Against the Nations: War and Survival in a Liberal Society.

AGAINST THE NATIONS

War and Survival in a Liberal Society

Stanley Hauerwas 

University of Notre Dame Press, paperback $12.95, 216 pp.

Objectivity isn't all that it's cracked up to be, but subjectivity isn't much better, so a confession is in order at the outset. Longer ago than I care to admit (and, no doubt, much longer ago than he'd care to admit), I took a couple of undergraduate theology courses taught by Stanley Hauerwas, who was then on the theology tenure track at Notre Dame (he now teaches in Duke University's divinity school), and he quickly became one of my favorite teachers. A congenial but intimidatingly erudite Methodist preacher whose accent betrayed origins far south of the Mason-Dixon line and far west of the Mississippi, he was fairly conspicuous on a northern Catholic campus. I imagine he stood out in the theology department, too, because at exactly the same time most of his colleagues were determined to show us how much Christianity was like other beliefs and movements and revolutions, he was inviting us to regard it as unique, utterly strange, dangerous and...that odd word...true.

I can't help but wonder what they make of him at Duke.

Catholic thinkers who address contemporary political issues--J. Bryan Hehir, Richard McBrien, Richard McCormick, Michael Novak (and, for that matter, the editor of Commonweal)--are usually uninteresting precisely because their arguments lack such a distinctively Christian voice. When the panel discussion on the "MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour" or "Nightline" or "Donahue" turns to whether of not to castrate rapists, snuff grandma, buy smart bombs, or distribute condoms to gay seminarians, finding the Christian ethicist can be like playing "Where's Waldo?" Nine times out of ten he or she will be advancing arguments and raising questions which presuppose that here we do indeed have an abiding city.

What distinguishes Hauerwas from such theologians is not only pacifism and a Texas accent, but also his contention that "theological convictions have lost their intelligibility. They have lost their power to train us in skills of truthfulness, partly because accounts of the Christian moral life have too long been accommodated to the needs of the nation-state, and, in particular, to the nation-state we call the United States of America. As a result, the everpresent power of God's kingdom to form our imagination has been subordinated to the interest of furthering liberal ideals through the mechanism of the state."

This is the sort of prophetic cussedness which leads many critics to dismiss his work as "sectarian," a sobriquet which could hardly be expected to scare off a Texan, but which Hauerwas vigorously denies in any case. Introducing these essays, originally published more or less contemporaneously with the writing and publication of the all-but-forgotten bishops' letter on war and peace, he insists that his theological project is "aggressively worldaffirming. Indeed, I find it odd that those who are so committed to the liberal values of the Enlightenment characterize a pacifist position as sectarian since they are usually the ones who develop justifications for Christians in one country killing Christians in another country on grounds of some value entailed by national loyalties. Surely if any position deserves the name of 'sectarian' it is this, since it qualifies the unity of the church in the name of a loyalty other than to the kingdom of God."

Although he cheerfully assails the efforts of such sectarian secularists, Hauerwas agrees with them that the church must occasionally address the world on issues of public policy. Nevertheless, the church must meet the world on the church's terms. "We must attend to the distinctiveness of our language," he writes, "and to the corresponding distinctiveness of the community formed by that language, because it is true." The bishops' pastoral letter on war and peace would have been a much different document had its authors been so attentive.

To follow Hauerwas's recommendations about language may well be to despair of lunch meetings with Henry Kissinger, appearances before Senate subcommittees, and the respectful attention of the movers and shakers, but it is not an invitation to withdraw from the world. It is an insistence that Christians engage the world first and foremost as citizens of God's alien kingdom. "I would say the same thing I am saying now even if I did not believe that such an emphasis more likely will help us meet 'the needs of the future,"' Hauerwas admits. "Yet I think such is the case, because I believe that what Christians believe about what God has done for us through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth is the truth and thus cannot but help us meet the future with hope and enthusiasm." The world view Hauerwas espouses seems identical to that described by the writer of the ancient letter to Diognetus, who observed that Christians "reside in their respective countries, but only as pilgrims....They are unknown, yet are condemned; they are put to death, but it is life they receive." You just can't get much less utopian than that.

These essays---on matters as diverse as theological method, nuclear disarmament, pacifism, the Holocaust, and the Jonestown suicides--are united by a gracious alienation which enables their author to flush out and rough up many of the dogmas of sectarian secularism. In writing about Jonestown, for example, he argues that to dismiss the suicides of Jones's followers as pathological mass hysteria is a "dangerous trivialization" which emerges from the assumption that "being modern involves at least agreement that no one ought to take religion too seriously, especially if it is going to ask any real sacrifices from us." Arguing that the dead of Jonestown died bravely, but as martyrs to a false god, Hauerwas adds that they were failed by the contemporary American society in which Jim Jones was allowed to assemble his People's Temple. Since that society no longer believes that "issues of truth and falsity pertain in matters religious," it is a society which is incapable of recognizing the demonic and thus helpless against such powers as those which reigned in Jonestown.

The one quibble I have with this writing (and I insist upon at least one quibble...God knows Hauerwas chewed up the stuff I wrote when he was trying to teach me) is its occasional absence of detail. About an appropriate posture toward nuclear armament, for instance, he says that "Christians, exactly because their hope is grounded in God, must learn to wait patiently by refusing to let the danger of nuclear weapons tempt us to buy security through apocalyptic threats. Such a waiting does not mean we withdraw from the struggle by wallowing in self-indulgent despair. Rather our waiting must be a time of activity that seeks to present to the world the excitement of God's peace." I can't help but wonder what such activity would look like, and Hauerwas doesn't say much more about it. I suspect that he would be recommending such activity regardless of the clock-reading on the cover of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. I'll bet such activity would look a lot like what once were called the corporal and spiritual works of mercy, acts too often dismissed as the products of a complacent, even decadent piety. (Just read Nation columnist Christopher Hitchens on Mother Teresa some time.) If anyone could give a compelling account of the "excitement of God's peace" inherent in such activity, Hauerwas could.