Stanley Hauerwas is one of the most well-known and impactful contemporary American theologians, so he's been on my list to read for a while. I had read his book Resident Aliens, co-written with Will Willimon, a few years ago, but I wanted a deep dive into his work. This collection is probably the best place to go for such a dive.

To begin, Hauerwas is brilliant and challenging. He is not a systematic thinker, so his work comes to us through essays. One of his primary points is to challenge the modern liberal pursuit of a sort of universal, disembodied truth. Following thinkers like Wittgenstein and MacIntyre, Hauerwas emphasizes the specific nature of our development of ethics. We learn ethics not by finding some universal truth binding on all, we learn ethics by living in a community in which we are sustained by the traditions and stories that make our community what it is.

Thus, Hauerwas emphasizes that the church does not have a social ethic, the church IS the social ethic. He calls for the church to be the church. Everything he writes emphasizes the place of a Christian in a community. This in itself is refreshing and necessary, if for not other reason than that most Christians (most humans) are shaped by the ideas we uncritically consume throughout our weeks. If we show up to church an hour on a Sunday, there is no way that small amount of time is going to shape us as much as the media and news we consume the rest of the week. I don't recall if Jamie Smith cited Hauerwas in his book You Are What You Love, but I see a lot of common ideas here.

Hauerwas would then challenge the idea that it is our Christian duty to shape the culture. This is a residue of Christendom all the way back to Constantine. It starts our ethical and moral task on the wrong foot. Our job is not, as Christians, to change the world but to live as disciples. Of course, Hauerwas has been accused of calling for Christians to totally leave the world. But Hauerwas is not calling for that. I do wish he had been a bit more concrete in what a Christian living a public life looks like. I suspect he would say this is situational, depending on our context. A Christian in a totalitarian regime will engage life differently then one in a democracy. The thing is, before we can even move into public life we need to be Christians in the church. For example, how can we oppose the nations using violence when Christians aren't even demonstrating a life of nonviolence?

Hauerwas might say, echoing Origen in the early church, that if Christians all just gave up war then the world would be forced to consider other paths to peace than violence. Importantly then, Hauerwas does not offer a pacifism with the promise that we can get the same ends through nonviolence as others do through violence. Hauerwas, in line with all Christian nonviolent teaching, argues we are nonviolent in obedience to Jesus with no promise of "success". We might, as Jesus did, die. Here we see Hauerwas challenge another idol of our culture: the right to and sacredness of life. Christians, he notes, are called to follow Jesus and this may mean death. It is not that life is unimportant, but it is that if you have nothing to die for then you aren't living. The idea of a "right to life" is not rooted in the Christian story, it is rooted in the modern liberal story which Christians, too quickly and uncritically, accepted.

Overall then, this book is a must-read for Christian pastors and leaders as we wrestle with ethics and morals and being Christians. That said, it seems a bit dated and there are a few areas where I wish Hauerwas had been more clear.

Speaking of being dated, when Hauerwas discusses gay marriage he...well, he doesn't discuss gay marriage. He discusses gay people being in the military. We live in a culture where gay marriage is now a legal right. Hauerwas doesn't even mention that as a possibility, nor does he discuss whether Christian churches ought to bless same-sex marriage and how this relates to divorce and other relationships. What about transgender persons? Not even mentioned. Intersex? This book demonstrates how fast our culture has moved. Perhaps we can find principles and tools in Hauerwas to answer such questions, but their absence already makes the book dated.

I'd say the same with his discussion of suicide. He seems to lump it in with euthanasia and discuss it as if its a reasonable choice, and an immoral one, people make. He takes no account of depression or mental illness. In my opinion, it just comes off as callous. Do we say to an alcoholic or a depressed person to just...stop being depressed? This takes no account of the fact it is a sickness and not a rational choice (or from a Christian perspective, there may be supernatural realities to deal with). If I had friends struggling with things like alcoholism, depression and thoughts of suicide, I don't see anything Hauerwas wrote here as helpful.

Finally, I wish Hauerwas had engaged more with the realities of a post-Christian culture. Some writers like Hauerwas tend to idolize the early church, with Christendom as the enemy, and the hope we just go back. But we can't just go back. Hauerwas doesn't quite do this. Yet so often as he spoke about the church, all I could think was that the church is the problem. In a post-Christian world, we see plenty of people who are not "Christians" but who live more Christ-like lifestyles than self-proclaimed Christians. There are historical reasons for this (see Tom Holland's Dominion). Where is this church Hauerwas speaks of? I suspect he would say we just need to have faith in the church, as irrational as it seems. I would track with that. In spite of its flaws, the church is my family. He may also point out the invisible universal church is not "the church"; the church is the concrete physical reality in a specific location. So don't worry about the "Church" but instead build a community of Jesus people in your location.

I am with all that. Amen.

I guess I am not sure what I want. Perhaps I just want to see Hauerwas interact with people like Charles Taylor and others who write about the big shifts in our culture. I think I just lack the faith in the church Hauerwas has. I see the church up against iPhones and Netflix and all the other things that shape us, that shape children from the crib, and I wonder what the future will look like? I am not sure how to end this review and maybe that's a testament to the book - Hauerwas gave me lots to think about and I am going to be chewing on it for a while...

Love love love me some Hauerwas. The Church is the most crucial element he always comes back to. God creates a community in Christ and gives them the Spirit, grafts them into the promises of His people Israel, and confers on them a Kingdom. Life in the Church is the primary witness to the rest of the world the truthfulness of the Christian Gospel. This is a fundamental challenge to liberal social orders that assume the primacy of the individual, autonomy, “rights,” etc.

The single best essay on abortion I have ever read is in this collection. It’s profoundly challenging.

The only problem I have with Hauerwas is his lack of exegetical engagement. He’s more philosophical, which is fine considering the problems he confronts in the church in America are usually philosophical (e.g. assumptions we have in a liberal democracy are primarily philosophical beliefs we’ve inherited). However, he often needs correction from Scripture and exegesis, and also to recognize its more foundational role in his reflection.

Even still, thank God for our brother Stanley.