Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony

by Stanley Hauerwas

This explains why, at least for a century, the church’s theology has been predominantly apologetic. The church did not want to duplicate the mistake we had made with Copernicus. When we took our first religion course in college, it was a course in how to fit the Bible into the scientific world view. We compared the archaic cosmology of Genesis to that of the true cosmology revealed by science. We learned how Moses could not possibly have written the Pentateuch nor Paul have written Ephesians. When we got to preaching, we were told to hold the Bible in one hand and today’s newspaper in the other. The preacher was the one who heroically bridged that great, wide gap between the old, ancient world of scripture and the new, real world of the modern era.