With the Grain of the Universe : The Church's Witness and Natural Theology - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0334028647 ISBN 13: 9780334028642

Publisher: SCM Press

Synopsis

This volume comprises Hauerwas' Gifford Lectures. Adopting his robust approach to theological questions, Hauerwas here proposes that natural theology divorced from a full doctrine of God cannot help but distort the character of God and, accordingly, of the world in which human beings find themselves. For Hauerwas, those who bear crosses work "with the grain of the universe." As the author sees it, the God who is worshipped and the world God created cannot be truthfully known without the cross, which is why the knowledge of God and ecclesiology are interdependent. Examining in turn the theologies of William James, Reinhold Niebuhr and Karl Barth, Hauerwas suggests how the truth-fulfilling conditions of Christian speech have been compromised in the interest of developing an ethic for Christians in liberal social orders. He argues that any attempt to provide an account of how Christian theological claims can tell us the way things are requires a correlative politics. In theological terms, such a politics is called "church". Finding Barth's theology a necessary corrective to the work of James and Niebuhr, Hauerwas sees here a bold reclamation of the visibility of the gospel after Christendom and of a theology done without apology or reservation.

About this title

From the Inside Flap:

More praise for With the Grain of the Universe, the Gifford Lectures at the University of St. Andrews (2001):

"An unexpectred threesome-William James, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Karl Barth-make for a surprising story and an original book. In Hauerwas's fresh interpretation of American intellectual history, Niebuhr the neo-orthodox theologian appears not as the Christian alternative to James's pragmatism,but as a thin religious version of the same, packaged in the vocabulary of Christian theology. Against this backdrop, Hauerwas draws on Karl Barth to set forth a 'theology without reservation' that takes modernity seriously but meets it not on modernity's terms but on the church's terms . . . This is a book we have long awaited: Hauerwas's account of what went wrong and what went right with theology in the twentieth century."
-Robert Louis Wilken, author of The Christians As the Romans Saw Them and The Land Called Holy

"In its animated conversations with William James, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Karl Barth, and its constructive proposals, this book makes for fine reading and ought to stir up some new and serious debate about what the church's confession has to say about natural reality."
-John Webster, Oxford University

"Hauerwas offers a highly informed account of his claim that Karl Barth understood what . . . William James and Reinhold Niebuhr did not: that natural theology is intelligible only as part of the whole doctrine of God revealed in Christ. Whether or not one agrees with Hauerwas-I do not-this book will rightly set the agenda for future discussion about the sources and authorities by which 'natural theology' may proceed."
-Harlan Beckley, Washington and Lee University
Stanley Hauerwas is Gilbert T. Rowe Professor of Theological Ethics at Duke University. He is a prolific author, with previous books including Resident Aliens, A Community of Character, The Peaceable Kingdom, and A Better Hope. Hauerwas has made signal contributions to three of the most influential developments in theology over the last thirty years: postliberalism, narrative theology, and virtue ethics. Vigorous and far-ranging in argument, he is perhaps the most quoted and debated theologian of our day.

From the Back Cover:

"In its animated conversations with William James, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Karl Barth and in its constructive proposals, this book makes for fine reading and ought to stir up some new and serious debate about what the church's confession has to say about natural reality."
--John Webster, Oxford University

"In Hauerwas's fresh interpretation of American intellectual history, Niebuhr, the neo-orthodox theologian, appears not as the Christian alternative to James's pragmatism, but a thin religious version of the same, packaged in the vocabulary of Christian theology. Against this backdrop, Hauerwas draws on Karl Barth to set forth a 'theology without reservation' that takes modernity seriously but meets it not on modernity's terms but on the church's terms as witnessed by Christian thinkers such as John Howard Yoder and John Paul II. This is a book we have long awaited; Hauerwas's account of what went wrong and what went right with theology in the twentieth century. With the Grain of the Universe is Hauerwas in full sail."
--Robert Louis Wilken, University of Virginia

"A highly original approach to natural theology. Through imaginative and often provocative arguments, Hauerwas challenges and often inverts many conventional assumptions in Christian theology and ethics. . . . Anyone broadly conversant with Christian theology . . . will be richly stimulated by one of the leading theologians writing today."
--America

"[This book] is a disassembled paradox; the magic box of Hauerwasian style is here broken open, its parts laid out before us in an exploded diagram. The effect is simultaneously impressive--one sees more clearly than ever how much learning is needed to produce Hauerwas' insights--and a bit disenchanting: I'm not sure I want to know how the magician does it. But no one reading this book can say Hauerwas hasn't done his homework. . . . [A] powerful and important book."
--Alan Jacobs, Books & Culture

With the Grain of the Universe was a Christianity Today 2002 Book Award Winner. This edition includes a new afterword that sets the book in contemporary context and responds to critics.

About this edition

• Publisher: SCM Press
• ISBN 10: 0334028647
• ISBN 13: 9780334028642
• Binding: Paperback