“In Good Company: The Church as Polis.” By Stanley Hauerwas, University of Notre Dame Press, 268 pp.; $29.95
Perhaps it is time to silence Stanley. No longer read him when he writes, no longer listen when he speaks. Hasn’t he made himself clear by now? Is there anything new to be learned from him? In addition, his habit of self-referencing, already high by any standard, in this newest book reaches truly off-putting heights. We are told of how the whole world has claimed him, of how his books have made him famous. We are taken on his honeymoon, even to the gravesite of his father. We sit at his feet to hear three of his sermons, and in his class to receive his course syllabus, the assigned readings and lectures for the Fall of 1993 for CHE 33 at the Duke Divinity School. My goodness, we’re even referred to his current minister at Aldersgate Methodist Church in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, for questions about his ecclesial life. And in chapter after chapter we are not so subtly reminded of what others have called him, labeled him, think of him; all to be met with extended self-defense that either takes the tack of mocking his critics or (a la Richard Rorty) the dismissive posture of “I’m not interested in that.” Does “In Good Company” finally mark the end of a Hauerwas worth listening to?
Unfortunately, not yet. Hauerwas continues to be right, right on, and quite necessary. He remains one of the most provocative and important writers for Christians struggling to make sense of Christian identity and the church in our confused age. In fact, I will even go so far as to say that the only way we should silence Stanley is by making him irrelevant. Only as we take seriously his claims, arguments, assertions, and then build practices that do, in fact, unleash the church’s true social ethic and theological politics can we finally hope to silence this vain man.
The book is a collection of 13 articles and papers, almost all of which have appeared in other contexts. Here they are gathered into three sections that deal with the good company Hauerwas has kept as he has abided with Protestants and Catholics and, finally, with himself as he teaches and practices what he calls “Ecclesial Ethics.” Of course, the book is really about Stanley and his travails. But ignore the perpetual self-referencing, ignore the self-celebration, get to the argument itself (it’s not easy, I grant you), and one is struck again by the cunning of his critique: of the fundamental flaws in our theological education, the institutions that perpetuate them, the academic outlets that give them voice, and, ultimately, the churches that are informed by them.
I found the latter two sections more interesting, more bracing, than the first. Protestant-bashing is all too easy. Of more interest and importance is how Hauerwas weaves together (not quite in a seamless web) the thought of Pope John Paul II and Vaclav Havel to blast the emptiness of contemporary liberal thought and life. In the final section, Hauerwas points to how vegetarianism and the celebration of the Catholic feast of Christ the King might form key practices of ecclesial ethics. By such practices American Christians, habitually fixated on trying to resolve liberal problematics like church-state relations, are liberated to celebrate these tensions and to unmask the imperialistic and ultimately violent ontologies upon which the modern liberal system rests. These are the kinds of intriguing concrete proposals that make him still invaluable for Christian reflection. (Readers long familiar with Hauerwas will note his increasing indebtedness to the thought of John Milbank. This is most hopeful, as it promises to deepen Hauerwas’s theoretical analysis beyond its recent sound-bite quality.)
Read this book. Go and practice it. Then shut up, Stanley.
-Ashley Woodiwiss
“Science and the Secrets of Nature: Books of Secrets in Medieval and Early Modern Culture.” By William Eamon, Princeton University Press, 490 pp.; $49.50
Remember the childish fantasy of becoming invisible? According to the medieval book “Secreti Alberti,” it is no fantasy: An opal charm will do the trick by “blind[ing] the sight of men that gaze upon it.” Just the nonsense that modern science arose to eradicate, right? Not so fast. William Eamon argues that “books of secrets,” immensely popular from the late Middle Ages to the early modern period, were not opposed to science. On the contrary, they fostered an experimental tinkering that actually inspired modern science. In Eamon’s view, “books of secrets,” listing recipes for making everything from charms to medicines to false gems, constitute a missing link in the development of modern experimental method.
The crucial shift was from the logically necessary universe of Aristotelian science, known by rational deduction from first principles, to the contingent universe of modern science, known by observation and experiment. In the late Middle Ages, the universities were dominated by the Aristotelian concept of knowledge (scientia). But among craftsmen and artisans a different ideal flourished: occult knowledge (magia), inspired by neo-Platonism and consisting of techniques for manipulating nature to serve human ends. These techniques tapped “secrets of nature” not known by Aristotelian reasoning but by experience. A paradigmatic example was the magnet: Its power could not be predicted from the nature of the elements composing the lodestone but is discovered only by observing its effects. “Such ‘secrets’ lay outside the rational ordering of nature,” Eamon writes; “they were purely contingent,” known by experiment.
How was the tradition of “secrets” transformed into the modern ideal of public knowledge? On the technical side, the advent of printing made “books of secrets” widely available to a popular audience, while the development of patents and copyright laws eliminated one practical reason for secrecy (to protect the work of inventors and intellectuals). On the conceptual side, nominalism undermined the sacramental view of language, in which communication is limited to initiates. And early scientists such as Bacon and Boyle gave moral force to the ideal of public usefulness, arguing that science is a gift of God not for the illumination of the few but for the good of the many.
-Nancy R. Pearcey
“Church and State in the Modern Era.” Edited by J. F. Maclear, Oxford University Press, 510 pp.; $65
This ambitious collection of documents is a gold mine for historians and useful as well to modern culture warriors. J. F. Maclear, who is retired from his history post at the University of Minnesota, has gathered a wide-ranging collection of laws, governmental promulgations, official church documents, papal edicts, and other material relating to his title. Careful headnotes introduce each selection, and almost all are provided with short bibliographies for further investigation. The book goes beyond other useful collections of this sort (e.g., J. E. Wilson and D. L. Drakeman, “Church and State in American History”) because of its scope.
Maclear’s earliest document is an early parliamentarian regulation for the Virginia Colony (1606), but his last one is a 1990 act on the freedom of religion in a Soviet Union well caught up in the process of glasnost but still clinging to a vestige of the Marxist control that would be swept away in 1991. In between come 184 more documents–from North America, from a few Asian and African countries, and especially from Europe (including Britain, France, the Netherlands, Germany, Italy, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Russia, and Poland). Included in this sweep are many of the critical pronouncements of the French Revolution, the Napoleonic concord with the papacy, the great movements of religious liberation of the nineteenth century, and some of this century’s most conflicted situations–Germany under the Nazis, for instance, and Eastern Europe under communism.
For historians, Maclear provides a primer in comparative religion and politics; for culture warriors, this book is a reminder that much can be learned from those who have been down our road before. Only the absence of an index mars the usefulness of this truly exceptional collection.
-Mark Noll
“Models for Interpretation of Scripture.” By John Goldingay, Eerdmans, 328 pp.; $20
“The Bible in Modern Culture: Theology and Historical-Critical Method from Spinoza to Kasemann.” By Roy A. Harrisville and Walter Sundberg, Eerdmans, 282 pp.; $20
The Christian church has never enjoyed such a full, useful, and edifying range of Bible-study materials as has been published in the last half-century. Of special note are the dozens of well-conceived and well-executed commentary series that pour forth from the presses to meet needs ranging from the most practical to the most scholarly. Unfortunately, the sterling work directly on Scripture has never been matched by the same quality of labor devoted to understanding how the Scriptures have been approached in the past or reflecting self-consciously on how best to sift through divergent approaches to the Bible. These two books go some way toward remedying that deficiency.
John Goldingay is principal of Saint John’s Theological College in Nottingham, England, and the author of “Theological Diversity and the Authority of the Old Testament.” In “Models for Interpretation of Scripture,” he examines four ways of approaching Scripture that he calls “witnessing tradition,” “authoritative canon,” “inspired word,” and “experienced revelation.” In a wide-ranging exploration of how these interpretive stances are assumed in the works of modern Bible scholars and teachers–and exemplified in differing interpretations of selected biblical texts–Goldingay appeals for a degree of critical self-consciousness in the interpreter to match the dedication to Scripture’s importance that is so much more common in the church. A closing list of “Guidelines for the Expositor”–which begins “Become aware of your own world and assumptions”–is a gem. (Also worthy of note is a companion volume, “Models for Scripture” [Eerdmans, 420 pp.; $20, paper], in which Goldingay further examines the doctrine of Scripture.)
Roy Harrisville and Walter Sundberg are very nicely situated as moderate Lutherans from Luther Seminary (Saint Paul, Minn.) to examine the complex relationship among theological conviction, philosophical assumptions, cultural instincts, and the interpretation of Scripture. In a series of clear, expert chapters that range over a gamut of expositors–chronologically, from the sixteenth century through the twentieth; ideologically, from Rudolph Bultmann to J. Gresham Machen–Harrisville and Sundberg show how very much goes into the effort to understand and apply the Scriptures. Not everything in these books should be accepted with the deference due only to the Bible. Yet much of the nonsense forthcoming from sincere Christians who take the Scriptures seriously but run amok in the task of interpretation would be avoided if Bible-believers read, marked, and inwardly digested books like these with some of the same seriousness they displayed for the Scriptures themselves.
-MN
FICTION
“Jackson’s Dilemma.” By Iris Murdoch, Viking, 249 pp.; $22.95
Every writer has distinctive mannerisms, but in recent years Iris Murdoch’s have become tic-like, nearly obsessive. Each of her last six novels can be described in virtually identical terms: the cast of characters is drawn from a group of educated, leisured friends living chiefly in London, friends who are now middle-aged but whose links with one another go back at least to their university days; this circle of friends is disrupted by a charismatic figure, either an outsider or someone peripheral to the group, who exercises what may be supernatural power over one or more of the group’s members; some inexplicable erotic attraction makes characters behave in bizarre ways; and the resulting plot is extremely complex and driven largely by remarkable coincidences (or what Jung, who wasn’t sure he believed in coincidence, called sychronicity).
These mannerisms, however repetitive, are not always bad; in her previous novel, “The Green Knight,” Murdoch made them work wonderfully, and the result was one of her very best novels. But in “Jackson’s Dilemma,” the machinery clunks. Some of Murdoch’s recent novels (“The Book and the Brotherhood,” “The Message from the Planet”) have been rather bloated, with too many characters and too many extraneous scenes; “Jackson’s Dilemma” has many fewer scenes and is less than half the length of those fatty tales, but it has just as many characters and an equally complex plot. The result is rather like an Alan Ayckbourn comedy played at double speed. Some of the characters behave in ways that seem utterly senseless, but since we learn so little about them we don’t know what to think. Murdoch typically uses her mysterious charismatic figures (Jesse Baltram in “The Good Apprentice,” Peter Mir in “The Green Knight,” and so on) to generate conflict and to provoke revelatory responses from the other characters, but the mystery man here–the Jackson of the title, who works as a servant for one of the leisured rich who largely populate the story–is so sketchily developed that he seems more vague than mysterious. Another character is working on a book about Heidegger (in which he presents some ideas Murdoch herself explored in one of her philosophical works), but we never learn why this is supposed to be important or whether his ideas relate to his own problems or those of other characters.
For dedicated Murdoch fans–who love her explorations of the irrational erotic, her speculations about the paranormal, her fascination with coincidence–this may be fun. But others are likely to be frustrated, and to wish that the book had either been more fully developed or not written at all. For Christian readers in particular, the virtual absence of Murdoch’s usual interest in the relations between the religious life and the moral life–can one have the latter without the former?–will be disappointing. Murdoch is well into her seventies now, and while “The Green Knight”, published just two years ago, indicated no loss of artistic power (just the reverse, in fact), one cannot help wondering at what appears to be slippage here.
-Alan Jacobs
Copyright (c) 1996 Christianity Today, Inc./BOOKS AND CULTURE Review
Volume 2, No. 2, Page 30
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