Abstract
Working with a systematician’s rigour, Nicholas M. Healy of St John’s University, New York, offers a mostly fair-minded and sympathetic assessment of Hauerwas’s theology. At one point he compares Hauerwas’s métier to that of an occasional essayist or a Christian intellectual gadfly such as G. K. Chesterton (p. 10). Yet Healy is surprised that, given the pervasive influence that Hauerwas exerts in contemporary theology, he has ‘not yet been subjected to the kind of sustained and critical analysis’ that such a thinker warrants (back cover).
Seeing a theologian’s project as combining an agenda with an argument, Healy runs a systematic rule over the Hauerwasian canon. He is broadly in agreement with Hauerwas’s agenda, though more so with the general agenda (rejecting such things as abstraction and quandary ethics, anaemic spiritualised Christianity and unembodied doctrinal beliefs), than with the particular or radical agenda (a Christian tradition where liberalism has no place and pacifism is normative, and in which your salvation is in doubt when you belong to a Constantianian church with a US flag in the sanctuary). Here, Healy supposes that Hauerwas’s ‘selection of pacifism as the key Christian practice, and his polemic against American political domination and cultural hegemony, both have something to do with his coming to maturity in the United States in the 1960s as much as they do with his reading of Scripture and John Howard Yoder’ (p. 93).
Healy’s critique of Hauerwas’s argument draws on David Kelsey’s distinctions between three diverse areas of enquiry that theologians have tended to focus on. The logic of belief has a theocentric focus on the nature and purposes of God’s being. The logic of coming to believe relates to ‘how we accept faith and why’, and has an apologetic aspect. Finally, the logic of living our beliefs concerns ethics. Problems arise when these three logics are conflated, which is common in modern theology and, in Healy’s judgement, rare in traditional or reformed theology. Kelsey illustrates this with reference to Schleiermacher, whose Christology, in which ‘Jesus is understood primarily in terms of his function for the present life of the church’ (as Healy puts it, p. 54), makes God-consciousness the ‘trigger’ for full human actualisation and faith. This conflation has the consequence of obscuring ‘Jesus’ unsubstitutable personal identity’ (p. 53). Schleiermacher’s apologetic/soteriological focus on coming to believe may reach Christianity’s cultured despisers, but at the expense of his Christology.
In Healy’s judgement, the same conflation of these three logics to the detriment of the first is an evident weakness in Hauerwas’s work. As an ethicist, his focus is on the logic of living out our beliefs and his theological web spins in an ecclesiocentric manner which thins out and distorts its theology into ‘ecclesism’ (‘an extreme … distortion of Christianity consequent upon a reductive locus for all theological enquiry’, p. 40). At this point, Healy seeks to press home the resemblance between this arch-critic of enlightenment liberal theology, and Schleiermacher, its godfather. He seeks to show that Hauerwas’s turn to the church is in the mould of a modernity in which ‘theologians lost confidence in the [gospel of Jesus Christ], … turning instead to the benefits of the church’ (p. 107). Healy sets Hauerwas over against ‘traditional’ theologians (including Barth and Bonhoeffer) for whom ‘God is understood as prior: logically, epistemologically, agentially, and ontologically’ (p. 42). Yet Hauerwas’s reading of Barth sees a refusal to ‘locate one central doctrine that will determine the meaning of all other doctrines’. Hauerwas sees himself as systematic to the extent of showing ‘how the “parts fit together” if they are to be lived’ (The Work of Theology [Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2015], p. 270).
Healy also faults Hauerwas for adopting MacIntyre’s non-theological account of practices defined as ‘socially established cooperative human activity … with the result that human powers to achieve excellence … are systematically extended’ (quoted on p. 104). He takes this to encourage an ‘apparent acceptance of Methodist perfectionism’ (p. 107), judging that it ‘can be misunderstood as almost Pelagian’ (p. 129). Hauerwas would do better to adopt Kelsey’s more theological definition of practices, which ‘makes a couple of game changing moves away from MacIntyre’ to include the phrase ‘conceptually formed’ and to exclude an express orientation to ‘systematically extending human powers of excellence’ (p. 117). This would avoid distorting the logic of belief as ‘[t]he church has not developed its practices primarily in order to form its members, but in order that we may respond appropriately to God made known in Jesus Christ by the Holy Spirit’ (p. 118). Healy’s problem here is not unlike that he sees in Abelard’s exemplarism: an emphasis upon the subjective response of the church undermines an objective understanding of the saving work of Christ ‘done independently of us and for our sakes’ (p. 125). Hauerwas has also failed to ‘bring sufficiently to the fore in his work’ the mystery of God—‘our knowledge of God and our relation to God is under God’s control … Christianity cannot be anything really like a tradition in MacIntyre’s sense’ (p. 109).
In the concluding chapter, Healy identifies two significant ways in which the logic of belief is eclipsed by the other two logics in Hauerwas. One is that, important as it is to embody the Christian story in the church’s practices, ‘the story is of One who is better than, and different from, even our best saints and their actions’ (p. 114). Healy notes that, historically, new disciples not only were inducted into the church’s practices but were catechised in its theological beliefs. As knowledge of the story of Jesus of Nazareth is an event in history, as well as being visibly embodied in the church, it is in some sense independent of the church’s actions and witness to it, and ‘Christian practices cannot be logically basic’ (p. 115). Hauerwas does claim that it is not possible to separate knowing Jesus from being his disciple but he reads the gospels as asserting that such knowledge cannot be merely cognitive but is transformative: the Autobasileia has come even among ‘unsatisfactory’ Christians (as Healy puts it). Greater attention to the discussion of the relationship between Christology and soteriology in A Community of Character, or the chapter on Jesus and the incarnation in A Peaceable Kingdom, would have helped Healy to see that he is not wholly at odds with Hauerwas here.
Hauerwas has responded to Healy in a thirteen-page postscript to his 2015 book, The Work of Theology (TWoT). Whilst he judges Healy’s criticisms to be ‘off the mark’, he takes them seriously and respects Healy as an ‘estimable theologian’ who indicates ‘possible ways of reading what I have written that I did not sufficiently guard against’ (p. 266). Yet if Richard B. Hays is correct in arguing that, ‘Theology is for Paul never merely a speculative exercise; it is always a tool for constructing community’ (The Moral Vision of the New Testament [Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1997], p. 18), then Hauerwas is not the first theologian to conflate Kelsey’s three logics. Such neatly delineated modes of doing theology may be quite foreign to the gospel kerygma in the practical reasoning and life of the church. For example, Ellen T. Charry’s examination of the pastoral function of doctrine introduces us to a sapiential theology that she takes to be central to Patristic method and hermeneutics and which ‘emotionally connects the knower to the known’ (By the Renewing of Your Minds [New York: Oxford University Press, 1997], p. 4).
Hauerwas’s popular work may be all too devotional and sermonic for Healy’s taste, but in a growing tradition of modern liturgical theology, the doxastic and the doxological are seen as inseparable. The continuity the Spirit brings ‘between our sociality and the formation of our bodies into the body of Christ’ avoids ‘a Manichean dualism between church and world’ (TWoT, p. 49). Here, Hauerwas’s writings have enlivened dissatisfied members of sound and cerebral evangelical congregations who are no longer willing to compartmentalise their doctrine and their ethics. They have further challenged the conflation of mega-church ‘felt needs’ soteriology with the crucified Christ to whom the saints and martyrs of the historical and New Testament church have witnessed.
Healy argues that the second way in which Hauerwas’s sharp turn to the church (what Healy terms his sola ecclesia hermeneutic) eclipses the logic of belief is that it denies Scripture its capacity to ‘say anything to us that we have not already learned through our formation as members of the church community’ (p. 59). In Healy’s estimation, Hauerwas ‘rejects authorial intention, remarking that we could not get a better understanding of Paul’s letters than we have now if we could ask him what he meant then, since the text is no longer Paul’s but the church’s’ (from Unleashing the Scripture [Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 1993], quoted on p. 57). Healy notes that communal reading of Scripture is no security against error, as ‘older papal documents … reveal at times mistaken or even self-serving interpretations of Scripture’ (p. 61). This ‘undermines the possibility of gaining critical distance’ or of the church hearing ‘something different and unexpected’ (p. 60). Yet Hauerwas stresses Scripture reading as a liturgical and moral act that challenges our capacity for self-deception. He quotes Athanasius who writes, ‘Anyone who wishes to understand the mind of the sacred writers must first cleanse his own life’ (in Unleashing the Scripture, p. 37). Here, one suspects that there is a degree of ‘ships passing in the night’, given the divergent concerns Healy and Hauerwas have about how the laity read Scripture, or ‘Romanticized ecclesiology’ (TWoT, p. 277), in their respective Catholic and American Protestant congregations.
Hauerwas thinks it odd when Healy brackets out his essays on ethics as ‘implications of his [Hauerwas’s] main argument’ which ‘do not contribute all that much to it’ (p. 2). For Hauerwas, ‘My ethics is where I do my theology because it is in those contexts [of disability, war, singleness and marriage, sickness] that you can show how the web that is theology is constantly changing given the problems facing the church’ (TWoT, p. 273). Indeed his Blackwell Companion to Christian Ethics (edited with Sam Wells, 2004) was seen by some readers as too theologically driven in its organisation of issues such as race, parenting, politics, abortion, cloning, marriage and war around prayer and Scripture reading, the Eucharist, offering gifts and Baptism. Certainly among ‘A’ level and undergraduate readers of Hauerwas in the UK, it is the thickness, not the thinness, of his theology that is evident in his ethics. And it is precisely because of his leftfield approach to issues in bioethics that many readers come to see that theology has much to offer as a discipline and practice.
Hauerwas shares Healy’s concern that the growth of theological ethics represents a loss of nerve in doing first order theology: ‘Too often I fear “Christian ethics” is simply the name for a way of doing Christian theology without taking theology all that seriously’ (TWoT, p. 126). Equally, he despairs at ‘The church-growth strategy to simplify the gospel’ which ‘is a version of the liberal Protestant theological presumption that the basic language of the faith is a description of our experience rather than being about God’ (TWoT, p. 106). He comments that each chapter title in TWoT begins with ‘How’ in order to ‘stress how the living out of the gospel … entails learning a language that is a decisive challenge to the apologetic agenda of modern theology’ (TWoT, p. 269). In a critique of the lack of theology in Hauerwas, one can excuse the inattention to the likes of Murdoch, Anscombe, Wittgenstein, Taylor and Burrell. Yet if Healy’s book was a first encounter with Hauerwas’s work, one would struggle to see the breadth and significance of his critical engagement with contemporary culture and ethics. The irony is that it is precisely in adopting Barth’s refusal to translate theological speech as part of the argument that Hauerwas has gained a hearing from an audience outside of but sympathetic to the church. To make propositions visible in people is not to prioritise a flawed church over creedal beliefs. It is to point to the ‘performative theology’ (p. 271) of a body that is possible, explicable and engaging due to the difference Christ makes, even in universities that increasingly view theology as a relic of an ecclesiastical past.
Hauerwas is keen to stress that most of The Work of Theology was written before Healy’s book, yet both it and his second 2015 title, The Holy Spirit (Nashville, TN: Abingdon), seem to be chiefly addressing persistent concerns raised by the likes of Healy, Webster and Biggar. One senses frustration when Hauerwas writes, ‘I cannot help but wonder who Healy was reading when he characterized what I have been about as insufficiently theological’ (TWoT, p. 272). It is unlikely that Healy will be wholly convinced by Hauerwas’s response given that a conflation of the three logics results from his ecclesism. Aghast at the thought of becoming Schleiermacher whilst fighting him, and of having moved too far from system to story, there is a Trinitarian turn as Hauerwas corrects a not unreasonable if unintended reading of his work. Hauerwas is at the stage of his career that he can see first-hand the bother Barth saw with ‘Barthians’. For Hauerwas, as for Obama, 2015 appears to be the legacy year. One only holds the most influential of roles, officially or unofficially, for a term; thereafter one’s critics get to reinterpret one’s work.
Healy lands some punches in his insistence that Hauerwas has failed to ‘lay out the doctrinal warrants and implications of his argument systematically’ (p. 40). Yet, as N. T. Wright is said to have wryly remarked, the problem with theology is that if you don’t say everything all of the time, they’ll have you down as a heretic. It is by the church’s prayer and practice—including in the way their ‘parts fit together’ (TWoT, p. 270)—rather than its system of logic, that he urges the church to ‘make clear to the world, a world shaped by the presupposition of the secular state, that what we believe is not “mere belief”’ (The State of the University [Oxford: Blackwell, 2007], p. 186, quoting Talal Asad). The systematisation Healy asks for would straightjacket Hauerwas, and he needs his hands free for praying and for fighting the good fight.