I first read Hauerwas' The Peaceable Kingdom: A Primer in Christian Ethics as a college student. What struck me then -- and still punches me in the gut each time I re-read it -- is that ethics, not to mention every part of Christian life and
discipleship, can only fruitfully be understood through the narrative of
our history as a people of God. He begins with the claim that every
ethic must include a qualifier, including and perhaps especially, "Christian ethics". He raises the contention against the backdrop of a
systemic view that there is somehow a "universal ethic" from which we
can derive our complete moral code (one which so much of the modern political world seems to assume). Apart from the problems with this
latter view, it quickly becomes clear that as Hauerwas sees it, there is
no clearer way to develop an ethical standpoint but through narrative -- through the history that is tied up in the qualifier "Christian".Thus the question becomes, not "what I ought to do?", but "what sort of person ought I to be?" We become the people that we are through the stories that we tell and the histories that we appropriate.
That was the most forceful point, for me, and it was a welcome note of challenge especially to legalistic evangelical approaches to morality. The chapter that most captivated me was his chapter on Jesus in the middle of the book, describing Jesus as the presence of the peaceable kingdom itself. The following chapter on the church -- "the servant community" -- was similarly wonderful, and brought some of the abstract themes he had been dealing with into wonderful clarity.
But it's the last chapter of the book that hits us where we all live. Here, Hauerwas contends that "tragedy" names the way in which Christians live in the world. God is God and we are not -- something Hauerwas always reminds us. That means we are free to live with imaginations of the Kingdom of God.
This book is dense and tightly argued, so it takes time to work through. But it's so worth the work.
(As one of Hauerwas' students in the day, I recall him saying that this book was simply written to "make people's heads hurt in thinking about God". He certainly accomplishes that.)