Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony

by Stanley Hauerwas

To launch out on a journey is to move toward some goal. Of course, in the journey of faith, we have no clear idea of what our end will be except that it shall be, in some form, true and complete friendship with God.

Ethics is a function of the telos, the end. It makes all the difference in the world how one regards the end of the world, “end” not so much in the sense of its final breath, but “end” in the sense of the purpose, the goal, the result.

For the church to be a community that does not need war in order to give itself purpose and virtue puts the church at odds with nations. Yet the church knows that this observation alone, and no other reason, puts it in the middle of a battle, though the battle is one we fight with the gospel weapons of witness and love, not violence and coercion. Unfortunately, the weapons of violence and power are the ones that come most naturally to us, so now we must ponder how we maintain the qualities needed to stay in this adventure called discipleship.

Christian ethics, as a cultivation of those virtues needed to keep us on the journey, are the ethics of revolution. Revolutionaries, whose goal is nothing less than the transformation of society through revolution, have little patience with those among them who are self-indulgent, and they have no difficulty disciplining such people.

revolutionaries value honesty and confrontation—painful though they may be.

given the world view of the revolutionary, the ultimate vision toward which the revolution is moving, revolutionary ethics make sense. This is, in its own secular way, an ethics of adventure not unlike the ethics of Christians.

We believe that it is only when our attentions are directed toward a demanding and exciting account of life that we have any way of handling something so powerful, so distracting, so creative, and so deadly as sex.

A journey requires not only an end, a goal, but also the ability to keep at it—constancy. Travelers, in the midst of the vicissitudes of the journey, learn to trust one another when the going is rough.

Constancy requires a particular kind of change. If we are to be true to the quest, to keep a demanding goal before ourselves, we must be people who are ready to be surprised, ready to forgive and to be forgiven.

Modern people usually seek individuality through the severance of restraints and commitments.

Yet, what if our true selves are made from the materials of our communal life?

By cutting back our attachments and commitments, the self shrinks rather than grows. So an important gift the church gives us is a far richer range of options, commitments, duties, and troubles than we would have if left to our own devices.

In a fragmented world that is a world perpetually at war, Christians can again recover how exciting and exhilarating it is to be a people of peace.

we are invited to see ourselves and our lives as part of God’s story. That produces people with a cause. We really are, if we are to believe Hebrews or Deuteronomy, examples of God’s determination to bring the world back into a right relation to its Creator—which finally is what peace is about.

Our fate is transformed into our destiny; that is, we are given the means of transforming our past, our history of sin, into a future of love and service to neighbor. We are contingent beings whose meaning and significance is determined by something, someone other than ourselves. True freedom arises, not in our loud assertion of our individual independence, but in our being linked to a true story, which enables us to say yes and no.

The modern world tends to produce a steady stream of victims, people who by economic circumstance, social class, education, race, intelligence, or psychological problems are told that they are hapless victims who would be happier if they accepted their fate rather than whine.

by telling the Story, were enabled to tell their story in such a way that they could look back on their history with honesty (repentance) and see their future as a gift (forgiveness),

Our particular community knows the story that tells how the Risen Christ returned to his friends, even when they were his betrayers, and because we know it, we know to expect him to return to us, to stand among us, to forgive us, even to bless us. The disciples went forward by looking back, by rejoicing in the sense of hope that comes from the realization that God does not leave us alone, and will not let us stay as we are. Through him, we really are getting somewhere.

when it comes to Christian ethics, is not whether we shall be conservative or liberal, left or right, but whether we shall be faithful to the church’s peculiar vision of what it means to live and act as disciples.

American Christians have fallen into the bad habit of acting as if the church really does not matter as we go about trying to live like Christians.

any Christian ethical position is made credible by the church.

In acting as if the church’s ethics were something that makes sense to every thinking, sensitive, caring American despite his or her faith or lack of it, the church is underestimating the peculiarity of Christian ethics.

Christian ethics only make sense from the point of view of what we believe has happened in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth.

The habit of Constantinian thinking is difficult to break. It leads Christians to judge their ethical positions, not on the basis of what is faithful to our peculiar tradition, but rather on the basis of how much Christian ethics Caesar can be induced to swallow without choking.

How bland and unfaithful such ethics appear when set next to the practical demands of the story.

It might be possible for Christians to argue that our ethics are universally applicable, that the way of Jesus makes sense even to those who do not believe that the claim “Jesus Christ is Lord” makes sense.

until we collide with a text like Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. There, even the most casual observer realizes that he or she has been confronted by a way that does not make sense.

The Sermon, by its announcement and its demands, makes necessary the formation of a colony, not because disciples are those who have a need to be different, but because the Sermon, if believed and lived, makes us different, shows us the world to be alien, an odd place where what makes sense to everybody else is revealed to be opposed to what God is doing among us.

People are crucified for following a way that runs counter to the prevailing direction of the culture.

This is the God who is specifically, concretely revealed to us in Jesus, a God we would not have known if left to our own devices.

The Sermon on the Mount is after something that Niebuhr, and most of the modern church, forsook—that is, the formation of a visible, practical, Christian community.

The Sermon on the Mount does not encourage heroic individualism, it defeats it with its demands that we be perfect even as God is perfect, that we deal with others as God has dealt with us.

The Christian claim is that life is better lived in the church because the church, according to our story, just happens to be true. The church is the only community formed around the truth, which is Jesus Christ, who is the way, the truth, and the life.

In a world like ours, it is tempting to seek community, any community, as a good in itself.

The Western democracies tend to have a problem with meaning. They promise their citizens a society in which each citizen is free to create his or her own meaning—meaning which, for most of us, becomes little more than the freedom to consume at ever higher levels.

Merging one’s personal aspirations within the aspirations of the nation, falling into step behind the flag, has long been a popular means of overcoming doubts about the substance of one’s own life.

Christian community, life in the colony, is not primarily about togetherness. It is about the way of Jesus Christ with those whom he calls to himself. It is about disciplining our wants and needs in congruence with a true story, which gives us the resources to lead truthful lives. In living out the story together, togetherness happens, but only as a by-product of the main project of trying to be faithful to Jesus.

What we have failed to see is that even the Kantian ethic, based on the myth of the isolated, rational individual, arises out of a story, an account of the way the world works, and is backed up by a community. Individualistic, contextualist ethics is dependent on a “community” that exists by devaluing community and a “tradition” whose claim is that we become free by detaching ourselves from our tradition.

The Sermon implies that it is as isolated individuals that we lack the ethical and theological resources to be faithful disciples.

The question is, What sort of community would be required to support an ethic of nonviolence, marital fidelity, forgiveness, and hope such as the one sketched by Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount?

Whenever Christians think that we can support our ethic by simply pressuring Congress to pass laws or to spend tax money, we fail to do justice to the radically communal quality of Christian ethics. In fact, much of what passes for Christian social concern today, of the left or of the right, is the social concern of a church that seems to have despaired of being the church.

The result is the gospel transformed into civil religion.

Christians are not about the business of urging ordinary people individually to launch out on heroic, individual courses of action.

For Christians, the church is the most significant ethical unit.

All Christian ethics are social ethics because all our ethics presuppose a social, communal, political starting point—the church. All our ethical responses begin here.

Whenever a person is baptized, be that person a child or an adult, the church adopts that person. The new Christian is engrafted into a family. Therefore, we cannot say to the pregnant fifteen-yearold, “Abortion is a sin. It is your problem.” Rather, it is our problem. We ask ourselves what sort of church we would need to be to enable an ordinary person like her to be the sort of disciple Jesus calls her to be. More important, her presence in our community offers the church the wonderful opportunity to be the church, honestly to examine our own convictions and see whether or not we are living true to those convictions.

The most interesting, creative, political solutions we Christians have to offer our troubled society are not new laws, advice to Congress, or increased funding for social programs—although we may find ourselves supporting such national efforts. The most creative social strategy we have to offer is the church.

As Barth says, “[The Church] exists . . . to set up in the world a new sign which is radically dissimilar to [the world’s] own manner and which contradicts it in a way which is full of promise”

The Beatitudes are in the indicative, not the imperative, mood. First we are told what God has done before anything is suggested about what we are to do.

In God’s kingdom, the poor are royalty, the sick are blessed. I was trying to get you to see something other than that to which you have become accustomed.”