With the Grain of the Universe: The Church's Witness and Natural Theology
By Stanley Hauerwas. Brazos Press, 249 pages, $22.99
There was once a time when American Protestanttheologians were a vital part of the national civic debate. In recent decades,however, theologians have steered their discipline toward a quest for academicrespectability, choosing narrow specialization over efforts to influence a widerpublic. It is a remarkable fact that today, even in a time of terror and warfare,when religious questions once again fill the public square, no one turns to ourtheologians for help. American believers seek the quieter spaces of church andsynagogue, the meetinghouse and the vigil, and the solace of prayer andcontemplation. Commentary in The New York Times and The Washington Post since September 11 has kept theological reflection to a minimum: predictable fulminations from Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell; a plea from the activist-author Jim Wallis to give peace a chance. For the most part, the voices of ministers and rabbis have been muted and serious theological talk has been relegated to academic symposia.
This popular indifference to professional theology makes allthe more interesting Time magazine's recent decision to add the category "America's Best Theologian" to its annual "America's Best" list and to name Stanley Hauerwas the first recipient. Although Hauerwas, who teaches at Duke Divinity School, no doubt winces at the very notion of "Best Theologian," he is a worthy selection. Hauerwas is a hardworking and generous man whose writing displays an exceptional intellectual range. His many books and essays are mostly free of the scholarly throat-clearing that plagues much academic writing. Meanwhile, Hauerwas has redefined theology in the American academy, reclaiming the language of Christian orthodoxy in the postmodern conversation.
Still, the selection of Hauerwas for "America's Best" caught many people bysurprise. Time's issue hit newsstands the week of September's terrorist attacks. With images of death and destruction everywhere visible, Time was bestowing its "America's Best Theologian" honor upon a pacifist. And not just any pacifist, but one with attitude, one who insists that taking up the Cross of Jesus means the final and complete rejection of all political means of self-defense. Here is a man who once argued that if gays are to be excluded from the military because of their unacceptable sexual practices, then Christians should be excluded, too: How could you ever trust a man who prays for the enemy? Who knows what kind of "disgusting behavior" these believers might engage in! They might even start gathering nightly to hold hands and bow their heads.
To the uninitiated, Hauerwas is a hard person to figure. Indeed, those of uswho have followed his work cannot always follow his drift. He not only considers the Christian Coalition heretical and fascist but also criticizes the conservative-Christian lobby for its failure to distinguish between discipleship and patriotism and for its "coercive reclaiming of a Christian America." He also signed the "Declaration concerning Religion, Ethics, and the Crisis in the Clinton Presidency," which was the closest the former president ever came to getting a pastoral rebuke. Hauerwas opposes abortion and the death penalty, and he thinks that school prayer can only inhibit genuine spiritual development, which flourishes at the margins of legitimacy. He has called capitalism the second-greatest threat to "family values" (the first being Christianity), and he doesn't worry himself with same-sex marriage, pornography, or Teletubbies. He has also called "justice" a liberal conceit that helps no one, and "human rights" the self-reflection of the controlling elites. No doubt, Stanley Hauerwas is something of a theological prankster: a Christopher Hitchens on Aquinas; Daniel Berrigan with a sense of humor. His recent popularity may be more attributable to a contrariness that lends itself to sound bites--Time called him the "Christian contrarian"--than to his theological contributions.
But Hauerwas is not peddling pop shock-theology like the so-called radicaltheologians of the late 1960s. Thomas J. J. Altizer, William Hamilton, andGabriel Vahanian, you may recall, made for good copy in Time magazine, too, with such ready-for-Rowan-and-Martin one-liners as, "God is dead, thank God!" With their pipes and paisley ascots, questions of eternal life cast aside like last week's church bulletin, 15 minutes of fame never felt so good. Hauerwas is a different breed, at once more radical than the radicals and more theologically serious than their Christian critics.
If there is a single ambition running through Hauerwas's books, essays,sermons, and occasional writings, it is this: to undo the Constantinian synthesisbetween the church and the world. The church must reclaim the proclamation thatscandalized the ancient world, that the "people who bear the cross," not thesword, are "working with the grain of the universe." (The phrase is borrowed fromthe Mennonite theologian John Howard Yoder.) Hauerwas wants to free the Americanchurch from its bondage to idolatrous self-constructions--otherwise known ascivil religion--and restore to its mission the countercultural practices offorgiveness and reconciliation, hospitality to strangers, and nonviolence, aswell as nonresistance to death and suffering brought on by forces of evil.
Over the years, critics of Hauerwas have complained that his worklacks careful articulation; that he tosses out provocative claims withoutsufficient attention to their complexity; that he has not given us any sustainedbook-length treatment of his overall project. Hauerwas has responded with hismost satisfying book to date, With the Grain of the Universe, originally delivered as the 2001-2002 Gifford Lectures at the University of St. Andrews. His aim is to retell the story of modern Protestant theology so as to show that the truth claims of Christianity do not rest on natural reason but are better understood as the revealed conditions of the church's peaceable witness in the world--as a new "narrative" about the relationship between the human and the divine.
It will come as no surprise to readers of Hauerwas that TheNature and Destiny of Man, Reinhold Niebuhr's classic study of Christian truth-claims in the nuclear age (delivered as his own Gifford Lectures between 1938 and 1940), is taken to exemplify the endgame of the Protestant liberal tradition. (The death-of-God theologians of the 1960s simply restate Niebuhr's conclusions in a different form.) Hauerwas does not share mainline Protestantism's veneration of Niebuhr as heroic churchman making faith acceptable to its scientific and cultured despisers. He does not even offer an acquiescent nod that Niebuhr, despite his theological failures, at least had the courage to get his hands dirty. Hauerwas takes Niebuhr's influence as just another dreary episode in the story of modern Protestant theology, wherein Christianity, after abandoning its historic commitment to revealed knowledge of God, becomes an anthropomorphic enterprise. "Niebuhr's theology," Hauerwas says, "seems to be a perfect exemplification of Ludwig Feuerbach's argument that theology, in spite of its pretentious presumption that its subject matter is God, is in fact but a disguised way to talk about humanity."
Protestant liberalism built its franchise on the premise that the truth claimsof Christianity could be reinterpreted in a manner consistent with theantimetaphysical drift of the modern world. Immanuel Kant's critiques of pure andpractical reason had rendered theological knowledge untenable even while keepingGod in the picture as an idea useful in ordering moral experience. The story ofProtestant liberalism begins with this reduction: The doctrines of the church aremeaningful only as lessons about human experience. As descriptions of the livingtriune God, they are nonsense. The nineteenth-century theologian FriedrichSchleiermacher may have shown that this flawed tradition could sometimes produceinspired results, as in his exquisite rendering of religion as an aestheticsensibility, "a sense and taste of the Infinite." But Feuerbach, Freud, and Marxbetter appreciated the devastating theological consequences of Kant'smethodological shift. Religious questions, however new or remarkable, are justquestions like all other questions and are answered with greater detail andpanache in nontheological accounts. As the philosopher Richard Rorty said in oneof his refreshing anticlerical rants: "The theologians read the philosophers inthe way in which couturiers in undeveloped portions of the fashion world read thelatest reports from Paris. For their activity consists largely in changing thelabel on the latest philosophical costume. The new label always reads 'God,' nomatter what the old label was."
According to Hauerwas, Reinhold Niebuhr accepted modernity's antitheologicalpremise while adding to it a further discrimination that would have horrifiedmost nineteenth-century liberal Protestants. Niebuhr claimed that the historicalJesus and his social teachings were irrelevant in the modern world. Jesus hasmeaning today only as a symbol that reminds us of our complex finitude,illuminating the tragic distance between divine love and human action. "TheCross," wrote Niebuhr, "symbolizes the perfection of agape which transcends all particular norms of justice and mutuality in history." Niebuhr's Cross is not the atoning miracle of the one who "became incarnate from the Virgin Mary," as the Nicene Creed instructs; nor is it the supernatural center of the church. Rather, Niebuhr's Cross is something like an interpretive key that "unlocks the mystery of what man is and should be and of what God is in relations with men." In fact, for all that the Cross might teach us about the pathos of human experience and the self's uneasy conscience, it remains a symbolic idea and may one day be replaced by other, better symbols.
As Hauerwas sees it, this is precisely the kind of mess you getin when you try to write theology for the "public" rather than for the church.People do not lay down their lives for their neighbor out of devotion to aprinciple or a hermeneutical key; they do so for the sake of a living andpersonal God who transcends nations and cultures, who calls and forgives andloves. Hauerwas abhors the spectacle of Christians constantly trying to adjustthemselves to the spirit of the age, whether to the fashions of academe, thespirit of nations, or the drumbeats of war. Any Christian seeking to be faithfulto scripture and tradition must recognize that Niebuhr's "morally creative worldview," with its tough talk about the will to power and coercive action, isfinally determined by the shared needs of the professional-managerial class.Hauerwas writes:
[Anyone] who would put Niebuhr on the side of the angels mustcome to terms with the extraordinary "thinness" of his theology. Niebuhr's god isnot a god capable of offering salvation in any material sense. Changedself-understanding or attitude is no substitute for the existence of a churchcapable of offering an alternative to the world. Of course, Niebuhr did not seeksuch an alternative, which is why he could not help but become the theologian ofa domesticated god capable of doing no more than providing comfort to the anxiousconscience of the bourgeoisie.
Niebuhr speaks of God by speaking of America in a loud voice.This is the theological voice we hear in presidential prayer breakfasts, inblessings for our way of life, in the cosmic-muffin piety of civil religion, thevoice that unites the Protestant mainline and the Christian right. But afterHauerwas, that Niebuhrian voice will never again sound so reassuring.
The hero of With the Grain of the Universe is the Swiss Reformed theologian Karl Barth, whose defiant "Nein" to natural theology turned the nineteenth century on its head. Barth believed that the blood-and-soil theology of the Deutsche Christen--the German civil religion of the Nazi state--demonstrated the logical conclusion of the Protestant liberal impulse. "Man has taken the divine into his possession," Barth wrote, "he has brought it under his management."
Hauerwas reads Barth's 14-volume Church Dogmatics as a comprehensive reconfiguration of the world from the perspective of the triune God. Barth's astonishing achievement, the creation of "a universe of discourse" (in the words of the theologian Hans Frei), with its peculiar rules and rhythms, its "lengthy, even leisurely unfolding" of the strange, new world within the Bible, was above all an expression of joyful confidence in the self-validation of Christian theology's distinctive message: True freedom is life lived in the intimacy of God's freedom. The God who revealed himself in Israel and Jesus Christ invites humanity to share in the divine history by sharing in the new dispensation of the nonviolent kingdom, which for Christians means the church. Authentic Christian existence must begin and end with the church's struggle to produce "truthful witnesses," who speak to us, as it were, from a different world, a counterkingdom of peace.
Hauerwas concludes his work with a meditation on the "necessity of witness."The term witness introduces a new theme in his work. In earlier writings, Hauerwas appropriated terms from moral philosophy such as character and virtue, which lacked sufficient theological depth and sometimes led to the confused impression that Christianity valued friendship and rectitude over discipleship and risk. Witness evokes a sense of fear and trembling that is too often missing in the heavy-handed communitarianism that underwrites most postliberal theology. Several of Hauerwas's theological soul-mates appear in this final section--John Howard Yoder, Pope John Paul II, and Dorothy Day of Catholic Worker fame--each intending to show us that the "Christian faith is not simply a set of propositions to be accepted by the intellect" but a truth to be lived and practiced. Each shows us too that the truthfulness of Christian witness is diluted when Christians accept the practices of the "culture of death." Says Hauerwas: "The Christian confession that God has placed the Messiah above every cosmology and culture means that Christians affirm that the cosmos will find its true coherence in the lordship of Christ." In other words, the credibility of Christian truth-claims depends on the church's steadfast commitment to nonviolence.
For this reason, "America's Best Theologian" has nothing to offerAmerica's new war. So fierce is Hauerwas's protest against Niebuhr that anyconcession on pacifism is taken as an offense against the nonviolent God of JesusChrist. God owes America nothing. In times of war and in times of peace, thechurch's task is to proclaim and practice the Gospel. Ministers, priests,laypeople, bishops--all must stand opposed to war. In private and in public, theymust preach, practice, and encourage one thing: peace.
Hauerwas's pacifism is neither quixotic nor easy. Hiscommitment to Christian peacemaking can freeze you in your tracks every time youtry splitting the difference between the Sermon on the Mount and the ways of theworld. As a sympathetic reader and theological fellow traveler, I neverthelessworry that Hauerwas's astonishing single-mindedness creates an oppressive mentalenvironment that forecloses too many options for peace. In a time when militaryaction appears unavoidable, I worry that Hauerwas's account of the Christianlife, wherein power, coercion, and force are always judged as corrupt, reckonsinadequately with the Cross. "Nonresistance but names the way God has chosen toredeem us," Hauerwas writes. Yet the Christian story of the Cross--at least asSaint Paul tells it--is about the defeat of the "principalities," the "powers,"and "the rulers of the darkness of this world." God has not demonstratednonresistance toward the antihuman powers of disintegration: God has destroyedthem. To be sure, the triumph over evil ought not to become triumphalistic;Christians live their mortal lives amidst transition and uncertainty--"betweenthe times," as Barth put it--on the Saturday between the Cross and Easter. Butfor Saint Paul, victory has been won, and this victory defines the Good News asthe victory over death, not death's veneration or its masochistic embrace. Sucha theological move is hardly Niebuhrian, a symbolic rebuke to the tragic senseof life, for it celebrates the Cross and the Resurrection as ontologicallydecisive events in the history of being.
In recent days, Hauerwas has admitted to friends that he feels heavy hearted,depressed, and exhausted. He continues to remind Christians that the colors red,white, and blue ought to mean Pentecost, Easter, and Mary, that the only defeatof the enemy we celebrate takes the form of the eucharistic feast. Yet mostchurch people since September 11 have seemed unusually circumspect; the patrioticsongs on Sunday mornings have felt more like laments than anthems for battle.Hauerwas seems confused about what to say to the church in these difficult times."I have made certain commitments," he has said, "and feeling the distance that mycommitments have made with people I know and love makes me very sad. But look, ifyou have strong convictions, you have to just live with them."
It is important, too, to keep in mind that the hero of Hauerwas's book, KarlBarth, was not a pacifist; nor was his best-known student, DietrichBonhoeffer--arguably the Protestant church's most powerful witness in thetwentieth century. Barth made it clear that if the church is faithful to theprimary obligation of calling the nations to repentance, it need not be afraid ofhow to act in a time of international crisis. For the church that does not giveeasy sanction to war, that in fact constantly seeks to avoid it and proclaimspeace alone as the will of God on earth, will be able in a true emergency to tellthe men and women who serve the country in the military that even though they nowhave to kill they are not murderers, and that they "may and must," as Barth says,"do the will of God in this opus alienum of the state."
The case of Bonhoeffer is even more troubling to Hauerwas's pacifism. As oneof the few Christian dissidents in Germany and a member of the resistance,Bonhoeffer abandoned his own pacifism in the face of Hitler. Or more precisely,he continued to believe that Jesus taught nonviolent resistance and thatChristians were called to witness to peace, but that his historical situationrequired sinful action for the sake of a greater good. Aware of the human costsof inaction, Bonhoeffer risked the moral consistency of nonviolence on the wagerthat there is in the Bible an implicit reservation in favor of those obviouslyextraordinary moments in history that responsible people understand asexceptional. Responsible Christians must sometimes sin boldly. Bonhoeffer died ina concentration camp in 1945 for his involvement in a plot to assassinateHitler. "The ultimate question for a responsible man to ask," he wrote in prison,"is not how he is to extricate himself heroically from the affair, but how thecoming generation is to live."
It is too early to tell whether, or how, the events of September 11 willchange Hauerwas's mind. Any honest theologian must feel about the present time acertain uneasiness with the familiar confidences and categories. Perhaps Hauerwaswill tone down his praise of martyrdom and medievalism; perhaps he will stopsaying that the son of his who joined the military would not be welcome home.Perhaps he will even rethink his pacifism in the good company of the saints andheroes he admires, though that seems unlikely. But I hope he will not letReinhold Niebuhr have the last word on ultimate honesty and worldly perplexity.For Christian social involvement may demand an even more difficult witness thaneither Niebuhr or Hauerwas is able to imagine.
