181 - The Gesture of a Truthful Story

The Gesture of a Truthful Story
By Stanley Hauerwas

"Put simply religious education is the training in those gestures through which we learn the story, of God and God's will for our lives... It is ongoing training in the skills we need in order to live faithful to the kingdom that has been initiated in Jesus."

I worry about the idea that religious education is some special activity separated from the total life of the church. When that happens, it makes it appear that what the church does in its worship is something different from what it does in its education. I would contend that everything the church is and does is "religious education."¹ Put more strongly, the church does not "do" religious education at all. Rather, the church is a form of education that is religious. Moreover, if that is the case, then I think there is a very close relation between Christian education and social ethics-at least if how I understand social ethics is close to being right. Such an assertion is by no means clear, nor are its implications immediately apparent. I will try to unravel that claim by analyzing first a similar contention about Christian social ethics-namely, that the church does not have a social ethic, but rather is a social ethic. ²

I

The claim that the church is a social ethic is an attempt to remind us that the church is the place where the story of God is enacted, told, and heard. Christian social ethics is not first of all principles or policies for social action, but rather the story of God's calling of Israel and of the life

Stanley Hauerwas is Professor of Theological Ethics at the Duke University Divinity School. His most recent book, The Peaceable Kingdom 1983), was written as a primer in Christian ethics. A new book, entitled Against the Nations, will be out soon. Professor Hauerwas is also a new member of the THEOLOGY TODAY Editorial Council. This article is a version of one that previously appeared in Encounter, a journal published by the Christian (Disciples of Christ) Theological Seminary in Indianapolis.

¹ The phrase "religious education" seems to me to be misleading, if for no other reason than that the content of "religious" is vague at best and, at worst, may involve reductionistic assumptions about positive Christian convictions. Moreoever, it is by no means clear how "religious" or "Christian" can qualify "education," since it is not clear whether "education" is a coherent enough activity or idea to be able to know what difference any qualifier would make.
² For a fuller analysis of this claim than I can offer here, see my A Community of Character: Toward a Constructive Christian Social Ethic (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981) and The Peaceable Kingdom: A Primer in Christian Ethics (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1983).

182 - The Gesture of a Truthful Story

of Jesus. That story requires the formation of a corresponding community that has learned to live in ways appropriate to them. The church does not have a social ethic, but is a social ethic, then, insofar as it is a community that can clearly be distinguished from the world. For the world is not a community and has no such story, since it is based on the assumption that human beings, not God, rule history.

Therefore, the first social task of the church is to help the world know that it is the world. For without the church, the world has no means to know that it is the world. The distinction between church and the world is not a distinction between nature and grace. It is, instead, a distinction that denotes "the basic personal postures of men, some of whom confess and others of whom do not confess that Jesus Christ is Lord. The distinction between church and the world is not something that God has imposed upon the world by prior metaphysical definition, nor is it only something which timid or pharisaical Christians have built up around themselves. It is all of that in creation that has taken the freedom not yet to believe." ³

The fact that the church is separated from the world is not meant to underwrite an ethic of self-righteousness on the part of the church. Both church and world remain under the judgment of the Kingdom of God. Indeed, we must remember that the church is but the earnest of the Kingdom. Those of us who attempt to live faithful to that Kingdom are acutely aware how deeply our lives remain held to and by the world. But this cannot be an excuse for acting as if there is no difference between us and the world. For if we use our sin to den), our peculiar task as Christians and as members of the church, we are unfaithful both to the Kingdom and to ourselves-and most importantly to the world itself.

Moreover, when we deny, the distinctive task of the church, we implicitly deny the particularity of the narrative that makes us what we are in the first place. As Christians, we are not after all called to be morally good, but rather to be faithful to the story that we claim is truthful to the very character of reality-which is that we are creatures of a gracious God who asks nothing less of us than faithful service to God's Kingdom. In short, we are people who know who is in control. What it means to be Christian, therefore, is that we are a people who affirm that we have come to find our true destiny only by locating our lives within the story of God. The church is the lively argument, extended over centuries and occasioned by the stories of God's calling of Israel and of the life and death of Jesus Christ, to which we are invited to contribute by learning to live faithful to those stories. It is the astounding claim of Christians that through this particular man's story, we discover our true selves and thus are made part of God's very life. We become part of God's story by finding our lives within that story.

For the church to be, rather than to have, a social ethic means that it

³ John Howard Yoder, The Original Revolution (Scottdale, Pa.: Herald Press, 1971 p. 116.)

183 - The Gesture of a Truthful Story

must be a community where the truth is lived and spoken. The story that forms the church is as I have suggested, a reality-making claim that tells us the truth about the world and ourselves. Such truth is indeed hard. It means that we cannot know the truth until we have been transformed by the story. We cannot know Jesus without becoming his disciples. There is, therefore, an unavoidably self-involving character to Christian convictions. It requires that our very selves be transformed if we are to face the truth that we are sinners yet saved.

A community of such people cannot help but be a social ethic, since it must stand in sharp contrast with the world which would have us build our relations on distortions and denials. The world is where the truth is not spoken for fear such truth might destroy what fragile order and justice we behaave been able to achieve. But the church, which claims to be construed by a people who have no fear of the truth, must be a polity where the truth is spoken, even if such truth risks pain and threatens disorder. The church is thus a polity that takes as its constitution a story whose truth creates a people who love honestly, because they have the confidence that such love binds our lives to God's very, character.

Such a community cannot help but stand in sharp contrast with the world. A people formed in the likeness of God cannot be anything less than a community of character. That is, it is a community which takes as its task the initiation of people into the story in a manner that forms and shapes their lives in a decisive and distinctive way. Put bluntly, the church is in the world to mark us. The church, therefore, alms not at autonomy. but at faithfulness. We believe that it is only as we learn to be faithful that we have the ability to be free. Freedom, contrary to much contemporary thought, consists not in having no story, but rather comes only through being trained and acquiring the skills of a truthful story.

That is why the church, in contrast to many communities, knows that the only way to learn to be faithful is through initiation by a master. Most of contemporary morality, both in its philosophical and popular expression. assumes that the moral life is an achievement that is open to anyone. On such a view of the moral life, what is required is not a master, but simply the ability to make well-reasoned decisions. In contrast, the church knows that the life of faithfulness is not easily acquired, but involves those skills that can be learned only through apprenticeship to a master. Living morally is not simply holding the right principles; it involves nothing less than learning to desire the right things rightly. Such desiring is not so much a matter or choice as it is the slow training of our vision through learning to pay attention to the insignificant. Such attention is gained only as we have the story mediated to us by masters who have learned what the story says by learning how, difficult it is to hear it. In short, the church, Christians, are the group of people capable of engendering and recognizing saints.

To be able to do that is no small feat. Saints cannot exist without a community, as they require, like all of us, nurturance by a people who, while often unfaithful, preserve the habits necessary to learn the story of

184 - The Gesture of a Truthful Story

God. Moreover, such a community must have the skills of discernment that make them capable of recognizing the saints in their midst. Recognizing the saints, especially while they are still alive, is no easy task either. For by their very nature, saints remind us how unfaithful we have been to the story that has formed us.

II

To be a community capable of engendering as well as of recognizing the saints requires that we be a people formed by the virtues of hope and patience. These are the virtues, the habits, crucial to learning well the story of God. To learn that story means we must desire nothing less than the accomplishment of God's rule, the Kingdom, over all nations and peoples. That rule is nothing less than the establishment of peace between ourselves and God, from which we learn how to be peaceful in ourselves and with one another. Because we have tasted this peace, because we have found how marvelous it is to have violence rooted out of our souls, is why we so desperately desire it for all. We know, God's peace is not easily made one's own. But we have confidence that if we are faithful to God's Kingdom, God will use our faithfulness to realize this Kingdom for all.

But just to the extent that we have been taught to hope, we must also be patient. For God does not will that the Kingdom be accomplished through coercion or violence. In the cross, we see how, the Kingdom will come into the world, and we are charged to be nothing less than a cruciform people. We must, then, learn to wait as we seek to manifest to the world God's peace that comes into our lives by no other means than the power of that truth itself. Such waiting is painful indeed in a world as unjust and violent as ours. But we believe it justified, since we have been promised that God will use our waiting for the complete triumph of the Kingdom. Moreover, patience is required because at least part of what it means for the church to be, rather than to have, a social ethic involves a rethinking about what is meant by social ethics. Too often, in an effort to appear socially relevant, the church has accepted the world's agenda about what "real" politics involves. Thus, calls for us to serve the world responsibly have too often resulted in the church simply saying to the world what the world already knows. We thereby end up trying to secure a "justice" which is only the continuation of some people's domination of others.

In contrast, I am suggesting we must be a patient people, as well as a courageous people, who have the skills to think through the current illusions about social justice and peace. We must be the kind of community that can draw on the character of convictions that expose the sentimentalities or the world-not the least of which is the assumption that nation-states have the right to qualify our loyalty as members of the church. It takes a patient as well as courageous people to manifest that the unity of God's eschatological meal is the only true internationalism.

185 - The Gesture of a Truthful Story

Such a meal

posits and proclaims a unification of mankind whose basis is not some as yet unachieved restructuring of political sovereignties but an already achieved transformation of vision and community. That all mankind is one cannot be demonstrated empirically nor can it be brought about by political engineering. That all mankind is one must first be affirmed as a theological proclamation. Only then is the engineering and structuring which are needed to reflect it even conceivable. It could just as well be said that Christian internationalism is the true unity which the servant church must let be restored. ⁴

Nor must we forget that the most embarrassing divisions in the church are not between Catholic and Protestant, U.C.C. and Methodist, Presbyterian and Church of Christ, liberal and conservative, but between social and economic class, race, and nationalities. Such divisions give lie to the fact that we are one people rooted in the God who has called us into the Kingdom inaugurated by Jesus' life and death. Thus, the first concern of any Christian social ethic must be with the fellowship of the church. We must be a community with the patience, amid the division and hatreds of this world, to take the time to nurture friendships, to serve the neighbor, and to give and receive the thousand small acts of care that ultimately are the heart blood of the Kingdom. That we must take the time to help the neighbor in need, no matter how insignificant that neighbor or his or her need is from the perspective of the world, is but a sign that we recognize that we are called not to make history come out right, but to be faithful to the kind of care we have seen revealed in God's Kingdom.

In this respect, the church as a social ethic must take its lead from those like Mother Teresa. From a perspective that would associate the church's social task with effectiveness, Mother Teresa is a deeply immoral woman. She takes the time to hold the hand of a dying leprosy victim when she could be raising money in Europe and America for the starving in India. Yet, she sits there holding the hand of a dying person-doing that while surrounded by unbelievable suffering and injustice-because she know that God will have the Kingdom come exactly by such care. And she knows she can do so because she does not seek to be like the powerful to help the poor and dying. She has learned instead that power derives from being faithful to God's Kingdom of the poor.

III

This surely, is not the word we want to hear today. We want a word that puts the church on the right side for a change-the side for political change and justice. This news I bring, therefore, seems more bad than good. If being Christian does not put us where the action is, if being Christian does not put us on the side of the progressive forces in this or any other society, then I suspect many of us would be a good deal less

⁴ Yoder, p. 130.

186 - The Gesture of a Truthful Story

happy with being Christian. The claim that the church is, rather than has, a social ethic cannot help but appear to many as a dangerous withdrawal of the church back into a self-righteous pietism that ignores the social agony of the world. At best, such a Christian social ethic is but a gesture; at worst, it is a failure of Christians to face responsibly the complexity of the social problems confronting us in these troubled times.

I am ready to concede that the church, and Christian social ethics, as I have tried to depict it, is but a gesture, but I do not think that to be a damaging admission. For nothing in life is more important than gestures, as gestures embody as well as sustain the valuable and significant. Through gestures, we create and form our worlds. Through gestures, we make contact with one another and share common tasks. Through gestures, we communicate and learn from each other the limits of our world.

In this sense, the church is but God's gesture on behalf of the world to create a space and time in which we might have a foretaste of the Kingdom. It is through gestures that we learn the nature of the story that is the very content and constitution of that Kingdom. The way we learn a story, after all, is not just by hearing it. Important and significant stories must be acted out. We must be taught the gestures that help position our bodies and our souls to be able to rightly hear and then retell the story. For example. while we may be able to pray without being prostrate, I think prayer as an institution of the church could no longer be sustained without a people who have first learned to kneel. If you want to learn to pray, you had better know how to bend the body. The gesture and posture of prayer are inseparable from learning to pray. Indeed, the gestures are prayer.

Of course, some of our most important gestures are words. But we can easily overestimate their significance if we assume that words can be separated from the context of their enactment. For example, the Apostles' Creed is not simply a statement of faith that can stand independent of the context in which we affirm it. We must learn to say it in the context of worship if we are to understand how it works to rule our belief and school our faith. The Creed is not some deposit or sum of the story; rather it is a series of reminders about how best to tell the story that we find enacted through the entire liturgy.

In the same way, baptism and the eucharist stand as crucial gestures that are meant to shape us rightly to hear as well as enact the story. Through baptism and eucharist, we are initiated into God's life by our becoming part of Jesus' life, death, and resurrection. These are essential gestures of the church; we cannot be the church without them. They are, in effect, essential reminders for the constitution of God's people in the world. Without them, we are constantly tempted to turn God into an ideology to supply our wants and needs rather than have our needs and wants transformed by God's capturing of our attention through the mundane life of Jesus of Nazareth.

187 - The Gesture of a Truthful Story

Thus liturgy is not a motive for social action, it is not a cause to effect. Liturgy is social action. Through liturgy we are shaped to live rightly the story of God, to become part of that story, and are thus able to recognize and respond to the saints in our midst. Once we recognize that the church is a social ethic, an ethic that is to be sure but a gesture, then we can appreciate how every activity of the church is a means and an opportunity for faithful service to and for the world. We believe that the gesture that is the church is nothing less than the sign of God's salvation of the world.

IV

But what does all this have to do with Christian education-and in particular the claim that the church does not do religious education, but is a form of education that is religious' First of all, it reminds us that religious education has as its first task the initiation of a people into a story. Its task is not to teach us the meaning of that story, but to teach us the story. There is no point that can be known separate from the story. There is no experience that we want people to have apart from the story. There are no "moral lessons" that we wish to inculcate other than the story. The story is the point, the story is the experience, and the story is the moral.

The task of religious education therefore involves the development of skills to help us make the story ours. Or, perhaps better, the task of religious education is to help remind us of those skills present in the church that are essential for helping us make the story ours. Such reminders may well involve psychological insights about how such skills work, but the former cannot be a substitute for the latter. The content of the story must control where and how the story is to be made our own.

Put simply, religious education is the training in those gestures through which we learn the story of God and God's will for our lives. Religious education is not, therefore, something that is done to make us Christians, or something done after we have become Christian. Rather, it is ongoing training in the skills we need in order to live faithful to the Kingdom that has been initiated in Jesus. That Kingdom is constituted by a story that one never possesses, but rather constantly challenges us to be what we are but have not yet become.

The primary task of being educated religiously, or better Christianly, is not the achievement of better understanding but faithfulness. Indeed, we can only come to understand through faithfulness as the story, and the corresponding community, which forms our life asks nothing less from us than our life. The story requires that we learn to live as a people who have been forgiven and thus can be at peace with ourselves as well as with others. We do not learn to be forgiven by intellectually admitting that we often have failed to live up to our own moral ideals, but rather by learning to depend on God as the source of life and the sustainer of our community. What we are asked to be is first and foremost a people who embody and manifest the habits of peace characteristic of a forgiven

188 - The Gesture of a Truthful Story

people-not just those world who provide worldviews through which to make sense of the world.

We become faithful just to the extent that we learn to participate in the activities of the people of God we call the church. Therefore, it becomes our duty to be a people who submit to the discipline of the liturgy, as it is there that we are trained with the skills rightly to know the story. We are required to care for one another, and to accept the care of others, for it is by learning to be cared for that we learn to care. Such duties may be no more than gestures, but the) are the essential gestures that initiate us into the narrative of God's dealing with people.

Yet all this may still sound far too abstract. Therefore, let me try to provide a concrete case that I hope will draw out the implications of the position I have tried to develop. One of the tasks people concerned with religious education have taken for themselves has been the attempt to find ways to help people better understand what it means to be a Christian. This most often has naturally taken the form of encouraging greater study of Scripture and theology, the assumption being that we will be better Christians if we simply know more. While I have nothing against the study of Scripture and theology, I think our emphasis in that respect has tended to make us forget that the way we learn the story is by learning such gestures as simple as how to kneel. More troubling, such an emphasis excludes in a decisive manner a whole group of people from participation in God's Kingdom. For what do you do with the mentally handicapped?

The mentally handicapped are a reminder, a test case, for helping us understand how any account of religious education involves assumptions about the nature of Christian conviction and the church. It is certainly true that the mentally handicapped may not be able to read the story; nor are they always able to "understand" the "meaning" of the story nor do they know what the social implications the story may entail. But what they do know is who the story is embodied through the essential gestures of the church. They know the story through the care they receive, and they help the church understand the story that forms such care. Moreover, they learn the story through its enactment as they feel and are formed by the liturgy that places us as characters in God's grand project of the creation and redemption of the world. They know that they too have a role in God's people as they faithfully serve God through being formed by a community that is nothing less than the enactment of that story.

It is important that we guard against a possible misunderstanding that may be occasioned by the interjection of the place of the mentally handicapped in religious education. I am not suggesting that the retarded represent some bottom line or minimum that must be met for religious education. On the contrary, I am suggesting that they, and I am sure there are other equally compelling examples, offer a clue about the center of the task of Christian education and why it is that the church as such is Christian education. For if faithfulness is our task, if it

189 - The Gesture of a Truthful Story

is through faithfulness that we rightly learn to hear, tell, and embody the story, then the mentally handicapped are a crucial and ever present reminder that such is the case.

Nor am I suggesting that the mentally handicapped are somehow naturally ready to be formed by the story. They are no less sinners than any of the rest of us. Their desires require training no less than our desires. Faithfulness is not a natural task for the mentally handicapped or for us. We equally must be trained to face the world, as it is not as we would like it to be. In like measure, we all must learn to accept and give forgiveness, as we also must learn to be people of peace and justice.

However, there is another connection between the argument I have tried to make about the church as a social ethic, the implications of that for religious education, and the mentally handicapped. For at least part of what it means for the church to be a social ethic is that it has the time to care in an unjust world for those who do not promise to make the world better, more just, or direct the course of history. The church as God's gesture in and for the world must be the people who manifest our conviction that we do not live on the world's time, but in God's time. I suspect we do that best when we show ourselves to be a people who have the time to care for one another even when some of us happen to be mentally handicapped.

It may seem extremely odd to end an essay on Christian education by calling attention to the mentally handicapped. To end there seems to suggest that our intellectual skills are not as important as we would like to think. I must admit, moreover, that I am not entirely unhappy with such a conclusion-even though it is clearly exaggerated. After all, I am among those who have engaged in that most ambiguous enterprise that we identify as theology. And I believe that the church is less if it does not engender and sponsor the critical activity we call theology.

Yet, in an interesting way, that activity, and the educational institution necessary to sustain it, draws on the same presuppostions and virtues that sustains the church's commitment to having the mentally handicapped among us. For the activity of theology can only be sustained by a community that has learned to wait patiently in a world of suffering and injustice. Theology and theologians do little to make the world better. Rather, our craft involves the slow and painful steps of trying to understand better what it means to be a people formed b), the story of God. Let us not forget, then, that, as theologians, we no less than the mentally retarded depend on and serve a church which provides us with the gestures necessary to being the people of God.