Thorn in the side

With the Grain of the Universe: The Church's Witness and Natural Theology. By Stanley Hauerwas. Brazos Press, 250 pp., $22.99.

Religious liberals need Stanley Hauerwas, a perpetual disturber of their peace. Religious conservatives can find him fruitfully unsettling too, since he is a pacifist and opposes capital punishment. But he offers basic reassurance to theological conservatives, who relish his steady insistence that the Christian message is not only true, but provides the one true account of "the way things are," of "the way the world is." Christians, he says, proclaim the truth that God revealed in Jesus. Christianity is not just "their truth, but the truth for everyone."

Hauerwas is a painful thorn in any liberal's side, but Christian liberals are his special target. He heaps scorn on the idea that Christianity can be or should be reconciled with modern culture. He thinks liberal Christians, pathetically eager to fit in to the mainstream of modernity, are asserting not the authentic gospel but a "disguised humanism." Protestant liberals, he says, take "humans, not God, as the center of Christian faith." In his estimation liberalism and modernity deserve each other. They've long since given up on witnessing to the unvarying truth that is the God made manifest in Jesus Christ.