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Christians describe our lives in the fashion of Day, Luther, or Luke not to give credence to the pagan fantasy of luck but rather to indicate our belief in Providence, those sometimes joyful, often terrifying moments when we lose control of our story, when we find ourselves commandeered by the Holy Spirit, and when we are being put to use for greater ends than we intended.
Resident Aliens is Christianity made countercultural because this faith is so corporeal.
As Bonhoeffer said, we must never dream a church that imagines a corporate identity that has never existed. Yet as Bonhoeffer also said, we must resist the tendency to make the Christian life something that is inward and spiritual rather than the sort of objective, personal truthfulness that is primarily visible and historical.
I therefore can’t take seriously the inane criticism that Stanley and I advocated a withdrawal from “public theology and political responsibility.”
“You can either be a responsible participant in modern democracy, doing your bit to make this world a better place, or you can be an irresponsible, sectarian nothing who fearfully withdraws from the world.” Resident Aliens attempted a more nuanced and complex discussion of church/world.
Resident Aliens could be read as an extended reflection on politics in the name of Jesus.
How then should we live now in light of the shock that God has raised crucified Jesus from the dead? That’s the “political” question before us.
Resident Aliens commendation of Christianity as the countercultural practices demanded by the worship of Jesus Christ
When pietism substitutes love by God for obedience to God it degenerates into safely personal, instrumentalist, suffocating sentimentality.
Thus this book is another illustration of the truth of the doctrine of election: God takes back what rightly belongs to God by using a few to bless the many. God graciously elects the wrong people to do the right work for a God who seems to delight in working with unlikely people.
A colony is a beachhead, an outpost, an island of one culture in the middle of another, a place where the values of home are reiterated and passed on to the young, a place where the distinctive language and life-style of the resident aliens are lovingly nurtured and reinforced.
we believe it is the nature of the church, at any time and in any situation, to be a colony.
In baptism our citizenship is transferred from one dominion to another, and we become, in whatever culture we find ourselves, resident aliens.
This book is about a renewed sense of what it means to be Christian, more precisely, of what it means to be pastors who care for Christians, in a distinctly changed world.
our parents had never worried about whether we would grow up Christian. The church was the only show in town.
By overlooking much that was wrong in that world—it was a racially segregated world, remember—people saw a world that looked good and right. In taking a child to Sunday school, parents affirmed everything that was good, wholesome, reasonable, and American. Church, home, and state formed a national consortium that worked together to instill “Christian values.”
Christians could deceive themselves into thinking that we were in charge, that we had made a difference, that we had created a Christian culture.
The world was fundamentally changed in Jesus Christ, and we have been trying, but failing, to grasp the implications of that change ever since.
the church, as those called out by God, embodies a social alternative that the world cannot on its own terms know.
The decline of the old, Constantinian synthesis between the church and the world means that we American Christians are at last free to be faithful in a way that makes being a Christian today an exciting adventure.
Tertullian was right—Christians are not naturally born in places like Greenville or anywhere else. Christians are intentionally made by an adventuresome church, which has again learned to ask the right questions to which Christ alone supplies the right answers.
The project of theology since the Enlightenment, which has consumed our best theologians, has been, How do we make the gospel credible to the modern world?
Everyone’s world view had shifted to something called “the modern world view.” The poor old church, however, was stuck with the legacy of a “pre-scientific (i.e., premodern) world view.” This explains why, at least for a century, the church’s theology has been predominantly apologetic.
When the modern pastor stands up to preach to a modern congregation, the pastor is the bridge that links the old world of scripture to the new world of modern people. In our view, the traffic has tended to move in one direction on that interpretive bridge.
Is it true that the church’s modern problem is the intellectual dilemma posed by Tillich: how to relate the ancient world of the faith to a modern world of disbelief?
Everything must be translated into existentialism in order to be believed. Today, when existentialism has fallen out of fashion, the modern theologian is more likely to translate everything into Whiteheadian process theology, the latest psychoanalytic account, or Marxist analysis in order to make it believable. We have come to see that this project, though well intentioned, is misguided.
Yet such a view distorts the nature of Christianity. In Jesus we meet not a presentation of basic ideas about God, world, and humanity, but an invitation to join up, to become part of a movement, a people.
Could we say “the Christ with all people?”
The belief, on which much apologetics tends to be based, is that everyone must believe in something. This is the Constantinian assertion that religious belief is unavoidable.
Apologetics is based on the political assumption that Christians somehow have a stake in transforming our ecclesial claims into intellectual assumptions that will enable us to be faithful to Christ while still participating in the political structures of a world that does not yet know Christ.
The Bible finds uninteresting many of our modern preoccupations with whether or not it is still possible for modern people to believe. The Bible’s concern is whether or not we shall be faithful to the gospel, the truth about the way things are now that God is with us through the life, cross, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth.
The Bible’s concern is not if we shall believe but what we shall believe.
Barth knew that the theological problem was the creation of a new and better church. Tillich hoped that, by the time one had finished his Systematic Theology, one would think about things differently. Barth hoped that, by the time one had plodded through his Church Dogmatics, one would be different.
In the life, death, resurrection, and ascension of Christ, all human history must be reviewed. The coming of Christ has cosmic implications. He has changed the course of things. So the theological task is not merely the interpretive matter of translating Jesus into modern categories but rather to translate the world to him. The theologian’s job is not to make the gospel credible to the modern world, but to make the world credible to the gospel.
Christianity is an invitation to be part of an alien people who make a difference because they see something that cannot otherwise be seen without Christ.
The project, begun at the time of Constantine, to enable Christians to share power without being a problem for the powerful, had reached its most impressive fruition. If Caesar can get Christians there to swallow the “Ultimate Solution,” and Christians here to embrace the bomb, there is no limit to what we will not do for the modern world.
That which makes the church “radical” and forever “new” is not that the church tends to lean toward the left on most social issues, but rather that the church knows Jesus whereas the world does not.
In Barth we rediscovered the New Testament assertion that the purpose of theological endeavor is not to describe the world in terms that make sense, but rather to change lives, to be re-formed in light of the stunning assertions of the gospel.
We cannot understand the world until we are transformed into persons who can use the language of faith to describe the world right.
Christianity is mostly a matter of politics—politics as defined by the gospel. The call to be part of the gospel is a joyful call to be adopted by an alien people, to join a countercultural phenomenon, a new polis called church.
The challenge of Jesus is the political dilemma of how to be faithful to a strange community, which is shaped by a story of how God is with us.
The primary entity of democracy is the individual, the individual for whom society exists mainly to assist assertions of individuality. Society is formed to supply our needs, no matter the content of those needs.
What we call “freedom” becomes the tyranny of our own desires. We are kept detached, strangers to one another as we go about fulfilling our needs and asserting our rights. The individual is given a status that makes incomprehensible the Christian notion of salvation as a political, social phenomenon in the family of God.
The church becomes one more consumer-oriented organization, existing to encourage individual fulfillment rather than being a crucible to engender individual conversion into the Body.
has thus become our unquestioned assumption that every human person has the “right” to develop his or her own potential to the greatest possible extent, limited only to the parallel of rights of others.
On the one hand, the democratic state modestly claims to be a mere means toward an end. On the other hand, the same state needs to convince its citizens that it can give them a meaningful identity because the state is the only means of achieving the common good.
States, particularly liberal democracies, are heavily dependent on wars for moral coherence. All societies may go to war, but war for us liberal democracies is special because it gives us a sense of worth necessary to sustain our state.
In short, there is nothing wrong with America that a good war cannot cure.
It is against the backdrop of such social presumptions that we must see the weakness of the liberal church’s flaccid calls for “peace with justice.”
Our problem is not how to make the Christian faith credible to the modern world. Yet in another sense, unbelief or atheism is a problem, not intellectually, but politically. Most of our social activism is formed on the presumption that God is superfluous to the formation of a world of peace with justice. Fortunately, we are powerful people who, because we live in a democracy, are free to use our power. It is all up to us.
