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There's something else curious about this claim: Hauerwas makes it in the Gifford Lectures he gave at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland (of which this book constitutes the final version)—and, as he notes, Lord Adam Gifford established his lectures, more than a century ago, with the goal of "Promoting, Advancing, Teaching, and Diffusing the Study of Natural Theology." But Hauerwas is well aware of the problem of "keeping faith with Adam Gifford," and one could do worse than describe the book as an attempt to ask just what such faith-keeping would have to be. Hauerwas discusses four previous Gifford lecturers at some length in this book: one (William James) who was thoroughly at ease with the Giffordian understanding of natural theology; a second (Reinhold Niebuhr) who might seem to be more narrowly Christian but, argues Hauerwas, is scarcely less comfortable than James; and two others (Alasdair MacIntyre and Barth himself—whose idea was it to invite him?) who have serious, though quite different, reservations about the whole idea. MacIntyre's doubts became the very subject of his talks, later published as Three Rival Versions of Moral Inquiry, and Hauerwas is following MacIntyre in making his book self-reflexive: Gifford Lectures about the Gifford Lectures.
Hauerwas' conclusion is that there's nothing wrong with natural theology, as long we define it in a Barthian way rather than in Lord Gifford's or William James' way—and as long as we don't try to dress up a highly generalized theism in Christian clothing, as Hauerwas believes Niebuhr did. "Do we have anything more in Niebuhr than a complex humanism disguised in the language of the Christian faith?" he asks, and his answer is, "Probably not." The warning signs come early, Hauerwas believes: "The first hint in Niebuhr's Gifford Lectures that his theology is in fact anthropology is that he does not begin The Nature and Destiny of Man with an account of our sinfulness but with the generalized anthropological observation that 'man has always been his own most vexing problem.' " And later he quotes approvingly Robert Song's claim that, while Niebuhr uses trinitarian language, the God he describes is functionally unitarian—a rather vague deity, not truly and intrinsically Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
I am a bit confused by Hauerwas' argument here. The existentialist language of "anxiety" was cutting-edge at the time that Niebuhr gave his lectures (1939), and indeed the great popularity of the book was largely a function of Niebuhr's ability to present the Christian faith as a set of answers to the most pressing questions of the day. Was it really impermissible, from a seriously Christian point of view, for him to start with those questions? Or could that strategy have been justified if Niebuhr had pushed through his existentialist lingo to a fully orthodox theological anthropology and doctrine of God? In any case, if Hauerwas is right to argue that Niebuhr never truly went beyond a kind of disguised humanism (and I think he is), then a major problem with natural theology is illuminated: one can begin with what unbelievers already know, already believe, but how does one get from that realm to the realm of revealed biblical truth?
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