Martin Luther and Stanley Hauerwas

Sunny Lee

Darrell Cosden

Christian Ethics

1 November 2015

Martin Luther and Stanley Hauerwas

Prior to the modern period, Aristotle developed an approach to the ethical theory called the Aristotelian approach. Aristotle was very concerned with the nature of virtues and the methods of achieving happiness. The key idea or question Aristotle had was the idea of an individual, as a human being, to be a good person. With the idea of the Aristotelian approach to ethics, Martin Luther’s ethics and Stanley Hauerwas’s ethics differ because of their view and their stance on the Aristotelian approach. Following the Aristotelian approach, in which ethics is the means by which you achieve the telos or the “ought”, Hauerwas states that the goal of ethics is to reflect the kingdom of God by becoming like Christ through worship. Unlike Hauerwas, Luther’s ethics completely rejects the Aristotelian approach. Therefore, according to Luther, the “ought” or the telos is just a given that follows from the justification of grace.

        Hauerwas’s main foundation for ethics is based upon what he calls narratives, or “a set of stories that constitutes a tradition” (The Peaceable Kingdom, 24). He emphasizes narratives and stories because they are the primary form, the channel, and the medium that God chooses to reveal himself to his people. Narratives and stories are thus the form of God’s self-disclosure to his people. Haeurwas’s main focus, then, are the stories of Israel and the stories of Jesus in the gospels. This is due to his belief that the stories of Jesus and Israel ought to continue to live by shaping people’s lives as “there is no more fundamental way to talk of God than in a story” (The Peaceable Kingdom, 25). By doing so, people will then learn to “imitate Jesus,” and, as Hauerwas believes, “the early Christians […] were learning to imitate God, who would have them be heirs of the kingdom” (The Peaceable Kingdom, 78). Not only do people know more about God through the narratives and the stories in the scripture, but people also get to know more about themselves through the narratives. This is because when people enter into the story, they can “identify [themselves]” by telling a specific story about themselves that is shaped by both their personal experience and the story they have entered into (The Peaceable Kingdom, 26). When someone talks about himself, he has to recount and reinterpret the history of the narrative, which then goes further into the idea of a person learning more about himself through his own narrative. According to Hauerwas, because narratives help a person know more about himself and know more about God, the “knowledge of God and [the ] knowledge of the self are interdependent” (The Peaceable Kingdom, 27). Going further into the idea of knowing God and knowing the self are interdependent, “[people] know [themselves] truthfully only when [they] know [themselves] in relation to God” (The Peaceable Kingdom, 27). The narrative and the stories of Jesus and Israel are the reasons why, to Hauerwas, the scriptures are crucial for Christians as an individual and as a community because “the Bible is fundamentally a story of a people’s journey with their God” (The Peaceable Kingdom, 24). Hauerwas’s framework of narratives thus provides the entry point into his ethics and how people as a community reach the telos.

        Because God’s self-disclosure demonstrates who he really is to the people, the people are then able to develop in virtues through practice. He is not interested in virtues such as, moral, intellectual, and cardinal virtues. Rather, he is interested in virtues such as character. His idea of virtues is mostly based don human characteristics because Hauerwas is mainly concerned with the question of “What constitutes a good person” rather than “What constitutes a good action?” (Grenz, 94). Hauerwas believes worship is one way to create virtues and worship is the main way to become more like Christ. According to Hauerwas, “God wants […] his people to worship him, to be his friends, and to eat him him: in short, to be his companions” (Hauerwas and Wells, 13). Hauerwas believes God wants people to worship him in order to “glorify and enjoy him forever” (Hauerwas and Wells, 14). Furthermore, God wants people to have an intimate companionship with him because that is what God longs for in his people. The main form of worship Hauerwas emphasizes is the Eucharist. The Eucharist is one of the main foundations of companionship because it heavily demonstrates community oriented worship. For example, people gather with each other, share their stories, talk about their trials and sufferings, offer help to those who need help, and then share communion (Hauerwas and Wells, 13). Worship is key to developing in virtues because then people get to know Christ more through building intimate relationships in worship. Also, “it is through [worship] […] that Christians are enabled to realize these goals” (Hauerwas and Wells, 16). According to Hauerwas, “worship is the time when God trains his people to imitate him in habit, instinct, and reflex” (Hauerwas and Wells, 25).

        Ultimately, according to Hauerwas, reflecting the kingdom of God is people’s vision in life. Hauerwas states the vision “is to assist the church in being just what it is – the church – the people in whom the narrative of God is lived in a way that makes the kingdom visible” (Community of Character, 1). For Hauerwas, there is only one kingdom. This kingdom is the peaceable kingdom or the nonviolent kingdom. This is because “the single characteristic that summarizes the journey from community to the Church is nonviolence” (Wells, 124). Doing the peaceable acts is the worship, which manifests the peaceable kingdom. This is why Hauerwas believes practicing the peace is one way the people and the community imitate Jesus, thus creating a way for them to the kingdom by recognizing the ultimate God. Hauerwas strongly believes when a person is “advocating nonviolence, [he or she] is being faithful to the gospels” (Wells, 125). Through the gospels, God is demonstrating how everything is in harmony and the way that he intended it to be. This peaceable kingdom Jesus announces through the gospels is because he wants people to transform the world; he wants people to reflect his peaceable kingdom, and by doing so is a form of worship. According to Hauerwas, “for through Jesus’ resurrection [people] see God’s peace as a present reality” (The Peaceable Kingdom, 88). The end goal, or telos, determines how people act now as the future determines the present. Jesus embodies the kingdom perfectly. He embodied the kingdom perfectly today, which is why people are called to embody the kingdom now in order to achieve the future. This peaceable kingdom “creates a disciplined community” that is built off from the foundation of the Christian Scripture and tradition for people to live in harmony (Wells, 124). Hauerwas believes that Christians should see the world in an eschatological way; people should “view the world eschatologically […] in terms of a story, with a beginning, a continuing drama, and an end” (The Peaceable Kingdom, 82). This then goes back to how Hauerwas demonstrates the pseudo-Aristotelian approach of having a developmental progress from the “is” to the “ought”.