Unmasking the differences: Nonviolence and social control

Cross Currents, Spring, 2002 by Gloria Albrecht

Stanley Hauerwas's emphasis on the social construction of character within a community of particular stories and practices resonates with feminists who also reject the liberal concept of self However, for feminists a next step becomes critical. What is the character of those communities that form our character? Whose stories are being told? Whose perspectives are embodied in these practices? These questions are especially pertinent for Christian communities characterized, typically, by hierarchical male leadership and divided by race and class. In her feminist critique of Hauerwas's approach to Christian community, The Character of Our Communities, Albrecht argues that until a plurality of voices shape Christian community, especially the voices of the marginalized, these communities betray their calling to be truly redemptive and prophetically liberating.

Oneness and the Will to Power

As we have seen, Hauerwas's ethics revolves around a core theme: a universal human fear of finitude leads to fragmenting, false loyalties and to a violent defense of those loyalties. For Hauerwas, the problem of contemporary life is its moral fragmentation and the loss of identity that can only be sustained in a community of shared values. Furthermore, this problem must be resolved in the one community that bears a true story empowering people to live nonviolently in this fallen world. Thus, salvation, for Hauerwas, ultimately involves the unity of all people within the Christian narrative. Aware of Christianity's past use of violence to accomplish this end, Hauerwas emphasizes that the core characteristic of the Christian community is nonviolence. However, it is my contention that violence is intrinsic to his proposal.

Kwok Pui-lan, a Chinese Christian, describes the Asian experience of Christian missionary expansion into China in which the "Word of God" was brought to the "heathens" who lived in a deficient culture characterized by "idolatry and superstition." (1) From this position of marginality Asian Christians were confronted with a gospel of Western presuppositions and modes of thinking. For example, the very notion of a scripture that contains all of Truth in one closed (Western) canon is a characteristic, Kwok warns, of Western religious traditions. There is within the western metaphysical tradition a "logocentrism"; that is, a hope and desire to reach a fully positive meaning that does not also carry within it its dependence upon difference. (2) Christianity exhibits this in its assumption of a transcendent presence located in a sacred text that leads Westerners to search for the voice of absolute truth. Kwok argues, "if other people can only define truth according to the Western perspective, then Christianization really means westernization." (3) Her recognition of the cultural embeddedness of the truth claims of the Western Christian gospel, and her experience of how these claims have been imposed upon her culture with an imperialistic assumption of acultural, universal applicability, has led her to appreciate Foucault's exploration of the relationship between truth and power. Asian Christians, she says, must ask who owns the truth, who interprets the truth, and what constitutes the truth? Her conclusion, with specific reference to the Christian scriptures, is that truth cannot be "prepackaged" but is found in the "actual interaction between text and context in the concrete historical situation." (4) "The whole biblical text represents one form of human construction to talk about God," she writes. (5) Speaking from the context of being a Christian in the mostly other-than-Christian two-thirds world (in which most people live, affected by the exploitation of the mostly Christian one-third world), Kwok argues that this focus on the oneness of truth produces the crusading spirit in which absolute truth provides not only the answers for all people but deigns to define for them the questions as well. (6) It is this hierarchical model of truth, she warns, that leads to the coercion of all others into one sameness and homogeneity; the universalizing of the One. (7)

This identification of power with oneness lies deep within the traditional Christian image of God. Trinitarian theologies, theologies that could also have led to an emphasis on diversity and relationality as the central characteristic of divinity, were shaped in the early centuries of Christianity by an increasing emphasis upon the unity of the substance of the Godhead. From the time of Tertullian, Christian theology increasingly emphasized the power and authority of God the Father in order to counter (while copying) the claims of Rome's absolute, divine monarchy. God, the Father of Christians, the maker of heaven and earth, rules over all and rules especially over all secular rulers. (8) For Christians of the first four centuries, according to Elaine Pagels, this image of God served as a source of power for those made in "the image of God" and straining under the burden of the authority of the Roman state. These early Christians identified human equality in the human capacity to exercise the moral freedom an d responsibility necessary to choose and to do good in resistance to the imperial cult. (9) However, a radical change in thought occurred that Pagels attributes to Augustine and to the theology he developed within a totally different political context. By the end of the fourth century, the emperors were Christian and Christians had come into imperial favor, wealth, and power. From this context of participation in secular power, Augustine reads the same texts from Genesis and concludes the opposite from his predecessors: the human race is incapable of ruling itself. (10) The will to rebellion lies within each human and leads to a lust for power that now distorts all human relationships. (11) The primary virtue for fallen human nature is no longer the exercise of moral freedom and responsibility, but the virtue of obedience: "our true good is free slavery." (12) Thus, as I interpret Pagels, in the age of Constantine, some Christian men gained political and economic power and yet also experienced the ambiguity a nd limits of their individual power. In this context of relative power, Augustine chose a theology emphasizing human guilt rather than face the possibility that human control over events, and even over the consequences of our best intentions, is limited. (13)