Stanley Hauerwas,Approaching the End: Eschatological Reflections in Church,Politics and Life

Scott R. Paeth, E. Harold Breitenberg Jr and Hak Joon Lee (eds), Shaping Public Theology: Selections from the Writings of Max L. Stackhouse, Eerdmans: Grand Rapids, Mich., 2014; 392 pp.: 9780802868817, £26.99/$40.00 (pbk)

To read or review these books in tandem is to find oneself in the middle of a disagreement about the very nature of theological ethics. It’s a deep disagreement, reaching down to basic principles and assumptions about the nature of the Church and its relationship to liberal modernity, and to choose between them is to choose between two different conceptions of Christian vocation in a pluralist society. Even to describe these two positions without banal oversimplifications is by no means an easy task, but it is helped by the way in which the books address each other and the theological traditions they represent.

Paeth, Breitenberg and Lee, in their choice from Max Stackhouse’s back-catalogue, want to act like sappers, undermining the edifice of what they see as sectarian post-liberal theology in favour of a ‘realist’ or ‘engaged’ alternative. Public theology, they write, can take many forms, but ‘not all of them are faithful, competent and capacious enough to engage with the pressing issues and challenges of society’ (p. 306). The first of three sections includes two extracts in particular where Stackhouse takes up cudgels against the bêtes noires of political and theological liberalisms – Alisdair MacIntyre and Stanley Hauerwas. The subsequent section lays out Stackhouse’s theological ethical method – this is highly dialogical, where faith offers us ground on which to stand while we ‘engage in a continuing and dynamic process of evaluation, blessing and support, criticism and transformation of the specific institutions in the social system which sustain or inhibit moral life’ (p. 152) – indeed, in Stackhouse’s view, one need not be a Christian to be about the business of ‘Christian Social Ethics’. The last section turns to Stackhouse’s manful attempts to wrestle theologically with turn-of-the-century uncertainties – the dominance of the market economy, the end of the (unattractive) communist alternative and the inexorable march of globalization.

In Approaching the End the recently retired Stanley Hauerwas does not offer, or so he says, his ‘swan song’ – an anthology of stuff he thinks – but rather a multi-faced reflection on ‘ends’, that is, eschatological, teleological and biological ends, and how these frame, and are framed by, the life of the Church. As he says, he’s suspicious of ‘method’ (another point of conflict with Stackhouse) and prefers to jump in at the deep end. That said, his first essay – ‘The End Is in the Beginning: Creation and Apocalyptic’ – is something of a prospectus. Unfortunately, it’s also the most difficult, a comparative reflection on Karl Barth’s and Jean Porter’s theologies of creation and their relationship to how Christians reason morally. Stackhouse takes on Hauerwas directly. Hauerwas doesn’t mention Stackhouse, but his early chapters set out a particular critique of liberalism, and implicitly of the churches and theologians he believes to be implicit in it (and Stackhouse would surely be one). The liberal State, he argues, demands sacrifice, the ultimate act of love – not least in the giving of its sons and daughters in war. Counter-intuitively, he draws Pete Leithart’s defence of Constantine – the emperor who ended the system of Roman cult sacrifices. How can we follow the Jesus who is the end of sacrifice and affirm the system of sacrifice latent in liberalism? His second and third sections unfold differently – exploring the eschatologically shaped Church, and then reflecting on specific questions around health, disability and bioethics.

By the end of the two books, a reader will be left in serious doubt about whether these two ethicists are pursuing the same discipline at all. In saying that, I would not want to indulge the framing of Hauerwas as a ‘sectarian, fideistic tribalist’, as James Gustafson once put it (thereby giving him something to dine out on in perpetuity), purely focused on an idealized church while Stackhouse takes on the real world of business, human rights, or even ‘management’. In one sense, Hauerwas’s is far more ‘applied’ in his final chapters than most of the Stackhouse material, save for a brief three pages on divorce. Rather, their objectives – their ends, if you like – are different, and refuse to be harmonized. Stackhouse wants a ‘just, peaceful, bountiful and loving global society’ (p. xv) – this is political theology at its most ambitious. Hauerwas has a more modest goal in mind – helping the Church to negotiate the world in the time in between the beginning and the end, but in a way that calls attention to the end. In my mind, it is not clear to me that Stackhouse’s approach is more ‘realistic’ or ‘engaged’ at all.

These books both come at the end of long and distinguished careers, giving occasion to reflect on what Hauerwas and Stackhouse have left behind. Hauerwas has perhaps ‘travelled’ further, Stackhouse – partly because he is a more entertaining writer (though frankly both Stackhouse and Hauerwas can suffer from an excessive loquaciousness which, at its worst, risks making their prose unfit for public consumption). Hauerwas, though, possesses the power of the aphorism, which has rendered his writing and speaking consistently engaging and thought provoking. More importantly, Hauerwas has been able to address the place of the Church in ‘post-Christendom’ without anxiety, offering theology and ethics which are located, but not bounded, in the Church. Stackhouse and others – I think of Hans Küng – have sought a political theology which is so global in scope that too often they have ended up addressing nothing in particular in order to help no-one in particular, without the means or theory of change which matches its own ambitions.