Saturday Book Review: Hauerwas and Wells

Last updated on: October 15, 2011 at 10:15 am by Scot McKnight

Saturday Book Review: Hauerwas and Wells 2011-10-04T18:54:19-05:00 Scot McKnight

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Stanley Hauerwas and Samuel Wells, eds., The Blackwell Companion to Christian Ethics (Wiley-Blackwell Companions to Religion), 2nd edition (Wiley-Blackwell, 2011).

Reviewed by Wesley Vander Lugt

When the first edition of this book was released in 2004, the idea of organizing a Companion to Christian Ethics around worship and Christian liturgy was a relatively novel idea. Yet not surprisingly, it struck a chord that continues to resonate, especially among those who believe that Christian ethics is a whole lot more comprehensive than a cauldron of conundrums, quandaries, and controversies. It’s about the kind of people we are and how we imagine God and his world.

Seven years after the first edition, proponents of this approach are multiplying, and this second edition includes new essays from a cadre of promising scholars who strengthen an already impressive volume. For example, Brian Brock provides an essay on the “Prophetic Public Presence of the Mentally Disabled,” showing through personal reflection and theological acumen that “we can have our favorite ‘other’ without embodying any fondness to the outsider class to which they belong.” His essay is a moving example of how the church is an alternative people and space where those who may be marginalized in public spaces are leading our praise.

Lauren Winner reflects on the gendered nature of standing and kneeling in our worship, and asks, particularly in connection with women kneeling to receive the Eucharist from male priests, whether “the Church is called to be a place where women learn to stand and men learn to kneel.” I find it interesting that Winner does not address why we need to receive the Eucharist directly from a priest in the first place, but her main point is quite profound, that when both men and women feel free to stand in confidence, then they will be free to kneel.

In “Being Baptized: Race,” Willie Jennings maintains that baptism is not the entrance into a homogenous unity, but is a way of life that embraces difference. Likewise, Luke Bretherton, in his essay “Sharing Peace: Class, Hierarchy, and Christian Social Order,” argues that the church should not “baptize” class conflict (liberation theology’s mistake), but should live according to new fraternal relations, in which worship and our way of life represent a new mode of production, distribution, and consumption. Class often negatively impacts our worship, since it “affects with whom we do or don’t gather on a Sunday,” but in reality, worship should reconfigure class as a signpost to a new kingdom order.

This second edition of the Companion also includes two replacement essays, not because the original essays were wrong (as Hauerwas and Wells assure us in the Preface), but because it is “interesting to have those topics addressed from a fresh perspective.” Hauweras and Wells contributed one of those essays (“Breaking Bread: Peace and War”), maintaining that war is a counter-liturgy to Christian worship, an insight that corresponds to James K. A. Smith’s observation in Desiring the Kingdom (2009) that many cultural “liturgies” compete with Christian liturgy in the formation of our imaginations and desires. Similarly, Kathryn Greene-McCreight claims that “receiving communion” wields a power of formation that helps us reconceive the muddled issues surrounding “euthanasia, suicide, and letting die.”

In a new Afterword entitled “The Virtue of the Liturgy,” Jennifer Herdt appreciates the insight of Smith and others regarding the extent to which cultural liturgies shape our imaginations and desires, but hesitates calling these “secular” versus “sacred” liturgies, preferring instead Charles Mathewes approach (A Theology of Public Life, 2007) that recognizes these liturgies—such as rituals of citizenship—are indeed sacred, “a continuing expression of Christian worship.”

I was happy to see this emphasis on cultural liturgies emerge throughout these new contributions, because although I recognize the formative potential of Christian worship, life is full of rituals that are forming our character and imaginations. From my childhood up to the present, one of the most formative rituals for me has been working in the garden, which is not a secular liturgy, as Herdt observes, but can be properly understood as an act of worship. If there would ever be a third edition of this Companion, I would love to see an additional section on “worship outside the sanctuary” with essays that address the formative power of our everyday and cultural liturgies. Or maybe that’s a topic for entirely separate volume.

As long as I’m dreaming of the ideal Companion to Christian Ethics, I would also wish for essays that communicate a greater dynamic interplay between formation and ethical performance. If worship is formative, it is also true that it is part of our performance in the drama of redemption. Hauerwas and Wells are right that worship makes us into people who encounter particular kinds of quandaries and decisions, but where and how we worship is itself a quandary faced by many Christians. Thus, formation and performance are intrinsically interwoven, with quandaries forming our character and character helping us deal with quandaries. In other words, we don’t need to choose between agent-oriented and action-oriented ethics: who we are impacts what we do and what we do influences who we are.

But of course, no Companion can say it all, and for what this one is trying to accomplish, it is a brilliant work. In the past several years, I have gone back to several of the original essays over and over again, and I’m sure I will do the same with some of the new ones. The cost of this book may make it prohibitive for personal libraries, but if you have a copy in a local library, I suggest blocking out an afternoon and soaking up the wisdom that permeates these pages.

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