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The Disarming Virtue of Stanley Hauerwas

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 January 2009

Samuel Wells
Samuel Wells
Affiliation:
The Vicarage, 75 Cadge Road, Norwich, NR5 8DG, England
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Extract

Stanley Hauerwas likes to be regarded as a theologian. He writes about ethics, and ethics is commonly thought to be about decisions. But he believes that the fundamental decision is God's decision to be in relationship with his creation and his people. He believes that out of the Christian narrative come particular habits and practices that shape the lives of Christians in a distinctive way. He believes that Christians proclaim the sovereignty of God and the imitation of Christ by the practice of peaceable engagement with the world. These convictions earn his ethics the epithets of theological, narrative, and nonviolent.

Type
Research Article
Information
Scottish Journal of Theology , Volume 52 , Issue 1 , February 1999 , pp. 82 - 88
Copyright
Copyright © Scottish Journal of Theology Ltd 1999

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References

1 Elshtain, Jean Bethke, ‘Citizenship and Armed Civic Virtue: Some Questions on the Commitment to Public Life’ in Reynolds, Charles H. and Norman, Ralph eds, Community in America: The Challenge of Habits of the Heart (Berkeley: University of California Press 1988) p. 51.Google Scholar

2 Milbank, John, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason (Oxford: Blackwell 1990) p. 363.Google Scholar

3 Aristotle, , The Nicomachean Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1990) 1115a30.Google Scholar

4 Hauerwas, Stanley and Pinches, Charles, Christians Among the Virtues: Theological Conversations with Ancient and Modern Ethics (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press 1997) p. 162.Google Scholar

5 Milbank points out the competition for limited economic resources that underlies a city-state of such magnanimous men (Theology and Social Theory p. 352).

6 Christians Among the Virtues p. 161, italics original.