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younggirl
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Posted -
2002/1/23 上午 03:38:00
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The gospel according to Stanley Hauerwas
By YONAT SHIMRON
DURHAM - The room at Duke University's Bryan Center was nearly full. On this late October afternoon, all awaited Stanley Hauerwas, one of the nation's preeminent Christian thinkers, to talk about his writings and answer questions. A Duke Press spokesman introduced a 730-page collection of Hauerwas' writings; notebooks flew open and pens scratched.
Then Hauerwas, the divinity school's cantankerous star professor, was asked about the events of Sept. 11.
In trademark fashion, he shot back with a theological one-liner.
"People say Sept. 11 changed the world," said Hauerwas, in his nasal Texas twang. "That is false. Thirty-three A.D. forever changed the world."
An audible "ahh" swept the room as the audience, mostly divinity students, straightened to hear what he would say next.
The statement was typical of Hauerwas and not only for its aggressive certitude. It really does sum up his beliefs. For 30 years, Hauerwas has taken it upon himself to recover a distinctively Christian way of talking. He's not embarrassed to talk about Jesus in public, and he's not afraid if he occasionally sounds like a fundamentalist street preacher.
This bald and bearded professor has made a name for himself in Christian and academic circles with his efforts to jolt Christians out of their complacency and force them to confront what he thinks is the radical message of the Gospels. For too long, Hauerwas believes, Christians have equated going to church with being good citizens. He wants to show them the two could not be more different.
In his view, Christians are called to worship God, live in community, share their resources and show the world the way of peace and forgiveness. Their loyalty is not to American democracy or market capitalism. It is to Jesus Christ. Hauerwas believes Christians should be known as those "peculiar people" who do not kill their unborn (he is opposed to abortion) or allow their elderly to take their lives prematurely (and euthanasia).
At 61, Hauerwas is considered the most prolific and influential theologian working in the United States, a man who has reconfigured the landscape of Christian ethics. His 22 books have been translated into such languages as German and Japanese. He is sought after worldwide -- traveling out of town on average once a week. Last year he gave the prestigious Gifford Lectures at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, the equivalent of the Oscars for philosophers and theologians. In September, he was crowned "America's Best Theologian," by Time magazine.
Perhaps more important, Hauerwas has shaped three decades of students, many now serving as pastors, many more teaching at divinity schools.
"He's someone whose work has influenced a whole generation of thinkers," said Jean Bethke Elshtain, a professor of social and political ethics at the University of Chicago divinity school. "People feel obligated to respond to him, more often in opposition. But he's someone you can't safely afford to ignore. His impact is undeniable."
Hauerwas is a complex person. He sees Christians as a holy people set apart from modern society, but he himself is known for rough language. He is a man of humble beginnings who takes pride in his blue-collar heritage, but he feels most comfortable at a white-collar school. He works 12-hour days and keeps an unbending routine but has a childlike wonder of God and zest for his tiny Methodist church in Chapel Hill.
His theology is equally difficult to define. He is best known for his scathing criticism of both political and theological liberalism. To him, the two are different but equally destructive in promoting the idea that people are best served when allowed to chase after their desires in an endless and meaningless fashion. Yet it would be misleading to define him as a conservative. He is a pacifist who believes nonviolence is the only way to stop the cycle of an eye for an eye.
Asked during that forum at the Bryan Center what he would say to churches that proudly display the American flag and see patriotism as a God-sanctioned duty, Hauerwas answered: "Let me be as clear as I can: That God is not the God of Jesus Christ."
As for the war in Afghanistan, Hauerwas thinks it's unbecoming for Christians to celebrate military victory. The proper Christian response to war, he thinks, is mourning. "Drape the sanctuary in black," he said, "and mourn that we've had to kill."
A salty tongue
A first encounter with Hauerwas quickly brings into focus his contradictory nature: He is a religious scholar who swears like a sailor.
At Duke Divinity School, proud of its Methodist affiliation and steeped in Southern niceties, that is bad manners. But Hauerwas feels no urge to quit swearing on campus or anywhere else. Just as he calls on Christians to speak the language of their faith, he thinks he should be able to speak the language of his upbringing. The son of a bricklayer who never went to college, Hauerwas keeps an arsenal of choice expletives to remind him of his roots.
They escape his mouth most often when he feels people are being pretentious, a trait he particularly hates at church.
"We've all been in a context where someone says, 'Let us pray,' " said Hauerwas, lowering his voice in a mocking hushed pitch. "'Oh God, we just ask you ...' What do you do? You quit listening. Oh pious shit. You leave it behind. What I'm trying to do is to say you don't have to protect God. You know? God can take it. We're not supposed to assume an extra posture of, 'We have to whisper because God's around.' Where did that come from?"
At Duke, that makes Hauerwas stand out. And that suits his contrarian disposition just fine. He wants believers to know that being a Christian is being odd. As the title of his most accessible book suggests, he wants them to live like "Resident Aliens" -- a holy people removed from the dominant culture and dedicated to following God.
Hauerwas thinks the time when Christian culture represented America as a whole is long gone. That doesn't sadden him; it thrills him. It means Christians are free to create a culture on the margins of society. "Resident Aliens" and much of Hauerwas' other books are filled with such words as "radical," "subversive" and "alternative."
In a Hauerwasian world, Christians would live in community, take communion each Sunday, disclose their salaries to one another and learn the virtues by apprenticing themselves to saints -- people who are good at living the Christian faith.
While Hauerwas' fans find this argument refreshing and exciting, others in religious and academic circles aren't as persuaded.
What Hauerwas has done, said his chief critic Jeffrey Stout of Princeton University, is put a "seductively radical veneer" on an old faith. He has not shown Christians the price they might have to pay for that kind of commitment.
Hauerwas is unfazed: "I'm trying to help us get reconnected with our brothers and sisters across time and across the world in a way that helps us see the ways in which we're not Americans."
Faithful churchgoer
The Bible says God loves a joyful noise, and Hauerwas takes that literally. His flat grating singing voice, more than anything else, lets fellow worshippers know he's there.
As one church member put it, "Stanley knows all the words and none of the notes." A church bulletin recently invited members of the church to join the choir. It followed with an explicit addendum: "except you, Stanley."
Hauerwas believes a person cannot be a Christian without going to church. Since 1989, he and his wife, Paula Gilbert, have attended Chapel Hill's Aldersgate United Methodist Church, a small congregation with a modest, 1950s red brick building. Located on busy U.S. 15/501, it is the ugly duckling next to St. Thomas More Catholic Church next door -- a megachurch with wide glass doors and a lofty ceiling.
But Hauerwas isn't here for beauty. To him, being in church means being part of a body of believers who come together to learn to be the kind of community Jesus calls for.
Hauerwas believes there is no salvation without the church. In this, he is deeply influenced by the Roman Catholic Church, which teaches that Christians need a congregation of fellow believers. Without a community to hold them accountable, Hauerwas believes, Christians can quickly fall into self-deception. The church community is there to teach people such virtues as marital fidelity, forgiveness, truthfulness and patience; traits, he thinks, can't be learned alone. In that, Hauerwas parts company with evangelical Christians, who believe salvation is purely a personal experience.
"I stand against those accounts of Christianity that say, 'Jesus is my personal Lord and savior,'" Hauerwas said. "God has much bigger business going on than my personal salvation. It's cosmic. To think Jesus died for my life to have meaning is too demeaning for Jesus."
Hauerwas is not ordained and takes liberties criticizing his own denomination. He considers himself "ecclesiastically homeless," but remains a grudging Methodist: "You have to stay with the people who harmed you," he said. "The Methodists left their mark on me. They've got to take responsibility for it."
The making of an academic
To understand Stanley Hauerwas, it helps to know where he's from. Fortunately, it's a story he never tires of telling.
He was born to lower middle-class parents in the Dallas suburb of Pleasant Grove. Their home contained two books: The Bible and a collection of Mark Twain.
When Stanley was 7, his father, Coffee Hauerwas, took the boy out on the job and began teaching him to lay brick. By 16 or 17, Stanley was working alongside his dad. That experience was probably the most formative in Hauerwas' life. Years later, it would help him develop the idea that character is formed by apprenticeship.
His parents belonged to a Methodist church where, he says, "people got saved Sunday night" -- after a long service. It happened to Hauerwas at 14. After singing "I surrender all," a dozen times, he says he gave his life to Jesus. Thinking he might want to be a minister, his parents encouraged him to go to college.
At Southwestern University in Georgetown, Texas, Hauerwas applied himself to his studies and worked summers laying brick to help pay tuition. His attitude toward college, he said, was, "Wow! Look at all the stuff I get to do." He studied religion and philosophy under the direction of John Score, a cynical evangelical Methodist who introduced him to art and film. From Texas, he went to Yale Divinity School, one of the top graduate programs in the country, to earn a doctorate and to figure out, once and for all, he said, if the Christian claims were true.
Hauerwas said he thought he'd be a liberal Christian like most of his contemporaries until he realized that Europe's leading liberals had abandoned the Jews to the Holocaust. It was Karl Barth, the great Protestant theologian, who stood against the Nazis. That started Hauerwas down his contrarian path.
However humble Hauerwas' beginnings, he seized on academic life with a passion. His career took off at Notre Dame, where he spent 14 years teaching. There, he published his most important books, "A Community of Character" and "The Peaceable Kingdom." In them, he proclaimed virtue as a central element of Christian ethics and began writing about nonviolence as a crucial component of Jesus' ministry. Hauerwas probably would have stayed in South Bend, but a new chairman and a move to make the department more "Catholic" resulted in his being made to feel uncomfortable and, ultimately, being pushed out.
He arrived at Duke in 1984; by all accounts, the university has been good to Hauerwas and vice versa. Although his reputation was made at Notre Dame, Hauerwas has worked diligently at Duke to further his career. His office, one of the most coveted in the building, overlooks the famed Gothic chapel and is stacked from floor to ceiling with books.
Like his academic career, Hauerwas' personal life has sometimes brought pain. His first marriage, to a woman he says was a manic-depressive, ended in divorce. Friends say she left him so many times that he finally said, "Don't come back." During those turbulent years, Hauerwas drew especially close to their only child, Adam. His ex-wife died last year.
In 1989, two years after his divorce, Hauerwas married Paula Gilbert, an ordained Methodist who works as Duke's director of continuing education and summer programs. Hauerwas says she has taught him to be more patient and prayerful. They live in Chapel Hill and are avid collectors of Chatham County sculptor William Moore.
Despite the distance he has traveled, in some ways Hauerwas has never left Pleasant Grove. In his writings, Hauerwas challenges the idea that ethics can exist in a vacuum. He believes people are formed by the story they grow up hearing. That story, if clearly told, provides them the skills to negotiate life. To remind himself where he came from, he has hung a level and a trowel that belonged to his father on the wall of his office.
The teacher
Stanley Hauerwas is fond of telling each new incoming class, "I don't want you to think for yourselves. I want you to think like me."
He does not mean he wants students to agree with him -- although the statement is often interpreted that way. He means that only by developing a discipline of learning can they think creatively on their own.
The statement is typical of Hauerwas' method, which is to jolt first, justify later. The Rev. Jack McKinney, pastor of Pullen Memorial Baptist Church in Raleigh, known for its liberal Christianity, calls Hauerwas "the theological shock jock."
His students love it.
"It's liberating to hear it," said doctoral student Alex Sider. "You grow up and go to liberal arts school, and it's all about making up your mind and having choices. When someone tells you education is not about making choices but learning to submit yourself to an authority that will help you form judgments -- well, that's just great."
Hauerwas has a huge student fan club and is regarded as one of the most accessible professors at Duke -- ready and willing to spend time and energy mentoring. He's famous for returning papers to students within hours of receiving them.
In his daily routine, he serves as a role model. Hauerwas rises before dawn and can usually be be found at his desk by 6 a.m. At 8:30, he attends a morning chapel service. At 11:30, he runs a 3-mile, 30-minute loop around the Duke golf course -- usually with a gaggle of students trailing him. In between, Hauerwas reads -- consuming as many as two books a day. He leaves for home about 6.
Though he teaches a core Christian ethics class for students who plan to enter the ministry, he works mostly with those pursuing doctorates. Nearly all come to Duke to study with him.
Students say Hauerwas makes Christianity seem like a big adventure, while imbuing it with an intellectual gravity they never thought it had.
Most important, though, they say, he cares about them. Sider remembers the day he graduated with a master's degree. He had already been accepted into the doctoral program and at graduation his parents had the chance to meet Hauerwas.
"Mr. and Mrs. Sider," Hauerwas told them. "I just want you to know we're really excited about having Alex here next year. I can't promise you we'll find him a job, but I can promise you we'll keep him following Jesus."
Pro and con
In an essay on Hauerwas in a new collection of his work, a former student writes that Hauerwas is the kind of person who would prefer to turn on its head Rodney King's famous appeal after the Los Angeles riots. Instead of "Can't we all just get along?" Hauerwas likes to ask, "Can't we all just have an argument?"
That argumentative stance moves Hauerwas to write provocative short essays, with pithy titles. Consider: "Sex in Public: How Adventurous Christians are Doing it," or "Why Gays (as a group) are Morally Superior to Christians (as a group)." Needless to say, his arguments aren't as transparent as the titles suggest. (Hauerwas believes in women's ordination -- and calls his wife a "priest." He does not think gays should be married but has suggested the church could help them honor their ties.)
Critics accuse him of not studying the modern world closely enough.
"I don't think he works hard enough at figuring out what our society is really like before criticizing it," said Jeffrey Stout of Princeton. "He's too quick to assume our society is basically an expression of an incoherent version of liberalism. If his criticisms of our society were right, it would be impossible to explain the virtues of the police officers, firefighters, jet passengers and others who risked their lives to save strangers on Sept. 11."
Hauerwas acknowledges, "There are probably deep reservoirs of moral practices that are better than our theories can account for." But then he asks, why aren't firefighters and police officers paid the kind of salaries that would signal society values their work?
And Hauerwas' argumentative nature doesn't sit well with some who see his appeals to nonviolence as a contradiction. "Stanley is not very peaceful," said McKinney, the Raleigh pastor. "His words are violent. It's disconcerting."
Yet there is little spiteful about Hauerwas. His students say his passion for the church and his love of God drive him to embrace contrarian positions. He speaks with awe of God's creation, punctuates his conversations with a bellow of a laugh and believes Christians should be "as happy as mockingbirds."
He is provocative in an effort to create a feistier church, he said. "We should hope to make the church recover the aggressive habits which make Christians hated, and hopefully feared, by the powers who would rule the world as if God did not exist," he wrote recently.
Hauerwas has no plans to retire, and the blue calendar book he carries is lined with lecture engagements in the United States and abroad. Friends say he recognizes he has only so many years left and is thinking of what he might want to say next.
At that forum, he spoke of unbelievers and sounded his battle cry. "It's better to die for a worthy reason than out of boredom. We're all going to die anyway. Let's die going down with the colors."
Staff writer Yonat Shimron can be reached at 829-4891 or yshimron@newsobserver.com.
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