Stanley Hauerwas, Working with Words: On Learning to Speak Christian

From Pneuma Review Spring 2013

Stanley Hauerwas, Working with Words: On Learning to Speak Christian (Eugene, Oregon: Cascade Books, 2011), 322 pages, ISBN 9781608999682.

I recommend this book to all Christians, and especially to those in pastoral and the theological vocations. Like his other publications, the Duke Divinity School professor of ethics and theology asks poignant hermeneutical and theological questions pertaining to Christian discipleship and witness. In Working With Words, Hauerwas shares his vision, approach, and experience as a pastor-theologian writing for the Christian public. His goal is to paint a vision of God with discipleship and witness in mind. And because he addresses life’s puzzling complexities honestly, this volume will be a good companion to his Hannah’s Child, a memoir of his theological autobiography.

The book has three parts, and Hauerwas writes seven essays for each section. Most of the essays are either public lectures or church sermons that he had shared in recent years. A few other essays fill the gaps for this compilation. Part 1 addresses disciplines for those learning to speak about God. These disciplines include reading, hearing, seeing and naming God amidst evil. Part 2 explains the Christian language of love for a) dealing with greed, b) discerning the Christian body, c) engaging the reality of “finite care[s] in a world of infinite need” (154) and d) explaining what it means for the church to be on a mission. In Part 3, Hauerwas co-writes (with a few theologians) on the lessons he had learned from some of his teachers. These teachers are political philosopher Charles Taylor, political activist-theologian Richard Niebuhr, and philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre. He also include a chapter examining the friendship between political pastor-theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Eberhard Bethge, and a few chapters explaining some of the virtues that underwrites medieval thinker Thomas Aquinas’s writing of Summa Theologicae, contemporary Catholic Social Teaching, and contemporary Methodist theological ethics.

What can we learn from Working With Words? Hauerwas provides an exemplar model for those who desire to live faithfully to the gospel. He proclaims that “naming God matters”. The gospel should not be expressed in ways that exclude society nor should it be presented so inclusively that it fails to witness to message of the cross before a watching world. The gospel should show hospitality to strangers in the name of Christ (185-186). However, and ultimately, “only God can name God”; no Christian has and knows God as we think we are able to (80-81). Friendship with God is not a relation between co-equals; we are always the poorer partner ever in need of God and his goodness (74-77). The discipline of seeing the splendors of God often require that seers set aside or at least subjugate conventional ways of seeing, so as to embrace “a totally reconfigured kingdom” perspective (58-59). For instance, Hauerwas recommends silence as a valid response to genocides, like Rwanda and the Holocaust; he explains that one can only know sin (including the sins of society) in light of divine grace, even though evil is often expressed in idealistic and utopian terms (21, 32).

Relating to the craft of theology and the ministry, Hauerwas postulates that those serving in the Christian ministry face the problem of loneliness more than the temptations of lusts and misconduct (85). The antidote is learning to listen and speak as Christians; this discipline is achieved by cultivating habits of good reading (87-93), especially “the reading of scripture disciplined by the rule of faith” (106). Christians must also learn to discern the subtlety of avarice and greed which “kill the possibility of knowing God”. We are reminded that these insidious desires are often presented as noble goals which will move us towards human flourishing and abundance, or at least are no worse than innocent curiosities (127-138). Still, Hauerwas wants his readers to remember that the process of growth is never an individualized affair. As such, he never gets tired of saying, “we desperately need one another”, or reminding he readers of the manifold expressions of love we can receive from each other (141).

Love is often slow, painful and difficult. To love God and to make Him known is the most difficult expression of the work of love (147-148). Christians are to live in the love of God because we have been bought with the price of Christ’s blood (150-153). This love is to be translated in our concrete life situations. For instance, when care-giving becomes a tremendous burden for our loved ones, Hauerwas urges those in old age to lay aside their “rights” to life-sustaining medical procedures (160). He recommends that senior citizens face death courageously by preparing to die well. Furthermore, by setting aside their “rights” to medical procedures that keeps them alive, they are actually redirecting scarce resources towards the service and care for others (160-163). To love is then a humbling practice of witnessing the reality of what we believe to a world that doubts our claims and beliefs (167-169). In other words, we have to learn to “trust God in a snake-infested world” and “look to the cross” when we are bitten by life’s challenges and temptations (5-7).

In examining the lessons of discipleship from mentors and friends, Hauerwas urges readers to side-step the caricatures of modernity in our daily living. For instance, he explains that people have learned from modernity to compartmentalize their life; and as a result, people mistakenly pursue mind over body, and fact over value (203, 206). To this development, Hauerwas calls Christians to embrace life and avoid the aforementioned unhealthy dualisms by attending to the ordinary life (174, 201). By practicing “the liturgies of everyday life,” we could counter some unhealthy tendencies in everyday living, especially those that would impoverish relationships and become detrimental to believers’ witness (174, 178). He further recommends that Christians embrace “a creative and charitable relation to plurality” by becoming open to engage others (182, 187). For Hauerwas, embracing attitudes of forgiveness, openness, and love would help Christians create “paths for moving beyond the impasses and closures of the secular age” (184, 186). More importantly, Hauerwas urges Christians to cultivate and acquire ethical virtues for living a happy life (216). The Methodist “religion of the heart” is not merely directed at one’s inner disposition; it contains communal, social and political implications (262). Hence, Christians who explore theologically what it means to be human must necessarily pay attention to gender, sexuality and ethics when they develop communal relationships; all of these must be pursuit in the spirit of the beatitudes, and the ongoing quest for holiness and happiness (233, 257). Ultimately, “to be Christian is to learn to be a participant in the life of God,” claims the theologian (269).

Given the range of impact Working With Words can effect on its readers (see the above take-aways from reading the book), I would recommend it to all Christians, whether or not they are pursuing a theological degree or career in ministry. The only caveat I would add—as can be seen from some of the quotations—this material does not read as smoothly as Hauerwas normally does. Perhaps it is difficult to find a coherent theme in a compilation of presentations, with its many tangents and adjacent themes. Nonetheless, as the Duke theologian puts it so well, words have consequence, and our discipleship and witness should matter to God, to us, and to others. Here is a tool for theologians, church leaders, and Christians to conscientiously think through their discipleship and witness in conversation with an Anabaptist public theologian.

Reviewed by Timothy Lim Teck Ngern

Preview http://www.amazon.com/Working-Words-Learning-Speak-Christian/dp/1608999688#reader_1608999688.