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Hauerwas: A (Very) Critical Introduction Book review

“[H]ow remarkably easy it is for middle-class white Americans to be pacifist, since for many it need involve little beyond talking correctly.” So observes Healy, Hauerwas: A (Very) Critical Introduction (93) as he reads the version of Christianity being offered by Stanley Hauerwas.

Nicholas Healy is interested in what he calls the concrete church. What actually happens in churches and how can that enhance our theological study and method? In order to help him think through what he is doing, he engages with the prolific pen of Stanley Hauerwas. On the surface, both might seem friendly. They both care about the church, about the realities of being Christian in contemporary life.

But Healy’s Hauerwas: A (Very) Critical Introduction, in fact becomes a rigorous, sustained, yet respectful critique of theological project emerging from the prolific pen of Stanley Hauerwas. It’s worth reading for that reason alone, as an example of how to listen carefully and engage deeply with those with whom you find yourself disagreeing.

The book has five chapters. The first, an introduction, sets out how Healy plans to read Hauerwas. It is a methodology for theological critique, one that seeks a respectful, yet rigorous engagement. The second chapter works across 26 books written by Hauerwas, to argue that Hauerwas’s theology is church focused. The third chapter reads Hauerwas in conversation with Schlieirmacher. While at first an unlikely theological conversation partner, Healy argues that both have a turn toward the subjective and the church.

The fourth chapter reads Hauerwas in light of ecclesiology and ethnography. It argues that Hauerwas deals with ideals. The result is a set of distortions that ignore the complex and often rather messy realities of the churches’ actual existence, creates unrealistic patterns of discipleship that in fact unhinge from historic Christian understandings of salvation and grace. The fifth chapter develops in depth the impact of these theological distortions, mapping out the ways in which Hauerwas’s turn toward the ideal church is in fact deeply problematic, most particularly in relation to Scripture, authority and Christology.

I first came across Healy in my research into fresh expressions of church. I was looking for ways to develop ethnography to explore ecclesiology. (See Perspectives on Ecclesiology and Ethnography and Explorations in Ecclesiology and Ethnography). I wanted to know whether insights from ethnographic and sociological views of the church can enhance ecclesiological method and substance. Healy becomes a helpful reading companion in my quest.

• He helps me think theologically. “Church practices therefore require us to reflect upon who God is and how God acts toward us.” (119)
• He allows me to consider the work of God missionally, with the Spirit’s activity inside and outside the church. “If our intentionality is Christian, we can bend almost any socially-sanctioned practice into a Christian practice, even if it is not such to most people.” (119)
• He reminds me that apologetics has taken a particular shape in contemporary culture, one that risks losing the value of apologetics as helping the church understand its own faith better. “Only in the modern period, when theologians seemingly lost confidence … did they mount cross-traditional arguments for our beliefs. (107)”
• He pushes me to consider not only faith practiced well, but faith practiced badly. This includes ways to allow for the differences between and within church communities, to be honest about the multiple communities and relationships humans experience and the need for a “theological understanding of failure and mediocrity” (107) as part of being honest about being church.