Approaching the End. Stanley Hauerwas

through the Holy Spirit, and for the world by anticipation) and that the powers are still rampant” (p. 9). For Yoder’s extended reflections on eschatology see his chapter, “Christ the King: Last Things,” in Preface to Theology: Christology and Theological Method, ed. with an introduction by Stanley Hauerwas and Alex Sider (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2002), pp. 240-80. In Preface to Theology Yoder makes explicit what is implied in The Christian Witness to the State, that is, that “the preaching of the gospel is why time does not stop. This then is the meaning and content of his [Jesus’] kingship. Kingship is the ruling over history so that this can happen” (p. 249).

6. John Howard Yoder, The Politics of Jesus: Vicit Agnus Noster (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995).

7. For a short but quite useful overview of what is meant by eschatology see Thomas Finger’s article “Eschatology and Ethics,” in the Dictionary of Scripture and Ethics, ed. Joel Green (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), pp. 276-79. Finger suggests that through my work I have expanded many of Yoder’s points about eschatology by emphasizing that Christian ethics is taught and practiced in the church. Finger says this means I think ethics is developed and transmitted by traditions and narratives rather than by rational arguments. I hope Finger is wrong about that because I think tradition and narrative constitute the possibility of making rational arguments.

8. I have also recently discussed the nature of practical reason in the “Afterword” to the new edition of With the Grain of the Universe soon to be published by Brazos Press. In particular I discuss Eugene Garver’s very important book, For the Sake of Argument: Practical Reasoning, Character, and the Ethics of Belief (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).

9. For my reflections on war as sacrifice see Stanley Hauerwas, War and the American Difference: Theological Reflections on Violence and National Identity (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), pp. 53-70. For an excellent book of essays on Leithart’s Defending Constantine (Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 2010) see Constantine Revisited, ed. Jon Roth (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, forthcoming).

10. Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, IV/2 (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1958), pp. vii-­xiii. In one of his last interviews before he died Barth confessed, “I am not ultimately at home in theology, in the political world, or even in the church. These are all preparatory matters. They are serious but preparatory. We have to learn to stand in them, to do so fully, and I want to do this quite cheerfully, but we have also to learn to look beyond them.” He then observed in answer to a question about grace: “Grace itself is only a provisional word. The last word that I have to say as a theologian or politician is not a concept like grace but a name: Jesus Christ. He is the grace and he is the ultimate one beyond world and church and even theology. . . . In him is grace. In him is the spur to work, warfare, and fellowship. In him is all that I have attempted in my life in weakness and folly.” Final Testimonies (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1977), pp. 29-30.

11. In my memoir, Hannah’s Child: A Theologian’s Memoir (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010), I report that as far as I know I am the only person to be defeated for the presidency of the Society of Christian Ethics — twice. But I was elected on the third go-around. So much for making a virtue out of not winning.

Part One

       Theological Matters

The End Is in the Beginning: Creation and Apocalyptic

      Why No Method Is a Method

When I began to think about what I should say about creation, the title “The End Is in the Beginning” immediately came to mind. That it did so I suspect is due to my long-­held conviction that creation, at least creation as understood by Christians, must be understood from an eschatological perspective. We only know there was a beginning because we have seen the end in Christ. Indeed, as I argued in the Brazos Commentary on Matthew, I think Matthew wrote his Gospel with the conviction that the story he has to tell is a story of a new creation. Thus Matthew begins the Gospel with the declaration that this is “the book of the genesis of Jesus Christ.”1

I confess I was pleased with the title “The End Is in the Beginning.” But I also thought, given that I originally wrote this for the Wilken Lecture, I should see if Robert Wilken might have said something I could use in support of my argument that creation must be rendered through the eschatological imagination shaped by the gospel. You can imagine my chagrin as well as my joy to discover Robert’s chapter in The Spirit of Early Christian Thought: Seeking the Face of God on Basil and Gregory of Nyssa entitled “The End Given in the Beginning.”2 I had, as so often is the case, forgotten where I had learned that the end is in the beginning. As Robert puts it, commenting on Gregory’s development of Basil’s thought: “Creation is promise as well as gift, and it is only in seeing Christ that we know what was made in the first creation.”3

Calling attention to Robert’s great book, moreover, allows me to make some comments to clarify my “method,” or what many think to be my lack of method, for doing theology. I am rightly well known for disavowing any attempt to do theology as a system.4 My work is occasional if not haphazard. I admire and learn from Robert Jenson’s Systematic Theology, but I do not have Jenson’s erudition or metaphysical imagination to do theology as “system.”5 Perhaps another way to put the matter is that I should like to think my work is closer in style and substance to the second volume of Jenson’s Systematic Theology, which deals with “The Works of God” and, in particular, creation.6 There, for example, Jenson asserts that “the story told in the Gospels states the meaning of creation.”7

That “the story told in the Gospels states the meaning of creation” is, of course, a systematic remark, but it is also a remark that begs for practical display. My worry about theology done as “system” is how that way of doing theology may give the impression that, as I observe in Sanctify Them in the Truth: Holiness Exemplified, “Christianity is a set of ideas that need to be made consistent with one another.”8 I go on to argue in Sanctify Them in the Truth (yet another of my books that, as far as I can tell, fell stillborn from the press) that theology is an intricate web of loci that requires ongoing exploration and repair. Exploration and repair are required because we are tempted to overemphasize one “doctrine” or locus in a manner that distorts what we believe and how we live.9 All of which is to say that the occasional character of my work is at least partly due to my conviction that theology is best understood as an exercise in practical reason.

I should like to think this way of understanding the theological task to be consistent with the way Wilken tells the story of the development of early Christian thought. He observes that the early Christian thinkers were not in the business of “establishing something.” Rather, they understood their task to plumb “the facts of revelation” by employing “the language and imagery of the Bible, and how the life and worship of the Christian