Hauerwas on Narrative theology

A key question for narrative theologians is this: 'how may the claims of a story to shape our lives be judged?'

Stanley Hauerwas offers four “working criteria”, without claiming for his list completeness or absolute clarity:

First, a story must display the power to release us from destructive alternatives.
It must, secondly, it must display ways of seeing through current distortions.
Thirdly, it ought to allow room to keep us from having to resort to violence.
Lastly, it should show a sense for the tragic: how meaning transcends power.

This list of criteria appears to be a little arbitrary, or linked to Hauerwas’ own ethical preferences (for non-violence, for example). Has he at this point reintroduced some abstract ethical ideas having previously disavowed them? Perhaps this is the weakness of the narrative turn that Hauerwas advocates: are these criteria prior to, or the result of a narrative understanding of discourse? Even despite his protestations about the provisionality of his criteria, there is no clear answer given (in this essay) as to how these have arisen. One proposal at this stage would be for an appeal to a master-story – namely the one that Christians tell about Jesus Christ and his Father - that narrates these criteria as the ones by which subsidiary stories ought to be evaluated (and adopted or rejected); and I suspect this is what Hauerwas has in fact done (and does do in practice) but appears to conceal somewhat. Towards the end of his essay, he more explicitly suggests that it is the acceptance of certain stories as “canonical” that marks religious faith. What this means in effect is that through these stories recognized as canonical we “discover our human self”, and are able to judge the adequacy of “alternative schemes for humankind”. Again, we need to ask “why are these stories canonical?” Isn’t this shifting the plausibility problem rather than answering it?

Further, Hauerwas’ criteria appear to ask which narrative works best, leaving him open to the charge of pragmatism. He freely concedes that there may be a plurality of narratives that meets his criteria. However, if these narratives make contradictory, even inimical claims about the world, and God, but work equally well to (say) steer us from violence, are we not able to make further discrimination between them? Are the differences between them merely irrelevant in that case? For those who inhabit these competing stories, it is unlikely to be an easy matter to cast off some parts of the narrative as unimportant.

There are many stories that do not exhibit these criteria and yet have claims to shape our lives. In our time as in the ancient world, stories of violent vengeance make powerful and popular appeal to the ideal of individual, extra-legal action to resolve outstanding moral business. Violence is essential for a feeling of justice in the resolution of these tales. This is even now advocated by Peter A. French, The Virtues of Vengeance ([Lawrence]: University Press of Kansas, 2001), who analyses the pursuit of vengeance in Western films like The Searchers and Unforgiven. Hauerwas would, no doubt, say that these are “bad” stories...But then, he already decided this on - well what grounds exactly?