THE PRIVATE STANLEY HAUERWAS AND HIS PUBLIC THEOLOGY
By Bruce Kaye
ABC RELIGION AND ETHICS | 30 SEP 2010

EVEN HIS MOST FEROCIOUS CRITICS AGREE THAT STANLEY HAUERWAS IS TOO IMPORTANT TO IGNORE.

In 2001 Time magazine described Stanley Hauerwas as the best theologian in America. He thought this was hugely ironic and, at the same time, somehow a serious theological error. “‘Best’ isn’t a theological category,” he said in response.

Stanley Hauerwas has written scores of books on particular issues of contemporary life. Many of these books were collections of essays or addresses given on specific occasions. His writing is addressed to particular issues of living in the kind of secular liberal society that is the United States of America.

He courageously addresses issues like abortion, political allegiance, truth in public life, the severely disabled, democracy, hospitality, the university, imperialism, individualism, the virtues, history, just war, justice, the Eucharist, discipleship, ethical theory, family – the list could go on almost endlessly to encompass all sorts of issues that anyone wanting to be a Christian in the United States of America, or pretty much anywhere else, might ever have to encounter.

He has lectured all over the world and delivered the prestigious Gifford Lectures in Scotland, published under the title The Grain of the Universe.
Due to the sheer breadth of his engagements and the forcefulness of his arguments, it is hard to disagree with the judgment of Jeffrey Stout – his long-time sparring partner – who describes Stanley Hauerwas as the most prolific and provocative theological ethicist writing in the United States. “I dissent strongly from many, perhaps most, of his conclusions. But Hauerwas is too important to be ignored.”

But now Stanley Hauerwas has written an entirely different kind of book. Hannah’s Child is a theologian’s memoir. Stanley Hauerwas is not exactly Hannah’s child, but he is the child of a woman who prayed Hannah’s prayer (see 1 Samuel 1).

His mother’s first child was stillborn and she prayed a prayer just like that which Hannah prayed in the Old Testament. Hannah gave her child to God and he became the prophet Samuel. When he was six years old Stanley’s mother told him of her prayer and that she had named him after Henry Stanley, journalist and explorer who famously found David Livingstone in deepest Africa and was portrayed by Spencer Tracy in the 1939 film Stanley and Livingstone which she had just seen.

Somewhat surprisingly, Jeffrey Stout says that this book might well be Hauerwas’s best book. “It must be read by everyone who knows him either first hand or through his other writings.”

This book is not an autobiography, though it contains a great deal of autobiographical information. Some of it is painfully candid about the struggles in his personal life. It is a conscious reflection upon his life, the events that have gone to make up the story which is Stanley Hauerwas.
At the beginning of the book he suggests that there are a number of themes that have been at the heart of his work, contingency, time, memory, character. Certainly these themes are to be found in his writing. His exposition of the theme of contingency in the chapters on Karl Barth in his Gifford Lectures is not only acute but borders on the inspiring.
The narrative of this theological memoir makes it clear that Hauerwas has been on a pilgrimage, a journey into the unknown. I like particularly the theme that runs through the book of humility, or a rejection of the idea that he has understood everything. The book is full of references about not understanding, not perceiving, not knowing. Yet of course it is clear from what he has written that he certainly knows an awful lot.

Along this journey, he has accumulated a vast array of friends. Hauerwas has a gift for friendship – not the adulatory kind that passes when fame has departed, but the kind of friendship which lies behind an extraordinary collection of essays in his honour by his former research students. They all argue with him and more often than not disagree with him. But these are his friends. Friendship for him means companionship, conversation and therefore also diversity, disagreement and argument.

Throughout this memoir, friends and colleagues are ever present realities. He says at the beginning, “I have written this memoir in an attempt to understand myself, something that would be impossible without my friends. I have had a wonderful life because I have had wonderful friends. So this attempt to understand myself is not just about ‘me’ but about the friends who have made me who I am. It is also about God – the God who has forced me to be who I am. Indeed, trying to figure out how I ended up being Stanley Hauerwas requires that I say how God figures into the story, and this is a frightening prospect.”

Hauerwas has never written a systematic theology. Clearly he has read and wrestled with the great theologians and philosophers of the Western tradition. The description of his reading during his graduate years at Yale would make an ordinary graduate student blanche.

This is a man who has done the hard yards in understanding the theological canon, and yet he does not have a systematic “position”. That is essentially because he sees his task as a theologian as trying to understand what it means to be a Christian and calling the church to that vocation. “By writing,” he says, “I learn to believe.”

There are a number of elements in this memoir that draw attention to the kind of work that Hauerwas has done. He has not always thought of himself as a theologian. It was at Duke University that he discovered he was.

Much earlier he learned from Rowan Greer that theology is not best understood as a system, and that instinct has led him to be more concerned with particular issues and with the importance of narrative in understanding what it means to be a Christian.

He has been deeply influenced by Mennonite theologian John Howard Yoder, and the memoir contains a wonderful story of how he discovered the published and unpublished writings of Yoder.

This book is not an intellectual autobiography. It is a theologian’s memoir. It contains much material to do with his personal life, his first marriage to Anne, and the twenty years of coping with her severe bipolar condition, his relationship with his son Adam and material about his academic relationships. It also contains material about his discovery of Paula Gilbert and their profoundly happy marriage, which has been a delight to his many argumentative friends.

This book is really the inside story of Stanley Hauerwas, the outside story of which has been his many publications. He is essentially a teacher and speaker and also someone who increasingly preaches. Through all of this he has learned what it means to pray and to believe in God.

At the end of this book he tells us what he learned through the writing this memoir. It was quite simply that he was a Christian.

The book will naturally not be attractive to romantics who think that being a Christian is something that certainly should precede being a theologian – this is far from true in Hauerwas’s own case.

It will not satisfy those who want to find a way of pinning down Hauerwas so that they have him fixed in a “position” – he does not have a position.
It will disappoint those who want to find material to support their disagreements with his published works – or, which is more likely, what they have read that others have said about him.

But the serious reader who approaches this book with an open mind will discover a story about the activity of God in the life of an individual that is at once remarkably surprising, volatile and profound.

Hannah in the Old Testament gave her child to Eli the prophet and the child became Samuel the prophet in Israel. Stanley Hauerwas did not become a prophet like Samuel, least of all a Nazirite, but he did become a kind of prophet which late modernity has so manifestly needed.
The Revd Dr Bruce Kaye is a Professorial Associate in the School of theology at Charles Sturt and a Visiting Research Fellow in the School of History at UNSW. He is formerly the General Secretary of the Anglican Church of Australia (1994-2004) and is the author of Introduction to World Anglicanism (Cambridge University Press, 2008) and Conflict and the Practice of Christian Faith: The Anglican Experiment (Cascade Books, 2009).

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