Resident Aliens Chapter 1

Chapter one begins with a John Wayne movie and ends with a bomb. In between, Hauerwas and Willimon deconstruct the myth of a Christian America. They recount the shift in their own lives, and name the new reality that we are all now living in a post-Christian America and world. After a brief (but quite stunning) critique of Paul Tillich as an accommodationist (really big word for about the worst kind of theologian imaginable, see key words), Hauerwas and Willimon move into what they are really concerned with: following Jesus. They remind us that, “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. By the very act of our modern theological attempts at translation, we have unconsciously distorted the gospel and transformed it into something it never claimed to be- ideas abstracted from Jesus, rather than Jesus with his people.” (21) In contrast to Jesus we find the modern, liberal project, and by liberal they do not mean Democrat. They mean children of the enlightenment (and Schleiermacher in particular) who believe that “faith” and religion are fundamentally about belief and are simply natural characteristics. It is here that the chapter hinges, and the reader is reminded that “The Bible’s concern is not if we shall believe, but what we shall believe.” (23)



At this point the real hero of this book is revealed, namely Karl Barth. It is Barth, finally who names our reliance on the state as an idolatry, “For Barth taught that the world ended and began, not with Copernicus, or even Constantine, but with the advent of a Jew from Nazareth. In the life, death, resurrection and ascension of Christ, all human history must be reviewed.” (24) Barth reminds us that, “The theologians job is not to make the gospel credible to the world [hear translate/relevant/accommadationist in place of credible], but to make the world credible to the gospel.” (24) All of this is meant to remind us of the incredibly important truth, “Right living is more important 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.” (24) So, what then is our task? Is it to be more liberal? More conservative? May it never be. “In the church’s view the political left is not noticeably more interesting than the political right; both sides tend toward solutions that act as if the world has not ended and begun in Jesus…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…This we know, not through accommodation, but through conversion.” (28) This bit crescendos into what is really the summary of almost all of Hauerwas’ ethics, “We cannot understand the world until we are transformed into persons who can use the language of faith to describe the world right.” (28) In a slightly different way, you have Hauerwas’ axiom, “You can only live in a world you can see, but you can only see in a world you can say.” The church’s job is to raise up these transformed persons who can see the world, specifically because they can say the world. The shocking example given in chapter one is the dropping of the atomic bomb, and the haunting reminder that, “One cannot know what the world is without knowing that the ‘greatest thing in the history of the world’ is not the bomb but the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus.” (28) The myth of the Christian nation, or the Constantinian world, has come crashing down, and has left in its fallout the need to re-imagine what the church can be. Hauerwas and Willimon do not stand in the midst of this fall out terrified and afraid, nervous for what might lie ahead, rather you get the distinct impression that they are giddy about the “marvelous opportunity” (29) that awaits the church. It is while standing amongst the wreckage of the modern, liberal, enlightenment project, that Hauerwas and Willimon will point towards a new direction for the church, a new direction that is in fact a recovery of a very old direction, in chapter two.