This prime bit of Hauerwas reflection has me thinking today about this whole Sojo-RO “conflict” that seems to be underlying a lot of Hauerwas and James KA Smith (the bold part is my emphasis) :

As Christans we believe we not not only need a community, but a community of a particular kind to live well morally. We need a people who are capable of being faithful to a way of life, even when that way of life may be in conflict with what passes as “morality” in the larger society. Chrsitians are a people who have learned that belief in God requires that we learn to look upon ourselves as creatures rather than as creators. This necessarily creates a division between ourselves and others who persist in the pretentious assumption that we can and should be morally autonomous. Of course Christians are as prone to such pretensions as non-Christians. What distinguishes them is their willingness to belong to a community which embodies the stories, the rituals, and others committed to worshipping God. Such a community, we believe, must challenge our prideful pretensions as well as provide the skillls for the humility necessary for becoming not just good, but holy.

Theologians, therefore, have something significant to say about ethics, but they will not say it significantly if they try to disguise the fact that they think , write, and speak out of and to a distinctive community. Their first task is not, as it has been assumed by many working in Christian ethics and still under the spell of Christendom, to write as though Christian commitments make no difference in the sense that they only underwrite what everyone else in principle can know, but rather to show the difference those commitments make. At least by doing that, philosophers may have some idea how the attempt to avoid presuming any tradition or community may distort their account of the moral life as well as moral rationality. Our task as theologians remains what is always has been– namely, to exploit the considerable resources embodies in particular Christian convictions which sustain our ability to be a community faitful to our belief that we are creatures of a graceful God.  If we do that we may well discover that we are speaking to more than just our fellow Christians, for others as a result may well find we have something interesting to say.
–Stanley Hauerwas, Against the Nations: War and Survival in a Liberal Society, pp. 43-44.

It’s not that “underwrite in principle what anyone else already knows” isn’t a pitfall to be avoided.  But “What anyone else already knows” is some useful information from which to devise a way to sound some alternatives that are derived from the Christian story (ie. the life of Jesus, scripture, tradition, community life) in such a way as to “correct” the distortions that result from those items which “anyone else already knows” (ie. common wisdom; “the way it is”)  I cannot see how one does that by appealing first to items which Hauerwas himself already describes as things which it takes a person already redeemed to understand.  While I can agree wholeheartedly that the “lived message” is the primary means of evangelism and conversion for the world which is EXPOSED to this alternative community,  what do we say to people who ask us to account for the life that is within us?  If it is true that only the reddemed can understand the language of the redeemed community,  is there a language of evangelism at all?  While language is certainly limited in this context (a context recognizing the prime source of evangelism as “lived witness”),  there follows a descriptive task;  a “narrative” for the world which will inevitably precipitate many a debate on what describes it best;  on when language is Biblical or taking too much license or just plain “missing it”.  But it seems to me we have to try and give that “reason for the hope that is within us” that is geared more toward the linguistic world of the receiver than to satisfy our own desires to keep our own language “acceptable” and “orthodox”  (although I do not deny that there IS acceptable and pure language—I just don’t know how contaminated I may still be,  regardless of how far I feel myself to have “advanced” in theological articulation.  Look at how much of what I have assumed to be exemplary Chritian appropriation of society and what constitutes the “Christian approach” has been under challenge from my own theological reading of Hauerwas, Bonhoeffer, Yoder, Bell, Cavanaugh, etc.).  I have been getting Sojourners for 20 years,  and was constantly being challenged at the point of my own assumptions about what was “normal” and “acceptable” and assumed about what was wrong and what was right with our American culture.  While there may well be a plethora of similarities and absorption of “liberal democratic political assumptions” working in the details,  it is indeed a valuable thing to be “awakend from our social slumber” and sensitized to the way in which our cultural blinders determine the ways in which we make choices with our lifestyle, unaware of what we’ve shut out from our consiousness,  out of a desire to fit comfortably somewhere.  If I don’t run across a Clarence Jordan, a Church of the Saviour,  and a Sojourners community,  I am simply not reading a James KA Smith or a Stanley Hauerwas.  I’m probably reading Al Mohler, Left Behind,  and maybe taking my youth group on cruises as “mission trips”