In what I've heard about Stanley Hauerwas's recent memoir from friends, blurbs, blogs, and facebook posts, I've seen a recurring phrase. People talking up the book's merits often throw in a line about Hauerwas being often "caricatured." They say that Hauerwas is misunderstood by his critics due to poor readings. I'm not bringing this up to argue with Hauerwas. From what friends tell me I think that his memoir is a powerful testimony to the power of the Gospel to change lives. I'm interested, instead, in dealing with "caricature" as a rhetorical tool in theology's toolbox.
Why is caricature seen as a bad thing? Often the theological caricature is a form of reductio ad absurdum that pushes lines of logic in an argument to their conclusion and finds inconsistencies down the line, so to speak. Caricature has always been used in theological argumentation, I'm sure going way back to the wrangling over trinitarian doctrine in the early centuries of the Church. Caricatures often start conversations or ferret out new dimensions of a particular perspective. To go to my initial example, how different would Stanley Hauerwas's work look today if he never had to answer to the (caricaturing) charge of being a "sectarian, fideistic tribalist?"
People describe caricature as if it were a vice opposed to the virtue of "charitable reading." But I'm not sure if it is possible to read a text, that is printed words on a page, with charity. (Studiousness might be a better virtue here, although it would work in a different and complex way.) This is because we read texts with inescapable presuppositions. Attempting to objectively catalog these presuppositions causes more problems then it solves as well, I think. We can fault people for caricaturing theological texts, but philosophically we have to realize that "caricatures" appear due to specific material reasons relating to the background of the reader, not because of a vicious lack of charity. "Caricatures" that arise when readers come to a text from different backgrounds can in fact be helpful as leading to conversation or making us notice things in our favorite texts that we've not noticed before.
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Caricature can be helpful. Caricature can demonstrate a lack of interpretive charity. Caricature can be intended and used to specific ends. Caricature can be unintended and deceiving. It is not as though a photograph is inherently better than a caricature, indeed the latter can often communicate more, but when the caricature is confused for a photograph several problems may arise. And there are several vices that we could point to when handling this confusion.
ReplyDeleteit would be awesome if we could all create our own caricature for people to use. it would be a good practice for a theologian to trivialize their own position. as for stan i wonder if he doesn't want people to do that to him. if they didn't he would have never ended up in time magazine.
ReplyDeleteYep I think that's exactly right Tripp...when people complain about Hauerwas being "caricatured" I think they miss that he tailored his writings to make such reactions occur and start people thinking.
ReplyDeleteSome theologians get so caught up in the "ideas" that they miss that people like Hauerwas are frying bigger ecclesial fish with their rhetorical style than just advancing the state of academic theology.
Creating one's own caricature = Facebook.
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