Book Review: Without Apology: Sermons for Christ's Church

Abstract

Without Apology: Sermons for Christ's Church. By Stanley Hauerwas. New York: Seabury Books, 2013. 208 pp. $18.00 (paper).In his Without Apology: Sermons for Christ's Church, we find renowned theological ethicist Stanley Hauerwas in an unusual, yet familiar place. This book is a collection of sermons and other popular writings. As such, it is a departure from Hauerwas s more academic work. Yet, many of the themes and positions that he develops therein are quite familiar to those who are even remotely acquainted with his thought. The result is twofold: we get interesting pieces that are more practical in nature, while also being treated to an accessible way to begin to filter through the main themes of Hauerwas s work.Without Apology contains three sections. The first is the introduction, where Hauerwas lays out a theology of preaching. The first move he makes in this theology of preaching is to fight the common presumption that he does not believe in apologetics; rather, he believes he follows Karl Barth in that the best apologetics is a good dogmatics. With this in mind, Hauerwas sees preaching as communicating the difference that exists for how we live and exist when we say that God was in Christ. From this, he does not try to translate the gospel into a more accessible language, but to allow the odd grammar that is Christian speech help us see the contingency of our existence and how we are to live and be as creatures made in Gods image. The second move that Hauerwas makes in the introduction is to explain why he does not explain. He fights against the critique leveled against him that he does not explain the gospel. He contrasts this by saying these attempts are almost always us; he would rather speak about the Triune God and how God has determined God's relationship to us. Our attempts at controlling the gospel must be broken by seeing our relationships and the whole of our lives in light of God's relationship with us. From this, Hauerwas refuses to dumb down sermons, instead opting to allow the Holy Spirit to show up as the Word is rightly proclaimed.The second section of Without Apology is the longest, containing a number of sermons that have been preached in a variety of places, but mostly at his home congregation, Church of the Holy Family in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and at Christ Church Cathedral in Nashville, Tennessee, where he is canon theologian. The main theme that runs throughout Hauerwass sermons is that the way we, as American Christians, often practice our Christianity is at best problematic and at worst unfaithful. …