narrative, character and community

I've been reading Stanley Hauerwas's book The Peaceable Kingdom: A Primer in Christian Ethics. It's a challenging read, intellectually and personally. Particularly for someone funded by the military-industrial complex, given that non-violence is central to his entire scheme of ethics. I can't do justice to the complexity of his overall argument here, but one aspect I have appreciated is his emphasis on the importance of character in ethical decision-making. He argues that the kind of character a person has formed determines the nature of the decisions they face. To use one of his examples, a person who has developed a non-violent character, when confronted with violence towards him or herself, is faced with a number of options but by virtue of his or her character those options do not include violence. This is not a matter of abstract principle, but a matter of the very person they have become. To quote Stanley himself:

`Once we resist the temptation to abstract "situations" and "cases" from their narrative context, we can begin to appreciate the testimony of many, both Christians and non-Christians, that in matters of significance even involving the "hardest choices" there was no "decision" to be made. Rather, the decision makes itself if we know who we are and what is required of us.' (129)

What I like about this approach is that it puts the emphasis not on those 'hardest choices' but on the day-by-day decisions that form our characters. These decisions, as Hauerwas argues, are not made in a vaccuum, but in a community that gives us a meaningful story by which to make sense of our lives. Either we make decisions that are true to that story, or we make decisions that reject that story and the meaning it offers. The gospel is one such story, and Hauerwas emphasises that it IS a story, not simply a set of propositions. The church offers us a community in which that story is continued. Our life within that community expresses the story and its meanings to others. Narrative, character, community - I think he's right.