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

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

By Stanley Hauerwas. Brazos Press, 250 pp., $22.99.

RELIGIOUS LIBERALS need Stanley Hauerwas, a perpetual disturber of their peace. Religious conservatives can find him fruitfully unsettling too, since he is a pacifist and opposes capital punishment. But he offers basic reassurance to theological conservatives, who relish his steady insistence that the Christian message is not only true, but provides the one true account of "the way things are," of "the way the world is." Christians, he says, proclaim the truth that God revealed in Jesus. Christianity is not just "their truth, but the truth for everyone."

Hauerwas is a painful thorn in any liberal's side, but Christian liberals are his special target. He heaps scorn on the idea that Christianity can be or should be reconciled with modern culture. He thinks liberal Christians, pathetically eager to fit in to the mainstream of modernity, are asserting not the authentic gospel but a "disguised humanism." Protestant liberals, he says, take "humans, not God, as the center of Christian faith." In his estimation liberalism and modernity deserve each other. They've long since given up on witnessing to the unvarying truth that is the God made manifest in Jesus Christ.

Once the wounded liberal extracts the Hauerwasian thorn, she realizes that Hauerwas has damaged only her complacency, not her faith. He has issued a timely wake-up call and inadvertently supplied a reminder of what is distinctive and worthwhile about liberalism, secular as well as religious. At his best he has even modeled how one should proceed in laying out whatever it is that one believes. One should embark on a careful, generous-minded exposition of what one's opponents hold dear, taking their ideas at their strongest, not their weakest. Hauerwas teaches an ethics of argument: develop and proclaim your views in sympathetic appreciation of those with whom you most fundamentally disagree.

As it happens, Hauerwas is much more diligent in being fair to individual liberals and moderns than he is to "liberalism" and "modernity," which become handy labels for what he most reviles. Yet he strives to explicate fully the liberal beliefs of his main antagonists, William James and Reinhold Niebuhr.

With the Grain of the Universe is the published version of Hauerwas's Gifford Lectures, delivered earlier this year at the University of St. Andrews. The purpose of the lectureship, according to Lord Adam Gifford's will, is to treat theology "as a strictly natural science," that of "Infinite Being, without reference to or reliance upon any supposed special exceptional or so-called miraculous revelation."

Naturally, Hauerwas rejects the idea that there can be any such science. But while rejecting Gifford's position he affirms the notion that Christian theology, correctly understood, can be taken as a natural theology. It is natural theology because Christians, knowing the world through God's revelation of himself, are equipped to "see the world as it is, and not as it appears." Their faith is fully in accord "with the grain of the universe," in the phrase Hauerwas borrows from the Mennonite theologian John Howard Yoder.

For his lectures Hauerwas chooses the structural expedient of explicating the ideas of three previous Gifford lecturers: William James (whose lectures were published as The Varieties of Religious Experience), Reinhold Niebuhr (The Nature and Destiny of Man) and Karl Barth (The Knowledge of God and the Service of God according to the Teaching of the Reformation). At first it seems a strange strategic choice. Why doesn't Hauerwas spend more time telling us what he thinks, instead of what these three earlier intellectual giants thought? Although his exposition of their ideas is peppered with his own judgments (often in dense, intricate but very rewarding footnotes that will tax every reader's patience and eyesight), he keeps his distance from his own text. He tells us he doesn't want the book to be about him or his ideas, ground "well-plowed," he says, in his earlier books.

He claims a special aversion to systematizing, and rejects the suggestion made by friends that he try in his final lecture to "pull everything together." In that lecture on "the necessity of witness" Hauerwas gives brief attention to three of his heroes--Yoder, Pope John Paul II and Dorothy Day--while reiterating his central claim that "witness is not simply something Christians `do,' but is at the heart of understanding how that to which Christians witness is true. If lives like theirs did not exist, then my argument could not help but appear as just another `idealism.'"

But the heart of Hauerwas's lectures is his thorough exposition of James, Niebuhr and Barth. James and Niebuhr serve him as exemplars of liberal modernity whose errors are transcended once and for all by the Christocentric Barth. But Hauerwas is not in the least dismissive toward James and Niebuhr. He lays out their intellectual and biographical trajectories in painstaking detail. For the pragmatist James the cross-cultural study of religion was essential because it presented human beings at the passionate peak of their shared experience. He was not a Christian believer himself, but he was a believer in "faith" as a key to personal and communal well-being. Indeed, his 1907 book Pragmatism was framed as a defense of religion, a fact often overlooked in today's broad revival of pragmatism.