Approaching the End

Eschatological Reflections on Church, Politics, and Life

Stanley Hauerwas

• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781467438995
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Religión, política y estado

In this book Stanley Hauerwas explores the significance of eschatological reflection for helping the church negotiate the contemporary world.In Part One, "Theological Matters, " Hauerwas directly addresses his understanding of the eschatological character of the Christian faith. In Part Two, "Church and Politics, " he deals with the political reality of the church in light of the end, addressing such issues as the divided character of the church, the imperative of Christian unity, and the necessary practice of sacrifice. End, for Hauerwas, has a double meaning -- both chronological end and end in the sense of "aim" or "goal."In Part Three, "Life and Death, " Hauerwas moves from theology and the church as a whole to focusing on how individual Christians should live in light of eschatology. What does an eschatological approach to life tell us about how to understand suffering, how to form habits of virtue, and how to die?

Part One

Theological Matters

The End Is in the Beginning:
Creation and Apocalyptic

Why No Method Is a Method

When I began to think about what I should say about creation, the title “The End Is in the Beginning” immediately came to mind. That it did so I suspect is due to my long-­held conviction that creation, at least creation as understood by Christians, must be understood from an eschatological perspective. We only know there was a beginning because we have seen the end in Christ. Indeed, as I argued in the Brazos Commentary on Matthew, I think Matthew wrote his Gospel with the conviction that the story he has to tell is a story of a new creation. Thus Matthew begins the Gospel with the declaration that this is “the book of the genesis of Jesus Christ.”1

I confess I was pleased with the title “The End Is in the Beginning.” But I also thought, given that I originally wrote this for the Wilken Lecture, I should see if Robert Wilken might have said something I could use in support of my argument that creation must be rendered through the eschatological imagination shaped by the gospel. You can imagine my chagrin as well as my joy to discover Robert’s chapter in The Spirit of Early Christian Thought: Seeking the Face of God on Basil and Gregory of Nyssa entitled “The End Given in the Beginning.”2 I had, as so often is the case, forgotten where I had learned that the end is in the beginning. As Robert puts it, commenting on Gregory’s development of Basil’s thought: “Creation is promise as well as gift, and it is only in seeing Christ that we know what was made in the first creation.”3

Calling attention to Robert’s great book, moreover, allows me to make some comments to clarify my “method,” or what many think to be my lack of method, for doing theology. I am rightly well known for disavowing any attempt to do theology as a system.4 My work is occasional if not haphazard. I admire and learn from Robert Jenson’s Systematic Theology, but I do not have Jenson’s erudition or metaphysical imagination to do theology as “system.”5 Perhaps another way to put the matter is that I should like to think my work is closer in style and substance to the second volume of Jenson’s Systematic Theology, which deals with “The Works of God” and, in particular, creation.6 There, for example, Jenson asserts that “the story told in the Gospels states the meaning of creation.”7

That “the story told in the Gospels states the meaning of creation” is, of course, a systematic remark, but it is also a remark that begs for practical display. My worry about theology done as “system” is how that way of doing theology may give the impression that, as I observe in Sanctify Them in the Truth: Holiness Exemplified, “Christianity is a set of ideas that need to be made consistent with one another.”8 I go on to argue in Sanctify Them in the Truth (yet another of my books that, as far as I can tell, fell stillborn from the press) that theology is an intricate web of loci that requires ongoing exploration and repair. Exploration and repair are required because we are tempted to overemphasize one “doctrine” or locus in a manner that distorts what we believe and how we live.9 All of which is to say that the occasional character of my work is at least partly due to my conviction that theology is best understood as an exercise in practical reason.

I should like to think this way of understanding the theological task to be consistent with the way Wilken tells the story of the development of early Christian thought. He observes that the early Christian thinkers were not in the business of “establishing something.” Rather, they understood their task to plumb “the facts of revelation” by employing “the language and imagery of the Bible, and how the life and worship of the Christian community gave Christian thinking a social dimension that was absent from ancient philosophy.”10 Accordingly, Wilken observes by way of commentary on Justin’s conversion that in contrast to the philosophers, who rely on demonstrations, “the Word of God makes its way not by argument but as men and women bear witness to what has happened.”11

Of course, Wilken would be quick to deny that argument is not an essential aspect of Christian witness. Rather, I take his point to be that argument without witness is empty. Even worse, argument without witness threatens to become a coercive ideology. Put even more strongly, witness is a form of argument if we remember — as Wilken, drawing on Origen, argues — that in the Scriptures seeing is never simply a beholding something that makes no difference for how we live, but rather seeing is a “discernment and identification with what is known. What one sees reflects back on the one who sees and transforms the beholder. As Gregory the Great will put it centuries later, ‘We are changed into the one we see.’ ”12

I hope my “method” has been an attempt to display the difference Christian convictions make for how we see the world, and how we see the world shapes how we rightly live. Some may well suspect that makes me a pragmatist. I have no objections to being so labeled as long as pragmatism is properly understood to be an attempt to show the differences necessary for what we claim to be true.13 Interestingly enough, I find myself in deep agreement with Austin Farrer’s way of putting the matter, that is, the necessity of theologians to do their work in such a manner that “the inseparability of real knowledge from activity” is maintained. Farrer elaborates this claim by observing “that to know real beings we must exercise our actual relation with them. No physical science without physical interference; no personal knowledge without personal intercourse; no thought about any reality about which we can do nothing but think.”14

You may well begin to wonder if I have forgotten this is supposed to be an essay on creation. I have not forgotten. Before I am through I hope to make clear how these remarks about method are interrelated with an understanding of creation as an eschatological reality. The methodological remarks, moreover, I hope also help explain why I have seldom written about creation as a topic in and of itself. Rather, I have tried to find contexts to illumine the work an account of creation can and should do to help us understand the way things are.15 For example, I wrote, with Jeff Powell, an article on William Stringfellow’s use of the Book of Revelation to illumine the role of the principalities and powers as perversions of their role in creation.16 I was attracted to Stringfellow because I thought he helps us see how creation understood apocalyptically helps us read our world in a manner not unlike how John of Patmos read his.17

My most extended account of creation, however, was in an article on Iris Murdoch’s work. As someone who had learned much from Ms. Murdoch, I was taken aback by her defense of Plato’s myth of the Demiurge in her book Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals. She defended Plato’s understanding of the Demiurge because she thought it a perfect metaphor for how she would have us understand the moral life, that is, as the art of making necessity beautiful. I thought her position to be profoundly wrong in a manner that makes clear why Christians have rightly thought that our understanding of creation necessarily has at its center creation ex nihilo. For if God did not create from nothing, Murdoch is right to suggest that our existence is pointless; but because Christians believe all that is exists by the grace of God, we can have hope that life is not without purpose. This summary does not do justice to Murdoch’s position, but I hope it is sufficient to show how I try to display the work an account of creation does for how we understand the moral life.18

I call attention to how I have tried to position how I think about creation in the past to prepare you for the argument I now want to make. The claim that creation is an eschatological doctrine may seem to have little practical import, but by juxtaposing Barth’s account of the doctrine of creation with Jean Porter’s use of creation to sustain a natural law ethic I hope to show why these matters matter for how we understand how Christians should li...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part One
• The End Is in the Beginning: Creation and Apocalyptic
• The End of Sacrifice: An Apocalyptic Politics
• Witness
• Part Two
• Church Matters: On Faith and Politics
• The End of Protestantism
• Which Church? What Unity? or, An Attempt to Say What I May Think about the Future of Christian Unity
• War and Peace
• Part Three
• Bearing Reality
• Habit Matters: The Bodily Character of the Virtues
• Suffering Presence: Twenty--five Years Later
• Cloning the Human Body
• Doing Nothing Gallantly
• Disability: An Attempt to Think With
• Index