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Stanley Hauerwas. With the Grain of the Universe: The Church's Witness and Natural Theology. Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2001. Pp. 249. $22.99 (Cloth).
Allen, Karl
Allen, Karl
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"Stanley Hauerwas is Gilbert T. Rowe Professor of Theological Ethics at Duke Divinity School. He is self-described as "part philosopher, part political theorist, part theologian, part ethicist". Time magazine recently described him as "America's Best Theologian," a heavy load that one hopes he is bearing bravely. [2] With The Grain of the Universe: The Church's Witness and Natural Theology was delivered as the Gifford lectures of 2001 at the University of St. Andrews. The Gifford lectures require the lecturer to discuss natural theology. The dictionary definition of natural theology is "theology based on knowledge of the natural world and on human reason, apart from revelation." The problem posed by this is that Hauerwas disagrees with the whole idea. He argues strongly that any God susceptible to proof is not really God: "The metaphysical and existential projects to make a "place" for such a god cannot help but "prove" the existence of a god who is not worthy of worship" (15). He believes that "the very idea that we might know God abstracted from how God makes himself known was the result of the loss of a Christian politics called church" (16). Hauerwas interprets even the hallowed proofs of the existence of God in Thomas Aquinas as the product of a culture where the existence of God was not problematic. Aquinas' never proved the existence of God from nature; instead he related the God in whom people believed to the world in which they lived. Since God's existence has become problematic in our culture, we misunderstand Aquinas, and seek to prove God's existence. But in so doing, Hauerwas argues, we inevitably subordinate our belief in God to other cultural beliefs in the primacy of the individual, in reason, and in the autonomy of the natural world. [3] Under these circumstances, Hauerwas' agreement to do the Gifford lectures must have led to some soul-searching, and then into researching how others solved the problem. The lectures and the book are the fruit of that research. In the course of discussing natural theology, Hauerwas tells the theological story of the twentieth century by concentrating on three of the greatest Gifford lecturers--William James, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Karl Barth. As he does so, he examines how our understanding of natural theology relates to seemingly distant topics such as politics and morals."(pg 1)
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2002
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