Unmasking the differences: Nonviolence and social control

Cross Currents, Spring, 2002 by Gloria Albrecht

It is a theology, Pagels argues, that appeals to a need to imagine oneself in control even at the cost of accepting oneself as a participant in the universal human condition of sinfulness. As Christians began to participate in social power, the image of absolute power residing in the absolute oneness of God the Father was joined to a theology of human fallenness. In Augustinian theology, divine domination and human guiltiness legitimate human relationships of domination: the Righteous One stands against all others. For Augustine, Bishop of Hippo, this theology led to an increasing use of coercion both inside and outside the church and to alliances with imperial power on behalf of his orthodoxy. (14) Thistlethwaite concludes:

God conceived as supreme ruler over all from whom other authorities take their cue is a theology of violence. Hierarchy introduces hierarchy:

The absolute power of God legitimates the power of the father priest, the father of the country, the father in the family, and so on. Monotheistic monarchism has been a powerful weapon for both church and state in their efforts to legitimate the ultimate power of some over others. (15)

Hauerwas seems to accept an essentially Augustinian view of human fallenness. (16) He views all humans a priori as seeking to avoid the truth of their finitude by asserting control over their lives and resorting to coercion and violence against others. His remedy for this condition of chaos and violence ostensively recoils from Augustine's resort to coercion. After all, Hauerwas argues that "we Christians" must recognize our powerlessness and do the one thing we can: participate in the one community, the Christian church, that knows the one truth of human finitude and divine, nonviolent love. Ironically, however, while purporting to eschew violence, Hauerwas legitimates the cause of the violent experiences related by Kwok Pui-lan and other non-Western Christians, the violent imposition of the one absolute truth. As Hauerwas insists: "outside the church there is no saving knowledge of God." (17)

Hauerwas is aware of the "polemical, if not violent, character of my essays"; a violence he defends as necessary to expose the sentimentalities of liberal culture. (18) The Christian church, the community of the reconciled, exists in the world as both the means and the goal of the world's salvation. While God is in control of history, the proof of that, for Hauerwas, is the existence of this faithful, nonviolent community. In his introduction to The Peaceable Kingdom, Hauerwas acknowledges that what he is presenting is a Christian ethic. Yet, he goes on to say that he also intends "to argue that the position I develop should be any Christian's" (emphasis added). (10) Therefore, the problem for Christians, writes Hauerwas, is how "we" are to survive "as disciplined communities in democratic societies" where the very values of liberty and individualism undermine the social formation necessary for Christian character. (20) In this context, the church must learn to become a disciplined and disciplining community in order to maintain its distinct identity. It is in this sense that Hauerwas sees an attractive model for Christian community in the Aristotelian polis; both are "equally antidemocratic." (21) According to Hauerwas, the church that is faithful to Jesus is not a democracy. To make a person into a Christian requires training, apprenticeship to a master, learning the "epistemological bias" of this craft. (22) Kwok Pui-lan would remind Hauerwas that "we" Christians do not all live in democratic societies, that not all Christians are being tainted by liberty and individualism, and, most important, that a theological ethics shaped by (and in response to) liberal Western society cannot be for "all" Christians.