In Good Company by Stanley Hauerwas
Jordan, Patrick
A MUSCULAR PACIFIST In Good Company The Church as Potts Stanley Hatwrwas University of Notre Dame Press, $29.95,20$ pp. Patrick Jordan Stanley Hauerwas, Methodist theologian and university...
...That means forming a "good company" of believers whose daily lifestyles make it a viable, inviting polis with a critical take on society...
...And force is a well-chosen word, for Hauerwas is one of those muscular pacifists who are never satisfied with simply inviting you to share his convictions but have to wrench your arm...
...He also has a keen nose for secularizing tendencies-both in the churches and on campus-and doesn't hesitate to expose them...
...It also happens to be the title of another just-released volume from the same publisher, a study of Hauerwas and Jiirgen Moltmann by Arne Rasmusson...
...Or again: "I sometimes think the reason that Protestants, and in particular Methodists, are more likely to believe in the 'real absence' than the 'real presence' is that God just scares the hell out of us...
...Catholics are scarcely better off...
...The churches in this country are in a missionary situation, he writes, because of the very culture they helped to create...
...That theme informs and braces every selection in this lively collection, and gives the reader the sort of workover one doesn't experience often enough when reading contemporary theology...
...Still, Hauerwas is not insufferable...
...Particularly when it comes to hammering liberals-theological, cultural, or political-Hauerwas takes no prisoners...
...And theologians shouldn't fear saying so because faith, by its nature, is "recriminatory...
...How's that for marketing...
...For Hauerwas, a church does not have a social ethic, it is a social ethic...
...It requires not only right-minded individuals but committed groups...
...While he praises John Paul II's Centesimus annus, he faults the pope for his romanticized notion of work and the way the pope construes biblical texts to weight an argument...
...I don't know of another American theologian who can have you laughing out loud while at the same time you're licking the wounds he has inflicted...
...His criticism of liberalism is unrelenting and, as Max Stackhouse has pointed out (Christian Century, October 18,1995), sometimes imprecise and misleading...
...Only such a polis can provide its members with the skills needed for living faithfully: "I want to be part of a community with habits and practices that will make me do what I would otherwise not choose to do," he writes...
...He begins explorations with self-deprecating humor: "I am not unaware of the highly compromised nature of the church," he writes...
...The book's subtitle, "The Church as Polis," serves as focus and impetus, although there are lapses...
...With the dexterity of a Zabar's lox fil-leter, Hauerwas dissects American individualism and displays its deleterious influence on the churches...
...and he's often right...
...However, it is not Hauerwas's criticisms that are the dominant note in this work, but his notion of church as living community, called-and called to account-by Christ...
...But Hauerwas is evenhanded, spreading his wrath to supply-side economics and what he sees as the half-measures of natural-law ethics...
...He's too lively, too engaging, enjoyable...
...Hauerwas is decidedly contemporary-his ethical discussions include front-page items, and his books have sold surprisingly well for a serious theologian-but he is no postmodernist (and clearly no modernist...
...That is why its liturgy must form its life and mission: "Worship is the most effective form of resistance to the powers who would dominate our lives," he writes...
...He might applaud the Catholic bishops for a particular stand, but would rightfully ask where the rest of the Catholic people stand...
...All of this can seem ill-defined-and at times it does in this collection-but it does not diminish the power of Hauerwas's message...
...Now professor of theological ethics at Duke University, Hauerwas taught Christian ethics at Notre Dame for a dozen years, and has an appreciative but realistic sense of things Catholic...
...He comments on Robert Wuthnow's The Restructuring of American Religion: "Members of Protestant churches now depend less on belief in the particular theological and ecclesiastical heritage of that denomination than on how that religious organization provides a means for individuals to express their particular interests...
...I am, after all, a Methodist...
...In Good Company, Hauerwas's eighteenth book, is a collection of thirteen essays, several coauthored, dealing with ecclesiology, ethics, and ecumenism...
...As they become thoroughly assimilated to American democracy, writes Hauerwas, they no longer possess a distinct and coherent Christian perspective and become less capable of or disposed toward challenging the status quo...
...The guiding argument in this volume, however, is more apparent and sustained than in Hauerwas's other recent collection of essays, Dispatches from the Front (Duke, 1994...
...I am trying to foment a modest revolution," he writes here, "by forcing Christians to take themselves seriously as Christians...
...Instead of being "gathered" by God and formed by a belief in the risen Lord, these congregations are increasingly voluntary associations of like-minded seekers...
...Patrick Jordan Stanley Hauerwas, Methodist theologian and university professor, sometimes verges on the irreligious...
...He takes aim at not only the pretensions of the American Christian "project," particularly the liberal variety, but at the blessed self-assurance of the reader...
...For Hauerwas, challenging the status quo is an essential aspect of being Christian...
Vol. 123 • February 1996 • No. 3
