Christians among the Virtues: Theological Conversations with Ancient and Modern Ethics

Christians among the Virtues: Theological Conversations with Ancient and Modern Ethics. By Stanley Hauerwas and Charles Pinches. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1997. xvii + 224 pp. $29.95 (cloth); $16.95 (paper).

We need more books like this: Pugnacious and articulate, it knows its own positions and is not afraid to state them. It likes a good fight; indeed the book is structured as a series of disputatious conversations. And it picks its fights well: Each interlocutor merits the attention it receives. The book's disputatiousness has both formal and material attractions. Formally, the disputatiousness compels it towards an admirable specificity through engaging in detailed discussions with diverse interlocutors; Martha Nussbaum, John Casey (author of Pagan Virtue), and even Alasdair MacIntyre and the current obsession with "virtue ethics" come in for insightful critique here. Materially, these engagements usefully illuminate matters central to Christian faith, such as the virtues' interrelatedness (especially the place of courage and patience alongside [or within?] Christian caritas), and how Christian convictions should inform our endurance of suffering.

As a set of engagements, the book raises crucial theological issues in a helpful way, even if one wishes to dispute the position put forward. Indeed, one learns at least as much by disagreeing with the book as by agreeing with it. For example, in defending its "sanctificationist" approach to ethics, the book argues that Christian faith allows the possibility of genuine moral development. This assumes that repair and development do not differ enough to undermine the practicality of virtue ethics for Christian faith. This seems usefully disputable; one might argue that a basic difference separating broadly "naturalist" ethics from Christian ethics is the Christian admission of original sin, which pictures humans as not simply born underdeveloped, but born positively perverted. This would seem to complexify the task of ethics-conceived of as reflection on "moral development"-in interesting ways. As "Christian realists" argue, Christian faith admits the possibility of genuine moral goodness but insists, against all teleology (whether Aristotelian naturalism or modern progressivism), that sin infects us too thoroughly for any such hope to be a straightforward ethical guide. Perhaps eschatology has a more complicated role to play in Christian ethics than this book admits; here it seems to function mostly as a kind of ultimate consequentialist trump card, legitimating a willed indifference to consequences by appeal to the idea that God will settle all things at the end of time. But one comes to this conclusion by arguing with the book, and the profitability of the argument is a measure of the book's value.

Indeed, such shortcomings as it has are largely due to the desires it elicits for further detailed engagements. For example, while Nussbaum's position is well-known and hence therefore warrants attention, Bernard Williams's recovery of ancient thought offers a more carefully developed (and thus more profound) challenge. More importantly, the book does not discuss theological writers. Its discussion of courage would profit from engaging Tillich or Barth; the discussion on suffering and endurance could have usefully addressed Bonhoeffer, Rowan Williams, or even Simone Weil. That it avoids such engagements is understandable but still regrettable, for it makes the book inadvertently suggest that the contestability stops at the church's door. But the authors agree that Christians' beliefs are contestable, and illuminatively so. To explore these disagreements would be useful, and not just for material reasons: Formally speaking, the oppositional tone of the book makes it seem to collaborate, pace the authors' intentions with contemporary culture's fixation upon "identity politics." At times the book's focus on clear opponents pushes it towards a less charitable and more polemical stance than it need occupy. It sounds sometimes too blustery, too much like it's already got all the answers, while at other times it sounds too exhibitionist, too fixated on the ritualistic reiteration of difference, of the "we're different from you because we believe [xi" variety. This contradicts the book's fundamental movement towards genuine engagement, and its claims about the Christian obligation to welcome the stranger; were its unapologetic character formulated in less taunting terms-were it more open and less ritualistic in its confessions-its illuminative power would increase.

These are not condemnations of the book; that these issues can be raised at all is a considerable victory. Greater clarity on such matters requires a more thorough investigation of eschatology and its implications than any one book can provide; it is enough that this one manages to raise such issues in provocative ways. If this book does not entirely elicit assent, nonetheless it elicits gratitude for forcing one to explain one's dissents. We need more books like this, not least to engage the arguments of this one.