendously, has suggested that being the church in the world can be seen in terms of Incarnation and hospitality. By this, he means that just as the Incarnate Jesus entered into the world, we also should be willing to enter into other people's worlds. Hospitality, on the other hand, is the act of letting other people into our world, according to Horner. Now I would disagree with Horner on the margins here, since I view the Incarnation itself as an act of hospitality on the part of God by entering an inhospitable world in order to save it from itself (the Johannine Prologue, I think, really does a great job of setting this up, while the rest of the Fourth Gospel works it out in ways few have recognized). I don't see the need to distinguish Incarnation from hospitality either conceptually or semantically, since I think Incarnation can be seen as part of hospitality. However, Horner's basic point is well taken. The church must be willing to go out into the world and enter into the lives of those who are not part of the church, just as Jesus did. And the church must also be willing to invite outsiders inside in order to get a taste of the Kingdom having come in part.

How many of us think about the Christian life in these terms? The church is usually fairly good about the latter, but usually not so good at the former. How many Christians believe in this model of hospitality, even though it's thoroughly Biblical? How many of us are willing to live like this and put this model of cultural engagement to work? Not many. The reason is because it is very demanding. It's not easy to walk across the street and talk shop to our Muslim neighbor. We'd rather build a fence instead, and that's what we often do. It's not easy to open your home (or your nation for that matter, a la Derrida) to folks who are very different from us either ethnically, religiously, or in their outlook. It's much easier to keep our distance and grumble about them behind closed doors. Now as will be made clear in future posts, I am convinced that the Christian vision of hospitality is actually a combination of hospitality and inhospitality that is patterned off of God's own dealings with the world during this unusual period of Kingdom overlap (yes, I'm an already/not yet guy). But as if often the case, the full vision of Biblical hospitality is often embraced only halfway. And the half that is embraced is usually the half that accords with our previous presuppositions and doesn't demand anything more challenging than what we're already predisposed to do. The result is that the wonderful full-orbed grid of hospitality that Scripture offers to us, in part, to offer to the world as a holistic Christian alternative to secular thinking, is often bypassed by the very people who claim to love Scripture the most. This then results in us not being able to engage the cultural conversation on hospitality with anything better than a half-baked vision that is usually not well thought out. We are missing a wonderful opportunity to engage the world on an issue that is front and center in our culture today (the issue of immigration, for example, is really a debate about what hospitality on a national scale looks like: Is the illegal immigrant my neighbor, yes or no? Christians, above all people, should be ready to answer this question. Yet, most of us aren't even asking the question, much less answering it Scripturally).