Captivating Christianity

Stanley Hauerwas says he is tired of being the "foul-mouthed theologian."

"It's just not that much a part of my life," he says in his Texan twang. "In our culture, people have no idea what it means to be a theologian, and they think it must be someone who's kind of pious or vague. And when they run into me and I'm neither vague nor pious, what they can understand is, 'Man, he says 's--t!'."

Hauerwas suddenly erupts into raucous laughter, rocking far back on his chair in his office in the Duke Divinity School, where he serves as Gilbert T. Rowe professor of theological ethics.

"And I'm just tired of that aspect of my life, of that becoming who I am," he continues. "Indeed, I have decided that I'm not any longer going to say 'goddamn' or 'f--k.' And I just said them, but I didn't use them. Of course, I'm still reserving 'a--hole,' 's--t,' 'damn' and so on."

America's Best Theologian, according to Time magazine, throws his head back and cackles again. "As Texans, you've gotta leave us some words to say."

Humble roots

Hauerwas was born in 1940 in Pleasant Grove, Tx., and raised in the religion of the Pleasant Mound United Methodist Church. The little town and the church community became the first major influences on this son of a bricklayer.

"I was raised an Evangelical Methodist," Hauerwas says during a recent theological debate with President Paige Patterson of Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary. "You join the church on Sunday morning, get saved on Sunday night, after a 45-minute sermon and a 30-minute altar call, of course. But I just couldn't get myself saved."

Hauerwas adds, "I think people are taken aback when they hear the gospel rearticulated in the way that they taught me to do it."

Radical Christianity

When asked to describe himself in terms of his work, Hauerwas takes his time, trying to find the most accurate words to say.

"I'm a Christian theologian trying to help Christians rediscover the extraordinary freshness of the faith," he finally says. "One of the great problems with being raised a Christian in this society is you're innoculated against the gospel, and you're no longer ready to hear the radicalness of it."

For those who wonder what would be so shocking about an account of the gospel, Hauerwas offers this: "Well, I don't blame them for being surprised; it continues to surprise me. I'm just a regular academic; I'm not a particularly admirable human being, from the gospel's perspective."

What is perhaps more shocking, and controversial, is Hauerwas' take on the relationship between church and state--not from a constitutional perspective, but from a point of view within the church.

"American Christianity has become more American than it has become Christian," Hauerwas says. "And we've seen that clearly over the last few weeks after September the 11th with the extraordinary reidentification of God with country. And I find it frightening. And, also, it makes me angry as hell, that Christians don't know any better."

Hauerwas' belief in the separation of Christianity from patriotism stems from his pacifist views.

"Patriotism is a loyalty to a particular country with a particular history embodied in a particular people," he says. "It's always a problem for Christians, exactly to the extent that that loyalty threatens to become more determinative than our loyalty to and love of God, in which our love of God is to discipline all other laws.

"And you see that nowhere better than in Christians willing to kill in the name of being French, in the name of being German, in the name of being Lithuanian, to kill other Christians in the name of those loyalties," Hauerwas continues. "And that's the problem with patriotism; namely, it divides the church. It gives lie to the unity that the church is and should be."

Critical target

Hauerwas acknowledges that his radical views have earned him several critics. "If you have strong positions as I do, you expect to be criticized," he says. "I don't always enjoy it, but I learn from it."

He notes that the group that most criticizes his ideas is liberal-minded Protestants "who want to show that there's no tension between Christianity and taking part in liberal democratic society."

One of Hauerwas' most prominent critics is Max Stackhouse, Stephen Colwell professor of Christian ethics at Princeton Theological Seminary, who disagrees with Hauerwas' opinions on the place of Christians in society.

Stackhouse contends that Hauerwas is a sectarian, despite his denial of the charge. "[Hauerwas] really sees the church as the enclave of believers who provide a fundamental alternative to the institutions of the world," he says.

"I think the church is one among several institutions of the world about whom God cares, but God is interested in a lot more than what goes on under the steeple, and the mission of the believers is not only to gather together in their communal lives and learn the stories of Jesus."

And while Stackhouse admits the two agree on that, he adds, "But it's my conviction that one of the chief functions of theology is to provide the moral and spiritual architecture for the culture and the civilization, and that this has to do with more technically the question of the sovereignty of God," Stackhouse adds. "Is God the Lord of life, or is he the God of individual and small-group piety?"

Jeffrey Stout, a religion professor at Princeton University, whom Hauerwas calls "a friend who thinks I've betrayed the democratic experiment," agrees that Hauerwas' views isolate Christians from the rest of society.

"The main effect of his influence has been to alienate Christians from their responsibilities as citizens," he writes in an e-mail. "The most notorious of [Hauerwas' pronouncements] is his claim that justice is a bad idea for Christians."

Stackhouse is more inclined to agree with Hauerwas' wariness of nationalism to a certain extent, but does not share his pacifist views.

"There's a proper patriotism, but there are also forms of nationalism that are really scary," Stackhouse says. "In the previous century, in the 20th century, we just had a bellyful of nationalism that led to vicious forms of colonialism in war. Like the fascists in Italy, and the Nazis in Germany, and Hirohito in Japan, those are all nationalist movements, very scary. From a religious point of view, they're idolatrists because they put the nation before God."

Adds Stackhouse, "I think that it's immoral to be a pacifist. I think there are times when we are called upon to participate in sometimes a righteous revolution and other times in justifiable combat. I think a chaplain could go with the guys who are going into Afghanistan and not feel like he's betraying the faith.... So far as we know, God does not want us to unduly harm the enemy but you do have to constrain evil and sometimes that restraint requires coercive action.... In the New Testament, soldiers are not advised to leave the army, but to treat people justly. The key term is vocation, having a calling. Are some people called to be generals? Are some people called to be soldiers? I think that's possible."

Despite his articulation of his differences with Hauerwas, Stackhouse, who wrote a 1997 Journal for Christian Theological Research response article entitled "In the Company of Hauerwas," is hard-pressed to pinpoint Hauerwas' views under any neatly labeled categories.

"What is the right spectrum?" he muses. "Liberal-conservative is not quite right. In some things he's radical. In some things he's reactionary. In some things he's orthodox. It's a real hodgepodge of spectra.... He's creating a camp or trying to, trying to raise up what has been a minority position into greater visibility. It's really anti-cultural, anti-societal, even contemptuous of the culture."

Stout hopes that current events will cause Christians to think twice before subscribing to Hauerwas' views.

"He's famous because American Christians like being told most of what he is telling them," Stout writes. "Maybe the war against terrorism will change all this. Maybe his pacifism will start ticking people off."

Increasing influence

Hauerwas notes that while his ideas do incense some people, many are simply surprised that they had been unaware of them.

"Oftentimes, when I go to talk to Christian groups about Christian nonviolence, somebody says, 'Nobody ever told us Christians have a problem with war.' And I say, 'I know, you've been betrayed,'" he says. "So many good people who... want to make the Star-Spangled Banner a part of the worship program don't know any better. No one ever told them there's a problem with that, and so I'm not blaming them. I'm blaming the ministers; they should know better."

This year, Duke University Press published The Hauerwas Reader, a 729-page collection of Hauerwas' articles and essays over the past 33 years. During the annual Founders' Day ceremony held earlier this month, Hauerwas received the University Scholar/Teacher of the Year Award, which is given by the Board of Higher Education and Ministry of the United Methodist Church.

And of course, there is the mainstream attention that comes with being named America's Best Theologian, though it was his non-mainstream ideas that brought him to Time's attention.

Hauerwas is still trying to interpret the implications of the title. "My first response was, 'Best is not a theological word,'" he laughs. "Our words are 'faithful' or 'unfaithful,' 'obedient' or 'disobedient.' And so I didn't know what to make of it. I think it's silly to say that you're not kind of pleased about it in some way.

"I hope what it means is that I'm interesting, what I do is interesting," Hauerwas continues. "I hope what that means is that people discover I have something to say. And I do have something to say. And I have people to say it to: they're called Christians. And other people can listen in, and in that sense, I hope that's what it says, that [it says] 'This is an interesting guy.'"