Abstract
Hans Frei makes the point that Barth’s Church Dogmatics was so expansive because it revelled in a theological speech that had fallen into disrepair. Now in his seventies and having written or edited around 30 books, Hauerwas likewise senses that learning to speak Christian remains a time-consuming task given the ‘aspect blindness’ of the contemporary church. This collection of 21 essays and sermons is grouped under three themes: the vision and speech involved in learning to say ‘God’; normative matters around the language of love; and teachers and movements who have shaped Hauerwas’s habits of speech. As well as chapters on Niebuhr, MacIntyre, Aquinas, and Catholic Social Teaching, this latter section also contains an essay on Methodist theological ethics that indicates more explicitly than before its influence on Hauerwas’s thought. There’s a lot thrown into this ‘kitchen sink’ (p. x) of a book, but the attention to theological speech acts is characteristic of Hauerwas’s writing in general; to cite but four sentences from his writing that demonstrate such a claim: ‘people not sentences make truthful claims’ (Wilderness Wanderings, 2001, p. 145); explanations can ‘give the impression that the explanation is more important than the witness’ (With the Grain of the Universe, 2001, p. 146); ‘the primary task of my work…was to demonstrate the link between the truth of what we say we believe and the shape of the lives we live. ‘“Ethics” has always been my way to pursue that task’; ‘Susan was not an intellectual, but everything she did would have been unintelligible if the God we worship as Christians did not exist’ (Hannah’s Child, 2010, pp. 69, 221).
Hauerwas’s 1990 work, Naming the Silences, diagnosed a tendency in medicine to be the last bastion of enlightenment dreams to bear the burden previously borne by theodicy and get us out of life alive. He returns to this in his second chapter on Augustine’s account of evil as privation. As he writes, a church enticed by ‘a god whose task is to put us…on the winning side of history’ and estranged from the Psalms can end up asking ‘Why does a good God allow bad things to happen to good people?’ (p. 11). Here, Augustine’s account of evil is properly to be read in conjunction with his confessions. His response is not strictly a theodicy, but the logic of a narrative that lives life as a confession of sin in the light of divine grace. His teaching on sin as the privation of good reveals to us that we often pursue apparent goods, or reason that evil can be defeated by evil when in fact ‘evil cannot overwhelm the good that is God’s creation’ (pp. 23, 24).
Chapter 15 sees Hauerwas and Romand Coles attempt to complicate Charles Taylor’s immanent/transcendence duality in A Secular Age (2007). The ‘radical ordinary’ lives of Jean Vanier, Ella Baker, Robert Moses and Martin Luther King incarnate caritas and agape (p. 184) as ‘hopeful alternatives to this secular age’ (p. 188). This interrupts the ‘flat pluralism’ imagined by ‘people thoroughly engaged in the liturgical work of shopping malls, television, exploitative labor…and gated geographies’ (p. 177). While Taylor helps us see ‘that atheism may not be all that interesting’ (p. 181), Hauerwas and Coles find it odd that he doesn’t engage with the lives and work of Barth and Bonhoeffer. These authors named Nazi visions of transcendence as idolatry ‘not because they thought maintaining some account of transcendence was at stake, but because they saw that the “immanent one”, Jesus of Nazareth, was being denied by the refusal to let him be preached to those to whom he had been sent’ (p. 186). Taylor identifies the moral narrative or spin of a secularism whose closed perspective is ‘obvious’. It is likened to ‘Wittgenstein’s “picture that held us captive”—a frame that we “have trouble often thinking of ourselves outside, even as an imaginative exercise”’ (Taylor, 2007, p. 549). Yet Hauerwas cites with approval a recent conference ‘Christianity, Democracy, and the Radical Ordinary’ which brought together ‘people trying to engage in radical democracy and radical ecclesia in dozens of communities in the United States’ (p. 187). Such political friendships, if chastened by an attention to the failures and possibilities of history, offer the hope that the current dangerous collaboration between ‘Constantinian Christianity (transcendence) and neo-Constantinian democracy (immanence)’ need not be perpetuated. Oft wrongly chided for his sectarian fideism, a less combative, more engaged tone is detectable in Hauerwas these days. If they can remain faithful and not forget their native tongue, the grassroots politics of radical ecclesia can yet be salt and light in an anaemic democracy, though those who would be social justice prophets scolding their flock need to ‘do so in a manner that does not result in the displacement of worship at the heart of the church’ (p. 85).
Hauerwas has elsewhere argued that ‘theology is a servant to the preaching ministry of the church’ (Preaching to Strangers, 1992, p. 12) and that a test of theology is whether or not it preaches and edifies the church. Hauerwas switched from preaching critic in Preaching to Strangers (1992), in which he responded to William Willimon’s sermons, to two books of sermons (Cross-Shattered Christ: Meditations on the Seven Last Words, 2005; A Cross-Shattered Church: Reclaiming the Theological Heart of Preaching, 2009). Here he adds four more and expresses the hope at a commencement address that students will be able to respond to his enquiry about their day, with ‘I think I wrote one good sentence in a sermon for Sunday’ (p. 93). Hauerwas’s own sentences don’t disappoint: ‘for those who assume that salvation is to know without looking… To be raised with Christ means the end of any attempt to stare passively at the crucifixion. You cannot stare at that in which you participate’ (p. 7); ‘Paul thinks that what we do with our bodies is more indicative of who we are than what we say we believe’ (p. 151); ‘I fear the stress on “eternal life” spiritualises the work of Christ. As a result, the political character of Jesus’ resurrection is lost… He is not playing at being human. He is human all the way down. The resurrected Christ is the crucified Christ’ (pp. 124-25); Christians are, all too often, ‘John Stuart Mill’s people’ for whom the meaning of phrases like ‘your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit’ and ‘you are not your own, you have been bought with a price’ is lost (p. 152).
Brad Kallenberg observed that Hauerwas’s refusal to ‘translate the argument is itself part of his argument’, but Hauerwas doubts whether these essays add up to ‘anything so grand as an argument’ (p. x). Instead, in the vein of Wittgenstein’s phrase, ‘Don’t think, but look!’ Hauerwas wants to train us not to say too much. For liberals, this means higher critical method, which can ‘rage against the silences of scripture’ (p. 88), or for conservatives, domesticating God to family values and American nationalism. He relates two remarks from Wittgenstein and Barth. The former, upon passing a street evangelist, commented, ‘If he really meant what he was shouting, he would not use that tone of voice’ (pp. 168-69), while the latter responded to an American evangelical’s enquiry about whether or not he was saved with the terse reply —‘33AD’. Hauerwas bemoans the ‘desperate attempt by some Christians to reassure themselves that what they believe cannot be true unless they force others to believe what they believe’ (p. 169). By contrast, learning ‘to use the word through our worship and prayer to the one called God…requires a lifetime…of transformation’ (p. xii).
Hauerwas’s commencement address at Eastern Mennonite Seminary is a particular highlight. He cites James’s warning to teachers that the tongue is flesh and its speech bodily, like a rudder that directs the ship. Leaders are to ‘acquire the habits of speech through the right worship of God’ and through scripture, ‘the source as well as the paradigm of Christian speech’ (p. 88). Seminary graduates may be tempted to say on the unexpected death of a loved one that ‘they have gone to a better place’, thus underwriting the pagan idea of an eternal soul, when for Christians, ‘our life with God on either side of death is a gift’ (p. 88); or that ‘Jesus is but one way to God’ when ‘if Jesus is the way to God, he is so only because he is the second person of the Trinity’ (p. 89). Indeed ministers often ‘cannot say “no”’ and end up ‘nibbled to death by ducks’ in their niceness, ‘because it is not clear what their “job” is in the first place’. Here Hauerwas’s advice is to ‘help the people you serve recognise that their support of your study is a good the whole people of God have in common’ (pp. 85, 93).
As Christian speech becomes less intelligible to secularised congregations and leaders and especially as they mistakenly defend against this by clinging to the residue of Constantinian power or mistake being salt and light for civilising democracy, Hauerwas’s attentiveness to speaking Christian is timely. With every new essay I read in his often apparently haphazard collections, the more coherent, interconnected and illuminating his thought becomes. Hauerwas remarked of Barth that ‘any attempt to understand him requires attention not only to what he says but how he says it’ (With the Grain of the Universe, 2001, p. 146). Hauerwas’s sentences avoid theology done in the apologetic mode and pay attention to the secular and Constantinian assumptions implicit in our grammar. The speech acts of the church are where the word is made flesh and makes his dwelling among us.