Christian ethicist speaks to packed house

By John Gleason

A standing room only crowd jammed into Bonfils Hall of the John Paul II Center Nov. 17 to hear noted lecturer and author Stanley Hauerwas deliver the latest in the Archbishop’s Lecture Series.

Professor Hauerwas, who teaches theological ethics and law at Duke University, was in Denver to speak on “Discipleship as a Craft: The Church as a Disciplined Community.”  The lecture was co-sponsored by the Augustine Institute.

Named America’s Best Theologian by Time magazine in 2001, Hauerwas’ book, “A Community of Character,” was selected as one of the 100 most important books on religion of the 20th century.

Hauerwas’ speech, “Carving Stone or Learning to Speak Christian,” explored Christian discipleship as a craft that cannot be adequately achieved without an apprenticeship. He began by using bricklaying as an analogy. Hauerwas said that in order for someone to excel in this craft they must know the subsidiary skills that come before it, such as knowing how to mix mortar.

“Attention to training necessary for crafts such as laying brick I believe is crucial if we are to understand the role theology might have in education,” he told the audience.  “Too often I fear we associate education with teaching students how to think … but it’s important that we not think of thinking as something that goes on in our ‘minds.’”

Hauerwas drew a laugh from the audience when he said he never teaches his students to think for themselves.

“I teach them to think like me,” he joked.

Hauerwas told the story of two stone cutters, master craftsmen who spent their careers working on the Washington National Cathedral in Washington, D.C.  Even though the two were born into families of stone cutters, they didn’t just pick up hammers and chisels and begin pounding away.  They went through the process of being apprentices and journeymen, learning all facets of the craft from obtaining to the stone in the quarry to its final placement in a building.

“It’s not sufficient to be simply born into a family of stone cutters,” he said. “You have to know how to cut the stone in the beginning, just as you need to know how to carve it later.”

Hauerwas said that the language of any craft, the terms and vocabulary unique to it, are as important to that craft as skill and ability. Theology, he asserted, is what helps us refine the language of the craft of discipleship.

“Vocabulary is everything,” he said, “but as in the case of our stonecutters, language must be constitutive of the work to be done.  What we say as Christians cannot be separated from the practices of a people called ‘church.’”

For some time now, Hauerwas said, Christians and non-Christians alike no longer believe that the words Christians use do any significant work.  He suggested that the task of a theologian is to direct attention to those whose lives have been shaped by the grammar of Christ.

“I believe God, the master carver, is doing a new thing for his people in our time,” Hauerwas said.  “I am convinced that those who discover the difference our speech makes will also find their lives have been made happy, for they have been given good work to do in a world increasingly determined by the belief that there is no good work to do.”

In concluding his talk, Hauerwas said that all Christian speech is tested by the one work we have been given as God’s creatures; that work is called “liturgy,” the work of prayer.

“Christian education begins and ends in the praise of God,” he said.