Hauerwas: A (Very) Critical Introduction

By Nicholas M. Healy

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Release date: Mar 14, 2014
• ISBN: 9781467440462

Nicholas M. Healy

Nicholas M. Healy is professor of theology and religious studies at St. John's University, Jamaica, New York. His other books are Church, World and the Christian Life: Practical-Prophetic Ecclesiology and Thomas Aquinas: Theologian of the Christian Life.

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Interventions

Conor Cunningham

General Editor

It’s not a question of whether one believes in God or not. Rather, it’s a question of if, in the absence of God, we can have belief, any belief.

If you live today, wrote Flannery O’Connor, you breathe in nihilism. Whether religious or secular, it is the very gas you breathe. Both within and without the academy, there is an air common to both decon­struction and scientism — both might be described as species of reductionism. The dominance of these modes of knowledge in popular and professional discourse is quite incontestable, perhaps no more so where questions of theological import are often relegated to the margins of intellectual respectability. Yet it is precisely the proponents and defenders of religious belief in an age of nihilism that are often among those most — unwittingly or not — complicit in this very reduction. In these latter cases, one frequently spies an accommodationist impulse, whereby our concepts must be first submitted to a prior philosophical court of appeal in order for them to render any intellectual value. To cite one particularly salient example, debates over the origins, nature, and ends of human life are routinely partitioned off into categories of evolutionism and creationism, often with little nuance. Where attempts to mediate these arguments are to be found, frequently the strategy is that of a kind of accommodation: How can we adapt our belief in creation to an already established evolutionary metaphysic, or, how can we have our evolutionary cake and eat it too? It is sadly the case that, despite the best intentions of such intellectual ecumenism, the distinctive voice of theology is the first one to succumb to aphonia — either from impetuous overuse or from a deliberate silencing.

The books in this unique new series propose no such simple accommodation. They rather seek and perform tactical interventions in such debates in a manner that problematizes the accepted terms of such debates. They propose something altogether more demanding: through a kind of refusal of the disciplinary isolation now standard in modern universities, a genuinely interdisciplinary series of mediations of crucial concepts and key figures in contemporary thought. These volumes will attempt to discuss these topics as they are articulated within their own field, including their historical emergence, and cultural significance, which will provide a way into seemingly abstract discussions. At the same time, they aim to analyze what consequences such thinking may have for theology, both positive and negative, and, in light of these new perspectives, to develop an effective response — one that will better situate students of theology and professional theologians alike within the most vital debates informing Western society, and so increase their understanding of, participation in, and contribution to these.

To a generation brought up on a diet of deconstruction, on the one hand, and scientism, on the other, Interventions offers an alternative that is otherwise than nihilistic — doing so by approaching well-worn questions and topics, as well as historical and contemporary figures, from an original and interdisciplinary angle, and so avoid having to steer a course between the aforementioned Scylla and Charybdis.

This series will also seek to navigate not just through these twin dangers, but also through the dangerous and that joins them. That is to say, it will attempt to be genuinely interdisciplinary in avoiding the conjunctive approach to such topics that takes as paradigmatic a relationship of theology and phenomenology or religion and science. Instead, the volumes in this series will, in general, attempt to treat such discourses not as discrete disciplines unto themselves, but as moments within a distended theological performance. Above all, they will hopefully contribute to a renewed atmosphere shared by theologians and philosophers (not to mention those in other disciplines) — an air that is not nothing.

Centre of Theology and Philosophy

(www.theologyphilosophycentre.co.uk)

Every doctrine which does not reach the one thing necessary, every separated philosophy, will remain deceived by false appearances. It will be a doctrine, it will not be Philosophy.

Maurice Blondel, 1861-1949

This book series is the product of the work carried out at the Centre of Theology and Philosophy (COTP), at the University of Nottingham.

The COTP is a research-led institution organized at the interstices of theology and philosophy. It is founded on the conviction that these two disciplines cannot be adequately understood or further developed, save with reference to each other. This is true in historical terms, since we cannot comprehend our Western cultural legacy unless we acknowledge the interaction of the Hebraic and Hellenic traditions. It is also true conceptually, since reasoning is not fully separable from faith and hope, or conceptual reflection from revelatory disclosure. The reverse also holds, in either case.

The Centre is concerned with:

•  the historical interaction between theology and philosophy.

•  the current relation between the two disciplines.

•  attempts to overcome the analytic/continental divide in philosophy.

•  the question of the status of metaphysics: Is the term used equivocally? Is it now at an end? Or have twentieth-century attempts to have a postmetaphysical philosophy themselves come to an end?

•  the construction of a rich Catholic humanism.

I am very glad to be associated with the endeavours of this extremely important Centre that helps to further work of enormous importance. Among its concerns is the question whether modernity is more an interim than a completion — an interim between a pre-­modernity in which the porosity between theology and philosophy was granted, perhaps taken for granted, and a postmodernity where their porosity must be unclogged and enacted anew. Through the work of leading theologians of international stature and philosophers whose writings bear on this porosity, the Centre offers an exciting forum to advance in diverse ways this challenging and entirely needful, and cutting-edge work.

Professor William Desmond, Leuven

Hauerwas

A (Very) Critical Introduction

Nicholas M. Healy

William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company

Grand Rapids, Michigan / Cambridge, U.K.

© 2014 Nicholas M. Healy

All rights reserved

Published 2014 by

Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.

2140 Oak Industrial Drive N.E., Grand Rapids, Michigan 49505 /

P.O. Box 163, Cambridge CB3 9PU U.K.

Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

ISBN 978-0-8028-2599-5

eISBN 978-1-4674-4046-2

Kindle ISBN 978-1-4674-4004-2

www.eerdmans.com

For David H. Kelsey

Contents

Cover

Dedication

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

Acknowledgments

The book has been long in the writing, interrupted as it was by various excursions into academic administration. These were interesting enough to delay what I should have realized was my inevitable retreat to the faculty, as a former dean of University of San Diego, Pat Drinan, used to call the move from administration to faculty status. Accordingly, I owe Linda Bieze at Eerdmans and the editors of this series many thanks for their patience as they waited some years beyond the original deadline for this book.

I have had the benefit of trying out a few of the broader ideas here in various gatherings over the years: the Karl Barth Society of North America; a number of meetings of ethnographers and others interested in the empirical church organized by Pete Ward, Gerard Mannion, and Paul Murray; the critically friendly atmosphere of the Catholic Theological Association of Great Britain. Among those who helped me, whether by reading something of mine or by other forms of encouragement, I am especially grateful to Kathryn Tanner, John Webster, Karen Kilby, Paul Murray, David Haddorff, and Paul Molnar, which is not at all to say that any of them would agree with what I have written here. I also thank my dean, Jeff Fagen. Jeff’s decanal skills have made the College of Arts and Sciences at St. John’s University a place where scholarship is strongly encouraged and supported.

I dedicate the book to David Kelsey. I was lucky enough to TA for David for a year while working toward my doctorate. I learned a lot from him then — though I now kick myself for not learning more — and I have continued to learn in the intervening years through his magnificent work, as will be evident in this book. He and I have not discussed this book, nor have we spoken about Stanley Hauerwas, so I have no sense of what he would think of it.

Abbreviations for Books by Stanley Hauerwas

The following lists only the books cited here; it is not an exhaustive list of Hauerwas’s works. The abbreviations are consistent with those in the Hauerwas Reader.

AC After Christendom? How the Church Is to Behave If Freedom, Justice, and a Christian Nation Are Bad Ideas. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1991.

AN Against the Nations: War and Survival in a Liberal Society. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1992.

BH A Better Hope: Resources for a Church Confronting Capitalism, Democracy, and Postmodernity. Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2000.

CC A Community of Character: Toward a Constructive Christian Social Ethic. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981.

CCL Character and the Christian Life: A Study in Theological Ethics. San Antonio: Trinity University Press, 1975.

CE The Blackwell Companion to Christian Ethics. Ed. Stanley Hauerwas and Samuel Wells. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004.

CET Christian Existence Today. Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2001.

CSC A Cross-­Shattered Church: Reclaiming the Theological Heart of Preaching. Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2009.

DF Dispatches from the Front: Theological Engagements with the Secular. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994.

HC Hannah’s Child: A Theologian’s Memoir. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010.

IGC In Good Company: The Church as Polis. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995.

LGVW Living Gently in a Violent World. Stanley Hauerwas and Jean Vanier. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2008.

MC Matthew, Commentary on. Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2006.

NS Naming the Silences: God, Medicine, and the Problem of Suffering. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1990.

PF Performing the Faith: Bonhoeffer and the Practice of Non-­Violence. Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2004.

PK The Peaceable Kingdom. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1983.

R The Hauerwas Reader. Edited by John Berkman and Michael Cartwright. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001.

RA Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1989.

STT Sanctify Them in the Truth: Holiness Exemplified. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1998.

SU The State of the University: Academic Knowledges and the Knowledge of God. Oxford: Blackwell, 2007.

TT Truthfulness and Tragedy: Further Investigations in Christian Ethics. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1977.

US Unleashing the Scripture: Freeing the Bible from Captivity to America. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1993.

VV Vision and Virtue. Notre Dame: Fides, 1974.

WAD War and the American Difference: Theological Reflections on Violence and National Identity. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011.

WGU With the Grain of the Universe: The Church’s Witness and Natural Theology. Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2001.

WWW Working with Words. Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2011.

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