How Catholic Is He? - books - book review

Commonweal, Jan 25, 2002 by Mark E. Gammon

With the Grain of the Universe
The Church's Witness and
Natural Theology
Stanley Hauerwas
Brazos Press, $22.99, 256 pp.

Christian Existence Today
Essays on Church, World, and Living in Between
Stanley Hauerwas
Brazos Press, $19.99, 271 pp.

The Hauerwas Reader
Edited by John Berkman and Michael Cartwright
Duke University Press, $27.95, 730 pp.

Stanley Hauerwas is a threat to American Catholicism, but it depends on whom you ask whether that is such a bad thing. The generation of Christian ethicists now dominant in Catholic universities are the intellectual heirs of John Courtney Murray. They have written at length to persuade America that Catholicism can work with a liberal democracy, and they have worked hard to make Catholics key contributors to the American public conversation. In particular, Catholic theologians have offered natural law as a nonsectarian conceptual tool to give liberalism more of a moral backbone.

In the meantime, Stanley Hauerwas, no fan of natural law, keeps churning Catholic theologians out of the Duke graduate program. Hauerwas and his former students call the church to rethink its priorities, to reframe moral and political questions in a way that addresses the church rather than society as a whole. According to Hauerwas, America and Catholicism are not quite as compatible as we like to think. With the Grain of the Universe is Hauerwas's most important work yet for those concerned with such matters.

This book, the published version of the 2001 Gifford Lectures in Natural Theology, challenges the claim that theology and Christian morality are intelligible when separated from the doctrine of the church. The argument takes the form of a narrative recounting Lord Gifford's purposes in founding the lectures and how three of the subsequent lecturers fulfilled or rejected his intentions. Informed by epistemological presuppositions of the Scottish Enlightenment, Gifford wanted the lectures to enrich our understanding of God through natural or scientific means. Hauerwas recounts how William James's The Varieties of Religious Experience fulfilled Gifford's intentions. James essentially turns theology into social psychology, rendering God but a subjective cog in an ethical system based on reason and experience. Religious experience, for James, is a motivating force operating in support of a pragmatic humanism.

Reinhold Niebuhr's Gifford lectures, published as The Nature and Destiny of Man, dress up James's pragmatism in biblical language, but in the process, Hauerwas claims, Niebuhr drains Christology of any real transformative power. Christ becomes an ethical ideal so lofty that to try to reach it inevitably results in the sin of pride. God is all about the fulfillment of human need, but humans must be properly humble and chastened with regard to what is possible. In contrast to Niebuhr, the hero of Hauerwas's story is Karl Barth, who insists that any attempt to derive God from human experience or scientific means is bound to be but a reflection of human needs and desires. Barth offers a God who makes claims on humans, who tells us who we are and what the true nature of the world around us is.

Through this story, which includes detailed and illuminating accounts of the three lecturers' lives and work, Hauerwas sets up his own position, namely that the God revealed to us through Scripture and church shows us the true nature of the universe. The peaceful witness of the church may seem out of step with human experience of the world, but it ultimately proves itself "with the grain of the universe" (a phrase borrowed from John Howard Yoder) as created by the Trinitarian God known in Christ. The only "proof" necessary is to be found in the lives of faithful witnesses such as Yoder, John Paul II, and Dorothy Day.

Past readers of Hauerwas will find the book a bit of a departure, in that it is a sustained argument rather than a collection of essays. Though the work is atypically academic in tone, the usual Hauerwas virtues and vices are to be found. In presenting James and Niebuhr, Hauerwas seems genuinely appreciative of the intellectual achievements of those with whom he disagrees. Of course, Hauerwas is never boring, sometimes gracing the reader with entertaining asides and histories, especially in the extensive footnotes (see pp. 35-36 to learn how the invention of the clock marginalized the church). He also displays his usual penchant for the one-liner, a habit at once amusing and infuriating. He sums up James's New England religious environment as "Calvinism shorn of Calvin's Christ"--a phrase he has used in the past to more-or-less accurately describe the work of his teacher, James Gustafson. Here it is more pithy than accurate. Nonetheless, the story as a whole holds together and serves as a challenge to those who hold forth natural law as an autonomous source of moral authority when separated from the revealed doctrines of the church.

Those seeking an introduction to Hauerwas's work have recently been offered two good resources. One is the Brazos Press reprint of Christian Existence Today, originally published in 1988. This collection contains a number of important "programmatic" essays, including the popular "A Tale of Two Stories: On Being a Christian and a Texan," and the oft-cited "A Christian Critique of Christian America." Most important here is the introduction, in which Hauerwas answers those critics who label him "sectarian": "Show me where I am wrong about God, Jesus, the limits of liberalism, the nature of the virtues, or the doctrine of the church, but do not shortcut that task by calling me a sectarian."