In the most recent issue of The Christian Century, Will Willimon expresses regret over his co-authored book Resident Aliens (1989) which he wrote with Stanley Hauerwas. This was a hugely influential book for me and my friends when we were in undergrad. I hadn’t thought about why it was appealing to us as undergrads until I read Willimon’s comments in this article:

“Few things are more humbling for a professor than to hear your classroom assertions parroted back to you. In the student’s puerile response you hear an echo of your own pronouncement—but on undergraduate lips the thought sounds unbearably stupid.”

Willimon’s regret about the book is not that it was watered down and easily slogan-ready. He has a more theological reason for his regret:

“For some time Hauerwas has engaged in a polemic against “practices based on atheism.” I worry that our infatuation with practices could be but the latest phase of atheism. Since God is now mute and absent, we try to locate a set of habits that will make us feel better about our situation.”

Willimon shows his cards in this article and demonstrates the flip-side of populism. While you want what you write to be easily accessible and clearly understood, what you don’t want is it to be trivialised in the process. If Kierkegaard were alive, perhaps he would have these same regrets about theologians doing this very thing with his writings. MacIntyre is still alive, perhaps he regrets the portrayal of his work in the writings of theologians like Hauerwas and Willimon.

Regardless of these regrets, Willimon says “I still believe just about everything Stanley Hauerwas and I said in that book.”

What are the ramifications of a confession like this? Are there any? Perhaps not. Perhaps this is just part of growing older and looking back twenty years later and seeing where you overstepped your boundaries. Or maybe it might be a word of warning to us about how we ingest philosophy and baptise it without attending to what the philosopher is saying. Perhaps it shows us the stretch marks of age where we’ve tried to make philosophy, theology.