"The followers of Christ have been called to peace and they must not only have peace but also make it. And to that end they renounce all violence and tumult. In the cause of Christ nothing is to be gained by such methods. His disciples keep the peace by choosing to endure suffering themselves rather than inflict it on others. They maintain fellowship where others would break it off. They renounce hatred and wrong. In so doing they over-come evil with good, and establish the peace of God in the midst of a world of war and hate."-Dietrich Bonhoeffer
"One of the ironies of the current situation is that the attempts to deny that ethics responds to the peculiarity of our current social and historic situation only makes us more subject to that situation. We are told that we live in a morally bankrupt age. People think what was at one time unthinkable; indeed they do what was once unthinkable ... We experience our world as so morally chaotic that we now feel our only alternative is for each person "to choose," if not create, the standards by which they will live.
I suspect that the experience of the world as morally adrift has a more profound source than the mere observation that people are permitted to do what was once unthinkable. Our disquiet about morality more likely arises from within us. Even though we feel strongly about abortion, divorce, dishonesty, and so on, we are not sure why we feel as we do, And the less sure we are of the reasons for our beliefs, the more dogmatically we hold to them as our only still point in a morally chaotic world. Ironically, our dogmatism only masks our more profound doubt, for although we hold certain moral convictions adamantly, we secretly suspect that we believe what we do because we have been conditioned. We hold certain beliefs as if they are unconditioned, yet are impressed with the knowledge that all beliefs are the result of environment, and thus at least potentially arbitrary. That very acknowledgment seems then to reduce all moral disagreements to subjective opinions about which there can be no argument.
This lurking suspicion that we really have no firm grounds for our beliefs makes us all the more unwilling to expose what we think to critical scrutiny. We thus take refuge among others who think as we do, hoping sheer numbers will protect us from the knowledge of the uncertainty. Or sometimes we suppose that if we think deeply and critically about our moral convictions, we will be able to supply adequate justification for what we believe. In both cases we assume that "ethics' must be able to provide the means for preventing our world from falling into a deeper moral chaos.
... Underlying such a view of morality is the presupposition that we are required by our own predicament to make up our "own minds" about what is good and bad. Indeed, those who do so with determination are seen as morally exemplary because they act autonomously rather than uncritically accept convention. But the very notion we are "choosing" or "making up" our morality contains the seeds of its own destruction, for moral authenticity seems to require that morality be not a matter of one's own shaping, but something that shapes one. We do not create moral values, principles, virtues; rather they constitute a life for us to appropriate. The very idea that we choose what is valuable undermines our confidence in its worth. In many ways the current popularity that "ethics" enjoys is odd, for most people most of the time would prefer not to have to think about what is the right or wrong thing to do. They simply want to get on with the living of their lives: to fall in love, raise families, have satisfying professions, support decent and worthwhile institutions."
Taken from: "The Peaceable Kingdom: A primer in christian ethics" by Stanley Hauerwas
The insufficiency of ethnical shaping to which Hauerwas is appealing to is something I have seen all to often in our culture. Can we critically come together and be a people who are shaped by our moral and ethical convictions? In an interview, Hauerwas has this to say in response to his "impractical and unlikely" claim as a "christian pacifist" a position in which he thinks that one cannot exist without the other:
"I fear that one of the reasons non-violence isn't given the time of day is because so many American Christians think they can have a relationship with Jesus that doesn't have immediate implications for their lives."-Stanley Hauerwas
I would only add that many American christians cannot clearly see the dichotomy of "american" with "christianity" because so many of these individuals read scripture, and understand Jesus, in light of their uncritical patriotism and nationalism. Howard A. Snyder muses upon this point in his book "Salvation Means Creation Healed: The Ecology of Sin and Grace," He says ...
"Uncritical patriotism is a long-standing dynamic in American history- as it is in many places in the world. Love of country is good and proper, of course. But, when it leads to disregard for the welfare of other lands and peoples, it becomes a plague. When patriotism or nationalism turns into ideology, and when criticism of our own government becomes unpatriotic, we are in grave danger. Uncritical patriotism leads to idolatry."-Howard A. Snyder
