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Iilc of Jesus by asking some simple question like, “What would Jesus do
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this situation?” To ask that kind of question is again to focus on what is to
be done as opposed to what kind of person I am to be. Moreover, serious
reflection makes it clear that asking what Jesus would do if he had to choose
whether to have an abortion approaches nonsense. But what does make
sense is to ask what kind of person I must be if my life is to be a continued
telling of the story of Jesus, if my life is to be the same kind of life as his.
Yet there are decisions to make. It is all very well to say that we ought to
focus on the kind of people we ought to be, but the decisions remain:
whether to have an abortion, whether to disconnect life support from a
“brain-dead” patient, whether to support our government’s military inter
vention in various parts of the world, and so on. How does the Church, as a
people formed by the story of Jesus Christ, address a society in which deci
sions like these are made every day? How do we, given the particularity of
Christian
ethics, develop a social ethic that can successfully address the world
we live in?
The Church as Social Ethic
The first thing to note is that the title of this section is not an error for
“The Church and Social Ethics” or some such. The Church, argues Hauer-
was,
is
a social ethic. Moreover, from what we have already seen, we may
deduce that there is no ethic that is not social. Every ethic is qualified; that
is, it operates within a community or people with a particular history or
story. It is our community that makes us who we are ethically. In that sense
ethics is always social.
That the Church cannot simply
have
a social ethic is apparent from the
fact that Christian ethics is an embodiment of the story of Jesus in the life of
the Church. Tha t story addresses the world as a story embodied in the lives
of Christian people. And if our ethics is necessarily a consequence of the
story that forms us, then we have nothing ethical to say apart from our par
ticipation in that story.
As the Church, we often get the impression that our approach to social
ethics ought to downplay that which is distinctively Christian about our eth
ical stance. Our Christian commitment to justice, peace, sexual morality, or
preservation of human life seems to suggest that we should set aside our doc
trine and work together with “like-minded people” to bring about good in
these areas.
But Hauerwas says:
I am in fact challenging the very idea that Christian social ethics is primarily
an attempt to make the world more peaceable or just. Put starkly, the first
social ethical task of the Church is to be the Church—the servant community.
. . . What makes the Church the Church is its faithful manifestation of the