David Tracy was my advisor at the University of Chicago Divinity School at
the time he was developing the idea of the analogical imagination. The way he
wove together all aspects of religious thought into an intricate fabric inspired
me, even though my evangelical Protestant instincts kept me from embracing it
entirely. Perhaps I was intimidated to find that Tracy had managed to weave
even my own dialectical predilections into his multicolored coat, making my
theology look patched and worn by comparison. I kept looking for a loose thread
to pull, but Tracy had managed to tie his arguments too neatly together.

Nobody read Barth much at Chicago in those days, but what I needed was an American
version of Barth’s thundering voice. Barth, of course, was more than a loose
thread; he threatened to rip the garment of modern theology into shreds. An
American Barth, however, would say “No!” to secular liberalism not from the
vantage point of the utter transcendence of God but from the more modest perspective
of a Church out of sync with the world, unable and unwilling to do for modern
culture what that culture could not do for itself.

Stanley Hauerwas was that voice, although it took me years until I could hear
him. Now I wonder how I could have kept from hearing him all along. Many theologians
do not have much of a voice in their texts; you have to hear them speak in person
to get a sense of who they are. They do not write like they speak, or, if they
do, it is because they speak like they write—in a formal, analytical, and dry
style. Hauerwas is an exception to this general rule: you don’t have to meet
Stanley to know him. And for many people, reading him is as close as they ever
want to get.

Like all voices that are distinctive and sharp, his can be irritating and annoying.
It can also be very appropriate. I teach at a secular institution, and my colleagues
really cannot imagine that their liberal assumptions are capable of being challenged.
Hauerwas has helped me to be more confident in articulating my differences from
them. I should also note that Hauerwas is not just a polemicist. More than any
theologian I know, he not only defends the importance of friendship for theological
conversation but also practices what he preaches. He promptly answers his mail
with long letters, generously giving his time to friends and strangers alike.

While he writes too much, Hauerwas can still be as surprising as he is predictable.
He always seems to be trying to get the words right in order to say the one
thing that is necessary to be said, and yet he never quite says it. This is
due in part to his insistence on the irreducibility of the particular, which
leads him to be more contextual than systematic. Indeed, much of the power of
his prose comes from his cleverly constructed mistrust of the very rationality
that he so beautifully showcases.

Hauerwas speaks from the whirlwind of hyperbole—the trope of prophets—and his
rhetoric is as intentional as Barth’s. As Flannery O’Connor once said, “When
you are talking to the hard of hearing, sometimes you have to shout.” Hauerwas’
hyperbole, however, has a more clipped and sarcastic bite than Barth’s Teutonic
proclamations. If Barth threw a bomb into the playground of liberal theologians,
Hauerwas, in his shadow, keeps throwing firecrackers to keep liberals on their
toes.

Understandably, his liberal victims never seem to appreciate his provocations,
but they could do a better job of reading him. They take him both too seriously
and not seriously enough. They take him literally, and thus they are outraged
by his jibes and generalizations. Readers who think his criticisms are indiscriminate
forget that liberalism is such a pervasive phenomenon that even the wildest
of swings is bound to hit its target. But if his critics would acknowledge the
rhetorical construction of his work, they could better understand how Hauerwas
has already anticipated their reactions. Asking Hauerwas to modify his critique
of liberalism is like asking Jim Carrey to tone down his facial tics. A Hauerwas
essay without antiliberal jeremiads might count as more nuanced and careful
scholarship, but it would not sound a thing like Stanley Hauerwas—and it would
be a lot less fun to read.

Over the years I have become convinced that Hauerwas is right more often than
he is wrong, but it is the way in which he is wrong that makes him so interesting.
His hyperboles can let evangelicals off the hook from thinking about the critical
issues liberal academics raise, and they can soothe the consciences of academics
(like me) who are alienated from their liberal colleagues. Hyperbole is a seductive
trope. It is so excessive that you can think you have done what it demands just
by speaking it. But saying something does not make it so. Indeed, Hauerwas is
so persuasive that his theology sounds too good to be true. That’s because it
is. Such rhetoric sounds good to those of us who believe that the Church has
lost much of its integrity in the modern world. Precisely because it is so pleasing
to the quasi–evangelical ear, this rhetoric can become a substitute for thinking
through the hard decisions that the modern world forces upon Christians. It
is easy to see the world through Hauerwas’ eyes while forgetting the fact that
he describes a Church that does not exist and a world whose existence cannot
be so easily denied.

Perhaps the key to the reception of his work is his anti–Americanism. Hauerwas
has given rise to a whole generation of theologians who make quick work of consumerism,
patriotism, nationalism, and popular culture. Some of his students have told
me that they are so alienated from American politics that they no longer vote.
Nevertheless, his critique of all things American is what makes Hauerwas look
more at home with liberals than conservatives. By continuously thumping on that
theme, he is able to gain a larger academic audience than would ever listen
to a more traditionally evangelical theologian. Indeed, without his constant
critique of everything American, he would be in danger of looking like just
another evangelical theologian.

Hauerwas thus pushes the intellectual elite to take traditional theological
claims seriously while at the same time assuring them that many of their left–leaning
cultural and political assumptions will remain untroubled. Can you really enter
theology from the right and exit at the left? That trick seems less plausible
in the light of September 11. Hauerwas recently has spoken about how isolated
he feels in sticking to his pacifism during the war on terrorism. During this
time of crisis, his barbed rhetoric seems less helpful. Now it does not seem
so wise to work so hard to isolate Christianity from America—and the West. Modernity,
after all, is the bastard child of Christianity, and Christians still have some
parental responsibilities. This is a time for a more prudent rhetoric about
America’s moral and political responsibilities in a world divided by poverty
and hatred.

Hauerwas’ recently published Gifford Lectures, With the Grain of the Universe
(an odd title for someone who goes so much against the grain), can be read as
a response to critics who think he is too reckless in his scholarship. It is
also a response to those who clamor for a masterwork. With the Grain
fails to live up to this expectation, however, because it swings too hard from
polemic to commentary. Note, for example, the long and involved footnotes, which
in many cases take up more of the page than the primary text. Like all great
hyperbolists, Hauerwas’ best work is occasional; the prophetic pace of his prose
makes him a sprinter, not a long distance runner.

The book is a lesson in Hauerwas’ reading habits rather than an addition to
his constructive theology. His meticulous commentary on William James, Reinhold
Niebuhr, and Karl Barth barely masks his anxiety about who has influenced whom.
He protests the most against the very theologians with whom he shares more than
he is willing to admit. For example, he blames James for pushing theology down
the slippery slope of subjectivity, but Hauerwas too has a pragmatic criterion
of truth. Hauerwas extends, rather than reverses, James by making the community,
not the individual, the justification of Christian convictions. For example,
Hauerwas often argues that you have to be a pacifist in order to understand
the Bible. Scripture, then, does not have any inherent meaning. Texts belong
to communities, which suggests that their interpretation is determined by the
practices of the community that reads them. In making this argument, Hauerwas
tries to combine the postmodern hermeneutics of Stanley Fish (“Is there a text
in this class?”) with the biblical realism of John Howard Yoder, a precarious
synthesis at best.

Hauerwas next turns to Niebuhr, who is the real villain of his book, just as
Barth is its hero. Hauerwas has to rebuff Niebuhr for the same reason that Niebuhr
so often put down Barth—both are gaining distance on theologians to whom they
are closer than they would like to be. This might seem like a surprising claim,
but the parallels between Hauerwas and Niebuhr are abundant. Both are ethicists
concerned with social questions, rather than systematic or dogmatic topics.
Both wrote quickly and boldly for a broad audience, without always playing by
the academic rules of the game. Both polemicize against liberalism, and neither
does exegetical theology. Both are obsessed with America (even if one thought
that America was a nation with the soul of a church and the other thinks that
America is soulless). More substantially, Niebuhr did for anthropology, the
popular doctrine of his day, what Hauerwas has done for ecclesiology, the doctrine
of today. Indeed, Niebuhr doesn’t really develop a full portrait of Christianity,
leaving out the doctrine of the Trinity and ecclesiology, for example, while
Hauerwas too has not shown much interest in a more systematic presentation of
Christian dogma, writing very little, for example, about liturgy and Christology.

Just as Niebuhr made it safe for atheists to use Christian rhetoric without
actually going to church, Hauerwas has taught evangelicals how to employ a hermeneutics
of suspicion and critique without accepting the values of the secular academy.
Evangelicals–for–Hauerwas are able to shun liberalism while still staking a
claim for membership in that most liberal of institutions, the academy. Hauerwas
has also made it possible for mainline Christians to sound as angry and alienated
as evangelicals or fundamentalists without actually having to inhabit those
particular subcultures. In fact, there seem to be two groups of readers that
Hauerwas attracts: evangelicals who want to engage with secular culture more
critically, and mainline Christians who want to position themselves outside
of secular culture without having to become evangelical.

Moreover, just as Hauerwas thinks that Niebuhr secretly legitimates the coercive
features of liberal democracies, Hauerwas himself is often accused of encouraging
the more conservative elements of the Christian churches. Niebuhr is no more
liberal than Hauerwas is conservative. Yet when Niebuhr criticizes the optimism
of liberalism or when Hauerwas criticizes the nationalism of conservativism,
each thinker ends up being much more implicated in the assumptions of his opponents
than he would like to admit. There is no doubt that Niebuhr was a kind of optimist.
He thought Christianity could be cleaned up and made presentable to modern liberals.
And Hauerwas is a kind of conservative who thinks the Christian Church can stand
against decadent secular culture by providing an alternative to liberal forms
of socialization. Niebuhr never sheds his optimism or his belief that American
democracy is the best, even though limited, vehicle for the achievement of the
Kingdom of God. Likewise, something of the American exceptionalism that Hauerwas
so vehemently rejects comes back to haunt his ecclesiology, wherein the Church
becomes an entity set apart from all other institutions and lacking any obligation
to enter into reciprocal relationships out of fear that that would compromise
or imperil its moral superiority.

Both Niebuhr and Hauerwas demonstrate to what extent theology is a rhetorical
art, a matter of persuading the faithful to rethink the historical and critical
context of their commitments. When Hauerwas writes that “the truth of Christian
convictions requires a recovery of the confident use of Christian speech about
God,” he could be describing Niebuhr’s project as well. One way of thinking
about their differences is to look at their rhetorical strategies, rather than
their theological conflict. Niebuhr is in debt to the figurative power of irony
as much as Hauerwas is to hyperbole. Indeed, Hauerwas is typically American
in his insistence that Christian theology be translated into American politics
in direct and aggressive form, without much reflection on the various ways in
which democratic structures mediate moral action. For Hauerwas, the Church is
not a merely passive sign of God’s grace, but an active body that accomplishes
God’s will. Hauerwas is missing an ironic sensibility that understands how our
best intentions often end up subverting the good we hope to achieve, and how,
therefore, even prophetic utterances should normally result in reform, rather
than revolution.

In sum, Hauerwas’ utopian view of the Church as self–sufficient and antimodern
needs a little Niebuhrian realism. Hauerwas has been very harsh in criticizing
Niebuhr’s famous use of the phrase “impossible possibility,” but the language
of impossibility is becoming popular in the academy today, thanks to its use
by Derrida and negative theologians. Such language is helpful precisely because
it reminds us not to take our hyperboles too literally. Americans, as Tocqueville
noted long ago, do not trust thinking that does not lead immediately to some
kind of action. We are stirred by extravagant rhetoric, and we like to think
we can remake the world in the image of our words. We are an impatient people,
and we like results. Hauerwas praises the virtue of patience in his work, but
he is also drawn to the grand gesture of sacrificial witness and the hope that,
even at this late hour, America can still be redeemed by the morally pure. In
a word, he wants pacifism to pay. Irony is missing from Hauerwas precisely because,
in spite of his many protestations, he is so perfectly American.

Stephen H. Webb is Associate Professor of Religion at Wabash College. His most
recent books include Good Eating: Diet, the Bible, and the Proper Love of
Animals and Taking Religion to School: Christian Theology and Secular
Education, both published by Brazos Press.