How not to move beyond Stanley Hauerwas

I think we can all agree that Tom Torrance is less interesting than Karl Barth.  Likewise, that the Westminster Divines are less interesting than Calvin and Luther.  In the hands of the second generation, the red hot magma that their teachers disgorge ossifies.

This is another reason why we need to move beyond Stanley Hauerwas and the "school" that's gathered around him, John Howard Yoder, Alisdair MacIntyre and others.  Hauerwas' trenchant critiques of the Enlightenment are spot-on.  The hyperbole in which they've been cast is necessary in order to get a hearing.

But in the hands of some of his interpreters these hyperbolic critiques have simply become shrill and wrong-headed propositions.  A good example is this post from Craig Carter's blog.  Now there is much about the post that I agree with.  Christian freedom is freedom for not freedom from.  Historical criticism has distanced Christians from their sacred texts.

But Carter's proposal, to reject any accommodation with the benign elements of liberalism in favor of a "full-blooded, pre-modern, Augustinian Christianity and its proclamation as a 'civilization of love'" is both impossible and even if possible, undesirable. 

We cannot unlearn what we've learned.  We cannot pretend we don't know about the documentary hypothesis or Q.  In fact, in the right hands, critical tools can open the minds of Christians to understand the scriptures in a way that pre-critical exegesis, with it's strange allegories, cannot.  And, after the Holocaust we cannot let the reading of our scriptures be controlled by interpreters who, frankly, were hotly anti-Semitic.  See Walter Brueggemann's review of Robert Louis Wilken's new collection of patristic and medieval commentaries on Isaiah.

There's no pristine Christianity we can recover back behind the latest distortion of it.  Augustinian and Cappadocian Christianity wasn't any purer than the compromised liberal Christianities on today's scene.  It was the fruitful product of semitic Christianity's long encounter with Platonism, an authentically pagan philosophy to the extent that it, unlike liberalism, arose in a non-Chistian culture.  And the pattern repeats itself.  Christianity plus Aristotle gives you Aquinas.  Christianity with Renaissance Humanism gives you the Reformation. 

We have no choice but to do theology where we are today.  To be sure we speak the language of scripture as best we know how, in consultation with the Communion of Saints, in conversation with the world.  The conversation might be sharply polemical or meekly apologetic.  But we cannot stop our ears and shout at the world, and expect to get a hearing.

The anti-Semitism of the Fathers is proof enough that Carter's Manichaean outlook--liberalism bad, 4th century good--is just plain wrong.  But consider also the American Church at her best:  the abolitionist movement and the Civil Rights movement.  If we're honest, it was liberalism, not historic Christianity that launched these movements.  Liberalism's creed of the equality of humanity up against the lived realities of slavery and racial and gender discrimination forced the question.  To be sure the Church responded by drawing from the wells of scripture.  But it is telling that no one read the Exodus story or Galatians 3:28 quite that way before the Enlightenment dawned.

Again, I happily grant that liberalism's definition of freedom is insufficient, but it needs to be completed by a Christian notion of the concept, not merely replaced.  Or, to put it baldly, I'd rather live in 21st century America's libertine society which at least has some possibilities for renewal lurking in the churches, than in Augustine's "civilization of love" that featured slave markets, and the customary and perfectly legal practice of disciplining wives, children and novices with beatings.

In short, Carter seems to have heard the Yoder/Hauerwas/MacIntyre hyperbole, and rather than laughing or taking offense, furiously scribbled down all the more polemical statements and laid them as his theological foundation.What you get is a fundamentalism of sorts.  A patristic fundamentalism is rather novel.  It's certainly not the Bible-thumping fundamentalism of the Southern Baptist Convention, or J. Gresham Machen's Westminster-inspired fundamentalism. 

But where you have intellectual isolation and a Manichaean outlook on history, there lies fundamentalism.  And that's not moving beyond where we are.  That's being frozen in place.

Comments

[Eric Lee]

I'm not Roman Catholic, but it is because of tendencies like Carter's that make the Catholic dialectic (of sorts) between ressourcement and aggiornamento very attractive. You can't have one without the other. Carter, it seems, stays only within the former.

[Eric Lee]

Also, in Fergus Kerr's recent _Twentieth-Century Catholic Theologians_, he laments over the theological amnesia that takes place around certain theologians where we get so caught up in their controversy or polemic that, while they had amazing insights to offer that we should not discard, we find ourselves forgetting just what it is that they were responding to in the first place. How many of us, for example, have actual first-hand experience with the Scholastic debates that were the theological millieu of Henri de Lubac? (to cite just one of Kerr's examples)

With Kierkegaard it was Hegel and more especially the Danish Hegelians (see, for example, this: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0521828384%3ftag=bookgarden-20%26link_code=sp1%26camp=2025%26dev-t=0EWYR1B23SP7NPZ4K2R2); with Karl Barth it obviously becomes, say, Schleiermacher, and with Hauerwas it is mainly and often Reinhold Niebuhr, but how many of us have read those figures in any depth? Of all of these I can only say that I am now reading scads and scads of Hegel and as difficult as it is, it is immensely rewarding.

[Jonathan Marlowe]

My comments were too long. You can see them at The Ivy Bush:

http://theivybush.blogspot.com/2008/03/in-response-to-marvin-on-fundamentalism.html