Hauerwas

A (Very) Critical Introduction

Nicholas M. Healy

• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780802825995
• eBook ISBN: 9781467440462
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

Stanley Hauerwas is one of the most important and robustly creative theologians of our time, and his work is well known and much admired. But Nicholas Healy -- himself an admirer of Hauerwas's thought -- believes that it has not yet been subjected to the kind of sustained critical analysis that is warranted by such a significant and influential Christian thinker. As someone interested in the broader systematic-theological implications of Hauerwas's work, Healy fills that gap in Hauerwas: A (Very) Critical Introduction.
After a general introduction to Hauerwas's work, Healy examines three main areas of his thought: his method, his social theory, and his theology. According to Healy, Hauerwas's overriding concern for ethics and church-based apologetics so dominates his thinking that he systematically distorts Christian doctrine. Healy illustrates what he sees as the deficiencies of Hauerwas's theology and argues that it needs substantial revision.

Chapter 1

Reading Hauerwas; Reading This Book

Why write a very critical introduction to Stanley Hauerwas? In my opinion, Hauerwas’s work has not as yet been subjected to the kind of exacting critical analysis that is appropriate for such a well-­known and controversial Christian thinker. There have been a good number of important criticisms of his work, to be sure, but for the most part these have been limited to one or two key issues, and they have usually been made in the course of developing an argument for a particular project not directly connected with his.1 Those who have engaged in book-­length discussions of Hauerwas’s work have sometimes been somewhat critical, but not, I think, sufficiently so, and have generally been content to propose modifications at most.2

Here the idea is to push the criticism much further and more extensively, not in particular areas so much, nor with a particular project of my own in view, but rather to get a handle on the work as a whole and assess it as such. I do not discuss all areas of his work, even those that are rightly judged to be important and especially insightful, such as his contributions in the field of medical ethics and his valuable essays on the disabled. For one thing, I do not have the expertise to be able to say anything of special interest about such matters to a reader of a book such as this. But that aside, I think that although these areas do illustrate and display the implications of his main argument, they do not contribute all that much to it, so they do not have to be covered by a critical analysis like this one, which is oriented toward assessing Hauerwas’s work as a whole.

Naturally, in order critically to examine his work in this way, I have had to come up with an interpretation of it as a whole, including how its various parts fit together. I have tried to make the interpretation as fair and nuanced as I can, but one reason why it may not seem entirely fair — besides its being so very critical — is that my reading of Hauerwas’s texts is guided to some extent by concerns that are somewhat different from his. Hauerwas and I are both Christians, of course, and so we take for granted a set of Christian presuppositions and a history of reflection upon them that is practical as well as theoretical. Perhaps the key differences between us (apart from ability, personal background, and the like) are that I attempt to be a systematic theologian and that I am a Roman Catholic. Although the difference in denomination will occasionally surface, the difference in theological interest is by far the more significant. I am concerned with systematic-­theological analysis and criticism of his work, while he is concerned to develop a constructive project that originates within, and is ordered toward, a social-­ethical perspective. Why that difference matters so much will become clear by the end of the book.

Those who share Hauerwas’s particular agenda and his ethical interests may therefore find my interpretation unsatisfactory for various reasons, and may conclude as a result that my criticisms are misdirected or wrong. My hope is that others will find enough within the critical analysis I present here to think that, even if the analysis is not always as good as they would have it be, it does indicate areas where some significant revisions of Hauerwas’s argument are necessary, and where some of his assumptions, proposals, and agenda items should be modified or abandoned. This is one sense in which this book is an introduction. That is, it attempts to pull together a broad range of critical reflection for others to reject, rework, or develop further in their own constructive projects. In no way is it an attempt at a kind of final judgment on Hauerwas.

In view of the “(very) critical” in the title, I think I should stress what would otherwise be obvious, namely that this is not a very critical introduction to Stanley Hauerwas the person. Such an effort would be rude, arrogant, and, at best, only superficially interesting. Rather, this book is a very critical introduction solely to what he has written, to his texts, which is a foolhardy enough undertaking in itself. Although this may seem an obvious point, consider the fact that most books on Hauerwas are written by people who know him. I have found that some of those who know him well seem to see in his work things I cannot find, and vice versa. I do not know Professor Hauerwas, and I have kept it that way, even though I hear he is a wonderful guy.3 I could have made efforts to meet him and discuss his work, but I do not think it would have been of much benefit for this critical essay, and I know it would have made me even more nervous about being so very critical. If I had met him, I would be thinking of his explanations when reading problematic texts, rather than working with the texts themselves. His charming personality would perhaps have led me to be less critical. I have wanted to avoid such pitfalls, even if it were at the cost of perhaps getting things a bit wrong in the eyes of those who read his work with special insight through their knowledge of his thinking expressed viva voce.

Accordingly, I have sought to read his work as one would read a theologian from another era, as it were: I acknowledge his context, of course, but I treat the texts on their own terms, for it is they that make the proposals and arguments now, not their author. This is not because I subscribe to some theoretical position concerning authorial intention. It simply reflects my view that it is the texts that count in learning about and assessing someone’s systematic-­theological proposal, not the person who writes them. So the reference in the title is to the work of Stanley Hauerwas, not the man, whose personality and personal history I will largely ignore.4

Another point about the title: Why, you may ask, should it be so very critical? What is the meaning of the bold emphasis, the “very,” in the title? Given the rather sharp tone of some of my remarks thus far (and they will get much sharper), are we to think of this as merely a hatchet-­job, an attempt to dismiss Hauerwas’s work outright as some kind of dead-­end or mistake? If not (and it is not!), then what? What makes it worth reading? What is the point of it?

Such concerns deserve a proper response at the outset of a book like this, both to orient and thereby, as it may be, to reassure the reader it is worth a further look. I have worried over the meaning and implications of the “very critical” phrase in the title, both before agreeing to write the book and throughout much of the work on it. One of the main reasons for my anxiety is something I do not always make apparent in what follows, namely that I admire Hauerwas’s work a great deal. I have learned much from it, I agree with quite a lot of it, and even where I disagree I have usually gained some good insights from it. His thinking has become a significant part of my own thinking. Yet ever since coming across his books at graduate school I have been taken aback, troubled, or at least confused by something or other on virtually every page he has written. Because I suspect I am not alone in this, it seemed a good idea to put together a critical analysis of his work that would display what the problems are, as I see them, at least.

In thinking over the relations between my own thinking, this critical analysis, and Hauerwas’s work, I have found it useful to make a distinction between a theologian’s “agenda” and the “argument” he or she constructs to support its acceptance by others, the agenda and the argument together constituting the theologian’s “project.” Let us say that a person’s theological agenda is constituted by a particular set of desired changes in the life and thought of Christians and the church. The changes might be to recover former things, to modify or further develop what is already present in some form, or to bring within the Christian orbit something more or less new, and so on. The agenda might be radical or reformist in nature, largely practical or purely theoretical, restricted or broad in scope. Such an agenda can be developed by any Christian, whether church leaders or theologians or ordinary laity, but the concern here, of course, is with the second group, the professional theologians.

Given this understanding of a theological agenda, we can distinguish between a theologian’s agenda and the rationale the theologian develops to persuade others of the reasonableness and benefits of the desired changes. This rationale is the theological “argument,” which is constituted by the various theoretical, rhetorical, and other means by which the theologian proposes and forwards the agenda.

This distinction between agenda and argument points to the possibility that a particular agenda can be supported by somewhat different arguments. A couple of examples will make the point. We might say that Karl Barth’s agenda was to recover the comprehensive significance, centrality, and prevenience of the person and work of Jesus Christ for the church, in order thereby to counter those patterns of thought and action which he regarded as distortions of Christianity. Barth’s argument took the form of the complex and extensive Christocentric trinitarian theology of the Church Dogmatics. However, the particularities of Barth’s arguments — for example, his development of a particularly strong Christological metaphysics, his heavy reliance upon a distinctive doctrine of revelation, his rather idiosyncratic sacramental theology, and so on — may not be absolutely necessary to support the broad agenda as I just summarized it. It might be possible, that is, to come up with somewhat different arguments that would indicate the need or advisability to make much the same changes he sought. Likewise, and perhaps more obviously, if we say that Karl Rahner’s agenda was to enable the church and its members to talk about God’s gracious action in the world in a way that is reasonable to both modern diaspora Christians and contemporary European philosophers, his argument did not necessarily have to take the transcendental-­existential form he actually developed in order for it to support something like that same agenda.

Thus we can say that (1) some theologians may share much the same agenda, and seek to realize it by means of much the same kind of arguments (as, say, some Barthians and some Rahnerians do, sometimes forming schools of thought as a result); (2) other theologians may share a similar agenda yet disagree to a varying degree over what constitutes a suitable argument for it; and, (3) it may be that yet others agree with most of the argumentation, but dispute the agenda, and end up using the arguments to support rather different changes.

Obviously these distinctions between agenda, argument, and project cannot be pushed very far. The argument will in some significant respects become integral to the description of the desired changes, so if it fails to appeal, the agenda may look less worthy than otherwise. Such may well have happened in the reception of both Barth and Rahner, or of any number of significant theologies, such as liberation and feminist theologies. That is, while Rahner’s agenda may have seemed very worthy to some who were convinced by his arguments, others have found the same arguments actually undermined or otherwise rendered problematic more or less the same set of changes they would otherwise have sought, or prompted them to reconsider and revise their own agendas.

Unease over the latter possibility partly informs this book. That is, I am concerned that Hauerwas’s argument may hinder or otherwise endanger an agenda I and others share with him. But now we need to distinguish between two different agendas. I and many others find in Hauerwas’s work an agenda — which we can call the “general agenda” — to which we also subscribe, provided it is not confused with the more specific agenda that follows, or seems to follow, from his argument, which we can call his “particular agenda.”

The shared general agenda items seek to bring about changes within the churches along the following lines (in no particular order, and by no means an exhaustive list): a shift of focus in social ethics away from a tendency to abstraction and universalism; likewise a shift away from ethics as the theoretical business of resolving moral quandaries by means of a method or a principle (such as “love” or “responsibility”); a greater emphasis upon our embodied existence with, correlatively, a greater sense of place and particularity, together with a rejection of an anemically spiritualized Christianity; a recovery of a concern to develop distinctly Christian characters among the members of the church; a collective rejection of those forms of Christianity that reductively, abstractly, and/or slothfully consider it to be a “system of beliefs” that we can adopt without clearly acknowledging that our beliefs, and the practices which embody them, should transform us in some way; a greater emphasis upon the relation between living faith and obedient living and thus also upon the role of community formation of the individual through socially-­sanctioned practices, especially worship; a reaffirmation and expansion of our understanding of the concrete church as that human context within which we may become more fully Christian.

I think it likely that not a few Christians among those who think and write about Christianity share something like this general agenda, perhaps as part of their own more particular agenda (as in my case). So these items do not constitute something that can be labeled simply as “Hauerwas’s agenda,” even though he is among those most responsible for putting it together and promoting it. His particular agenda, on the other hand, seeks to bring the churches to agree that pacifism is the central Christian norm, that all forms of Constantinianism must be rejected, that liberalism and other traditions have no place in Christian thinking and practice since Christianity has its own rationality, and many other items which we will discuss in the chapters to follow.

So we can say that while much of Hauerwas’s general agenda is shared by not a few theologians, including myself, it is likely that some of us would offer arguments at some distance from Hauerwas’s own and find some parts of his argument unconvincing. We find Hauerwas’s more particular agenda unwarranted by his argument and, on that account, we may wonder if we should not take another look at the general agenda we share. One concern of this book, then, is to analyze just what may be problematic within his argument for those who are otherwise largely sympathetic to the general agenda, by and large, with a view to making it easier for everyone to develop more cogent arguments for something like that agenda. This book, then, does not attempt any criticism from other, more sharply divergent agendas and construals of Christianity, though it may at times reflect some of their arguments.

Another reason for the very critical approach has to do with the force of Hauerwas’s argument. In general, Hauerwas is not an inclusive thinker, in the sense that he does not — that is, his texts do not — tend to look for what is good in proposals that differ from his own, beyond those that are fairly similar. Nor, apart from an occasional qualification, does he seem to accept the possibility that one can be a good Christian and yet also be a liberal or a Constantinian. Instead, he generally rules out alternative proposals to his own about how we should live as Christians and the churches, even though it would seem that most Christians and churches — and their duly authorized leaderships — do not live, and do not believe they should live, in the way he says they should, and have not lived, nor have they believed they should live, in such ways throughout most of the church’s history. Often he writes as though he believes there is no true church if it is tainted with Constantianism or liberalism or individualism, with activism or idealism, with humanism or spiritualism or the wrong kind of rights talk, o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations for Books by Stanley Hauerwas
• 1. Reading Hauerwas; Reading This Book
• 2. The Church, the Center
• 3. An Ecclesiocentric Method
• 4. The Empirical Church and Christian Identity
• 5. Hauerwas’s Theology
• Bibliography
• Index