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respon se ol Ilie read e r , in h is /her cho ice lo make the slory h is /her own by loi
low ing C h r is t .
The ethical question for the Christian, therefore, becomes a question
about who I am in relationship to the story which is to form me. What kind
of person shall I be in order to be faithful to the story of Jesus Christ? As the
Church, what kind of people shall we be in order to be able to continue to
tell the story of Jesus faithfully? Ethically, we will seek to become people who
possess the virtues necessary for a faithful living of the story.
Hauerwas does not produce a definitive list of the virtues which are to be
formed in the Christian community. If the story is continually in process,
then the virtues necessary to the telling of the story will be in process as well
as our understanding of the practical implications of those virtues. The clas
sical virtue of justice, for instance, while clearly a virtue for the Christian, is
possible only in combination with the distinctively Christian virtues of
patience and hope.
The temptation in an ethic of virtue is to attempt to make the virtues into
principles by deriving them all from some single, preeminent virtue. For the
Christian, we might be tempted to single out love as the distinctive mark of
Christian character. Love is certainly given a prominent place in the Chris
tian story. But to base all of Christian ethics on a single principle of love, à
la Joseph Fletcher’s
Situation Ethics
, is to forget that the story we live as
Christians is a complex story. It is no accident that love abides with faith and
hope, for, in the complexity of the story that God is telling in the life of Christ
and his people, love could not abide without faith and hope. Once again, we
may not simply read off from the story as we find it in the Bible a list of prin
ciples, rules, or even virtues which are definitive for Christian ethics. What
is definitive for our ethics is just the story, and we comprehend that story just
as far as we have learned to live it.
We find, then, that virtue ethics, far from leading us away from the Chris
tian message into what might be regarded as a non-Christian appropriation
of classical Greek culture, instead calls us to greater attention to the story
which makes us who we are. One of the classical questions about virtue con
cerned the way in which it is learned. Since virtue is a practice rather than a
principle the way it is learned is closer to the way one learns a skill as opposed
to learning a set of facts. Skills are learned by practice and by observation of
and contact with a person who possesses the skill one wishes to learn. I con
tinue to learn to preach by comparing my pulpit performance with skilled
preachers whom I observe. It is in this way also that the life of Jesus is for
mative of who we are as Christian people.
Virtue is learned from the person who already possesses it. So as the
Church of Jesus Christ we learn the virtues necessary to be his people from
our contact with his life as we find it told to us in Scripture. It is not as
though the answers to our ethical questions may simply be discovered in the