With the grain of the universe - Stanley Hauerwas

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.