Posted 7:00 AM by Sarah G.
A Review of
Resident Aliens

written by Stanley Hauerwas and William H. Willimon
published by Abingdon Press
reviewed by Duane Garner

Theaters screen movies on the Lord’s Day. Little League baseball and soccer schedules go uninterrupted over the entire weekend. One can find as many shopping opportunities on Sunday afternoon as are available any other day of the week. According to Stanley Hauerwas and William H. Willimon, this is a good thing. The two professors from Duke University Divinity School are the co-authors of Resident Aliens, “A provocative Christian assessment of culture and ministry for people who know that something is wrong.”

Hauerwas and Willimon propose that the Church has hidden too long behind the Constantinian veneer of an assumed establishment in and acceptance by Western culture. Only now, in light of the West’s pronounced cultural apostasy over the last forty years (which in their view was simply the culture ridding itself of a dead relic which it never really respected in the first place), can the Church shake off its lethargy and face the fact that it does not have a true ally in the kingdoms of this world. Rather than taking a defensive or retreatist position however, Willimon and Hauerwas advocate a third option, that the Church should simply be the Church, a colony of the people of God within the culture, neither bowing to it or retreating from it.

The book begins, “Sometime between 1960 and 1980, an old, inadequately conceived world ended, and a fresh, new world began.” The authors lead us to take a good, honest look at the state of the Church within the culture today. “All sorts of Christians are waking up realizing that it is no longer ‘our world’ – if it ever was.” Whereas at one time, perhaps, the general population of the United States might have at least viewed the Church on some level as a fundamental part of a healthy society, and would have acknowledged the Bible’s usefulness for basic instruction for moral behavior, today it seems that the majority lives as if there is no God and each man is a law unto himself. To the modern man, the Church and her affairs are of marginal concern at best, outside of a macabre interest in the evening-news reports of her failures. All the while the Church is largely doing precisely those things which only further reduce her impact upon the culture. “What we call ‘church’ is too often a gathering of strangers who see the church as yet another ‘helping institution’ to gratify further their individual desires.’”

The answer, say the professors, is for the Church to take this incredible historical opportunity to refocus her energies and resources onto those things which are of essential and primary importance and to take hold of the “adventure of being the church”. Rather than disassociating the gospel from its covenant context and presenting it as a set of abstract philosophical ideas apart from Christ, as the Church has done in an effort to make it more agreeable to the post-modern palate, the only hope for the Church is to present the gospel as it was intended by its Author; a relationship between Jesus and His people.

The authors are strongly opposed to the notion that the task of the Church is one of marketing the gospel in such a way that would make it appear more appealing to the world around her. While for some the approach to ministry and evangelism is in a basic sense similar to adding enough sugar to the cough medicine to make it go down and stay down, Willimon and Hauerwas are of the persuasion that the Church is at its best when it is at its boldest. They propose that the goal of the gospel is not to redefine a set of thoughts about the mysteries of God until they make sense, but rather to drastically change lives and to re-form them in the light of the stunning claims of the Word of God.

The meat of the book is wrapped up in the statement, “So the theological task is not merely the interpretive matter of translating Jesus into modern categories but rather to translate the world to Him. The theologian’s job is not to make the gospel credible to the modern world, but to make the world credible to the gospel.” What they are presenting is a radical shift from the church growth, seeker sensitive, purpose-driven Church models batted around in the last ten years and even the revivalist models of the last one-hundred and fifty years. The gospel is not simply concerned with if someone believes or not, but is actually concerned with the content of that belief. If we see our task as one of reforming the world to the Church, rather than reforming the Church to the world, we can go about our work with a solid sense of identity and carry out the implications of the gospel past “right thinking” all the way to “right living”.

One arena in which this change in perspective among Christians should be seen is in the way the Church interacts with the culture. While they affirm that “In baptism our citizenship is transferred from one dominion to another”, the authors recognize that our commission demands a great deal of interaction with the culture and submission to the authorities God has placed over us. As they sort through this tension between heavenly citizenship and earthly residence, they reveal what it means to be “resident aliens”, or Heaven’s colonists on planet Earth.

Hauerwas and Willimon take exception to the way in which H. Richard Niebuhr dealt with the issue of the Church’s dual citizenship. They say that he presents an incomplete set of choices when he proposes that the Church has the option to either be “sectarian” and “separatist” in an Anabaptist sense, or to accept culture and politics in the name of the unity. For our authors, the particular form of acceptance of the culture which Niebuhr advocated could not be accomplished without a great deal of compromise on central points of the gospel, and that Niebuhr’s argument was unbalanced to begin with. There are other options, the professors propose, outside of being either the “world-affirming” Church or the “world-denying” sect.

Throughout the chapters dealing with Christian interaction with politics and the society in the day-to-day ministry of the Church, the two authors call us to see a Church that is at odds with the cultural establishment. They say, “the church doesn’t have a social strategy, the church is a social strategy” , meaning that the Church ought to neither retreat from nor conform to the society, because it is a society unto itself, and seeks the establishment of its own culture in all the earth. This is not accomplished by marrying into the human civil government or social strata, but by becoming a “confessing church” driven by faithfulness rather than by a human measure effectiveness. “The overriding political task of the church is to be the community of the cross.”, they write.

In all of this, Hauerwas and Willimon help us to consider the position in which God has put His Church. He has not placed her in a role of beggar to the world, supplicating for the merest scrap of attention in order that she might justify her existence. He has seated her in the heavenlies with Christ, and she has a rank of authority in God’s world. She does not approach the world with hat in hand asking for validation and acceptance. The kingdoms of this world come to her to have their crucial questions answered and their eternal souls saved. The Church is at her best when she realizes her position, and that she truly possesses a unity, peace and perfection that men in all their endeavors can never hope to achieve on their own. “We serve the world by showing it something that it is not, namely, a place where God is forming a family out of strangers.”

This work is not without its faults. Some of the eschatological implications are left for the reader to work out on his own. There is some language in the book which seems to be avoiding or ignoring any sort of covenantal understanding of the family and God’s method of raising up Godly seed and as good modern Methodists the authors do not refrain from often employing the feminine pronoun when referring to pastors.

With all of that aside, however, their instruction for the Church’s health and success is not drawn from the well of pop psychology or from the latest marketing fad, but from an earnest zeal for the integrity of the cross and the identity of the church. They see the culture’s disenchantment with the Church as a golden opportunity for the Church to return the favor and become disenchanted with the culture. It is their thesis that the Church’s primary mission is to simply be the Church, the community of Christ, confessing the gospel without apology. The result is a Church that is a culture within a culture, a colony of foreigners in a foreign land passing their language, customs and lifestyle on to their children, loving each other and their God.