Theology in the Raw - S2 Ep1048: Resident Aliens: Dr. Stanley Hauerwas

Episode Date: February 6, 2023

Stanley Hauerwas is Gilbert T. Rowe Professor Emeritus of Divinity and Law at Duke Divinity School. He has a B.A. from Southwestern University, a B.D., M.A., M.Phil., and Ph.D. from Yale University and a D.D. from University of Edinburgh. Time magazine named him "America's Best Theologian” in 2001, to which he responded: "'Best' is not a theological category." He’s the author of dozens of books including Resident Aliens, which forms the basis of our conversation. If you would like to support Theology in the Raw, please visit patreon.com/theologyintheraw for more information!

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at patreon.com forward slash Theology in the Raw. That's patreon.com forward slash Theology in the Raw. Woo's patreon.com forward slash TheologyNaraw. Woo-wee. You ready for this one? All right. Stanley Hauerwas, everybody. Stanley was born in 1940 in Dallas, Texas. He received several degrees, including a PhD from Yale University.

He's been teaching at various schools, including University of Notre Dame. And more recently, Duke University, the Divinity School at Duke University has written tons of books, including Resident Aliens, which he co-authored with William Willimon. The subtitle is A Provocative Christian Assessment of Culture and Ministry for People who know that something is wrong. Stanley should need no introduction. I mean, the dude is super well-known. In 2001, Time Magazine named him America's best theologian. He responded by saying, best is not a theological category. Oh, man, I've been looking forward to this for a while.

So, yeah, without further ado, please welcome to the show for the first time, the one and only Dr. Stanley Hauerwas. Dr. Hauerwas, thank you so much for making time for this podcast. I've been looking forward to this conversation, and I'm really honored you agreed to come on my podcast. Let's go back to Dallas, Texas in the 40s and 50s. Who was the young Stanley Hauerwas? What kind of kid and teenager were you? kid from working class parents who taught me the importance of staying with it. My father was one of six brothers, all who were bricklayers. When I was seven or eight, I was taken out to the job to learn how to labor and I worked

aiding bricklayers every summer until I was probably 15 my father then taught me how to labor we went to an evangelical Methodist church where you could join the church on Sunday morning, but you had to be saved on Sunday night.

I thought I wanted to be saved, but I didn't think you should take it. So Sunday night after Sunday night, I sat there waiting for God to call me to do something. Finally, one Sunday night, we were singing God Surrender Off for the 25th time. And so I decided that if I didn't do something, we would be there all night. And so I went up and dedicated my life to the Lord. I had no idea what that meant. People assumed it meant I was going into the ministry. We had an associate at that time who had been in the seminary, and he told me I should read books. So I started reading a lot of very bad books, but I hit on a book by B. David Napier, who was an Old Testament scholar at Yale.

I didn't know what that meant at the time, but I discovered JEDP, and I thought, I don't know what to make of this. Then I read a book by Nelson F. S. Moret who was an early Swedish-Londonian theologian who taught at Carrot and he it was called The Son of the Umbrella and the argument was that religion probably hides God as much as reveals God. It was a kind of take off on Plato's cave. And I thought, that's probably right, so I'm going to give it up. But I was committed to going to college. No one in my family had ever gone to college. So I went to Southwestern University in Georgetown, Texas, I went to Southwestern University in Georgetown, Texas, and I was the philosophy major at Southwestern. And I had a wonderful course where we read

cultural history with the primaries. And I thought after some time that I wasn't smart enough to be an atheist. So I would go to seminary to discover, to try to find out if this stuff was true. But I had become convinced that one of the decisive issues about the truthfulness of what we say we believe as Christians was the destruction of the Jews and the Christian

complicity with that. And I thought it would be Protestant liberals that would have stood against the Nazis. It turned out to be Barton Bonhoeffer. So I read Barton Bonhoeffer, and the rest is history. So Barton Bonhoeffer, they were early influences in your theological journey? I mean, I know they still are, but... I don't know. My first year in seminary, I read. Was he widely read in seminaries the time you went to seminary? Okay.

As a matter of fact, Barton has never been widely read in America. Princeton Theological Seminary has a wonderful collection of people who are Barth scholars. I'm not a Barth scholar myself, though I've read widely in his work, but I'm not a McCormack reader. But Barth was read at Yale, because of Hans Frey

that was very important because most readers of Barth thought he was some kind of crazy fundamentalist it's interesting, in my seminary journey the name Karl Barth was associated with being liberal. He was the name under the group of liberal scholars. So I just thought Karl Barth was some liberal theologian until actually when I went to Aberdeen University, John Webster was there, another Barthian scholar.

So a lot of students studying Barth. And they looked at me funny when I'm like, oh, so you're studying that liberal guy. You know, they're like, no, we're studying Karl Barth. He's like he wasn't too privy with liberals. And then so anyway, I got my view of Barth kind of corrected and dabbled in Barth probably a lot less than than than you have. You know, especially then we had Francis Watson, who was, you know, a New Testament scholar, but also very much integrated biblical studies with theology, which I know you've done the same. And I studied under Simon Gathrigal. Webster was there. Was Brian Brock there?

Brian just came in. Brian's, yeah, I've kept up with him a little bit over the years. He's been on the podcast as well, actually. He's a wonderful thinker and great guy. Yeah, he's doing great work in disability theology. And let's say, I mean, there's so many books we can talk about. The Resident Aliens is, I think, still your most widely sold book, as far as I know, from the Internet, at least. But what led you and William to write this book? Tell us the backstory of why you wanted to write this book. Well, we had, Will and I had not known one another until we both ended up at Duke.

We had corresponded. we had corresponded. And in conversation, we discovered we had a lot of shared convictions that we arrived at independent of one another. And we wrote a little article for the Christian Century called Embarrassed by God. And we said that people were afraid that Protestantism was dying out. And we suggested that that may well be the case because most people try to keep Christianity going, whether God exists or not. And we thought that underneath fundamental projects of liberal Christianity was a denial of the reality of God.

Therefore, most modern Christian theology was more of atheism. We didn't think that that was a peculiarly informative thing to say because it was so obviously true. But people just got a raft of letters, protests going into the Christian century. So we decided, why don't we write a book? And so we started in terms of having discussions with one another about how to organize it, what should be in each chapter. I dictated each chapter in terms of getting it first in text and then it was transcribed

and then Will would write over it and then I would write over what Will wrote over. And Will, of course, is just a master of example. And the examples really pull the argument of the book along. So that's how the book happened. I mean, just from a literary perspective, the book is unique in many ways, but particularly in having just robust thought. It's provocative. It's nuanced. It's obviously built on much research, but it's so fluidly written.

But then, yeah, you weave in examples and stuff. And so it's almost like, you know, is this an academic book? Is it a popular level book? And it's like, it just kind of has its own category, which I just so appreciated. On the cover, it says, you know, life in the Christian colony. And I think it's in, I think you guys coined this term, you know, the church is like a colony of heaven on earth. And there's variations of, can you unpack what that, what you mean by that? For people that maybe aren't familiar with that concept,

because that kind of draw, that kind of is an underlying theme in the entire book, life in the Christian colony. Originally we were, Will wanted to call it the colony. It wasn't clear that that would tell people much about the book. And so my, my wife was reading the text of it, a phrase in it Resident Alien. And she said, why don't you

call it Resident Alien? We said, that's a great suggestion. So we sent the book to Abington and Abington came back and said, oh, we want to publish the book, but we don't like the title. And we said, why? And they said, well, people will think it's about wetbacks coming over from Mexico. And we said, great, that's what we want. that's what we want. Many Christians are on the move. So that's how the kind of fundamental perspective. And of course, one of the fundamental arguments of the book is that we've been in a Christendom context, particularly in America, where mainstream Protestantism has thought it should be supported by the fundamental social and political developments that though we don't say we are an established church, in effect, we admit. And that's exactly the reason

why we're in such trouble, that how for Christians to reclaim the fundamental convictions and practices that make us odd people in this society is exactly what the book is trying to do, what mainstream Protestantism has been built on. And this is evangelical Protestantism, too, is Christianity is pretty much what anyone would believe, is pretty much what anyone would believe,

just with a little nudge about, well, we have certain kinds of beliefs, maybe about Jesus or something like that, but we're not sure what difference that makes or what it means to be American. My kind of way of putting it is we underwrite a story of freedom kind way of putting it is we underwrite a story of freedom that says

what we want is to produce people in modernity that believe they should have no story except the story they chose when they had no story and if you don't believe that it's your story.

I can illustrate it this way. Do you think you ought to be held responsible for decisions you made when you didn't know what you were doing? Most people think you underwrite that you shouldn't be held responsible for decisions you made when you didn't know what you were doing. You get to choose your own story. The only difficulty with that, of course, is it makes marriage unintelligible. Who could know what they were doing when they promised lifelong monotonous fidelity?

So you certainly don't know what you're doing when you have children. So exactly what it means to be a Christian is to challenge the fundamental convictions that are so associated with modernity, instantiated in the institutions of America. We're free in a way that makes it intelligible for us to choose who we will be. Now the problem with the story that you have no story except the story you chose when you had no story, you didn't choose that story. And but that keeps that keeps hidden from us. We keep that hidden from ourselves by assuming that we get to make Christianity up if we want to be Christians at all.

Christianity is not a faith that you get to make up. It's what you receive. So there is a fundamental tension between what it means to be Christian as people formed by a reality God that we didn't get to make up. And that continues to be a tension between Christianity and the American project. Yeah. Yeah. Well, along those lines, you know, one of the things I appreciated in the book, and I guess, let me, let me back up. I mean, it's, what I appreciated is your consistency in situating this Christian colony against the backdrop of, of for lack of better terms, empire.

You know, it's easy to find books written from the perspective of the Christian right kind of criticizing the left and then from the Christian left criticizing the right. But, you know, your book sat right in the middle, not even middle, it just sat in a different world where you, I think, very consistently were critical of all forms of allegiances to Babylon's politic. You know, would that be an accurate description? Yeah. Can you unpack maybe the ecclesiological underpinnings of that? unpack maybe the ecclesiological underpinnings of that like what was driving so I would imagine in your educational environment it's easy to find again flackenberg terms you know more left left wing Christians but yeah that that that must have been a provocative uh point because you're really

consistent in that it is I I hope it is an intelligible argument. The first task of the church is to be the church, not as a matter of fact to make the world work. be the witness to God's character of making us a people capable of worshiping God. Because that's quite an achievement to worship God. That is the God of Jesus Christ. And that so and that so the world

cannot know it is the world unless there is a church that is an alternative to the world so Christians for example are called to nonviolence in a world of violence

because that's what Jesus has made possible through the calling of us into a relation with the people of Israel called Jews that have learned to live in the world as Jesus wants us to live in the world as Jesus wants us to live in the world, that is, without an army. So Christians are an alternative in a way that is quite a surprise for most Christians in the world in which we find ourselves.

Yeah, I mean, you quoted, I had this quote written out on page 38. You say, we argue that the political task of the church is to be the church rather than transform the world. It was just, I mean, you summed up that phrase. That does seem to be one of of the more um provocative and yet important statements in in the um in the book you do go on to say this doesn't mean i think on page 47 um that the church can participate in secular movements against war against hunger against other forms of inhumanity but it sees this as part of its necessary proclamation

proclamatory action can you i mean this is the thing with the book and why i wanted to talk to you because every statement you have in this book is so there's so much there so much to to unpack i I think where I say we had no way to know that we could anticipate the development of Donald Trump and Christian support of someone like Donald Trump as part of the developments of Christianity placed within modernity in a way that makes us support nationalism that is hypothetical to the Catholic character of the church and Christians kill Christians in the name of national unity, we're committing suicide. So how to help us reclaim a Catholic sense of the church in a way that we discover in a way that we discover stories that shape us that we didn't know that were integral to what it means to be Christian today. It's part of our ongoing task. So you don't get to make up your mind how the condition comes down to you. And, of course, it comes down to you, to the witness of people of holiness, that we don't know where they came from other than God is great, that has pulled certain people into the life of Jesus in a way that makes us aware

of what an extraordinary thing it is that we worship the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit as central to making sense of our lives as Christians. This episode is sponsored by Faithful Counseling. I'm so excited to let you know about this awesome organization. Faithful Counseling is a Christian-based online counseling center filled with over 3,000 U.S. licensed therapists across all 50 states. Look, God is always there for us, but sometimes things in this life can feel downright overwhelming, and it can be really beneficial for your mental, spiritual, and physical well-being to talk to a professional counselor. Faithful Counseling is safe and private. You can get help on your own time at your own pace.

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and financial aid is available. So if you want to get started, go to faithfulcounseling.com forward slash theology and theology in Raw listeners will receive 10% off your first month. Okay, so that's faithfulcounseling.com forward slash theology. Hello friends. Registration is now open for Exiles in Babylon conference and I cannot wait for this conference. Here's a few topics that we're going to wrestle with. The future of the church, disability in the church, multi-ethnic perspectives on American Christianity, and a conversational debate on the problem of evil and suffering. We have Eugene Cho, Elise Fitzpatrick, Matt Chandler, Michelle Sanchez, Justin Gibney, Devin Stalemar, Hardwick. The list goes on and on.

Joey Dodson's going to be there. Greg Boyd and Clay Jones, they're going to be engaging in this conversational debate on the problem of evil and suffering. And of course, we have to have Ellie Bonilla and Street Hymns back by popular demand. And Tanika Wye and Evan Wickham will be leading our multi-ethnic worship again. We're also adding a pre-conference this year. So we're going to do an in-depth scholarly conversation on the question of women in ministry, featuring two scholars on each side of the issue. So, Drs. Gary Brashears and Sydney Park are on the complementarian side, and Drs. Cynthia Long-Westfall and Philip Payne on the egalitarian side. So, March 23rd to 25th, 2023, here in Boise, Idaho. We sold out last year and we'll probably sell this year again. So, if you

want to come, if you want to come live, then I would register sooner than later. And you can always attend virtually if you can't make it out to Boise in person. So all the info is at theologyintheraw.com. That's theologyintheraw.com. Since you brought up Donald Trump, one of the questions I had written down was what, what, what is your, your take on the American evangelical church as a whole? Since 2016, we've been through a lot. We've been through the election of Donald Trump, large Christian support. Now, I know some people, I think this is where I appreciate your theology, because i don't think the answer against trump is hillary clinton like i don't you know i think i think that there's deeper ecclesiological problems with even yeah what's going on there but the pandemic hit um the church had interesting responses there like like are you um hopeful or discouraged after seeing the church's discipleship over the last, say, five or six years? Is it surprising or is it kind of like, or not, I guess?

I think I'm not Christians in Western society is continually so inadequate. The formation being that we are being shaped by community in a way that that community takes priority in terms of everything that I do. One of the problems with evangelical Christianity, for example, in is they have the New Testament and now the Christian tradition across time is fairly fundamentally lost and some individuals get to experience something which is usually

their own narcissism, in a way that we lose the communal character of what it means to be part of a people who make it possible for us to take risks that otherwise we could not take. The kind of individualism that shapes so many people that consider themselves Christians, good people, is often, I have an experience with God, which I go to church to have expressed, but at the heart of Resident Aliens is, without without the church there's no salvation at all so it's not me and god it's that i have been made part of god's promised people that give me a way to go on in a world that's deeply hypothetical to Christianity.

I have a pastoral question for you, because I get this a lot. What do you say to somebody, and I might even put myself in this category, that reads Resident Aliens, that very much agrees with the ecclesiological vision, and when when they look around at individual churches it's really hard if not impossible or just let's just say it's hard to find a church that is even coming close to trying to live out this community as a christian colony a colony of heaven on earth like i mean is that i think some of the one of the critiques of the book was that you know well this is a great idealistic vision, Stanley, right? But where does this exist?

And, you know, what do you say to somebody that's like, I would love to go to a church that has even a glimpse of this kind of desire to live out this community of God's people rather than collecting a bunch of individuals with maybe really good experiences. But still, it's just kind of a collection of individual experiences. I say we're all congregationalists today. It's not necessarily the ideal way for Christians to be because congregations need to be tied to other congregations. When you move from Aberdeen to Boise, you would have some conviction that would give you the confidence that you are worshiping the same God you worshiped in Aberdeen when you go to Boise. And so what is the relation between congregations and the formation of a people who are genuinely Catholic. And that means that they can't kill one another because you can't kill and be a follower of Christ.

So you look for a congregation today that will at least sustain you in everyday living that the gospel promises. I go to Holy Family Episcopal Church in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. I think it's a wonderful church and in particular embodies the rich liturgy that shapes our lives as Christians. The worship of God is of God. The worship of God is of God, namely, it is the God who comes as Holy Spirit, shaping lives that I find are remarkable, because I depend, as a Christian, on lives that are more significant than mine. Do you think size of the church matters? Like, do you have any opinions on how big or small a church ideally should be before it loses its discipleship vision?

Size oftentimes makes a big difference, but I don't think you can anticipate what difference, I mean a cathedral means that you can be part of a people in which you are not known and you do not know many of the people, but you are sharing a feast with them in a way that their lives make a difference to your life. It just takes time.

The Anabaptists, of course, which I have deep sympathy with, on the whole are very small congregations in which you get mutual correction as a possibility. But I don't think smallness is a form of faithfulness necessarily. So what would you say to somebody that said, well, I'm a Christian, I like Jesus, but I don't like the church, and I don't need an institution to live out my faith. You know, the kind of like more de-churched or anti-church Christian. Can you be a Christian and not be part of the church?

No. What it means to be part of a church may be negotiated in terms of different ways that that can take. But there is no being Christian without church. Or that same person might say, well, I do have community. When they say, I'm a Christian, but not part of the church, I think they're speaking about, I'm speaking anecdotally here, people I've heard say that. I think they're speaking about, I'm speaking anecdotally here, people, you know, people I've heard say that. I think they're talking about a specific form of what they would call the institutionalized, typically evangelical mainstream church that's oriented around maybe Sunday morning services that are maybe more performative.

I'll tell you the truth. I honestly don't understand why people go to Joel Osteen's church. I just don't get it. If you want entertainment, television does a better job. So why are you going to that church unless somehow you were raised thinking that you need some little dollar of Christianity, and Joel gives you a little, at least says he's a Christian, but it's hard to see how he relates to any of the tradition of the church over time. So I just don't get it. the church over time. So I just don't get it.

I think that the numbers that that kind of Christianity attracts will be there for 20 years. But the children of the people that go to Joel Osteen's church won't go. I think that's increasingly clear because they recognize parody when they see it

and they're not. They see no reason to follow through on that. We only have a few more minutes left. I want to be respectful of your time. I sent out a question on Twitter. I said, I'm about to record with Stanley Harawas. Does anybody have any questions

you want me to ask him? And I've got about 50 questions that came in, so we can't get through them all. I am curious. I just glanced at this one. Have you changed your mind, opinion, or position on any theological doctrine over the last several decades? I assume that. I don't know. I don't know. I may have. But it's more growing, more articulate about certain aspects of the faith that I've had the opportunity and I mean it's been wonderful. Christians have given me the opportunity to do nothing but read books and then to write and so I've learned a good deal that way. I think one of the things to be a theologian is you very early have to recognize that God is a mystery. You must always stand in awe, and I hope that's deepened in my life over time. God is not going to be played with Father, Son, Holy Spirit, name,

in reality. I hope I become more articulate about over the time i've had to think about these matters and the right i i do have a question and if you don't want to respond to it i'm i'm perfectly fine with that you you i've been wanting to ask you this actually for years i'm surprised i didn't lead with this but um you knew john howard yoder right i mean personally oh very much yeah do you have i mean yeah it's a kick in the gut between that and john vanier and founder of harsh it's just been devastating the reality yeah that deep betrayals of women.

Yeah. I still, I've learned a lot from John Howard Yode, but I think it will remain to be seen what the future of his life is going to be for us. Is it okay, I mean, I get this question a lot too, what do we do with the politics of Jesus and his other many, he's got so many other works that are way lesser well-known that are just brilliant pieces of work. Do we read those differently now that we know

that he had this, you know, history of abuse? I mean, or does that change how we learn from him? Should we throw away our Yoder books or do we say, hey, this is, you know. I gave away my books recently to the Theological Book Network. And they're in Malaysia now. I had to think very hard whether I would keep my Yoda or not. I have it lost, John. And I let it go. It will be read in Malaysia.

So it's going to make a lot of difference where it's read and how it's read. But I think it will need, it will continue to need to be read. And you didn't have any suspicion when you knew him? I mean, it was, it really came out of nowhere. Came out of nowhere. Yeah. I mean, us evangelicals have had a few in our journey that are similar to that. We've had some that when you look back, you're kind of like, well, can't say I'm terribly surprised. And others, it was like you said, a kick in the gut. Like I did not see that um that coming so um stanley i want to be sensitive to your time and i can't thank you enough for giving us a um uh some of your time and speaking from

years and decades of wisdom so many blessings on your future work are you working on any current projects right now that you can talk about i've been writing a piece called Retractions, which is a biography of my books. So I'm going through trying to remember what I wrote when and why and how the content of that book relates to the content of the other book that comes. I'm doing that for my own amusement. Well, thank you, Stanley. Many blessings on your life and ministry. Appreciate you.

I wish you well. You take care. This show is part of the Converge Podcast Network.