Performing the Faith

The following book review is submitted to Trinity Seminary Review for publication.

Performing the Faith: Bonhoeffer and the Practice of Nonviolence. by Stanley Hauerwas. Grand Rapids: Brazos Press (www.brazospress.com), 2004. 252 pp. ISBN # 1-58743-076-2 $21.99 (Paperback).

Is Christian pacifism a realistic option in our age marked by the war on terror? Stanley Hauerwas argues that Dietrich Bonhoeffer can guide us toward a positive answer to this question by his theology of truth: the church offers the world a politics of nonviolence made possible by learning to speak truthfully through its worship of Jesus.

Here lies the connection of Bonhoeffer to Hauerwas’ essays on nonviolence. If one is intrigued by the seemingly paradoxical claim of the book’s title and expects to find therein an extensive theological defense of his involvement in the plot against Hitler, then the reader will encounter disappointment early into the endeavor. Hauerwas acknowledges up front that his portrait of Bonhoeffer could be seen as shaped to his own likeness, yet remains satisfied that such an implication fails to detract from his point to root his essays in what he understands to be Bonhoeffer’s ecclesiology of truth and deed. To speak truthfully and to refuse to accept lies plucks politics out of the realm of violence and places it within a community ordered by the proclamation of the gospel. A community of peace and justice relies on speaking the truth, which is Jesus. His community is identified by the capability to confess sin and the authority to forgive it.

Hauerwas responds to his critics who charge that his depiction of the church seems to be a ghetto community withdrawn from the world. He contends that to be the church does not require the community to strive for every justice issue in the political realm. Rather, when the church is the church, it makes the world be the world. For to live in Christ is to live in reality as revealed by God. He explains, “Our God is a performing God who has invited us to join in the performance that is God’s life” (70). The church does not withdraw from the world; the church is patient with it, because God is patient with us. “Because the Christian story has, so to speak, already ended victoriously and definitively in Jesus, the church is free to bear witness, peaceably and patiently, to that ending” (97). This patience allows us not only the freedom to listen to the many stories about ourselves and our world, but also to perform our own story.

In this way Hauerwas picks up again the theme of narrative in his early works, which he abandoned when it became popular and thereby ambiguous. The author clarifies the idea of narrative: we are immersed in God’s story. Although we do not know every detail yet to come in the plot, we do know the outcome -- the final chapter. And so, we are able to approach each conflict in the story with a broader context informed by hope. Thus, as actors within the drama, we are able to improvise based on our hopeful imaginations.

Having described the basis of Christian ethics as eschatological truth-telling, Hauerwas then explains his understanding of Christian pacifism and its response to 9/11. First, he insists that Christian nonviolence is not defined as something we are against (anti-violence); but rather it is defined by our understanding of who God is as the performer of the salvation story and of our identities as participants in that performance. Second, the author adopts John Howard Yoder’s position as “The Pacifism of the Messianic Community.” Christian pacifism cannot be separated from Christology. For it is rooted in Jesus’ ministry and proclamation, and it is enabled by his death and resurrection. To be his disciple is to live in a community that expects to experience a foretaste of God’s reign such that there are no distinctions between pacifism and what worshiping Christ entails. Third, Hauerwas traces the ill affects of the church’s long history under the Constantinian arrangement. He insists that the church must not result from cultural assimilation. Following Jesus requires a voluntary community, because the Christian “ecclesia” is a gathering of people doing business of a public matter according to the politics of Jesus. Our worship and desire to follow Jesus requires nonviolence and enables us to perform it.

In response to the war on terror, Christian pacifism emphasizes our vocation to perform the truth. For Hauerwas, no other option remains for Christians. Nonviolence is the necessary condition of a politics based on the hope we have in Jesus’ resurrection, rather than a politics based on the fear of death. “[If] there is anything to this Christian “stuff,” it must surely involve the conviction that the Son would rather die on the cross than have the world to be redeemed by violence. Moreover, the defeat of death through resurrection makes possible as well as necessary that Christians live nonviolently in a world of violence. Christian nonviolence is not a strategy to rid the world of violence, but rather the way Christians must live in a world of violence” (203). Therefore, the response of Christian pacifism to the war on terror is not an alternative foreign policy, but rather an alternative community that speaks the truth: our world did not change on September 11, 2001; it changed during the Passover in 33 A.D.

This book is a must read for any serious student of Christian ethics. For those unfamiliar with Hauerwas, Performing the Faith summarizes major themes in many of his previous volumes and provides insight into the significant contribution with which Hauerwas has impacted the discipline. For those who follow Hauerwas, this book emboldens the Christian witness of nonviolence. For those who criticize him, they will encounter an honest and humbled scholar responsive to their concerns. Yet, all who read these essays will discover a gift placed at their fingertips, waiting to be unwrapped in their own witness to the truth revealed to us in Jesus.

Kevan D. Penvose

St. Stephen the Martyr Lutheran Church

Greendale, Wisconsin