Moved by God to Act

An Ecumenical Ethic of Grace in Community

Aikin

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781630871147
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Moved by God to Act offers a fresh description of Christian moral action as a moment of connection between divine and human agency. Through an ecumenical consideration of a variety of resources, this book gives an accessible description of the work of God's grace not only in individual Christian agency but also within the dynamics of Christian community. Moved by God to Act brings the contemporary theological ethics of community into dialogue with the pneumatology of Thomas Aquinas. The ethic emerging from this dialogue lifts up the centrality of God's grace in Christian community while at the same time offering a detailed articulation of the human being as naturally and beautifully drawn into cooperation with God's grace in the ethical life. The book concludes by showing how Aquinas stands in substantial harmony with the contemporary authors discussed, offering a proper description of God's agency in individual Christian human agency and the dynamics of the body of the Christian community to which the contemporary discourse so rightly points. Moved by God to Act is an attempt to speak to the work of God in the life and day-to-day action of Christians and Christian communities as moved to act by the Holy Spirit.

1

Stanley Hauerwas

Stanley Hauerwas and Contemporary Theological Ethics

The Place of Stanley Hauerwas in the Present Treatment

Stanley Hauerwas rightly refocuses the attention of theological ethics on the importance of community, the distinctiveness of Christian language, and the necessary bond between Christian convictions and their concrete performance. Additionally, his contribution has directed the discourse to look again for the work of an entirely transcendent God amongst the banality of dynamics internal to the Christian worshipping community. He places Jesus Christ at the center of Christian theological ethics and draws from Wesleyan notions of sanctification to argue for the importance of God’s grace for Christian transformation. Even given the great importance he grants to the categories of narrative and tradition, Christian ethics is not merely an ethical system well informed by a storied reality, but is rather the possibility of moral action created anew by means of God’s redeeming and sanctifying grace as given through Jesus Christ. For Hauerwas, Christian ethics is a linguistic retraining of vision and the ability to recognize the eschatological self in a truthful story within a community of memory. In these ways, Hauerwas’ work adds much to the potential for articulating an ecumenical ethic of grace in community.

For Hauerwas, Christian ethics is a radical relationship with God’s transforming grace through transformed vision, language, praxis, and community. This trajectory heralds a different consideration of ethics in the contemporary discourse. Christian ethical transformation is a connection between free, authentic human action and God’s redeeming agency. In Hauerwas’ efforts toward this cooperative and relational framework for ethics he places himself in a larger stream of theologians across the centuries who have strived to articulate that same framework for the Christian ethical life. In the present chapter, I hope to situate Hauerwas with regard to this project and show those places in which his theology points to the need for this connection between divine and human agency in the moral life, and articulate the means through which he sees this transformative connection occurring. At the same time, I hope to show how much he can benefit from other theologians who share this overall conviction about the nature of Christian ethics, but articulate the connection with complementary language around the shape of human agency, as such, which would take this ideal of an ethic of grace much further. I contend that the goal to which Hauerwas points the contemporary discourse could be sped along by a close conversation with the theology of Thomas Aquinas and the more complete picture of the causal dependence in human action and its connection with God’s grace that Aquinas can provide.

Of course, Hauerwas’ treatments of these dynamics have changed considerably in the past thirty-plus years. Toward the beginning of his writing career, Hauerwas argued for Christian character as completely self-determined and Christian agency as entirely self-caused (closing the structure of the Christian act to any and all external influences). Hauerwas’ later writings, however, depict the reality that we are in fact determined by the communities in which we live and the narratives by which they subsist. Nonetheless, Hauerwas places strict limits on the ways in which the self can be determined by any external cause. The shape of Christian character, for instance, is quite permeated by the convictions and practices of the worshipping Church for the later Hauerwas. The tools Hauerwas utilizes as he moves toward this increased permeability of the self are truly striking. Formation is linguistic and conceptual. A story-formed community of practice shapes Christian agency through shaping language as the pattern of action and life together. The shaping of Christian character is formation to live Christian foundational grammar. Christian agency, for Hauerwas, is pliable through molding concept, grammar, and thus vision and the ability to live the truth. God speaks forth the church as a new grammar and Christians live as an extension of the Gospel narratives. Hauerwas pushes the discourse to account for Christian ethical transformation in terms of God’s grace, Christian worship, and the Gospel narratives.

His description of ethics points to a deep connection with divine agency in the individual, and in the worshipping community as a whole. Hauerwas could much benefit, I contend, from a much thicker description of the shape of ethical agency in itself. While his ethics describe the impact of God’s grace on the grammar, the vision, and the practice of a Christian, they rely largely on the transformative impact of foundational grammar and a narrative-formed community to do so. Other tools can carry his ethics beyond these limits and speak more directly to the pliability of human agency to the movements and non-competitive shaping action of God’s grace.

As I will argue in this chapter, Hauerwas affords the grace of God in sanctification and the work of the Holy Spirit a central place in his theology, though he is in need of more detailed conceptual tools with regard to grace, the shape of human agency, and its potential to be drawn into cooperation with grace. The greater complexity with which his more recent writing offers to the shape of Christian moral action is a helpful indication that these detailed tools could move the ethical trajectory he offers forward. The overall hope of his place in this project is to articulate an ethic of grace like the one toward which he points, through placing him in interaction with other theologians aiming at the same grace-centered picture of Christian ethics.

The Centrality of Divine Agency

Stanley Hauerwas writes as a preacher and a teacher. Saying that his writing is occasional sells short these two important descriptors. Hauerwas writes not so much to provide a perfectly sound system as to give instruction where it is required, and to preach the centrality of Christ for the Christian life where it needs to be heard. His great gift is insisting on the applicability of Christian convictions and narratives to the ethical life. “Ethical reflection may exist in a highly abstract form, but men cannot. We must decide to stay married or celibate, to fight in war or not to fight, to teach our children this rather than that.”1 Hauerwas’ moral theology seeks to frame a lived existence, never stopping at idealistic frameworks.

The theological ethics of Stanley Hauerwas are, inarguably, christologically centered. Jesus Christ is not just the center of a faith upon which a distinctive community rests, but the promise that our lives rest on a new hope and are enfolded in a new reality. “The hope by which we journey is not of our own making. Far from arising from our own unworthiness, our hope comes as an open invitation to locate our lives in a new history that is made present in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.”2 This invitation to locate ourselves in a new history gives hope in that it is not a story of our own making. The hope that we can locate our lives in Christ is not to be drawn from the story, but is the story. Or, as Hauerwas writes, “the claim that the story of Jesus is a social ethic means that there is no moral point or message that is separable from the story of Jesus . . . Jesus’ identity is prior to the ‘meaning’ of the story. There is no meaning that is separable from the story itself.”3 Trying to find a core to Christian ethics beyond Christ fails to cling to the hope that moral action emerges from becoming a part of God’s story. The grace of God in Jesus Christ is much more than a mere facet of theological ethics.4 Rather, “Christians betray themselves [when] we say and act as if the cross of Christ is incidental to God’s being. In fact, the God we worship and the world God created cannot be truthfully known without the cross.”5 This story in which we are enfolded is the story of God’s saving action through Christ. Christian virtue is inseparable from God’s redeeming and sanctifying work. Moral action emerges, then, not from reflection upon Christ, but is rather “a response to a love relation with God in Christ. That is why it makes sense for the Christian Aquinas to say that true or complete virtue is fundamentally not our own achievement but is rather infused in us by God’s grace, which saves us and enables us.”6 The ethic of Stanley Hauerwas consistently indicates Christ as its center and the dynamics of Christian community as its setting. This indication is not just in the centrality of the story of Jesus, but rather strives to be an ethic in which the “love relation with God in Christ” and the grace of God are the conditions sine qua non.

As Jeffery Stout has rightly noted, “one constant in [Hauerwas’] thinking from the beginning has been his own tradition’s emphasis on the power of the Holy Spirit to transform the life of the believer.”7 The grace of God “saving and enabling us” finds voice in a variety of ways in Hauerwas’ ethics, but most primarily in the Christian knowing the truth about herself through Christian narrative. For the Christian to know herself and her moral acts according to something other than the “love relation with God in Christ,” is to miss this truth. “By making the story of such a Lord central to their lives, Christians are enabled to see the world accurately and without illusion . . . by being trained through Jesus’ story we have the means to name and prevent these ...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Christian Moral Action
• Chapter 1: Stanley Hauerwas
• Chapter 2: Reinhard Hütter
• Chapter 3: Common Threads
• Chapter 4: Thomas Aquinas
• Chapter 5: Toward an Ecumenical Ethic of Grace
• Conclusion: A Community-Centered Ecumenical Ethic of Grace
• Bibliography