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5 Continuity, Discontinuity, and the Quest for Justice Raymond Williams aptly asserts, “In spite of substantial and at some levels decisive continuities in grammar and vocabulary, no generation speaks quite the same language as its predecessors.”1 Immediate knowledge of the past is always complicated by the ever-shifting appropriations of language in response to changing social conditions. “The difference,” Williams continues, “can be defined in terms of additions, deletions, and modifications, but these do not exhaust it.”2 As each generation reads and responds to past events, it appropriates these events on its own terms. A new generation apprehends the knowledges left by previous ones in accordance with ever changing social conditions and modifies language to correspond with its own understanding of those social conditions. The poignancy of Williams’s statement for a theory of interpretation comes with the realization that “meaning is always produced; it is never simply expressed.”3 This final chapter turns again to Stanley Hauerwas in an effort to investigate more directly how he navigates through the intimate spaces between history and ethics. The implications of and alternatives to this investigation will equip ethicists with a tangible starting point for reevaluating the ethical consequences inherent in the production of historical meaning. The first section of this chapter highlights the various ways an emphasis on historical continuity functions to perpetuate a universal and unified reading of the church’s story. Tertullian uses a hermeneutic of selective continuity in order to socially legitimate Christianity and distinguish it from its neighbors. Hauerwas also employs a method for reading Christian history for its continuities. Constantinianism is the lens that enables him to produce seamless 1. Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 131. 2. Ibid., 131. 3. Ibid., 166. 141 unities between present and past that uncritically unite the virtue of patience to his pacifistic ethic. Yet we must keep in mind that the presence of similar linguistic symbols in Tertullian and Hauerwas in no way corresponds directly to the same meaning found in a shared vocabulary. The second section emphasizes the need to read for history’s discontinuities as a starting point from which to cultivate a critically self-reflexive historiography. Emphasizing discontinuity is imperative because it exposes the political unconsciousness of the historian or ethicist, destabilizes hegemonic constructions of universal histories, and opens a space in which alternative historical accounts can arise from the gaps, aporias, and silences of history.4 The third section of this chapter turns its attention more specifically to the ethics of historical analysis, or rather, the importance of an intentional historical analysis for ethicists. The destabilization of unity and continuity will rattle the identities of those required to give-up their false claims of unity and continuity, but let us find hope in the recognition that our stories can be told in better ways. This being said, such destabilization has the potential to erode the divisive boundaries separating center and margins and move us to produce ethical horizons more attuned the a wider application of justice and equality. Impositions of Continuity on Interpretation We go to great lengths to unite the present with the past in coherent, meaningful and directive ways. Specifically, Christians often look to the past as a source of significance, hoping to find continuities within their own tradition capable of making sense out of contemporary modes of life. Both Tertullian and Hauerwas find ways to align their messages of patience with the life and teachings of Jesus and the developing Christian tradition. Tertullian wrote that because Jesus “cursed for the time to come the use of the sword,” and endured his enemy’s wounds “as a sheep for a victim,” so too must persecuted North African Christians undergo persecution and martyrdom.5 De patientia does the hard work of mediating between Jesus’ example and Tertullian’s call for martyrdom. Yet with less than two hundred years separating them, Jesus’ language and Tertullian’s language shift in response to differing linguistic and 4. While I do not presume to speak for these silenced voices, I do point to a methodology of inclusion, diversity and heterogeneity that, if adopted by ethicists from the center, could facilitate more productive dialogues between center and margins. 5. Pat. 3. Quotes are taken again from the S. Thelwall translation in the ANF series that is used exclusively by Hauerwas. My translations of Tertuallian are provided wherever the English rendering accompanies the Latin text. 142 | We Are Who We Think We Were [3...

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