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Christ within Community
“Possibilities of a Post-Liberal
Ecclesial Ethic of Non-Violence—Today”
By Jeff Stark
Vanderbilt University
“It may be that in a world suffused with violence the issue is not simply ‘violence versus peace’ but rather ‘what forms of violence could be tolerated to overcome a social ‘peace’ that coercively maintained itself through the condoned violence of injustice.’ But if one decides to put on soldier’s gear instead of carrying one’s cross, one should not seek legitimation in the religion that worships the crucified Messiah. For there, the blessing is given not to the violent but to the meek.” 1
“Why is the topic assigned us, ‘The Problem of Ethics Today?” It is evidently intended that we should be reminded that in this problem we are concerned not with a view of life, a philosophy, or any other matter similarly innocuous, but rather with our very existence, with our instant situation at this moment: we are dealing with an actual problem as we see it as it really is and not as something that it is not. We are faced not with a problem but with the problem. When we speak of the problem of ethics today, we mean as far as possible to eliminate any time element which might separate us from and cause us to be spectators of the problem in its reality.”
2
We find ourselves at a point of convergence. It is not primarily an epistemic convergence; though it is. It is not the primacy of divergent political, economic, and social modes converging at the point of a Global Village and Global Market; though it is.
It is a convergence that catches up both these complex arenas of thought, theory, and practice into a common realm of inquiry, conversation, and assertion. It is a convergence that challenges the comfortable but conflictual dichotomies of idealism or realism, of
Plato or Aristotle, of mind or body, of language or action, of rationalism or empiricism, of materialism or essentialism. It is a convergence that both threatens and promises, that seeks peace and offers violence. It is a convergence that pushes some to relativism and others toward sectarianism. This is the convergence of history.
3
History is the ground upon which thought and action converge. All theology begins at this point of convergence. This alone is a loaded assertion. For long it was suggested that the theologian was given a privileged access to truth and hence a meta-position from which to speak about and critique lived reality. However, in this historical moment, it has become the common claim of post-modern theorists that no ‘metas’ exist. There is no meta-position, no meta-narrative, no universal timeless truth. We have only localized,
1 Volf, Mirslov. Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and
Reconcilliation.
(Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1996), 306.
2 Barth, Karl. “The Problem of Ethics Today” from The Word of God and the Word of Man . (Gloucester:
Peter Smith Publishing, 1978), 142.
3 “The dualisms that were so prevalent in modernity—distinctions between phenomenal and noumenal, body and spirit, and human and nature—are less and less tenable as we confront a situation that demands that we acknowledge our embeddedness in the natural realm and affirm our responsibility for enhancing that sphere if life is to continue and flourish. Human history brought us to this juncture and it is human action and decision that will, at least in part, decide both ours and nature’s fate.”

Stark 2 historicist knowledge. We are construed by language, embedded in communities and utterly influenced by tradition. This historicism is by no means a simple esoteric intellectual task. This historicism affects bodies and shapes the public practice of all life.
Theology in the twenty-first century takes seriously this convergence.
Throughout the course of this essay I intend to suggest that post-liberal theology, especially as given ethical voice in the work of Stanley Hauerwas offers a public way of being in this world for the particular community of the ecclesia that takes seriously this convergence of history. Through a Christocentric ethic of non-violence, I believe postliberalism proposes a way of negotiating this complex realm of convergence between mind and body. This analysis will develop in the process of three movements. First I develop a brief sketch of the primary tenets and internal logic of Post-Liberal theology given voice in the work of Hans Frei, George Lindbeck, and William Placher, with a special emphasis on the influence of this methodological program on the ethical work of
Stanley Hauerwas especially as it relates to Narrative, Community, and Discipleship.
Secondly, I will turn to current criticism of Post-Liberal theology, most notably in the works of James Gustafson and Sheila Greeve Davaney, as it relates to isolationism, traditions and historiography. Finally, I will turn attention to a synthetic analysis of both the program and its criticisms in the identification of the possibilities for substantiating an ecclesial ethic of non-violence. Finally, I will conclude with a constructive movement forward utilizing the work of John Wesley and Hans Georg Gadamer.
Where the Idea of Rubber Meets the Material Road
“...each age reconfigures its understandings of reality in the face of new knowledge, altered social relations, and changing challenges.” 4
It is beyond the scope of this essay to comprehensively rehearse the epistemological critiques levied by post-modern theorists at assumptions behind the project of Western European Enlightenment, either in its rationalist or empiricist forms or to trace the historio-philosophical movement of the Enlightenment. In an overly simplistic manner, I suggest that the modern fixation with an epistemological
Foundationalism, seeking a universal, stable, value-free, ahistorical truth has been called into question. For some, it is not simply questioned but utterly rejected as wrong-headed, necessarily violent and espousing ideological hegemony. Instead, I will proceed by outlining four historical turns that have taken place in the last century and a half that are particularly valid for this discussion. I will also suggest that these turns, in of themselves, are no less inherently violent than those espoused during modernity. There is, I believe, an inherent violence in the ethical discourse of both modernity and post-modernity. In modernity the search for the absolute, universal principles upon which all ethical conduct could rest, implies that those that deviate from those universally accessible (by right reason) principles should be “brought back in line” with the way they “should” act, even if this implies coercion. In post-modernity, fragmentary living, or a living without any recourse to what is absolute or universally applicable engenders a life as Hauerwas notes,
4 Davaney, Shelia Greeve. Pragmatic Historicism: A Theology for the Twenty-First Century . (Albany; State of New York University Press, 2000), 80.

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“always on the edge of violence, since there are no means to ensure that moral arguments in itself can resolve our moral conflicts.” 5
1.
Turn from universal to localized knowledge:
It was the lofty attempt of modern philosophy (followed by modern theology) to construct a system of truth that was universally valid for all people groups in all times.
This program emerged during a time in Western civilization when the accepted mediums through which truth was preserved were being toppled. No longer was the church the depository of truth. The German Reformation followed by other European Reformations called into question the uncontested power of the Roman Catholic Church. The Thirty-
Years War was witness to the brutality of humankind as varied groups sought epistemic validity. In response, philosophers sought a method of determining truth that wasn’t given to the complex subjectivities of humanity, subjectivities that ultimately would contain religion and theology. Their task was the attempt to ground certainty in the smallest mode of objective, verifiable truth. Either by means of Continental Rationalism or British Empiricism, with the help of the Scientific Revolution and Newtonian Physics, truth was to be discovered deductively by means of right reason. However, over the course of the next couple hundred years, it was recognized just how lofty this program was. Critics began to suspect that perhaps the certainty that humankind sought was elusive and beyond grasp. Kant called this program into question with his Critical
Philosophy, although unable to completely break free from modernist assumptions. Later there emerged the 19 th
Century historicists and nihilists. The former suspected that all truth was conditioned by local knowledge, historically situated. The latter suggested that all truth is the arbitrary construction of the powerful who seek to both control and dominate those that have not the power to resist dominate forms of Western, white,
European-American hegemony. For our purposes we will consider the ways in which postliberal theology speaks to the shift as defined by Shelia Greeves Davaney in this manner, “...all knowledge is localized, relative to its time and place, shaped by its history, infused by interests and interpretive in character, and part of a historical strand of other interpretations. Humans have no access to the world in an unmediated manner nor any way to compare an uninterpreted reality with our version of reality as the true one.” 6
2.
Turn from reductionism to holism :
If we are to associate the beginning of the Enlightenment with the overlysimplified mantra of Descartes, “
Cogito Ergo Sum
,” then we recognize that from the beginning of this modern period the move toward reductionism. As noted above, this is the move to establish truth based upon the smallest, objective, verifiable medium of truth.
The means by which this pursuit was validated was through the use of the Scientific
Method. Nancy Murphy, in her book Anglo-American Postmodernity, brilliantly examines both the method and consequences of this pursuit. I now turn to Murphy’s analysis as a way of defining the core tenets of reductionism.
5 Hauerwas, Stanley. The Peaceable Kingdom: A Primer in Christian Ethics. (Notre Dame: Notre Dame,
1983),5. Hauerwas notes, “For the attempt to secure peace through founding morality on rationality itself, or some other ‘inherent’ human characteristic, ironically underwrites coercion. If others refuse to accept my account of ‘rationality,’ it seems within my bounds to force them to be true to their ‘true’ selves.” 12
6 Davaney, 23.

Stark 4 a.
It is “the strategy not only of analyzing a thing into its parts, but also of explaining the properties of behavior of the thing in terms of the properties and behavior of the parts.” 7 b.
“The general tendency of modern science has increasingly been to see the natural world as a total system and to conceive of it in terms of a hierarchy of levels of complexity, from the smallest subparticles (at present, quarks and leptons), through atoms, molecules, cells, tissues, organs, organisms, and societies, to ecosystems and the to the universe as a whole.
Corresponding to this hierarchy of levels of complexity, is the hierarchy of sciences.” 8 c.
“Bottom-up causality” d.
The “Catachretical Extensions of Atomism” into politics, morality, and social science. e.
She analyzes the Hobbesian account of atomism by noting, “So while early modern physicists were developing an atomistic account of matter,
Hobbes was devising atomist accounts of ethics and politics. Hobbes is best known for his development of social contract theory. The atomistic individualism of social contract theory is clear: individuals are logically (if not temporally) prior to the commonwealth, which is an artificial ‘body.’
Social facts such as moral obligation and property rights come into existence only as a result of the social contract, which is motivated by the individual drive for self-preservation.”
9
In his insightful piece, Cosmopolis , Stephen Toulmin suggests that with changes in scientific cosmology, changes in anthropology, philosophy, and epistemology are due to follow. The modern assumptions of reductionism were made possible through the assumptions of Newtonian physics, however, with a shift to a physics of relativity and then to quantum physics, the atomism of the modern period has been called into question.
It is now suggested that causality isn’t determined in a simplistic (deterministic) “bottomup” trajectory. That, in fact, sometimes the whole determines the possibility and function of change upon the smaller parts. In avoiding the technical scientific analysis of what
Murphy has termed “ supervenience,” 10
I specifically note the implications for our present purpose. Some modern counter-positions have suggested that the “social sphere” is not simply an aggregate of individuals, but instead is the only way in which being human can be constructed. A more-fully defined post-modern critique would be careful not to draw such clearly defined dichotomies between individual and society, but instead look to the holism of factors that define human organization and operation. These factors would necessarily include anthropological and sociological analysis, the consideration of tradition, community, and narrative upon humanity, as well as, developing a historicist and ecological account. We will attempt to define the ways in which Postliberal
Theology answers this critique.
7 Murphy, Nancy. Anglo-American Postmodernity: Philosophical Perspectives on Science, Religion, and
Ethics.
(Boulder: Westview Press, 1997), 12.
8 Ibid., 13.
9 Ibid., 15.
10 Ibid., 22.

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3.
Turn from referentialism to hermeneutics :
The Modern era has also carried certain assumptions about the nature of language.
“The predominant view could be described as atomistic and referential (or representtative).” 11
Again we turn to Murphy for her descriptive analysis of modern language.
“Complex utterances were to be understood by analyzing them into their smallest parts, and the meaning of the parts was to be accounted for in terms of reference. Thus, for
John Locke, words referred to or represented ideas...Ideas, in turn, stood for things; simple ideas were ‘perfectly taken from the existence of things.’ Simple ideas were compounded to form complex ideas; sentences represented the connections the mind makes between ideas.” 12
Within this linguistic construct, language either refers directly to a factual reality, or in a second-order expression of a reality or essence behind the linguistic representation. This foundational approach to language leaves religious utterance with only two options. They either must validate themselves within the technology of logical positivism, forcing a text to refer directly to an ontological or historical “reality.” Or, religious utterances are phenomenal representations of noumenal reality that communicate essences. “God is Love” doesn’t refer directly to the ontological reality of God but the essence of the human construction desiring a love-filled life. Within either mode, there exists a point of reference.
However, language under the lead of J.L. Austin and eventually Ludwig
Wittgenstein has undergone a challenge to the Modern assumption of language. Instead of simply positing the either/or case of language as either factually representative or expressions of a deeper reality, Austin has suggested that the analysis of the performance of language is just as important. “Meaning depends on the role language plays in a system of conventions, both linguistic and nonlinguistic, of practices, performances,
‘forms of life.’” 13
For this discussion on Postliberal Theology, it will become important to consider the ways in which Hans Frei takes Austin’s lead and presumes upon the
Gospels a certain linguistic performance. We will investigate what Frei sees as the failure of historical criticism to attempt to reconstruct the history behind the text, reproducing the hegemony or referentialism and instead specifies the religious performance of the gospels as presenting a Jesus as an unsubstitutable person on which the community of the church makes manifest such performance.
4.
Turn from hegemony to relativity :
Finally, we will turn our attention to the peculiar result of the prior three turns.
With the questions and then for some the collapse of Foundationalism as the most appropriate method by which truth is both asserted and attained, philosophers and theologians find themselves at a precarious historical moment. Can one assert in any way truthfulness that is adequate and valid for all people? The answer for some is no, others yes, and still for others, maybe.
11
Murphy, Nancey Murphy, Nancy. “Textual Relativism, Philosophy of Language, and the baptist
Vision.” in
Theology without Foundations: Religious Practice and the Future of Theological Truth.
Ed.
Stanley Hauerwas, Nancey Murphy, and Mark Nation. (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1994), 246.
12 Ibid., 246.
13 Murphy, Anglo-American, 24.

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There are those that have sought to avoid the relativism of post-modern critique by asserting the ongoing validity of the modern project. These thinkers still believe in the universal performance of verifiable truth. For deconstructionists and nihilists, this move toward relativity has been a hopeful sign for mankind. Such thinkers have been quick to maintain the hegemony of the Modern project and the ways that this project has privileged a certain type of demographical knowledge, maintaining both the supremacy and infallibility of Western culture. Now the voices of the margins have become valid and necessary. Yet still others have maintained that if there is universality, it will not be demonstrated in propositions and reference, but by performance and practice. While refusing to negate the historical situatedness of all knowledge, they have sought to point the pragmatic concerns of communal presentation. There is perhaps an adequacy of consequences that move one to believe that certain claims are truer than others.
Interestingly enough, these thinkers still tend to cling to categorical assertions that serve as a backbone on which validity is determined, i.e., justice, human flourishing, and freedom. I intend throughout this essay to identify the ways in which the Postliberal school of thinkers find themselves situated within this shift toward relativism. I will do so by acknowledging both their “courage to be” a particular community and their unfortunate drift toward sectarianism. There are those like Hans Georg Gadamer that believe that ongoing conversations between disparate communal bodies are the only way humanity can live in harmony. Is there a way for postliberalism to develop an external hermeneutic without drifting toward apologetics in the modern sense?
The Road of Terror
At the same time these intellectual moves have been made toward relativity, tolerance and conversation, bodies have been ravaged. From 1990 to 2005 over two million men, women, and children had their lives brutally destroyed through the advancement of genocidal ideologies. Rwandan citizens were wrapped in one of the deadliest short-lived
14
campaigns of violence in the history of the world. When the body count was completed, estimates suggest nearly 800,000 human beings had been killed or had died as casualties of this barbaric violence. The Balkans also experienced in the
1990’s the lamentable reality of ethnic cleansing, as Srebrenica had its streets painted red with blood during the Bosnian War. The oft-forgotten region of Darfur in Sudan has been the recent foci of the plague of ideological tyranny, religious intolerance, and genocidal brutality. Even on the safe shores of America, 3000 men, women, and children who had innocently gotten ready for work and schooling on September 11 th
, 2001, by day’s end lay under the rubble of terrorism’s vengeance. This may seem a small number in comparison to the hundreds of thousands lost in Rwanda. Yet, that moment touched off a war against terrorism which has claimed the countless lives of innocent victims throughout Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India. The 20 th Century was the epoch of infamous demagogues, committed to the exercise of unrestrained power and hegemony.
Their names still send chills down the spines of those that have committed themselves to human rights and peace. Joseph Stalin, General Augusto Pinochet, Pol Pot, Idi Amin 15 ,
Adolf Hitler, these names have become synonymous with the banality and terror of evil,
14 The entire duration of the Rwandan Genocide was nearly 100 days.
15 Nicknamed the “Butcher of Uganda.”

Stark 7 violence and oppression and have become case studies for a highly developed doctrine of
“just war.”
Unfortunately, not only has religion and theology remained fairly impotent within these tragic contexts, but religion has been used as a means through which such action has been endorsed and justified. Therefore, to suggest an ethic of non-violence is to recognize both the substance of post-modern criticism and the violence which has been regularly distributed amongst the ‘least of these.’ To speak about non-violence is to recognize that these words are spoken into unjust suffering and the heartbreaking cries of mothers whose children have been stolen and brutalized, or children whose minds are plagued by the memories of their parents cut down, raped, and tortured, or men whose lives are a shadow of their former selves as they daily relive the torture they endured at the hands of tyrants. Any attempt to construct a viable and justifiable doctrine of nonviolence must tread lightly on the carnage of the last hundred years. It must take seriously our historical location. It must take seriously the theological possibility of seeing in the faces of these victims the face of Jesus Christ. Yet, it must also recognize that within particular communities, especially communities of faith, there are enduring explications about the response to such violence, terror and evil. As a historical community, the Christian church is one such entity. Before turning to consider the ways in which we might consider whether or not it is justifiable and valid for the church to maintain an ethic of non-violence in the face of such philosophical shifts and political injustice, we will first turn toward how the Postliberal “School” of Theology deals with the above mentioned intellectual climate.
Postliberalism as both School and Continuing Response
In turning toward an analysis of postliberal theology and how the core tenets of this theological movement respond the current philosophical climate, I will make a few opening comments to situate the theological underpinnings of the various scholars located within this tradition, speak about the particularity of thought as expressed by the primary sources of “post-liberalism” and then define four primary areas in which a convergence of thought and practice might be recognized.
It would be the common assumption that to begin this discussion, we would first turn toward Hans Frei. Frei’s work at Yale had become the subject of inquiry far earlier than the work of George Lindbeck. However, with the advent of George Lindbeck’s seminal piece, The Nature of Doctrine , the theological/academic world was introduced in a systematic way to what Lindbeck had self-entitled, a post-liberal theology. Since that time, Frei’s work has been viewed through the lens of the Lindbeck’s program. Paul
Dehart notes, “Frei’s highly independent intellectual trajectory, never widely grasped from the beginning had become well-nigh invisible to the broader theological public at least since the appearance of Lindbeck’s book, or even earlier, since the time his work had come to be lumped in with ‘narrative theology.’” 16
Therefore, we shall turn first to
Lindbeck and then toward Frei.
Cultural-Linguistic Model: Turn toward Locality
16 DeHart, Paul J. The Trial of the Witnesses: The Rise and Decline of Posliberal Theology.
(Malden:
Blackwell Publishing, 2006), 40.

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In The Nature of Doctrine , Lindbeck establishes a complicated system through which religions are to be understood and attested as valuable and truthful. Influenced by the historicist movements of the 19 th
and 20 th
centuries, Albrecht Ritschl, Ernst Troeltsch and the historic-sociological criticism of Clifford Geertz and Peter Berger, Lindbeck has been less concerned with protecting the sanctity of religious claims to transcendent truthfulness, and has instead opted for an account that takes seriously the human construct of religion and the meaningfulness of those religions within particular human communities. According to Lindbeck, religions are “seen as comprehensive interpretive schemes, usually embodied in myths or narrative and heavily ritualized, which structure human experience and understanding of self and world...Stated more technically, a religion can be viewed as a kind of cultural and/or linguistic framework or medium that shapes the entirety of life and thought.” 17 The implications of this definition are vast.
Lindbeck’s definition of religion seeks to avoid the modernist foundationalism of both cognitive-propositionalist and experiential-expressivism.
Operating within an ecumenical mindset, Lindbeck attempts to define religions in a manner that is sensitive to their particularity. There is no universal essence to which these various religions point. Each religion is a self-enclosed system of meaning, language and practice. To understand a particular religion, one must become a participant. From the point of objectivity (as if that were ever possible) the definitive structure and movement of that religion is lost. The question that he himself raises is,
“How can the truthfulness of any one religion be maintained.” Again, in avoiding the modern assumptions of universality, religions are defined as truthful if they are rendered so by recourse to their “intrasystematic” logic. Lindbeck states, “This is an account of what it means to say that a particular belief is true within the context of a given religious framework. It can also be applied to the religious system itself: to say that a religion is intrasystematically true is to say that it is consistent and coherent.” 18
Truthfulness is not established necessarily by assertion and hegemony, instead through the critical internal conversation of the community itself and its bodily performance. As the community speaks, its self-analysis of its speech attempts to determine that speech as faithful to the system as a whole, “Utterances are intrasystematically true when they cohere with the total relevant context, which, in the case of a religion when viewed in cultural-linguistic terms, is not only other utterances but also the correlative forms of life.” 19
Lindbeck doesn’t suggest that there is no way by which the truths of certain religions can be validated against the intrasystematic logic of other religions. Lindbeck turns here to Austin’s performative understanding of language discussed above, and suggests that “a religious utterance, one might say, acquires the propositional truth of ontological correspondence only insofar as it is a performance, an act or deed, which helps create that correspondence.” 20
Language in this regard is demythologized and deessentialized, and what we are instead offered is bodily realities that more adequately cohere with ontological reality—or a particular reality of being in the world. In spite of
17 Lindbeck, George. The Nature of Doctrine: Religion and Theology in a Postliberal Age. (Philadelphia:
Westminster Press, 1984), 32-33.
18 Murphy, 121.
19 Lindbeck, 64.
20 Lindbeck, 65.

Stark 9 this possibility for adequacy of one religious utterance over that of another, Lindbeck maintains a high suspicion of those that attempt to make the judgments of truth and untruth, real or unreal. Humanity is radically historicized. “The sense of what is real or unreal is in large part socially constructed, and what seems credible or incredible to contemporary theologians is likely to be more the product of their milieu and intellectual conditioning than of their science, philosophy, or theological argumentation.” 21
The argument established by George Lindbeck in The Nature of Doctrine is both involved and extends beyond the scope of this essay. An analysis of his “rule theory” of doctrine is one such area. We will return to a further element of his program, namely
“intratextuality” in our final section. However, for now it is sufficient to say that within
Lindbeck’s program we find a decisive response to the nature and future of religion in an era where the philosophical climate has shifted from universality to locality and specificity. The cultural-linguistic system speaks to the possibility of understanding religions within their particularity. The implication for inter-religious dialogue and peaceful coexistence shall be developed later in this essay.
Narrative Christology: Turn toward Hermeneutics
We now turn our attention to the work of Hans Frei and more specifically to the development of his narrative Christology as response to the turn from referentialism to hermeneutics. Frei has been designated as one of the fathers of narrative theology.
Narrative theology has been defined by Alexander Lucie Smith as, “one that starts not with abstract first principles, but with a particular story; it is inductive rather than deductive. The story it examines is found, or ‘embodied’, in a community’s tradition, and is usually taken to sum up or encapsulate the community’s belief about itself, the world and God. Moreover, the story is rooted in the community’s particular experience of itself, the world and God.” 22
However such a categorization fails to recognize the particularity of his task, in fact, “Christian theology, as Frei understood it, is not concerned with narrative per se , but rather seeks to discern and describe the structure and content of a particular narrative.” 23 Or, as William Placher notes in an article about Frei’s biblical hermeneutics, “A Christian theology that respects the meaning of the biblical narratives must begin simply by retelling those stories, without any systematic effort at apologetics, without any determined effort to begin with questions arising from our experience. The stories portray a person—a God who acts in the history of Israel and engages in self-revelation in Jesus of Nazareth.”
24
Frei’s career was the product of varying theological influences, from H. Richard Niebuhr to his exposure to Karl Barth’s theology. Immediately concerned with the mode of Biblical Interpretation in modernity
( Eclipse of the Biblical Narrative ) and how both conservative and liberal theologians had laid upon biblical interpretation a set of foundational presuppositions that were naturally foreign to the text. Frei advocated a return to a pre-modern interpretive structure that
21 Lindbeck, 63.
22 Lucie-Smith, Alexander, Narrative Theology and Moral Theology . (Great Britain: MPG Books, 2007), 1.
23 Campbell, Charles L.
Preaching Jesus: New Directions for Homiletics in Hans Frei’s Postliberal
Theology . (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1997), 54.
24 Placher, William C. “Hans Frei and the Meaning of Biblical Narrative.” Christian Century. May 24-31,
1989, 57

Stark 10 preserved the sensus literalis of the text, reading the narratives of the bible in a “historylike,” “realistic” fashion. The primary loci of his interests for our concern rest in the interpretation of Jesus for present history. He became immediately engaged in the conversation that pitted two opposing and contentious forms of Christology against one another. On one side, we find the radical historicist critique of the life of Jesus found in the work of Strauss in Life of Christ.
On the other is the dogmatic theology that instead asserts a Christ of Faith. What Frei sought was a mediating position somewhere between and somehow outside these two positions.
It became the contention of the 19 th
and 20 th
century historicist schools, that the dogmatic theology of the church had been eclipsed by the advent of the historical-critical method. While many historicists attempted to maintain the validity of the Christian religion (among them Albrecht Ritschl) others were far more concerned with establishing the social contextual nature of Christianity as a product of certain times and certain worldviews. For Strauss, the dogmatic propositions of the Resurrection, the Virgin Birth, and the Miracles were mythologized representations of a partially truthful narrative. It became the project of many historians to instead attempt to construct the world behind the text so that the history of the Gospel accounts could either be validated or rendered a remnant of an ancient past, not altogether valid or useful for the current historical moment.
In assessing the validity of this particular historicist project, Frei noted with interest the linguistic presuppositions on which this project rests. In attempting to reconstruct the history behind the text, these philosophers and theologians are trapped by linguistic referentialism. Instead, Frei turns to various thinkers across a broad spectrum
(Auerbach, Ryle, and Austen) to suggest a more performatory process of linguistic intent within the Bible. Although and perhaps necessarily early Christians viewed these narratives as literal events, the primary task of these narratives was to communicate and to move a community of readers in a certain direction, toward faithfulness in the God rendered in the text. This aspect of Frei’s theology has broad implications, to which we now turn, and was determinately influenced by Karl Barth’s theology, “Like Barth, Frei contended that much of scriptural narrative is ‘history-like’ without needing to be historical. The purpose of the Gospel stories is to narrate the identity...The test of their truth is not whether the particular incidents that they describe took place, but whether they truthfully narrate the identity of Jesus to us.” 25
In Frei’s piece
The Identity of Jesus , he attempts a constructive approach to the interpretation of Jesus from the Gospel texts. Heavily influenced by the work of Gilbert
Ryle, Frei adopts an “intention-action” model of identity that locates our identity not in some hidden existential reality, but in the public action rendered by realistic narratives.
“The intention-action model, borrowed from Ryle, located human identity at the public level, rather than in some inner consciousness or self-understanding ‘behind the scene.’” 26 Within this particular model, both the cross and the resurrection move then from being purely dogmatic formulations of the church or historicist demythologized events that capture the essence of Jesus in this world, and instead are understood to be absolutely essential to the identity and the church’s understanding of Jesus from
25 Dorrien, Gary. “The Origins of Postliberalism: A Third Way in Theology.” in Christian Century, July 4-
11, 2001, 16.
26 Campbell, 25.

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Nazareth. There is no greater point in the narratives than in these two moments that more fully develop identity of Jesus Christ. Mark Higton notes, “In the Gospels, at least in the passion and resurrection sequences, the densely woven actions and encounters of the characters in their diverse circumstances are constitutive for the characters’ identities— and in particular for the depicted identity of Jesus.” 27
While attributing the intention-action model as critical for the recovery of the identity of Jesus and positing this model on the movement of climactic events in the life of the one establishing identity, Frei also suggests an “ascriptive-subject” description.
This description is the rendering of identity as it is known in its consistency and coherence throughout the narrative. It must be noted, both of these methods are inherently social. They also turn from referentialism/essentialism, either in the form of conservative fundamentalism or modern liberalism to suggesting the power of language as acknowledged in the gospels as a performance of a community that intentionally renders an identity necessary for the shaping of that community. Higton again notes, “the depiction of an identity firmly ingredient in a public, social world where actions and interactions have real weight, an identity which is nevertheless not wholly dispersed but has real continuity and cohesion. With these and other concepts, we can seek to understand what we have met in these texts.”
28
Rendering the identity of Jesus Christ in the way in which Frei has established has implications in suggesting that in the Resurrection, Jesus is (as an identifier) to be recognized in continuity with the Father, “the depicted identity of Jesus of Nazareth is inseparable from the claim that God raised him, and in so doing enacted the good of humankind on their behalf.” 29 Or as Frei has said, God acts and Jesus appears. This is a historical action that has ongoing historical implications as the presence of God in Christ is then mediated throughout the world in a way that is unsubstitutable; it is the very same
Jesus present. There are no “Christ figures” that seem to capture the essence or portray the underlying virtue that prompts the movement of Jesus. Likewise, it is also a presence that is not fully captured by the narrative. It is ongoing and ever moving presence that appears in the variety of historical occurrences in ever-creative ways.
Consequently, Frei turns his attention briefly to the ways in which Jesus is present in the ecclesia . His turn is both brief and like much of his writing a bit convoluted.
However, and I quote Frei,
“...the church is to be follower rather than a complete reiteration of its
Lord. ‘To enact the good of men on their behalf’ has already been done once and for all. The church has no need to play the role of ‘Christ figure.’ Rather it is called to be a collective disciple, to follow at a distance the pattern of exchange, serving rather than being served, and accepting (as the disciple, as differentiated from his Lord) the enrichment given to him by his neighbor.” 30
The role of the church is a historic role. It is to engage the world in such a way as to identify the various ways in which the church is called to follow Christ into the
27 Higton, M.A. “A Carefully Circumscribed Progressive Politics: Hans Frei’s Political Theology. Modern
Theology, 15:1, January 1999, 57
28 Ibid.
, 59.
29 Ibid., 59.
30 Frei, Hans W. The Identity of Jesus Christ.
(Eugene: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 1997), 191.

Stark 12 same varieties of occasions that Jesus is present. The church “is the place where the accessible description of the identity of Jesus is re-presented, yet it has its own identity as an unsubstitutable corporate follower of an unsubstitutable Lord, and it witnesses to the fact that whom it follows is present beyond the church to the whole of history.”
31
The vision of the ecclesia is one of humility, generosity, and particularity and one that we will return to later in this paper.
Unapologetic Theology: Loss of Hegemony but Resisting Relativity
We have engaged the two formative thinkers of the postliberal school of theology.
We will now briefly consider the work of William Placher, former professor of religion at
Wabash College, and indebted to the work of both Lindbeck and Frei. The following is only a brief synopsis of Placher’s book Unapologetic Theology , but his findings will be developed later in this essay. For our purposes, I will attempt to establish that although some have viewed postliberal theology as given to the development of a sectarian
“theological ghetto,” thinkers like Placher have sought to counter such criticisms through balancing the postmodern concern for historicity and generosity and the avoidance of slipping into either nihilism or relativity.
Placher’s book is an attempt to deal with theology by way of a via media between those who have been called “Wittgensteinian Fideists” and “Relativists.” Wittgensteinian
Fideists are those that have taken the linguistic turn and are accused of asserting that language only makes sense to those that use it and understand its rules. Only those that understand the game that is being played by use of the language are able to assess the value and truth of any given statement. Relativists are those that have taken the radical historicist and deconstructive approaches and have either through their acknowledgement of the hegemony and power of knowledge suggested that no assertion of truth should nor could ever be given supremacy or who have by valuing the historicism of knowledge suggested that the materialism embodied in this approach creates space for the voices of the “other.”
Placher, as a postliberal theologian, is committed to living and conceiving of faith within a “truly pluralistic” world community. However, he is diligent in maintaining the particularity of traditions over the modern attempts to define “essences” that lay behind all such traditions. These attempts have established apologetics that suggest that there is either a deeper ontological or existential reality to be discovered within these traditions that appeal to modern assumptions of universalism. Throughout his work, he refers to both Frei and Lindbeck as middle ways between incommensurability and relativism.
Frei’s way of reading scripture as a Christological narrative that engenders the life of a particular community and Lindbeck’s cultural-linguistic mode of religious selfunderstanding are central to the issue of particularity.
However, Placher goes one step further, a step that perhaps both Frei and
Lindbeck would have resisted. He asserts that Hans Georg Gadamer’s hermeneutics might perhaps aid in the formulation of a theology of via media. Highly historicist and dialogical, Gadamer’s hermeneutics draws upon the “assumptions, biases, and particular questions,” that the reader brings to the text. He designates our capacity to interpret as highly impacted by the horizon of vision. It is the limits to our horizon of vision that
31 Higton, Modern Theology . 63.

Stark 13 sometimes occasions either the sectarianism of religious fideism or the lack of acknowledgement of diversity by modern epistemologists. However, for both Placher and Gadamer, the horizon of vision as it is related to the mind isn’t problematic but a possibility for conversation and cooperation. Placher states, quoting Gadamer,
“Applying this to the thinking mind, we speak of narrowness of horizon, of the possible expansion of horizon of the opening of new horizons, etc.” 32
The expansion of horizon is made possible as the traditions in question approach themselves with a hermeneutic of suspicion, especially as it encounters its textual interpretations. Again quoting Gadamer, “every age has to understand a transmitted text in its own way, for the test is part of the whole of the traditions in which the age takes an objective interest and in which it seeks to understand itself.” 33
Placher also suggests the need for conversation partners from both inside and outside the tradition. We will return later in this essay to Placher’s belief that those committed to particularity need a
Gadamerian hermeneutic.
Tradition, Text, Eschatology & Practice: Turn toward Holism
Finally, in our analysis of postliberal theology as a possible developing tradition of theological thought for a historicist ethic of ecclesial nonviolence, we turn our attention to perhaps the most outspoken and often criticized voices in current ethical debate, Stanley Hauerwas. Educated at Yale, Hauerwas was unquestionably influenced by his teachers, George Lindbeck and Hans Frei. In surveying the vast textual literature of Hauerwas, we find few references to his alliance with the postliberal program.
However, his radical historicism, emphasis on a Christological narrative theology, and intrasystemic validation for the truth of Christianity found in the performance of the
Christian community all witness to his close ties to Yale. While also undoubtedly influenced by the work of John Howard Yoder and Alasdair MacIntyre, we can easily suggest that Hauerwas becomes the primary ethical voice for the postliberal proposal.
For the purposes of this essay, we will attempt to establish Hauerwas as a response to the shift from reductionism to holism, as witnessed by his abstention from Christian Ethics as a project of establishing universality, quandary ethics, the reduction to the individual as the point of ethical deliberation and the need for community as the heuristic structure for the development of virtue and ethical action.
As a prolific writer, the scope of his thought is too broad to survey in this essay.
Hauerwas has resisted the development of systematic approach to his theological project and his writings are intentionally situational and vast, covering a broad range of subject material. However, central to the project of Hauerwas is his assertion that the Christian
Community should be a non-violent community. In what follows, we will identify major areas in the work of Hauerwas that not only speak to his holistic endeavor but also his staunch adamancy for ecclesial non-violence.
In some respects, the project of Hauerwas could be defined as a polemic against modern liberalism. Unfortunately, oftentimes his attacks on liberalism are so broad and comprehensive that he fails to point out the varieties within the modern liberal program
32 Placher, William C. Unapologetic Theology: A Christian Voice in a Pluralistic Conversation .
(Louisville; Westminster John Knox Press, 1989), 111.
33 Ibid., 112.

Stark 14 or his indebtedness to that project, especially to Ernst Troeltsch. Yet as he mounts his critique, he is quick to establish the areas of modern liberalism that he has defined as problematic in securing and defining the ethical orientation of life and their impact on the nature of the church’s faithfulness to its particular vocation. Central to that critique is the problematic assumptions of Foundationalism for the legitimacy of ethical decisions.
Foundationalism posits a secure, universal, necessary ground on which to proceed in defining the right and the good. This foundational direction pays no heed to the tradition, location, or narrative assumptions of the agent making the ethical decision. Instead, such decisions are made from an ahistorical, meta-point of reference. He also resists the
Kantian urge to seek a universally valid organization of human morality on a deontological basis and instead takes a much more postmodern/historicist approach. “All ethical reflection occurs relative to a particular time and place. Not only do ethical problems change from one time to the next, but the very nature and structure of ethics is determined by the particularities of a community’s history and convictions.” 34
Consequently, Hauerwas is then quick to assert that this does not mean that ethics is left in the hands of individuals caught up in the contingencies of human history, attempting to do the best they can for the benefit of most. Instead, all ethical reflection is determined by the community of decision makers as they take seriously the tradition in which they are situated, their allegiance to narrative structure, and the practices that engender good decisions. However, it must be noted that Hauerwas isn’t particularly interested in developing a substantial ethical theory, valid for all people. Instead, the primary locus of his theorizing is the Christian church and its faithfulness to the vocation of witness. This witness is not an apologetic task of accommodating our actions and reason to modern sensibilities or the individual experiential-expressivism of romanticism.
As he states, “The essential Christian witness is neither to personal experience, nor to what Christianity means to ‘me,’ but to the truth that the world is the creation of a good
God who is know through the people of Israel and the life, death, and resurrection of
Jesus Christ.”
35
Hauerwas, like Frei is quick to regard the narrative of Christ as the central and governing narrative for the life of the Christian community. Although narratives as a whole, are necessary in shaping and defining public enactment of ethical decisions (a la
MacIntryre) the particularity of the Bible serves as the Christian story. This story, which describes the actions of God first in the people of Israel and then ultimately in the person of Jesus, points us to our knowledge of self, others, and God. This particular narrative not only describes the world but it also directs the church to faithful action in the world.
Hauerwas writes,
“To know our creator, therefore, we are required to learn through God’s particular dealings with Israel and Jesus, and through God’s continuing faithfulness to the Jews and the ingathering of a people to the church.
Such knowledge requires constant appropriation, constant willingness to accept the gift of God’s good creation. As Christians we maintain that such appropriation is accomplished in and through our faithfulness to the
34 Hauerwas, Stanley. The Peaceable Kingdom: A Primer in Christian Ethics. (Notre Dame: Notre Dame,
1983), 1.
35 Ibid, 15.

Stark 15 life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. We believe that by learning to be his disciples we will learn to find our life—our story—in God’s story.”
36
It is important to note that not only does Hauerwas focus on a Narrative
Christology with the identity of Jesus as rendered in the Gospel narratives, but Hauerwas in mediated ways also appropriates Lindbeck’s intratextual view of Scripture in which
“the bible absorbs the world rather than the world absorbing the bible,” and Lindbeck’s
“intrasystematic truth.” The former can be seen throughout the work of Hauerwas in the following statements, “...the narrative character of our knowledge of God, the self, and the world is a reality making claim that the world and our existence in it are God’s creations; our lives, and indeed, the existence of the universe are but contingent realities.” 37
Hauerwas also writes, “The form of the Gospels as stories of a life are meant not only to display that life, but to train us to situate our lives in relation to that life.”
38
It is evident from these statements that Hauerwas believes that the Scriptural narrative is not simply a good story, but also a true story. Narrative truth isn’t measured by modern foundational assumptions, but instead through the intrasystematic validation of the
Christian community and its ongoing tradition. Hauerwas writes,
“By recovering the narrative dimension of Christology we will be able to see that Jesus did not have a social ethic, but that his story is a social ethic.
For the social and political validity of a community results from its being formed by a truthful story, a story that gives us the means to live without fear of one another. Therefore there can be no separation of Christology from ecclesiology, that is, Jesus from the church. The truthfulness of
Jesus creates and is known by the kind of community his story should form.” 39
We now finally turn our attention to the ecclesial significance of Hauerwas’ project. As already noted, the church are those that have situated their lives within the truth rendering narrative of the Biblical story. This biblical story is primarily focused in the revelation of God’s self in Jesus Christ, who in Hauerwas’ terms, sets for the church the example around which they are to orient their action in this world. In orienting themselves in such a manner, the church is called upon to witness to God’s definitive actions of redemption and reconciliation. He states, “The most important social task of
Christians is to be nothing less than a community capable of forming people with virtues sufficient to witness to God’s truth in the world.” 40
The above noted theological methodology points us to our final and ultimate concern for this paper in regards to Hauerwas. To witness to God’s intentions for reconciliation and redemption and the truth of the Biblical narrative requires a certain kind of people that have been formed and shaped to embody a certain type of virtue.
Central to this task of virtue formation is the practice of non-violence. Non-violence draws its determinacy first from the example of Jesus, who both commanded nonviolence and embodied it in his public dealings with the violence of the world. Within
36 Ibid.
, 28.
37 Ibid., 25.
38 Ibid., 74.
39 Hauerwas, Stanley. A Community of Character: Toward a Constructive Christian Social Ethic . (Notre
Dame; University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), 37.
40 Ibid., 2.

Stark 16
Hauerwas’ ethical application, the church is called to imitate Jesus as a witness to God’s action in God’s particular self-manifestation. Secondly, non-violence finds its priority based on the assertion that the biblical narrative is truthful. Truth is not to be defended or promoted through coercion or violence, but through the public witness and willingness to suffer on its behalf. Truth is not upheld by the action of fear or threat, but of trust and faith. Consequently, Hauerwas’ ethic of non-violence is substantiated through a high eschatology that points to the coming of the Kingdom and the promise of resurrection that vindicates such truthfulness. “For the announcement of the reality of this kingdom, of the possibility of living a life of forgiveness and peace with one’s enemies, is based on our confidence that the kingdom has become a reality through the life and work of this man, Jesus of Nazareth. His life is the life of the end—this is the way the world is meant to be—and thus those who follow him become a people of the last times, the people of the new age.” 41
Finally, Stanly Hauerwas should not be viewed as suggesting that nonviolence is simply an ahistorical universal ethic, instead it is situated within the particularity of present time. Evidence of this is found in his collaborative article, “The Case for
Abolition of War in the Twenty-First Century.” Throughout this article Hauerwas,
Hogan, and McDonagh assess the failure of violence to create, perpetuate, and preserve peace and justice. They intentionally evaluate various modern day humanitarian crises that have sought violent intervention as peaceful mediation. They then make the radical claim that perhaps our recourse to violence in securing peace and justice is a failed telling of history. History, too often, has become the grounds on which the violence of competing entities has been worked out, versus the steady and progressive attempts at peace, justice, tolerance, and human freedom. Again applying his Christologicalecclesiology, Hauerwas suggests that the Christian story of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus presents a narrative in which the present moment can be engaged by nonviolent resolutions toward reconciliation and redemption.
For Hauerwas considering an ethic of nonviolence is a suspect topic. Such a category could insinuate the presumption that ethics is a field of discourse different from the theological discourse of the church. To view ethics in this manner is to reoccupy the space of modern assumptions of the “universality of morality” versus the “subjectivity of theology.” However, for Hauerwas one cannot draw such distinctions. Consequently, I have intended in this paper not to draw such distinctions, by first considering the theological implications of postliberal theology, I have structured this essay to suggest that the very “ethic” of nonviolence is none other than the bodily life flowing from the second-order practice of theological articulation made possible by the first-order practices of liturgy and discipleship. “The persuasive power of Christian discourse rests upon the indissoluble unity of the theological and the ethical aspects of Christian faith, not their separation.” 42
In conclusion, in this extended section of analysis, I have intentionally broken from the tendency to analyze the postliberal movement of theology in reference to one voice. Too often, critics, as we shall note in our coming section, have evaluated postliberalism by response to the theological, sociological, and philosophical project of
41 Hauerwas, Peaceable Kingdom, 85.
42 Hauerwas, Stanley, Sanctify them in the Truth: Holiness Exemplified.
(Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1998),
36.

Stark 17
George Lindbeck. However, as we have seen in a brief manner, postliberalism ranges across a developing spectrum as given voice in the projects of a variety of thinkers, each adding and challenging certain assumption, but carrying forward this conversation into new and unchartered directions.
Criticism: Isolationism, Historiography, Multiple-Traditions
There has been no shortage of criticisms levied at the postliberal project. As we have sought to assess the theological legitimacy of this project in the development of an ecclesial ethic of nonviolence, in fairness, we now turn our attention to two primary voices of critique. We will look to James Gustafson who represents for us the primarily modern liberal approach to theology and to Shelia Greeve Davaney as our representative of the pragmatic historicist approach.
Suggesting criticisms of postliberal theology can sometimes be viewed as an exercise in futility. This is not to say that the criticisms aren’t valid or appropriate, however, it is simply to say that postliberalism has defined its methodology in a way to make it nearly impervious to external critique. If all theology is particular and selfvalidating than the application of external categories fails to take seriously the task at hand. According to the categories of “intrasystematic truth” “cultural-linguistic religions” “ sensus literalis reading of scripture” and the “priority of communal practice and particular witness” it is difficult to criticize based upon abstracted categories of just, effective, utility, or good. The primary intention of theologians within this tradition is to maintain faithfulness to a particular rendering of the Christian life and ethical action.
43
Perhaps, this imperviousness is our first critique. As Gary Dorrien notes,
“For years James Gustafson, Max Stackhouse and others have charged that postliberal theology risks ghettoizing the church with its fixation on liturgical practices and on the ecclesial context of Christian speech.”
44
Whether intentionally or unintentionally and, in the case of Lindbeck, ironically (because he seeks and ecumenical dialogue) the core tenets of postliberal theology seem, according to Gustafson, to quickly move the church toward isolationism. We will return again to this critique in Davaney’s work, but for
Gustafson, who perhaps shares much more sympathy with the correlationist approach of
David Tracy, traditions and religious faiths are not so exclusive as to share nothing in common or have anything to say to one another. Nor, according to Gustafson, are we able to assert that we stand in only one tradition at a time. Therefore, as Gustafson has claimed, the attempt to absorb the world in the biblical text fails to recognize all the various worlds which would need absorbed, many of which are incompatible. “Gustafson thinks that Lindbeck, Holmer, and Hauerwas all erect a ‘cultural-linguistic’ wall between the world and the Bible and that of other texts, thereby rejecting the dialogical interaction necessary to arrive at meaningful warrants for belief.” 45
Likewise, Gustafson suggests that perhaps postliberalism’s primary sin is that of avoidance. “Postliberal Christian thought and religious life might be simply an avoidance of the questions, not answers to them, that a Troeltschian ‘liberal’ Christianity
43 Hauerwas, The Peaceable Kingdom, 60.
44 Dorrien, July 18-25, 27.
45 Reynolds, Terrence P. “A Conversation Worth Having: Hauerwas and Gustafson on Substance in
Theological Ethics.” Journal of Religious Ethics. Vol. 28, .398.

Stark 18 asked. But then, how does its agenda differ from very traditional, very orthodox or
Protestant evangelical views of the Christian faith?” 46
This avoidance is not only levied at biblical interpretation, the privileging of tradition, and abundant rhetoric of the primacy of liturgical practice. It is also suggested of the ethical approach of Hauerwas, “Raising the specter of ‘Wittgensteinian fideism,’ Gustafson has suggested that Hauerwas' narrativist loyalties generate a truncated, sectarian ethic, incapable of useful dialogue with other ethical perspectives” 47
Having now looked at the liberal critique of Gustafson, I now turn our attention to the historicist critique of Davaney. Unfortunately, too often the critiques of postliberalism, especially from other historicists, fail to do that to which they pride themselves. Historicists value the plurality and multiplicity of life, historically and in the present. Davaney suggests, “According to historicism, human existence is embedded in the matrix of particular, concrete histories; there is no humanity in ‘general,’ but only specific individuals and communities.” 48
They acknowledge that tradition is constituted in the contestation of multiple voices. Yet, when they turn attention to a critique of postliberal theology they do so by collapsing the above mentioned variety and ongoing expression into the seminal moment of origin in Lindbeck’s
The Nature of Doctrine .
Little attention is paid to the difference between Lindbeck and Frei, the Gadamerian emphasis of Placher, and others such as Ronald Thiemann, Bruce Marshall, Garrett
Green, and various members of the Duke Divinity School who also share sympathies of postliberal theology. We will, however, consider Shelia Greeve Davaney as one such voice that offers valid critiques of specifically George Lindbeck.
In her book, Pragmatic Historicism , Davaney attempts the constructive theological proposal that takes seriously deeply historicist concerns while protecting theology from a collapse into relativity. She evaluates what she considers two modern day historicist approaches, that of postliberalism and the correlationist approach. After evaluating, she moves to a critique that suggests that each fails to offer a substantive response to historicism and radical historic contingency. Davaney’s project is a response to those failures. For the purpose of this paper, I will briefly identify the four areas of critique levied at Lindbeck’s proposal.
1.) Tradition: Davaney also shares with Gustafson the recognition that no one can inhabit only one tradition at any given time. Davaney notes, “But for pragmatic historicists numerous persons today cannot so easily distinguish such a primary, encompassing perspective but are compelled to fashion creatively and critically the diverse traditions that impact them into some new conceptually and functionally coherent perspectives that work for today.” 49
2.) Isolationism: Although it is recognized that Lindbeck suggests an ecumenical concern, his project suggests such incompatibility and incommensurability that
“Postliberals, in the end, fail to demonstrate why communities today should or how they could genuinely interact with other communities.” 50
46 Gustafson, James, M. “Just what is ‘postliberal’ theology?” in Christian Century, March 24-31, 1999,
355.
47 Reynolds, 396.
48 Davaney, 23.
49 Davaney, 37.
50 Davaney, 37.

Stark 19
3.) Not only has postliberalism failed to take into account the multiplicity of traditions to which we belong, it has also rendered a one dimensional view of tradition marked by a “failure to include in their analysis of the relation of past and present any rigorous exploration of or even programmatic attention to the political, economic, social, or broader cultural location of religious beliefs and practices.” 51
4.) And finally, she suggests that lingering within their theological proposal is an elusive essentialism. Within both the work of Lindbeck and Hauerwas, there seems to exist a stable core within theology and tradition. This is counter the radical historicism of Davaney who is quick to point out that “even at the beginning, there was not one Christian story, agreed upon by all. Christianity’s origins, like the rest of history, are unstable and contested.”
52
In concluding this section, I would like to suggest two further critiques I feel are adequate in assessing the possibilities of postliberal theology. Rather than utilizing foreign categories, I shall direct our attention to limits within already existent categories within the postliberal proposal. The first is historiography, the way of telling history. I suggest that in its consistent polemic against modernity, especially in the work of
Hauerwas, its appropriation of modernity and its assessment of modern liberal implications are a bit slanted and predetermined by accusations of “rugged individualism” and a complete loss of communal or traditional content. The lack of generosity toward modern liberal tradition of thinkers that has attempted to seek the good for humanity, based on the assertion of freedom, natural right, and the diminishment of religious hegemony—leading to tyranny of action and thought, fails to take seriously the positive implications of their projects. Hauerwas moves too quickly to dismiss such figures as Spinoza, Hobbes, Hume, and Kant as perpetuating a failed philosophical experiment, often dismissing it as individualistic. He says of modern liberal society, “A good society is one that provides the greatest amount of freedom for the greatest number of people. Although such an ethic appears to be highly committed to the common good, in fact it’s supporting theory is individualistic, since the good turns out to be the sum of our individual desires.” 53
What Hauerwas fails to adequately commend are the ways in which this system has led to the just freedom of oppressed people, suffrage for women, and destruction of the system of chattel slavery.
In addition, I would also challenge the consistent insistence about the biblical narrative. However, the narrative to which they refer is so limited, it appeals to at times only deal with the New Testament. Throughout Frei’s work he regards the figural reading of the Old Testament as the ancient traditional way of reading scripture, but for
Hauerwas, he often refers to the Story of Israel or the “Chosen People,” and he is careful to avoid the Marcionite tendencies of denying the validity of the Hebrew Scriptures, and yet one is hard pressed to find a great deal of exegetical consideration for the appropriation of the Hebrew Scriptures in the life of the Christian community. The question might be asked if there is need to ignore the modern critical endeavor? While I am not suggesting captivity to the Historical Critical Method, or Form and Source
51 Davaney, 38.
52 Davaney, 39.
53 Hauerwas, The Peaceable Kingdom , 9.

Stark 20
Criticism, I am instead suggesting that dealing determinatively with these texts might open up the possibility of asking different questions of the Old Testament texts. In
Community of Character , Hauerwas suggests that much of the failure of the church is its inability to ask the appropriate questions. I would turn this very critique upon Hauerwas.
An uncritical perspective regarding Old Testament texts fails to ask questions such as, “in light of the revelation of Jesus Christ can we question the validity of the Holy War tradition in the text of Joshua?”
Above, I have suggested that the postliberal school has often been criticized from various theological proposals within the academy. I have suggested Gustafson and
Davaney as two such critics, but there are others. In fact, “liberation theologians have protested that postliberal theology is more concerned with Christian catechesis, formation and liturgy than with the struggle for social justice.” 54
I have also suggested two of my own criticisms regarding the postliberal developing tradition of theology. We shall turn our attention to the final section of this paper which both seeks to answer the question and appropriate that answer in full view of both an analysis and its criticisms of whether in fact, “postliberalism offers possibilities for an ecclesial ethic of nonviolence in today’s social environment?”
Toward an Intellectual and Bodily Ethic of Non-Violence
“And yet who of them have so purified their own hearts as to love their enemies instead of hating them; instead of upbraiding those who first insult them (which is certainly more usual), to bless them; and to pray for those who plot against them? On the contrary, they ever persist in delving into the evil mysteries of their sophistry, ever desirous of working some harm, making skill in oratory rather than proof of deeds their business. With us, on the contrary, you will find unlettered people, tradesmen and old women, who, though unable to express in words the advantages of our teaching, demonstrate by acts the value of their principles. For they do not rehearse speeches; but evidence good deeds. When struck, they do not strike back; when robbed, they do not sue; to those who ask, they give, and they love their neighbors as themselves.” 55 Athenagoras
To this point in the essay, we have established that we are currently living in a time of convergence, where mind and body are intricately woven together. It is a time in which the intellectual climate has experienced substantial shifts, challenging the possibility of theology as a substantive program. It is a time that intellectually values multiplicity, particularity, relativity, and pragmatism. At this same moment we have witnessed the atrocities of violence in barbaric proportions. The overall intent of this paper has been to establish the theological viability of an ecclesial ethic of non-violence for today. To do so we have considered the postliberal school of theology as a set of theological voices that could possibly provide space for such non-violence. We began by briefly surveying the implications of postliberal theology especially as they reference the intellectual shifts to locality, holism, hermeneutics, and relativity.
We then proceeded to investigate a few criticisms levied at this program. We now turn our attention to the
54 Dorrien, July 18-25, 2001, 27.
55 Meeks, Wayne A. The Origins of Christian Morality: The First Two Centuries. (New Haven: Yale
University, 1993), 120.

Stark 21 synthetic moment in this essay. Throughout this section I intend to draw from both the strengths and criticisms regarding the possibility for a particular, narrative-rendered
Christological, pneumatological, hermeneutic, ecclesial ethic of non-violence inspired by the developing tradition of postliberalism, yet moving on within a Wesleyan context.
Courage to Be
I might first regard an ethic of non-violence emerging from postliberalism as a possibility by grounding these theological voices in a narrative-based communal
“courage to be.” We needn’t again rehearse the importance of both historicity and particularity within our postmodern setting. Given such value, postliberalism offers the church the capacity to recognize itself as particular, historically situated community grounded in both a substantive, albeit ever-evolving tradition and a peculiar narrative centered on the unsubstitutable Jesus of Nazareth. Within such a theological tradition, the church is not viewed as a “willy nilly” community, constantly adapting itself to the power structures and hegemonic agendas of the violent world. Instead, it rests upon its particularity in hopes of witnessing to God’s redemptive purposes for the world in its entirety. Likewise, such courageous communities don’t start with questions of accessibility to modern sensibilities or correlation.
This courageous community has a specific way of understanding itself in relationship to both the world and its constitutive narrative. According to Wayne Meeks, a fellow faculty member of both Frei and Lindbeck, “The goal of a theological hermeneutics on the cultural-linguistic model is not belief in objectively true propositions taught by the text nor the adoption by individuals of an authentic self-understanding evoked by the text’s symbols, but the formation of a community whose forms of life correspond to the symbolic universe rendered or signaled by the text.” 56
Likewise, entry into the community is not substantiated by cognitive assent to a set of detached propositions, the acquiescence to a moralized form of civil religion, or the coercive manipulation of powerful forces. Instead, “Becoming a Christian is a process of socialization or enculturation within a particular cultural-linguistic community.” 57
To become a member of this courageous community is to enter into a process of moral formation that renders a virtue capable of participating in the normative ethic of that community. We don’t come to the community with morality of our own making, for
“...we cannot begin to understand the process of moral formation until we see that it is inextricable from the process which distinctive communities were taking shape. Making morals means making community.”
58
The member of that community only comes to understand what is both faithful and acceptable by learning the community’s narratives, participating in the community’s practices, and recognizing the historic dynamism of the community’s tradition. According to Hauerwas, “Communities teach us what kind of intentions are appropriate if we are to be the kind of person appropriate to living among these people.” 59
56 Wayne Meeks, “A Hermeneutics of Social Embodiment,” Harvard Theological Review 79 (January,
April, July, 1986): 180-81.
57 Campbell, 67.
58 Meeks, Origins of Christian Morality , 5.
59 Hauerwas, The Peaceable Kingdom , 21.

Stark 22
As we have already learned from our analysis of Hauerwas, he suggests that faithfulness as a church is inextricably tied to the practice of non-violence. Taken within our current reference, the church is courageously non-violent, first because it courageously accepts its distinctiveness as a community. It is not dependant on the need to accommodate definitions of practicality that emerge from traditions whose basic assumptions about the world and God are radically different than that of the church. As
Hauerwas suggests, “The nonviolence of the church derives from the character of the story of God that makes us what we are—namely a community capable of witnessing to others the kind of life made possible when trust rather than fear rules our relation with one another.” 60
We have also recognized that central to the project of postliberalism is its narrative Christology that shapes the ethical action of the church. The courageous community of the church recognizes that it owes its primary allegiance and obedience to the rendering of Jesus in the Gospel stories and the ongoing presence of Jesus through the
Holy Spirit. Hauerwas, Frei, and Lindbeck emphasize the centrality of Jesus for the faithfulness of the Christian community. In fact, Hauerwas notes,
“The kind of radical Christocentric ethics I am trying to develop, at least to some, seems to threaten the ability of Christians to act constructively in a world already far too divided. In such divided world what is needed, it is argued, is a universal ethic capable of resolving conflict. In contrast, I will try to show that if Christians are to help such a world live more peacefully, we can only be what we are—those who worship Jesus Christ, the Son of God.” 61
However, it is precisely at the point Lindbeck’s and Hauerwas’ courage that we might balance the postliberal project with the generosity and humility of Frei. As noted above, it is the multiplicity of voices within this tradition that add richness, depth, and possibility to the project. Within the postliberal traditioning that is currently taking shape amongst educators, pastors, and laypeople, these formative and yet pensive theologians have secured for us the possibility of holding courage without hubris and generosity without relativity. Frei’s theology, while asserting a courageous distinctiveness recognizes the looming sin of the community and seeks to moderate the dialogue with a sense of humility. I quote in length the description of Higton’s assessment of Frei’s
“carefully circumscribed progressive politics:”
“Frei’s political theology speaks of the ‘openness and ambiguity of
Christian life in regard to the human and political present.’ The church’s involvement in the world will take the form of a tentative discernment of the movements of God’s Spirit, and a responding co-operation with those movements, not an absolute initiation on the church’s part. The church does not first settle into its given identity, and turn to the world only in a second movement: rather the church gains its identity in acting responsively in the world, hoping for ‘a temporary design of fitness’ between God’s action and Christians’ in the world, woven into the one story of redemption. The church will practice its figural skills, and make a
‘temporary accommodation between imperfect good and the lesser yet less
60 Hauerwas, Community of Character, 70.
61 Hauerwas, Sanctify them in the Truth , 178.

Stark 23 than total evil with the least possible bloodshed and cruelty’. The church’s action will be ‘in principle limited by divine governance’,
‘contingent, qualified and limited’, ‘fragmented...partial and nuanced’,
‘pragmatic’, ‘provisional’. ‘for the time being’, ‘experimental’. Doing less than this is to settle for less than the church’s true identity, Jesus
Christ, whose capacious identity opens up on to the whole of reality; doing more than this is to misconstrue Christian knowledge of that person— either by turning him into a principle or a schema, ignoring his unsubstitutablity, or by short-circuiting his profound eschatological mysteriousness, and settling for a debased form of significance.” 62
I would assert that it is precisely the non-violence that we have been pointing to throughout this essay that makes Frei’s political/social theology possible. Non-violence forces the courageous community to be patient, investigate its intentions, think well and pray diligently. It forces the community to come to terms with the providence of God even in the midst of situations that seem hopelessly broken, even moments like the cross.
It resonates well with yet another assessment of Frei’s public theology.
“It calls us to read the newspaper and the Gospels alongside one another unapologetically, to work to find connections, to pray that by the grace of the Spirit we will not be drawn away into Christian platitudes but delve ever deeper into the thick of history and of the gospels, convinced that we do not need methodological or theological sophistication to pursue this task, even if we might need theological sophistication to fight against those forces which would declare the practice impossible or nonsensical.” 63
Postliberal theology becomes beneficial to our pursuit of an ethic of nonviolence precisely because it is a courageous community. It seeks to exist as a community defined by the particularity of an incarnate, crucified, resurrected Jesus Christ. Its non-violent community seeks creativity and proactivity rather than racing in fear and reaction to deal with injustice with violence. Now, we turn our attention from “being” a community to
“acting” as a community.
Courage to Act: Material and Bodily Realism
It has been my intention throughout this essay to avoid slipping into the temptation of rendering a purely intellectual ethical account of both postliberalism and nonviolence. As stated at the beginning of this essay, there exists in our postmodern context a convergence of mind and body. Having established the postliberal methodological approach, I shall now, with the help of Richard B. Hayes, one who shares many sympathies with the developing postliberal tradition, and Stanley Hauerwas look at the narrative account of Jesus in the Gospels and seek a communal understanding that will move the church as a “body” into this world in a nonviolent manner.
In his brilliant piece, Moral Vision of the New Testament
, Hays’ work could be construed as the New Testament exegetical project of postliberal theology. Within his
62 Higton, Modern Theology , 77.
63 Higton, Mike. Christ, Providence, and History: Hans W. Frei’s Public Theology . (London: T&T Clark
International, 2004), 15.

Stark 24 work, he concentrates on narrative, community, and practice as definitive for the moral development of the Christian community. Hays writes, “...normative Christian ethics is fundamentally a hermeneutical enterprise: it must begin and end in the interpretation and application of Scripture for the life of the community of faith.”
64
Not only is this a narrative approach, but in coherence with postliberalism it is an intratextual narrative approach. “The New Testament calls the covenant community of God’s people into participation in the cross of Christ in such a way that the death and resurrection of Jesus becomes the paradigm for their common life as harbingers of God’s new creation.” 65
For
Hays, the community of ecclesia does not first look to the world and apply to it the cross, instead it first looks to the cross and then enters the world.
As the Christian community engages this intratextual hermeneutic, for Hays,
Hauerwas, and Frei, it does so under the predisposition to obedience. Again, this is grounded in the narrative Christology of Hans Frei. Too often, according to Frei, theologians have attempted to posit an overarching theme that directs consistently the actions of Jesus. Some have suggested love while others have suggested mercy.
Categories such as the above named have a way of suggesting these categories have a sort of “essential” “ontological” precedent over the life of Jesus. However, given Frei’s
“intention-action” “ascriptive-subject” identity structure and its public performance, he suggests that we first turn toward Jesus’ obedience to the Father as enacted in the Gospel narratives as the impetus behind his actions. The obedience of Jesus prefigures the calling of the church, and this predisposition of the community to obedience helps enable its self understanding. In some respects we are dealing with a hermeneutical circle. In speaking of Hauerwas’ ethical task, Hays suggests, “Obedience must precede understanding.” 66
Hays then goes on to note,
“...we act in simple obedience to the God who willed that his own Son should give himself up to death on a cross. We make this choice in the hope and anticipation that God’s love will finally prevail through the way of the cross, despite our inability to see how this is possible. That is the life of discipleship to which the New Testament repeatedly calls us. When the church as a community is faithful to that calling, it prefigures the peaceable kingdom of God in a world wracked by violence.” 67
Note for Hays that our intratextual hermeneutic which requires a predisposition toward obedience leads us toward nonviolence and witnesses to the peaceable kingdom.
Only as the world is absorbed into the story of God’s redemptive acts in Jesus
Christ and only as the church emerges from that story in obedience to God’s selfmanifestation and enactment in Jesus is the courageous community able to live nonviolently. We now turn our attention to the particularity of Jesus’ story and suggest, based on the postliberal view of courageous community, narrative Christology, intratextuality, and discipleship as obedience, a present day hermeneutic of non-violent ethical action. Before turning to the story, listen as Hays’ briefly narrates the ecclesia’s constitutive narrative. Hays states,
64 Hays, Richard B. The Moral Vision of the New Testament: Community, Cross, and New Creation . (San
Francisco: HarperSanFranciso, 1996), 10.
65 Hays, 292.
66 Hays, 255.
67 Hays, 343.

Stark 25
“The God of Israel, the creator of the world, has acted (astoundingly) to rescue the lost and broken world through the death and resurrection of
Jesus; the full scope of that rescue is not yet apparent, but God has created a community of witnesses to this good news, the church. While awaiting the grand conclusion of the story, the church, empowered by the Holy
Spirit, is called to reenact the loving obedience of Jesus Christ and thus to serve as a sign of God’s redemptive purposes for the world.” 68
Hermeneutic of Narrative Obedience
“The gospel commands us to submit to a vigorous and continuing discipleship if we are to recognize our status as subjects and properly understand the requirements for participation in the kingdom.
Furthermore, to be a Christian is not principally to obey certain commandments or rules, but to learn to grow into the story of Jesus as the form of God’s Kingdom.” 69
1.) Incarnation: The church consider first its story as it renders an account of
Jesus Christ as directly congruent with God. Frei, as we noted above views the resurrection as the decisive moment when the unity of Jesus with the Father is noted.
Throughout Christianity, the recognition of God’s union with the Son has been designated the incarnation , God become flesh. This of course is not simply an exegetical statement but also relies on an orthodox traditional account of this truth. The incarnation references the decisive moment when God humiliates himself and becomes human.
God’s movement is one toward humankind and among them, not as a stance of withdrawal in protection of purity. God is deemed the one who “gets God’s hands dirty” in the everyday, particularity of human interaction. The extent to which God is willing to extend himself into the world is expressed in Jesus’ consistent encounters with perversion, corruption, sin, evil, and violence. He does not embody a utopian dream, but the staunch realism of living amongst a people gone astray. Yet not only does God confront in Jesus the rebelliousness of humankind, but also enters into the world of brokenness, heartache, suffering, oppression and injustice. The Gospel narratives render this incarnate moment as the historic presence of a God that befriends the friendless, speaks with the forgotten, and extends invitations to the excluded. The incarnation presents to us a socially enacted identity, moving amongst the “other” in a way that intentionally reveals the futility of violence in providing change amongst humanity and instead opts for non-violence as break from the myth of “redemptive violence.”
From this incarnate identity, the church is recognized as the imperfect and unsubstitutable extension of Jesus’ incarnate body. A thoroughgoing narrative obedience embodied in the courageous community will take seriously the incarnation. The ecclesia will intentionally avoid isolationism as a failure to fully encounter the world, even on the world’s own terms. It will instead situate itself in spaces where the possibility of “dirty hands” becomes a reality. It will be a community that runs to the world instead of away.
It does not demand the ritual purity of the Levitical Laws, but instead the social holiness
68 Hays, 193.
69 Hauerwas, The Peaceable Kingdom, 30.

Stark 26 expressed by Jesus as moving into confrontations with evil and violence, but also toward the disenfranchised, the marginalized and the oppressed. It will seek to enter into the abyss of urban poverty, take up residence, and work to challenge the cycles of destructive living and social violence. It will be willing to humiliate itself in befriending the social outcasts and the mentally ill. It will seek humanitarian intervention in creative, just, redemptive manners without recourse to violence. The ecclesia in this historic moment will obey the commands of “enemy loving” and “cheek turning” not as ahistorical principles of idealism, but as the real bodily practices of resistance to vicious cycles of barbaric violence that have in mind the good, but instead evoke terror, fear, and oppression. The incarnate church will celebrate the redemptive practices of the Truth and
Reconciliation Commission in South Africa. The incarnate church will non-violently engage the regions of Sudan, Somalia, and Southside Chicago through organized efforts in community development, education reform, and egalitarian living. Courageously, this community will take seriously its incarnate prophetic task of standing against systems of hegemony and oppression, making itself vulnerable to the vengeance built into systems like free-market capitalism, economic and cultural colonialism, and Western hegemony.
The courageous ecclesia will obey both the commands and the actions of God as present in Jesus, nonviolently, as witness to the possibility of newness and difference.
2.) Crucifixion: The narrative obedience of the church in this world as it acts non-violently is not a naïve endeavor. The church, just as is evidenced by Jesus on the cross, recognizes that sometimes those that seek nonviolent redemption are killed precisely by the violence it sought to subvert. Therefore, we are reminded that entry into the world is precarious, risky, and unsafe. It has come to terms with the level of sin and evil operative in the world and it recognizes on the face of every man, woman, and child surrendered to the “gods of war” the broken and bleeding face of Jesus Christ. In the story where the cross is found, hopes are sometimes dashed, the innocent are sometimes stolen from our presence, and justice is sometimes surrendered in preference to ignorance, hatred and prejudice. But an obedient community formed by the cross is also formed by the linguistic utterances of Jesus on the cross, utterances of forgiveness, compassion, brutal honesty, and faith in the providence of God. Hauerwas notes, “The
Christian, however, does not claim that the world is safe but only that it is under God’s lordship.”
70
Not only does the church recognize in the cross the evil that exists “out there” in the world. It also comes to terms with the evil still operative “in here” in the church. At the cross the church points to the brutality of "righteous" institutions and religious councils gone wrong. It also acknowledges that at the foot of the cross all are on the same ground, standing together, sinner and saint, looking up at the innocent broken body of the world’s Lord.
A cross shaped community recognizes that sexual deviants still exist and that there is need for “justice-seeking” institutions to keep such deviant behavior from preying on the helpless and the children. It speaks of forsakenness when it peers into the mass graves of victims of genocide. It rends its garments when another shooting takes place in a black neighborhood and the police refuse to respond. It marches to Golgotha when it places our children in mission agencies in countries of creative access knowing that they might be kidnapped, tortured or killed instead of pushing them to see their primary duty as citizen as serving the war machinery of political agendas. It learns to lament, to pray
70 Hauerwas, Community of Character . 101.

Stark 27 and to surrender to the redemptive providence of God even in hopeless and desperate situations. This courageous community is obedient even to death on the cross, precisely because it believes that, “The violence Jesus endured in love has undone the human history of violence in hatred, as well the blood-sacrifices by which Israel and other human communities attempted to expiate their hatred and violence.”
71
3.) Resurrection: We live currently in a world when many of the dreams of progressive evolution toward the good, the just and secular salvation have been dashed.
It was a world that was announced by Nietzsche but went unheard. It is a world that perhaps hasn’t reached Fukuyama’s end of history just quite yet. In fact, from a historicist perspective, the current collapse of hope is possibly one of the greatest crises in today’s culture. Davaney notes,
“The final crisis I wish to point to is a peculiarly western one and that is the loss of the sense of sure progress that has long marked Western thought and has been present, if battered, throughout modernity.
Theologians Langdon Gilkey and Peter Hodgson have referred to this loss as the collapse of salvation history. The belief in history as a salvific process, lured by an indefatigable telos, has had different forms, including traditional Jewish and Christian ones, Enlightenment and liberal bourgeois accounts, nationalistic and Marxist-Leninist versions. But in each form it has evidenced the conviction that history was the arena in which humanity might pursue its destiny and within which evil was to be progressively overcome. Yet today confidence in such a vision seems quite unrealistic as we court nuclear and ecological disaster and confront, ill-prepared, the collapse of or the challenge to the great modern systems of economic and political power.” 72
It is a world without hope.
Yet, the courageous community that lives through narrative obedience to the gospel rendered Jesus has yet to give up hope. According to the Gospel stories, the cross has not said the final word. There is still another chapter; our story bids us to turn the page. The turned page speaks of a hope against hope, redemption in the face of impossibility and despair. According to the story, Jesus lives. The ecclesia is not a community gathered in memorial to a fallen leader. It is a community constituted by the one who both lives and gives life.
The church is a community that refuses nihilism as the determinative telos through which the world exists. Instead, it envisions the resurrection as a pointing and a promise. It points to the way of the world, ultimately and finally redeemed. It promises a time when violence, evil, and death will no longer have their way with humanity. It is a telos that keeps the courageous community continuing to lean into the possibility of redemption, reconciliation, and new creation. It finds moving forward into the world not a hopeless endeavor but a worthwhile course of action. Even to a pragmatist such as
Davaney, such a radical view on the historical providence of God and orientation of the world should be considered beneficial and helpful to the flourishing of humanity in a world devoid of hope.
71 Hauerwas, Journal of Christian Ethics, 25.
72 Davaney, 21.

Stark 28
In fact, as we have looked to narrative obedience and courageous action, it might just be that the only way to evaluate the possibilities of the above mentioned ethic is by considering its outcomes and evaluating them historically and communally, or has Hays notes in a section of his book called “The Pragmatic Task,” “The value of our exegesis and hermeneutics will be tested by their capacity to produce persons and communities whose character is commensurate with Jesus Christ and thereby pleasing to God.” 73 I would add faithful to the redemptive cause of God in this world.
The Need for Strange Bedfellows
In this synthetic section of this essay, we have looked to the possibilities of postliberal theology for an ecclesial ethic of nonviolence based upon it “courage to be” and its “courage to act,” both of which have been shaped by the narrative structure of the gospel rendering of Christ. As we conclude this paper, I want to turn our attention to what I believe to be necessary conversation partners for the continuance of this ongoing tradition. In order for the Postliberal school of theology, and the tradition that is developing through the theological influence of Frei, Lindbeck, and Hauerwas, to offer the church the possibilities of a nonviolent ecclesial ethic, they will need to more deeply engage in conversation two interlocutors that might perhaps offer constructive proposals to negotiate some of the above named limitations and critiques. I will suggest that both
John Wesley’s pneumatology and Hans Georg Gadamer’s work will be essential for further movement in nonviolence, both as it pertains to the intellectual climate and the material content of actual bodily reality. .
In our previous section we discussed the narrative obedience of the Christian church as central to its enactment of the story of Jesus Christ in this world. Words that become central to postliberal theologians are discipleship, practice, imitation, mimesis , and virtue. Hauerwas and Meeks are both representative of this Aristotelian account of a community’s “habitus” for moral formation. Hauerwas states,
“No one can become virtuous by doing what virtuous people do. We can only become virtuous by doing what virtuous people do in the manner that they do it. Therefore, one can only learn how to be virtuous, to be like
Jesus, by learning from others how that is done. To be like Jesus requires that I become a part of a community that practices virtues, not that I copy his life point by point.”
Yet we are left with a sense of a communal semi-pelagianism, with a near emphasis on
“learning to do what is already in you [pl.] to do.” Yet perhaps by wedding the emphasis of discipleship as imitation with the pneumatology of Wesley, we might discover a
Christian life enabled, empowered, and driven according to the very Spirit sent by the
One whom we are called to follow. As Wesley rightly asserts, “The indwelling Spirit applies the work of Christ to the soul of man and initiates and administers the Christian life.” 74
According to Wesley, for whom the Holy Spirit exercised significant importance in the life of the believer, the movement of the Christian to the perfection of holiness was only and ever a gift from God that extended to the Christian the capacity to obey and
73 Hayes, 7.
74 Staples,

Stark 29 follow in a way that would have otherwise been deemed impossible. “In ‘A Letter to a
Roman Catholic,’ Wesley writes: I believe in the infinite and eternal Spirit of God, equal with the Father and the Son, to be not only perfectly holy in himself but the immediate cause of all holiness in us; enlightening our understandings, rectifying our wills and affections, renewing our natures, uniting our persons to Christ, assuring us of the adoption of sons, leading us in our actions; purifying and sanctifying our souls and bodies, to a full and eternal enjoyment of God.” 75
Such a developed pneumatology pushes the narrative beyond the scope of the gospels and into the book of Acts and the witness of God’s work in the epistles of Paul.
Rather than a purely sociological approach to personal and communal moral formation, this robust account of the Spirit’s work might enable both Hauerwas and Meeks to conceive of the possibility of faithfulness despite the fragile and unreliable nature of humanity. Not simply through the performance of the story, but literally a movement in the life of the believer when story is intertwined into the very existence of both the believer and the community. The Holy Spirit, according to Wesley’s account moves, by grace, the community into the new creation of the biblical narrative. Wesley claims,
“Well may a man ask his own heart, whether it is able to admit the Spirit of God. For where that divine Guest enters, the laws of another world must be observed: The body must be given up to martyrdom, or spent in the Christian warfare, as unconcernedly as if the soul were already provided of its house from heaven; the goods of this world must be parted with as freely, as if the last fire were to seize them to-morrow; our neighbor must be loved as heartily as if he were washed from all his sins, and demonstrated to be a child of God by the resurrection from the dead.
The fruits of the Spirit must not be mere moral virtues, calculated for the comfort and decency of the present life; but holy dispositions, suitable to the instincts of a superior life already begun.” 76
Not only is Wesley’s pneumatology helpful for the faithful bodily action of the community in its performance of its witness, it also sets the stage for our final movement, which is willingness to more fully interact with other voices and communities outside the
Christian tradition and perhaps outside any religious tradition at all. Above we noted that
William Placher was one such postliberal voice that sought such encounter. Placher suggests that we must converse. He substantiates that claim within the Christian tradition with an appeal to Scripture, especially as it relates to the Christian belief that all are made in the image of God. His plea for conversation is highly particularistic and believes that all traditions will necessitate an internal logic that will substantiate such engagement with the other. Refusal to converse is a movement toward a tyrannizing tradition that ultimately gives way to violence. Non-violence can only be maintained as a tradition consistently investigates its own claims to truth with a sense of historicist suspicion, listens to outside critique, and refuses coercion of belief.
A non-violent ethic is premised on the confession of culpability of religion in the play of power, violence, oppression and terror. Religion, regardless its particular
75 The Works of John Wesley , 14 Vols. (Kansas City: Beacon Hill Press of Kansas City, reprint ed., 1979),
X, 82.
76 John Wesley’s sermon “On the Holy Spirit,” Sermon 141. From http://new.gbgmumc.org/umhistory/wesley/sermons/141

Stark 30 orientation, even to non-violence must willingly engage the “other” seeking points of contact, and (using a Wittgensteinian term) family traditions. Such conversation does not seek common foundations or essences, nor does the absence of these make all conversation incommensurable. Instead, as Placher notes,
“This lack of common foundation is a weakness, but it is also a strength.
It means, on the on hand, that the partners in dialogue do not start with the conviction that they really basically agree, but it also means that they are not forced into the dilemma of thinking of themselves as representing a superior (or inferior) articulation of a common experience of which the other religions are inferior (or superior) expressions. They can regard themselves as simply different and can proceed to explore their agreements and disagreements without necessarily engaging in the invidious comparisons that the assumption of a common experiential core make so tempting.”
I would argue with Placher that what postliberalism needs is the voice of Hans Georg
Gadamer as offering a hermeneutic of non-coercive discourse. But I would argue that
Gadamer is made possible for postliberalism because of Wesley’s robust pneumatology and his doctrine of Prevenient Grace.
Wesley had a substantial economy of Grace (by which he means personal Spirit).
Grace was present “for all and in all.” Though humanity was naturally depraved, God was inherently faithful. It is God’s work already taking place in this world that makes possible our knowledge of his work. Prevenient Grace is the grace the goes before our recognition of grace and Spirit. Further developing this category might give the church eyes to see the redemptive work of God in the world even as it takes place outside the courageous community and to perhaps even learn from that activity. Understand that prevenient grace is not the way by which we accommodate Christianity to modern sensibilities but the way in which the world is seen as the ground upon which God is active to Christian sensibilities.
Such a doctrine makes the possibility of conversation without the presumption of violence possible. In one of Wesley’s sermons, Catholic Spirit, he makes possible both conversation and cooperation with movements in the world that resonate with the movement of the Christian church. Enhancing this doctrine of grace with a Gadamerian hermeneutic might make possible the resistance of postliberalism from “theological ghettoizing” and sectarianism. As Gary Brent Madison points out, “Gadamer’s dialogical view of understanding (as a communication process) provides the model for a social order based not on coercion or domination but on rational persuasion, the kind of tolerant and pluralist social order envisaged by the great rhetoricians and humanist of the past...” 77
Placher situates his desire for such conversation on the way in which he understands the church to perform the story of Jesus Christ and to the generosity and humility that he derived from Frei,
“In short, the ascriptive logic of the gospels sets some limits but does not provide any single correct interpretation. Jesus simply cannot and will not become the possession of any interpretation, but continually interrupts and disrupts them all. The journey of the Christian community involves an
77 Madison, Gary Brent. The Politics of Postmodernity: Essays in Applied Hermenuetics . (Boston: Kluwer
Academic Publishers, 2001), 27.

Stark 31 ever-growing faithfulness to Jesus Christ, a continual wrestling with the narratives rendering his identity, but never a possessing or controlling of him. The fourfold gospel assures this kind of disequilibrium.” 78
Conclusion
In conclusion, what I have attempted throughout this essay was an explication about what I feel to be the possibilities of postliberalism as a tradition that offers a viable and historicist ethic of nonviolence. By acknowledging that our current intellectual climate is shifting and the various voices of postliberalism can be viewed as responses to such shifts and by recognizing the convergence of such shifts with the actual bodily reality of violence, I have offered a synthetic, constructive approach that validates the strengths and suggests possible directions to improve upon the valid critiques in determining a Christ-centered ecclesial ethic of nonviolence. In closing we must remember two points in assessing the viability of my constructive ethic. 1.)
Postliberalism and this present ethic presuppose the necessity of courage in particularity and witness. As Hauerwas has stated, “...the first social ethical task of the church is to be the church—the servant community. Such a claim may well sound self-serving until we remember that what makes the church the church is its faithful manifestation of the peaceable kingdom in the world. As such the church does not have a social ethic; the church is a social ethic.” 79
2.) For some the idea of an ethic of non-violence might be rendered irrelevant in a world of power politics and military might. However, I also presuppose that the textual portrayal of Jesus and his ongoing message as presented by the New Testament church is more at home amongst the powerless and those marginalized by the powerful. Therefore, the powerful find it difficult to utilize the word of Jesus or imitate his actions because they do not primarily address them. When the powerful are addressed it is to call into question their power, violence, and hegemony over the lives of the primary addressees, the poor, the weak, and vulnerable.
78 Placher, 145.
79 Hauerwas, Peaceable Kingdom , 99.

Stark 32
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