Hauerwas on Evangelicals

In this very short video, Stanley Hauerwas points to a few things that evangelicals need to recover.  His thoughts are a simple articulation of what I often struggle to communicate to my evangelical friends.  I left my work with a campus ministry organization because Dietrich Bonhoeffer (and later Karl Barth) showed me that the church is not a second reality to my immediate relationship with God.  Instead, it is precisely through the church that a person knows God.  Jesus mediates between humanity and God, and the church is inexorably bound up with Jesus.

After coming to Duke and taking (only) two semesters of church history, it is clear to me that our conception of faith, and the church as well, is one that we’ve inherited  As Hauerwas says, “You don’t get to make up God.”  I’ve come to see that it is absolutely vital to the Christian faith of today that we engage with the faith of old in order to remain faithful tomorrow.  This means that we need to read Scripture in concert with the voices of past Christians, in dialogue with the wisdom of the Church.  Recognizing that we are actors in a drama that began 2000 years ago is crucial to combat myopic, and thus heretical, conceptions of God.

Advertisement