425 - Christian Existence Today: Essays on Church, World and Living in Between

Christian Existence Today: Essays on Church, World and Living in Between
By Stanley M. Hauerwas
Durham, The Labyrinth Press, 1988. 266 pp. $14.95.

Stanley Hauerwas has changed the stance of Christian ethics in this generation. With books such as A Community of Character and Against the Nations, by barnstorming speaking engagements back and forth across the continent, in his classrooms and seminars at Notre Dame and currently at Duke, he has teased, argued, and passionately persuaded American (and some British) Protestants and Catholics to take a fresh look at their commitment in Jesus Christ to the moral life. Sometimes profane and, by academic standards, often outrageous, this Methodist from Texas has shown us another way to think theologically, challenging plenty of easy assumptions.

This new collection of essays represents half a decade of ongoing theological work. It finds its unity not in the topics addressed (these

426 - Christian Existence Today: Essays on Church, World and Living in Between

range from the character of Christian presbyters to "how Christian universities corrupt youth") but in certain consistent Hauerwasian themes that recur from topic to topic.

The organizing theme is suggested by the Barthian title, Christian Existence Today. In 1933, the very year Hitler came to power in Germany, Karl Barth wrote Theological Existence Today! (exclamation point and all) to take his stand against state control of the German church. Many believe that book began the fateful struggle for a Confessing Church. Fifty years after, Hauerwas sees the situation to be at least as threatening but for different reasons: the distinction between church and world cannot be discerned by a church that abandons its own hope in order to rely on the world's version of power. Thus, sixteenthcentury Thomas More (the subject of one essay) steadfastly refusing King Henry's offers of power because on theological grounds More could not accept the King's marriage or the King's church-a man obliged to die for his refusal-provides a clearer picture of the true Christian predicament in America than either Jerry Falwell or the Christian mainstream, those identical twins, can offer. Falwell and the mainstream would accept, indeed they would clamor for the King's offer and the life it yields. Thomas More would not, and he died for it. Hauerwas asks us to choose between them.

Yet, these essays do not constitute a diatribe. They are (in the best sense of an abused term) constructive theology, answering the demand for a Christian way through the present slithering social crisis of the churches and the church. Addressing now one concern, now another, Hauerwas celebrates a genuine Christian existence, a present presence, that is adequate to that demand. I cannot reproduce these constructive moves here but can only indicate such recurrent Hauerwasian themes as: (1) the necessity of the church to be the church if the world is to be able to know itself as world; (2) the importance of narrative as a critical tool for Christian self-understanding, and of virtues (as opposed to "situations" or "cases" or "decisions") in understanding the Christian narrative; (3) the role of the church as an alternative community instantiating these virtues and living out the central narrative of Jesus Christ; (4) peacemaking as a virtue, that is, as a costly and ongoing way of life that is not optional for Christian existence. There are other recurring themes, Methodist or Catholic or Anabaptist or simply Christian, but these are the distinctive structural elements I find at work here.

The beauty of a book (in contrast to a movie) is that you need not read it all to get to the end. Though I did read it all, I have some dislikes: "Clerical Character" seemed to me to lack the critical caution a Catholic such as Bernard Cooke would exercise, and I thought the introductory debate with James Gustafson fruitless. On the other hand, I found some favorites: "On Being a Christian and a Texan ... .. The Ministry of a Congregation," "Taking Time for Peace" (a piece in the spirit of the later Barth, by the way). It may be objected against

427 - Christian Existence Today: Essays on Church, World and Living in Between

Hauerwas that his epithets are too sharp, his targets caricatures, his pronouncements one-sided. But I suggest that the caricatures and jabs and exaggerations have a deep and good justification: the theologian who is not heard might just as well have remained silent. Stanley Hauerwas is a prophet to whom a voice has said "Cry!" I suspect that the prompting voice is the same voice that spoke to another prophet so long ago, and to another theologian who found Christian existence in his day at issue.

James W.M. McClendon, Jr.
Church Divinity School of the Pacific
Berkeley, California