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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Stanley Hauerwas is a renowned theologian, ethicist and professor. His educational background includes a Ph.D. from Yale and a D.D. from the University of Edinburg. He is the Gilbert T. Rowe Professor of Theological Ethics at Duke University. He was named “America’s Best Theologian” by Time Magazine in 2001. In terms of his theological perspective, Hauerwas writes as a Methodist who works and teaches among Catholics, has been deeply influenced by mentors who are Anabaptist or Mennonite and who (more recently) has begun to self identify as an Anglican. He is an outspoken Christian pacifist and an advocate of non-violence. He is critical of nationalism and American patriotism and has been associated with the narrative theology movement (in which this book is an important text). Influences include Reinhold Niebuhr, Alasdair MacIntyre, and John Howard Yoder.

INTRODUCTION
Hauerwas contends that for the church to regain its social significance it must realize that its primary social task is to be a community “capable of hearing the story of God we find in the scripture and living in a manner that is faithful to that story.” Convinced that the intelligibility and truthfulness of Christian convictions resides in their practical force, Hauerwas make that argument that “the truth of Christian convictions cannot be divorced from the kind of community the church is and should be.” Therefore, the primary task of the church in society is nothing less than to be the church, not a lesser pursuit, such as merely working for social change. Writing from the context of the United States he contends: “it is not the task of the church to try to develop social theories or strategies to make America work; rather the task of the church in this country is to become a polity that has the character necessary to survive as a truthful society.”

MAJOR SECTIONS
There are three major sections of this book. The first explores the narrative character of Christian social ethics. In this section Hauerwas defines his methodology making the claim that every community and polity both involves and requires a narrative. He attempts to characterize the nature of the Christian narrative by exploring Christology and the authority of scripture. He then explores the nature and political relevance of a people formed by this narrative contrasting it with the narrowly understood meaning of “politics” defined by American liberalism. In the process he challenges the widely held assumption that Christianity and liberal democratic social systems have some special relationship.

In the second section, “Church and World: History, Politics and the Virtues,” Hauerwas explores the implications of the claim regarding the significance of narrative and virtue for social ethics. (A foundation for ethics cannot be abstracted from any community’s history and tradition). This includes a critique of various theories of moral development.

In the third section, Hauerwas applies this ethical construct to the categories of family sex and abortion (normally considered to be “private” issues). Contending that nothing could be further the truth from the perspective of the Christian narrative, Hauerwas reasserts the importance of marriage and the family as a decisive indicator of the polity of any society (including the church). In particular, through these essays, Hauerwas explores the implications of the Christian story to convictions about having and rearing children. In the process he de-centers the church’s debate on the ethics of abortion from a question of the “rights” of the fetus (the primary moral construct intelligible through the lenses of modern democratic liberalism).

PERSONAL REACTION
Hauerwas’ central contention that the social significance of the church must be related to its ability to faithfully tell and truthfully embody the Christian narrative as a body politic clearly distinct from “the world” or modern liberal democracy makes tremendous sense to me. Admittedly, before reading this book I had already found myself drawn toward narrative theology, and highly suspicious of what I perceived to be Western Christianity’s largely uncritical acceptance hyper-individualism. I found this book to be tremendously clarifying and stimulating at the same time. For example, I found his exploration of Solzhenitsyn’s critique of liberal democracy through the lenses of the Christian narrative to be particularly compelling. This calling into question of the moral assumptions of political liberalism and critiquing it on the basis of the kind of people it produces is very helpful to me as a pastor as I consider what it might mean to cultivate a people who live faithfully in the way of the Kingdom of God. Freeing my understanding of “the church” from the basic assumptions of political liberalism helps me to ask afresh what it would truly mean to help cultivate a community who together live as the people of God.

Hauerwas’ emphasize on the importance of narrative also rings true. I believe that an empiricist reading of the Scriptures (one that views them as revealed morality instead of revealed reality) leads to selectivism and a certain arbitrariness in terms how we actually apply what we find there. This is further made problematic by the widespread belief that response to scripture is largely a private and individual enterprise rather than an activity that is meant to shape a body politic. A narrative reading that views the scripture as the true story of the activity of God in the world to which our lives in community must now attest is much more compelling to me. I like the language he uses of viewing the cannon “not as an accomplishment but a task.” (I was quite taken by Hauerwas’ retelling Watership Down as an example of the power of narrative.) Also, as a pastor, I found his contention that “the most basic task of any polity is to offer its people a sense of participation in an adventure” to fire my imagination in terms of how I view the task of preaching and leading a local congregation. Rather than dispensing “Godly principles” that help people build “successful” or even “moral” lives, I am helping them to see their lives as an adventurous extension of the true story that defines our collective existence and each persons apprenticeship to the One who is the story of the Kingdom.

For me this infuses such tremendous life and power into what it means to be a “pastor” (a drab, un-compelling task in my opinion, if the assumptions of liberal democracy reign in the midst of the church). To preach about marriage and family becomes a deeply meaningful task when done through the lenses of narrative theology. Marriage and family suddenly become a context within which the deepest convictions Christian story and mission are lived politically before the world. By the continual formation of families, we sustain the virtue of hope “in a world which rarely provides evidence that such hope is justified” and our confidence in God as the ruler of the world who will not abandon it to the powers of darkness. We also model welcoming “the other” in the form of our own children. Longing to “make a difference with my life” I have often felt a desire to leave “ministry” and seek to affect change in other ways. I personally felt a sense of deeply renewed passion for the church work when that work is re-defined through the lenses of narrative theology.

I had a small sense of dissapiontment with the book when I realized that in his application of the concept of narrative to important issues in Christian ethics (sex, abortion and family) Hauerwas avoids the topic of homosexuality. His appeal to narrative in the abortion debate (which de-centers the conversation from the very limited liberal democratic idea of “rights”) was compelling to me and I would love to read a similar treatment of the topic of homosexuality.