Faith in a crucified Christ allows Hauerwas to continue his work with what seems like indefatigable energy. It also inspired him to argue that the “we” in a “we are at war” response to the events of Sept. 11, 2001, could not possibly be a Christian “we.” One might suggest that such a challenge was not a far cry from Stanley Hauerwas, age 7, who innocently challenged the etiquette of the water kegs available for bricklayers with one cup designated for white and another for black workers. Young Hauerwas drank indiscriminately from either one. The difference now, 60 or so years later, is that Hauerwas intentionally chooses to drink from the cup that unites us all as sons and daughters of God, no matter the consequences.
I believe he is Mrs Schori’s favorite theologian, as well, because his theology justifies her views.
Based on this review, I think I’ll give it a miss. Anyway, I’m busy enjoying J.R.H. Moorman’s “A History of the Church in England” at the moment.
I am currently reading this book, and almost cannot put it down. I cannot recommend it highly enough.
I had the privilege of getting to know Stanley Hauerwas just a little bit during my first year at Notre Dame, just before he left for Duke. It was a privilege. He was then, and is still, one of the most challenging Christian theologians alive. What makes Hauerwas such a challenge, is that he insists on taking the claims of the gospel seriously, especially the claim that if Jesus is Lord, Caesar is not. He makes both liberals and conservatives equally uncomfortable, just to the extent that both sides have their favorite Caesars.
I would be very surprised if he is KJS’ favorite theologian. Hauerwas’s radical discipleship and KJS’s inclusivist Liberal Protestantism are almost at opposite extremes. Compare KJS’s oft uttered claim that Jesus is “a way” among others, with Hauerwas’s claim that the starting point of his theology is that Jesus Christ is fully God and fully human. Also, Hauerwas’s three chief theological influences are Thomas Aquinas, Karl Barth, and Mennonite John Howard Yoder. I have seen no evidence that KJS is familiar with any of these three.
First, on KJS.
On one hand, I would love to see where, in print, KJS endorses Hauerwas as her favorite theologian. Like William, or even more, I don’t see how that it could be possible. On the other hand, learning that KJS did in fact hold Hauerwas in the highest regard might be the worst of all possibilities because it would be proof again that she thinks all perspectives and claims are really in the end non-competive with one another, that sentiment outweighs truth, and that Christ is and, at the same time, isn’t who the NT writers saw him to be–or, worst of all, that she likes the way Stanley shoots up the town, as only he seemingly can or will, and she thinks his unsettling effect is pretty much the same thing that she and the progressives are doing, so she places herself in his camp
Now, second, as for the book and the man.
I, too, look forward to reading the whole book, having read a part of it so far. At an Society for the Study of Theology mtg in the UK some free (and expensive) tickets were offered for an evening performance by the Royal Shakespeare theatre which was taking place at the same time as Hauerwas’ first talk at the conference. Stephen Sykes rose to say ‘Hauerwas will be the better show.” I think he was!
Having myself had the pleasure and blessing of engaging with Stanley Hauerwas both via his books and at two conferences, one in England and another in Australia, I can only agree he is one of God’s better gift’s to the Church. Simultaneously “uncomfortable†and enriching, yet not without flaws or faults, much of his work will likely endure – as it should. His insistence on closely reading Scripture together with the key scripts of our own lives and measuring the distance in between exhorting us to holiness is surely a vital task.
For another, qualified review, see Gilbert Meilaender’s Opinion piece, “A Dedicated Lifeâ€, in [i]First Things[/i] April 2010 (unfortunately not an open article; subscribers only; sorry!).
Oops! apologies, it’s the May 2010 edition, number 203, pp.14-17. The memory is failing instant recall!
And let’s mention also Hauerwas’s concern for the handicapped, especially families bringing up a handicapped child. He has written with such care and compassion about this, and understands well the isolation that often afflicts such families as they find their social horizon shrinking.
I have had the privilege of hearing Hauerwas and reading some of his books as well as being around people who have loved him. He is a formidable presence ignored at one’s own peril. One of his most admirable skills is the deft ability to give terse images and aphorisms that are in no way trite or trivial, like one deep calling out to another — in sound bites. One example (paraphrased): Some 50 years in the future, you will be able to distinguish the Christians in America from those who are not because they will be ones who do not kill their elderly or handicapped.
Probably the most important, and certainly the most provocative, American theologian of the past 50 years. Whatever you are, he will challenge you and make you think, but if you’re a mainline Protestant liberal, your life will NEVER be the same if you read him seriously. Most definitely NOT one of KJS’s favorite theologians!
I think I must have a different opinion of Hauerwas. I ran into him at a conference once, and heard him give a lecture at another time, and he came across to me, both in his public speaking and when I queried him about something he said, as being incredibly arrogant. Maybe I caught him on a bad day, but the encounters certainly put me off from being a devotee of his, shall we say.
To be fair, he does, as comments above have stated, put Christ at the center of his whole theology which truly exasperates some of more liberal theological persuasion. He likewise can’t be pigeonholed as a theological conservative by any stretch of the imagination.
I think what personally does not sit well with me, his personality aside, is that his bald statements in his writings which grab people’s attention, are often logically non sequiturs. For instance, in this article, he can claim
but this does not necessarily follow.
If Aquinas and Barth are his key figures, I think they would tend to disagree with him on such matters via Just War theory or the Barmen Declaration. He tends to want to speak prophetically for the whole of Christian thought, and I think he often comes up short because he will glaze over conflicting Christian traditions as if they are of no consequence.
Again, maybe I just have a contrary nature.
I think that Stanley has a tendency to overstate for the purposes of defining arguments.
I’ve had the privilege to know Stanley Hauerwas for the last few years, and while he can certainly be abrasive in public discourse (he is never so in private conversation), he is not at all arrogant. In fact, one discovers in private conversation with him just how humble he actually is.
MP2009’s (#4) comments vis-a-vis KJS are probably on the money. For Hauerwas’ part, let me just suggest that KJS is not his favorite bishop.
Hauerwas can be abrasive, and he does not suffer fools lightly. That, combined with his use of four letter words, can result in unfortunate first impressions. (He claims in his autobiography to have dropped the colorful vocabulary.) The first time I heard him speak he was asked during the Q and A how he could speak of a normative Christian ethic, when modern biblical studies made clear that the New Testament was a compilation of documents representing many different and often contradictory and irreconcilable points of view. His response was direct: “I’m getting f—ing tired of over-educated academics trying to use higher critical German b— s— to justify their bourgeois life styles! Next question.” I was surprised, but also impressed.
As a professor, he was kind and patient to a first year doctoral student who had never read Aristotle’s or Aquinas’s ethics and had not a clue about why virtue was important, or that Scripture even had anything to do with ethics. My previous ethical commitments (derived from both Evangelicals and Roman Catholics) were a hodgepodge of a kind of C.S. Lewis version of “natural law” picked up from The Abolition of Man, with a smattering of H. Richard Niebuhr’s Christ and Culture, and some idea that Christians needed to be countercultural picked up from a subscription to Sojourners Magazine. I assumed (as does Lewis) that ethics is simply “out there,” that all people of good will should be able to agree on the nature of right and wrong, whether they are Buddhists, Hindus, Jews, pagans or Christians. (Perhaps not atheists.) I had learned (from Roman Catholics) why the pope was wrong about artificial contraception, but I knew practically nothing about how Christian ethics is rooted in the story of Jesus, and that a Christian worldview has distinctive implications for how Christians live their lives, that Christian ethics is different from Buddhist or Platonic ethics.
Hauerwas does indeed disagree with Aquinas about just war. That does not mean that he does not understand the just war tradition. He acknowledges his debt to Paul Ramsey in the autobiography. His commitment to pacificism results from a particular way of reading the story of Jesus influenced by John Howard Yoder and Karl Barth. Specifically, when God became human, he dealt with evil not by responding with violence, but by allowing himself to be crucified. Jesus’ followers are expected to take up his cross.
Hauerwas and Yoder make about the best case for Christian pacifiism that can be made. If I finally disagree, it is because I think they do not address adequately enough the role of the state in Rom. 13.(Oliver O’Donovan is helpful here.) Granted that Christians as citizens may not use violence to defend themselves, may Christians nonetheless be magistrates? Hauerwas and Yoder say “no.” O’Donovan says “yes.” That, I think, is the crucial theological issue, and not secular arguments about the right to self-defense or the importance of responding to terrorism or the myriad forms of appeal to fear that justify killing others because they might kill us instead.
Another way to address the question would be to ask whether or not Bonhoeffer was justified in participating in an assassination plot against Hitler. I think Hauerwas would take one position, and O’Donovan would take another.
Nonetheless, with this one exception, I agree with Hauerwas more than I disagree. He would probably say that to the extent that I am not a pacifist I do not understand him at all.
William Witt, that’s a thoughtful and, I think, accurate synopsis of what I’ve read from Hauerwas. One of the reasons I never found Yoder very compelling is what seems to be a failure to consider the uniqueness of Jesus; we are indeed called to be like Him, but we cannot possibly be [i]exactly[/i] like Him. His role in salvation history is utterly unique, and his role in executing justice is deferred until the eschaton, while we must do our best in this fallen world. I think when it comes to certain political issues, Hauerwas is just too close to being a conventional academic. I remember looking forward to an article he and Paul Griffiths wrote on the war in Iraq, but within just a few paragraphs it devolved into a standard-issue Marxist-flavored screed. It was very disappointing. I have yet to see a convincing defense of even the morality of pacifism as a general political program (as opposed to an individual calling), much less its being a requirement of the Christian life.
Yes; for what it’s worth, I too think both WW and Don R have put their finger on something crucial re SH’s work. The classic debate of course is between him and Oliver O’Donovan. See for example: [i]The Desire of the Nations: Rediscovering the roots of political theology[/i] (Cambridge, 1996), [i]The Ways of Judgment. The Bampton Lectures 2003[/i] (Eerdmans, 2005), and his delightful if brief [i]The Just War Revisited[/i] (Cambrdige, 2003).
For all that, the trick is also to maintain what I termed earlier “holiness†– the key mark of distinction between the Church and ‘the world’. And here the likes of Brian (#8) are spot on – however one actually populates those distinctive traits in various cultures at various times: just so Bonhoeffer indeed.