Why Stanley Hauerwas Needs Bruno Latour: Unlikely Allies Against Modernity

This article brings Bruno Latour's accounts of construction, mediation, and religious speech into conversation with Stanley Hauerwas's theology of Christian witness. Both resist the modern demand that truth be secured by concealing the practices through which it becomes available, yet their reasons differ. Hauerwas begins from the triune God made known in Jesus Christ and locates theological rationality within ecclesial practices. Latour traces the heterogeneous mediations through which realities acquire durability and religious words renew presence. The article argues that Latour supplies a more precise description of how Scripture, preaching, sacrament, bodies, institutions, and inherited forms of speech participate in the continuation of Christian testimony. His account also clarifies why fidelity requires transformation rather than unchanged repetition. Latour's criterion of religious felicity, however, cannot determine whether a successful performance bears truthful Christian witness. Hauerwas provides this Christological measure by making the peace disclosed in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus normative for both the content and form of testimony. Christian witness therefore depends upon mediation, while every mediation remains answerable to the truth of Christ.