With the Grain of the Universe

The Church's Witness and Natural Theology

Hauerwas, Stanley

• Publisher: Baker Academic
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781441244796
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

This major work by one of the world's top theologians offers a provocative and closely argued perspective on natural theology. Stanley Hauerwas shows how natural theology, divorced from a confessional doctrine of God, inevitably distorts our understanding of God's character and the world in which we live. This critically acclaimed book, winner of a Christianity Today Book Award, is now in paper. It includes a new afterword that sets the book in contemporary context and responds to critics.

1

God and the Gifford Lectures

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God, at least the God whom Christians worship, has seldom held center stage in the Gifford Lectures. That the god of the Gifford Lectures is rarely the Trinity is not surprising, given the conditions of Lord Gifford’s will and the times and circumstances in which the Gifford Lectures have been presented. The god that various Gifford lecturers have shown to exist or not to exist is a god that bears the burden of proof. In short, the god of the Gifford Lectures is usually a god with a problem. That some Gifford lecturers have actually tried to show that something like a god might exist seems enough of a challenge. For a Gifford lecturer to maintain that the God who exists is the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit seems wildly ambitious, if not foolish.

Yet the heart of the argument I develop in these lectures is that natural theology divorced from a full doctrine of God cannot help but distort the character of God and, accordingly, of the world in which we find ourselves. The metaphysical and existential projects to make a “place” for such a god cannot help but “prove” the existence of a god that is not worthy of worship. The Trinity is not a further specification of a more determinative reality called god, because there is no more determinative reality than the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. From the perspective of those who think we must first “prove” the existence of god before we can say anything else about god, the claim by Christians that God is Trinity cannot help but appear a “confessional” assertion that is unintelligible for anyone who is not already a Christian.

That God is Trinity is, of course, a confession. The acknowledgment of God’s trinitarian character was made necessary by the Christian insistence that the God who had redeemed the world through the cross and resurrection of Jesus was not different from the God of Abraham, Moses, and the prophets. God has never not been Trinity, but only through the struggle to render its own existence intelligible did the church discover God’s trinitarian nature. Accordingly, Christians believe rightly that few claims are more rationally compelling than our confession that God is Trinity. Of course, our knowledge that God is Trinity, a knowledge rightly described as revelation, only intensifies the mystery of God’s trinitarian nature.

I am acutely aware that claims about God’s trinitarian nature seem to be no more than sheer assertion for those whose habit of thought has been nurtured in modernity. Surely there must be a better, or at least more polite, way to begin the Gifford Lectures? Yet I assume that a Gifford lecturer is rightly held to say what he or she takes to be true. And I am a Christian theologian. As such, I am not trying to think a new thought or to rethink an old one in a new way. Rather, I must show why Christians, even Christians who are theologians, can be no more than witnesses. And the very character of that witness is an indication not only of who God is but of why that which exists, that is, God’s created order, cannot avoid witnessing to the One who is our beginning and end.

John Milbank has observed that “the pathos of modern theology is its false humility.”[1] Theologians, particularly theologians who are paid by universities, too often do theology in a manner that will not offend the peace established by the secular order. Given the requirements of that order, theology cannot help but become one more opinion, one more option, to enliven the dulled imaginations of those who suffer from knowing so much that they no longer know what they know. I hope Milbank’s warning about false humility explains why I cannot help but appear impolite, since I must maintain that the God who moves the sun and the stars is the same God who was incarnate in Jesus of Nazareth. Given the politics of modernity, the humility required for those who worship the God revealed in the cross and resurrection of Christ cannot help but appear as arrogance.

That Christian humility cannot avoid appearing arrogant is an indication of why the argument I develop in these lectures entails a politics and an ethics. I show that the very idea that we might know God abstracted from how God makes himself known was the result of the loss of a Christian politics called church. Put in the categories we have learned to use in modernity, I show why ethics cannot be separated from theology. In terms more appropriate to the Christian tradition, I show why the truthfulness of theological claims entails the work they do for the shaping of holy lives.

The title of these lectures, With the Grain of the Universe, is a phrase from an essay by John Howard Yoder. The passage that frames this phrase appears as the epigraph to this book, and it is worth repeating here:

The point that apocalyptic makes is not only that people who wear crowns and who claim to foster justice by the sword are not as strong as they think—true as that is: we still sing, “O where are Kings and Empires now of old that went and came?” It is that people who bear crosses are working with the grain of the universe. One does not come to that belief by reducing social process to mechanical and statistical models, nor by winning some of one’s battles for the control of one’s own corner of the fallen world. One comes to it by sharing the life of those who sing about the Resurrection of the slain Lamb.[2]

The attempt to develop a natural theology prior to or as grounds for subsequent claims about God cannot help but be mistaken to the extent such a project fails to help us see that there can be no deeper reality-making claim than the one Yoder makes: those who bear crosses work with the grain of the universe. Christians betray themselves as well as their non-Christian brothers and sisters when in the interest of apologetics we say and act as if the cross of Christ is incidental to God’s being. In fact, the God we worship and the world God created cannot be truthfully known without the cross, which is why the knowledge of God and ecclesiology—or the politics called church—are interdependent.

Such are the bare bones of the position that I develop in these lectures. Only in the last three lectures will I turn to these claims explicitly, but I state them at the beginning, without argument and qualification, because these are the convictions that have informed the way I have approached these lectures and that have shaped the story I tell. I realize that by stating my views so baldly I risk losing those people who have already decided such theological claims cannot be defended. To these people, I can say only that the proof is in the pudding, and I ask them to have patience—a virtue Christians share with many traditions, but also one that we believe has been given particular form by the worship of the God who would rule all creation from Christ’s cross.[3]

Keeping Faith with Adam Gifford

The question remains whether or not the lectures I am about to give are in fact the Gifford Lectures. In this respect, I am at least in good company. Alasdair MacIntyre begins his Gifford Lectures with the same question.[4] MacIntyre observes that the Gifford lecturer is someone who should try to implement the conditions of Lord Gifford’s will. Yet MacIntyre does not share Lord Gifford’s presumption that a nontraditioned account of rationality is sufficient to make natural theology a subject analogous to the natural sciences. Put more accurately, MacIntyre does not think Adam Gifford’s understanding of the natural sciences should be a model for natural theology because Gifford’s view distorts the character of science. I suspect that MacIntyre also thinks that our knowledge of God is more certain than the knowledge secured through the natural sciences. To that extent his own views cannot help but be at odds with the assumptions that shaped the provisions of Lord Gifford’s will.[5]

The clause from Lord Gifford’s will that best indicates the distance between MacIntyre and Gifford says that “the lecturers shall be under no restraint whatever in their treatment of their theme.” MacIntyre characterizes this clause as Adam Gifford’s “reckless generosity” and uses it to justify his being a Gifford lecturer.[6] From MacIntyre’s perspective, to “be under no restraint” is but an indication that we have lost the possibility of rational argument. Accordingly, MacIntyre traces the increasing incoherence of the modern university to the loss of religious tests for appointments to the professorate.[7] MacIntyre attributes the success of the natural sciences in modern universities to their informal and unstated policy of limiting questions through exclusion. Thus the sciences continue to enjoy a confidence in their ability to tell us the way things are because scientific disciplines do not correspond to Lord Gifford’s understanding of rational inquiry. In comparison to the sciences, moral and theological inquiry are now at a disadvantage because the ideological effect of Gifford-like accounts of rationality have relegated such subjects to private opinion.

However, just to the extent MacIntyre is concerned to keep faith with Gifford’s will, he honors what I take to be Gifford’s concern that those who give the Gifford Lectures should attempt to help us understand how any account of the moral life cannot be divorced from our understanding of the way things are. In Lord Gifford’s words, the Gifford Lectures are dedicated to:

“Promoting, Advancing, Teaching, and Diffusing the Study of Natural Theology,” in the widest sense of that term, in other words, “The Knowledge of God, the Infinite, the All, the First and Only Cause, the One and the Sole Substance, the Sole Being, the Sole Reality, and the Sole Existence, the Knowledge of His Nature and Attributes, the Knowledge of the Relations which men and the whole universe bear to Him, the Knowledge of the Nature and Foundation of Ethics or Morals, and of all Obligations and Duties thence arising.”[8]

MacIntyre hopes that if Lord Gifford were alive today, he might be able to recognize as his own MacIntyre’s attempt to provide a quite different account of moral rationality and its relation to natural theology.[9] It is quite remarkable that, unlike MacIntyre, many Gifford lecturers have not thought it necessary to attend to the provisions of Gifford’s bequest. I take this lack of attention to Gifford’s will as a confirmation of MacIntyre’s account of the philosophical developments over the century in which the Giffords have been given. In a world in which you can no longer trust your knowledge of how things are, it is unclear why you should keep trust with trusts.

I have called attention to MacIntyre’s attempt to justify his Gifford Lectures as the Gifford Lectures because my arguments are even more foreign to the purpose of the Gifford Lectures than MacIntyre’s. At the very least, MacIntyre shares with Gifford a profound commitment to philosophy as a master science.[10] Yet I am a theologian. Even worse, I am a theologian who has been profoundly influenced by the work of another Gifford lecturer, Karl Barth. My problem becomes even more acute because I will try to convince you that Karl Barth is the great natural theologian of the Gifford Lectures—at least he is so if you remember that natural theology is the attempt to witness to the nongodforsakenness of the world even under the conditions of sin.[11]

I am aware that this claim will strike many people as problematic at best, and some may even think such a claim borders on being intellectually dishonest. Indeed, I believe it might make Stanley Jaki apoplectic. In his overview of the Gifford lecturers, Jaki treats most of the lecturers with respect. He even praises antitheistic Gifford lecturers such as Dewey and Ayer for “touching off a hunger for something more solid and elevated on the part of judicious readers.”[12] Jaki shows no such respect for Barth, whom he characterizes as “alone among Christian Gifford lecturers in inveighing against natural theology. He and his followers seem to be strangely myopic to a facet of the much heralded onset of a post-Christian age through the alleged complete secularization of the Western mind.”[13] The only thing positive Jaki can say about Barth is that he serves as a witness “to the reluctance of most Christian theologians to cut their moorings from reason, for fear of undercutting their very credibility.”[14]

Jaki was equally unimpressed by the lectures given by Reinhold Niebuhr. He notes that from the “viewpoint of philosophy” there is little significance to be gathered from Niebuhr’s lectures. “The ‘Christian’ interpretation which Niebuhr tried to give to the nature and destiny of man was deprived of philosophical foundations and breadth by the short shrift given in his Barthian neo-orthodoxy to metaphysics and epistemology.”[15] However much it may seem from the “viewpoint of philosophy” that Niebuhr is a Barthian, it will be the burden of my lectures to show that the difference between Niebuhr and Barth is exactly the difference between a theology that has given up on its ability to tell us the way the world is and a theology that confidently and unapologetically proclaims the way things are—a distinction that is unintelligible if the God Christians worship does not exist.

Like MacIntyre, I hope that in spite of my distance from Lord Gifford’s theological convictions, he might recognize what I try to do in these lectures as a trustworthy attempt to keep faith with the provisions of his will.[16] Although I lack MacIntyre’s brilliance and learning, I am going to try to do in these lectures something like what he did in Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry. In those lectures, MacIntyre told the philosophical story since the endowment of the Gifford Lectures. I am going to try to tell the theological story. By so doing, I hope to show, like MacIntyre, that Lord Gifford was right to think that the truthfulness of our theological convictions is inseparable from questions of how we are to live.

I hope it will be evident not only from the form but from the substance of these lectures that I have learned much from MacIntyre. I should make clear, however, that as much as I would like to use MacIntyre to support the position I develop, to do so would be unfair. MacIntyre and I differ, and not simply due to my pacifism (though that is not unrelated). Rather, we differ in our understandings of the relationship between philosophy and theology. For example, in response to the suggestion that his most recent philosophical positions conceal a reassertion of Christianity, MacIntyre declares:

It is false, both biographically and with respect to the structure of my beliefs. What I now believe philosophically I came to believe very largely before I reacknowledged the truth of Catholic Christianity. And I was only able to respond to the teachings of the Church because I had already learned from Aristotelianism both the nature of the mistakes involved in my earlier rejection of Christianity, and how to understand aright the relation of philosophical argument to theological inquiry. My philosophy, like that of many other Aristotelians, is theistic; but it is as secular in its content as any other.[17]

I have no stake in denying that philosophy has a history that can be told in a manner that separates the work of philosophy from theology, or that philosophy as a discipline, particularly in the modern university, has its own canons of excellence. Nor do I think that philosophy has no other purpose than to be a handmaid to theology. Yet the strong distinction MacIntyre maintains between philosophy and theology—such that philosophy represents a secular discipline—does justice neither to the complex relationship between philosophy and theology in Aquinas, the thinker MacIntyre most admires, nor to MacIntyre’s own historicist commitments.[18]

I do not think that to be valid, philosophy—or any other science—must be shown to “depend” on our knowledge of God. Aquinas certainly did not construe ...