Stanley Hauerwas's Pacifism

...In fact, Hauerwas seems to welcome a post-Christian America, because it may free Christians to see themselves primarily as Christians...

...Thomas Aquinas...

...The vast majority of responses to Hauerwas defend some version of the just-war theory that he rejects...

...Reinhold Niebuhr's theology is usually contrasted with James's...

...We lack a shared narrative or vision of the meaning of sex...

...War is a way of "reaffirming our national history" by performing acts that render us worthy heirs to those who have made sacrifices in the past...

...sonality, his ceaseless work schedule, and his profanity-larded speech...

...One author tells the story of being awakened by a phone call just before 7 a.m...

...Pacifism is a way of giving witness to a higher power, which is "self-emptying and pacific...

...With the Grain of the Universe ends by pointing us toward contemporary witnesses of the Christian life: John Paul II, John Howard Yoder, and Dorothy Day...

...Instead, there is a conflict between moralities...

...He is quick to add that this proposition—known fondly among his students as Hauerwas's Law—is reversible: "You always marry the right person...

...Hauerwas has been so successful that we forget just how unusual his work was at the time...

...Those books, particularly Vision and Virtue (1974) and Character and the Christian Life (1975) contained remarkably prescient reflections on key ethical issues...

...He likes to say that one of the reasons he could not become Catholic is that the Catholic Church does not recognize his wife's priesthood...

...Hauerwas is certainly in favor of Christian resistance to abortion and euthanasia...

...To make his case, he looks, in particular, at the work of William James, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Karl Barth—all three of whom preceded Hauerwas as Gifford lecturers...

...Precisely because even Christians have grown afraid to speak of the purpose of anything, our public discussion of sex vacillates between a realism that subordinates moral norms to norms of health and a romanticism that sees sex as a "significant gesture" but cannot tell us why this is so or how that insight ought to guide behavior...

...Hauerwas is famous as well for reading literally everything published in every field of theology, for his massive correspondence, and for the number of devoted students he's turned out—especially the graduate students, who, perhaps even more than his writing, have made him the most influential theologian in the nation...

...He puts Christianity in tension not only with war but with any notion of secular justice...

...What is most curious about all this is that Hauerwas receives serious, sustained, and principled treatment mostly among Christian conservatives...

...It principally concerns the "feelings" of isolated individuals and thus excludes the institutional and communal context of religious practice by pushing doctrine to the margins of religious life...

...This was theology's version of the arguments that dominated twentieth-century moral philosophy between the rule-based ethic of Kant and the consequence-based strategies of the utilitarians...

...But, the truth is, neither does her own church—for Methodism rejects the Catholic form of priesthood...

...But to flesh out that answer, one has to turn to the pieces gathered in The Hauerwas Reader, which gives us Hauerwas at his non-systematic best, as a master of the occasional piece reflecting on contemporary debates from the perspective of the church...

...In his "A Christian Critique of Christian America," Hauerwas takes aim at the neoconservative argument that religion is a necessary source of the morality requisite for a democratic polity...

...He worries that American Christians, whether liberals or conservatives, see their fundamental allegiance to America rather than to Christ and his church...

...The theology of his day provided Hauerwas with very few resources for this turn, and he seems—all on his own—to have intuited the direction moral philosophy was about to take and applied it brilliantly to moral theology...

...Right-to-lifers may thereby gain a hearing in the public realm, but they also distort the distinctively Christian understanding of human dependence—and thus unwittingly reinforce the notion that our humanity consists in our prized autonomy, our self-conscious independence from others...

...In order to get along in a liberal order, Christians have become a mere "people of goodwill...

...A baffled interviewer once asked him, "How will we get anything done...

...It's merely organized murder...

...The real issue here is how Christians can support any coercive activities of the state: from soldiers to judges to policemen...

...The Hauerwas Reader contains selections from Hauerwas's early books that launched his distinctive career as a theologian...

...Hauerwas strongly disagrees...

...This critique of the right-to-life movement indicates that, although Hauerwas is at odds with liberalism, he is not at home with Christian conservatives either...

...But he is made anxious by those who opt for the language of a "right to life" instead of the scriptural language of life as a gift...

...MacIntyre's After Virtue is the most innovative book of moral philosophy in the second half of the century and the seminal entry in the ethics of character and virtue...

...They all play central roles in the thought of Stanley Hauerwas, the Methodist thinker and Duke University professor whom Time magazine has named "America's best theologian" and one of the most important figures in American thought over the last decade...

...There is, however, another route: the path blazed by Karl Barth...

...instead, war typically involves a "moral commitment to the good of others...

...By contrast, liberal pacifism is often cowardly, in its assumption that death is the greatest evil, and naively utopian, in its assumption that the antiwar movement will eventually issue in world peace...

...Liberal theologians tend merely to call Hauerwas names, "sectarian" and "tribal" being the most popular...

...But what is astonishing about Hauerwas's achievement is that his Vision and Virtue and Character and the Christian Life predate MacIntyre's work...

...The point is that neither Christian marriage nor the having of children is about self-fulfillment...

...Tracing his way through the tradition, Hauerwas perceived the central role played in ancient ethics by concrete examples and paradigms of virtue and vice—as, for instance, in Plutarch's Lives...

...But Hauerwas's pacifism does not fit neatly with generic, secular pacifism...

...Chastised for taking the Lord's name in vain, he replied that of all those theologians, "I was the only one who mentioned God's name, and I did it twice...

...The editors of The Hauerwas Reader speak of his "promiscuous pew hopping" and relate a story that Hauerwas likes to tell about how he almost became a Catholic...

...In the Gifford lectures, Hauerwas traces the decline of Christian theology and demands its liberation from political liberalism...

...In language that often mirrors John Paul II's analysis of the culture of death that now threatens advanced Western societies, Hauerwas takes aim at our attitudes toward sex and toward those members of our community whom we increasingly deem less than human...

...As a way of underscoring the amoralism often operative in the scientific community, Hauerwas once asked a defender of experiments on fetal tissue: "What if it were discovered that fetal tissue were a delicacy...

...By the last quarter of the century, certain moral philosophers—originally led by Thomistic thinkers and culminating in Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue in 1981—began to see their way clear of this impasse by recovering premodern notions of character and virtue as the central categories in ethics, particularly with terms of moral appraisal such as "courageous," "generous," or "spiteful" that are simultaneously descriptive and evaluative...

...For Hauerwas, Barth is the key twentieth-century theologian, because he turns "Feuerbach on his head...

...Thus, they ignore the scriptural admonition that "we have here no lasting city" and risk making an idol of the state...

...He seems to conceive of the Christian church as an "intergenerational community" whose traditions pass on the stories and teachings of a Christian wisdom and whose sacramental practices initiate individuals into the virtues of the Christian life...

...He readily acknowledges the nobility of war and repudiates liberal views of war as rooted in a narrow selfishness...

...Like James before him, Niebuhr ends up confirming the atheistic thesis—put most famously by the nineteenth-century philosopher Feuerbach—that "theology is a disguised way of talking about humanity...

...But where does Hauerwas's Barthi-an turn leave us...

...By their teachings and, even more, by their lives, they oppose what the theologian John Milbank calls the "false humility" of modern theology: its unwillingness or inability to provide a comprehensive vision of the world...

...The life of Christ embodies a model of power that eschews all coercion and falsehood...

...The problem, however, is that he's never clear about the actual embodiment of the church...

...And yet, what Hauerwas claims to have learned from Thomas is the fundamental opposition between the virtues constitutive of Christian excellence and the "ideology of liberalism," which wants "to create a society where no one has to die for what they believe...

...The same individualistic attitude of disengagement informs our public discussion about biotechnology, abortion, suicide, and euthanasia...

...Once, while participating in a Newsweek interview with a group of theologians, Hauerwas said in exasperation, "God is killing the church, and we goddamn well deserve it...

...Niebuhr's project is thus only another means (like James's) for constructing a "liberal Christianity acceptable to liberal culture and politics...

...Hauerwas is the last person anyone would accuse of false humility...

...Still, however scandalous his pacifism and vision of the church are to Christian conservatives, Stanley Hauer-was is far more a scandal to liberals— precisely because, unlike almost every other theologian in America, he thinks the existence of God actually ought to make a difference in how we behave and how we think...

...Hauerwas has, they say, withdrawn from the world and committed himself to the Christian narrative in a way that renders it immune to the challenges of science, politics, and culture...

...Hauerwas is acutely sensitive to the way contemporary Christianity follows Locke in the subtle transformation of the meaning of charity and forgiveness so that both become indistinguishable from toleration...

...The problem, as Hauerwas sees it, is the assumption that there is one morality, Judeo-Christian morality, operative in America...

...This vision of marriage is incompatible with the "self-interested individualism promoted by liberal politics and a capitalist consumer economy...

...Christians, he says, are certainly making truth-claims which are in principle open to challenge—but he sees no evidence that science has undermined basic Christian beliefs, nor is he convinced by the Lockean assumption, which informs so much contemporary theology, that what Christianity should be about is promoting toleration...

...Religion for James is thus very limited...

...Theology becomes "ethics and ethics becomes an investigation of the conditions to make liberal society work...

...Barth reasserts the claim that a proper understanding of the Christian life requires an assertion of Christianity as a universal vision about the way things are...

...It must have seemed to his fellow theologians as though it came out of nowhere, and it swept across the field, exposing in an instant the sterility of the dominant theological debates...

...Many have argued that this necessitates an affirmation of Catholicism, but Hauerwas's relation to the various Christian denominations is a bundle of tensions, if not outright contradictions, as he himself is happy to admit...

...Lacking a church, he is compelled to find something doctrinal with which to identify Christians—and his virtue ethics insists that doctrine issues in immediate ethical consequences, as his view of Christ's precise way of manifesting divinity in and through humanity entails hard pacifism...

...With his students, Hauerwas is blunt: "You always marry the wrong person...

...And many Americans, not just members of the liberal media, find that they can proceed just fine as Americans while opting out of the traditional, Christian ways of life...

...And Hauerwas replied, "Why do you think your first task as a Christian is to make society work...

...It is one of the great ironies of contemporary theology that the Methodist Hauerwas has produced more students of Thomistic ethics than entire Catholic departments of theology...

...Here's where his virtue ethics kicks in...

...For Hauerwas, these three twentieth-century figures—John Paul II, John Howard Yoder, and Dorothy Day—run counter to the most prevalent tendencies of modern theology...

...When he came of age as a theologian, moral theology was embroiled mainly in endless debates about principles versus circumstances and whether exceptions could be granted to moral rules for the sake of a greater good...

...Indeed, in a nice line, he argues that the phrase "just war" is a tautology: If it isn't a just war, then it isn't a war at all...

...But Hauerwas's pacifism gives rise to other sorts of difficulties...

...Hauerwas's distaste for the liberal order has real consequences...

...In any discussion of virtue ethics, Aristotle stands at the beginning...

...This transformation of the church of Christ into a culture of toleration reflects—and reinforces— the view that religion is principally concerned with universal moral ideals, not with specific truth-claims...

...Our cynicism, rooted in the assumption that there is "nothing to which one can worthily dedicate one's entire life" is a correlate of our liberal, individualist politics, which counsels us that we must "always be able to disengage from commitments at any moment...

...He began taking instruction, but discussion with his wife, who is a Methodist minister, led him to rethink the move...

...This, he says, is a symptom of "pathogenic abandonment" in which hardness of heart, an unwillingness to bear the burdens of our neighbors, masquerades as compassion...

...Indeed, there was a certain irony when Time exalted America's leading Christian pacifist in an issue published only two days before the attacks of September 11...

...One wonders whether Hauerwas's inability to discover an actual church to whose authority he might submit himself is part of what motivates his elevation of pacifism as the key mark of Christianity...

...Given these claims, it seems that Christians must be not just "resident aliens" but stalwart—perhaps even seditious—enemies of the state in all its economic and legal functions...

...He sees the dominance of the language of toleration as fostering an indifference to the purpose of our lives and to the making of judgments about better and worse ways of living...

...Above all, it is Hauerwas's pacifism that sets him at odds with the Christian right, as is evident in his February 2002 exchange with the editors of the journal First Things over the war against terrorism—an exchange that led to Hauerwas's resignation from First Things's editorial board last week...

...In The Varieties of Religious Experience and elsewhere, James argues that, given modern science, theology can no longer tell us anything about the way things are—and yet we are beset at the same time by a need for a vision of our place in the universe that science cannot supply...

...The result may never quite become full-blown atheism, but modern theology seems determined, as Alasdair Maclntyre puts it, to give "atheists less and less to disbelieve...

...Hauerwas asserts intimate links between capitalism and war and (in his anti-liberal and anti-utopian pacifism) between the modern state and war...

...Could you eat it...

...Far from aligning Christianity with liberalism, Hauerwas's pacifism emerges from a distinctively Christian vision of history and power...

...As for the canard that this sort of Christianity renders one indifferent to injustice and worldly politics, Hauerwas notes that Barth himself issued the famous Barmen Declaration and refused to take the oath of loyalty to Hitler...

...In one of his most measured essays, "Why the 'Sectarian Temptation' is a Misrepresentation," Hauerwas responds...

...It is typical for theological developments to follow in the footsteps of philosophical advances...

...that began, "I'm a professor at Duke named Stan Hauerwas, and I just wanted to say that was a great f—ing piece you just published...

...By helping us "reclaim the human from the impersonality of chance," religion sustains hope and supports human endeavor in the face of the apparent meaninglessness of the world...

...In part because many of his formative years were spent as a professor at Notre Dame, he also took up St...

...Indeed, he links pacifism so closely to Christology, that non-pacifists can easily be branded not just moral sinners but full-blown heretics...

...Indeed, the truth-claims of Christianity are embodied in the witnesses of individuals as participants in the practices of the church...

...Niebuhr's insistence on the reality of original sin and his rejection of pacifism in the face of the Nazi threat are often seen as a public reassertion of distinctively Christian doctrines...

...A Texan born in 1940, he is famous among academics for his love of bawdy humor, his hunger for Mexican food, his large perThomas Hibbs teaches philosophy at Boston College...

...Instead, Christian marriage involves participating in an exalted political enterprise, an adventure in faithfulness, a way of remembering that what matters most is God, not making the world safe or rich...

...Just what is the dis-tinctiveness of Christianity, its theology, and its practices...

...Hauerwas insists that seeing Christianity as true requires self-transformation, which is possible only in the context of community, a church...

...He contrasts the sense of "collective responsibility" that made suicide rare among African-American slaves with our mainstreaming of the practice...

...All this prompted him to focus on the distinctive role in Christianity of narratives, scripture, the lives of the saints, and liturgical practice in the formation of individuals capable of seeing the world with the eyes of Christ...

...Notice, for example, his habit of speaking not of "the church" or "a church" but just of "church...

...Hauerwas worries that Christians who participate in war are motivated by an idolatrous desire to "make history turn out right," a desire that denies God's providential control over history...

...What both the Kantian and the utilitarian models typically leave out is a sense of the capacities of perception, articulation, and judgment that human agents must possess in order to decide what ought to be done...

...Recent months have seen the publication of two books from Hauerwas: With the Grain of the Universe (his Gifford lectures, the most distinguished international lecture series in philosophy and theology, which he gave in 2001) and a retrospective compilation of his essays called The Hauerwas Reader...

...Since Niebuhr thinks the effects of original sin are obvious, he can deploy the notion of original sin as the basis for promoting a general virtue of humility, understood as liberal toleration...