NOT OF THIS WORLD Stanley Hauerwas & liberal democracy
Stout, Jeffrey
NOf OF THIS WORLD Stanley Hauerwas and the fate of democracy Jeffrey Stout Stanley Hauerwas, the Gilbert T. Rowe Profes-sor of Theological Ethics at Duke University, is the most prolific and...
...responsibility we share for the justice of our political arrangements inside and outside our religious communities not only concerns who-women...
...To the extent that believers and nonbe-lievers accept the caricatures and exclusive choices now offered, they become more likely to retreat into separate camps that are incapable of reasoning and living peaceably with one another...
...If so, the pronouncements have escaped my notice...
...NOf OF THIS WORLD Stanley Hauerwas and the fate of democracy Jeffrey Stout Stanley Hauerwas, the Gilbert T. Rowe Profes-sor of Theological Ethics at Duke University, is the most prolific and influential theologian now working in the United States...
...That but indicates why I feel so isolated even among the critics of the war in Afghanistan...
...Several temptations are at issue: (1) an uncharitable attitude toward the world, especially in its democratic forms, (2) a failure to distinguish adequately between disappearing into the world and pursuing justice as a responsible member of one's national community, and (3) excessive pride in the visible church as a virtuous community...
...In particular, "Christians must withdraw their support" from any social or political order that "resorts to violence in order to maintain internal order and external security...
...I think especially of his extensive writings on care for the disabled and retarded, which express a courageous patience with deformity, as well as his reflections on medicine and suffering, and his many insightful contributions to virtue theory...
...There is no doubt that the main effect of his antiliberal rhetoric, aside from significantly widening his audience, is to undercut Christian identification with democracy...
...Religious faith essentially involves "accepting a certain set of stories as canonical," but these stories tend to be quite unlike the cases of the modern ethical theorist...
...Yet Christian integrity, he insists, requires careful scrutiny of putative obligations arising from any social bond other than the church...
...Hauerwas has tried to articulate the situated ethos of a living tradition, not a Utopian ideal or categorical imperative based on pure reason...
...If Hauerwas were to stop thrashing his liberal straw man, rediscover the language of justice, and put that language to use in prophetic works of social criticism, his reviewers would surely stop charging him with sectarianism...
...For this reason, Hauerwas's pacifism has often come across more as a quixotic gesture than as the demanding doctrine he intended it to be...
...But in The Peaceable Kingdom, he implicitly rejects this possibility by envisioning the political culture surrounding the church in terms that combine Maclntyre's anti-liberalism with Yoder's "dualistic" conception of the relation between church and world, faith and unbelief...
...They are all active consumers, and many hold positions of influence in corporate and governmental bureaucracies...
...It requires jointly taking re-sponsibility for the criticism and renewal of tradition and for the justice of our social and political arrangements...
...It is a world not only outside the church but also lacking virtue...
...Hauerwas does not say...
...In his vision-and here it is Maclntyre's influence that matters-liberal democracy and tradition appear as oppo-sites, necessarily opposed to each other...
...Otherwise it will lack an intelligible standpoint for its critique of that world...
...To my knowledge, he has advocated neither the withholding of taxes that finance the military, nor participation in costly acts of civil disobedience, nor refusal of Communion to soldiers and their commanders...
...This is understandable, because Hauerwas has argued against the vices of liberalism countless times, most often invoking After Virtue (1981), a groundbreaking if fundamentally flawed critique of modern liberalism by the Roman Catholic philosopher and Notre Dame professor Alasdair Maclntyre...
...It requires jointly taking responsibility for the criticism and renewal of tradition and for the justice of our social and political arrangements...
...In the modern period, according to this story, ethics ceases to be a matter of cultivating the virtues and instead becomes a quest for universally acceptable principles...
...There are many other worthy purposes in social ethics for which this language seems essential-such as the critique of global capitalism, the reform of tax law, and the restructuring of familial roles...
...According to this view, much of what is wrong about modern society and modern thought can be explained by neglect of the very concepts that Hauerwas had been emphasizing...
...the alliances have involved such aims as the abolition of slavery, the equal recognition of women, and the avoidance of cruelty...
...In the new political situation, pacifism as such is a controversial matter...
...The chapter begins by contending that "the current emphasis on justice and rights as the primary norms guiding the social witness of Christians is in fact a mistake...
...Christian moralists found themselves addressing the odd question of how to rule empires and fight wars lovingly...
...Yet one of the practices we need to participate in, I would argue, is the democratic practice in which we try to take responsibility, as a people, for the practices and institutions that constitute our common life together...
...If A Better Hope offers little evidence that Hauerwas has tired of making traditionalist arguments against liberal society, it does show signs that he is growing uneasy with the posture those arguments have left him in...
...Hauerwas agrees with Maclntyre that the citizens of a liberal democracy are essentially rootless individuals, not members of a community united by their commitment to the same "canonical stories" and "exemplary instances...
...By combining this anti-Constantinian narrative with the antimodern narrative he takes over from Maclntyre, Hauerwas leaves the world outside the modern church in a doubly darkened condition...
...No theologian has done more to inflame Christian resentment of secular political culture...
...Nor, for that matter, is the choice between an ethics of conduct and an ethics of character...
...Hauerwas, to his credit, has long insisted on the centrality of pacifism to his outlook...
...Unfortunately, the religious dimensions of our political culture are typically discussed at such a high level of abstraction that only two positions become visible: an authoritarian form of traditionalism and an antireligious form of liberalism...
...Hauerwas soon became a protege of another Protestant then teaching theological ethics at Notre Dame, John Howard Yoder...
...As a new traditionalist, Hauerwas joins Maclntyre and others in charging that we live in a fragmented and morally incoherent society whose spiritual core is empty...
...Yoder was a Mennonite, a member of the pacifist Christian church that originated in the radical wing of the Protestant Reformation under the leadership of the renegade Dutch priest, Menno Simons...
...To be fair, Hauerwas's positive purpose in making this argument is to show that the categories of virtue, tradition, and narrative are crucial to ethics...
...It does not want to adopt the posture of mere nostalgia...
...the poor?-gets to play what roles...
...But he underestimates the extent to which his heavy-handed use of the term "liberalism" as an all-purpose critical instrument continually reinforces the impression that total rejection is in fact required...
...Because he thinks of them in this way, he slides into thinking that the only way to shape virtuous people is to favor a particular kind of premodern, authoritarian tradition...
...He does not hold up Pax Christi, World Peacemakers, and the sanctuary movement as exemplary concrete practices...
...He rose to prominence while teaching at Notre Dame, but one constant in his thinking has been his own tradition's emphasis on the power of the Holy Spirit to transform the life of the believer...
...It is the common link among the various types of antimodern traditionalism...
...How Hauerwas became a traditionalist To understand what attracted Hauerwas to Maclntyre's ideas in the first place, one needs to keep in mind, first of all, that Hauerwas is a Methodist...
...The alternative Hauerwas and Burrell propose is an ethics of character...
...He claimed that Yoder's pacifism, because it is conceived as a form of discipleship to Christ, was left essentially untouched by the standard arguments against pacifism...
...I would argue that what we need today in the struggle against terrorism is a rediscovery of the language of justice, a language Hauerwas once prized as a way of being faithful to the biblical call to righteousness...
...As such, its vices are especially ugly...
...For democracy," he claims, "has in fact become an end in itself that captures our souls in subtle ways we hardly notice...
...By the time he published After Christendom in 1991, his rhetorical posture appeared to divorce the "language of faith" from the "language of justice" in the same way he had formerly criticized Yoder for doing...
...Hauerwas seems not to imagine this democratic, critical activity-which necessarily entails political contention and what I call reason giving-as a practice that involves the cultivation of virtues or the construction and telling of narratives...
...In order to do this, they may adopt roles and enter into associations with other people as they wish...
...What interested Hauerwas from the start about Aquinas was the Dominican's account of the virtues, not the natural-law account of moral principles attributed to him by scholastic Thomists...
...They are guilty of diluting the wine of the gospel with the water of liberalism...
...He is as well positioned as any intellectual to pose the challenge of the twenty-first century to American Christians...
...And the opponents are not merely fellow intellectuals like John Rawls or Reinhold Niebuhr, but his fellow citizens, who, by accepting his portrayal of them, may come to view the social world outside the church as merely "pernicious" and forget how to trust and identify with one another...
...The alternative, from his point of view, is to let the church be the church...
...The rhetoric of the new traditionalists implies that they have already given up on democracy...
...It eventually gets around to claiming, more generally, "that if the gospel is true, the politics of liberalism must be false...
...Either way, the church is in danger of collapsing into something it purports to criticize...
...First, he had resolved his doubts about Yoder's position and declared himself a pacifist...
...Hauerwas continued to develop his accounts of narrative and virtue while wrestling with Yoder's influence throughout the 1970s...
...They declare the civic nation or modernity itself innately vicious, and then, having no place else to go, identify strictly with communities distinct from democratic society as a whole...
...Writing recently of his inability to "share the reaction of most Americans to the destruction of the World Trade Center," Hauerwas is unabashed in his distrust of popular democracy...
...This message has largely made matters worse, both for democracy and for the church...
...What exactly does this mean...
...Hauerwas's writings of the 1970s had an enormous impact, for he was largely successful in persuading theologians representing a wide spectrum of denominations to reconsider the role of virtue in Christian ethics...
...He endorsed Yoder's claim that the church's task is not to transform the social-political order through direct engagement with it, but rather to establish its own community of discipleship-in the world, but not of it...
...There is, though, another reason why Hauerwas has been accused of sectarianism...
...The result of such posturing is the Manichaean rhetoric of cultural warfare...
...Second, when Maclntyre's After Virtue appeared in 1981, Hauerwas immediately embraced Maclntyre as the paradigmatic philosophical critic of our time...
...And one of the things he is now in the habit of denigrating is American democracy...
...His concern is that disci-pleship is bound to be neglected unless the church can keep its mind on its own proper vocation...
...Far from making this point effectively, Hauerwas relentlessly criticizes theologians who draw attention to it...
...For the Methodist Hauerwas, Christian ethics is perfectionist...
...Votes cast by Christians influence the rate of taxation, the condition of the environment, the fate of the underclass, and the nature of foreign policy...
...He wants to make those who read him as a sectarian "think twice...
...They seem to be inherently at odds with the substantive, comprehensive visions of the religious traditions...
...The social significance of his position appears to be changing, however, in the period since September 11, 2001...
...It must find a place in the modern world, but not of it...
...Many of Hauerwas's theologically orthodox critics, such as George Hunsinger of Princeton Theological Seminary and Nicholas Wolterstorff, professor emeritus at Yale Divinity School, welcome his call for increased emphasis on the visibility of the church, insofar as he offers a corrective to liberal and liberationist theological programs that tend to reduce the church to a movement for social democracy...
...The liberal, of both kinds, is committed to 'englobing' all positions into liberalism...
...What seems clear, however, is that the "language of justice" has now dropped almost completely out of Hauerwas's thinking...
...John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, taught that once God had justified the believer through the gift of faith, thus setting straight his or her personal relation to God, it remained for the believer to be made holy through the achievement of Christian perfection...
...Each of them needs a Force of Darkness to oppose if it is going to portray itself as the Force of Light...
...The perception of modern democratic societies as morally and spiritually empty is hardly confined to the Amish and similarly isolated sects...
...They use each other to lend plausibility to their fears and proposed remedies...
...The issue is whether he takes appropriate care to get his opponents right...
...On the final page of the chapter, though, he indicates cryptically that it is not his intention to imply that Christians "must give up working for justice in the societies of modernity...
...Being "for" the democratic ideal of political justice is something, I would argue, that should be high on the list of virtues for any Christian...
...According to Hauerwas, the Christian task is to preach and live out the gospel, not to find the philosophical basis on which anybody, Christian or non-Christian, can stand...
...It is the language one needs when explaining not only why we have just cause to bear arms against terrorists, but also why our armed forces should not be firing at civilians, and why we should not be supporting regimes that depend on us to thwart the democratic aspirations of their own people...
...When Hauerwas argues against the quest for universally valid principles and grants that everyone has some sort of traditional ethical and social inheritance to take responsibility for, he may seem to be preparing the way for a pluralistic conversation among people representing varying reasonable points of view-a conversation at least partly about the demands of justice, both inside and outside the church...
...Most of his readers have found this commitment hard to swallow, but they have often been prepared to treat it as a side issue, while focusing instead on his critique of liberalism...
...In Against the Nations (1992), he argued against the idea that the "church has a stake, and it is a theological stake, in making American democracy a success...
...Reduction and repetition are both rhetorically intrinsic to the procedure...
...Hauerwas and Maclntyre actively foster alienation from the citizenry's public discussion of divisive ethical questions while promoting identification instead with premodern traditions and religious communities...
...Christians rightly find themselves members of many communities...
...Church & world Hauerwas does not like being called a "sectarian...
...If nothing much follows from it, what is there to worry about...
...They are rather stories like the Gospels or Augustine's Confessions, which present "an exemplary instance" of divinity, holiness, or virtue...
...For here is a philosopher who not only agrees with him that these concepts are of central importance, but also provides an impressive historical explanation of how quandary ethics had come to dominate the scene...
...Thus Christians today who concern themselves mainly with the struggle for justice are simply the democratic descendants of Constantine...
...The core of Hauerwas's anti-Constantinian teaching is absolute pacifism, justified on biblical grounds as a vocation of discipleship to Christ...
...In the introduction to A Better Hope (Brazos Press, 2000), he confesses, however, that he has "grown tired of arguments about the alleged virtues or vices of liberalism...
...For an author of Hauerwas's prominence and style, the risks are not merely academic...
...ology intent on excluding the voice of theology from public discussion...
...it also concerns what the basic roles are going to be and what sort of personal character a society prizes...
...On the other hand, admitting that the community of virtue itself exhibits the vices it accuses the world of exhibiting causes the substance of virtue to evaporate into mere ideality, leaving it a virtue in name only, draining it of substantial content...
...In ethics this meant shifting the balance between the right and the good...
...He has done more than anyone to spread what I call the new traditionalism among Christians in the English-speaking world...
...The point of this remark, I take it, is to acknowledge that, as a citizen of the United States, he can acquire certain obligations to his fellow citizens...
...He warns his readers-and reminds himself-that "Christians cannot afford" to let themselves be defined by what they are against...
...The trouble started when the Emperor Constantine converted to Christianity...
...Quandary ethics is the variety of ethical discourse in which one performs the legalistic task of formulating moral principles and subsuming cases under them...
...The index to A Better Hope, however, contains more than twenty listings under the term "liberalism," and the book begins by arguing against the temptations of the paradigmatic political liberalism of Harvard political theorist John Rawls (A Theory of Justice...
...Maclntyre's traditionalist rhetoric depends on a traditional-modern dualism, the intended effect of which is to eliminate ambivalence in one's response to modernity...
...He prefers these categories because he thinks they help him get at the question of what kinds of people our society is producing and the even more basic question of what social practices and institutions we should be committed to...
...It is a pity that some of his most extreme and dangerous conclusions appear to be winning a large following within the church...
...To advocate it at a time when cells of terrorists are actively plotting the murder of one's fellow citizens is to place those citizens at risk...
...For example, chapter 2 purports to explain "Why Justice Is a Bad Idea for Christians...
...It is Hauerwas's way of describing these vices that leads many of his readers to assume that he sees the world of liberal democracy as wholly lacking in grace...
...As Hauerwas originally put the point when criticizing Yoder, it is doubtful that "any discriminating social judgments by the Christian can be made without buying in at some point to the language of justice...
...In a powerfully argued 1974 essay, "The Nonresistant Church," Hauerwas offered a detailed analysis of Yoder's views...
...Both books describe the church as a community of virtue in a "divided" or "fragmented" world...
...The stronger its claim to represent virtue as distinct from the way of the world, the more quickly it degenerates into a form of conceit that cannot honestly be sustained...
...He has taken a clear stand against abortion, which is not mentioned in the New Testament but strikes him as obviously incompatible with a commitment to nonviolence...
...Thus I am not only a Christian but a university teacher, a Texan, a United States citizen, and a devoted fan of the Durham Bulls...
...Not long after publishing Christian Existence Today (1988), he seemed to turn away from his previous interest in questions of justice...
...The project of trying to find reasons that would be compelling for any rational person (regardless of upbringing and circumstance) is not only destined to fall short of its goal, it also deflects the church's efforts from the task to which it has been called, which is simply to be the church...
...It is hard, at this point, to escape the conclusion that his ethics rests on an extremely selective reading of the Bible...
...Hauerwas thinks of democratic questioning, conflict, and reason-giving not as valuable social practices, but as the acids of individualism eating away at tradition...
...Community of Character (1981) and The Peaceable (1983) remain the most unified statements of Hauerwas's mature theological and ethical outlook...
...Modernity" and "liberalism" become almost interchangeable categories, two names for a society dominated by vicious individualism in the epoch after virtue ceases to matter...
...He thinks that characteristically "liberal" political issues like these are largely beside the point...
...The purpose of this community is to follow Christ's nonviolent example, thus exemplifying in its own conduct God's way of dealing with evil in the world...
...When he does not succumb to the temptation of repeating his diatribes against liberal society, he is often an imaginative and generous thinker...
...With the implications of his pacifism suddenly in clearer focus, it is dawning on Hauerwas's audience that he is saying something they don't necessarily want to hear...
...With the pacifism in his position now receiving the emphasis he has always intended it to have, Hauerwas's main challenge will be to explain more clearly than before why some apparently strict teachings from the New Testament warrant a rigorist emphasis while others do not...
...I think that this move represents an unwarranted form of despair and that it tells a largely false story about the kind of society we live in...
...Christian ethics has traditionally taken all of these roles as falling within its scope, and made it its business to evaluate existing social arrangements in light of stringent standards of justice and love...
...Yet they are also, as Hauerwas has pointed out, members of families, unions, professions, colleges, ethnic groups, and nations...
...The institutions in question include the family, industry, the market, the university, and the church...
...He has not, however, made clear what his pacifism demands, practically speaking...
...In doing so that ethos must, however, resolve the problem of point of view...
...This essay's nickname for modern ethical theory is "quandary ethics...
...It is true that Hauerwas sometimes writes as if no such total rejection of American society is necessary just now...
...The question is always open whether ours is such a moment...
...If such principles are there, they generate too much controversy among apparently rational people to do us much good...
...He then went on to argue that the church is essentially a community of peaceable virtue...
...To view the picture in high contrast, consider the Amish, a group that nobody would characterize as either fragmented or secular...
...The slogan is succinct, and it has caught on among those who find the "social gospel" of Christian liberalism to be thin...
...If Hauerwas has his way, thinkers such as Reinhold Niebuhr and Walter Rauschenbusch will no longer hold a place of honor in the memory of American Christians, for despite their noble intentions, they were caught up in the way of the world, not the work of Christian virtue...
...The question is whether he is prepared, on the whole, to take sufficient care in guarding against them, especially in works designed to reach the broadest possible audience...
...Quandary ethics gives rise to a view of the moral life as nothing more than a succession of problems calling for decisions and thus to a view of the self as little more than a principled will...
...In doing so, it has entered into conversations and alliances with groups outside the church...
...Each of these positions thrives mainly by inflating the other's importance...
...Much good would ensue...
...For he now spends much of his time denigrating the democratic quest for justice and the protection of rights...
...Their worry is that Hauerwas habitually expresses these valuable points in a way that threatens to vitiate his message...
...There is much of value in Hauerwas's work...
...In theology it meant playing down the image of God as one who issues commands, while playing up the image of God as one who both personifies goodness in the figure of Christ and graciously reshapes the character of those called to follow him...
...Liberal society," "the secular," and "democracy" become his names for what the world has become in an age of fragmentation after the demise of virtue and tradition...
...The role he is most interested in-and understandably so-is that of disciple...
...In contrast, modern democratic societies appear to lack any such unifying framework...
...It is mainly about what kind of people Christians are called to be, not about what one ought to do, and he has always read Aquinas with this thought in mind...
...Edmund Burke, Pope Pius IX, Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, T. S. Eliot, and many others have voiced the same complaint...
...His most influential essay from this period is probably "From System to Story: An Alternative Pattern for Rationality in Ethics," which was co-authored by his Notre Dame colleague David Burrell...
...Even in the Middle Ages, according to the view Hauerwas adopts from Yoder, the mainstream church had already succumbed to the temptation of taking an essentially non-Christian interest in justice...
...Is the point, then, that the liberal conception of justice is a bad idea, whereas working for justice for sound biblical reasons is a good idea...
...The Christians abandoned the ethos of the early church precisely when they started trying to rule society lovingly, Hauerwas argues...
...In responding to the charge of sectarianism, Hauerwas has said almost nothing about the significance of his debts to Mac-Intyre...
...Henceforth, he has used Maclntyre's traditionalist framework to say much of what he wants to say about virtue and narrative...
...In the modern era, the conversations have often been about democracy...
...Hauerwas appeals to arguments from Maclntyre as warrant for criticisms of secular liberal notions of justice and goes on to suggest that liberation theology may have "underwritten a sense of liberation [that is] at odds with the gospel...
...Members are united in their beliefs about the world and their codes of conduct, their tables of virtues and vices, their pieties and their aspirations...
...To be sure, over the last two decades the principal targets of Hauerwas's criticism have not been politicians but theologians who dedicated themselves to social justice and sought to make the church safe for democratic aspirations...
...The first and third temptations combine to form another: (4) excessive certainty that one possesses the virtue of discernment, the capacity to tell the difference between the way of the world and the stirrings of the Spirit...
...When this rhetoric is conjoined with Yoder's conception of the church, the result, regardless of Hauerwas's intentions, is an especially rigid form of church/world dualism...
...This is why Hauerwas has difficulty in articulating the "for" of his position as clearly as he articulates the "against...
...I do not even share their allegiance to American ideals" (South Atlantic Quarterly, Spring 2002...
...He explicitly denies "that the only community in which Christians can or should live is the church...
...As individuals, they have their own private conceptions of the good, and they strive to satisfy their own desires...
...Vietnam was a time of great tension, but the politics of the antiwar movement did not require those opposed to the war to think of themselves as fundamentally standing outside the American mainstream...
...The language of justice Christians have every reason to concern themselves with the integrity of the church and with the question of what way of life it is meant to exemplify...
...Democratic questioning involves and inculcates virtues, including justice, and becomes a tradition, like any social practice, when it manages to sustain itself across generations...
...Still, it must be said that he has stated the "against" in his message much more forcibly than the "for...
...In Character and the Christian Life (1975), a book based on his doctoral dissertation, Hauerwas not only explicated the Wesleyan and Calvinist conceptions of sanctification, but also connected this doctrine with an older tradition of thinking about the virtues that goes back to Aquinas and, through him, to Aristotle...
...But there is no wisdom in replacing one reductive interpretation of the gospel by another...
...People with a conscience can always be faced with a social and political order that must be rejected in the name of one's basic commitments...
...Reducing the gospel to democracy and reducing it to ecclesiolo-gy are hardly the only alternatives...
...According to Hauerwas, this tied them into all sorts intellectual knots...
...Given that military conscription is no longer the law of the land, his followers face no governmental pressure to serve in the armed forces...
...That ethos finds modern society generally perverted by individualism, and therefore aims to articulate the claims of virtue over against the way of the world...
...This process of transformation, which is called sancti-fication, depends on divine grace but also requires a serious and sustained effort in self-cultivation, a striving for virtue, on the part of the justified sinner...
...They also welcome his bold criticisms of secularist liberalism as an ideCommitment to democracy does not entail the rejection of tradition...
...The practices include nurturing the young, the production and distribution of goods, the pursuit of learning, and worship...
...It effectively eliminates character from ethical consideration...
...And in his subsequent books, Hauerwas makes that rejection explicit by dismissing the surrounding political culture in increasingly strident terms...
...A large percentage of those who call themselves Christians favor capital punishment, the possession of nuclear weapons, and using force to defend their nation against terrorists...
...The choice is not between an incoherent quest for personal autonomy or unconstrained existence, on the one hand, and authoritarian practices and hierarchical institutions, on the other...
...Hauerwas has made little effort in recent years to persuade his fellow Christians to join hands with non-Christians in the quest for this-world-ly justice...
...It is easy to see both what marks this group as a community and what tradition its members can take for granted when discussing their ethical differences with one another...
...Whereas Hauerwas sees mostly moral danger in democracy capturing our souls, I fear that without the robust commitment of religious people to democracy, America will become a much worse place to live...
...Perhaps he has somewhere drawn morally rigorous conclusions on topics concerning which the New Testament would seem to be a costly teaching for many of the people in his audience-remarriage after divorce, for example, or the chances of a rich man to enter the kingdom of God...
...Hauerwas likes to shock first and qualify later, but in this case the fine print is only slightly less worrisome than the bold...
...Hauerwas responds that, "my 'contrarian' style is necessitated by my polemic against theological and political liberalism...
...Hauerwas's theological ethic can succeed on its own terms only if it faithfully espouses the life and teachings of Jesus in their entirety...
...The actual church does not look very much like a community of virtue, when judged by pacifist standards...
...Hauerwas does not face with sufficient candor the fact that his own desire to reduce all opponents to a single figure, "the liberal," gives him an interest in ignoring the details and nuances of what the targets of his critique actually say and do...
...The critics would not say that Hauerwas always succumbs to these temptations...
...The new traditionalists (among whom I would include First Things editor-in-chief Richard John Neuhaus and the social critic and theologian John Milbank) frequently add that the ethical substance of Western culture, historically and philosophically based on Christian precepts, has been drained off by liberal secularism...
...By the early 1980s he had taken on two important commitments that changed the tenor of his writing significantly...
...Hauerwas, however, shows little interest in the question of who gets to play what roles in society and what our basic social arrangements ought to be...
...Commitment to democracy does not entail the re-jection of tradition...
...But they lack the sort of narrative framework they will need if they want to make sense of their lives, cultivate the virtues, and sustain meaningful discourse with one another on ethical and political questions...
...For Hauerwas, I believe, it has meant turning away from an active engagement in the biblical demand for social justice and a fateful narrowing of the church's necessary role in the world...
...Most critics of Vietnam (just as many that now criticize the war in Afghanistan) based their dissent on their adherence to American ideals that they felt the war was betraying...
...Since neither ordinary people nor ethical theorists have been able to reach agreement on what the correct principles are, it is hard to see why anyone should think that there really are principles of the kind being sought...
...Hauerwas's criticisms of liberal political theory sometimes hit the mark, but his rashly negative conclusions about real politics do not follow from the points he makes about political theory...
...Hauerwas therefore set out to give the concept of virtue its due...
...He describes the book as his "attempt to make the 'for' more determinative than the 'against.'" His "problem has never been with political liberals," he says, "but rather with the widespread assumption shared by many Christians that political liberalism ought to shape the agenda, if not the very life, of the church...
...In his polemical writings, the ones that have made him famous, Hauerwas seems to see in all this little more than a corruption of the gospel-the spoiled fruit of a misguided Con-stantinianism...
...In place of cases, ethics must attend to narratives that are rich enough to display the significance of virtuous and vicious character traits in particular human lives...
...Saying "Amen" to his jeremiad now requires more courage...
...Any such group is bound together closely by sacred stories, dogmas, and rituals transmitted across generations...
Vol. 130 • October 2003 • No. 17
