Hauerwas, 'The Peaceable kingdom"

Hauerwas, Stanley. “The Peaceable Kingdom: A Primer in Christian Ethics.” Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1983.

Books on ethics tend to be a search for universal principles (or rules), valid for all (or most) times and places. These universals can be grouped teleologically (the “good” of an action depends on its ends or purposes), or deontologically (actions are good in themselves regardless of consequences).  In as much as they go beyond descriptions (“that’s how it is”) and into prescriptions “(that’s what you should do”), these books tend to contain a number of cases studies and imaginary situations. For instance, “If telling the truth endangers lives, is lying the ethical thing to do?” Inevitably these books mention “freedom” and “autonomy.” After all, if we’re not free and in charge of our decisions, how can we be ethical? 

Some of these books specifically address the relationship between ethics and the Christian faith. Calling to mind that God is Creator, the traces of God’s design for the universe must reside everywhere. Also in ethics even when practiced by those who do not see God as Creator. Authors may point to the Ten Commandments as the foundation for all ethics. Other Christian writers seem to have more trouble making direct links between Bible pronouncements and doing right in modern conditions. They may lean towards seeing ethics as an entirely human endeavor (good humanists have the same notions of right and wrong as Christians do), but see the Christian faith as a motivator (don’t only talk about doing good, but do it because the Bible tells us so).

But here comes Stanley Hauerwas with his “Primer in Christian Ethics.” Now over 70 and retired, he taught theology for years, first at Notre Dame, and then at Duke University. He has produced a library of articles, interviews and books.  In 2001 Time Magazine called him the foremost theologian of our time. He is also known as a burr under the saddle, an iconoclast, a disturber of the status quo. He may be all of that, but any review of his work must be grounded in the realization that this man loves his Lord, loves the Church, and loves the People of God. He only wants them to be what God wants them to be, a conduit for God’s hope and joy and peace in a world that of itself (so Hauerwas believes) does not exhibit these qualities.

This is a “primer in” and not “of.” The difference is telling.  A “primer of” would have us expect a more or less definitive account. Keeping the first two paragraphs in mind, we might expect a modern Christian foundational account on which, with confidence, we build our personal set of ethical stances. A “primer in” seems to make a far more modest claim. My image was that of a curious person rooting around in the ethical garden. And that (for me) was his book.   

For starters, in the Foreword David Burrell (a trusted friend of the author) reflects this rooting around when after asking “Who will help me decide what to do?” he anticipates what Hauerwas will say by observing that “decisions are not so much the sorts of things we do (or make) as they are more nearly made for us, yet in the end make us by shaping our lives (ix). So much for “freedom” and “autonomy.” So tell us, Stanley, how can we be ethical if we are NOT free or autonomous, if we’re not in a position to make the decisions, but instead these are made for us? (But notice Burrell saying “more nearly…”)

Well, Hauerwas says in more than one place: ethics begins not with case studies and human situations that ask of us decisions about what we ought to think and do ethically. It begins with reflections on who we are, or who we ought to be.  And that for a Christian is a loaded question, one Hauerwas takes time to “root around in.”

“The nature of Christian ethics is determined by the fact that Christian convictions take the form of a story, or perhaps better, a set of stories that constitutes a tradition, which in turn creates and forms a community (24).” He doesn’t mean that in the Bible we find many stories (e.g. parables) which contain an important ethical truth or religious doctrine. No, the stories (forming one umbrella story) themselves are the truth. As Christians we live the story (as also enacted in liturgy), and our lives are to be part of the story. “My contention is that the narrative mode [of Christian convictions] is neither incidental nor accidental to Christian belief. There is no more fundamental way to talk of God than in a story. The fact that we come to know God through the recounting of the story of Israel and the life of Jesus is decisive for our truthful understanding of the kind of God we worship as well as the world in which we exist (25).” Not doctrine, but story is decisive for the way we live. “…it is God’s choice to be a Lord whose kingdom is furthered by our concrete obedience through which we acquire a history (story] befitting our nature as God’s creatures (27).”

Who are we, we who call ourselves Christian? The Hauerwas “rooting” offers us images startlingly different from those captured in media and most contemporary thinkers. First of all, we are creatures – “we come to know ourselves only in God’s life (28).” Second, we are historical beings, that is, we are part of a community shaped by a tradition. “Community joins us with others to further the growth of a tradition whose manifold storylines are meant to help individuals identify and navigate the path to the good. The self is subordinate to the community rather than vice versa, for we discover [our Christian self] [only] through a community’s narrated tradition. Third, “God has revealed himself narratively in the history of Israel and in the life of Jesus (28-9).” As we travel through our own lives, we travel the story as well.

That conviction makes Hauerwas observe that there is no universal ethics, no umbrella set of universals valid for all times and all places and all peoples. “…our moralities are historical; they require a qualifier (29).” There is no “ethics,” only Christian ethics, Buddhist ethics, Hindu ethics, humanist ethics, etc. And “Christian ethics…is not first of all concerned with ‘Thou shalt’ or ‘Thou shalt not.’ Its first task is to help us rightly envision the world (29).” “In other words, the enterprise of Christian ethics primarily helps us to see.” “We do not come to see by merely looking, but must develop disciplined skills through initiation into that community that attempts to live faithfully to the story of God. Furthermore we cannot see the world rightly unless we are changed, for as sinners we do not desire to see truthfully. Therefore Christian ethics must assert that by learning to be faithful disciples, we are more able to see the world as it is, namely God’s creation (29-30).”

Those are startling invitations. For we of the 21^st century have come to see community as merely the free choice of individuals. And faith as a compartment of our lives next to other compartments (work, family, recreation, leisure, hobbies, friends).  For many Christians the decision to attend church is weighed against the demands of the other compartments. In regular surveys about spirituality and religious practices, if one attends church once a month one is considered a regular attender.  But for Hauerwas a Christian’s identity depends on being intimate part of God’s community, for only within that community is our true nature nurtured and are our eyes opened to the truth. Or, as he says in one of his other books, there is no salvation outside the Church. “Just to the extent I refuse to be faithful to God’s way, to live as part of God’s life, my life assumes the character of rebellion. Our sin is not merely an error in overestimating our capacities. Rather it is the active and willful attempt to overreach our powers. It is the attempt to live sui generis, to live as if we are the authors of our own stories. Our sin is, thus, a challenge to God’s authorship and a denial that we are characters in the drama of the kingdom (31).”

It is within that community that we learn the true nature of virtues (decisions that are in harmony with our being), the constant practice of which forms our character (the instinct of acting rightly in various situations). We then live lives of true freedom, “a quality that derives from having a well-formed character. Put in traditional terms, only the truly good person can be a truly free person. In this view, freedom follows from courage and the ability to respond to a truthful story (37).” “We rightly seek neither happiness nor pleasure in themselves; such entities are elusive. Rather we learn happiness and pleasure when we find in a faithful narrative an ongoing and worthy task that is able to sustain our lives (68).”

Hauerwas spends time describing for us how the life of Israel and the life of Jesus give us that “faithful narrative ((76ff.).  Israel learned to see its existence determined by “a series of events…decisive for God’s relation to mankind (77).” And “early Christians came to understand and believe in Jesus’ life, death and resurrection…[as a] recapitulation of the life of Israel and thus presented the very life of God in the world. By learning to imitate Jesus, to follow in his way, the early Christians believed they were learning to imitate God, who would have them be heirs of the kingdom (78).” “We are not to accept the world with its hate and resentments as a given, but to recognize that we live in a new age which makes possible a new way of life (85).”

Here is the contrast between how most people approach morality these days, and the way of Hauerwas. On the one hand autonomous people who individually survey life and believe that in full freedom they choose how to act rightly. (But advertisers, politicians and media moguls know better: by and large they see only hordes to be manipulated, and fairly easily so.) Hauerwas offers the alternative of seeing ourselves as participants in a long story of God’s relationship with his world and humanity, a story that began before time and lasts until the end of time, a story that connects us intimately to others, but in learning and in service.  As we absorb and practice that story, we will be able to not only distinguish between right and wrong, but live it, almost instinctively. At least ideally so.

This book is a tough read, not because the language isn’t clear and the arguments not cogent. Its toughness arises from the challenge to the Church, which only recently has come to face its seemingly irrelevance in a world grown secular and forms of spirituality far removed from the Christian tradition. Are any of us Christians able to look in a mirror and see the person Hauerwas describes in this book?

And does Hauerwas get “practical?” Uhhh, sort of. He does advance “peace” as a major ethical commitment for Christians, peace also in the Mennonite sense of resisting all temptation to get violent, no matter what the provocations maybe. However, true to his major point, he declares us to be agents of God, who, when drenched in our identity as participants in God’s narrative, will know what to do in specific circumstances. At times I felt let down by that. Like most of us, I tend to live easier when I know the rules in advance. It’s tougher to be always wary about living the Christian life on guard, assessing situations as they come upon us for our specific calling then to do the right thing. Then again, the apostle Paul keeps contrasting living in the flesh and living in the Spirit, in trust that when one truly lives in the Spirit one will know what to do in specific circumstances. Paul, too, places the right person ahead of the right act (law). I hear in Hauerwas the echo of Paul.