Book Review: The Authority of the Gospel: Explorations in Moral and Political Theology in Honor of Oliver O'Donovan

Robert Song and Brent Waters, <i>The Authority of the Gospel: Explorations in Moral and Political Theology in Honor of Oliver O’Donovan</i>

The Work of Theology. By Stanley Hauerwas. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans Publishing, 2015. vii + 305 pp. $28.00 (paper).The latest offering from retired Duke professor Stanley Hauerwas, The Work of Theology, perhaps unintentionally verifies his conviction that work of theology never done (p. 265). With his characteristic melange of Aristotelianism, Wittgensteinianism, and (Alasdair) Maclntyreism, this an apologia of Hauerwas's life's work, further expounding his thought while also responding to misunderstandings of it. The opening chapter's thesis, paradigmatic for the volume, that Hauerwas views theological work as an exercise in reason (p. 4). This signaled in the fronting each chapter's title, which could otherwise convey that the book something oi a do-it-yourself manual. Yet Hauerwas wants readers to grasp not only that theology so defined indivisible from ethics, but that the good work of theology attracts others to join you (p. 9). In short, his apologia not only defense but invitation.Even more than in Hauerwas's other works, the first-person singular pronoun dominates this book. While upon first glance this may suggest Hauerwas's thought largely autobiographical, it instead intended to uphold the Maclntyrean significance of people along with they understand themselves (p. 14) when making claims about the good and true. Rather than generating a cul-de-sac of narcissistic subjectivity, Hauerwas anticipates that others will identify with elements of this who trying to tell the story of how I learned to think theologically (p. 20). Moreover, this approach again designed to develop Hauerwas's claim of the inextricable relationship between politics and theology, so that doctrine not concocted in the abstract but occasioned by the experiences of Christians in the world. Even writing a significant theological sentence dependent on the latter, as Hauerwas explores in How to Write a Theological Sentence. Hauerwas takes up Robert Jenson's sentence that raised Jesus from the dead, having before raised Israel from Egypt to contend that theological sentences should render the familiar strange (p. 123). Here whoever questions readers' presuppositions that they know who God is prior to God makes himself known (p. 134).Following Eugene Garver's For the Sake of Argument: Practical Reasoning, Character, and the Ethics of Belief, Hauerwas asserts that theology practical reason and therefore inseparable from ethics. This central assertion embodied in the book's movement from an emphasis on methodology to a consideration of its social and political ramifications. These later chapters on political theology, rights, and remembering the poor are Hauerwas's rejoinder to the recurrent critique, particularly from Nicholas Healy, that his ecclesial focus compels him and his readers to disregard the world. …

This recent work by Aristotle Papanikolaou, professor of theology and founding co-director of the Orthodox Christian Studies Center at Fordham University, is a profound achievement in political theology. Papanikolaou's work fills a great void in Orthodox Christian studies as well as political theology. Continuing his emphasis on divine-human communion and ecclesiology, he offers the beginnings of a contemporary Eastern Orthodox political theology divorced from imperial and Constantinian traditions found in most Orthodox thought. Additionally, he engages contemporary political theologians and ethicists such as William Cavanaugh, Vigen Guroian, Stanley Hauerwas, John Milbank, and Jeffrey Stout, suggesting possibilities for Christian engagement with liberal democratic civil society that some of these thinkers denounce. What I find particularly helpful in this work is his positive appreciation of liberal democracy and human rights from an Orthodox Christian perspective, which many Orthodox prelates and theologians simply find incompatible with their faith tradition. Papanikolaou starts his work with a discussion and critique of the Eusebian and Constantinian model of Orthodox political theology, bringing the discussion to the present age. Such a model has failed in the postimperial age of the church and does not reflect an alternative patristic theology that can be brought forth for the present age. In this regard, he suggests this other approach to political theology based on divine-human communion in Cappadocian thought as understood in the personalism of John Zizioulas. Emphasizing the importance of the human being as a relational being bearing the imago Dei and existing in Trinitarian relationships of love, a rich model for political theology can be developed. But Papanikolaou does not blindly accept the Eucharistic theologies offered by Nicholas Afanasiev and being discussed in the Radical Orthodox movement today, whereby a sectarian disavowal of the secular is maintained. Asking whether the option is the Eucharist or democracy as Cavanaugh and Guroian (and others) insist, he suggests that the Eucharistic basis of the church opens up the possibility for acceptance of the democratic political sphere as well as greater participation in the common good of civil society.

Exploring novels by Virginia Woolf, D. H. Lawrence, Evelyn Waugh, and Sylvia Townsend Warner as political theology – works that imagine a resistance to the fusion of Christianity and patriotism which fuelled and supported the First World War – this book shows how we can gain valuable insights from their works for anti-militarist, anti-statist, and anti-nationalist efforts today. While none of the four novelists in this study were committed Christians during the 1920s, Andrews explores how their fiction written in the wake of the First World War operates theologically when it challenges English civil religion – the rituals of the nation that elevate the state to a form of divinity. Bringing these novels into a dialogue with recent political theologies by theorists and theologians including Giorgio Agamben, William Cavanaugh, Simon Critchley, Michel Foucault, Stanley Hauerwas and Jürgen Moltmann, this book shows the myriad ways that we can learn from the authors’ theopolitical imaginations. Andrews demonstrates the many ways that these novelists issue a challenge to the problems with civil religion and the sacralized nation state and, in so doing, offer alternative visions to coordinate our inner lives with our public and collective actions.

Destructive political histories across the Muslim world are not the sole legacies of the modern age; this age has also seen an unprecedented fusion of religion and politics, particularly from the last quarter of the twentieth century onwards. The extant body of literature, simply through its coupling of these two characteristics of Muslim polity, suggests that Islam has been the one formidable obstacle to the development of constructive politics in the Muslim world. The essentialist approach that informs the underlying assumption of this literature argues that Islamic teachings foster anti-democratic and violent politics, leaving no space for freedom, equality, human rights, and tolerance. Departing from this view, this chapter argues that Islamic political theologies, irrespective of whether they are anti-democratic or democratic, are not merely products of the theological exploration of Muslim ideologues. There are always complex interactions between theological exploration, on the one hand, and the political dynamics of a given time and space, on the other. In this chapter, the assumption that Islamic political theology yields anti-democratic politics is challenged by investigating the lived reality of the Shīʿite ʿulamā’s engagement with the constitutional movement in Iran. An examination of the politico-religious thought and deeds of Ākhūnd-Khurāsānī, the most eminent figure of the Shīʿite orthodoxy during Shīʿites’ initial encounter with democratic principles, reveals the degree to which he reimagined and redefined the foundations of Shīʿite political theology to accommodate democratic notions such as parliamentarianism, elections, freedom of expression, equality, and liberty within an Islamic framework. Through his conceptual and empirical endeavours, Ākhūnd-Khurāsānī planted the seeds that grew into a democratic vision of Shīʿite political theology.

The concept of "church practices" has entered in a prominent way into current theological discussion. While the lineage of this concept includes Alasdair MacIntyre and Stanley Hauerwas, the concept most recently has been taken up as a special point of concentration by a group of Lutheran, Roman Catholic and Anglican theologians, which this year has brought out a book entitled, Knowing the Triune God: The Work of the Spirit in the Practices of the Church. Among its accomplished contributors is Reinhard Hütter who, as is indicated by the title of his recent book, has been a principal advocate in the development of the concept. Hütter's work is especially instructive for the following reasons: (a) his account of what is meant by the concept of church practices; (b) his account of the comprehensive role church practices (together with church doctrine) play in determining what theology is and does, and; (c) his criticism of Barth's account of church practices and, consequently, of the way in which Barth does theology. Since Hütter's account of church practices gains some of its descriptive force from its polemical relation to Barth's theology of the Christian community, it is useful to compare Hütter's proposal (first section) with Barth's (second section). Further, it may be noted, Barth provides something that Hutter does not-the exegetical support for his proposed understanding of one church practice-water baptism. (The implication of his exegesis for the understanding of the other church practices is, I believe, evident.) The question posed, then, is: are Barth's exegetical grounds (recounted in the third section) for his description of church practices clear enough and convincing enough to withstand Hutter's criticism and alternate proposal? Contrariwise, Hutter is challenged to provide more convincing exegetical grounds for his proposal than has Barth.

Recent publications such as The Blackwell Companion to Christian Ethics, edited by Stanley Hauerwas and Samuel Wells (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004), reaffirm traditional interconnections between worship and ethics. Bernd Wannenwetsch's Anglican–Lutheran informed study, an English translation of his 1997 Gottesdienst als Lebensform: Ethik für Christenbürger, contributes to this conversation by developing an engaging account of Christian citizenship that mediates debates between liberal and communitarian frameworks. The basic presupposition of the book is that ethics begins with worship, which, according to Wannenwetsch, amounts to a capacious ‘form of life’ as conceived by Wittgenstein's late philosophy that underlies (and therefore cannot be attenuated by) public political participation. In the book's three principal thematic sections, Wannenwetsch examines the dimensions of worship vis-à-vis Christian ethics: worship as the foundation, the critical power, and the formative power for Christian ethics. One of the book's strengths is its sustained dialogue between Scripture, Luther's theological ethics, and recent thinkers, including Hannah Arendt (Wannenwetsch's most frequent interlocutor), Charles Taylor, Wittgenstein, James Cone, John Milbank, Barth, Richard Rorty, and Habermas. These dialogues demonstrate the critical breadth of Wannenwetsch's project, but they could benefit from more nuanced distinctions. For example, Wannenwetsch remains uncharitable to the Catholic tradition because he discovers ‘certain characteristics of a clerical ethic’ (p. 56) in papal writings. Although Wannenwetsch also notes specifically Protestant variants of the clericalization of ethics, his reduction of Catholicism lapses into tired denominational dichotomies. This reduction glosses Catholicism's robust social teaching, notably its principles of solidarity and subsidiarity that illuminate two of Wannenwetsch's central concerns: the relationship between oikos and polis and the demands of neighbourliness. Another shortcoming of these dialogues derives from his failure to note the dynamics of power and oppression in politics outside of—and within—the Church. Wannenwetsch distinguishes his preferred concept of political worship from political theology, ‘which aims at the politicization of the whole of life’ (p. 12). Yet, part and parcel of serving as Christ to the neighbour—in the way that Jesus challenged social boundaries and oppressive mechanisms and ministered to those excluded from political participation—demands unmasking hegemonic power structures. Wannenwetsch insightfully argues that the heart of political worship consists of intercession and compassion, where ‘the permanent political task’ (p. 341) of Christians is to serve as advocates for others. In carrying out this advocacy, political theology, and its analogues in feminist, liberation, and womanist theologies, integrates praxis and a complex hermeneutics, a hermeneutics of suspicion and retrieval. Wannenwetsch contends that in and through worship the hermeneutics of suspicion ‘can be unlearnt’ (p. 296); however, it is precisely through such a hermeneutics that one reconfigures the relationships between self, other, and world, calls the world into ethical and political accountability as it offers resistance as well as forgiveness, and enables others’ voices to be heard in a transformed world (p. 324) without capitulating the basic tenets of Scripture and tradition.

This is a book with an edge. Its author, by no means a provocateur per definitionem, is necessarily provocative, and this for the simple reason that he is challenging a fundamental assumption about the early church that has achieved widespread currency. Whether among popular writers (e.g., Dan Brown), historians (e.g., Ramsay MacMullen and James Carroll), or theologians (e.g., John Howard Yoder and Stanley Hauerwas), the name of Constantine is associated with “tyranny, anti-Semitism, hypocrisy, apostasy and heresy”; it represents, at best, “a hardened power-politician who never really became a Christian” yet “who harnessed the energy of the church for his own political ends” and, at worst, a “brute,” a “murderer,” a “usurper,” alas, an “evil genius” (pp. 9, 92, 177). Stated economically, Constantine has been “a whipping boy for a long time, and still is today” (p. 9). Described by its author, Peter J. Leithart, a senior fellow at New Saint Andrews College, as “old-fashioned,” Defending Constantine takes up the “traditional” Constantinian questions that “historians have long since tired of answering” (p. 9). In a supremely colorful way, it engages more recent scholarship for a wider audience with several principal aims. Leithart seeks to offer the reader a full-blooded “life of Constantine,” given the fact that “[n]early everything about Constantine is disputed” (p. 10). But the volume has an explicit and visibly theological trajectory as well, insofar as the author is burdened to refute the polemic of “Constantinianism,” a term of derision proffered by Anabaptist theologian John Howard Yoder. While Yoder is by no means the only exponent of the anti-Constantine thesis, Leithart considers Yoder's to be “the most sophisticated and systematic treatment of the concept” (p. 11). Yoder's baseline assumption is that Constantinianism represents a heretical mindset that has distorted Christian faith since the fourth century. In Yoder's telling of the patristic story, “the church ‘fell’ in the fourth century (or thereabouts) and has not yet recovered from that fall” (p. 11). Constantinianism, therefore, represents “the wedding of piety to power,” that is, “the notion that the empire or state, the ruler of civil government rather than the church, is the primary bearer of meaning in history” (p. 176). A further aim, issuing out of Leithart's critique of Yoderian political theology, is to argue that, far from representing the church's fall (contra Yoder and his disciples), the fourth century presents us with something of “a model for Christian political practice” (pp. 10-11). Such a tendentious claim, of course, will need justification.

Reviewed by: The Hidden God: Luther, Philosophy, and Political Theology by Marius Timmann Mjaaland Gregory Walter The Hidden God: Luther, Philosophy, and Political Theology. By Marius Timmann Mjaaland. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2016. xii + 233 pp. Marius Mjaaland has written an important book on Luther's Hidden God and the nature of modernity. This work differs from other approaches because it adopts a genealogical perspective, uses a variation of Carl Schmitt's research program into secularization, and focuses entirely on the uses Luther puts to the Hidden God to discuss Luther's political theology. This combined approach is what "political theology" means in the book, a coinage of Schmitt's that is only somewhat related to other uses of political theology that seek to show how theological positions may have a political effect. Mjaaland's work shows how the political is not purely secular but instead is theological in ways that Luther can criticize. In sum, "Luther thus draws the hiddenness of God into the praxis of reading and interpreting texts, as a condition of understanding" (173). Mjaaland establishes the hiddenness of God as this pre-condition for thought, whether political or theological, in distinction from other modern ways of interpreting Luther's discourse on the Hidden God. These other traditions, associated with the names of Eberhard Jüngel, Karl Barth, and Gerhard Ebeling, reduce any divine hidden-ness to the revealed God. While these approaches to the Hidden God are undertaken for theological purposes, Mjaaland also objects to assimilating Luther too readily to the various positions on contingent and absolute power in late medieval theology. Yet another trajectory allies Luther with German mysticism or the Pseudo-Dionysian tradition; for these interpreters, Mjaaland has more sympathy. While Mjaaland's case is sharply presented, readers devoted to these alternatives may desire more substantial evidence and discussion of the positions Mjaaland sets aside. To show that the Hidden God is the condition for political and theological thought in Luther, Mjaaland takes up the distinction [End Page 445] between God in and outside of Scripture that Luther employs against Erasmus in the bound will debate. This distinction shows that one can neither abandon the Hidden God skeptically, acting as if hiddenness does not exist and adopting the motto "that which is above us, doesn't concern us," nor can one attempt to tame the Hidden God by reducing it to God in scripture. Mjaaland shows that the Hidden God as precondition of theology and the political alike does not rest in grasping, writing, or otherwise fixing the character of God or of political life. Such efforts are fleeting at best according to Mjaaland's Luther. For Mjaaland, God's hiddenness always destroys, destabilizes, and undermines the secular and religious alike. Thus, for Mjaaland the Hidden God is a genuine continuation of Luther's theologia crucis. The Hidden God as the pre-condition of all thought gives way to a surprisingly incomplete discussion of God's grace as a gift. Mjaaland claims that the unconditionality of the Hidden God is a kind of pure or free gift. Owing to the substantial discussion of gift in contemporary theology and philosophy, sometimes directly dealing with Luther's work, Mjaaland's argument here deserves further development, especially since Luther prefers promise to gift in most of his articulations of God's graciousness. In the course of this work, Mjaaland considers Luther's Heidelberg Disputation, his dispute with Erasmus on the bound will, and writings concerning the peasants' revolt. Mjaaland makes considerable use of the work of Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida, and other philosophers to aid his argument. Written in the style of continental philosophy, this work should be considered by Luther scholars of all stripes, especially those interested in Luther's theology and its relationship to modernity. Mjaaland's approach to this relationship is especially valuable because he has shown how Luther's use of the Hidden God has been overlooked as a factor in the formation of modernity. [End Page 446] Gregory Walter Saint Olaf College Northfield, Minnesota Copyright © 2017 Johns Hopkins University Press and Lutheran Quarterly, Inc.

(2004). Stanley Hauerwas, With the Grain of the Universe: The Church's Witness and Natural Theology. Political Theology: Vol. 5, No. 4, pp. 487-489.

Hong Kong Christian communities often draw upon theological resources from the West. But can Western theological sources be meaningfully applied to Hong Kong? Western theological sources stem from Western epistemologies, which may not necessarily resonate with the values or cultural assumptions of Hong Kong Christians. The lived experiences of 'Chan Tai-man,' a placeholder name for average Hong Kong Christians, can be a source for exploring Hong Kong Christian epistemologies. 'Chan's' lived theology has significance for the field of practical theology in considering how majority world epistemologies can impact the Western world, especially regarding Christianity in individualistic societies. This paper analyses Hong Kong theologians' engagement with Stanley Hauerwas's theological convictions and makes a critical comparison to 'Chan's' lived theology. First, the article will address (1) why Hauerwasian theology resonates with Hong Kong theologians and (2) why Hong Kong Hauerwasians think Hauerwas's ideas would be useful in the Hong Kong context. Second, after explaining the author's ethnographic research methods, the article will illustrate 'Chan's' lived theology, followed by a comparison between the two approaches. In conclusion, while Hong Kong theologians' engagement with Hauerwas makes an adequate start, Hong Kong Christian communities' understanding of political theology will eventually have to be broadened through a critical self-reflection of Hong Kong lived theology.

Book Review: Robert Song and Brent Waters (eds), <i>The Authority of the Gospel: Essays in Moral and Political Theology in Honor of Oliver O’Donovan</i>

The call to make the world a better place is inherent in the Christian belief and practice. But why have efforts to change the world by Christians so often failed or gone tragically awry? And how might Christians in the 21st century live in ways that have integrity with their traditions and are more truly transformative? In To Change the World, James Davison Hunter offers persuasive-and provocative-answers to these questions. Hunter begins with a penetrating appraisal of the most popular models of world-changing among Christians today, highlighting the ways they are inherently flawed and therefore incapable of generating the change to which they aspire. Because change implies power, all Christian eventually embrace strategies of political engagement. Hunter offers a trenchant critique of the political theologies of the Christian Right and Left and the Neo-Anabaptists, taking on many respected leaders, from Charles Colson to Jim Wallis and Stanley Hauerwas. Hunter argues that all too often these political theologies worsen the very problems they are designed to solve. What is really needed is a different paradigm of Christian engagement with the world, one that Hunter calls faithful presence-an ideal of Christian practice that is not only individual but institutional; a model that plays out not only in all relationships but in our work and all spheres of social life. He offers real-life examples, large and small, of what can be accomplished through the practice of faithful presence...Such practices will be more fruitful, Hunter argues, more exemplary, and more deeply transfiguring than any more overtly ambitious attempts can ever be. Written with keen insight, deep faith, and profound historical grasp, To Change the World will forever change the way Christians view and talk about their role in the modern world.

In his inaugural speech, President George W. Bush suggested that the mission of America to spread freedom and democracy in the world is a divinely authored mission. The intention first announced in Bush's inaugural to globalize an American Christian vision of freedom and democracy, and of free market capitalism, reflects the theological underpinnings of the neo-conservativism of the Bush administration. In this article I trace the remarkable continuities between the neo-conservative political theology of Bush and his acolytes and more mainstream Niebuhrian approaches to democracy and the ‘manifest destiny’ of America. I then subject the emergence of an American imperium, and the political theology associated with it, to a critique in dialogue with early Christian critics of Roman Empire, and with the Christian pacifist tradition as recently retrieved by North American theological ethicists John Howard Yoder and Stanley Hauerwas.

Stanley Hauerwas’s theology is widely read as a rejection of the world in favor of the church, and thus the antithesis of politically‐engaged, publicly‐minded theologies like Reinhold Niebuhr's. However, Hauerwas's critical work can be more fruitfully understood as an effort in disambiguating concepts like “love” and “justice.” Attending to the role language plays in Hauerwas's thought shows how neo‐Anabaptist theology acts as a corrective to, not a rejection of, public theology. Charles Mathewes's The Republic of Grace is one example of a neo‐Augustinian political theology that takes Hauerwas's conceptual clarifications seriously.