With the Grain of the Universe: The Church's Witness and Natural Theology

Christian Century, Nov 21, 2001 by Richard Wightman Fox

Niebuhr was at one with the Social Gospel in caring much more about social justice than about his own or anyone else's individual salvation. And of course social justice was not only about witnessing, but about political action to build coalitions, change laws, and shore up imperfect institutions that defend the poor and disadvantaged.

When Hauerwas asserts that liberal Christians are those who take "humans, not God, as the center of Christian faith," or when he says that one of "the most cherished conceits of modernity" is that "humans are the measure of all that is," he reveals that he has not thought hard enough about what liberalism and modernity mean to their proponents. He does not have to agree with them, of course, but he owes it to himself to know his enemy better than this.

From the liberal standpoint, modernity is not the desert of meaningless lifestyle-chasing Hauerwas implies it is (he appears to endorse Wendell Berry's judgment that the "dominant story of our age, undoubtedly, is that of adultery and divorce"). Liberal Christians typically put God at the center of their faith, not human beings. They typically believe that God is love, and as such knowable and accessible to them when they are at their best, that is, when they are cultivating love individually and socially. Some liberal Christians doubtless make the attainment of love too simple, as Niebuhr thought they did. But plenty of liberals have learned from him, from his predecessors like Walter Rauschenbusch and from his disciples like the now-late, always-great Robert McAfee Brown, that the path of love is the path of suffering.

With the Grain of the Universe shows Christian and secular liberals why James and Niebuhr are so important to their faith. James, like his hero Whitman, underwrites the quest for novel experience, for becoming more fully human. This was Emerson's way: living one's life in a quest for wider and wider circles of experience. Liberalism is about individuals getting to be who they decide they most truly are, according to their own lights, whether they are women or men, gay or straight, no matter what their color, cultural background or economic status. Liberal modernity is about choice, and helping others acquire the power to choose. It is about choosing again and again, remaining open throughout one's life to refashioning oneself. This can look like anarchy to many defenders of tradition. But now it is a tradition in its own right, a tradition (in the 19th-century U.S. alone) developed by Jefferson, Emerson, Fuller, Douglass, Whitman, Lincoln, Stanton, Anthony, Gihnan, Rauschenbusch, Gladden, Debs, Dewey and James, among many others. It is a tradition that needs defending today more than ever. It is the tradition at the fountainhead of liberal and democratic freedom.

Hauerwas is right that an outlook based on the pursuit of individual autonomy may well launch people into idolatry, as they will often put themselves first, before other people and before God. If they deny their createdness, they are setting themselves up for a spiritual fall even if they finagle a worldly success. But liberal religion has been more vibrant in the modern era than Hauerwas imagines. Thanks to such teachers as James and Niebuhr, it holds in balance forces that traditionalists often wrongly consider incompatible: individual growth and a sense of personal limits, reason and revelation, science and faith, faith and doubt, the religious and the secular.