Stanley Hauerwas - From Yale and Augustana to Bricklayer Theologian, Notre Dame and Duke University

 

Hauerwas was born in 1940 and began work as a bricklayer for his father's business. His academic life was Yale, Augustana, Notre Dame, Duke.

Jesus Changes Everything: A New World Made Possible (Plough Spiritual Guides) Paperback – March 11, 2025

by Stanley Hauerwas (Author), Charles E. Moore (Editor), Tish Harrison Warren (Foreword)

A new Hauerwas book popped up this morning, so I decided to list a few coincidences. His first teaching job was at Augustana College in Rock Island, and I met him very briefly. He was fired (not re-hired after the initial three-year hitch) and went on to Notre Dame, where he was paid even less. 

We talked in the windowless basement of the Notre Dame library some years later. My sister-in-law babysat his son - once - and that was the connection that led me into the Notre Dame PhD program in theology. 1975. Christina and I moved only an hour away from Notre Dame for a number of years to get that done. 

Charles Caldwell and I were in the same Pastoral Theology program. He was a conservative Episcopalian who had a lot of quips about the far-Left Episcopalian priests. Caldwell was like one of those angel characters in movies, coming up with other-worldly commentary. 

The Notre Dame theology department was rather small in those days. Some Protestants were teaching there - and married. Various denominations were well known and expected to produce books and articles. 

For written finals (which would qualify us to start writing a dissertation) we were locked in small rooms and given a limited amount of time. I brought my electric typewriter and plugged it in - the only one. That was about 50 years ago. 

Yes, we brought nickels to the library to copy journal articles from Xerox machines.

Now I set up Zoom broadcasts, blogging the post, sending a file around. The broadcast converts to a YouTube, and the YouTubes increase in number. Now the old guys beg the younger ones to explain the technology.

The Reformation is over. Protestants won. So why are we still here? - The Washington Post

 Stan Hauerwas illustrates the problem of
being a professional, ecumenical theologian.
His article says nothing, so it is illuminating
about modern theology.

The Reformation is over. Protestants won. So why are we still here? - The Washington Post:



"Under the influence of the great Protestant theologian Karl Barth, an emphasis on the centrality of Christ has been the hallmark of my work in ethics. Yet, perhaps tellingly, a number of my Protestant graduate students have become Roman Catholics over the years. (So many crossed the Tiber that my colleagues joked I was an agent for Opus Dei.) They convert because Catholicism is an intellectually rich theological tradition better able to negotiate the acids of our culture. "



'via Blog this'

Spiritual Fathers in the Christian Church

Bainton took time to pose with our son twice,
and he helped me with my dissertation, offering to xerox pages for me.

Luther taught OJ, according to Jay Webber.
I guess he never read this book either.

My first interest was church history, so I was very happy to see Roland Bainton on campus at Yale so often. If he was talking, we were there.  He was a socialist and a rationalist, but that did not keep him from being kindly, considerate, and easy to approach. When we asked to visit him at Sterling Library, where he had his own office, he posed with our son the second time and showed off his bands for keeping his trousers out of his bike spokes. 

Years before, Bainton posed with baby Marty, after our son broke up the lecture audience at the mention of Martin Luther's son - Martin. LI moved his arm and said "Eep" very distinctly. Bainton loved it as much as the others, who knew the baby was another Martin.

Paul L. Holmer posed with Little Ichabod in his office.

I took continuing education one year at Yale, just so I could hear Paul Holmer again. Mrs. Ichabod threw him a party when he had a one-semester sabbatical. It gave the students and faculty a chance to show him how much we appreciated him. The Left hated him, so some liberals took his class just to argue with him.

Last night I was searching for graphics and found a number of Holmer. I often go to the page for that graphic. I found a summary of his life work and realized even more what a genius he was, how he held that back to let his students thrive. He and Nils Dahl were always in church at Bethesda Lutheran; they even did Swedish services together,  Dall preaching in Swedish - with Holmer on the organ.

Nils Dahl was considered the best Biblical expositor of his time.

 Dahl taught Biblical studies unlike the rest. He stymied the class by asking what we knew for certain about Jesus - in his Christology class. He answered, "The text! Do not teach what we do not know, but what we do know." He studied under the famous New Testament scholars of Europe, such as Mowinkel and Bultmann, but he shunned the theories for the text. He wanted us to study the famous scholars but use the text for research.

Meanwhile, the so-called conservative Lutheran professors want everyone to follow the official dogma, no matter how much that contradicts the Bible.

I met Stan Hauerwas at Augustana College, where he was not renewed,
took his advice for attending Notre Dame, and had him for a dissertation advisor.

Stan Hauerwas and Roland Bainton were my examples in publishing early and often. Stan grew up a bricklayer - helping his father - doing a lot of hard physical work, similar to what I did in my father's bakery. However, I had much better benefits and far less to lift.

Stan was the opposite of my official advisor, who was all talk and all forked-tongue. Stan acted tough but he made things happen, without asking or expecting thanks.

He is now the best known theologian in America. His publishing allowed him to be selected for a well known European lecture series and endless opportunities, such as working with the Kennedy family.

Sterling is the main library,where I found a 270 year-old book labeled,  when Yale wasjust the  Collegiate Institute at Saybrook.

This is the nave of Sterling Library - yes the nave.
Baintain said Sterling was a church where education was worshiped,
pointing to the figure of Knowledge above the desk.

Defending Constantine and Christendom

My sister-in-law babysat Hauerwas' boy, which led to my discussing grad study at Notre Dame with him.
I took his ethics seminar and he served on my dissertation committee.

Defending Constantine and Christendom

By Mark Tooley on 5.2.11 @ 6:06AM

  Defending Constantine: The Twilight of an Empire and the Dawn of Christendom.
By Peter J. Leithart

(IVP Academic, 373 pages, $27)
The destruction of Osama bin Laden underlines how many U.S. church voices, even since 9/11, have adamently insisted that Christianity demands pacifism.

Much of the Evangelical Left, so influential on Christian college campuses and increasingly prominent in Washington, D.C., relies on neo-Anabaptist beliefs. Sojourners activist Jim Wallis, who last week launched a crusade against "cuts" in the 2012 federal budget, adheres partly to this tradition. These neo-Anabaptists demand total pacifism and reject the military. Unlike traditional Anabaptists, they are not separatists, and many exuberantly advocate Big Government control over medical care, food, energy, and virtually all of life. The godfather of sorts for these disjointed neo-Anabaptists was the late Mennonite theologian and Notre Dame professor John Howard Yoder. He joined most Anabaptists in assuming that Christianity was massively corrupted by 4th century Roman Emperor Constantine's embrace of Christianity. The resulting Christendom created over 1,600 years of wars and oppression ostensibly in the name of Christ.

Constantine famously professed Christianity after winning a military battle before which a cross had appeared to him in the sky. His conversion largely ended Rome's persecution of Christians and facilitated Christianity's eventually becoming the majority faith for the West. Constantine is often derided as a brute who usurped the church to enhance his own rule over the empire. His critics note that that he governed and waged war bloodily like all such emperors, and that he purportedly executed his wife and son. The more extreme conspiracists, echoing the Da Vinci Code's fiction, accuse Constantine of imposing theological orthodoxy, even Christ's divinity, upon an obedient Council of Nicaea. Anabaptists typically fault him for turning previously pacifist Christians into willing soldiers for Rome and all subsequent empires. The neo-Anabaptists are most distressed by Christians who support today's American "empire."

In response, Presbyterian theologian Peter Leithart has penned a very important book,   Defending Constantine: The Twilight of an Empire and the Dawn of Christendom. He not only competently restores Constantine's reputation but also thoughtfully and polemically rebuts the Anabaptists, specifically including John Howard Yoder. A senior fellow at new Saint Andrew College in wonderfully named Moscow, Idaho, Leithart argues that Constantine's conversion was sincere, that his legalization of Christianity was a tremendous relief to the persecuted church, that his Christian inspired legal reforms ameliorated some of Rome's pagan savagery, that he respected the church's autonomy, and that he desacralized the empire and began the end of all civic pagan burnt offerings once so universal. Leithart also persuasively disputes that the early church was decisively pacifist. Despite Anabaptist claims, especially by Yoder, there simply is not sufficient evidence to show the early church had ratified a teaching on military force. Leithart points to the usual New Testament examples of Jesus and His apostles not objecting to force by civil authorities. He also describes the pagan sacrifices once required within the Roman military, probably enhanced in reaction to Christianity's growth, and which prohibited service by Christians who otherwise did not object to legitimate force. Constantine's abolition of state-imposed pagan sacrifices removed this barrier for Christian military service.

Leithart's book is not an unqualified ode to Constantine. He admits that much of Roman law remained brutal, and Constantine was sincere in faith though still inexact in theology and often savagely politically ambitious, like any successful emperor. Constantine was hardly the "thirteenth apostle," as some eastern Christians later portrayed him in their icons. And his main contemporary biographer and apologist, Eusebius, was not flawless, though neither was he merely a propagandist. Leithart thinks Christians of the time were understandably grateful and fulsome in praise for their patron and emperor, who delivered them from centuries of routine persecution and martyrdoms. Leithart also suggests that the ostensible execution of Constantine's wife and son, reputedly in punishment for a tryst between the son and his step-mother, may in fact have been self-induced. The son supposedly died by poisoning, while the wife ostensibly was boiled to death in her bath, possibly, Leithart proposes, while trying to induce an abortion. Even if they were executed, incestuous and treasonous adultery would have demanded the penalty by standards of that day.

Constantine created a new system of sort of religious liberty, in which pagans continued to worship their deities, but without state patronage. The emperor often cited God vaguely enough to incorporate Christians and pagans, creating a new form of civil religion, even while he himself lavished personal patronage on the church and granted bishops some juridical authority. This new civil arrangement, Leithart argues, created a relatively coherent form of mostly harmonious civil arrangement corrupted by later emperors who more assertively suppressed paganism. Still, he credits Constantine for ending nearly once and for all the system of ritual sacrifices so central to virtually every society. The suppression of sacrifices has thankfully persisted to this day, Leithart notes. But he qualifies his thanks by noting that the modern era's nihilism, embodied in genocidal totalitarianism, arguably opened a new form of terrible state-imposed sacrifice.

Leithart is respectful of Yoder while amply illustrating that much of Yoder's version of history was superficial when not completely false. Even Yoder's main disciple, Stanley Hauerwas of Duke University, favorably reviewed Defending Constantine for Christian Century. "Leithart's fundamental criticism of Yoder is that he betrayed his own best insights when he denied the possibility that by God's grace emperors (or whoever is the functional equivalent, such as "the people") might receive a vision sufficient to make them Christian," Hauerwas wrote. "That is a point that I think Yoder would find worth considering."

That God can use armed rulers to achieve His purposes is hardly a profound discovery about omnipotent Divine Providence. But it's still an assertion that befuddles many of Yoder's followers. Oddly, many neo-Anabaptists of today's Evangelical Left, Jim Wallis above all, vigorously assert that the coercive, modern welfare and regulatory state are God's chief instruments for His justice. Leithart does not directly address their claims, and somebody else will have to write that book. But Defending Constantine more than adequately explains that a Roman Emperor's conversion, even amid the squalor and brutality that characterized that age and every age, did overall bolster the church and humanity with it.

Yoder supervised my PhD dissertation.

***

GJ - Few people realize that the Christian Byzantine Empire lasted 1100 years, that its power kept the Muslim Ottoman Empire from invading Europe. After Constantinople fell to the Muslims in 1453, the Ottoman Empire moved into Europe and threatened Vienna several times. In fact, the Muslim threat kept the Roman Catholic Emperor from exterminating the Lutheran Reformation. That gave the Lutherans just enough time to get established.

Two Recent Books That Remind Me of Our Perilous Times

Stan Hauerwas recently published Hannah's Child.
His work with John Howard Yoder has become a minor publishing industry.
Both men were my professors and on my dissertation committee.

Hauerwas is still alive, but I bought his theological autobiography anyway. I was working at the Augustana College library when I met him, around 1968. My sister-in-law babysat his son Adam when Hauerwas moved to Notre Dame. For that reason I met him to discuss the PhD program at Notre Dame. I was accepted there with a full scholarship, the same week our daughter Bethany was diagnosed with a terminal neurological disorder. Hauerwas was head of the PhD program, so I saw him repeatedly as a professor, etc.

I also bought Carl Braaten's On Account of Christ, another memoir. I may provide more details about both books later. The two men named just about everyone I knew in theology, including a few graduate students. Theology can be a small world, even in a large denomination. Braaten published a famous letter about Pelikan and others leaving ELCA. Long ago, I met Pelikan's brother and father in Cleveland, and I saw Jaroslav regularly at church when we were at Yale. One of his doctoral students was LI's godmother.

A rooster crowing or a little girl's name can bring back many memories, all at once. The last 50 years seem to rush together at once, from the day I was confirmed at an Augustana Synod congregation to the present.

Among theologians, Hauerwas is clearly the one with the highest IQ and the broadest range of knowledge. When I mentioned his name to a committee of doctors at the Cleveland Clinic, they all gasped at once. I knew the Great One of medical ethics.

Braaten became known as the big shot who opposed the malignant trends in ELCA.

Both men exemplify the current trends in theology and church life. There is no connection between reality and their work. Here are some brief examples.

Hauerwas loves Karl Barth, but Karl was a Marxist fraud. Barth slept with Charlotte Kirschbaum, moved her into his home, and let her write most of the Dogmatics. A little reading in Barth shows that he was an apostate who used religious categories to suit his need to overthrow the Christian faith. Robert Preus summed up Barth in a few words - read the intro and that is enough. Look up a few photos of Barth and family. His wife Nellie was a hausfrau. Charlotte was HAWT!

The Barth-Marxist-mistress connection has been known for decades, but one does not stay in the parlor with refined theologians after identifying Barth as a disgusting example of humanity. No, he is the official theologian of Fuller Seminary, whose graduates pursue hot babes to this day.

Braaten is even less connected with reality than Hauerwas. His chosen hero is Paul Tillich, who was famous for sleeping with the wives of his graduate assistants. Tillich pretended to fight with Barth, an old academic charade carried out by professors and grad students to fill journals and fuel dissertations. Hannah Tillich wrote about her wandering husband, whose theology was so far off that his own colleagues at Union Seminary (aka The Devil's Playground) were appalled at his Systematic Theology.

Braaten is quite proud of editing the enormous Braaten/Jenson Dogmatics, a set so vile that ELCA denied using it while making it required reading at every seminary. The two-volume set is about 25 years old and still in print. The authors denied every article of faith in the Apostles' Creed, clearly and boldly, then began screaming Apostasy! at the ELCA they helped create.

Braaten is clearly in love with himself and in awe of his great accomplishments. I doubt whether he will be remembered in a few years.

Hauerwas had to deal with severe personal trials. I do not agree with his theology at all. However, the photo above does a good job of portraying his character. He wrote about being self-absorbed in his book, but he was the most caring professor on the faculty, perhaps the only one. He looked out for his students and made some good things happen, without looking for recognition.

The Braaten book is great for inside dope about ELCA, but grating otherwise.

Hauerwas Memoir - Hannah's Child

Stan Hauerwas earned his PhD at Yale, taught at Augustana, and became my first contact with Notre Dame's doctoral program.

American Specator Book Review

I do not buy modern theology books or keep them in my library. During graduate school I had to read many modern theologians and met many of them.

Hauerwas was right out of Yale when I was a freshman at Augustana College. They did not renew his contract ("They fired me," he said) because he did not harmonize with Swedish Pietism. He took a pay cut to teach at Notre Dame, where he achieved great fame. Pope John Paul II visited Notre Dame, picked up an honorary doctorate, and told the school to get rid of its Protestant and liberation theology faculty members in the theology department.

Hauerwas left for Duke. Wilken (LCMS apostate) joined Duke. Elisabeth Schussler-Fiorenze departed for the Episcopal school near Harvard. Her fellow-professor husband, Frank, left for any job available. Both Fiorenzas ended up with endowed professorships at Harvard. Being a Roman Catholic feminist (Elisabeth) or a Marxist (Frank) will not hurt a job search at Harvard Divinity.

I was at Notre Dame before the JP.2 purge, so I had a rainbow coalition of professors: Hauerwas (Methodist), Yoder (Mennonite), Hommes (liberal Dutch Calvinist), both Fiorenzas, Primus (Rabbinic Judaism), and guest lectureships from Ahlstrom (Yale Lutheran), Wiesel (Judaism), and many others. The most fun was having a long conversation with Prince Charles' personal guru, Laurens van der Post. Laurens was being ignored during a long break at the Jung conference on campus, so I struck up a conversation with him. After he lectured, a knot of people surrounded him. Such are the vicissitudes of fame.

I used to think that years of studying modern theology were an enormous waste of time, which I might have spent in taxidermy or another useful profession. However, seldom does anyone have the time and energy to study hundreds of related books, only to burrow through the library again to study a more focused topic for a dissertation, taking notes, interviewing people, writing letters, reading archives.

According to WELS' ecumenical Pietism, I cannot be trusted to discern the spirits because of my first-hand knowledge. One publisher asked me to review a book before publication because I studied under Hauerwas and Yoder.

WELS honors those who study at Fuller Seminary, Willow Creek, and Trinity Divinity School - as long as they lie about it.

Hauerwas and Yoder are both examples of Enthusiasm. Neither one had a real confessional base. Hauerwas is associated with Methodism, Anabaptism, Roman Catholicism, and the Episcopal Church (Peace-nik conference). Yoder got involved with the Cambellites (Disciples of Christ, Church of Christ) - influencing them so much that they write about him long after his death.

Hauerwas is a kindly man who cares about other people and relates well to his students. Although I have not been in contact with him for decades, I still remember his thoughtfulness at critical times.

Two people influenced my approach to publishing: Bainton and Hauerwas. Whatever theological journals or books I searched through, those names jumped out everywhere. Their publication list was endless, it seemed.

I thought it worthwhile to do the same for traditional Lutheran theology. I could not stay in the LCA, so I wrote about that in 1987, knowing my PhD gave me credibility.

I have experienced two dominant responses among the "conservative" Lutherans.

The first was a demonic hatred for Lutheran doctrine and anyone connected with it. Some (like John Seifert) tried to ascribe this to a local phenomenon, such as the long-standing wobbly nature of Columbus, Ohio. Some of the poison-pen responses on this blog are nothing compared to the things said and done by WELS and Missouri leaders, not to mention the odious ELS and CLC (sic) cults.

The second was an overwhelming effort to silence me in every possible way. This recently came from a source: "Synod and professors seem more worried about Seminary students wasting time on Ichabod."

The silencing has been more extensive than that. UOJ Enthusiasts made sure that Otten never published anything by me again, and never published anything positive about what I wrote. Some long-term readers sent in comments about Thy Strong Word. Otten refused to publish them. Trinity in Bridgeton refused to give Christian News money until I was banned. Money talks at the "independent" Christian News. And Otten listens closely to all the synodical spin-doctors, who are appointed to keep him in line.

An independent publisher asked me to provide him with book manuscripts to publish and sell. When Bivens and Valleskey heard about it, the same WELS printer said he had to protect his income. He could not afford a WELS boycott. He refused to print what he asked me to give him, and he kept all the photographs for the book about Bethany and Erin - Angel Joy. I asked for them repeatedly, but he kept them forever, finally sending them when the book was printed elsewhere. Like many in WELS, he complained about how mean WELS was. Like many in WELS, he was ready to turn on a dime when commanded.

I could not even buy an ad in Marvin-Schwan's-Logia at one point, and they refused to review anything. The most shunned book has been Thy Strong Word, but it remains the most influential (in my opinion), although that has taken a long time to develop.

The silence and shunning prove to me how dangerous the Church of the Augsburg Confession appears to the Synodical Conference franchise. The Syn Conference seminaries are expensive introductions to New Age ecumenism, whether the graduates stay to wreck the sect, move to Rome, or openly join the Methodobapticostals. The shards of the Syn Conference are no better, so they should not rejoice in the breakdown of the Mother Ship. They are worse than their parents, typical of incest.

The financial fraud in WELS-ELS-LCMS is a wonder to behold, because everyone is so greedy for money but they do not notice the skimming of funds for everything except the true purpose of the Church. Mostly, the money goes to the managers who manage the money - not to mention the lawsuits they bring against the innocent and defend against the guilty. As WELS Pastor Fred Adrian said when WELS lost a $400,000 - "It doesn't matter. Insurance is paying for it." DP Seifert said about the disgraced Adrian, "We have to get him back in the parish!" (My words - Seifert's apostasy).

The worst part of this financial fraud is the doctrinal fraud, because the apostates have their claws and hooves in the treasury, doling out funds to one another and rejoicing in the confessional orthodoxy of Holy Mother Sect.

As I told one or two people, the WELS/LCMS reporting is getting repetitive. The Spineless Presidents are too timid to annoy the Daddy Warbucks and their allies, making the SPs the enablers. They throw a little raw meat to the base from time to time, but the trend line is pure apostasy, funded apostasy, planned and programmed apostasy.

I am going to do a long-term study of the Formula of Concord, starting with the beginning and going through every article - though not every word of it. I will label it so people can find the parts from clicking the label.

John Howard Yoder was drawn into teaching at Notre Dame by Hauerwas and became my dissertation advisor.
The Book of Concord annoyed him for naming his sect as wrong about doctrine.
But he did the same about the Book of Concord.