Lord Gifford’s will established a series of Lectures to demonstrate the rational credibility of Christianity and to secure the spiritual and moral values of modernity. Hardly then the sort of project suited to Hauerwas, who has been variously called a ‘sectarian, fideistic, enlightenment-basher’. It is Hauerwas’s contention that Lord Gifford’s conception of Natural Theology as evidentialist apologetics, a rational sieve to confessional claims, has been naturalized in Modern Theology’s anaemic God ‘who bears the heavy burden of proof’. Hauerwas examines three prominent Gifford Lectures to seek both the symptoms of and the cure for the malaise in modern theology.

William James’s lectures The Varieties of Religious Experience fulfil the spirit of Gifford’s will by explaining the persistence of religion as a human defiance of science’s impersonal and deterministic universe. Aside from the absurdity of creedal ‘Over-beliefs’, religion, (best understood in psychological terms), endows life with both meaning and moral purpose. Such a religion of the human spirit ‘remains today as functionally reductive as it is seductive’. Yet the corridors of James’ university are patrolled. Pluralist democracy must sever us from the very beliefs that give our lives meaning, for the things we most care about threaten to destabilise the humanist political order. Thus James’ pragmatic validation of religion comes at a cost.

Reinhold Niebuhr’s The Nature and Destiny of Man interprets the central insight of the Bible as the tension between humanity’s freedom to attain transcendent love, and its sinful egoism. Yet for Hauerwas he falls prey to Feuerbach’s argument that theology is ‘but a disguised way of talking about humanity’. In Harnack, Troeltsch, and Tillich, Niebuhr found thinkers who rehabilitated the Christian ‘myth’ in terms that offered hope and spiritual regeneration to Western civilization. Niebuhr’s theology with its slimmed down Christology and marginalizing of the church, had exchanged its prophetic voice for a seat at the tables of democratic power. Such a concordant was to be short-lived, however, for as American society peeled away its Protestant Liberal veneer the question it asked was ‘Why go through Niebuhr’s verbal gymnastics to save the “symbols” of Christianity when James can give you everything Niebuhr wanted in a less confused way?’ Yet Hauerwas’s criticisms of Niebuhr fail to acknowledge the extent to which liberalism finds its roots (e.g. toleration and freedom) in the Christian story. Hauerwas’s non-conciliation with the world of public policy making where rival interests, preferences, and accounts of the human good compete in the world of real politic may secure the Church’s saltiness. Its light however, may shine in fewer corners than that of the more pragmatic Niebuhr, whom Hauerwas acknowledges to be the last great public theologian of America.

Subversively, Hauerwas sees Karl Barth as the great natural theologian of the Gifford Lectures in realising ahead of Maclntyre, that there are no ‘non-traditioned accounts of rationality’. His Church Dogmatics set out a ‘theological metaphysics that provides an alternative to the world in which Lord Gifford’s understanding of natural theology seems reasonable’. Drawing an along between Barth and Aquinas, Hauerwas argues that as with the Summa, Church Dogmatics provides a transformative training, allowing the reader to participate in the divine revelation and be shaped by it. Just as the androcentric theology of his Protestant liberal predecessors was as integral to their signing of the war policy of Wilhelm II in August 1914 ‘a black day’), so was Barth’s christocentricity to his drafting of the Barmen declaration opposing Hitler in 1934. Barth learnt from his predecessors that ‘if we get our theology wrong, we get the world wrong’. Barth’s strange new world of the Bible discovered in his Romans commentary of 1918 found that when theology began with God, not man, it rightly ‘diagnosed who Hitler was’ and was able to ‘name as well as resist the demons unleashed in the name of humanity’. Barth is the hero of Hauerwas’ story, for he ‘helps us see why “natural theology” is unintelligible when abstracted from a full doctrine of God’.

Hauerwas has conceived of the task of natural theology along the lines of Pascal for whom atheism’s symptoms were rational doubts, whereas its roots were habits and passions: ‘You want to be cured of unbelief and you ask me for the remedy: learn from those who were once bound like you and now wager all they have.’ It is in the disciplines, practices, and skills of the Christian community, and not through apologetics to and on the terms of autonomous reason that the God of Jesus Christ as opposed to that of philosophers is to be met. This is not ‘the comprehensive theological argument we have long requested’ of Hauerwas, as one reviewer conceives it, for as Hauerwas himself says, for ‘if there were a “knock-down” argument capable of demonstrating the truth of what Christians believe about God and the world that made witness irrelevant, then we would have evidence that what Christians believe is not true.’ Hauerwas’ natural theology which carves faithful lives and not rational idols is persuasive precisely because it questions why it should play modernity at its own game. He draws on Maclntyre’s criticism that Christians in modernity have offered atheists less and less to disbelieve, and that they need to attack rather than conciliate with descriptions of the world that are presumptively atheistic, putting them into ‘epistemological crisis’. The task of the church is to be a visible, distinctive community who see the world more clearly through the redemptive revelation of the triune God. The truth of Christian convictions as running with the grain of the universe is best exemplified in sanctified lives like that of Maximilian Kolbe, the Catholic priest who voluntarily gave his life in Auschwitz to save another’s. A world orientated by such a compass may well be disorientating, for as Yoder writes, it is the ‘people who bear crosses (who) are working with the grain of the universe’.

Few contemporary theologians are as punchy and readable as Hauerwas. Though he may generate more heat than light at times, he practices in academia what he preaches—that the church should be a visible witness to the God of Jesus Christ who redeems the world on his own terms. This isn’t the place to start with this plain talking Texan, the son of a bricklayer. Resident Aliens or After Christendom are more accessible and make the same central points. The portraits may be painted with a Hauerwasian gloss, but what is striking in a world straddling modernism and postmodernism, is just how prophetic and persuasive the natural theology of Aquinas and Barth turns out to be.

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