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by Stanley Hauerwas Brazos Press, 2001 256 pp.; $22.99 |
Occasionally, when taking a train to or from Chicago, I'll notice through the buzz of commuters a recorded message. Among other things, the disembodied voice instructs me that "emergency exits are to be used in case of power loss." I have heard this message dozens of times, and yet every time—every time—the voice penetrates my consciousness, I somehow hear, "emergency exits are to be used in case of Hauerwas." And I twitch for a moment before realizing what the voice really said.
This quirk of mine suggests that I've got some faulty wiring—and, yes, I've spent too much of my life in academic precincts—but it also tells a story about the workings of reputation. For Stanley Hauerwas is known, especially to people who haven't read a word he's written, as a provocateur, a prankster with a penchant for the outrageous—the sort of person who might well send the weak of heart and delicate of sensibility scrambling for an emergency exit. Has Hauerwas done anything to earn such a reputation? Certainly. ("Justice is a bad idea for Christians," he says in one essay; Bill Clinton "is incapable of lying," he declares in another. This list could be extended, and colorful supplementary anecdotes provided.) Is the reputation fair to Hauerwas? No. But it is the fate of a paradoxical theologian to be misunderstood.
Hauerwas' reliance on paradox has attracted much attention—it had a lot to do with Time magazine calling him "America's best theologian"—but it has also led some to question his intellectual seriousness. Such skepticism is simply mistaken, as it was when it was directed, decades ago, at G. K. Chesterton. Yes, "paradox," like "mystery," is a term too easily invoked, often used to cover a reluctance to think hard thoughts; but true paradox is a powerful mode of thinking, a way of calling attention to the inadequacies of our conventional categories and suggesting alternatives to them. (See Hugh Kenner's Paradox in Chesterton—now, alas, long out of print—for a compelling survey of this territory.)
Still, however wrong-headed such accusations of frivolity may be, it's hard to imagine that Hauerwas hasn't noticed them. And in his account of natural theology, With the Grain of the Universe, he seems to abandon his habitual rhetorical mode. The book is far more expository than we are accustomed to seeing from him, and more heavily documented; the argument is even a bit dry at times, something I never thought I'd say about anything by Hauerwas. Yet these appearances are at least somewhat deceptive. In the preface, Hauerwas warns his readers not to expect this to be "the 'big book' that many of my friends and critics have suggested I should write," and adds: "I do not think theologians, particularly in our day, can or should write 'big books' that 'pull it all together.' "
So if With the Grain of the Universe is not that kind of book, and not a typical Hauerwas performance either, what is it? I suggest that it is a disassembled paradox; the magic box of Hauerwasian style is here broken open, its parts laid out before us as in an exploded diagram. The effect is simultaneously impressive—one sees more clearly than ever how much learning is needed to produce Hauerwas' insights—and a bit disenchanting: I'm not sure I want to know how the magician does it. But no one reading this book can say that Hauerwas hasn't done his homework.
There is, very clearly, a paradox at the heart of this book, and it is the claim that Karl Barth is the greatest modern exponent of natural theology. This is an evidently strange claim, because if there's anything that people know (or think they know) about Barth it is that he repudiated natural theology—that is, the project of articulating and defending at least some Christian beliefs on the basis of what can be known from "nature," or general revelation. (Arguments for intelligent design, for example, are a form of natural theology.) The tradition originates, for Christians, in St. Paul's claim that some of the "invisible attributes" of God can be discerned in the things he has made (Rom. 1:20); but theologians have never agreed on just how much of what Christians believe can be inferred from an investigation of the Creation itself without the aid of Scripture. Karl Brunner, in his 1934 book Nature and Grace, argued that, because humans are made in the image of God, there is a substantial "point of contact" between the human and divine that can be readily understood and developed. The blunt force of Barth's rejoinder to Brunner is captured in its title: Nein! Little could anger Barth more than a claim that we humans can in any way move towards God (either morally or epistemologically) by our own power. How could such a thinker be an ideal representative of natural theology?
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