Theology Today - Vol 52, No. 2 - July 1995 - BOOK REVIEW - Dispatches from the Front: Theological Engagements with the Secular

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Dispatches from the Front: Theological Engagements with the Secular
By Stanley Hauerwas
Durham and London, Duke University Press, 1994. 235 pp. $24.95.

Readers of Stanley Hauerwas' new book are apt to feel that his engagements are not so much with the secular as with a kind of Christian thinking he feels is unable to stand up in the face of the secular. Accordingly, it may help us reflect on the issues involved in two types of Christian thinking, adapting Kierkegaard's device for distinguishing such types.

Christian Thinking A. Here there is assumed to be a realm of objective reality, beyond human language, accessible to reason, and thus a basis for

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objective truth; the Thomist view of nature is illustrative. The following are likely corollaries of such a view: that common rational inquiry is a valuable human practice, that tolerance and attentiveness are desirable personal qualities, and that people should strive for a certain detachment and objectivity when searching for the truth. This kind of Christian thinking also is apt to embrace the ideal of universality; the objectivity of truth would be perfectly vindicated if we could all agree. Also it entails a kind of individualism; the ideal universality of truth implies ground on which one might stand alone, apart from every social group.

Christian thinking of this kind is often called "liberalism." For many of us, it is so familiar that it seems like common sense. Nonetheless, it entails serious disadvantages, aside from the difficulty made so familiar to us by present-day philosophical critiques-that of finding anything beyond our language except more language. One of these disadvantages is the debilitating necessity, deriving from the goal of keeping the channels of rational discourse open, of prefacing every statement of belief with the tacit proviso: I may be wrong. A second disadvantage is akin to this. In order to make one's personal beliefs comprehensible to everyone, one must dilute them; if possible, beliefs are translated into familiar secular terms, such as "transcendence" in place of "God." Christian thinking that responds to these difficulties may, of course, cease to be very strongly and distinctively Christian. It is not amiss to suspect a connection between liberalism and the present decrepitude of the mainline denominations. Hence the appeal of an alternative way of thinking.

Christian Thinking B. Here you commit yourself perhaps to a creed, although more likely to a group (in the case of Christians, normally a church) representing a creed that you accept as a member of the group; once von have made your commitment, you logically enough refuse to grant that you may be wrong. Liberalism, along with all of its corollaries, is at once upended. The concept of realities beyond language, the possibility of objective truth, the ideal of common rational inquiry, standards such as objectivity and tolerance, all become at best problemtic. As for those who profess not to like or understand your views, your most adequate response may be that they, not you, suffer deprivation. In place of universality, there is firm association with a concrete group; and rather than even qualified individualism, there is the steady discipline of a common way of life.

This kind of thinking may, for the sake of convenience, be called "postmodernism." Obviously there are drawbacks attached to this, as well as to the other, type of thinking. For one, it is difficult to describe and defend your beliefs except as objectively true and rationally preferrable to other beliefs. But in doing that, you surrender to liberalism. Moreover, you find yourself handicapped in defending civil, reasoning human relationships against fanatics; your own group may affirm decency, but as the twentieth century has made distressingly plain, not all groups do. An allied difficulty is that comprehensive social criticism is impossible if you know the world, and the standards social criticism would employ, only

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through the habits and practices of a social group; in some measure (depending on the nature and scope of your own group), you are impelled in the direction of a stultifying relativism.

It would no doubt be oversimplifying Hauerwas to say that his views correspond, except roughly, to Christian Thinking B. It does seem, however, that the "front" from which he sends his "dispatches" runs somewhere along the dividing line between these two ways of thinking and that hostility toward liberalism is one of the most conspicuous characteristics of his book. And I may succinctly express part of my assessment of Dispatches from the Front by saying that the "dispatches"-the essays making up the book-are often perceptive and amusing, occasionally profound and eloquent (as is the closing essay on our indebtedness to the mentally handicapped), and that they, therefore, provide an agreeable and sometimes illuminating way of forcing us rationally to ponder the issues dividing the two types of thinking. Yet, there is a certain duplicity involved in saying that postmodernism is worth thinking about, for in doing that you have tacitly taken your stand with liberalism and, thus, have decided the issue before even starting to think. Moreover, such an assessment would, if left to stand alone, be unsufficiently critical.

Christians adhere to the doctrine of Christ as the World through whom all things were made. Major passages from Scripture, such as Genesis 1 and Romans 1, and primary works of Christian literature, from the time of Augustine even to that of Hegel, point compellingly to the faith that there is an order of creation, seen and known by God in the beginning and accessible to his people through observation and reason. Hence, there is a sense-whether or not this applies fully to Hauerwas-in which postmodernist Christians are vulnerable to what Newman considered Augustine's most lethal charge against the Donatists: they stand apart from the world, from the universal company of Christians through the ages. Such a posture is not only perilous; it is strange for thinkers who repeatedly emphasize our dependence on established habits, practices, and conventions.

Glenn Tinder
University of Massachusetts
Boston, MA