Hauerwas’s Gun: A Warning to Culture Warriors

While I may be right in principle, more significant is whether I am becoming the right kind of person.

“Cap” by Red Desert Rifles, published under Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International license.

If you’re not familiar with Stanley Hauerwas, when Time magazine named him “America's Best Theologian,” he quipped, “‘Best’ is not a theological category.” Long before that, as he began his graduate studies in theology, his father began hand-crafting a deer rifle. Here is the rest of the story in his words:

… my wife and I made our usual trip home and we had hardly entered the door when my father thrust the now completed gun into my hands. It was indeed a beautiful piece of craftsmanship. And I immediately allowed as such, but I was not content to stop there. Flush with theories about the importance of truthfulness and the irrationality of our society’s gun policy, I said, ‘‘Of course, you realize that it will not be long before we as a society are going to have to take all these things away from you people.’’

Morally, what I said still seems to me to be exactly right as a social policy. But that I made such a statement in that context surely is one of the lowest points of my “moral development.” … I was simply not morally mature enough or skillful enough to know how to respond properly when a precious gift was being made. For what my father was saying, of course, was ‘‘Someday this will be yours and it will be a sign of how much I cared about you.’’ But all I could see was a gun, and in the name of moral righteousness, I callously rejected it. One hopes that now I would be able to say, “I recognize what this gun means and I admire the workmanship that has gone into it. I want you to know that I will always value it for that and I will see that it is cared for in such a manner that others can appreciate its value” (“Character, Narrative, and Growth in the Christian Life (1980)” in The Hauerwas Reader, 246–247).

It seems to me that pastors on social media are in a position somewhat analogous to that of Hauerwas facing his father. We are daily presented with the digital offerings of our families, friends, colleagues, and flocks—well-intended posts that, often enough, offend our sense of social morality. And we who feel called to join the chorus of those commenting on such matters can find ourselves posting jeremiads in response that are at once candid and corrective yet dishonest about our shared human experience and bereft of any deeper story that connects us to common bonds. As Tim Keller put it: “The subtext of bad evangelism [or bad persuasion writ large] is: ‘I'm right, you're wrong, and I would love to tell you about it.’”

Hauerwas’s story is a pacifist warning to those of us who take on the mantle of social media keyboard warrior on behalf of one side of the culture wars or the other: While I may be right in principle, more significant is whether I am becoming the right kind of person. Am I a person who has a story that can make sense of the tensions between social and interpersonal goods so that I can carry my convictions humbly, graciously, unassumingly, and sensitively? Or am I so committed to the abstract ideals of a righteous cause that it covers the sepulchre of my self-righteous, fault-finding, smug, and callous moralizing with a whitewash of prophetic clarity?

Ideologies tend to reduce what it means to be a good person to the indispensable pursuit of some ideal society. That is how they justify admitting no allowance for the admirable qualities of an otherwise good person whose social mores or politics happen to be unreformed. This forms characters dedicated to the cause that bear the defect of the humanitarian doctor in Dostoyevsky’s Brothers Karamazov who confessed, “The more I love humanity in general, the less I love man in particular.”

The story of God’s kingdom reconciles our past to our present so as to orient us toward a future that is good for humanity in general, yet not dependent on drumming up support for this-worldly change in ways that make us insufferable to others who disagree with us or miserable when we are around them. So, if in the spirit of our pioneers we are called to take up a cause of social, moral reform, let it not be at the expense of our “strongest argument” as “loving and lovable” Christians (Ellen G. White, The Ministry of Healing, 470, compare 337–346). Rather, let us take the blessed hope as permission to act within loving limits, confident that we are free to make a difference in the here and now and that the difference we make in this world does not ultimately depend on us.

David Hamstra is Lead Pastor of the Edmonton Central Seventh-day Adventist Church and Managing Editor of Best Practices for Adventist Ministry.