The Ecclesiology of Stanley Hauerwas
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The Ecclesiology of Stanley Hauerwas

A Christian Theology of Liberation

John B. Thomson

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eBook - ePub

The Ecclesiology of Stanley Hauerwas

A Christian Theology of Liberation

John B. Thomson

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About This Book

This book presents the theological work of Stanley Hauerwas as a distinctive kind of 'liberation theology'. John Thomson offers an original construal of this diffuse, controversial, yet highly significant modern theologian and ethicist. Organising Hauerwas' corpus in terms of the focal concept of liberation, Thomson shows that it possesses a greater degree of coherence than its usual expression in ad hoc essays or sermons. John Thomson locates Hauerwas in relation to a wide range of figures, including the obvious choices - Rauschenbusch, Niebuhr, Barth, Yoder, Lindbeck, MacIntyre, Milbank and O'Donovan - as well as less expected figures such as Gadamer, Habermas, Ricoeur, Pannenberg, Moltmann, and Hardy. Providing a structured and rigorous outline of Hauerwas' intellectual roots, this book presents an account of his theological project that demonstrates an underlying consistency in his attempt to create a political understanding of Christian freedom, reaching beyond the limitations of the liberal post-enlightenment tradition. Hauerwas is passionate about the importance of moral discourse within the Christian community and its implications for the Church's politics. When the Church is often perceived to be in decline and an irrelevance, Hauerwas proffers a way of recovering identity, confidence and mission, particularly for ordinary Christians and ordinary churches. Thomson evaluates the comparative strengths and weaknesses of Hauerwas' argument and indicates a number of vulnerabilities in his project.

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Publisher
Routledge
Year
2017
ISBN
9781351891196

Part I
Delineating an Architecture of Stanley Hauerwas’s Project

Chapter 1
Recovering Christian Liberty

‘Linear exposition of a system has not to date been Hauerwas’s greatest contribution’.1 Indeed, the variety, extent and occasional nature of his work make any distillation of his thought a major challenge. Hauerwas is a writer of essays and sermons rather than books. His thought appears as that of a maverick rather than a systematic thinker, a preacher as much as an academic, yet the very provocative nature of his ideas and their colourful expression render his work as engaging as it can be enigmatic. Nevertheless his considerable output over the past three decades reveals a coherent project rooted in his earliest writings and which achieves its distinctive shape with the publication of The Peaceable Kingdom in 1983. This first section will therefore seek to delineate an architecture of this emerging project with particular attention to its emancipatory suggestiveness. This will enable us thereafter to consider whether his ecclesiology offers a distinctively Christian theology of liberation from the Enlightenment legacy.

Questing for a Distinctively Christian Ethic: Agency, Character, Virtue and Narrative

Hauerwas’s earliest thought is expressed in the distillation of his doctoral thesis first published in 1975 as Character and the Christian Life.2 In this work Hauerwas seeks to reintroduce concepts of virtue and character into Christian ethics in order to avoid an understanding of the self as passive and atomistic, implied by the occasionalistic nature of Protestant command ethics.3 In so doing Hauerwas sought to reanimate a discussion on sanctification, which in Barthian thought had been subsumed within justification, and thereby to introduce the notions of character and the virtues as a means of restoring the pivotal role of the agent in ethics. This also challenged a misplaced concentration upon acts and decisions in contemporary ethical theory by asserting that the formation of the agent’s character over time informed the nature and status of ethical decisions.4
Sanctification, according to Hauerwas, must be distinguished from justification, not in order to legitimate a soft form of Pelagianism, but in order to enable a theological rationale for the display of Christian believing and therefore distinctive Christian ethics. Hence his reconsideration of the insights of Calvin, John Wesley and Jonathan Edwards whose respective doctrines of sanctification suggested an approach that escaped both the intense historicism of Barth and Bultmann and the anarchy of situation ethics, the unexpected offspring of their command ethics.5 In Hauerwas’s discussion, command ethics’ concern to root everything in grace and its preoccupation with the moment of decision are qualified by seeing sanctification, or the formation of character, as about living out of the establishment of the Kingdom by Jesus Christ and as witness to this reign, rather than being an attempt to realize it.6 Character, he argues is ‘the qualification of man’s self-agency through his beliefs, intentions, and actions, by which a man acquires a moral history befitting his nature as a self-determining being’.7 Having a character is not about being a character in the popular sense, but is about living in a particular way in which it is asserted that ‘man is more than that which simply happens to him’.8 It implies notions of integrity, consistency, responsibility, habit, and accountable willing. It also involves a particularity and sense of integration that distinguish one agent from another more explicitly than the concept of virtues alone. Character, most pertinently from an ecclesiological perspective, also presumes a context and a community from which moral norms, values and direction are drawn, yet has at its heart the notion of self-agency.9 Hence it includes a sense of tradition and history, while rejecting any hard determinism. Character, above all, is the agent’s point of view, rather than that of the detached and abstract spectator so beloved of post-Enlightenment ethical theory.10 Yet equally, ‘the self that gives rise to agency is fundamentally a social self not separable from its social and cultural environment’.11 Hence the agent is always engaged and a subject within a greater narrative than their own and thereby gains intelligibility from this anterior narrative world.12
Such a conception of the place of character in the moral life leads Hauerwas to retrieve the legacy of Aristotle and Aquinas, both of whom recognize that it is virtue rather than law which makes a good man. To have character, according to Aristotle, involves being able to give reasons for one’s actions rather than specifying causes.13 It involves the development of practical reason or phronesis, an approach that does not simply judge an issue, but includes a description of it in the process. It is about having intentions, rather than simply being purposive, for intentions can only be articulated by the agent rather than by the spectator.14 In addition, the communicability of these explained intentions reveals the ‘social nature of action’ which is ‘but a reflection of the essential sociality of man’s nature’.15
Character is therefore something disclosed and is understood through attention rather than by empiricism. Equally, it is character that indicates choice, rather than vice versa for ‘by acting under one description rather than another the agent not only determines what he will do but also the kind of person he will be’.16 Hence, consistency rather than definitive predictability is a by-product of character, for character, as a timeful reality, is open to development.
For Hauerwas, this depiction of character questions which beliefs and resources inform the generation of a person’s identity, given its distinctiveness and particularity. For the Christian ‘to have Christian character is to have one’s attention directed by the description of the world that claims it has been redeemed by the work of Christ’.17 The intrinsically ecclesial nature of this is clear when he asserts that we are formed through the church and sanctification to see the world as redeemed in Jesus Christ.18 Yet this is not by abstract rules but by stories and metaphors which provide us with narrative accounts that suggest how we should see, since ‘the significance of stories is the significance of character for the moral life as our experience, itself, if it is to be coherent, is but an incipient story’.19 Although all are shaped by a variety of stories present in their cultural and biographical situation, for the Christian the priority must be to attend to the substantive stories of the faith.
While Character and the Christian Life reflects the generation of Hauerwas’s particular ethical trajectory, it is in the essays of these early years that we see the way his project develops. Although his first collection of essays, Vision and Virtue: Essays in Christian Ethical Reflection, was published in 1974, there are several others from the same period which reflect Hauerwas’s determination that the ‘central intention and unifying focus of these essays is the attempt to do responsible and constructive ethical reflection’.20 This is articulated in the face of those who decry the possibility of a distinctive Christian ethic, given the dislocation of religion and morality in much post-Enlightenment ethics, the apparent sectarianism of past Christian ethical endeavour and the pluralist culture of academic departments. At this early stage of his career, Hauerwas expresses concern at the ‘narrow conception of the moral experience accepted by many philosophers and religious ethicists’,21 and asserts that ethics is not simply about the justification for particular actions and practices. As a confessedly Christian ethicist, Hauerwas maintains that the Gospel is about
the nature of the self and how it is formed for our life project [and that] once ethics is focused on the nature and moral determination of the self, vision and virtue again become morally significant categories. We are as we come to see and as that seeing becomes enduring in our intentionality. We do not come to see, however, just by looking but by training our vision through the metaphors and symbols that constitute our central convictions. How we come to see therefore is a function of how we come to be since our seeing necessarily is determined by how our basic images are embodied by the self, i.e. our character.22
For Hauerwas as a Christian thinker, these basic images are to be tested against the conviction that ‘the world has been redeemed by the work and person of Christ’.23
Such a pregnant introduction reveals much of Hauerwas’s distinctive project present at the outset of his academic career. The priority of vision and formation in ethics, an appreciation of the centrality in ethics of notions of virtue and character and the sense that a distinctive reservoir of formative convictions has to be identified are quite explicit. Similarly, Hauerwas is beginning to grasp the relationship between ethics and church through his exposition of Yoder’s theological ethics, although it is still clear that most of his attention at this stage remains focused upon the self as the principal agent in displaying Christian character.24 This he later qualifies as the role of the community supplants that of the singular ‘liberal’ self.25
Hauerwas’s concern with impoverished Christian ethics emerges particularly in his engagement with Joseph Fletcher’s Situation Ethics and the ‘new morality’ emerging in the wake of the Second Vatican Council. Whilst acknowledging a greater appreciation of the contingency and historicality of ethical decision in Fletcher, the latter’s concentration on the centrality of the decision is too simplistic, since it assumes that the situation is an uncontentious given. This continues the positivist myth of spectator neutrality and posits an abstract agent, whose own contingency and historicality are ignored. For Hauerwas a better metaphor of the moral life is ‘like an artist engaged in his work rather than a critic making a judgement about a finished product’.26 The moral life is not about fixed entities confronting each other as situation and decision-maker arbitrated by an ambiguous concept called ‘love’. Rather, both the situation and the agent are in formation, a process that does not lead to anarchic subjectivism, since the agent is not isolated but part of a substantial community, whose language embodies moral convictions. As such, it is not the decision that creates value, for values anticipate decision-making, embedded as they are in the linguistic community of the agent. Indeed, it is the formation of the agent that bridges this apparent divide, since such formation frames and names the ‘situation’ in terms of the agent’s own linguistically mediated convictions. ‘To learn moral notions is in effect to act upon the world as it trains our vision a...

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