Stanley Hauerwas is the most provocative and widely read Christian ethicist in the English-speaking world of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. His A Community of Character (1981) and The Peaceable Kingdom (1983) developed a Christian political philosophy centered on the Church as an alternative polis shaped by the narrative of Scripture, arguing that Christian ethics cannot be abstracted from the particular community formed by biblical narrative into liberal proceduralism. His work combines Aristotelian virtue ethics, Anabaptist ecclesiology, pacifist politics, and close reading of the New Testament into a distinctive and challenging whole.
The Thinker and His Work
Stanley Hauerwas (born 1940 in Pleasant Grove, Texas) was raised in a Methodist family, studied theology at Yale under James Gustafson, and taught at Notre Dame before moving to Duke Divinity School in 1984. His intellectual formation combined Anglophone analytic philosophy, Aristotelian ethics (he studied under Alasdair MacIntyre's circle before MacIntyre's conversion to Catholicism), and the narrative theology of Hans Frei and George Lindbeck at Yale. The decisive influence was John Howard Yoder's The Politics of Jesus (1972), which convinced Hauerwas that Christian pacifism is not a peripheral option but the central implication of Jesus's life and teaching.
Hauerwas was named by Time magazine as 'America's Best Theologian' in 2001 - an honor he accepted with characteristic ambivalence, noting that 'America has no best theologians.' His body of work, spanning more than forty books, is characterized by its unflinching confrontation of liberal assumptions about the relationship between religion and public life, its recovery of the Church as a counter-cultural political community, and its insistence that Christian ethics requires the Church to be the Church rather than a chaplain to liberal society.
Biblical Texts Engaged
Matthew 5:38-39 - 'You have heard that it was said, "An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth." But I say to you, Do not resist the one who is evil. But if anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also' - is the central text of Hauerwas's pacifism. He reads this not as impractical idealism or private spiritual counsel but as a political program: the community gathered around Jesus is constituted by the renunciation of retaliatory violence, and this renunciation is not an impossible demand but the natural expression of a people who believe that God, not Caesar, rules the world.
Matthew 5:44 - 'But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you' - extends the political logic. The command to love enemies is the most politically distinctive aspect of Jesus's teaching because it refuses the friend-enemy distinction that Carl Schmitt identified as the foundation of the political. A community constituted by enemy-love is a radically different political form from any that human history had previously produced - and Hauerwas argues that the Church is meant to be just this.
Revelation 21:2 - 'And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband' - provides the eschatological horizon of Hauerwas's ecclesiology. The Church is not the Kingdom of God but an anticipation of it - a provisional, imperfect, but genuine foretaste of the City of God that is the ultimate destiny of history. This eschatological perspective relativizes all earthly political arrangements, including liberal democracy, and refuses to identify any human political order with the Kingdom.
Core Argument
Hauerwas's central philosophical thesis is that ethics is narrative-dependent: who I am as a moral agent, what virtues I have, what goods I pursue, and what obligations I recognize are all constituted by the particular story I inhabit. There is no view from nowhere - no neutral, tradition-independent rationality from which universal moral principles can be derived. The liberal tradition's pretense to such neutrality is itself a particular tradition with its own particular vision of the human good.
The Church is the community constituted by the narrative of Israel and Jesus: the story of a God who creates the world, calls a people, sends his Son, and is gathering all things toward their eschatological consummation. Living in this narrative shapes a particular kind of character - what Hauerwas calls a 'peaceable people' - whose virtues include patience, humility, forgiveness, hospitality, and nonviolence. These virtues are not merely individual qualities but social practices sustained by the community's common life.
Hauerwas's 'Constantinian critique' argues that the Church's accommodation to political power - beginning with Constantine's adoption of Christianity as the Roman empire's preferred religion - was a theological and ethical disaster. When the Church ceased to be a counter-cultural community and became the chaplain of the imperial order, it lost its most important social witness: the demonstration that a different way of living together is possible.
Intellectual Context
Hauerwas's three most important intellectual dialogue partners are Aristotle (whose virtue ethics and account of moral formation in a political community provide the philosophical framework), Alasdair MacIntyre (whose After Virtue argued that modern ethical discourse has lost the narrative contexts that give moral concepts their meaning), and John Howard Yoder (whose The Politics of Jesus provided the Christological grounding of Hauerwas's pacifism). The tension between MacIntyre's Thomist communitarianism and Yoder's Anabaptist pacifism runs through Hauerwas's work as a productive irresolution.
Reception and Critique
Hauerwas has been criticized from multiple directions. Liberal Protestant ethicists argue that his ecclesiocentrism is sectarian - that it withdraws the Church from political responsibility. Reinhold Niebuhr's legacy has generated the most sustained critique: that Hauerwas's pacifism is irresponsible 'perfectionism' that abandons the neighbor to evil by refusing the use of force. Catholic natural law theorists argue that his narrative-dependent ethics undermines the universal moral claims that provide the basis for dialogue with secular society. Feminist theologians have noted that the 'peaceable kingdom' can too easily become a community that pacifies those who should resist.
Legacy
Hauerwas transformed Christian ethics from a discipline focused on applying universal moral principles to public policy debates into a discipline focused on the formation of character in the community of faith. His recovery of the Church as a political community in its own right - rather than a voluntary association that reinforces liberal values - has influenced post-liberal theology, Radical Orthodoxy, and the emergent church movement.
Key Passages
'The first task of the church is not to make the world more just but to make the world the world.' (A Community of Character)
'Christians do not first ask, "What are the social conditions for the good life?" They ask, "What kind of community do we need to be to be faithful to the story of God?"' (The Peaceable Kingdom)
Contemporary Relevance
In an era of political disillusionment, the collapse of liberal consensus, and renewed interest in community and belonging, Hauerwas's vision of the Church as a counter-cultural political community has gained wider resonance. His insistence that the most important political question is not 'what policies should we support?' but 'what kind of people are we being formed to be?' offers an important corrective to the Christian tendency to reduce political engagement to electoral activity.