Stanley Hauerwas has always been a reader first, only then a writer. His favourite genre is the essay, and his essays are almost always commentaries on recent reading. The idea is to draw his own readers into a conversation with other writers, to recommend their work, and sometimes their ideas, even as he invites consideration of his own. Quite often, the essays include long passages from the authors being discussed and lengthy footnotes, with caveats and digressions, but also more snippets of text, more recommended reading. All of this is well known. Here I simply want to acknowledge the generosity on display in this way of proceeding. It bears witness to Hauerwas’ capacity to regard imagined readers as potential friends, and his desire to unite his many friends in a shared conversation.
He reads a lot, and the essays accumulate. Every couple of years, he gathers together a new collection, bound by a common topic, more or less. Here we have another, with most of its essays published for the first time. Across the years, Hauerwas has offered repeated commentary on some of the same authors. Many reappear in this volume: Yoder, MacIntyre, McCabe, Barth, Berry, Lewis, Niebuhr, Lincoln, James, King, Foucault and Milbank. So do many of the same claims and concerns. It's a familiar list. America exemplifies modernity. Modern persons attempt to live according to a story of their own choosing. As this attempt invariably fails, they seek some other source of moral coherence. For Americans, war provides that coherence. They cannot live without war. And yet, in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, war has been abolished. Christians are called to bear witness to this abolition with their lives – in non-violence embedded in habit, in habit formed among others in a specific locale and in a language of peace that shuns imperial universals, that expresses love for those whom Jesus loved, even ‘enemies’. These Christians are called disciples, this witness, the church.
But there is also something new here. In chapters 3–5, Hauerwas considers war's sacrificial substance, its atoning work. The insight – confirmed by anthropologist Nancy Jay and political theorist Danielle Allen – is that sacrifices can create spiritual lineages. They can unite persons previously divided by differences of some kind (racial, ethnic, religious) or by a legacy of injustice. They can generate trust. They can create at-one-ment. And a community created by sacrifice must be sustained by its liturgical repetition. Repeated sacrifice makes coherent groups endure.
By this logic, the sacrifices of war are modernity's social glue and source of meaning. They also enable war to redeem itself, to dignify its frequently dubious ends. Those ends must be just, or so the story goes, precisely because they were pursued by sacrificial means, by our willingness to offer up the young, train them to set aside their natural resistance to killing and ask them to forsake the truth in favour of euphemism. Deny the dignity of the ends and you demean these sacrifices, you discount their atoning effects (pp. 60–1). Crucially, the sacrifices of war must be repeated across the generations in order ‘to sustain our belief that we are worthy . . . recipients of the sacrifices made on our behalf’ (p. 27).
The theological heart of Hauerwas’ pacifism comes into focus just here, by way of contrast. The sacrifice of Christ abolishes war. In the worship and witness of the church, its repetition offers an alternative to the sacrifices of war. Its sacred lineage, the household of God, challenges all other sacrificial loyalties. In baptism, Christians are ‘incorporated into Christ's sacrifice’, gathered into his sonship, and redeemed from the need to make war's sacrifice ‘for tribe or state, or even humanity’ (p. 69).
Not all will endorse this conclusion. There are details to dispute. But we should all be grateful that Hauerwas keeps reading and, with his writing, keeps inviting his readers along.
