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Review Essays of Academic, Professional & Technical Books in the Humanities & Sciences
Gifford Lectures
With the Grain of the Universe: The Church's Witness and Natural
Theology: Being Gifford Lectures Delivered at the University of St. Andrews in
2001 by Stanley Hauerwas (Brazos) Stanley Hauerwas is a
no-nonsense, confessional Christian theologian whose scholarship, sometimes
disputed yet always demanding a response, has earned him a prominent reputation
on the theological horizon.
These lectures explore how natural theology, divorced from a confessional
doctrine of God, inevitably distorts our understanding of God's character and
the world in which we live. Hauerwas criticizes those who use natural theology
to defend theism as the philosophical prerequisite to confessional claims.
Instead, after Karl Barth, he argues that natural theology should witness to
"the non-Godforsakeness of the world, even under the conditions of sin."
Stanley Hauerwas has good news for the church: theology can still tell us
something significant about the way things are. In fact, the church is more than
a social institution, and the cross of Christ, never peripheral, is central to
knowing God. Whatever our native moral intelligence, the truth that is God is
not available apart from moral transformation. Ultimately-and despite the scars
left by modernity-theology must translate into a life transformed by confession
and the witness of the church.
"In this stunning book, the great
Christian ethicist Stanley Hauerwas offers the comprehensive theological
argument we have long requested. Of course, if we were worthier students, we
would have known this could not come in the form of a conceptual system. Like
Barth, whom he makes the hero of this book, Hauerwas teaches that Christian
theological argument begins not with our own rational constructs, but by bearing
witness to God's life among us. The argument proceeds not by speculating on what
God's life might mean, but by narrating how it is in fact imitated by sanctified
lives here in this created world. The argument ends not by framing doctrines,
but by warning us of the error, violence, suffering, and death that remain in
this world-and it calls us, in imitation of God's life, to help heal this world
and to work for its final redemption. For those whose habit it is to call this
world 'nature,' Hauerwas's theological argument may be dubbed 'natural
theology,' and the consequence will be a radical change in what we take natural
theology to be. Natural theology will be the story of God's life as it is lived,
visibly, in this world; as its meaning is disclosed to the community of those
who inquire after it, and as its truth is displayed through its visible effects
in transforming this world into the one it would be and will be." -Peter Ochs,
University of Virginia
John Milbank has observed that 'the pathos of modern theology is its false humility.' Theologians, particularly theologians who are paid by universities, too often do theology in a manner that will not offend the peace established by the secular order. Given the requirements of that order, theology cannot help but become one more opinion, one more option, to enliven the dulled imaginations of those who suffer from knowing so much that they no longer know what they know. I hope Milbank's warning about false humility explains why I cannot help but appear impolite, since I must maintain that the God who moves the sun and the stars is the same God who was incarnate in Jesus of Nazareth. Given the politics of modernity, the humility required for those who worship the God revealed in the cross and resurrection of Christ cannot help but appear as arrogance…
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