AMERICAN SOCIO-HISTORICAL AND CULTURAL CONTEXT

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Chapter 3: FORMATIVE INFLUENCES ON STANLEY HAUERWAS’S PROPOSAL

Introduction

As the previous chapter has highlighted some significant socio-historical and cultural features of the American context, the central aim of the present and the two subsequent chapters is to analyze Stanley Hauerwas’s proposal on moral formation and demonstrate its acquaintance with this context. Needless to say, his proposal, embedded in an overall ethical project developed over a period of almost four decades by means of an exceptionally prolific authorship, can only be briefly sketched in a work of this size. However, offering a broad outline of the important theological, philosophical, psychological and practical issues involved can help to accurately capture the gist of his proposal. In this regard, the present chapter begins the analysis of Hauerwas’s proposal on moral formation and revolves around Hauerwas’s social, theological and philosophical background to explore who and what have influenced his proposal. The subsequent sections are also meant to demonstrate that Hauerwas’s proposal essentially consists in a critical engagement and appropriation of various theological and philosophical insights from classical and contemporary thinkers.

Stanley Hauerwas: The man and his thought

In the effort to understand his proposal attention should be given not only to religious experiences, theological teaching and philosophical influences that shaped Hauerwas’s academic career, but also to his personal characteristics. The sections below offer some insights on Hauerwas’s life story and his theological and philosophical background.

Biographical sketch

The powerful formative influences that played a major part in Hauerwas’s ethical project in general and his proposal on moral formation in particular are to be located in his education and career. Nonetheless, other influences, not less crucial, hearken back to his childhood and are worth mentioning. The first section will highlight his journey from central Texas to North Carolina in the United States to indicate significant events in his family environment and his academic achievements that partially explain his theological and ethical stance. The second section will focus on the influence from teachers as well as classical and modern scholars.

From Pleasant Grove to Duke

Stanley Martin Hauerwas is a United Methodist theologian, ethicist, and professor of law. For more than two decades, he had been Gilbert T. Rowe Professor of Theological Ethics at Duke University Divinity School with a joint appointment at the Duke University School of Law, in Durham, North Carolina, USA. On 30 June 30 2013, he retired from the faculty of the Duke University. Currently, he is “an emeritus professor [with] a continuing appointment in the Divinity School at Duke as a Senior Research Fellow” [GOW].
Before being established at Duke, Hauerwas taught at the University of Notre Dame, from 1970 to 1984. He moved to this Roman Catholic university after lecturing for two years at Augustana College in Rock Island, Illinois, a Lutheran institution. At the same time he was also working as a senior research fellow at the Kennedy Center for Bioethics. Teaching in various denominational contexts has led Hauerwas to develop a kind of “ecumenical” or eclectic theological ethics.
Hauerwas holds a D.D. from the University of Edinburgh, UK; and he earned a Ph.D. in 1968 from the University of Yale, USA, where since the mid-60s, he attended the divinity and graduate schools. He did his undergraduate programme at Southwestern University in Georgetown, Texas (LGV:111; HC:2010:7-8, 47-72).
He is well-known as one of the most America’s influential pacifists who gained celebrity through the debates on the morality of war throughout the country since September 11, 2001. During the same year, Hauerwas’s academic career and public profile reached a climax through some noteworthy events. He delivered the prestigious Gifford Lectures at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, becoming the first American theologian in four decades to do so. This elevated him to the rank of one of the most pre-eminent religious thinkers of the twentieth century. The collection of these lectures was made available to the scholarly readership through his book With the Grain of the Universe. Along with this book stands The Hauerwas Reader, witnessing three decades of his theological and philosophical thought, and published by Duke Press in 2001. On the cover of this latter book, the Duke theologian is introduced as “one of the most widely read and oft-cited theologians writing today.” In 2001, Hauerwas received from Duke University and the Board of Higher Education and Ministry of the United Methodist Church the Duke’s Scholar/Teacher of the Year Award. Times Magazine, through a newly created category, declared him the “America’s Best Theologian of 2001 in America” in its issue of September 10, 2001 (HC:261; Logan 2006:522-3). Moreover, the recent inclusion of five essays on the work of Hauerwas in a 2012 issue of Journal of Religious Ethics constitutes further academic recognition of Hauerwas as a prominent ethicist.
Born on July 24, 1940 in Pleasant Grove, in central Texas, Hauerwas grew up within a working-class and Evangelical Methodist family. In his autobiography written after 25 years of his teaching at Duke, Hauerwas reveals that he continues to think of his life as “a long way from Pleasant Grove,” because, he adds: “The kind of Christian I am, the kind of academic I am, the kind of person, has everything to do with this distance. That distance, moreover, creates the space that make the story I have to tell possible” (HC:17).
Indeed, some of the most prominent formative experiences of his life are related to his working-class family and a Christian background. He is the son and grandson of Methodist bricklayers. Coffee Hauerwas, his father, was “the general superintendent of the building project” of Pleasant Mound Methodist Church, the congregation to which the family was affiliated (HC:5-6). There he first learned, outside of formal school settings, at least two important tenets found in his writings on community and virtues: a community is a group of people having a claim on each of its members and formation as a craft through apprenticeship to a master — the second being an Aristotelian theme which he will rediscover through the Nicomachean Ethics. Methodism through its Protestant ethic of work and the community of the craft have helped Hauerwas become an exceptional hard worker, books having replaced bricks (HC:27-37). This family background has also affected his academic writing. He prefers to produce short essays in a process he acknowledges himself as “laying a brick at a time” because of their “deliberately unfinished character” (STT:8-9; Cavanaugh 2001:18; Cartwright 2001:626). Yet Hauerwas has also inherited the licentious language of bricklayers and Texans. He is known for his use of profane language and swearing during public occasions, academic conferences, classes and even church groups (Cavanaugh 2001:29-30; HC:173).
Hauerwas’s parents, Coffee and Johanna, were a couple who married late and were initially childless. Like Hannah in the Bible, his desperate mother prayed for a child and promised to dedicate him to the Lord. Thus Hauerwas is a Hannah’s Child, as he has entitled his memoir written for his 70^th anniversary. He believes this story – often told to him since he was six – has shaped his life and set the path of his Christian faith. While he has not become a minister as prayed by his mother, he has become a lay preacher, a trainer of ministers, and a radical theologian advocating a Christianity of devotion and conviction with innovative insights to transform the world (HC:23, 73-121, 233-260). In addition to his family background, marital life has noticeably impacted Hauerwas’s moral vision on the ethics of sexuality and marriage and suffering. Married in 1962 to Anne who would later develop a bipolar illness, Hauerwas experienced the ambiguity, difficulty and pain of living with a spouse suffering from a gradual and terrible mental decline. Although this troubled marriage ended in a divorce after twenty-four years, Hauerwas considers the friendship he has developed with their child Adam through this trial and sorrows as a blessing (HC:179-87, 199-201). Regarding this painful marriage that began with a romantic experience, Hauerwas declares: “Only God knows what I thought I was doing. Of course, I thought I was in love. I know I was at least in lust” (HC:54). This echoes his deep conviction that marriage is “a heroic institution” and an “adventure” that needs Christian virtues to be sustained (CC:186-93). Moreover, the lessons learned from this troubled marriage furnished the argument of Naming the Silences: God, Medicine, and the Problem of Suffering (1990) against theodicies — a book recognized by himself as autobiographical (HC:207).³ In 1989, Hauerwas got married to an ordained minister of the United Methodist Church holding a Ph.D. in American Church History and working as the director of admissions at Duke at the time they began to date. Paula Gilbert would become his dearly beloved second wife. With Paula, Hauerwas has delightfully enjoyed “going a lot to the church,” participating in the life of the local church with liturgy, worship, community, and prayer so determinative for his community ethics (HC:213, 222-3).

Academic work

Hauerwas has authored or edited about fifty books as well as over three hundred and fifty scholarly articles. What has been noticed by David W. Gill (2000:30) at the dawn of the century continues to be true: Hauerwas is still publishing « faster than most of us can read! » He is not only a distinguished teacher and author but also a well-known preacher, seminar speaker and socio-cultural critic speaking to various public forums.
Hauerwas’s academic books are mostly presented as selection of essays. His preferred genre of academic publication is a short essay writing model, rightly described by Quirk (2002) as a “craftsman-like character of his piecework prose” different from the “standard-issue scholarly book.” Thus short essays, including not only relevant theological literature but also philosophical and social critical insights as well as pieces of literature, stand as chapters in Hauerwas’s books. This demonstrates his remarkable proficiency in these corresponding fields, in addition to theology, from which he finds relevant insights to thoroughly substantiate his assumptions. To this craftsman-like mode of his writings corresponds “the craft-like nature of morality” he promotes through his proposal on moral formation (AC:93-111; CC:115).
As a prominent leading theologian and ethicist, Hauerwas has especially contributed to the recovery of virtue ethics and the revival of ecclesial ethic through Christian narrative and community in response to the post-modern condition. Thus his outstanding contribution embraces the fields of virtue ethics, narrative ethics, ecclesiology and medical ethics. Particularly, critical moral issues of public interest, such as abortion, euthanasia, suicide, and the condition of the disabled as well as violence of war and militarism have been at the core of his writings. Anticipating crucial ethical debates — on communitarianism and virtues, the Americans with Disability Act of 1990, genetic manipulation in American society and Christianity — has been one of Hauerwas’s noticeable achievements, since he addressed these issues in his writings before their becoming widespread talk among scholars and the public (Berkman 2001:3; Elshtain 2001).
Throughout four decades of theological and philosophical conversation, several academic theologians from various denominational backgrounds have been so interested in Hauerwas’s work that they have eventually devoted dissertations, books and articles to his ideas to such an extent that they have created and promoted, what one may call “a Hauerwas industry.” He is a singular theologian who in the last decades, because of his stands, theories or lines of reasoning has seen his name being, pejoratively or complimentary, turned to the adjective “Hauerwasian” or merely to “the Hauerwasian school” (Biggar 2011:13). Because of his prolific, varied and challenging contribution to Christian ethics, that has brought him a magnificent reputation in North America, Europe, Australia, Middle East and Japan, Hauerwas is perhaps the most prominent North American theologian and ethicist alive (Berkman 2001:3).

Theological and ethical stances

Hauerwas is ecclesiologically an eclectic theologian and ethicist critically exploring the possibilities and limits of various Christian traditions (PK:xxvi). His education at Yale, oriented towards an analytical and critical assessment of theological positions, has prepared him to belong nowhere. Being without positions derived, amongst other relevant influential figures at Yale, from Hauerwas’s acquaintance with Paul Holmer, his professor of philosophy. “One of the most valuable things I gained from Mr. Holmer, declares Hauerwas, was an understanding of intellectual work as investigation;” and he adds: “Positions too easily tempt us to think that we Christians need a theory” (HC:53, 60). Thus, introducing himself he says: I am part philosopher, part political theorist, part theologian, part ethicist, but I have no standing in any of the ‘parts’” (WGU:9).
Hauerwas is very critical of academic theologians divorced from a denominational affiliation seeing themselves as “Bultmannians, Barthians, process theologians, feminists or liberationists rather than as Methodists, Presbyterians, Anglicans or, perhaps, even Christians” (TTF: 213-6). While his particular family background is “evangelical Methodist” and “biographically Protestant,” he speaks of himself as follows: “I am an evangelical Catholic. Which is but a way to say that I am a Methodist” (PK:xxvi; STT:77). He perceives classical Methodism, not as a Protestant tradition, but rather a Catholic tradition since John Wesley, his founding Father, “held to the Eastern fathers in a more determinative way than did any of the Western churches — Protestant or Catholic” (TTF: 213-6). And thus, Methodism has helped him, as it should do for its believers, “to being members of Christ’s whole church” (PK:xxvi; IGC:10). Yet, he holds that, in his theology, he remains critical, even of his own Methodist tradition, in order to direct all the Christians to “the one Lord who reigns over all people” and better serve the (whole) church catholic encompassing Catholic and Protestant, and even Orthodox as well (PK:xxvi). If Yale influence on Hauerwas spawned a sense of belonging nowhere, Methodism as a Catholic tradition with its free-church polity taught Hauerwas to serve the whole Church of Jesus (TTF:213-6; IGC:66).
For Hauerwas, the influence of the Yale methodological approach of making theology a de-traditioned practice, has helped his theology to be useful to many Christian traditions. This he sees himself as a contribution to Christian unity albeit his problematic status of being “ecclesiastically homeless” (HC:254-255; IGC:66-7). But his falling in love with the theology of Karl Barth and the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein have prevented him from belonging nowhere and embracing the foundationalist epistemologies of Enlightenment (TTF:213-6). They have led him to appreciate particularism and express a deep commitment to the church. This has allowed himself taking part in a span of Christian communities: Pleasant Mound Methodist, Hamden Plains Methodist, the Lutheran church at Augustana, (Roman Catholic) Sacred Heart, Broadway Christian Parish (Methodist), Aldersgate United Methodist, and the Church of the Holy Family (Episcopalian) (TTF:213-6; HC:254, 278-9). Moreover, with his high commitment to radical pacifism and anti-Constantinianism, he also regards himself as an Anabaptist, particularly as a “high church Mennonite” (CMC; IGC:66).
Hauerwas is categorized as a post-liberal theologian because of his commitment to narrative theology. The centrality of the narrative is one of the hallmarks of his work; he constantly speaks of narrative as “the necessary grammar of Christian convictions” in that Christian claims are inextricably linked to what God has done in the history of Israel and Jesus Christ and the ongoing story of God’s people through time (TET:408-412; PK:28-9). However, as he sees himself as a theologian without position, he dislikes both the qualification of being a narrative theologian and even the idea of narrative theology per se. He declares:
I hate the idea I am a “narrative theologian.” I hate all qualifiers to theology other than “Christian.” Any qualifier other than “Christian” suggest that someone is trying to highjack Christian theology for their peculiar set of interests or that they are trying to provide a theory about theology that is more determinative than first-order theological claims. [..] I also dislike the description “narrative theology” because it can suggest that theology is more concerned with narrative than with God (PF:136).
Nonetheless identifying Hauerwas as a narrative and post-liberal theologian explains why he is very critical to both theological and political liberalism as he strongly champions a traditioned, storied and community-based ethics (CC:72-86; PK:17-24, 28-30, 101-2; 117-8). Alister E. McGrath (2007:93) is the one who pointedly introduces Hauerwas as a post-liberal theologian:
Stanley Hauerwas is one of a number of writers to explore post-liberal approaches to ethics. Rejecting the Enlightenment idea of a universal set of moral values, Hauerwas argues that Christian ethics is concerned with the identification of the moral vision of a historical community (the church), and with bringing that vision to actualization in the lives of its members.
He considers himself only partially in sympathy with feminist theology which he has evaluated as “so often liberal Protestant theology in a different key” and its views on justice as mostly motivated by egalitarian and distributive perspectives “so characteristic of liberal political theology” (CAV:234-5). Hauerwas claims, against his background of white southerner from lower middle class raised in the practices of segregation, a theological and philosophical kinship with Martin Luther King, Jr. He reads King’s speeches and writings and interprets his activism as an embodiment of a narrative, a “history of discrimination in the name of race,” an issue of memory, not of justice related to political liberalism (RML:136, 147). Surprisingly, while firmly setting a great store to traditional family values, Hauerwas does not hold a strong position against homosexuality (CC:167-229). He refuses to consider homosexuality as “the” issue of Christian ethics requiring a “position” since the utmost issues for sexuality and marriage are that “Christians no longer practice Christian marriage” as a “lifelong monogamous fidelity” and the lack of “an adequate account of marriage” (STT:105, 107).
Hauerwas admits of being a conservative theologian devoted to a radical Barthian-like orthodoxy (HC:37). He remains, however, an open-minded thinker, very critical to Roman Catholic and Protestant theological traditions — even to evangelical or conservative and liberal trends among his own Methodist tradition because of what he considers as their accommodation to American CLD (TTF: 213-6; CC:73-4).
As he continues to reclaim “the language of Christian orthodoxy in the post-modern conversation,” Hauerwas is far from being a proponent of public theology regarded as an accommodated reaction to political liberalism (Berkman 2001:3). However at the core of his writing, teaching and public interventions have been “his calls for alternatives to the violence of war and militarism, capital punishment, abortion, euthanasia, and suicide” involving personal and public morality (McCarthy 2003a). Against all forms of violence including the American patriotism and identity shaped by waging wars all over the world, Hauerwas vehemently put forward a radical pacifism derived from John Howard Yoder’s Christology by claiming: “I am not a pacifist because of a theory, I am a pacifist because John Howard Yoder convinced me that non-violence and Christianity are inseparable” (HC:60). His condemnation of capital punishment as essentially a means for retaliation and revenge and not for moral correction or transformation is but a correlative position to his pacifism (PC: 57-72).
In brief, this biographical sketch directing attention to Hauerwas’s family background and academic career consistently points to the craft of bricklaying as well as family and marital life as powerful and inspirational influences on his ethical project in general and his proposal on moral formation in particular. Yet more critical to the understanding of Hauerwas’s ethical project is its diachronic account.

Declaration 
Acknowledgements 
Dedication 
Summary and key terms 
Abbreviations and acronyms 
Chapter 1: INTRODUCTION 
1.1. Background to the problem
1.2. Research problem
1.3. Definition of concepts
1.3.1. Moral formation
1.3.2. Moral formation and moral education
1.3.3. Moral formation and spiritual formation
1.3.4. Discipleship
1.4. Purpose
1.5. Methodology
1.6. Contribution
1.7. Structure
Chapter 2: AMERICAN SOCIO-HISTORICAL AND CULTURAL CONTEXT 
Introduction
2.1. Cultural context: “The American Dream”
2.1.1. The American Dream through the centuries
2.1.1.1. In the beginnings of America
2.1.1.2. In the founding period and its aftermath
2.1.1.3. In the contemporary era
2.1.2. Shadows on the American Dream
2.1.2.1. Social prejudice and multiculturalism
2.1.2.2. Crime and violence
2.1.2.3. Sexuality, marriage and family life
2.1.2.4. War and foreign policy
2.2. Political context: “The American Creed”
2.2.1. Traditional values of liberalism
2.2.1.1. The individual and individualism
2.2.1.2. Freedom, liberty, and rights
2.2.1.3. Justice and equality
2.2.2. Liberal and capitalist democracy
2.2.2.1. Legal democracy
2.2.2.2. Political liberalism
2.2.2.3. Capitalist economy
2.3. Religious context: The American disestablishment of religion
2.3.1. Religious diversity
2.3.1.1. Religious pluralism and its implications
2.3.1.2. Conservatism and liberalism
2.3.1.3. American civil religion
2.3.2. Religious and moral liberal-conservative divide
2.3.2.1. Conservative Protestantism
2.3.2.2. Liberal Protestantism
2.3.2.3. Roman Catholicism
2.3.2.4. The influence of American civil religion
2.3.3. Religion in the public sphere
2.3.3.1. The interplay between religion and politics
2.3.3.2. Religion and moral education in the public schools
Conclusion
Chapter 3: FORMATIVE INFLUENCES ON STANLEY HAUERWAS’S PROPOSAL
Introduction
3.1. Stanley Hauerwas: The man and his thought
3.1.1. Biographical sketch
3.1.1.1. From Pleasant Grove to Duke
3.1.1.2. Academic work
3.1.1.3. Theological and ethical stances
3.1.2. Theological and philosophical pilgrimage
3.1.2.1. Themes in Hauerwas’s intellectual pilgrimage
3.1.2.2. Corpus on moral formation
3.2. Theological and philosophical influences
3.2.1. Classical virtue ethics thinkers: Aristotle and Aquinas
3.2.1.1. Aristotle
3.2.1.2. Thomas Aquinas
3.2.2. Sanctificationist theologians: Calvin and Wesley
3.2.3. Ecclesio-centric theologians: Barth, Bonhoeffer and Yoder
3.2.3.1. Karl Barth
3.2.3.2. Dietrich Bonhoeffer
3.2.3.3. John Howard Yoder
3.2.4. Contemporary philosophers: Wittgenstein, Murdoch, MacIntyre and Taylor
3.2.4.1. Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein
3.2.4.2. Dame Jean Iris Murdoch
3.2.4.3. Alasdair MacIntyre
3.2.4.4. Charles Margrave Taylor
3.2.5. Post-liberal theologians: Frei, Lindbeck, McClendon and Milbank
3.2.5.1. Hans Wilhelm Frei
3.2.5.2. George Lindbeck
3.2.5.3. James Wm. McClendon, Jr.
3.2.5.4. Alasdair John Milbank
3.2.6. Christian traditions: Methodism, Catholicism and Anabaptism
Conclusion
Chapter 4: THEOLOGICAL AND ETHICAL FRAMEWORK OF STANLEY HAUERWAS’S PROPOSAL
Introduction
4.1. Metaethical foundational categories
4.1.1. Virtue ethics
4.1.1.1. Character and self-agency
4.1.1.2. Virtue, habit and telos
4.1.1.3. Vision and description
4.1.2. Narrative ethics
4.1.2.1. Narrative
4.1.2.2. Tradition
4.1.3. Community ethics
4.1.3.1. Community
4.1.3.2. Practice
4.1.3.3. Performance
4.2. Core theological themes
4.2.1. Scriptural and natural theology accents
4.2.1.1. The moral status of Scripture
4.2.1.2. Beliefs and lives or doctrine and discipleship
4.2.1.3. Revelation and witness
4.2.1.4. The rejection of natural law and creation ethics
4.2.2. Christological and eschatological accents
4.2.2.1. Jesus and the imitation of God
4.2.2.2. Jesus and the Kingdom of peace
4.2.3. Soteriological accents
4.2.3.1. Salvation and the mediation of the church
4.2.3.2. Sin as a non-universal category
4.2.3.3. Redemption as discipleship
4.2.3.4. Conversion as a process
4.2.3.5. Justification by faith and sanctification
4.2.4. Ecclesiological and practical accents
4.2.4.1. Inseparability of ecclesiology and ethics
4.2.4.2. Non-Constantinian and confessing church
4.2.4.3. The church as an alternative polis
4.2.4.4. Local and visible church as a community of virtues
Conclusion
Chapter 5: PRACTICAL ASPECTS OF HAUERWAS’S PROPOSAL
Introduction
5.1. Moral formation in the church
5.2. Moral formation in the public sphere
5.3. Moral formation in the family
5.4. Moral formation in the school
5.5. Moral formation, suffering and health care
Conclusion
Chapter 6: SKETCH OF THE AFRICAN SOCIO-HISTORICAL AND CULTURAL CONTEXT
6.1. The reality of “Afro-pessimism”
6.2. The vision of the “African Renaissance”
6.3. Traditional morality, modernity and globalization in Africa
6.4. The African church
Chapter 7: ASSESSMENT OF HAUERWAS’S PROPOSAL ON MORAL FORMATION
Introduction
7.1. Africa vs. America: A brief socio-cultural contextual comparison
7.2. Hauerwas’s ecclesial ethic
7.3. Theology of moral formation
7.4. Extended moral formation
Conclusion
Chapter 8: MORAL FORMATION IN AN AFRICAN CHURCH: TOWARDS A CONSTRUCTIVE PROPOSAL
Introduction
8.1. Moral formation as character and conscience formation
8.2. Moral formation and Trinitarian ethics
8.3. Moral formation and integrative Christian worldview
8.4. Contextual Christian character and conscience formation
Chapter 9: CONCLUSION
Introduction
9.1. Summary of the exposition of Hauerwas’s proposal
9.2. Contribution
9.3. Limitations of the dissertation
9.4. Possibilities for further research
References
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