For me, the best critique any form of "high church" denomination is not found at the popular level but in two rather academic articles by Theo Hobson. While they are specifically aimed at "Post-Liberals" like Hauerwas, the articles are devastating against any form of delusion about retreating to "the Church". I'll post relevant extracts to it here and the links to the full articles.
Extracts from Against Hauerwas:
Like Luther or Barth, [Hauerwas] is not just a theologian, he’s a self-made myth. He’s the baseball-loving, straight-talking, former bricklaying Texan pacifist who has, for thirty years, told the church to stop cavorting with liberalism and be itself . It must be a totally distinctive society, or polis, rooted in its version of Aristotelian virtues. It teaches a distinctive practice, like bricklaying or baseball.
It is an engaging performance. Yet I want to argue that this straighttalking rhetoric masks a massive evasion. Hauerwas’ work epitomises the core failure of theological postmodernism: the failure to use the word ‘church’ with sufficient care. Contemporary theology ought to reflect far more critically on the use of this word. For this word is intellectually dangerous. Rather like a beautiful woman (apologies for the gendered analogy), it has the power to make intelligent men forget their critical duties; to enchant them. It is crucial that we interrogate every use of this word; that we ask whether it refers to an actual institution or an ideal. Instead, ambiguity on this question is universally tolerated, as if ‘church’ is meant to be used with pious vagueness, as if this is part of its grammar.
This failure to be firm with the seductive ambiguity of ‘church’ has a pervasively detrimental effect on theology. The most serious theological question of our time is whether theology exceeds ecclesiology. Can theology legitimately seek to stand outside of any community, any institution, in order to think Christianity through? If the attempt is futile, then authentic theology is that which is done in the service of an institution; its authenticity is a function of the intrinsic authority of a certain institution. This is the either-or of contemporary theology.
My complaint is that contemporary theology tends to fudge this question, to deny the seriousness of this dilemma. It does so by inhabiting a space of virtual institutional commitment. It gestures at its own authenticity by making regular, positive references to ‘church’, but refuses to be institutionally specific. Even when a theologian is clear about his denominational allegiance, he will commonly use the word ‘church’ in a wider, vaguer sense, so that it refers to an ideal transcending any actual institution. By this means he claims the right to be free of the constraints of his particular institution: he is claiming to speak for ‘the church’ in a wider sense. He hopes that this will seem piously ecumenical, but it is really an attempt to evade the awkward fact that particular Christian institutions are involved in the exercise of authority. The theologian wants to forget about that kind of unpleasantly specific authority; he wants to access the benign authority of the church in general.
What I am suggesting is that academic theology inhabits a dishonest space. It wants the benefits of institutional rootedness without the drawbacks. It wants to assert its legitimacy by means of allying itself with ‘the practice of the community’, yet it also wants the freedom not to be associated with any particular community, any actual institution. Hauerwas is the arch-culprit.
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For Hauerwas the church must actually be different - outwardly, practically, visibly. The underwriting of this difference is the renunciation of violence. His pacifism is his attempt to draw a firm line between church and world. The church’s difference is not just spiritual or invisible, because it rejects the essence of human power. This is seen as ‘proof’ that it is an eschatological reality, whose survival is a divine miracle. As he recalls thirty years later: ‘Yoder convinced me that if there is anything to this Christian “stuff”, it must surely involve the conviction that the Son would rather die on the cross than have the world to be redeemed by violence. . . Christian nonviolence is not a strategy to rid the world of violence, but rather the way Christians must live in a world of violence.’7
The ecclesiology that Hauerwas learns from Yoder, then, is a form of utopian sectarianism. The church is called to be a separate society that opposes the ways of the world, and realises small-scale political perfection. The obvious problem with this is that there is no empirical reality which corresponds to such an account of church. And of course Hauerwas is somewhat uneasily aware of this problem. He himself is a Methodist, but he does not dare claim that this proto-Kingdom can be identified with this denomination.
Lacking a referent, how is his utopian sectarian ecclesiology sustainable? Here we must refer to his belief in the doctrine of sanctification, which Jeffrey Stout has recently suggested is the key to his thought.8 Sanctification names the belief that Christians are in the process of becoming perfect, fit citizens of the Kingdom of God. Similarly, the church is becoming its ideal self. Moral perfection is, by grace, possible. The doctrine describes a massive leap of faith: this hitherto imperfect community might now become perfect. Despite all the evidence of its past performance it might nevertheless live up to its calling, once we truthfully re-proclaim that calling.
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Sometimes he injects a ‘realistic’ note. For example he does not want ‘to imply that the church is any less a human community than other forms of association. Just as in other institutions, the church draws on and requires patterns of authority that derive from human needs for status, belonging, and direction. The question is not whether the church is a natural institution, as it surely is, but how it shapes that “nature” in accordance with its fundamental convictions.’13 Soon he makes a similar point. He admits that the church ‘is not just a “community” but an institution that has budgets, buildings, parking lots, potluck dinners, heated debates about who should be the next pastor, and so on.’14 And it is precisely this empirical reality, he now claims, rather than some ideal essence of church, that ‘comprises the sanctified ones formed by and forming the continuing story of Jesus Christ in the world.’
Let us be very clear about what he is doing here. He is talking about the church in idealised terms, as God’s perfect society, and denying that he is engaged in such idealism. He is not commending the ‘invisible church’, he insists, but the actual church: this perfect society is what the church is called to be in actuality; the church must be its ideal self, and by grace it can be and is. One cannot really argue against such a position; for it is not so much an argument as a rhetorical performance, a pious speech-act. What he is really saying is something like: ‘It is pious to pretend that the flawed reality of church is “really” the Kingdom of God. Let’s pretend.’
I believe that this sort of fantasy ecclesiology is not conducive to theological clarity. Instead of honestly grappling with the problems of ecclesiology, Hauerwas wants to be a preacher of corporate sanctification - one who encourages the flawed church to see itself as totally holy. What is strange about Hauerwas is that he is a revivalist preacher who disguises himself as a serious theologian, drawing on the latest philosophical wisdom. And here we must return to his Aristoteleanism. He uses postmodern social philosophy to lend weight to his fantastic ecclesiology.
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Salvation is a matter of incorporation into this distinctive set of traditional practices. Again, everything depends on the claim that these practices can create a qualitatively different ethical life, one possessed by the eschaton. In the church, God’s counter-politics is really present. ‘The church must be understood as an alternative politics.’
In [After Christendom] his refusal of denominational particularity becomes even more marked. For he begins to emphasise his sympathy with Catholic tradition, particularly Augustine’s account of the church as an alternative polis of peace. His technical allegiance to Methodism fits into this, he claims: ‘Methodism only makes sense as an evangelical movement in the church Catholic.’21 So he is now repositioning himself not as a sectarian Protestant but as a fringe Catholic. But does not Catholicism imply an accommodation with worldly power such as Hauerwas has always claimed to despise? It now seems that things are less clear-cut. He quotes a commentator on his work:
Hauerwas is quite consistent once you see that he does want to create a Christian society (polis, societas) - a community and way of life shaped fully by Christian convictions. He rejects Constantinianism because ‘the world’ cannot be this society and we only distract ourselves from building a truly Christian society by trying to make our nation into that society, rather than be content with living as a community-in-exile. . . [He seeks] to be a ‘Catholic’ Methodist in roughly the same way that some Episcopalians are Anglo-Catholic.
Hauerwas comments: ‘That is exactly the ecclesial position that I hope After Christendom? exemplifies.’ But surely this ecclesial position is fundamentally confused. It wants the church to be an alternative society, whose practices constitute a counter-politics, and it locates salvation in incorporation in this other society. It also claims to be opposed to any accommodation between this other society and political power. It is a fantasy. In reality, this politically distinctive church will be an institution within the general body politic, and if it is numerous it will be established, whether officially or not. He cannot have it both ways: if the church is an actual political society, it cannot hope to be politically innocent. Conventional Catholics do at least admit that the visible church is flawed, that it is caught up in questionable alliances with secular power, in the whole legacy of Constantinianism. Hauerwas wants to apply the purity of the gathered church to Catholic tradition. Yet Catholic tradition is magisterial, Constantinian; it acknowledges the necessity of political compromise.
His position on Christendom and Constantinianism is contradictory. He claims to be its sworn enemy, the theologian who dares to denounce the church’s habitual subservience to political power. But he also proposes a sort of neo-Christendom, rooted in a pure church: a strong Christian culture that is a political reality. If Christianity were to become a new political reality, a distinctive and comprehensive culture, what grounds are there for thinking that it would be purer than past models? He fails to address this obvious question.
After Christendom? develops a rhetoric of ecclesial machismo - a rhetoric that is questionable in the light of his denominational semidetachment. He argues that the church must be a direct authority over the Christian’s life, as if obedient submission to the subculture of church is the essence of Christian faith. At present, he complains, the church ‘cannot conceive what it would mean to be a disciplined community.’23 The churches offer friendliness and pastoral care, but this is insufficient: we need to ‘recover a sense of the church as a community of discipline.’24 ‘If salvation is genuinely social, then there can be no place for a distinction that invites us to assume, for example, that we have ownership over our bodies and possessions in a way that is not under the discipline of the whole church.’25 To put this right, he suggests that churches should require each member to declare what he or she earns. He gives another example of what he claims to favour. It is drawn from a television documentary in which a member of a fundamentalist congregation was ordered by the pastor to forgive his adulterous wife, to accept the decision of the congregation that she should be pardoned.26 Hauerwas commends this example of the church’s authority overriding liberal assumptions. But as he does not himself belong to such a fundamentalist church, his commendation is unreal, and in fact rather creepy. He likes the idea of other people submitting to the theological judgment of the local pastor.
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For he cannot point to a church that ‘is capable of embodying the practices of perfection.’ Instead, he remains detached from all churches, in order to construct a sort of collage, a virtual church that is made up of the particular practices that strike him as authentic. But real church is not like this. It is an institution that claims authority for its entire collection of practices. A real church condemns this attitude of freedom and detachment.
He seems to admit that his theological position is idealistic, unreal. For he cannot find a concrete ecclesial reality that would justify his ecclesiology. ‘My ambiguous ecclesial stance has at least taught me to drop all pretensions of superiority’, he now claims. But this is hardly true: he certainly pretends to be superior to liberals. What is objectionable is that Hauerwas refuses to admit that he is a liberal individual, detached from ecclesiastical particularity, insisting on the right to pick and mix from various churches.
His entire persona as an ecclesial authoritarian is simply phoney, if he himself chooses not to submit to an ecclesial authority. In an interview of 1998 he returns to the idea of church discipline. ‘The moment a church tries to discipline any member, that person can just take off and go down the street to another church. Put very simply, what’s killing Christianity is democracy. It’s a degraded form of democracy, whose habits we bring into the church and then assume that we don’t need to be under orders.’31 In the light of his own situation this is mere posturing.
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Hauerwas is determined to believe in a pure church... It must understand itself as absolutely different from any other form of human life. It must embody God’s counter-politics. This cannot be a mere aspiration, a characteristic of the ‘invisible church’. For he has learned from Aristotle and Wittgenstein that ideas must be rooted in actual communal practices. If the Kingdom of God has really broken into human history, it must take the form of an actual character-forming community.
Can he find such a church? No he cannot. But this he cannot quite admit. For, as he puts it, ‘My theological position makes no sense unless a church actually exists that is capable of embodying the practices of perfection.’ So he must keep talking as if his impossible ideal of church is already real, as if it is a hard-core reality, no more abstract than the local baseball team.
His ecclesial evasion leads to a deeply disingenuous theological rhetoric. He imitates a person who has a firm ecclesial position, who is subject to the authority of a particular community. As he himself insists, this particularity is essential to the coherence of his theological position. But there is no particular institutional commitment, which means that there is no coherence. He surely knows this. He can hardly be unaware that his vision does not cohere. Beneath the tough-talk and the clowning he is a tragic figure, piously upholding a fiction, hoping that a cheery feisty rhetoric will cover the cracks.
His success, his star-quality, is testament to a deep malaise in academic theology. It would rather not think honestly about church. When a charismatic ecclesial idealist comes along, there is such a desperate desire to believe in his vision that it is not properly scrutinised.
Extracts from Ecclesiological Fundamentalism:
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