New Explorations in Theology

Bridging Barth and Postliberalism

David B. Hunsicker

• Publisher: IVP Academic
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780830866663
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Teología cristiana

In the past half-century, few theologians have shaped the landscape of American belief and practice as much as Stanley Hauerwas. His work in social ethics, political theology, and ecclesiology has had a tremendous influence on the church and society. But have we understood Hauerwas's theology, his influences, and his place among the theologians correctly?Hauerwas is often associated—and rightly so—with the postliberal theological movement and its emphasis on a narrative interpretation of Scripture. Yet he also claims to stand within the theological tradition of Karl Barth, who strongly affirmed the priority of Jesus Christ in all matters and famously rejected Protestant liberalism. These are two rivers that seem to flow in different directions.In this New Explorations in Theology (NET) volume, theologian David Hunsicker offers a reevaluation of Hauerwas's theology, arguing that he is both a postliberal and a Barthian theologian. In so doing, Hunsicker helps us to understand better both the formation and the ongoing significance of one of America's great theologians.Featuring new monographs with cutting-edge research, New Explorations in Theology provides a platform for constructive, creative work in the areas of systematic, historical, philosophical, biblical, and practical theology.

Part One

The Making of a
Barthian Postliberal

THE BASIC ARGUMENT I MAKE in this book is that in order to understand Hauerwas’s theological ethics, you have to understand how he is influenced by Karl Barth and postliberalism respectively. For therein lies the theological convictions that make his ethical arguments intelligible. Central to this point is the claim that one cannot simply reduce Hauerwas’s Barthianism to his postliberalism. Scholars who do so tend to assume that he is a bad interpreter of Barth, at the least, or part of a type of Protestant liberalism that is incommensurable with Barth’s theology.

In the first part of this book, I develop the argument that Hauerwas is a Barthian postliberal. I do this by first attending to the way Hauerwas understands modern Protestant theology in general and the development of Christian ethics in American theology specifically. First, Hauerwas argues, Protestant liberalism is plagued by a particular Christian response to Enlightenment rationalism: namely, that God was a subject that was beyond the possibility of empirical knowledge and, therefore, theology should be about morality. Second, it was subsequently determined that morality was a topic that could be established without respect to any particular religious convictions. With regard to how this plays out in the discipline of Christian ethics, Hauerwas notes that by the middle of the twentieth century, Christian ethicists were asking themselves if they really needed to be “Christian” to arrive at the conclusions they made.

I follow both of these suggestions as they work themselves out in Hauerwas’s thought. First, the story of Protestant liberalism is the story of how ethics, or morality, becomes divorced from theology. For Hauerwas, the problem of reducing theology to morality is resolved by Barth, who rejected any attempt to reason theologically from any starting point other than God. This includes Barth’s famous rejection of natural theology, which Hauerwas adopts and extends in his own rejection of rationalist appeals to universal law. We see this especially in the similarities between Barth’s and Hauerwas’s treatments of abortion.

Next, the story of Christian ethics in America is the story of how ethics ceased to be Christian, or how the church lost its distinctiveness in American culture. This problem is solved by a fusion of influences from John Howard Yoder and postliberalism. In the first instance, it is Yoder who—influenced by Barth—rejects the entire tradition of Christian ethics and grounds his own theological ethics in Scripture. This emboldens Hauerwas to break with the liberal Protestant Christian ethics of his Yale teachers. In the second instance, it is the development of a new type of postliberal theology that emphasizes practical reasoning that points a way forward for a theological ethics that at once speaks about God and human moral action in correspondence to what Christians have to say about God. For Hauerwas, this means learning from Barth how to ground his ethics christologically, from Yoder how to work out the ecclesiological implications of such a Christology, and from postliberalism how Christians “perform their faith” in light of these christological and ecclesiological convictions.

These two streams of theological influence come together in Hauerwas’s thought to produce Barthian postliberalism. For the vast majority of English-speaking interpreters of Barth, such a reading of Barth is problematic on its face. To the contrary, I argue, Hauerwas’s attention to performance, and particularly to how Barth’s theology performs its task, enables him to work with the grain of Barth’s theology in order to develop surprising but consistent theological impulses in his own American theological context.

1

The Stories That Made
Stanley Hauerwas

STANLEY HAUERWAS ALTERNATIVELY calls himself a theologian and an ethicist. Early in his career, he was apt to identify himself as a Christian ethicist;1 however, over time, he came to describe himself predominantly as a theologian. There is some fluidity between these terms in Hauerwas’s thought to the extent that theology cannot be divorced from ethics.2 Nevertheless, the shift represents a subtle, albeit significant, development in Hauerwas’s work: over time he has learned to speak about God.3 Indeed, in Hauerwas’s later work he jokes that his colleagues do not consider him an ethicist and that he prefers to think of himself as a “theologian.”4

That Hauerwas prefers to think of himself as a theologian instead of an ethicist has everything to do with the critical stance he takes against Protestant liberalism. “Ethics” is what remains of Christianity after the retreat of theological convictions from the public square. For Hauerwas, this retreat is synonymous with the name Immanuel Kant.5 In this regard, “Christian ethics” is the means by which Christian theologians seek to legitimize their existence in modern research universities and hospitals. Quoting his doctoral advisor, James Gustafson, Hauerwas writes, “The term ‘ethicist’ is popular because it provides an identity for former theologians ‘who do not have the professional credentials of a moral philosopher.’”6

In order to understand why Hauerwas prefers to think of himself as a theologian and insists on keeping theology and ethics together, one must understand two important stories that Hauerwas tells about the history of theological ethics: The first is about the rise of Protestant liberalism as the end of theological ethics, while the second is about the continuation of the liberal Protestant project as “Christian ethics” in America. In this chapter, I will introduce each story—first, the divorce of ethics from theology, and second, the development of Christian ethics in America. Then I will tease out how Hauerwas conceives of his own theological ethics as parallel to Karl Barth’s insistence that dogmatics and ethics are inseparable. All of this will set the stage for chapters two and three, where I will attend specifically to the stories of how Hauerwas came to be influenced by Barth and postliberalism respectively.

ONCE THERE WAS NO CHRISTIAN ETHICS

The first story Hauerwas tells is a story about how ethics became divorced from theology. This story begins with the early church and ends with the Enlightenment. Its basic thesis is that current conceptions of Protestant social ethics are contingent, not necessary. In fact, earlier expressions of the Christian life better exemplify Christianity as the integration of belief and practice. The punch line to the first story is that theologians began by talking about God but, over time, ended up talking about humanity. This story is worth retelling briefly because it gives concrete expression to Hauerwas’s claim that he follows Barth in rejecting liberalism.

For Hauerwas, “Once there was no Christian ethics simply because Christians could not distinguish between their beliefs and their behavior.”7 Indeed, early Christianity was predominantly focused on how Christians should live. Theology simply was “pastoral direction” for how to live a morally substantial life.8 This changed somewhat with the rise of Christendom, or “Constantinianism,” as Hauerwas sometimes calls it.

Constantinianism is a term used by John Howard Yoder to describe the manner in which Christianity changes as it transitions from a persecuted minority to an established majority in the Roman Empire.9 Hauerwas and Wells explain, “Prior to Constantine, it took courage to be a Christian. After Constantine, it took courage to be a pagan. Before Constantine, no one doubted that Christians were different. After Constantine, it became increasingly unclear what difference being a Christian made.”10 In other words, before Christianity became established, what Christians believed made all the difference for how they lived; and how they lived, therefore, distinguished them from everyone else. With Constantinianism, everyone became Christian by being born in a “Christian” society. Meanwhile, moral behavior became secondary to theological belief. When this happened, ethics became about inward dispositions because outwardly everyone was already Christian.11

Even so, Christians developed a variety of theologically robust moral traditions. The most prominent is that of Augustine, who represents the mainstream of Western theological tradition. Two aspects of Augustine’s work are worth noting. First, Augustine argues that pagan conceptions of virtue (temperance, fortitude, justice, prudence) find their proper telos when they are understood as “forms of love whose object is God.”12 The priority of love for God has direct implications for how Christians imagine the social order.13

Secondly, as seen in City of God, Augustine distinguishes between the earthly city, which does not know God and is “characterized by order secured only through violence,” and the heavenly city, which is peacefully ordered by the worship of the one true God.14 While many see the Augustinian tradition as one that, for the most part, embraces Constantinianism—emphasizing the moral life as the pursuit of virtue while maintaining a sort of realpolitik with regard to the inherently sinful nature of worldly existence—Hauerwas maintains that Augustine’s argument in City of God is that true worship founds true politics. In this regard, Augustine refuses to compromise the essential link between Christian convictions and the moral life.

A second substantial response to Constantinianism comes from the monastic tradition. Monasticism maintained the distinctiveness of Christian convictions by recovering some of the effects of persecution and martyrdom with vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. Such lives became exceptional witnesses to the radical demands of the gospel that more “worldly” Christians could aspire toward.15 Although it began as a countercultural movement within Christianity, monasticism came to have a lasting influence on mainstream Christianity through the development of penance.

Sometime around the fifth century, monks in Ireland began to hear confession from the laity. This practice became formalized with the development of penitentials (books that correlated particular sins with acts of penance meant to strengthen virtue as counteraction to sin).16 With the practice of penance, the church developed a rich and sophisticated casuistical approach to moral formation that simultaneously took seriously the call for Christians to pursue holiness and the importance of communal practices in such a pursuit. Casuistry, remember, is the case-by-case application of general ethical principles. In this case, it meant that the church developed a rich moral reasoning that prescribed certain acts of penance in correspondence with particular sins. The basic idea was that Christians could be trained to pursue virtuous action and avoid vicious action by practicing acts that refocused their desire away from sin and toward God. Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologica demonstrates the enduring influence of casuistry on Christian moral theology.

Aquinas’s moral theology is particularly exemplary for Hauerwas because Aquinas avoids the risk of reducing casuistry to legalism by underscoring the unity that exists between theology and ethics.17 Aquinas’s Summa has a three-part structure: part one explores God’s creative activity in divine freedom, part two describes creation’s return to God, and part three elaborates the means by which creation is able to return to God. A large part of the third section is devoted to casuistry. By considering questions regarding the moral life within the larger context of the story of creation and redemption, “the Summa, rather than being an argument for the i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Foreword by Stanley Hauerwas
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part One: The Making of a Barthian Postliberal
• Part Two: The Schleiermacher Thesis Examined
• Part Three: The Ritschl Thesis Examined
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• General Index
• Notes
• Praise for The Making of Stanley Hauerwas
• About the Author
• More Titles from InterVarsity Press
• Copyright