Quote of the Week: Stanley Hauerwas
Christians must again understand that their first task is not to make the world better or more just, but to recognize what the world is and why it is that it understands the political task it does. The first social task of the church is to provide the space and time necessary for developing skills of interpretation and discrimination sufficient to help us recognize the possibilities and limitations of our society. In developing such skills, the church and Christians must be uninvolved in the politics of our society and involved in the polity that is the church. Theologically, the challenge of Christian social ethics in our secular polity is no different than in any time or place — it is always the Christian social task to form a society that is built on truth rather than fear. For the Christian, therefore, the church is always the primary polity through which we gain the experience to negotiate and make positive contributions to whatever society in which we may find ourselves.
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Insofar as many Christians assume that our liberal and secular society is at least neutral to, if not positively an advantage for, the church, we have failed to see and understand the depth of the moral challenge facing this society. Of course we all recognize our society has problems, but we assume our society and politics have the means to deal with them. We have no reason to question fundamentally our ‘form of government’ or the ‘American way of life.’ Rather, as Christians we assume we have a stake in America’s extraordinary experiment to create a free people through the mechanism of democratic government.
We thus feel puzzled by critiques of our society such as that of Solzhenitsyn. For it is the brunt of his charge that a polity is ultimately judged by the kind of people it produces, and from such a perspective our society can only be found wanting.
–Stanley Hauerwas. “The Church and Liberal Democracy,” pgs 72 – 86 in A Community of Character (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981; repr. 2005):74.
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Imagine if everyone took that seriously.
Excellent quote. I will have to read it, as he seemsto have a level-headed handle on liberal democracy.
Hauerwas should be Catholic
Thanks for the quote!
I love Hauerwas; the challenge (or, at least one of them) as is so often the case is how to concretize his proposals in a programmatic manner. Or is that even possible?
In developing such skills, the church and Christians must be uninvolved in the politics of our society and involved in the polity that is the church.
I love Hauerwas, but I can’t totally follow him when he says things like this. His books Resident Aliens and After Christendom are full of these kinds of statements.
So I’m glad he has clarified himself and has said that he does not think Christians should not be involved politically, but that they should be involved as Christians. And we know that when Hauerwas says “as Christians,” he means something deadly serious.
Michael
Right. I had a difficult time finding a good quote to use, because the best quotes I wanted were probably 2-3 pages long on the relationship of the American political system and how it leads to the pro-choice society we have.
I had a problem with the first sentence; it could be read as gnostic rejection of the world. However, I think he is saying that the world is as it is – it is good, and while we do what we can for it, we also know there is no utopian development which we can do for a final improvement.
With the second quote, I think he is saying that we should not be married to the political situation as it is; in other words, we shouldn’t be involved only as, merely as, politicians (such as people who are democrat-only, republican-only), but, as he points out later, as Christians, and Christian first, and more importantly — find find that our duty and task is not exhausted by politics.
Chris
I think it is impossible if we think of ourselves within the secular terms and not a Christians first.
This is a great quotation, it had me scurrying to my bookshelves to retrieve my copy of Community of Character to read the whole chapter. It expresses why I feel so disturbed by my Protestant denomination’s unchallenged assumption that it can do good works under the auspices of liberal democracy. It also explains why politics has become more and more irrelevant as time goes on. I am sick of governments pledging to fix some social wrong, again under the auspices of liberalism, that is the problem in the first place. Hauerwas goes on in the chapter to explain why the law in an insufficient moral teacher, well worth a read.
Friends, I am not sure I’ve heard anyone call Stan “level-headed”! If his mind is anything, it is cruciform. To that end, let me share a link to a fantastic lecture he gave on medicine, death, and community. This is a must listen! Begins with a lovely quote from Leo XIII’s Laetitia Sancte, a meditation on the rosary.
http://cdn4.libsyn.com/emergent/EP-2006-Aug-19-Hauerwas.mp3?nvb=20080904001204&nva=20080905001204&t=0e17e71b8692f4fa76bf6
Chris said: I love Hauerwas; the challenge (or, at least one of them) as is so often the case is how to concretize his proposals in a programmatic manner. Or is that even possible?
Chris, his proposal is for the Church to live the Gospel, which is by nature political and radical. His proposal is to suggest that American Christians are not invested at the end of the day in the American experiment. So Church life which requires forgiveness, repentance, confession, mutual aid, a peace and justice witness to the world, openness to life in marriage, and confesses the presence of Christ in the Eucharist, are all “concrete” ways Hauerwas is after. Unless you are a gnostic, of course.
But what does that look like, concretely? I imagine that *many* Christians would say, “yeah, I do that,” but they’re missing SH’s point, b/c they don’t know what what he’s talking about looks like.