Hauerwas' Particular Imagination and the TRC

(Readers may be aware that I began this blog to help me think through my graduate thesis on the work of Stanley Hauerwas. I handed it in tonight, here is the conclusion which may serve as a brief overview for anybody who is interested in what I've been writing about these past months.)

Stanley Hauerwas always claims that he neither has a position to defend nor is he intelligent enough to come up with a position to defend.[1] Yet, there are characteristic ways in which Hauerwas does theology and it is my hope that I have at least been able to describe the particular imagination that Hauerwas displays in trying to show the difference that Jesus makes to how the church is to live and think. That Jesus matters for Christian theology and ethics should be part of the definition of these practices, yet so often this has failed to be the case. In attempts to be ‘relevant’ or ‘rational’ in modernity, theology, especially in North America, has often abandoned the particular claims of the gospel in favour of a more universal message that can be understood by the grammar of universal and self-evident truths. But the gospel, while having universal implications, is a radically particular message that both depends upon a history for its intelligibility and defines the meaning of that history. Hauerwas’ particular imagination is therefore not an abstract commitment to an anti-foundationalist epistemology, nor a fideistic retreat into sectarian security, but is the result of a deep commitment to the particular revelation of God in the person of Jesus Christ.

In chapter one I noted that Hauerwas’ theological particularism comes to him from Karl Barth. I followed Hunsinger’s argument that Barthian christology is essentially Chalcedonian and a-symmetrical. This a-symmetry is a relationship that necessarily exists between Christ’s full humanity and full divinity in that his divinity precedes and fulfills his humanity. For Barth, this meant that God determine’s God’s self-revelation, and so it is God who determines theological language. This clarifies Barth’s insistence that theological method proceeds from the doctrine of God in that, for Barth, ontology now precedes epistemology. God’s being is prior to our knowledge of him and must therefore determine the categories we use to describe him. Barth thus reverses the order of the analogia entis in favour of the analogia fidei. Instead of working by analogy from created things to God’s being, created things are recognized as creatures by acknowledging their radical contingency and dependence on God as their creator.

Human speech can make sense. God offers faith, and this faith creates an analogy between human words and divine being. By this analogia fidei it is possible to speak meaningfully, not just about God but about ourselves and the world we live in. By following this analogy we find that neither the world nor our lives are subject to necessity or fate. Instead, we find that we are creatures and that the world is God’s creation.[2]

In following Barth’s analogia fidei,[3] Hauerwas’ particularism is both derived from and aimed towards God’s self-revelation in Christ. The claim that ‘Jesus is Lord’ is a political claim and as such represents speech that depends on a polis for its intelligibility – that polis is the church. In chapter two I argued that Wittgenstein has overturned the descriptivist claims of language that operate under the presumption that no politics are necessary to establish the meaning of words or phrases. Meaning, on the descriptivist account, is able to be established by connecting words or phrases to their objects of reference. In contrast to this, the radical claim of Wittgenstein’s ordinary language philosophy is that the meaning of words is determined by their particular use grounded in a community of practice.

Hauerwas uses Wittgenstein’s account of language as a way to show that, in order to speak rightly about God, to use the analogia fidei, Christians must undergo a transformation in both theory and practice. While it is enough for the philosophers to point toward the necessity of traditions, practices, and narratives as pre-requisites for meaningful speech, Hauerwas has no interest in discussing these things in the abstract. Instead, as I argued in chapter 4, Hauerwas adopts both Wittgenstein’s ordinary language philosophy and MacIntyre’s work on the virtues to describe the church as the community of practice that makes meaningful our speech about God. I deliberately focused on the practices of prayer and preaching, as they are two practices that are deeply related to the development of truthful speech which is necessary if Christians are to say anything truthful about God.

Hauerwas has spent so much time thinking about how to discipline the speech of Christians because he wants to help the church bear witness to Jesus. Hauerwas contends that Jesus is really present in the midst of the gathered church, and if not, all of our practices are just silly.[4] While the Christian ability to see the world and describe it rightly requires training, it is ultimately a gift of the Holy Spirit. In his mature thought, Hauerwas has appropriated the language of theosis from the Eastern church to once again reinforce that God’s self-disclosing activity precedes our knowledge of God. In the practice of the Eucharist we receive training, but this is more than just a psychological or linguistic trick. As Christians consume the body and blood of the risen Christ we are in turn consumed by Christ, and through the power of the Holy Spirit, enfolded into the life of God.

The doctrine of theosis is a particularizing doctrine.[5] By being grafted into the divine, humans do not cease to exist – rather they exist fully as the creatures that they were created to be. John’s gospel reminds us that those who are grafted into the true vine are able to produce much fruit; it is those that are cut off that cease to exist. For all of Hauerwas’ talk of practices, narratives, traditions, and politics, what he is deeply committed to is the particularizing power of God’s Spirit to make us more truly the creatures God created us to be.[6] The practices that form the Christian life are merely the training necessary to be able to witness, in word and deed, to the salvific power in each of our lives of the God who raised Jesus from the dead, having first raised Israel from Egypt.

Future Directions

            I have made passing mention already of my own particular situation in writing this thesis. I live in Manitoba, Canada. I am the son of a fourth generation farmer of the same corner of land on the western edge of the province. That means that I live on Treaty Two land. The land and the life it has made possible for me has a history, and that history is the abject failure of both church and state in treating the indigenous inhabitants of that land with the integrity they deserved.[7] My church and government were complicit in the genocide of indigenous people across this country, and I have benefited from it.

            What is perhaps most troubling about the complicity of the church in this genocide is the failure to recognize the wonderful particularity of the indigenous people as creatures of God. The residential school policy to “kill the Indian in the child”[8] is a chilling rejection of exactly the theological particularity that Hauerwas has displayed for us. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission has concluded and offered many recommendations for future healing.[9] As the church in Canada seeks to work through the process of reconciliation, there are some lessons that can be learned from Hauerwas.

            First, it is important to recognize the various different traditions at play in the discussion and the histories that we bear in common. Indigenous peoples have a variety of different ethnic and theological traditions they inhabit. The state is an inheritor of the modern liberal traditions of the Enlightenment that Hauerwas has so often criticized, and as such, may not be able to provide an adequate framework to properly have the trans-tradition dialogue that will be necessary for healing. Finally, the church continues to be normed by the narratives of scripture and the embodied practices of worship. The church must also be willing to be guided by the traditional practices of confession and repentance to be truthful about its role in both legitimating the modern state and its complicity in the genocide of indigenous peoples.

            Healing the rift between our nations will take time, but in the practice of Eucharist, Hauerwas reminds us that we have been given all the time and resources necessary to learn to live peacefully with one another.[10] As we learn what it means that God revealed himself as the cross-shattered Christ, we will learn to recognize the invitation to peace and healing for even the most shattered of lives.[11] Hauerwas rightly reminds us that we have learned that God is love because God, deeply in love with his creation, has revealed himself in the mighty saving acts he performed to rescue Israel from their stiff-necked way and raise Jesus from the dead, effectively shattering death and giving history a purpose.[12]

            Hauerwas has not written much about race relations, and what he has written is for a very different context.[13] But the church may be able to begin thinking about how reconciliation can happen by attending to the ‘particular imagination’ Hauerwas has displayed. Perhaps, by attending to Hauerwas’ theology and opening ourselves to the practices he commends to the church, we may become the type of people for whom reconciliation is possible.

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[1] Stanley Hauerwas, Disrupting Time: Sermons, Prayers, and Sundries (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2004), 6–7.

[2] Ariaan W. Baan, The Necessity of Witness: Stanley Hauerwas’s Contribution to Systematic Theology (Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2015), 15.

[3] Hauerwas explicitly takes up Barth’s analogia fidei in his Gifford Lectures. SeeStanley Hauerwas, With the Grain of the Universe: The Church’s Witness and Natural Theology: Being the Gifford Lectures Delivered at the University of St. Andrews in 2001 (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos, 2001), 189. It is important to remind ourselves here that “the analogia fidei was not an attempt to develop a theory or method of analogy based on prior metaphysical claims but an attempt to display the metaphysical claims intrinsic to theological speech” (189). The analogia fidei makes theological speech possible by teaching Christians to see everything that exists as ‘creation.’

[4] Stanley Hauerwas and Will H. Willimon, “Embarrassed by God’s Presence,” The Christian Century 102, no. 4 (January 30, 1985): 98-100, 100.

[5] Stanley Hauerwas, The Work of Theology (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2015), 42.

[6] Stanley Hauerwas, Hannah’s Child: A Theologian’s Memoir (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2010). I read this memoir as the story of a man who has learned through much practice that he is a creature of God.

[7] A helpful ally in thinking through the responsibilities of living in a place is the farmer-poet Wendell Berry. I mentioned Berry earlier in this thesis and noted that Hauerwas has pointed to him as one whose life is marked by ‘witness.’ Berry is another useful thinker in the reclamation of a concrete particularity, and may prove helpful in discussions of reconciliation with a people who have a much more determinative attachment to the land than even fifth-generation citizens such as myself. See The Gift of Good Land: Further Essays, Cultural and Agricultural (Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint, 1981).

[8] “Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRC),” accessed February 7, 2017, http://www.trc.ca/websites/trcinstitution/index.php?p=39.

[9] “Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada: Calls to Action” (Winnipeg, 2015), http://www.trc.ca/websites/trcinstitution/File/2015/Findings/Calls_to_Action_English2.pdf.

[10] Hauerwas reminds us that peace both takes time and creates its own time. We can have confidence that we have enough time for peace, because Christ’s peace is more determinative than the world’s violence. See Stanley Hauerwas, “Taking Time for Peace: The Ethical Significance of the Trivial,” in Christian Existence Today: Essays on Church, World, and Living in between (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 1995): 253-266.

[11] Stanley Hauerwas, Cross-Shattered Christ: Meditations on the Seven Last Words (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2005).

[12] Stanley Hauerwas, “How To Write A Theological Sentence,” in The Work of Theology (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2015), 122–46.

[13] Hauerwas has often pointed to the fact that the first thing he ever wrote was an essay entitled “The Ethics of Black Power” for the Augustana Observer. Either he misremembers the title, or the editors changed it on him, and I have yet to come across somebody who has found it. I believe that this article is the one that he is referring to, Stanley Hauerwas, “White Christian Liberals Resentful,” Augustan Observer, February 5, 1969. In it, he argues that the Black Power movement should be celebrated because it represents black people expressing themselves in a way that is not beholden to the sensibilities of white Americans. This celebration of Black particularity in the late sixties is instructive for how white Canadians might be able to think about similar modern movements in our indigenous communities such as “Idle No More.”