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The Row Boat"Had we but world enough, and time..." *
Hauerwas' Wife9/24/2005 18:10:04At the beginning of the slick Duke University Press edition of The Hauwerwas Reader, there is a wonderful reflection on "Stan the Man" by one of his friends an colleagues. It offers a pleasant cowboy-theologian image that makes reading his essays and books a whole lot more fun. Stanley Hauerwas, by the way, is a Christian theologian, a Methodist, interested especially in pacifism, theological ethics, and ecclesiology. And according to this biographical essay, he nearly became Catholic at one point, drawn by its sacramental theology of the Body of Christ. But then he decided not to. Why? By his account, what turned Hauerwas away was that the Catholic Church would not recognize the priesthood of his wife, a Methodist minister. He knew her priesthood to be a true one, and there wasn't much sense in joining a church that didn't. Finally, by my memory of the account, the decision was not founded in interpretations of revelation or alignments of theological theory. It really just wasn't very prudent. And this sort of consideration, I think, is where a lot of the best theology comes from, that which is grounded in insular, human-scale decisions, sensations, and convenience. Not to mention cries of injustice and the ambition to simply survive. Or which church is close enough to walk to. There is a certain religious mind that insists on perseverence of principles, that walks twice as far to go to the right church, clinging as it does to certain eternal principles or details of ritual. But very often it is this mind that kills and looks like a horrible mutilated blindness, only the frail semblance of an actual human being. Sometimes, it does make sense to abandon convenience, as it did for ancient St. Antony and his monks to flee the cities and their possessions for the desert caves. Not to say that Hauerwas' reason was petty; but it easily could have been, or could appear so in a cosmic scale of absolutes. A good theology, I think, is one that could be a little bit petty, attending to the incarnated minutae that most of our whispered prayers are about anyway. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - |
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