Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony

by Stanley Hauerwas

In chapter 4 we attempted to show that, whenever a people are bound together in loyalty to a story that includes something as strange as the Sermon on the Mount, we are put at odds with the world. This makes necessary the demanding business of being the colony of God’s righteousness in a world that refuses to acknowledge God as sovereign. Our assertion of the indispensability of the church for Christian living is more than the practical observation that life is difficult and thus we need a little help from our friends. It is also a claim about how the church enables us to be moral in the first place. The church not only gives us the support we need in being moral, it also teaches us what being moral is. To put the matter in words typical of a couple of professors: The church is crucial for Christian epistemology. We would not know enough to be moral without the colony.