discusson

Chapter 6

VIRTUE AND THE WAY

OF THE WORLD

Si:ANLEY HAUERWAS is surely the most prolific and influential theologi:111 now working in the United States. He has also done more than anyon(' else to spread the new traditionalism among Christians in the English speaking world. But in the introduction to his recent book, A Better Hope , he confesses that he has "grown tired of arguments about the alleged vir tues or vices of liberalism." 1 This is understandable, because he has argued against the vices of liberalism countless times, often while invoking Mar Intyre's authority, in the many books he has written since the latter's After Virtue appeared in 1981. The index to A Better Hope contains more th;111 twenty listings under the term "liberalism." The book begins by arguing against the temptations of Rawlsian political liberalism (BH, 26-27, 30), and eventually gets around to claiming, more generally, "that if the gospel is true, the politics of liberalism must be false" (BH, 124).

If A Better Hope offers little evidence that Hauerwas has tired of such arguments and claims, perhaps it does show signs that he is growing uneasy with the posture in which they have left him. He warns his readers-and reminds himself- that "Christians cannot afford" to let themselves be de- fined by what they are against. He describes the book as his "attempt to make the 'for' more determinative than the 'against' " (BH, 9). His "prob- lem 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" (BH, 9). I-le wants to make those who read him as a sectarian "think twice" (BH, 10). It must be said, however, that he has stated the "against" in his messag1 • much more forcibly than the "for."

Over the last two decades the principal targets of his criticism have bec11 twentieth-century theologians who have dedicated themselves to social jus- tice and sought to make the church safe for democratic aspirations. If Hauerwas has his way, such people will no longer hold a place of honor i11 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. He has other figures to propose as models of virtue. There is no doubt that the main effect of his antiliberal rhetoric, ;iside from signifi - cantly widening his audience, is to undercut Christ i:111 idrnt ifi cation with democni cy. No theologi::in h;:is clone more to i11fh11w ( :111 i ~ ti : 111 n.:sent111c1it of sernl:ir politi l·al rnlturc.

VI !HUE AND Tl I I'. WAY OF THE. WOR I .I) 1·11

How HAUERWAS BECAME A TRADITIONALIST

1; , understand what attracted him to Maclntyre's ideas in the first pl:1n·, 1111 c needs to keep in mind, first of all, that Hauerwas is a Methodist. t\ftcr t 1·:H.:hing briefly at Augustana College, he joined the Department of' I ' h~·111 11 gy ;:it the University of Notre Dame, a Catholic institution, and ~iln· pt( · d .i position in the Methodist divinity school at Duke University in I

1 >H ·I.

llut one constant in his thinking from the beginning has been hi s 11w11 1r:1dition's emphasis on the power of the Holy Spirit to transform the lilr qf the believer. John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, taught that 0111 '1' ( ;od had "justified" the believer through the gift of faith, thus st·tti111". ·:t might his or her personal relation to God, it remained for the bcli c vn t • 1 lie made holy through the achievement of Christian perfection. This pro 1·css of transformation, which is called "sanctification," depends on divin( · gra ce but also requires a serious and sustained effort of self-cultivation 1111

th e part of the justified sinner. 1 lauerwas's commitment to the Methodist doctrine of sanctifi c<ition kd

him to become dissatisfied with the leading forms of Protestant ethics lw st uclied while pursuing his doctorate at Yale. He began rethinking :l tt:H'h i11 g that had been central to tl1e Protestant Reformation- the doct rinr ol w1lfl fides. According to this doctrine, the sinner is justified , or set st r;iiµfo , solely by divine grace through the gift of faith. This means th;:it on e r: 11111ot achieve a proper relationship with God by behaving morally or by st ri vi11 1" virtuously but can do so only by receiving the gift of faith from (;od . · I 'I 11·1 r is much truth in this doctrine, from Hauerwas's point of view, li11t 111a11 y Protestants had gone seriously wrong by using it, in effect, to 1111dn111i111· th e equally important doctrine of sanctification, which obliges th e ju st i I we I sinner to cultivate the virtues of Christian perfection. Luther;:i11 t lwolog y, in particular, is partly responsible for dislodging the virtues from thl'ir lnr merly central place in Christian ethical reflection. Hauerwas set 0111 tn g ivr virtue its due. In ethics this meant shifting the balance between thl' ri g l11 :ind the good. In theology it meant playing down the i1mge of God :is 11111· who issues commands while playing up the image of God as one who li11tl1 personifies goodness in the figure of Christ and graciously reshape s t lw

character of those called to follow him. 2

In his doctoral dissertation, Hauerwas not only explicated th e W es k y:111 :ind Calvinist conceptions of sanctification, but also connected this dort ri 11 v with an older tradition of thinking about the virtues that goes ba ck to /\qui 11:is and, tl1rou gh him , to Aristotle.) One can see what led Notre l>a11w tn hire him as a tt·:i c ht·r of th eolo gic;il ethics in what Hau erw;i s th c 11 r:ilkd " an ccumc1ii\·: il d"lrn1t11w11t nftltt•nl ogy in a Catholic university.'"

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retrieval of themes from the moral theologian <>f ( ::11 lioliris1n. 13111 wh:i1 interested Hauerwas about Aquinas from the start' was hi s account· of llH· virtues, not the natural-law account of moral principles attributed to hi1n by scholastic Thomists. Catholics had not done much better at giving vir tue its due in moral theology than had the Lutherans. For the Methodist Hauerwas, Christian ethics is perfectionist. It is mainly about what kind of people Christians are ca ll ed to be, not about what one ought to do, and lw has always read Aquinas mainly with this thought in mind.

Hauerwas's writings of the 1970s had an enormous impact on theology in the United States, for he was largely successful in persuading theologians representing a wide spectrum of denominations to reconsider the role of virtue in Christian ethics. 5 These writings drew upon and consolidated the work of thinkers like Elizabeth Anscombe, Iris Murdoch, Stuart Hamp- shire, and Edmund Pincoffs, who had already been raising doubts about similar imbalances in philosophical ethics. His most influential essay from this period is probably a piece entitled, "From System to Story: An Alterna - tive Pattern for Rationality in Ethics" (TT, 15-39), which was coauthored by one of his Catholic colleagues at Notre Dame, David Burrell. This es- say's nickname for modern ethical theory is "quandary ethics," an expres- sion Pincoffs had introduced in a paper originally published in Mind in 1971. What quandary ethics tends to focus on, as Pincoffs first put it, is "a quandary which arises because I fall into a certain situation. The situation is such that it can be described in perfectly general terms, without any reference to me as an individual, including my personal conceptions of what are and are not worthy deeds and attitudes and feelings: worthy of me."

6 A quandary, then, is an example capable of causing moral perplexity,

a problematical case in search of a moral principle under which to be sub- sumed. Quandary ethics is the variety of ethical discourse in which one performs the legalistic task of formulating moral principles and subsuming cases under them. It is a variety of discourse, according to Hauerwas, in which character is effectively eliminated from ethical consideration.

A quandary is essentially a case, and a case is essentially a narrative ren- dering of a situation that has been stripped of all but a few details that arc necessary for displaying its potential for falling under conflicting generali - ties . To qualify as a case, an example must first pass through a filter, so that it becomes thin ly narrated and, from the perspective of someone applying rules to it, clear. Hauerwas and Burrell argued that the resulting narratives are too thin and abstract to retain the actual moral significance of the prob- lems we face in real life. Focusing mainly on examples of this kind tends, therefore, to distort the situations that do call for ethical reflection. It also tends, over time, to distort our understanding of the moral life as a whole. 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 :i view of the

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"I' ll' :i s link n1.,n· 1 !1.111 .1 1•11111 1pl 1·d will . W he rever qu :111d :1ry ..:thi ('.; i.; tl1(· cl o 111i11anl vari ety ot' 1·!1111 ,ti .!1 .. 11111r<;r, elhi c;1l theory is hound to ht·\·01111· preocc upied with thl' l'orn11da1 io11 of prin ciples designed to syste111 ~1l i1.e :111d r:Hi o nalize our intuitions ;ilioul qu andaries. Modern ethical theory " re prc se nts an attempt to make the moral life take on th e chara cteristi cs of :1 sys tem" err: 23).

The alternative Hauerwas and Burrell propose is an ethics of chara t· lcr. In place of the quandarist's cases, ethics must attend to narratives that :ire ri ch enough to display the significance of virtuous and vicious trail s of ·haracter in particular human lives . Narrative, as defined here, is "th e con nected description of action and of suffering which moves to a point. ' I 'Ill' point need not be detachable from the narrative itself; in fact, we think :i story better that does not issue in a determinate moral" (TT, 28; cmph:i sis in original). The stories that someone cares about determine th e sulis1:11H T of his or her ethical life. Quandary ethics, with its thinned-out c: t sl·~ , i ~ too abstract to have much substance. Religious faith essentially in vol v e' ~ "accepting a certain set of stories as canonical" (TI~ 38), but th ey trnd 111 be stories quite unlike the cases of the modern ethical theorist'. Tli l'y 111 c· rather stories like the Gospels or Augustine's Confessions, whi ch pn· ~rnt 11 .111 exemplary instance" of divinity, holiness, or virtue (TI~ 31 ).

His critique of quandary ethics was one of the most influential :1rg1111H·11h I-Iauerwas put forward during the 1970s. It quickly became associat\'d wit 11 the topic of narrative theology that was then attracting much atte 11t io11 111 the divinity schools. Meanwhile, however, Hauerwas had been lc:1rni11n much from the other Protestant then teaching theological ethi cs at Nol 1T Dame, John Howard Yoder. Yoder represented the Mennonites, a pal'i li sl church that originated in the radical wing of the Protestant Refornwl ion under the leadership of the renegade Dutch priest, Menno Simons. 111 :1 powerfully argued 1974 essay, "The Nonresistant Church" (VV, l 97- 22 I) , Hauerwas offered a detailed analysis of Yoder's views . He claimed that Yo· der's pacifism, conceived in vocational terms as a form of discipl es hip lo Christ, was left essentially untouched by the standard arguments aga in st pacifism. And he endorsed Yoder's claim that the church's task is not to transform the sociopolitical order through direct engagement with it, li111 rather to establish its own community of discipleship-in th e world , hut not of it. The essay stopped just short of committing its author to a pa c ifi st stance. What prevented him from taking the final step appears to he hi s worry that "the nature of evil is broader than the questions of vi o le nce in itself. We constantly confront and perpetrate on others subtl e form s 111' aggression and injustice that are all the more fatal for th eir nonvioknl forms. What form would nonresistance take in the fa ce o f thi s kind of problem in our lives ?" (VY, 221) At this point in his development, l lau e r was worri ed th :11 pacifism foil s to acknowl edge the diffi culty o f cxtri c 1tin g

144 C II/\ PT 1-:H (1

oneself from complicity in the evils of the world. Rei'rni11i11 g frorn killi11g can, of course, have unintended but foreseeable violent consequences. /\11d violence is not the only bad thing there is to avoid.

The final section of the essay raised several other serious questions I( 11 · Yoder's position. One of these, which "concerns Yoder's interpretation ol the nature of the dualism between faith and unbelief," is "whether SOlll(' forms of justice based on the possibilities open to unbelief do not have ;i more positive relation to the life of faith" than Yoder was prepared to gn111 1 (VV, 217).

7 Hauerwas then asked whether "Yoder's theological predisposi

tion has not prevented him from considering a more positive understand ing of the nature of political community. Yoder's assertion that violence is the essence of the state fails to appreciate that the state as a form of commu nity cannot be explained or reduced to a Hobbesian mutual protection society" (VV, 218). Hauerwas complained that "Yoder seems to assume thal the language of justice is completely determined by sin and thus from the perspective of faith can only be negatively understood ... . Thus the lan - guage of faith can have no positive relation to the language of justice." But Hauerwas wondered whether "any discriminating social judgments by the Christian can be made without buying in at some point to the language of justice" (vv, 219). The underlying difficulty is that Yoder seems to assume "an exact parallel between faith and the new aeon [of God's kingdom!, unbelief and the old aeon." "There would be no difficulty in this," Hauer- was concludes, "if Yoder's understanding of the relationship between the two aeons were more dynamic" (vv, 220).

Hauerwas continued to deve lop his accounts of narrative and virtue whil e wres tling with Yoder's influence throughout the 1970s. But by the ea rly 1980s he had taken on two important commitments that changed the tenor of hi s writing significantly. First, he had resolved his doubts about Yod er's position and declared himself a pacifist. Henceforth, he will argue that the church is essentially a community of peaceable virtue. The purpose of this community is to follow Christ's nonvio lent example, thus exemp li - fying in its own conduct God's way of dealing with evil in the world. Sec- ond, when Maclntyre's After Virtue appeared in 1981, he immediately em - braced him as the paradigmatic philosophical critic of our time. Henceforth, he will use Maclntyre's traditionalist framework to say much of what he wants to say about virtue and narrative. 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 eth - ics had come to dominate the scene. According to this story, much of what is wrong about modern society and modern thought can be exp lained by neglect of the very concepts that Hauerwas had been emphasizing. The change in Hauerwas's thinking can first be seen in his 1981 essay co ll ection, A Community of Character, and emerges more fully in his 1983 book, '/Zu'

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13oth of these hooks desc ribe the church as a co mmunity of virlue in :1 "divid ed" o r "fragmented " world (CC, 89-110; PK, 1- J 6). The latte r (PK , •I 5) quotes a full page from the sublime opening of Afte r Vi1171 e to se t 1 k 11111e for the volume as a whole, and then adds:

lf Macintyre is correct we live in a precarious situation. L ife in a world of moral fragments is always on the edge of violence, since there ;1re no 11H;:111 s ro ensure that moral argument itself can r esolve our moral co nfli cts. No w01 1

der we hunger for absolutes in such a world, for we rightly desire p <.:~ll'I.; i11 o urselves and in our relations with one another. Granted tl1e world has ;i lw:ir been violent, but when our own civilization seems to lack tl1 e mea ns t(> s1.'t' 11n ·

peace within itself we seem hopelessly lost. (PK, 5- 6)

I lauerwas agrees with Macintyre that the citizens of a libe ral de ll1on':ll'y ~re essentially rootless individuals, not members of a commu ni ty 111iil !' d liy I heir commitment to th e same "canoni ca l stories" and "cxe 111pl :11 y 111 sta nces ." As individuals, they have their own private con ce ption s 1111 lw good, and they strive to satisfy their own desires . In order to do 1 Iii , , 1 lwl' may adopt roles and enter into associations with other people as 1 lw y w1., l 1 But they lac k the sort of narrative framework they will n ee d i I' I iit· y w:1111 to make sense of their lives, cultivate the virtues, and sustain 111 <.; a11i11 g l11i discourse with one anoth er on ethical and politi cal questions. Fthi ca I 1I1t·•' ri sts, like th e rest of us, start out with a co ll ection of inherited moral rnk~ that have been uprooted from the traditional contexts in whi ch they ori gi nally made sense. They then try in the midst of all of the fragment<1t io11 to supply some source of stability by searching for principles that every ral io nal person would have reason to accept. It is precisely the fragm e nt:11io11 ca use d by the disintegrati o n of a traditional way of life that makes peo pl(' want to cling to such principles. But because the theoretica l proj ect me re ly re Aects the underlying fragmentation, it is doomed to fail.

In the modern period, according to this story, ethics ceases to be a rnal tl'I' of cultivating the virtues and instead becomes a quest for universa ll y :l e ce ptable principles. Because neither ordinary people nor ethica l t heo ri sls have been able to reach agreement on what the correct prin cipl es ar<.;, it is hard to see why anyone should think that there really are prin cipl es of rhc kind being sought. Each e thical theory offers evidence that its co mpe titors arc mistaken, yet each claims to have found universally acceptable prin cipks. The Catholic natural - law theorists appear to be in th e sa m e bu sin ess as tl11.· modern moral philoso ph e rs. But too many peopl e di sagree with C:11holi (' chiims about di e li:1si1 · pri1wipks of the natural law for it to be plau sihk lo think th::it thl'S(' pri1w ipl 1" . .11< ' wrillrn upo n our conscie nce hy Cod . ll' s11l'li

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principles arc there, they generate too much t·o11t rnvt·rsy :1111011 g- :1pp:1rl'11t ly rational people to do us much good .

Another problem with natural-law theory, says Llaucrwas, is the imprt·~ sion it leaves that distinctively Christian beliefs do not make much difft·r ence to ethics. The task of Christian ethics should be to say what di fferen<'r Christian commitments and practices make to ethics. If Christian beliefs d11 make a difference to ethics, it should not be surprising that people who :1rr brought up outside the church reach ethical conclusions that put them at odds with Christians. The primary way for a Christian to persuade such people, as Hauerwas sees it, is to preach the gospel and to conduct onesdl in a way consistent with the gospel, so that people can see what the Christian way of life looks like. They may still reject it. When God ordains that tl1t·y convert to Christianity, they will. The Christian task is to preach and livt· out the gospel, not to find the philosophical basis on which anybody, Chris tian or non-Christian, can stand. 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, but also deAect~ the church's efforts from the task to which it has been called, which is simply to be the church. Being the church, according to the view Hauerwas now takes over completely from Yoder, is a matter of maintaining a pacifist com munity of virtue in the midst of a violent world, thus providing a foretastr of the peaceable kingdom in which God reigns absolutely and eternally.

Rather than striving for universally acceptable moral principles, Hauer was is concerned to figure out to what Christians, as members of a particu Jar community, are committed. At the center of Christian practice over tht· centuries are the retelling of certain stories and the cultivation of certain habits and dispositions. He begins, in other words, not with foundational prin ciples discovered by pure reason, but simply with the liturgical and ethi ca l pra cti ces that he and his fellow believers engage in as members of the church. Christian ethics, he concludes, is essentially in need of tht· qualifi er, "Christian" (PK, 1-2, 17- 34). For him, every form of ethics re quires some kind of qualifier- an adjective that specifies connection to some particular tradition or community. Even natural lawyers, who try to do ethics from a universal standpoint, are really expressing the beliefs and commitments of a particular historical tradition of thought and practice . Like everybody else, the Christian starts somewhere. But not everybody starts in the same place, and where you start is bound to shape how and what you think and how and why you act. Future experience and dialogu" with others may convince you to change your mind. Being reasonable re - quires openness to that possibility. There are no guarantees in this life. Wl' can only begin where we are and do our best to deal reasonably with what we inherit from our tradition, changing om minds when we have good reason, from our own point of view, for doing so.

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W li c 11 ht· :1rg 11 !'" "l\ 1!111 •.i tl1 1 q1tc "il 1111· 1111 ivt· rs:ill y v: ilid pri11<'iph ·~ :111il 1; r:111t s that t·vcry1111c · lill' , ""111 1· '< 1111 11l lr:1ditio11 :1I inli e rit:t11n: li 1r wliit ·li to t:1ke responsibilit y, 11111· 1·:111 ~cT ho w 11111 c h I l::iucrwa s h::i s in c011111H111 witl1 1•'. rn e rso n' s pcrfcctio11i s111 , Wliit111 :1n 's e mpha sis on ch<ira cte r, :ind I >cwtf~ pr:1g matism. He mi g ht seem, th e n, to be preparing the w<iy for :i ph1r: tli ~ 1 it · nrnvc rsation mnong peopl e repres enting varying re aso1rnblc point s "' view- a conversation at least partly about the demands of justice hot Ii i 11 ~ ide of and outside of the church. For these were the demands he l1:1d vlrnrged Yoder with neglecting. Hauerwas appears to have been act iwl y l'x pl o ring this way forward in the essay collections he publi s he d in tltl· I <)7 0s. But in The Peaceable Kingdom, he implicitly forecloses thi s possihilit hy e nvisioning the political culture surrounding the church in te rm s t lt:it ('o rnbine Maclntyre's antiliberalism with Yoder's "dualistic" concept io11 ol t lt e re lation between faith and unbelief. And in his subsequ e nt hook ~ , lw m <i kes the foreclosure explicit by rejecting the surrounding political l'lllt 111 1· in increasingly strident terms. "Liberal society," "the secular," <ind "dl'111111 r:icy" hecome his names for what the world has become in ;111 :t g'l' 111' I 1 :11\ 111c ntation after the demise of virtue and tradition. 9 His previou s drnil11 •1 :1ho ut Yoder's "dualism" suddenly and thoroughly reced e fro111 vinv.

CHUR C H AND WORLD

I l;i uerw<is does not like being called a "sectarian ." In th e in t rod11 cti 1111 to Christian R-cistence Today, he protests that the Mennonite con ce pt ion ol tlw ·hurch he takes over from Yoder does not entail withdraw;1I frt1111 tlw world. 1° Christians, as he rightly points out, are not faced with :i si111plc choice between "w111plete involvement in culture or complete withdr:1w :tl " (CE'I~ 11; emphasis in original). T hey must decide on their own tc n11 s whi ch forms of involvement are compatible with Christian commitml'llt ~ rnd which are not. This is something tlrnt must be decided contextuall y. " It is certainly true," he adds, that he has "been critical of liber<il soc i::il :111cl po litical presuppositions, particularly as these are played out in /\m c ri c 111 society .... The ahistorical chara cter of liberal social and po liti ca l th eory strikes me as particularly pernicious, as in the name of freedom m<inipul :t 1 ivc soci al relations are legitimated" (CET, 12). But Hauerwas remind s hi s critics that he has "written about why and how Christians should support :1s well as serve the medic<il and legal professions, Christian r elations wit Ii .I udaism, how we might think about justice, as well as an an alysis o f tl1l· 111 oral debate concerning nuclear war" (CET, 7). So it should h:iv c hcrn ·lcar that he is not recommending complete withdrawal even fro m liher:tl political orders.

l'urthermore, Hauerwas explicitly denies "that the o nly communit y i11 whi ch Christians can o r should live is the church." "Chri stians ri g htl y li11d

148 C ILAPTFR 6

themselves members of many communities. Thus I a111 not only a Christ ia11 but a university teacher, a Texan, a United States citizen, and a devoted 1':111 of the Durham Bulls" (CET, 15) . The point of this remark, I take it, is to acknowledge that, as a citizen of the United States, he can acquire cert:1i11 obligat}ons to his fellow citizens. But Christian integrity, he insists, requi rt· careful scrutiny of putative obligations arising from any social bond oth<:r than the church. "What is required for Christians is not withdrawal but :1 sense of selective service and the ability to set priorities." In particul~r, "Christians must withdraw their support" from any social or political onk:I' that "resorts to violence in order to maintain internal order and external security" (CET, 15).

Hauerwas has repeatedly argued that Yoder's conception of the church, when properly stated, does not entail an unacceptably rigid form of church world dualism. He charges his critics with a failure to appreciate Yoder' s position on its own terms . Their bias, he says, derives from the severely skewed distinction between "church" and "sect" drawn by Ernst Troeltscl1 (CET, 7). I do not propose to challenge Hauerwas on the question of how Yoder and Troeltsch should be interpreted. Indeed, I suspect that if Hauer was and his critics could agree to write and speak for a full decade without using the epithets "sectarianism" and "liberalism,'' we would quickly find out how mu ch they really have to say. Both of these terms are loaded i11 ways that skew the debate. The term "sectarianism" can all too easily bt' used to imply, misleadingly, that Christians "may always, as a matter of their own decision, be respectable- as though martyrdom were a tempera - mental disposition or an ecclesiastical policy." 11 People with a conscience can always be faced with a social and political order that must simply be r ejected in the name of their basic commitments. The question is always open whether ours is such a moment. It is true that Hauerwas sometimes writes as if no such total rejection of American society is necessary just now. But he underestimates the extent to which his heavy-handed use of the term "liberalism" as an all-purpose critical instrument continually rein - forces the impression that total rejection is in fact required. This, I believe, is what keeps the charge of sectarianism alive.

The real issue, then, is what happens when Hauerwas combines Yoder 's church-world distinction with Macintyre's antiliberalism. In responding to the charge of sectarianism, Hauerwas has said almost nothing about the

· significance of his debts to Macintyre. That this is the issue should have been clear from the start. If Yoder's outlook, taken separately, were the real issue, then the critics would have been writing mainly about him, and Hauerwas would be viewed as a relatively minor figure-a herald preparin g the way for the master. But in fact it is Hauerwas's amalgam of themes from Yoder and Macintyre that generates the controve rsy. It is thercforc crucial to determine what Macintyre adds to the 111ix .

V I H I 111• ,\ N I 1 I I Il l \\ '" < H 'I' I II •. \V <>I < I . I) I· I' I

/\s we hav e s1.: t·r 1 i 11 ti H' 1•11 ·v11111 " 1·I1 :1 pl 1.: r, Mad nty rc's tr:1d it io11:il ist rhl't o ri c de pends 011 :1 t r:1di1 i<111 :il 111rnkrn du ali sm, the intended e ffe ct of' wl1id1 is to eliminate ambivalence in one 's response to modernity. "Modc.:rnit y" :ind "liberalism" become almost interchangeable categories, two n:imt·s 1; '" ~ scene dominated by vicious individualism in the epoch after virtu e n: :i ~t ·~ to matter. When this rhetoric is conjoined with Yoder's conce ption of tlH· :hurch, the result, regardless of Hauerwas's intentions, is an especin I ly rigid form of church-world dualism. This, I take it, is at the root of wh;il I l:i11n was's critics are complaining about. One cannot stand in a church conffiV('(/ i11 Y(;der's terms, while describing the world surrounding it in th e W flJ Mflrlnl,Y11' describes liberal society, without implicitly adopting a stance that is rigicl~y rl11fllil111 in the same re.1pects that rightly worried Hauerwas in 1974. A defense ol' t Iii .. stance that focuses solely on Yoder's conception of the church bcµs tlH' question .

There is, however, another reason that the controversy over scc 1:1ri:i11i •.r11 soon escalated rather than subsiding. Not long after publishin l-\' ( ,'h r i1t 11111 ! 1.'xistence Today, Hauerwas seemed to be turning away from hi s pn·v11>11'1 interest in questions of justice. By the time he published / lfter ( ,'/11 il1md11111 in 1991, his rhetorical posture appeared to divorce the "la11 g 11:1 g1· 111 l.11111 " from the "language of justice" in the same way he had fornKrl y 1·11111 11 1 ii Yoder for doing. 12 Chapter 2 purports to explain "Why Ju sti n · 1 ... 1 II. id ldea for Christians." Hauerwas likes to shock first and qu alil'y l:11 t' r\ .111d 111 this case the fine print is slightly less worrisome than the bold. Tl1c <"11 :1p1 1•1 begins by contending that "the curre~1t emphasis on justi ce :rnd rig'lih .1•. the primary norms guiding the social witness of Christians is in f':1 ct :1 111i •, take" (AC, 46). I-Iauerwas does not support this contention by :ippt·: di11 g to Yoder; indeed, he would have trouble doing so, for I sec no 1.:v id('llt ·1· that Yoder argues in this way. Instead, Hauerwas appeals to arg um e 11t s l'l'l 1111 Macintyre as warrant for criticisms of Rawls (AC, 47- 50, 60- 62) and s11 g gests that liberation theology may have "underwritten a se nse of lilit·r:11ic111 I that is] at odds with the gospel" (AC, 53). On the final page of th e d1 :qi11 ·1·, however, he indicates cryptically that it is not his intention to irnpl y 1 li :11 C hristians "must give up working for justice in the societi es o f rnod c rni1 y." Ls the point, then, that the liberal conception ojjustice is a bad id c:i , wli1·rrn " workingforjustice for sound biblical reasons is a good id ea? f Jaucrw:1s dcl(' " not say. Neither does he take it upon himself, in any work that I k11ow c d, to explain what those biblical reasons might be.11 Wh at seems cl e:i r, 1111 w eve r, is that the "language of justice" has now dropped almost co111pit-1 t" ly o ut of Hauerwas's thinking.

'fo see the effects o f this, consider the contrast between the w:1 y 11 :111 (' 1 was di scusses di e social processes in whi ch selves are shaped :ind tlH · w:i y de mocrnti c fc111i11i s 1 ~ do . /\ c('ordin g to Hauerwa s, most o f o ur :1 ctio11 s, II\' li e fs , ;rnd ('h :1r:l('l\ ·1· 11 .1i1 .. :111 · 11C•I wh:it: th ey are as a res ul t of' dcci ~ io11 ~ w1·

150 C lli\P'l'l·: I< 6

make on the basis of reasoning. They result rather frrnn our hav in g lwrn raised in a certain way and from our daily participation in the pra ctices :111.I institutions of our society. The process begins in infancy. We le arn to pl:i ) one set of games rather than another. We hear stories and learn to recog nize and assess the kinds of characters they involve. Imitating our e lder~, we participate in the rituals of daily life. In one society this might rn e:111 bowing and scraping in the presence of certain people. In another it rni g l11 mean shaking hands firmly and looking people squarely in the eye whrn you meet them. The possible variations are endless, but it matters greatly to which ones we happen to be exposed, because that determines what kinds of people it is possible for us to be. Hauerwas thinks that Christi:i11 ethics needs to be constantly aware of the ways in which social practice~ shape selves. He thinks that th e basic question to ask of any society is what kinds of people it produces. If the basic character types made possible hy a society are bad or vicious, h e thinks, then you know the most important thing about the society in question.

Gloria Albrecht, who has written an interesting feminist critique of Hauerwas, agrees that societies shape selves through games, storytelling, and other practices. 14 She also agrees that an important question to ask of any society is what kinds of people it produces. She even agrees that criticnl reasoning can operate only within some delimited social location or other and th at ethics therefore always n eeds a qualifier, just as Hauerwas says it does. But she thinks that Hauerwas does not come entirely clean about his own social location. I would say that one reason for this is that he docs not employ the language of justice when discussing the ways in which he and his audience have been shaped into particular sorts of people. H e therefore ends up proposing an ethics that tends , by default, to reinforce unjust arrangements.

Albrecht and Hauerwas obviously differ over what kinds of people would count as genuinely virtuous. She thinks that democracy in general and fem - inism in particular have taught Christians important lessons about wh;it the virtues are. I take Albrecht to be reminding us that justice is one of the virtues, just as Aquinas said it was. But justice, as the virtue that gives each person his or her due, cannot take for granted in our setting that a patriar- chal authority structure-whether it be found in church, family, business, or the state-adequately reflects what men and women actually deserve. We do need to look at how societies create the kinds of people that inhabit them. But if we do that in a way that shows genuine concern for all of th e kinds of people involved, we will see, according to Albrecht, that Hauerwas is insensitive to a range of vices that his form of traditionalism fosters.

When some feminists refer to their goal as the liberati o n o f women, they seem to imply that their project involves taking aw;iy the soc ial co nstraints that are now in p lace so that th e real essence of wo111l·t1 will lil: :ihlc to shin"

\I l l( 11 11• \ rJ ll I 111 • \\ '1\\' 1)1 • T iii •'. W<ll< l . I > I ~ I

forlh for the fir st 111111 " /\ 1111 1·1111 11 · 1 · 01~ 11 i1. es, how l:vc r, lhat t hc rc will :il w:iy~ li c some soc ial co 11 s11":1i111 ., 01· utl1n. Yo u ca nn ot ju st take awt1y soc i:d co 11 st mints altogethcr. 'l'hc qucst:ion is what the social constraints ::irc go in g to lie, not whether there are goi ng to be any. Whichever practiccs and in st it u 1i o ns replace the current ones will in turn create th e kinds of 111 c n :111d women there can be in that social setting. Hauerwas makes a si milar poi111 i11 some of his writings against liberation theology (e.g., AC, 50- 58). If yrn1 ge t carried away with the ideal of liberation, he says, you end up t hi11ki11 g that the ultimate goal is to be freed from all social constraints. But :1 sdf that was freed from all social constraints would not be free to do mu ch of' ::inything. To be free to do most things that are worthwhile, o ne nccds 10 :icq uire skills and habits by parti cipating in practices and institutions . ( )11(' becomes free to excel in soccer, jazz, essay writing, or cathedral h11ildi11 1'. by participating in activities that place constraints on one's behavior, wl1t ·1·1· not just anything one does counts as acceptable, where peopl e of s1ql\"ri111 · experience and accomplishment can serve as role models and offn nit i cism. The ideal of perfect freedom or complete liberation docs llol hl'lp " " here. Hauerwas is right about all of this- if not always fair in ch:1r:1c 1ni1i 11 11 the views of th e " liberals" and "liberationists" he is criticizin g.

His positive purpose in making this argument is to show th:1t tli l' 1·.11 1·1'.'' ries of virtue, tradition, and narrative are crucia l to ethics. I lc prl'frr~ 11 11' ··1· categories to the concept of liberation because he thinks thcy help hi111 g1 ·1 at the question of what kinds of people our society is produ cin g :ind t 111' even more basic question of to what soda! practices and inst il 111 ion ~ w1· should be committed . Albrecht would grant that it is incoh e rent to st ri v1· for a society in which we would be completely free of constraining i111l11 e nces. If a young woman is going to become an excellent ja zz mu sici:111 , she will have to deal with standards of competence and excellence and st rivr to constrain her musical performances accordingly. She will be well sc rvr d by apprenticing herself to someone more experienced and accomp li slwd than herself and, up to a certain point in her development, by imir:11i11g models of excellence. But a prerequisite for becoming free to play jau well is the freedom to play at all. Another is access to competent tea chers wli11 care about helping her get better and offer her encouragement. If th c in st i tutions currently in place deprive her of that opportunity because shc is :1 woman, the constraints being placed on her will be constraints from whid1 she needs to be freed. In other words, she will need to be libcnitcd f"ro111 the kinds of social constraints that either exclude women fro m soc ial pr:1c tices or inhibit their performance once they are allowed to e ngage in 1 lirn1. You can strive to be liberated from constraints of those kind s without t hi Ilk ing it is possihlc or dcs ir:ilil e to do away with constraints ;iltogc th e r.

O ne thin g wonH·n 11t Td to he libe rated to partici pate in, I would :1rµ111 ·, is th c cl c111on:1ti (' pr .1111 11 · in wl1id1 wc try to t::ikc rcs po nsihility, as a pl'o pk ,

15 2 Cl I /\ I" n : I< r,

for the activities and institutions that constitute our co 111111 0 11 life toge tht·r. The institutions in question include the family, the firm, the market, tlil· university, and the church. The practices include nurturing the young, tlit' production and distribution of goods, the pursuit of learning, and worship . I-Iauerwas seems not to imagine this democratic , critical activity as a prnc tice that involves the cu ltivation of virtues or the construction and telling of narratives.

He thinks of democratic questioning not as a valuable social practice , like jazz or baseball, but as one of the acids of individualism eating away at tradition. In his vision- and here it is Maclntyre's influence that matters- liberal democracy and tradition appear as opposites, necessarily oppose d to each other. Because he thinks of them in this way, he slides into thinking that the only way to shape virtuous people is to favor the particular kind of premodern, authoritarian tradition he has in mind. In this book, I have been defending the notion that democratic questi oning and reason-givin g are a sort of practice, one that involves and inculcates virtues, including justice , and that becomes a tradition, like any social practice, when it man - ages to sustain itself across generations. I reject as incoherent the quest for a socia l situation completely free of constraints. 15 Freedom, in my view, is a kind of constraint by norms. The question before us, as I see it, is to what norms we are entitled to commit ourselves, given everything else we know. If, as I will argue in part 3, norms are creatures of social practi ces, then th e question boils down to which practices and institutional arrangements we ought to foster. The choice is not between an incoherent quest for uncon - strained existence, on the one hand, and authoritarian practices and hierar- chi ca l institutions, on the other. Nor, for that matter, is the choice between an ethics of conduct and an ethics of character, between deontic and aretaic considerations. Rules are important because they make explicit the norma - tive constraints on conduct that arise in social practices and institutions. These normative constraints make possible specific kinds of expressive free dom, different roles and aspirations, and therefore different kinds of people. Reference to the virtues is important because it allows us to make explicit our ideals for judging the kind of people we have become, which in turn all ows us to double back and ask whether changes are ca ll ed for in social practices and institutions.

Commitment to democracy does not entail the rejection of tradition. It requires jointly taking responsibility for the criti cism and renewal of tradi - tion and for the justice of our social and political arrangements. As Hauer- was origina lly put the point when criticizing Yoder, it is doubtful that "any discriminating social judgments by the Christian can be made without buy - ing in at some point to the language of justice" (VY, 219). The responsibi l- ity we share for the justice of our political arrangements ins.ide of and out- side of our religious communities not on ly concerns wh o gets to pl ay what

\' II ( 11 11, ,\ N II 1111 1 \\ \\ «!1 ··· 1111 · \\'< Hl l . l l I ~ I

roks; it al so l't1ll <'t· 111 " wli.11 t 111' I 1,Pdt 11 ill' ~ :111d d1ar:1cte r typt·s an· µoi11 g 11 1 111.:. /\ lhrec ht is s:1yi11111'1.11 , 111 0111 da y, Lakin g respo nsibilit y lc>r th e St1\ ·i:d roles and chara clt'I' 1 y1w~ 111 rn1r social syste m rai ses the qu es tion of how we mi ght adjust ;111 of o ur pra cti ces and institutio ns so ;is to give shapl' 111 ~elves who are capab le o f treating women justly. T his questio n wns ;1lread y on the minds of Mary Wollstonescraft, Harriet Martineau, :rnd Viq; ini :1 Woo lf, none of whom aspired to a society absolutely free of co nst: raint.

11 '

I Jauerwas, however, shows little interest in feminist compl ai nts about what kinds of people our society produces and the rol es it makes nvailal>k to them. The role he is most interested in-and understand ably so- is that of disciple . Discipleship, he might say, is open to all C hri stians . ~I 'he trnu l >le is t hat the normative constraints it involves are bound to be neglected 1111 less the church ca n keep its mind on its own proper vocation . l ·~ve n in the Middle Ages, according to Yoder, the mainstream church had nlr<:: 11l y succumbed to the temptation of taking an essentially non-C hristim1 i111l ·r est in justice. T he trouble started when the Emperor Constantinl' rn11 verted to Christianity. Suddenly, Christians were being asked to ad viS(' ('111 perors on how to run an empire. When Catholic Christianity hcc1111( ' !Ill' o fficial religion of that empire, Yoder says, it lost connection with it ~ 1111l ' ca lling as a community of peace and hospitality intended to se rve as :1 1'11n · taste o f God's kingdom. T he Catholic attempt during the medi eva l pnirnl to run a world civilization on C hristian principles of justi ce in f:K t 11>ad(· C hristianity too much a thing of the world. Christi an moralists found tl1rn1 se lves addressing the odd question of how to•rule empires and fi ght w:1r~ lovi ngly. According to Hauerwas, this tied them into all sorts of in tc ll er t u:tl knots, including the talk of double-effect th at lies at the core of just - war thinking. They became very adept at telling Christians where and whe n and how to coerce or kill somebody in the name of Christ.

All of this happened, Hauerwas claims, because Christians sto pp ed r:ir ing enough about the implications of their own master narrative, whic h is a sto1y about God's way of dealing with evil. What God does in responsl' to the evils of the age is to suffer nonviolently on the cross in perfect vi rt Ill' . This is the way of life (and sacrifice) to which Christians are ca ll ed. C hri s tia ns abandon ed the ethos of the ea rly church precisely wh e n they sta rt ed trying to rule society lovingly. All they were rea lly doin g when they did that was to place a veneer of love-talk over the realities of imperia I violc11rl' . C hristians who concern themselves nowadays mainly with the stru ggle ft 11 · justi ce are simply the democrati c descendants of Constantine. Th ey :in· busy basting the rotten carcass of governmental violen ce with hol y w:ltl·r, but succeed in chan gi ng nei th e r the taste nor the smell o f t he thin g.

Tt is not cl ea r how I l:rn e rwn s proposes to comb ine thi s ant i-Co nsta 11t in i;i n narrative with the :111ti111od e rn narrative he takes over from M::id11t y1\'. O ne diffi cult y in l'o 111l ,i11i111~ il1 (' rn , o f co urse , is that they locate th e c nH'i :d

154 C lli\l'Tl•'. I{ (1

dramatic reversal-the fall, if you will- in different pl:i res . Yoder locatl· ~ it around the time of Constantine's conversion, where;is Macintyre loca tt·s it around the time of Luther and Machiavelli. Perhaps Hauerwas wants lo claim that the broader social world within which Christians find themsclVl' s has always had the disadvantage of being outside the City of God, but th:it its spiritual and ethical condition only worsened, horribly, in the modem period. Yoder, then, explains how the church became confused over it s vocation. Macintyre, on the other hand, explains how things got worse, morally and spiritually, for everyone outside of the church when libern ls proposed to dispense with the kind of overall narrative framework th:it would allow them to make sense of their lives ethically. Pagans in the an cient world could. at best exhibit splendid vices, given that they did not worship the true God, but at least they were trying to live virtuously in terms of a shared narrative framework. Their modern successors, havin g lost their grip on the concept of virtue and being content to live in a society that treats commitment to large-scale narratives as a private affair, are sim - ply vicious.

By combining the two stories in something like this way, Hauerwas leaves the world outside the modern church in a doubly darkened condi - tion. It is a world not only outside of the church, but also after virtue. /\s such, its vices are not splendid but especially ugly. It is this way of describ- ing these vices that leads many of his readers to assume that he sees the world of libera l democracy as wholly lacking in grace. Notice, howeve r, that Yoder intended his historical narrative as a criticism of the church, not as a criticism of the world. It was therefore possible, in principle, for Hauerwas to develop Yoder's conception of the church in a nondualisti c direction, as seems to have been his intention in 1974. All he needed to do was to empha size that the world, like the church, is a realm ordained and rul ed by God-an arena in which those with the eyes to see can perceive the workings of God's gracious providence. He could reinforce this empha - sis by adopting the Barthian view, discussed in chapter 4, above, that "the boundary between Church and the profane still and repeatedly takes a course quite different from that which we hitherto thought we saw." The main effect that Maclntyre's traditionalism has had on Hauerwas's thinkin g is to hinder th e possibility of taking Yoder's "politics of Jesus" where he had once wanted to take it. For he seems no longer to be moving in the direction of a world -engaging conversation about the biblical injunction to build commun ities-ecclesia l, fami li al, and national-in which justi ce and peace visibly embrace. One reason for this is that justice has large ly

· dropped out of the picture . Another is that what Barth saw as an evcr- shifting boundary between church and world appears to have hardened in Hauerwas's rhetoric into a rigid and static line between Christian virtue and liberal vice. It is clear that he does not intend tn ;1llow the boundary

\ ' II ~ 11 11• \ t~ l l 1111 • II'/\\' Ill • T iil •'. WO l{l , ll I tiS

to hard en in tlii ~ w.1y .it t Ill' l<·w l nl doctrine. But his antilihe ral rli t· tori <' <'an easily give th t· in1pr('~si on th ;ll the boundary has harden ed in pr:i vti l'(' . In practical terms, Barth was engaged in a project quite unlik e I lauerw:is's. I le wanted both to utter an absolutely unequivocal "No!" to N<1:r.is1n and to counteract the tendency of the confessing church to believe that· it rn nld have the gospel without progressive politics.'7 Hauerwas utters his "No!'' to liberalism, but there is little in his work that resembl es Barth 's •Kl iv(· ommitment to democracy and socialist reform.

A detailed doctrinal comparison of Hauerwas and Barth on the natun· nl' t he church would take us too far afield . In The Peaceable Kingdo711 ( I M> (1 7 n. 5), Hauerwas quotes favorab ly from two passages in Church Dogu1111ii:r, IV/2. The first addresses the need for a humble conception of the clll!r('h as "itself only a human society moving like all others to [Christ's] maniks1:1 tion ." The second asserts that "if the community were to imagine t h:11 tl1 1· reach of the sanctification of humanity accomplished in J esus C hri st wn <' restricted to itself and the ingathering of believers, that it did not l1 :1w corresponding effects extra muros ecdesiae, it would be in flat C<>n t r:uli< ·t i< 111 to its own confession of its Lord ." Hauerwas goes on to claim that :1 s11it :d1l v humble conception of the church as "a natural institution in no wa y lv·,·.1 ·11 •, the demands the church puts on any society in which it find s it sl· ll 1111t the least of which is the demand for tl1e free preaching of the gospe l." 11:11t11 , o f course, as the principal author of the Barmen Declaration, would :1gnT . More recently, however, Hauerwas has criticized Barth for denyin g 111 (' 1u · cessity of the church as a medium of faith and 'fai ling to account for t lw role its social practices play in the sanctification of believers .18

There is an important theological controversy developing here. l'ro111 Barth's point of view, the issue is whether the church maintains a prnpn recognition of the distance between the human social practices it cm hod il·~ ;ind God's freedom to act graciously wherever and however he sees fit. From Hauerwas's point of view, the issue is whether the church ca n Ii(' given its due as a herald and foretaste of the kingdom of God. J\ l3 ;Htl1i :rn critic might want to argue that Hauerwas's one-sided ly negative pol ellli r against liberal society-his fai lure to distinguish what he ca lls libern lis111 from democracy- is the fruit of a theological erro r. But it see ms to Ill(' that one could resist Barth's especially austere view of the church wit hout endors ing Hauerwas's description of "the world " in its current form :is :1 11 expression of "particularly pernicious" liberal ideas. His debt to Mad 11 tyre's antiliberalism remains the key issue.

Many of Hauerwas's theologically orthodox critics welcome hi s ca ll l(,r in creased emphasis on the visibility of the church, insofar as he offers :1 ·orrcctive to li hcr:1l and libcrati on ist theo logica l programs that· te nd to

rnd11ce the church to :i 111n v1·11H·11t for socia l democracy. They also weko ni t· l1i s bold critici s 111 ~ nl' "1 ·11d :11 i': t lil1 t"r:di sm as an ideology intent on l'Xrh1d

156 C l I APTl•: R 6

ing the voice of theology from public discussion. Their wo rry is 111 :11 Hauerwas habitually expresses these valuable points in a way that thre:1lc11 s to vitiate his message. Several temptations are at issue: (1) an uncharit:i hk attitude toward the world , especially in its democratic forms; (2) a fai lurc lo distinguish adequate ly between disappearing into the world and pursuing justice as a responsible member of one's national community; and (3) execs sive pride in the visible church as a virtuous community. The first and third temptations combine to form another: (4) excessive certainty th:11 one possesses the virtue of discernment, the capacity to tell the different·t· between the way of the world and the stirrings of the Spirit. The critics would not say that Hauerwas always succumbs to these temptations. Tht question is whether he is prepared, on the whole, to take suffici ent care in guarding agai nst them, especia lly in works designed to reach the broadesl possible audience.

Recently Hauerwas remarked that people who think he writes too much should tell him which parts to leave out. T he quip comes in the introclul'- tion to In Good Company, and it leads into a series of reflections that meril quotation. 19 Hauerwas says that there "are two st andard criticisms agains l those who write a great deal: (1) we are repetitious, or (2) we are not ca re - ful" (IGC, 12). He adds :

I do not believe, however, that my work is "careless" though I know what I am U)'ing is risky and the risk is increased by my "contrarian " or polemical style. The risks I take are of the academic sort and, therefore, not all that "risky." l know that I recklessly cross academic lines, which makes me vulnerable to those who know "more," but given the task before theology I cannot conceive of any alternative. Such r isks are minor given the challenges before the church. (JGC, 13)

This passage casts Hauerwas in the role of a taker of risks on behalf of a noble cause. It says that he is the one made vulnerable by his risky business, as if there were n o clanger here of misrepresenting his interlocutors or the society he is discussing. The risk he runs, he implies, is the merely "aca - demic" o ne of feelin g embarrassed when charged with wrongdoing by tl1e academic border police. 20

In a note connected to the same passage Hauerwas names his principal targets: "my 'contrarian' style is necessitated by my polemic against theo- logical and political libera li sm. The liberal, of both kinds, is committed to 'englobing' all positions into libera lism" (IGC, 224 n. 32). What Hauerwas does not face with sufficient candor is the fact that his desire to reduce all oppon ents to a single figure, "the liberal ," gives him an interest in ignoring the details of what the targets of his critique actually say and do. Once they have been reduced in this way, the same arguments can he used on all of them. Reduction and repetition are both r hetori c:i ll y i111ri11 ~ i t · 1·0 the proce -

\ ' Ill 11 11r .\ N ii I i ll •' \\' 1\\' <)J!'l" lll •: \ V l>l<l . ll I '\ '/

durc . The issuv ol i 111t·1pH ' l1 v1· 1 1111 ri1 y, ll1 c 11, is wheth e r he l:1 kc s appropri:ilt' ·<i re to get his oppo11 t·11h ri g ht , to li sle n to what they are sayi ng :ind olisn Vl'

what they arc <loin g, be fore b <i ggin g them as argum e ntative qu:irry. /\nd the opponents are not merely fellow intellectuals like Rawls, Niebuhr, :ind /\lbrecht, but his fellow citizens, who, by accepting bis portray<ll of Lht: 111 , may come to view the social world outside of the c hurch as me1'e/y "pe rni - cious" and forget how to trust and identify with one anotl1er. For an ;rnthor o f his prominence and style, the risks are not merely academic.

How would this be described in the Aristotelian language he often appro~ priates? It would be called "unfriendliness." The careless misrepresentrition o f others would be called "negligen ce," and repeated instances of the s:111w behavior would be called a bad habit, a "vice." Yet he now has an audi e ntT l<lrger than that of any other theological ethi cist in the Engli sh - spc aki 11 1• world. On ly a small percentage of his readers read the books he c rit it· i;-. l' ~, so they can only applaud the amusing professor who defends virtu e :1 gai 11 ~ 1 the heathen. IfHauerwas were to leave out the passages in which hc offt·11d ·, against the vocation of c haritable interpretation, he would have to lc :i w c 1111 a great deal. But the remaining parts would be both voluminous :rnd v:il11 ab le. I think especia lly of bis extensive writings on care for the dis:ihkd .111d retarded, which express the sort of patience with deformity th:it I 11 :1111• praised in Whitman, 21 as we ll as his reflections on medicine and s11ffn·i11 1•, and his many insightful contributions to virtue the01y.22 W11en he de it·~ 11c 11 succumb to the temptation of repeating hi s diatribes against libern l socic ·1y, he is often an imaginative and generous thinker. •

Reca ll that o ne of the questions Hauerwas posed to Yoder in 19 74 w:1s how the pacifist church proposed to disentangle itself from comp li c it y i11 the evils of the world so as to exemplify genuin e virtue, given th<1t killi11g· is only the most obvious form of impropriety at issue. Here, too, the e a rl y Hauerwas is his own best critic, for he has done little to clarify how Chri s tians are supposed to go about disentangling themselves from the libe ral society and militarist state he denounces. A similar message of fid e li ty to the ethos of early C h ristianity would come across differently if spok e n liy a Dorothy Day, a Tolstoy, or even by an actual Mennonite. For, in t l10st: cases, the living example of the messenger constitutes the ethi ca l sulist:111t'l' of the message while also demonstrating exactly what must be s:inifi ec d for the disentangling to count as auth entic. In Hauerwas 's case, it is hard to see that any nonverbal disentangling has been attempte d at <1 11.

A cynic might say that the secret of Hauerwas's vast influen ce in !li t· c hurch in the 1980s and 1990s lay in the imprecision of the sac ri li ce hl' <i ppeared to be de111m1cling of his fo llowers. Surely he wa s no t propos i11 g 1'11at the stren g th of on e's sc ntim e nt<il identification with t he c hu rd1 v1111ld hy itself sec ure 110111'<1111pli1 ·i1 y with th e evi ls of the world. I lis fovoritl' p:1 " tristi c t<.:xt :1pp1·:1r •: lei lw < l1 in «11 \ 11.'.r:hortrrtirm to Mrn·tyTrlrn11. !1 But i11 1111·

158 C lli\l'Tl -:H r,

absence of a clear statement of the price Christians nH1st lie willing to p:1y 1

his audience was able to indulge itself in fantasies of martyrdom without experiencing actual poverty or persecution at all. Many of Hauerw:is 's readers probably liked being told that they should care more about being the church than about doing justice to the underclass. At some level thcy knew perfectly well how much it would cost them to do justice. So they hardly minded hearing that justice is a bad idea for Christians. It was tempt ing to infer, half-consciously, that following Jesus involves little more than hating the liberal secularists who supposedly nm the country, pitying poor people from a distance, and donating a portion of one's income to thl· church. Hauerwas has not done much to guard his readers against this temptation.

Votes cast by Christians influence the rate of taxation, the condition ol' the environment, the fate of the underclass, and the nature of foreign pol - icy. Far from making this point effectively, Hauerwas relentlessly criticizes theologians who draw attention to it. They are guilty of diluting the wine of the gospel with the water of liberalism. The alternative, from his poinl of view, is to let the church be the church. The slogan is succinct, and it has caught on among those who find the "social gospel" of Christian liber- alism thin. But there is no wisdom in replacing one reductive interpretation of the gospel by another. Reducing the gospel to democracy and reducing it to ecclesiology are hardly the only alternatives. 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. Yet they are also, as Hauerwas once pointed out, members of fami lies, unions, professions, co ll eges, ethnic groups, and nations. They are all active consumers, and many hold positions of influence in corporate and governmenta l bureau- cracies . Christian ethics has traditionally taken all of these roles as falling within its scope, and made it its business to evaluate existing social arrange - ments in light of stringent standards of justice and love. In doing so, it has entered into conversations and alliances with groups outside of the church . In the modern era, the conversations have often been about democracy; the alliances have involved such aims as the abolition of slavery, the equal recognition of women, and the avoidance of cruelty. In his polemical writ- ings, the ones that have made him famous, Hauerwas seems to see in all of this little more than a corruption of the gospel-the spoiled fruit of a misguided Constantinianism. His critics are struggling to articulate a more balanced view that would be more charitable both to the tradition of Chris- tian ethics from Augustine to Barth and to the history of Christian political involvement from the Putney debates to the March on Selma.

The core of Hauerwas's anti-Constantinian teaching is absolute paci - fism, justified on biblical ground s as a vocation of discipl eship to C hri st. Most of his readers have found this comm itment hard 1·0 swal low, but t hey

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l1 :1w oft e n iil'l'n pn·p.111 ·d 111111., 11 1t : 1 ~ a side - issue, whik: ~( 1cu s in µ- in sl\' :tcl 1111 his c ritique of l il1n: d1 ~ 111 . I l:111l·rw:1 s, lo hi s credit , has lon g insisll·d 011 1I1 e centrality of p:Ki li s111 to his outlook. H.e has not, however, m:idc ck:1r wh:it hi s pacifism <kman<ls, pra cti call y speaking. Given that milit:iry ('on ~v ription is no longer the law of the land, his followers face no governn1 e 11 1 :ti pressure to serve in the armed forces. He does not, as lJ unsin ger dol's , hold up Pax Christi, World Peacemakers, and the sanctuary movem e nt :1s vxe mplary concrete practices. To my knowledge, he has advocated neit hl'r th e withholding of taxes that finance the military, nor participation in costl y :i cts of civil disobedience, nor refusal of communion to soldiers ;ind their n> mmanders. 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. If nothing much follows from it, what is there to worry about ?

The social significance of his position appears to be changing, howcvl'r, in the months since September 11, 2001. In the new political situatio11 , p;1 cifism as such is a controversial matter. To advocate it at a tim e wlt v11 .·ells of terrorists are actively plotting the murder of one's fellow cil i :1, 1 · n ~ is to place those citizens at risk. With the implications of his p;i cifis111 ~ 11d denly in clear focus, it is dawning on Hauerwas's audience that he is s:1yi111•, something they don't necessarily want to hear. Saying "Am en" to hi ~ j1 ·1·1· miad now requires more courage . Meanwhile, a rapidly wid e nin µ- rift 11.1 •, l1ecome visible between the quite different forms oftraditiom1li s111 rq111' se nted by Hauerwas and Neuhaus. With the latter lamenting th e pa s,~ i111•, o f Christendom, adding his blessings to militarism, an d proclaimin g" /\1111· 1· ica's providential role in global politics, it is becoming much har<ler f(1r t l1v new traditionalists to present a united front in opposing a society suppos edly dominated by secular liberalism. What, in the end, do Hauerwa s and Neuhaus agree on, aside from calling themselves Christians? Th e ve ry thing that links them, ironically, to Islamic radicals-name ly, th e proposi tion that secu lar liberalism needs to be opposed because it destroys tl1l· tradition that inculcates true virtue. But it is now plain to all con ce rn ed that very different traditions are being proposed as remedies for secuhr liberalism's alleged deficiencies, even by those who speak for Chr istian ity ·''' It would not be a bad time to question whether traditionalism provides :111 adequate critica l vocabulary for diagnosing what has gone wrong with our society and for prescribing remedies, whether by peaceabl e or oth er 111e;i11s.

Hauerwas's theological ethics can succeed on its own terms onl y ii" it faithful ly espouses the life and teachings of]esus in their entirety. With th~· pacifism in his position receiving the emphasis he has always intend ed it to have, bis main chall enge will now be to explain more clearly th;in l>d(1rl' why some app;ire nd y stri ct teachin gs from the New Test;imcnt warrant 11 ri go ri st emphas i ~ while 11tllt'rs dn not. He has taken n cle;ir stn nd :1 µ- ai11s1 :1hortion , whi ch i·: 11111 1111 ·111i11111'd in th e N ew ' lcst;iment but strik es hi111 :1s

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obviously incompatible with a commitment to 11011viokm·c. Perhaps li l' li 11•1 somewhere drawn morally rigorous conclusions on topi cs conccrni1111 which the New Testament would seem to be a costly teaching for 1m111y ol the people in his audience-remarriage after divorce, for examp le, or 1 lw chances of a rich man to enter the kingdom of God. If so, the pronoun('(' ments have escaped my notice. 25 It is hard, at this point, to escape the con clusion that his ethics rests on an extremely selective reading of the Bibl e.11'

The language of justice, which Hauerwas once prized as a way of being faithful to the biblical ca ll to righteousness, is currently of paramount i111 portance in the struggle aga inst terrorism. It is the language one needs when explaining why we have just cause to bear arms against terrorists, why o ur armed forces shou ld not be firing at civili ans, and why we shou ld not hi' supporting regimes that depend on us to thwart the democratic aspirations of their own people. And there are many other worthy purposes in soci:d ethics for which this language seems essential-such as the critique of gloh:1I capitalism, the reform of tax law, and the restructuring of familial ro les. 11 Hauerwas were to stop thrashing his libera l straw man, rediscover the hm guage of justice, and put that language to use in prophetic works of soci:1l criticism, his reviewers wou ld surely stop charging him with sectarianislll . And much good would ensue. He is as well positioned as any intellectua l 10 pose the challen ge of the twenty-first century to An1erican Christians .27

Hauerwas wants to articu late the situated ethos of a living tradition, not a utopian ideal or categorical imperative based on pure reason. We havt· seen that the new traditionalism rejects the formalism of modern ethica l theory. The reasons it offers resemble the ones Hegel invoked against Kant two centuries ago. Like Hegel, it seeks a sittlich alternative to formalism . It aims to make explicit the ethica l li fe of a community. In this sense, it is expressivist. But what community is at issue here? The new traditionalism does not harbor the hope Hegel and Whitman had of articulating the se lf- consciousness of a nation. It finds modern society "generally perverted" by the "activity of individuality," and therefore aims to articulate the claims of "virtue" over against "the way of the world." 28 In doing so, as we have seen in the previous chapter, it must, however, resolve the problem of point of view. It must find a place in the modern world , but not of it. Otherwise it will lack an intelligible standpoint for its crititpe of that world. It docs not want to adopt the posture of mere nostalgia. It therefore claims to make explicit the ethical substance of a living communi ty of premoderrz virtue. For Macintyre, the relevant community is a for m of Thomistic Catholicism, and he can read ily point to the parishes that embody this outlook. Hauer- was claims, with equa l self-assurance, to be speaking for the actua l church of communion, homilies, Bible study, and potluck dinners. But where arc we to find the community of nonviolent discipleship he has in mind? I le is a Methodist, not a Mennonite, and has stro ng tics to Catho li cism . So

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11111 · wo 1Hkrs wli nt· li1 · l111 11ll "• 1lw v1., d1lc legacy of the 1t1:1r1yrs 01'1l1t' l' :1rl y 1 l111rd1. I l::iucrw :1s is 11 ~ 11 : ill y 111111 ·1! lv ss con crete than I lun sin gcr, who 1:1kt·~ 111 ~pir :1tion from th e llal'llH ' ll l> cd:m1tion and ho lds up contcrnpnr:iry /\ 111 e ri can examp les of rcsis1:111 cc and civi l disobedience to cl:irify wh:11 i1 111t·:1ns to identify with the confessing church today. Hauerwas concludes l1i s Gifford Lectures, With the Grain of the Un iverse, witl1 a chapter e111i tl l'd "Th e Necessity of Witness," in which he offers John Howard Yod e r, Jol111 l'11ul II, and Dorothy Day as representatives of the church as he undl'r •11: 1nds it. His reference to Day appears to have been an afterthough1. It rn nsists of only a single, brief paragraph (230) that does not even begi11 10 rnrn e to terms with the politics of the Catholic Worker, whereas both Yodl'r :111d John Paul II are treated at some length. Nonethe less, it gives me lwpt· r hat Hauerwas may be heading in a more promising direction.

1 n its Hauerwasian form, virtue's rejection of the way of the wor ld k:1d ~ 111 ::in unpleasant dilemma. On the one hand, the stronger its claim to rq1rr se nt virtue as distinct from the way of the world, the more quickly it d q~<'l 1 l'l'ates into a form of "conceit" that cannot honestly be sustained . ' I 'Ii (' :I<' 111a l church does not look very much like a community of virtu e, wlw11 j11clged by pacifist standards. A large percentage of those who ca ll 1111'111 selves Christians favor capital punishment, the possession of nucl ear w1· :1p qns, and using force to defend their nation against terrorists. On thl' 01'11 ·1 hand, admitting that the community of virtue itself exhibits the v i n·~ ii :1ccuses the world of exhibiting causes the substance of virtue to ev: q 1or:11 t' into mere ideality, leaving it "a virtue in name only, which lacks substa111i :il rn ntent." Either way, it is in danger of collapsing into something it puqH>l'I ~ 10 criticize. This is why Hauerwas has difficulty in articulating the "for " of hi s position as clearly as he articulates tl1e "against." An extended, scns i1 ivl' treatment of Dorothy Day and her politics would make the "for" bot Ii ·!carer and more concrete. It wou ld also give Hauerwas an opportunity to retrieve his earlier com mitment to the language of justice. So long as ht: shows little interest in persuading Christian citizens of their obligatio ns 10 the least well-off, "the knight of virtue's own part in the fighting [will re - main], strictly speaking, a sham-fight." Mere pacifism-in whic h the mem - ory of distant martyrs and the vision of the peaceable kingdom are divorce d from a visible practice of social justice- is "like the combatant who, in tht: ·onflict, is on ly concerned with keeping his sword bright."