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Stanley Hauerwas' Theological Ethics in Eschatological Perspective
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 January 2009
Extract
The three most common criticisms of Stanley Hauerwas' work are that he is a sectarian, that he is a fideist, and that he lacks a doctrine of creation. My intention in this essay is to show that how greater attention to the eschatological implications of his theological ethics would enable Hauerwas successfully to respond to his critics.
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- Copyright © Scottish Journal of Theology Ltd 2000
References
1 de Certeau, Michel, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Rendall, Stephen (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), pp. 35–36Google Scholar, quoted in Hauerwas, Stanley, After Christendom: How the Church is to Behave if Freedom, Justice, and a Christian Nation are Bad Ideas (Nashville: Abingdon, 1991), pp. 16–17.Google Scholar
2 Thus, for example, Hauerwas' observation that Christianity ‘must always be a Diaspora religion’, Against the Nations: War and Survival in a Liberal Society (Minneapolis: Winston Seabury Press, 1985), p. 77.Google Scholar
3 I derive this idea from Kenneson, Philip, ‘Taking Time for the Trivial: Reflections on Yet Another Book from Hauerwas’, Asbury Theological Journal 45 (Spring 1990), pp. 65–74.Google Scholar
4 Maclntyre, Alasdair, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (2nd edn, London: Duckworth, 1984), p. 216.Google Scholar
5 One example is Hauerwas' concern for the place in the narrative of the Jews.
6 Lindbeck, George, The Nature of Doctrine: Religion and Theology in a Postliberal Age (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1984), pp. 132–133.Google Scholar
7 In his essay ‘On Taking Religion Seriously: The Challenge of Jonestown’ (Against the Nations, pp. 91–106), Hauerwas discusses the mass suicide of 900 members of the People's Temple at Jonestown, Guyana, in 1977, on the instructions of their leader Jim Jones, as an extreme case of the practice of a false story.
8 Stanley Hauerwas does this on the nuclear annihilation issue. See Against the Nations, chapters 8 and 9.
9 Hauerwas, Stanley, Dispatches from the Front, p. 111.Google Scholar
10 Hauerwas, Stanley, Dispatches from the Front: Theological Engagements with the Secular (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994), p. 175.Google Scholar
11 O'Donovan, Oliver, Resurrection and Moral Order: An Outline for Evangelical Ethics (2nd edn, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994), p. xvGoogle Scholar. The emphasis on the crucifixion is a theme Hauerwas shares with Yoder.
12 See Gustafson, James, ‘The Sectarian Temptation: Reflections on Theology, the Church, and the University’, Proceedings of the Catholic Theological Society 40 (1985), pp. 83–94Google Scholar; Stanley Hauerwas, Christian Existence Today, pp. 1–19.
13 Hauerwas, Stanley, ‘Murdochian Muddles: Can we Get Through Them if God Does Not Exist?’, Wilderness Wanderings: Probing Twentieth-Century Theology and Philosophy (Boulder, Colorado and Oxford: Westview, 1997), pp. 155–170.Google Scholar
14 Ibid., p. 165.
15 Hauerwas, Stanley, ‘Creation, Contingency, and Truthful Nonviolence: A Milbankian Reflection’, Wilderness Wanderings, pp. 188–198.Google Scholar
16 In Against the Nations (p. 84 n. 26), Hauerwas quotes Reinhold Niebhur's indictment of the violence of universalism: ‘The logic of the decay of modern culture from universalistic humanism to nationalistic anarchy may he expressed as follows: Men seek a universal standard of human good. After painful effort they define it. The painfulness of their effort convinces them that they have discovered a genuinely universal value. To their sorrow some of their fellow men refuse to accept the standard. Since they know the standard to he universal the recalcitrance of their fellows is a proof, in their minds, of some defect in the humanity of the non-conformists. Thus a rationalistic age creates a new fanaticism. The nonconformists are figuratively expelled from the human community’ Niebuhr, Reinhold, Beyond Tragedy (New York: Scribners, 1965), p. 237.Google Scholar
17 Milbank, John, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), pp. 5–6; italics original.Google Scholar
18 Hauerwas, Stanley and Berkman, John, ‘A Trinitarian Theology of the Chief End of All Flesh’, In Good Company: The Church as Polis (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995), pp. 185–197.Google Scholar
19 Ibid., p. 193.
20 Here I am following the use of the term ‘historicist’ by Oliver O'Donovan in his Resurrection and Moral Order: An Outline for Evangelical Ethics (2nd edn, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans), chapter 3.Google Scholar
21 Oliver O'Donovan, Resurrection and Moral Order, p. 64. It is hard to see how such a perspective is sustainable in view of the delay of the eschaton noted by the New Testament authors. The fact that evil was still very much around was surely one of the most important reasons why the New Testament was written.
22 Hence the tendency of this kind of eschatology to be more concerned with the incompleteness to be removed than in describing or conceiving of the wonders to come. Such a reticence is appropriate for those who believe in an other-worldly eschaton, for such would be by nature conceivable. The same should not apply for a salvation within time, which should be much more open to conception, but seems not to be. One recalls Oscar Wilde: ‘One wonders how long the meek will keep the earth after they inherit it.’ The shortcomings of an ethical gradualist version of eschatology, such as that of Albrecht Ritschl, were caricatured by Richard Niebuhr: ‘A God without wrath brought men without sin to kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross’ (Niebuhr, H. R., The Kingdom of God in America (New York: Harper Textbooks, 1959), p. 193).Google Scholar
23 Yoder, J. H., ‘The Constantinian Sources of Western Social Ethics’, The Priestly Kingdom: Social Ethics are Gospel (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984), pp. 135–147 at p. 137.Google Scholar
24 O'Donovan, ibid., p. 73. O'Donovan observes that protest is the way liberalism pinches itself to find out if it is still alive. Many theologians have asserted a Christological foundation for the significance of protest. O'Donovan, however, suspects ‘that here, as with the crowd before the praetorium, what is really happening is the replacement of Christ by Barabbas’ (p. 73).
25 An ironic twist to the this-worldly and future version of eschatology is that it is not necessarily immune from some of the dangers perceived in an other-worldly and future version. This has been demonstrated in the failure of the Marxist rendering of the revolutionary apocalypse. Ruether summarises the similarity thus: ‘As in Christian history, Marxism begins with the announcement of the apocalyptic day of wrath and the speedy advent of the kingdom of God, but ends in the indefinite prolonging of the era of the Church, which can justify all persecution and suppression of liberty in the name of that final liberation which never comes but to which it is the exclusive gateway.’ (Ruether, Rosemary Redford, The Radical kingdom: The Western Experience of Messianic Hope (New York: Harper & Row, 1970), p. 25.)Google Scholar
26 Hutter, Reinhard, ‘Ecclesial Ethics, the Church's Vocation, and Paraclesis’, Pro Ecclesia 2/4 (Fall 1993), pp. 433–434Google Scholar; see also In Good Company, p. 30.
27 Hauerwas, , ‘The Need for an Ending’, The Modern Churchman 27/3 (1986), pp. 4–5.Google Scholar