Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony

by Stanley Hauerwas

The church is a colony, an island of one culture in the middle of another. In baptism our citizenship is transferred from one dominion to another, and we become, in whatever culture we find ourselves, resident aliens.

The demise of the Constantinian world view, the gradual decline of the notion that the church needs some sort of surrounding “Christian” culture to prop it up and mold its young, is not a death to lament. It is an opportunity to celebrate.

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. Right living is more the challenge than right thinking. The challenge is not the intellectual one but the political one—the creation of a new people who have aligned themselves with the seismic shift that has occurred in the world since Christ.

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.

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.

Once the concept of “human rights” has established itself as an axiom, the question inevitably arises: How and by whom are these rights to be secured? With growing emphasis, post-Enlightenment societies have answered: by the state.

If there is any entity to which ultimate loyalty is due, it is the nation state. In the twentieth century we have become accustomed to the fact that—in the name of the nation—Catholics will fight Catholics, Protestants will fight Protestants, and Marxists will fight Marxists. The charge of blasphemy, if it is ever made, is treated as a quaint anachronism; but the charge of treason, of placing another loyalty above that to the nation state, is treated as the unforgivable crime. The nation state has taken the place of God.

We argue that the political task of Christians is to be the church rather than to transform the world. One reason why it is not enough to say that our first task is to make the world better is that we Christians have no other means of accurately understanding the world and rightly interpreting the world except by way of the church.

The church is the one political entity in our culture that is global, transnational, transcultural.

The confessing church is not a synthesis of the other two approaches, a helpful middle ground. Rather, it is a radical alternative. Rejecting both the individualism of the conversionists and the secularism of the activists and their common equation of what works with what is faithful, the confessing church finds its main political task to lie, not in the personal transformation of individual hearts or the modification of society, but rather in the congregation’s determination to worship Christ in all things.

For the church to set the principle of being the church above other principles is not to thumb our noses at results. It is trusting God to give us the rules, which are based on what God is doing in the world to bring about God’s good results.

The confessing church seeks the visible church, a place, clearly visible to the world, in which people are faithful to their promises, love their enemies, tell the truth, honor the poor, suffer for righteousness, and thereby testify to the amazing community-creating power of God. The confessing church has no interest in withdrawing from the world, but it is not surprised when its witness evokes hostility from the world.

The cross is not a symbol for general human suffering and oppression. Rather, the cross is a sign of what happens when one takes God’s account of reality more seriously than Caesar’s. The cross stands as God’s (and our) eternal no to the powers of death, as well as God’s eternal yes to humanity, God’s remarkable determination not to leave us to our own devices. The overriding political task of the church is to be the community of the cross.

We would like a church that again asserts that God, not nations, rules the world, that the boundaries of God’s kingdom transcend those of Caesar, and that the main political task of the church is the formation of people who see clearly the cost of discipleship and are willing to pay the price.

People of God do not let the world determine how they respond to tomorrow.

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.

Through the teaching, support, sacrifice, worship, and commitment of the church, utterly ordinary people are enabled to do some rather extraordinary, even heroic acts, not on the basis of their own gifts or abilities, but rather by having a community capable of sustaining Christian virtue. The church enables us to be better people than we could have been if left to our own devices.

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. Here we show the world a manner of life the world can never achieve through social coercion or governmental action. We serve the world by showing it something that it is not, namely, a place where God is forming a family out of strangers.

the basis for the ethics of the Sermon on the Mount is not what works but rather the way God is. Cheek-turning is not advocated as what works (it usually does not), but advocated because this is the way God is—God is kind to the ungrateful and the selfish. This is not a strategem for getting what we want but the only manner of life available, now that, in Jesus, we have seen what God wants. We seek reconciliation with the neighbor, not because we will feel so much better afterward, but because reconciliation is what God is doing in the world in the Christ.

From a Christian point of view, the world needs the church, not to help the world run more smoothly or to make the world a better and safer place for Christians to live. Rather, the world needs the church because, without the church, the world does not know who it is. The only way for the world to know that it is being redeemed is for the church to point to the Redeemer by being a redeemed people. The way for the world to know that it needs redeeming, that it is broken and fallen, is for the church to enable the world to strike hard against something which is an alternative to what the world offers.

Idolatry is probably a much more interesting dilemma to biblical people than atheism.

ethics is first a way of seeing before it is a matter of doing. The ethical task is not to tell you what is right or wrong but rather to train you to see.

Leadership always produces a certain amount of loneliness—particularly when leaders lead through vision or loyalty to God rather than public opinion surveys.

the gospel, as a new literary form, was created because the presence of Christ produced a people who were willing to hear, indeed expected to hear, a story so truthful that it demanded our conversion.

Is not it interesting how Luke links money to self-deceit? Peter accuses Ananias and Sapphira, not of greed, but of lying. There is something quite natural about the lies of Ananias and Sapphira, for we all know the way we rationalize and excuse our own covetousness, acquisitiveness, and greed. “I’m not really that well off,” we say. “I have all I can do to make ends meet.” “I worked hard for this and I deserve it.” “It’s getting harder and harder to put food on the table.”

Luther called security the ultimate idol. And we have shown, time and again, our willingness to exchange anything—family, health, church, truth—for a taste of security. We are vulnerable animals who seek to secure and to establish our lives in improper ways, living by our wits rather than by faith.

As an act of pastoral ministry, was the episode with Ananias and Sapphira a pastoral success or not? It all depends on how you look at it. Through Peter’s pastoral care, the church lost two of its more “prominent” members. Yet, at the same time, the church first experienced itself as church, first used the word ecclesia to describe what happened. In Luke’s wonderfully laconic, almost humorous verdict, “And great fear came upon the whole church.”

What we call church is often a conspiracy of cordiality.

The faithful pastor keeps calling us back to God. In so doing, the pastor opens our imagination as a church, exposes us to a wider array of possibilities than we could have thought possible on our own.

Perhaps we forget, in a time of tame churches, toned down preachers, and accommodationist prophets, that there was a time when the church believed that though there was nothing in Jesus we needed to kill for, there was something here worth fighting for, dying for.

The gospel is so demanding that it not only expects us to be willing to suffer for its truth but also supposes those we love will have to suffer.

The gospel gives us something worth dying for and sacrificing our loved ones for as opposed to the nation’s attempt to give us something for which it is worthy killing.

Tribalism is the pinch of incense before the altar of Caesar.

For pastors to speak the truth boldly, they must be freed from fear of their congregations.