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The social ethic of the Church, what the Church has to say to the world
on the subject of ethics, is its own life as a community formed by the life ol
our Savior. For the Church to abandon its distinctive character as the people
of God would also be for it to abandon the world. The Church has some
thing to say to the world only insofar as it displays to the world the world’s
own nature as sinful and inadequate. The world needs the Church in order
to truly know itself as the world.
By being itself the Church offers to the world an alternative approach lo
the world’s own problems. Thus the ethic being proposed is not one of with
drawal from the world. By being itself the Church shows the world that the
skills, that is, the virtues, exist which are necessary to survive in a sinful
world.
But that means that the Church must indeed be a community of virtue.
Christians must strive to make our community a place where the story of
Jesus is told faithfully in such a way that it produces the growth in character
necessary to life in the present world. If the Church is to truly be a social
ethic it must not offer principles to live by but must offer training in the skills
for living, training in faith, hope, love, patience, etc.
I began this essay with the example of abortion as a contemporary
dilemma. It would be instructive to conclude with a brief consideration of
the way in which Hauerwas deals with the issue of abortion, not as a
dilemma to be resolved, but as a question about what kind of people we will
be in relation to abortion.
In
A Community of Character,
Hauerwas argues that Christians have lost
their ability to say anything constructive in the abortion controversy because
they have accepted the constraint of speaking within the framework of a plu
ralistic society. Tha t is, whatever we say about abortion must be based on
principles acceptable to society at large, that is, on principles with no distinc
tive religious character. So the anti-abortionists have made their case on the
principle, acceptable to all, that life is sacred and murder is wrong. Thus,
since abortion is the taking of human life, abortion is murder and is wrong.
However, it wras quickly discovered that not all of society accepts the conten
tion that a fetus is a human person and the abortion debate quickly became
a question about the starting point of human life.8And there seems to be no
route to agreement about the latter question.
Hauerwas contends that our moral error as Christians has been to enter
the debate about abortion as religiously neutral participants. He counsels us
7. Hauerwas,
The Peaceable Kingdom, 99.
8. Hauerwas,
A Community of Character,
212-14.