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Just democracy, just church: Hauerwas and Coles on radical democracy and Christianity

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 December 2010

John Bowlin
John Bowlin*
Affiliation:
Princeton Theological Seminary, Princeton NJ 08540, USAjohn.bowlin@ptsem.edu
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Abstract

In their remarkable new book, Christianity, Democracy, and the Radical Ordinary, Stanley Hauerwas and Rom Coles endorse a radical turn in our democratic practices and ecclesial engagements. In what follows, I say what this turn amounts to and consider what reasons might encourage churches and democracies to make it. In the end, I argue that good reasons are missing. We should forgo the radical and settle for just democracy, just church. In large measure, it is a dispute over Augustine's legacy as a social critic. Hauerwas and Coles accent the discussion of pagan virtue and temporal politics in the City of God while I prefer the remarks on idolatry and just love from book 4 of the Confessions. Hauerwas and Coles might share Augustine's anxiety about idolatry, but they resist his solution. He suspects that our idolatrous tendencies can be resolved only as we take on the just love of Christ, while they are inclined to think that democracy and church made radical will do the trick. They might also insist that their departure from Augustine on this matter is less than it seems, that they accent the radical in order to avoid unjust love, but I'm not convinced and in the end I bring in Plato's Alcibiades – garlanded, drunk and angry – to help justify my doubts.

Type
Article Review
Information
Scottish Journal of Theology , Volume 64 , Issue 1 , February 2011 , pp. 80 - 95
Copyright
Copyright © Scottish Journal of Theology Ltd 2010

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References

1 Hauerwas, Stanley and Coles, Romand, Christianity, Democracy, and the Radical Ordinary: Conversations between a Radical Democrat and a Christian (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2008)Google Scholar. Page numbers from this book will be cited in the body of the text.

2 Augustine, , Confessions, trans, Chadwick, Owen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991)Google Scholar, 4.8.13.

3 Aristotle, NE 8.3 (1156b6–13).

4 Wolin, Sheldon, The Presence of the Past: Essays on the State and the Constitution (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), p. 191Google Scholar, quoted by Coles, p. 149.

5 Romand Coles, Beyond Gated Politics: Reflections for the Possibility of Democracy (Minneapolis. MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), p. xi, quoted by Hauerwas, p. 19.

6 Karl Barth, CD, IV/3, pp.114–15.

7 For a useful discussion of grace and norms, see Hector, Kevin, ‘The Mediation of Christ's Normative Spirit: A Constructive Reading of Schleiermacher's Pneumatology’, Modern Theology 24/1 (Jan. 2008), pp. 1–22CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 The point needs to be put precisely. On the one hand, there is talk of virtue in this book, of patience and generosity in particular, but it appears stripped of the conceptual resources one needs to think of these virtues as ordered to ends external to themselves and geared to our engagement with the world. Still, on the whole, Hauerwas and Coles substitute activity for virtue and propose certain activities as solutions to our disordered agency, complacent churches and gated democracy.

9 From the RSV translation.

10 Duke, Paul D., ‘John 13:1–17, 31b–35: Between Text and Sermon’, Interpretation 49 (1995), pp. 399–402Google Scholar, here p. 400, quoted by Coles, p. 218.

11 John 12:1–11.

12 Stoicism is often the language of radicals, of those trying to break with the current order. Sometimes this resort accompanies defeat and hopelessness. Think of the moves Boethius makes in the Consolation of Philosophy. But sometimes it is motivated by the desire to discount the present in hope of something better. Recall how, in Works of Love, Kierkegaard uses a Stoic-inflected account of agape to discredit the spiritual complacency of bourgeois Christendom. With their talk of the radical, Hauerwas and Coles make a version of this latter move.

13 Plato, , Symposium 215a–222c. Trans. Nehemas, Alexander and Woodruff, Paul (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1989), pp. 65–75Google Scholar.