I’m just wondering how it cannot be both – indeed, how the Incarnation is not both. Or perhaps I misunderstand your use of terms.

Second, I’m not entirely sure from this why what they’re doing is inherently problematic. They are, in fact, responding to the times in which they are placed and made active theologians by the Holy Spirit. How is it inappropriate to construct alternatives in this context? I’m not convinced that an ecclesiology in response to something is nothing more than “reactive” or somehow less than fully substantive. That’s like saying the creeds are only reactions and therefore have no substance or bearing outside their present context.

I agree that it is not ipso facto the case that to relate to liberalism is “reactive,” and I understand Hauerwas’ averral that he does not wish and does not think his ecclesiology fundamentally determined by a reactionary relation to liberalism. This is one of the points where he most clearly disagrees with my reading of him.

And I also take your point as to the emphasis upon the positive determination of the church by way of habituation into the Christian virtues, such that the church constitutes is own “public” as “prior” to the world, as such. But the reason I resist this idea that the church is positively a matter of habituation into a public is that this putative “priority” seems to me to operate in such a way as to require the construction of “another” (the world) as productive and reflective of its own identity. And so although Hauerwas’ concern is positive, his ecclesiology turns out de facto to be determined by liberalism, especially at those points where he identifies “liberalism” as determinative and characteristic of the “world” in our time.

At the end of the day, I just think that apocalyptic is domesticated when submitted to an understanding of the church as positively determined as a mode of habituation into virtue. And this is because it shifts the locus of apocalyptic decisively away from God’s action and onto the the church as a “work.” That is to say, my concern is that that “work” apocalyptically determines the church vis-a-vis the world, rather than being from the outset and without reserve determined by the apocalyptic action of God.

In response to your other concerns, I would say that this is indeed a temptation: viz., to set apocalyptic against ideology in such a way as to make of apocalyptic itself a negatively determined dialectical category. I would also only say that this is in part bound up with the temptation to think apocalyptic as a general category, and why I am concerned to insist throughout upon a determinately Christian apocalyptic in which the action of God is the basic datum (that is, one in which the act of God in Jesus Christ is determinative of apocalyptic, as such). And so I have tried to be conscious about thinking apocalyptic beyond ideology and not merely against it. In this respect, Hauerwas’ ecclesiology is not something one needs to be “against” as such, but rather is a species of modern ecclesiological idealism that we need to account for and be conscious of in thinking beyond. And I think this is a way of being true to Hauerwas’ own pervasive concern that what the church finally be about is the witness to the Gospel of Jesus Christ. That concern, I think, is what Hauerwas really always means to be “prior,” and which I take to be at the heart of his life and work.

Furthermore, it’s not clear why, if liberalism is real, relating to it is immediately “reactive.” Interprellation, anyone?

After all, perhaps Kerr’s theology needs something to be “against,” namely a certain polemical construction of Hauerwas’s ecclesiology.

And anyway, isn’t “ideology” a modern problem, and therefore the dualistic opposition b/w ideology and apocalyptic is a thoroughly modern problem?

I would agree with you that the project of Hauerwas and (for the most part) his students is driven by the desire to articulate a “proper Christian ecclesiology.” What is not recognized here (and I am currently working on this idea for publication) is that the problem of what constitutes a “proper Christian ecclesiology” is itself a decidedly modern problematic. The drive to articulate a proper Christian ecclesiology has been from the beginning of modernity a reactive project, one bound up with the Catholic counter-Reformation response to Luther. This was a point articulated well by Georges Florovsky in the middle of the last century, and which has recently been rearticulated by James Alison. The irony of Hauerwas’ polemic against modernity is that, for all the concern that it makes of his ecclesiology reactionary, it is really the reverse: the putatively positive concern to construct a proper ecclesiology determines his anti-liberalism and anti-modernism in all the wrong ways. And this because modern ecclesiological construction from the outset requires that there be something which it sets itself up against — whether that be liberalism, modernity, Constantinianism, etc. And so, I would suggest, this so-called positive drive for a “proper ecclesiology” (I keep using this phrase as such because I honestly have no idea what such a thing might actually be), is part of what prevents Hauerwas from appreciating what is right in Luther, and that leaves him at a loss for articulating a robust doctrine of justification by faith, as well as of a robust account of the trinitarian action of God as rooted in and determined by the apocalyptically singular action of Jesus Christ.

One more point, as to Hauerwas’ so-called sacramentology. Hauerwas has explicitly denied (in public) that he has a “sacramentology” as such. Rather, he says, he is concerned to speak of those practices by which the church “is,” and then to discern in what sense these practices are “sacramental” according to their mode of ecclesiological “production.” This is not a “sacramentology,” so much as it is an instrumentalization of so-called “sacramental practices” (a critique I lay out in the final chapter of my book). It may in fact be that it is precisely the lack of a “sacramentology” as such that drives his concern to construct a proper “ecclesiology” (and here again I’m following Florovsky and Alison).

All of that to say: Hauerwas’ work is a species of modern ecclesiological idealism, and what it has birthed in many of his students is the determined search for a given ecclesiological “ideal,” which, lacking any concreteness in-itself, must then receive its concreteness by the production of something to be “against.”

That said, I’m not sure reading those summary points that Kerr accurately reads Hauerwas. Based on what Hauerwas I’ve read, and the works of his students in some continuity with his own, I don’t see H’s ecclesiology as merely a negative reaction to modernity. Rather, the negative reaction occurs because of proper Christian ecclesiology. Given that H’s discussion occurs in the context of modernity, it probably can’t help but appear to some that modernity is all H’s concerned with. The second point on that summary simply isn’t problematic at all, until the last sentence, which doesn’t necessarily follow from the previous sentences. On the third point – and again, not having read more than the beginning of Kerr’s book – how much of that is due to H’s sacramentology, one that would tie Christ and Christ’s Body together in ways somewhat foreign to Radical Reformation sensibilities (as Schlabach points out)? Moreover, how is Christ’s singular identity known if not via the community of faith, the church?

The only thing I’d add would be to perhaps question the notion of “counter-story” as a sort of meta category through which the church’s interaction with the world is understood. Its precisely that “counter” that most troubles me. The gospel is not, ultimately a story to be told (though it is certainly a “storied” reality in a very significant way — it has a narrative aspect in that it is tied to the past historicity of Jesus and Israel). Rather the gospel is the living person of Jesus himself who was, is, and is to come.

That said, I really do appreciate the way you’re bringing Hart into this and I find it helpful — and patently ironic to pair him with Moltmann here!

To speak of the crucified God as a destabilizing force as you did, as the transcendant voice that cannot be domesticated, is to speak, from the Hartian perspective, of the particular Nazarene who’s life, death, and resurrection opens up for creation “a practice, a style of transmission, susceptible of variation, analogical imitation, extension, and elaboration. The hiddenness of God in Christ, Christ’s messianic secret, is nevertheless an open and unconcealed shape of existence; it can be followed on through the contingencies of time…” (BOTI, 327)

All this to say that in one sense you are appreciating what Moltmann is saying here because he is taking the emphasis off of the church’s need to define itself against the world by way of a stable counter-story and instead focus on inner renewal. However, could we not, as I think Hart displays nicely, argue that the church must tell its counter-story as a way of engaging in this renewal. Through the restless beauty that animates the churches word and practice, could the church not announce this restless and beautiful evangel as a story among other stories — as a story evoking desire, not just to persuade the other stories of ‘the secular’ but also to persuade and draw the church into the renewal of the Spirit? In this way, the church is not animated by their resistance with the stories of the secular, but by way of their engagement with the beauty of Christ whose form evokes the desire to speak and act in accordance with his example.

Just some thoughts.