“RESIDENT ALIENS: LIFE IN THE CHRISTIAN COLONY”
A video book review by Douglas Schoelles
Many thanks to Douglas Schoelles, pastor of St. John’s Lutheran Church in Fort Wayne, Indiana (NALC) and member of the board of Lutheran CORE, for giving us a video review of the book, “Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony” by Stanley Hauerwas and William H. Willimon (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1989). A link to Doug’s review can be found here. A link to our You Tube channel, which contains reviews of around three dozen books as well as a dozen CORE Convictions videos on various topics related to the Christian faith and life, can be found here.
Doug writes: “While this book has been out thirty-five years, it is worth the read because the points Hauerwas and Willimon make are more salient than ever. Congregations will need to see themselves as unique faith communities set apart in our neo-pagan, post-Christian society. Paganism permeates our society, filling our thoughts, converting our youth, and subverting the church. Efforts to accommodate the society whether with liberals or cultural conservatives is an empty effort to underwrite American societies. The message of the church is not for ourselves, but for the whole world. As an incarnation of Christ, our purpose and only significance is a vessel of the Gospel which God uses to bring hope and salvation to the whole world.”
Doug continues: “In our world where loneliness and detachment are epidemic many people are searching for a rooted tradition. Do we offer that? ‘With our emphasis on the narrative nature of Christian life, we are saying that salvation is baptism into a community that has so truthful a story that we forget ourselves and our anxieties long enough to become part of that story, a story God has told in Scripture and continues to tell in Israel and the Church’ (Hauerwas & Willimon, p. 59). As we are baptized to be priests we are commissioned to help people in the name of Jesus, not do-gooders who help people. We are called to be a community of disciples who believe the gospel and are shaped by it.”
Doug concludes: “The authors did not anticipate some twists of history, but much of what they forecast is spot on.”
