The gesture of a truthful story

Hauerwas presents a moral vision of the church and reframes the way in which we might understand Christian education. He presents a model of the church as a social ethic. The church does not simply do ethics, it is an ethic insofar as it embodies the gestures of the coming Kingdom and reveals the good-life that is found in Christ. Hauerwas argues that 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. Hauerwas suggests that 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 they 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 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.

Duke Scholars

Author Stanley M. Hauerwas Divinity School