living without explanation
reading the theology Stanley Hauerwas
No theological voice has been more formative for me than Stanley Hauerwas.
That's not something I share in common with a lot of "progressive" or liberal Christians today. Dr. Hauerwas has a reputation as sectarian, as a reactionary, as someone out of step with those of us who attempt to practice an ecumenical, justice-oriented, and tolerant form of the faith. Some of that reputation is well-earned, but mostly, I find these assessments of Hauerwas to be borne of a fundamental misunderstanding of his theology, often picked up more from the critiques of others than a studied engagement with the things Hauerwas has actually written, said, and done.
The content of Hauerwas' theology is somewhat secondary to me, however. This isn't to say I don't find it important - I obviously do. But, more than what Hauerwas says, I am struck by how he says things. Stanley Hauerwas writes with clarity and integrity like few modern theological voices. He is not captured by a politics, or an ideology. He does not feel the need to compromise or bend his beliefs for the sake of the latest fad or passing fancy in academia or theology. Drawing on Karl Barth and John Howard Yoder, Hauerwas maintains an intense fixation first and foremost on Christ - everything else he writes starts here, and everything of the world must be filtered through what it means to follow Jesus. Most crucially, he says what he means, and he does so in a way that is clear and readable, even to non-academics.
That said, I also find the content of his theology quite compelling. I don't always agree with him. But, there is an integrity to his work, and a quality of such conviction about who Jesus is, and what he demands of us, that makes the theology of Stanley Hauerwas irresistible to me. Because of his clarity, you cannot handwave what he says away as the result of convoluted or overwrought intellectualism. You can't dismiss him as irrelevant and confined to an ivory tower. Even where intense disagreements arise, you must grapple with his words, and in doing so, you'll find your own ideas and beliefs being put through a ringer. It’s hard, and it’s good.
I first encountered Stanley's words early in my seminary career, while I was still at Phillips Theological Seminary here in Tulsa. I vaguely knew of him by reputation, and it was a reputation that wasn't good, at least not in the progressive and emergent circles I was running in. So, it was with a bit of skepticism that I embarked on reading chapters from the book of essays he co-wrote with Romand Coles, titled Christianity, Democracy, and the Radical Ordinary. If you can't tell from the name of this Substack I'm writing on a decade later, this book had a huge impact on me. I remember being gripped by his writings, and bewildered at the reputation of his I had encountered up till that point. Yeah, he was abrasive, and iconoclastic, and not always very politically correct. But, he was also right about a lot of things. Specifically, in that book, his critical engagement with democracy, and its shortcomings, spoke so relevantly, as we were grappling with the looming specter of Donald Trump, who had announced his emergence on the political scene that year and was upending American democratic norms. His words from the essay "A Haunting Possibility: Christianity and Radical Democracy" hit me like a ton of bricks back then, and they are still working on me today:
In short, a community shaped by the memory of the martyrs makes possible a patient people capable of the slow, hard work of a politics of place, because they are not driven by the politics of fear. Yoder's "wild patience" assumes that such a people must exist if the work of nonviolence is to be a radical challenge to the way the world is. What the church contributes to radical democracy is therefore a people who seek not glory but justice. Such a people have been made possible because they have been formed through liturgical action to be for the world what the world can become.
Right there is everything that is Hauerwas: character formation, the virtues, an alternative politics, the task of the church, nonviolence. It's all there.
Ok, one more from that essay collection, words from a letter written to Coles:
If I have a basic political conviction, it is that people matter. Politics names for me the practices required for the formation of a people in the virtues necessary for conversations and conflicts to take place if goods in common are to be discovered. These goods are not abstract but draw on the stories of failures and successes that make a people recognizable to one another. Vulnerability must be at the heart of such a politics just to the extent that living well requires readiness to learn from the stranger. I should like to think that vulnerability is at the heart of what it means to be Christians, because through worship we are trained to have our lives disrupted by the strangest of strangers - God.
To anyone who would assert that Hauerwas is dangerously or irresponsibly apolitical, I would offer that paragraph, among a whole host of others. That paragraph exemplifies what I think first grabbed me about him, and what stuck with me in a way that proved prescient and vital for the moment the church finds itself in today: an alternative, to the partisan politics of the world, and the anodyne politics of the church, which too often finds itself merely an appendage of one political party or the other. I was feeling that tension already in 2015; the skepticism about politics Hauerwas began inculcating in me at that point proved crucial for my development over the years, which allowed me to get to the place I am in today, and where I feel the healthier parts of the Christian left (the Hauerwasian in me hates that terms) are moving: away from partisan politics, away from a political engagement whose boundaries are delineated by the needs of the Democratic Party, or the social democratic movement, or liberal politics in general. What I encountered in reading Hauerwas was a wholly different way of approaching Christian political engagement, an approach radically different from what most Christians think of when they think about how Christians should do politics. This difference - predicated on a starting point of Jesus, and committed to the values of the church first and foremost - was what I needed at this point in my life, and has shaped my gradual re-engagement ever since. Hauerwas did not moderate or soften my political views: what he did was radically reorient me in how I go about thinking about politics as a follower of Jesus. For decades, Stanley Hauerwas was yelling at us that everything we do should be about Jesus, even our politics, even our justice. I was stopped dead by that message. I think - I hope - the church is as well. Stanley deserves some credit for that.
Christianity, Democracy, and the Radical Ordinary sparked something in me. At AAR Southwest the next spring, I picked up The Work of Theology, and shortly after that, encountered Resident Aliens - his most important and well-known book, written with Will Willimon - soon after. A couple of years after that, I inherited almost his entire bibliography from a retiring pastor, and spent the Covid year reading through all of them. I found myself changed, convicted, theologically undone and rebuilt by a critical engagement with his idea of who Jesus is and what that demands of us. At various times, I found him inspiring, hilarious, infuriating, pig-headed, grounded, generous. Although a variety of other theological voices have been very important for me - Jurgen Moltmann, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, St. Oscar Romero and the liberation theologians of South and Central America, Karl Barth - none have been more so than Hauerwas.
Why am I writing about Stanley Hauerwas today? After all, almost all of my writing here since January has been explicitly political, focused on democracy in America and current events with the Trump Administration. I've had a lot of energy and passion around that, and if anything can be asserted about Stanley Hauerwas, it is that he has almost a knee jerk reaction against overt politicism and a healthy skepticism about democracy and liberalism. So, me writing today about Stanley Hauerwas certainly feels like a big shift in focus, and must come across that way as well, especially to those who have subscribed in the last two months and come to expect something in particular from this space.
I see this essay, and what is to come, as a bit of a personal corrective for myself. I'm never particularly happy about myself and my writing when I spend too much time and energy focused on the politics of the moment. I feel it to be a dangerous distraction, something that drags me into the muck of the game of politics, and away from where my focus really needs to be. I want that people politics of vulnerability that Hauerwas mentioned in the above quote, but too often, I get bogged down into partisanship and anger and ideology. I don't like that about myself. I'm not critiquing that in others; but for me, it leads me to a place of anger and anxiety and preoccupation. I want to keep my head above the water, so to speak, and my eyes on a bigger picture. Not that I want to disavow politics - I won't and can't. I just need to actively work to shift my focus periodically in a healthier and more sustainable direction.
And it’s a shift I need because the world is wearing me down, emotionally. The firehose the Trump Administration has pointed at all of us is getting to the point of feeling overwhelming to me; it felt really good to unplug a little bit over Holy Week and disengage from the world for a few days. I know that a fully turning a blind eye to the things happening is not responsible, nor is it going to be feasible as the things happening keeping hitting closer and closer to home and pushing in on our lives. Easter helped me realize that if I’m going to sustainably engage the world, I need to re-center my faith and my desire to live more like Jesus. Intellectually, this is the way I want to do this, by reading Hauerwas and engaging these theological ideas, and applying them to the world around me.
Recently, I picked up Hauerwas' newest book, Jesus Changes Everything: A New World Made Possible, a series of reworked essays that serve as an introduction to Stanley's works. Published by Plough, it is part of their Plough Spiritual Guides series, a collection of little books, each focused on a specific Christian thinker or idea. Reading this book, re-encountering words and ideas I had previously loved, reawakened my passion for the theology of Stanley Hauerwas, and more importantly, made me want to engage his ideas again in this moment in history that I believe to be absolutely singular. Confronting the damage that Donald Trump is doing to American democracy, the church's shifting role in the our culture, and an uncertain future for Western liberalism, what do the words of Stanley Hauerwas have to say, if anything?
This essay isn't the start of a series or anything like that. What it is, is a statement of intention: I am planning on re-reading the books of Hauerwas currently on my bookshelf, and encountering for the first time the few I don't have. As I do, I am hoping to think and write about his work. I believe there to be a need for his unique brand of theology, and as I look around, I don't seem many others out here focused specifically on bringing his words and ideas to a wider audience. I want to do that here. I think his work is very interesting, and has much to say. I believe, as I stated above, that he has been neglected and ignored by the wing of the church that has much to learn from him, and now is as good a time as ever.
I will declare that I'm not going to writing a theological hagiography of Hauerwas here. I don't always agree with him, and I'm eager to dig into those areas of disagreement - most crucially, on liberalism and democracy. And he isn't all I'm going to be writing about - there are still political happenings I feel obligated to comment on, and I will continue the series on Timothy Snyder's On Tyranny. But, I do intend to move back towards more a theological focus, and that focus will have a strongly Hauerwasian bent to it. I don't know exactly what form this will take - I've been toying with the idea of writing about each essay I read as I go, which is a pretty tall task - but I trust that what I need to do will become clear to me as I go. Writing is how I work out ideas most often, and that's what I'm trying to do here.
This may not be something you find yourself interested in; that's ok. This is my space, and I'm trying to hold true to the imperative to write about what interests me, and not worry about what get clicks or is popular. That isn't easy for me. But I'm trying.
Let's close out with a bit more directly from the man himself, as one last selling point for this new focus. One of the things I find most endearing about Hauerwas is his desire to turn our thinking about Christianity on its head. He seems to get a kick out of taking what people assume about Jesus, or the Church, or any other topic, and upending all those assumptions. Christianity, for Hauerwas, is always and in every situation a disruptive and revolutionary force, a way of being and living that takes a sledgehammer to our sacred cows and our carefully constructed systems of thinking.
He does that in this passage from the last chapter of Christianity, Democracy and the Radical Ordinary, which is the transcript of a conversation between him and his co-author, Romand Coles. You can see here his need to be contrarian, not for its own sake, but to wake us up to what Christianity really means for our lives. Stanley is trying to upend our ideas because that's what he see this faith as: something that undoes all the ways we try to exert control over the world, and one another, and over Jesus. Its when we try to have control that we screw everything up. I'll let him explain it:
Crucial for me is the presumption that the gospel is a story meant to train us to live without explanation. Explanation presumes that if I can just account for why what happened did happen, then I will be able to live with what has happened. In modernity, this hunger for explanation often takes the form of mechanistic cause-and-effect relations that ironically attempt to give people who have such a view of the world the presumption that they are in control. I think Christianity is the training for learning how to live without being in control: You learn to live in the silences, and you learn what the politics of living in the silences might look like. I always think of nonviolence as crucial to this. Just think about this: what does it mean to try to end a war - the war in Iraq - when people feel that if you end it, they could not explain the meaninglessness of the deaths of the people who have died so far? So you've got to somehow make the deaths successful. But to learn to live patiently in a world where you have no answers, it seems to me, gives you political alternatives that otherwise would not exist - through hope. And I don't care whether the people who are able to do this are called Christians or not. I mean, I assume that God will show up in all different kinds of ways. That's how I try to conceive of what it means to live hopefully without explanation. You don't have to explain the death of a child. That will kill you. That will kill you.
The need to always explain everything - a real risk most theologians run all the time - can kill faith, smothering it under the Enlightenment-era blanket of rational explication at all costs. Hauerwas understands that; its why he doesn't "do" theology like most theologians - via systematics and constructions, through careful categories like "Christology" and "Soteriology." All his books are collections his essays; all his theology is constructed through asides and vignettes and humor and Stanley's plain-spoken Texan sayings and stories. And in that different way of doing things, we can start to remember that Jesus didn't do theology systematically and rationally either. Christianity isn't about dogmatics and creeds, not primarily. As Stanley reminds us:
We are not Christians because of what we believe, but because we obey the call of Jesus: “come, follow me.”
Yeah, that's the Gospel right there.
Let us close with prayer, a prayer written by Stanley, which should give you a little insight into his approach to faith and theology:
Sovereign of All Life, we pray that you will give us the patience to stay still long enough to witness the beauty of creation. Help us live at peace with your world, especially with our brothers and sisters in and without the church. Help us to live at peace with those creatures not like us - that is, dogs, pigs and even, God help us, chickens. And help us to live in peace with ourselves. Amen.
Great stuff, as always, Justin. You know I’m with you in this.