I first bought Resident Aliens almost four years ago on the raving recommendation of a friend, and though I had started it a few times, I had never read beyond the first chapter or two. So it was with great enthusiasm that I assigned the book to myself for the Christian Life class and began reading it again.

          The main concern that Hauerwas and Willimon have in this book is the conception of the church as a colony. The book begins by explaining the reasons for this conception and then meanders around the implications it has for politics, community, ethics, and ministry.

          The foundations for this view of the church as a colony of "resident aliens" are explored in the first chapter. The authors begin by making the claim that the United States is no longer a Christian society--an assertion that struck me as entirely obvious, but one which must not have been as obvious to all in the authors’ context of the southern United States in 1989. This change is the shift of the church’s position from the imperial religion to the religion of a discrete community. The relationship between the world and the church are summed up well at the end of the book:

Our world recognizes the subversive nature of the Christian faith and subverts us either by ignoring us or by giving us the freedom to be religious--as long as we keep religion a matter of personal choice (152).

Hauerwas and Willimon welcome this change, and the opportunity it brings for the church to be concerned with conforming itself to the gospel rather than conforming the gospel to the world in an effort to be credible to the powers that be. They critique the modern church’s preoccupation with apologetics:

It is the content of belief that concerns Scripture, not eradicating unbelief by means of a believable theological system. The Bible finds uninteresting many of our modern preoccupations with whether or not it is still possible for modern people to believe. The Bible’s concern is whether or not we shall be faithful to the gospel, the truth about the way things are now that God is with us through the life, cross, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth (22).

This emphasis on obedience rather than belief as the main imperative of the gospel is maintained throughout the book.

          Having defined the church in essentially political terms--as a colony from a foreign nation (or rather, a foreign kingdom), Hauerwas and Willimon outline some appropriate Christian approaches to politics. first on their agenda is a critique of the conventional notion shared by liberals and conservatives that the goal of Christian politics is the transformation of government.

Unable through our preaching, baptism, and witness to form a visible community of faith, we content ourselves with ersatz Christian ethical activity--lobbying Congress to support progressive strategies, asking the culture at large to be a little less racist, a little less promiscuous, a little less violent (80).

Instead of this sort of political participation, which uses secular power and reasoning to advocate change, the church must effect change by simply being the church. The best example of this approach to politics is in the following story about a conversation one of the authors had with a student about U.S. military action in Libya:

          The assumption seems to be that there are only two political options: Either conservative support of the administration, or liberal condemnation of the administration followed by efforts to let the U.N. handle it.

          "You know, you have a point," I said. "What would be a Christian response to this?" Then I answered, right off the top of my head, "A Christian response might be that tomorrow morning the United Methodist Church announces that it is sending a thousand missionaries to Libya. We have discovered that it is a fertile field for the gospel. We know how to send missionaries. Here is at least a traditional Christian response."

          "You can’t do that," said my adversary.

          "Why?" I asked. "You tell me why."

          "Because it’s illegal to travel in Libya. President Reagan will not give you a visa to go there."

          "No! That’s not right," I said. "I’ll admit that we can’t go to Libya, but not because of President Reagan. We can’t go there because we no longer have a church that produces people who can do something this bold. But we once did."

          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 (48).

The idea that the church’s primary role is to form Christian disciples is emphasized repeatedly throughout the book. Addressing ethics, Hauerwas and Willimon contend that again the church’s role is not to define ethics theologically, but to model them.

. . . a primary way of learning to be disciples is by being in contact with others who are disciples. So an essential ethical role of the church is to put us in contact with those . . . who are good at living the Christian faith (102).

Christian ethics are not only based on the Christian community, though--they are ultimately grounded in Christ, whose ethics are at odds with the world’s. His ethics are not based on the standards of moral calculus accepted by the world at large. Instead,

His is an ethic built not upon helping people or even upon results, certainly not upon helping folk to be a bit better adjusted within an occupied Judea. His actions are based upon his account of how God is "kind to the ungrateful and the selfish," making the sun to rise on the good and the bad. We are called to "be perfect" even as our Heavenly Father is (121).

          Turning from the discussion of politics, social action and ethics, Hauerwas and Willimon begin to address the ministry by which a community of obedient disciples can be created. This ministry is defined by the church’s need-- not its psychological maladies but its need to have the truth preached to it.

The greatest challenge facing the church in any age is the creation of a living, breathing, witnessing colony of truth, and because of this, we must have pastors and leaders with training and gifts to help form a community that can produce a person like Gladys [a woman who bravely asked hard questions at a church meeting] and a people who can hear Gladys speak the truth without hating her for it.

          Failing at that, the pastoral ministry is doomed to the petty concerns of helping people feel a bit better rather than inviting them to dramatic conversion. The pastor becomes nothing more than the court chaplain, presiding over ceremonies of the culture . . . Or else the pastor feels like a cult prostitute, selling his or her love for the approval of an upwardly mobile, bored middle class, who, more than anything else, want some relief from the anxiety brought on by their materialism (123).

The answer to the frustrations that ministers often feel, the authors contend, is an approach based on the adventure of telling the truth from God.

          I had a number of difficulties with this book. The most irritating one was a matter of editing--I found the organization of the chapters baffling and was frustrated by awkward contrivances resulting from the dual authorship. It was because of these obstacles more than any others that I encountered such difficulty the first few times I tried to read it. More significantly, I found a lot of the authors’ criticism of the "church as social club" to be completely obvious, and the problems they were addressing in their southern mainline denominations did not map well onto my experience in northern evangelical ones. Likewise, I found their criticism of the capitulation of liberal Christian politics to secular ideology and methodology obvious.

          Aside from these superficial things, the book was really timely for me. Two or three weeks ago I attended a presentation by representatives of the Seamless Garment Network, which seeks to live out a "consistent life ethic," including nonviolence and protection of the right to life, through community involvement and political activism. Resident Aliens made me think a lot about the Network’s methods for achieving its goals. During the forum, a Regent student from South Africa asked a piercing question: "Do you see yourselves as a counter-cultural movement or as a culture transforming movement, and if the latter, what will you do when you succeed?" The Network representatives replied that they were still figuring some of those things out. This book reminds me that Christ’s and the church’s main concern are not with enforcing Christian morality on the world but on enabling the church to be the church, transforming the world by its witness. Conventional political activism seems like it will end up wielding the same power it has fought against. But this book also reminds me that the Kingdom is a subversive political reality, and even the act of worship is a political statement of allegiance to one other than the state.

          The importance of centrality of worship is another theme, briefly touched on in this book, that fit well with what I have been learning and experiencing. Hauerwas and Willimon write:

In our worship, we retell and are held accountable to God’s story, the adventure story about what God is doing with us in Christ. All ministry can be evaluated by essentially liturgical criteria: How well does the act of ministry enable people to be with God? (138—139)

This summation of all the church’s business as worship resonates with my experience this semester at Regent. In all of my classes I have been challenged to know God in a new way, and the object of this knowledge is worship. As J.I. Packer puts it, "true theology is doxology." And the book fits well with the Christian Life class too--the unique claim of Christianity is that who we are and what we are to do is not defined in human terms but in our relationship with our Creator and Saviour, and our identity as his chosen people.