ABSTRACT
This chapter is a response to a number of issues that have transpired in the previous chapters. These issues are the following: first, the insufficiency of MacIntyre’s account of the relationship between Christians and non-Christians. Second, the contrast between MacIntyre’s meta-theory for how incommensurable traditions can resolve ethical disputes that, in practice, generates conflict, and O’Donovan’s account of the inherent incommensurability between Christian and non-Christian criteria of evaluation that, in practice, gives rise to an ad hoc commensurability. Third, the need to formulate a constructive account of how Christians should relate to their neighbours, one that takes into consideration eschatology and ecclesiology. I shall now seek to construct a model, not of how to resolve disputes between Christians and non-Christians, but of how Christians are to relate to non-Christians when ethical disputes arise. This is done by means of an assessment of the motif of hospitality, how it differs from other, contemporary ways of structuring difference, how it fits within a wider philosophical discourse, and how it can be understood within a specifically theological framework. On the basis of this analysis I will set out a model of the actual practice by which Christians have, do and should relate to their neighbours in such a way that these relations take account of the simultaneous continuity and radical discontinuity between them.
