Book
Stanley Hauerwas and Romand Coles. Christianity, Democracy and the Radical Ordinary: Conversations between a Radical Democrat and a Christian. Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2007.
Reviewer
Paul Doerksen, Mennonite Brethren Collegiate Institute, Winnipeg, MB
It is not only Christians who find difficult the practice of engaging the world in constructive ways; not just believing that engagement should happen, but engaging the complicated issues of how to proceed, occupies all kinds of people. In this volume we observe a Christian theologian (Stanley Hauerwas) and a political theorist who is not Christian (Romand Coles) grapple with such issues in ways that try to think about the right questions and display fruitful practices within a mutual pursuit of the transformation and development of a flourishing political imagination.
The purpose of this collection of essays, letters, lectures and conversation is to exhibit a politics that refuses to let death dominate our lives, resists fear, and seeks to uncover the violence at the heart of liberal political doctrine.
Not only does this book discuss such matters, it seeks to display some of the very practices it brings into view. Practices central to this ongoing conversation include attention, engagement, vulnerability, receptive patience, tending, “microdispositions” and “micropractices,” waiting, and gentleness. Such practices, patiently pursued, might make up a life that is political, claim the authors, yet not beholden to conventional politics.
We witness Coles and Hauerwas engage each other as well as a vast array of interlocuters in an attempt to cultivate a politics of “wild patience”: Sheldon Wolin, Cornell West, Ella Baker, John Howard Yoder, Will Campbell, Rowan Williams, Jean Vanier, Samuel Wells, and Gregory of Nanzianzus.
Both authors here are exemplary in their own openness and vulnerability to learning from traditions outside their own, and Coles especially so as he provides insightful readings of a number of Christian theological voices.
Nonetheless, in the midst of their respectful and deep mutual engagement, Hauerwas and Coles exhibit at times a certain wariness in relation to each other. Hauerwas worries that radical democracy will be an end in itself for which God becomes an afterthought, a superfluous place-holder, domesticated and tamed in service of some other agenda.
But he also worries that Christians do something very similar when they mistake the Christian faith for a garden variety of humanism. Coles, on the other hand, is concerned that Christian jealousy regarding Jesus may prevent proper vulnerability and underwrite a kind of territoriality. He further believes that no matter how sincere the upside-down practices of the church may be, these kinds of practices have a way of turning themselves right side up -- and without appropriate discernment on the part of the church.
I have my own worries. Sometimes it feels as though Coles comes close to equating the insurgent grassroots political practices of radical democracy with the politics of Jesus. Coles also seems tempted to turn the church and its practices into an instance of radical democracy. Perhaps this is one reason he claims to be so “haunted” by John Howard Yoder, who himself is open to the criticism that he thinks the church’s practices can be translated into the world without loss.
Further, the extended conversation in this volume, while richly informed by a wide variety of interlocutors -- political theorists, activists of many kinds, theologians, a number of Mennonite thinkers, and so on -- is in the end strangely thin on the Christian exegetical tradition. While we see close, nuanced readings of Wolin, West, Campbell, et al., we search in vain for the same kind of close attention to sustained readings of the Biblical text.
This is not to say that the conversation between Coles the radical democrat and Hauerwas the Christian is not informed by biblical ideas. However, I wonder if Coles’s concern for Christian jealousy of Jesus also extends to Christian privileging of the Scriptural text and, if so, what implications this might have for a long-term continuing conversation.
Jeffrey Stout, who in his own effort to revitalize the American democratic tradition often converses with Christian theologians such as Hauerwas, claims that this book gives him hope, since it takes the conversation between Christianity and democracy in a most welcome direction.
This book also gives me hope as a Christian, because it seeks to find ways for people to engage in the world that resist the violence and death that have been inscribed deeply into the story of our shared lives. And part of that hopefulness includes paying close attention to practices that can be embodied on a human scale, whether as a radical democrat or a Christian.