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3 Metanarrative Habits Are Hard to Break “Stanley Hauerwas hates liberalism,” writes Max Stackhouse in response to Hauerwas and Willimon’s 1989 release of Resident Aliens.1 Stackhouse’s comment illuminates the explicit rhetoric in this book against all things modern: a theme that characterizes much of Hauerwas’s work. Liberalism, for Hauerwas, is broader than what gets labeled as “liberal” by contemporary politics. For him it denotes the entire tradition of Western political thought from Thomas Hobbes, Immanuel Kant and John Locke, to John Rawls and Robert Nozick.2 This liberal tradition presents us with a story about who we are, and for Hauerwas its “story” represents the greatest threat to the development of the true Christian church as a community committed to and distinguished by the “story” of the gospel of Jesus Christ. Through his criticisms of liberalism, Hauerwas generally and deliberately fortifies the classical distinction between sacred and secular in order to assert an ideal type of Christian identity. Deeply rooted in historical assumptions, he conceives of true Christian identity as established by a commitment of oneself to a community that takes seriously the truth of its historical narrative. This chapter examines the inadequacies of Hauerwas’s anti-liberal claims by exposing the liberalism inherent in one of his fundamental background assumptions, the grand narrative of Constantinianism.3 Constantinianism is an idea that arose primarily among Anabaptists during the Protestant Reformation. For these anti-Catholic groups, it was the general theory that the church 1. Stanley Hauerwas and William H. Willimon, Where Resident Aliens Live: Exercises for Christian Practice (Nashville: Abingdon, 1996), 11. This excerpt was originally published in Max Stackhouse, “Liberalism Dispatched versus Liberalism Engaged,” Christian Century 112, no. 29 (October 29, 1995), 962. 2. I am indebted to Rodolfo J. Hernádez-Díaz for pointing out this observation. Representative works from these authors include: Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003); Immanuel Kant, Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone (London: Open Court, 1934); John Rawls, A Theory of Justice, Rev ed. (Cambridge: Belknap, 1999); and Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (New York: Basic, 1974). 73 existed with pristine values until the conversion of Constantine in the fourth century CE. After Constantine’s conversion, the church colluded with the state in vying for worldly power and adopted violence as a solution for securing that power. This theory became known as the Constantinian synthesis and is still used widely among those in the Anabaptist tradition.4 Hauerwas assumes the validity of this theory, but takes it a step further by channeling every detail of the Christian story through it. Thus, Constantinianism functions as a master narrative throughout his corpus. Specifically, Hauerwas uses Tertullian’s language of patience to create a bridge between the early and contemporary church. Reading Tertullian and the virtue of patience through Constaintinianism, Hauerwas concludes that a particular pre-Constintinian instantiation of patience must be embraced as a universal virtue in order for the church to be what it was originally intended to be. His method, however, means that the parameters and results depend on a false assumption. Hauerwas’s approach to history offers a valuable case study for understanding the relationship between ethics and history among so called normative ethicists. While loosely drawn from the “linguistic turn” in historiography in the late 1960’s, Hauerwas emphasizes narrative over and above the recovery of “facts” that consumed the historicist pursuits of figures like Walter Rauschenbusch. In his rejection of methodological objectivism expressed through historicism, he turns to narrative and acknowledges that our stories are constructed by and within communities of interpretation. He states along with William Willimon, “Story is the fundamental means of talking about and listening to God.”5 Yet, beyond the assertion that the church interprets itself, Hauerwas provides no other parameters by which one may discern an 3. Once again, the use of “grand, master or meta” as a modifier for narrative are used synonymously. For the majority of this chapter I favor the term “master” because it conveys a stronger political or ethical range of meaning and coincides better with Hauerwas’s own pedagogical philosophy. For an explanation of training graduate students, see Stanley Hauerwas, “Between Christian Ethics and Religious Ethics: How should Graduate Students be Trained?” Journal of Religious Ethics 31, no. 3 (Winter, 2003): 399. 4. For others who use and adhere to the general principle of Constantinianism, see Bryan P. Stone...

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