Eric Gregory on Hauerwas

Came across this paragraph in Politics and the Order of Love last night. I’m intrigued by the way in which Gregory frames Hauerwas’ theological trajectory as one which has become less Protestant in his recent writings. Certainly, Hauerwas has returned repeatedly to traditionally Catholic emphases.

Gregory’s points of criticism also seem parallel to those advanced by Kerr and Mathewes.

I do not in any way disagree with the spirit of Stanley Hauerwas’s influential thesis that “the church does not have a social ethic; the church is a social ethic.” I do worry, however, that this claim has taken on a self-referential life of its own and strips the world of its created goodness. To his credit, Hauerwas transformed Protestant ethics by a renewed emphasis on virtues and sanctification that was critical of Barth’s actualism. He was right to highlight the modern avoidance of the Christian qualifier of ethics as temptation for a confused (often violent) universalism which abandoned the narrative of the Christian story. His more recent work, however, backtracks from his earlier affirmation of a Barthian ecclesiology under the pressure of his desire to identify a reliable site for the social practices of embodied Christian virtue. He still issues a prophetic concern against the cultural accommodation of the Gospel to the world. But it is couched less in terms of the witness of the church through the Spirit of Christ and more in terms of a witness to the church as the Spirit of Christ. Now, against Barth, Hauerwas holds that “the community called the church is constitutive of the gospel proclamation.” This move pushes him closer to Milbank and makes it harder to maintain the view that [the] world stands under the gospel judgment of Christ, not an eternal church (pp. 132-3).