Question

Demonstrate your grasp of Hauerwas's arguments that the Christian discomfort with war is liturgical. What dose did he mean by this? '

'How is this a critique of the various attempts to offer ethics related to war?

Finally, show that you can work with these ideas by putting them to use in analyzing capital punishment in what you imagine might be a "Hauerwasian" way. In other words, how would you bring the notions of liturgy, sacrifice, expiation, etc. (so crucial to Hauerwas's project) to bear on thinking about capital punishment?

Answer 1

Answer.

Stanley Hauerwas takes up the challenge to analyze a theological response to the modern societies’ obsession with wars. the argument that is worked out here is to show why Hauerwas’ ideas can be so compelling and timely. As a theological ethicist in the Western society, he emphasis on the story of Christianity as the primary ethical shaping force for the church and individual Christians such that the faith in the church constitutes a social ethic.

He goes on to trace the Christian doctrine on war and violence in the Old and the New Testaments and then attempts to convince Christians that war has been abolished in the cross of Christ. He uses the attitude of the American population towards war in particular to ultimately deconstruct the morally compelling status of war in the United States. A sense of American exceptionalism which is manifested through the size of the U.S. economy and U.S. military, has offered a popular justification for America’s ease with war. Hauerwas argues that our ease with war has to do with American lack of any common story. Here he contrasts the American fear of death with the strong of the sacrifice of Jesus. Tracing the genesis of modern day a United States in the Vivil War, he argues that “ the story of the transformation of the Civil War from limited to total war is also the story of how America became the nation we call America” . Christian sacrificial formulations influenced the development of this same national narrative.

thus, sacrifice and the state became inseparably intertwined and this is what he implied in his statement about the Christian discomfort with war being liturgical. the dying and killing of war become attached to certain understandings of redemption within this national narrative of war at both personal and national level. the sacrifices of war reinforce the mechanism through which the nation achieves and maintains its transcendent status as a stalwart of victory and might.

This leads him to a further venture ahead and deliberate how Christians should live in “a world of war” as people who believe that war has been abolished. Hauerwas to raise questions for just war theorists who would brand pacifists as “unrealistic.” This allows him to debunk the claims of the Just war theory as he builds on his argument about war being a morally compelling reality in the present world Attempts to justify wars begun and fought on realist grounds in the name of just war only serve to hide the reality of war”. Our democracy enables us to place more limits on war than authoritarian societies? However, the Just war theory in fact fails to take into account that people are addicted to war, and use the discourse of national sacrifice as a way to continue to rationalise war.

Ultimately, pacifism and nonviolence become inadequate descriptions for the disavowal of violence required by being a disciple of Jesus as a pacifist is as much likely to imagine war as the real condition as a Just war idealist. Peace is a deeper reality than violence. And whether it is war or legal practices such as those pertaining to capital punishment, a system of justice cannot be build on the idea of sacrifice of a life to atone the world of the wrongdoings of an individual or a group.