Stanley Hauerwas continues his long-time screed against the American church as “too American.” What do you think? Does he go too far here? Not far enough? What is the value and what are the dangers of such categorical critique?
Truth in advertising: (1) I certainly recognize the syndrome he describes; (2) I deny that the church in America has entirely lost its mission, selling its spiritual heritage for a mess of nationalist pottage; (3) I feel Hauerwas’s sweeping critique is excessive and counterproductive. It stands to discourage American Christians and deter us from participating in our churches more than it helps us to participate well.
Feel free to call me out on this. I’m always ready to learn and be corrected.
Medieval Wisdom for Modern Christians
Grateful to the dead 
Gosh! Far from discouraging me, discovering Hauerwas this past year has been a real kick in the pants, a breath of fresh, a bolt of lightning out of a Carolina blue sky. I think he’s just what Reformed christianity needs (I’m coming from a reformed perspective) that majors on the me-and-my-Jesus and doesn’t know what to make of the church as church. It’s just a place we meet to worship God but we haven’t really thought of it as missional in the witness we can be by forgiving each other, enemy love, and all the rest. So i’d much rather err on the hauerwas side and think about what it means to be Christian within the body of Christ than become an apologist for the American christian status quo with its scary fusion of christianity and patriotism. Not that it’s one or the other but given those two choices, the path is clear.
(BTW, I do love Sayers and Lewis and the adaptations of Sayers’ Lord Peter series with Petherbridge and Harriet Walter.)
Darius, I’m glad he works that way for you! As Gregory the Great said, “gentle hissing that calms horses, excites young puppies.”
OK, maybe that’s a little opaque 🙂 I think Greg meant: not everyone reacts the same way to the same rhetoric. One man’s meat is another’s poison, and all that. But for me, there are better ways of leveling the critique against patriotism (etc.) in the church than painting us all with the same brush. Truthfully, the dude just rubs me the wrong way, and part of the reason is that I really, really liked what he had to say in some of his earlier work. So I’m disappointed at the totalizing direction he’s taking his message.
When Hauerwas is at his provocative best you don’t want to treat him as vitamin supplements that edify the body. He is more like chemotherapy that helps get rid of the cancer, albeit, with some undesirable side-effects!
Yeah, OK, if you include in the list of undesirable side-effects, DEATH of the patient. 🙂
Well, I use the C-word according to Yoder’s definitions of it – and recognize that its precise relationship to the early church is historically tricky at best. It’s the theological premise that I’m trying to get at – the idea that God’s work is being done through particular governmental structures, military actions, legislative agendas, etc.
I’ve certainly been to a few churches like the ones you describe, and am aware of a few more that I haven’t actually attended. But – and call me a cynic here if you like – the vast majority of my religious experience has been in classical Pentecostal circles, and I think the sorts of churches you describe are not very prominent there. As Hauerwas says, you’ll find out that the gospel has enemies if you walk into a church like that and suggest that violence might not be an appropriate Christian response to our enemies.
You’ve never been to a church that hasn’t sold out to Constantinianism? I have. Many. Have they been tinged with/wrestled with/fallen occasionally into Constantinianism (by the way, as you also know, I think we throw that term around too much, doing justice neither to our own churches nor the early church, but that’s another matter)? I’d say yes, at least provisionally. “Sold out?” No, I think that would be an immature and incorrect critique of almost any American church I have attended.
As you know, I tend to think that Hauerwas tends to be on the mark when it comes to diagnosing the problem (1 above), but I also tend to think that he may be closer on (2) than you give him credit for – witness the furor in evangelical churches over Glenn Beck’s comments last week. And, it works the same the other way – how many Episcopalians or other mainliners (or Jim Wallis) tend to believe that liberal political agendas = God’s work in society?
I do think that Hauerwas is problematic in the sense that the church that he envisions does not exactly exist, and that frustration about this can drive one to not participate on one’s church, and that’s not helpful. But I’m not sure what the other options are. In the 1993 article “How the World Lost Its Story” recently republished in First Things‘ 25th anniversary issue, Robert Jenson argues that the loss of the idea of the “narratable world” in the culture at large means that for the church to bear any witness to the gospel, it must be the narratable world for its members. I cannot see how we can be that sort of world – a center for life which provides a narrative through which to read the rest of the world – if we’re sold out to Constantianism, whether of the Left or the Right.
But that’s just my .02.