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T h c r d o i v , loi I laiK-rwas, the re is no such ih ing as an unqua lif ied c tluc ,
an e th ic in the ab s trac t that app lies lo all peop le simply b ecau se they are
h um an . An e th ic is always qua lif ied by the s to ry o f a p a r t ic u la r com m u n ity .
Thus Hauerwas insists that ethics for the Christian must always be
Christian
ethics. One might suppose that this insistence on the particularity of Chris
tian ethics makes our ethical deliberations irrelevant to society at large. But
the relation of ethical decisions to character formed by a particular story
makes it clear that without a qualifier we have only ethics in the abstract.
The ethics of the Christian community, then, is an ethic produced by the
narrative that forms that community. That narrative is the life, death, and
resurrection of Jesus Christ. It is by being true to that story that we find our
selves to be people of character, people who embody certain virtues. “We
Christians are not called on to be ‘moral’ but faithful to the true story, the
story that we are creatures under the Lordship of God .”4
It is important that we see that as Christians our faithfulness to a story is
faithfulness to a
true
story. For if ethics is always qualified by the narrative of
a particular community, we might suppose that what is being suggested is
simply a form of relativism. But the Christian commitment to the story of
Jesus as formative for our character is a commitment to the truth of that story
as it comprehends human life and our relationship to God. What I cannot do
is abstract bits of ethical truth from that story and hold them up as principles
to guide decision-making in some general way applicable to all situations.
The nature of Christian ethics is determined by the fact that Christian convic
tions take the form of a story, or perhaps better, a set of stories that constitutes
a tradition, which in turn creates and forms a community.
So Christian ethics arises when the Church takes seriously its commit
ment to the story of Jesus Christ, when it seeks to make its own story a con
tinuation of the story of its Lord. The title of this section is taken from
Hauerwas’ book,
A Community of Character.6
The story of Jesus makes us
who we are as we seek to continue that story in our own lives. Indeed, it is
impossible to really understand who Jesus is without becoming part of his
story, without learning to follow him. The Gospels, especially the Gospel of
Mark, display the need to follow Christ in order to learn who he is. It is only
as the disciples continue the story of Christ in their own lives that they begin
to approach a comprehension of the person they have followed. One inter
esting solution to the problem of the ending of Mark’s Gospel is the sugges
tion that it originally had no ending. The ending is to be found in the
4. Ibid., 68.
5. Ibid., 24.
6. Stanley Hauerwas,
A Community of Character
(Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame
Press, 1981), chap. 1.