Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony

by Stanley Hauerwas, William H. Willimon

In this bold and visionary book, two leading Christian thinkers explore the "alien" status of Christians in today's world and offer a compelling new vision of how the Christian church can regain its vitality, battle its malaise, reclaim its capacity to nourish souls, and stand firmly against the illusions, pretensions, and eroding values of today's world. Hauerwas and Willimon call for a radical new understanding of the church. By renouncing the emphasis on personal psychological categories, they offer a vision of the church as a colony, a holy nation, a people, a family standing for sharply focused values in a devalued world.

Genres: Theology, Christian, Religion, Nonfiction, Christianity, Church, Politics

175 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1989

About the author

Stanley Hauerwas (PhD, Yale University) is the Gilbert T. Rowe Professor of Theological Ethics at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. He is the author of numerous books, including Cross-Shattered Christ, A Cross-Shattered Church, War and the American Difference, and Matthew in the Brazos Theological Commentary on the Bible.

America's Best Theologian according to Time Magazine (2001), though he rejected the title saying, "Best is not a theological category."

Reviews

[Kyle · Rating 3 out of 5]

Who doesn't love a repeated swift kick in the backside?

As a loud and clear call for the Church to start acting like the Church, this book was a gem. There is a reason, it is becoming a modern ecclesial classic. Although many of the socio-political references are dated (Reagan, Iran/Contra, yuppies, etc.) the attitudes behind the critiques are not. Some of the pokes at mainline denominations are even funnier (and thus more sad) because the criticisms are still true (i.e. one mainline denomination's "peace with justice" week comes to mind). Reading it cursorly one might think that Willimon and Hauerwas are against politics, peace, and justice. They're not. They're simply fed up with a Church who takes their cues from a sinful American culture instead of allowing the Church to be the Church who takes their lead from the God who has revealed Himself in the Holy Scriptures.

[Kaleb · Rating 4 out of 5]

Back in my Hauerwas era. Hauerwas argues that Christianity is no longer the dominant culture in the US and that Christians should stop trying to make our ethics make sense to a secular culture. Instead, Christians should embrace being strange and that the church should see itself as a colony, trying to live out the Christian story in a world that is hostile to it. Lots of interesting examples of this, I especially liked the stories of pastors in Southern churches who (unpopularily) fought for integration and pacifism, something that doesn't make sense outside of Christianity. Great book, my favorite Hauerwas so far.

Quotes

"We Christians have never handled success very well. We seem to be at our best as salt, as a struggling congregation in inner-city Philadelphia rather than St. Peter’s in Rome."

"Without Jesus, Peter might have been a good fisherman, perhaps even a very good one. But he would never have gotten anywhere, would never have learned what a coward he really was, what a confused, then confessing, courageous person he was, even a good preacher when he needed to be."

"In his teaching and preaching, Jesus was forever calling our attention to the seemingly trivial, the small, and the insignificant—like lost children, lost coins, lost sheep, a mustard seed. The Kingdom involves the ability to see God within those people and experiences the world regards as little and of no account, ordinary."

[R.L.S.D · Rating 4 out of 5]

"We believe both the conservative and liberal church, the so-called private and public church, are basically accomodationist in their social ethic. Both assume wrongly that the American Church's primary social task is to underwrite American democracy."

This book is intended as a shot of anti-venom for Christians who were misled to believe that Niehbur's query "what is the relationship between Christ and culture" was a good question. Hauerwas and Willimon would like to serve as pall bearers for the "transformationist" and "accomodationist" paradigms of church/culture relationships - perspectives that many Christians would think oppose each other but that H&W contend are really two variations on the theme of taking our cues from the rest of the world.

I have quite a bit of overlap with Hauerwas's blend of non-violent/ neo-anabaptist/ narrative theology/virtue ethic. There is something compelling in their articulation that "Christianity is an invitation to be part of an alien people." At the end of the day though, I think Luther's language of the "two kingdoms" is richer than the authors' term "colony of Heaven" for several reasons, not the least of which because it does not rely on the infelicitous metaphor of "colony." I would contend that much of the push back they received for this book was due to a problem with their poetics. That is to say, their theology may have had room for things that their poetics did not - language of the world as gift for example, or Jeremiah's words to the exiles to "build houses and live in them, plant gardens and eat their produce." As someone who works in agriculture, I this language important for theologies of creation care.

Occassionally, in trying to counter a watered down "social gospel" version of the faith, the authors say things like "In fact we are not called to help people. We are called to follow Jesus." The doctrine of two kinds of Righteousness (that is, when our relationships are "right" with God and with the world) and the doctrine of vocation (God doesn't "need" your good works, but your neighbor does) would have helped their clarity.

I had hoped for a book that was pitched a little more at the underpinnings of our latest heresies (N.A.R) rather than at the mainline Methodists, but I loved a great deal of it nonetheless. Life in the Church is truly a spectacularly "odd" adventure.

[Kaylin Verbrugge · Rating 5 out of 5]

Changed my life. I have faith in the church now!

"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 the people" (21).

"The confessing church, like the conversionist church, also calls people to conversion, but it depicts that conversion as a long process of being baptismally engrafted into a new people, an alternative polis, a countercultural social structure called church. It seeks to influence the world by being the church, that is, by being something the world is not and can never be, lacking the gift of faith and vision, which is ours in Christ. The confessing church seeks to be the visible church, a place, clearly visible to the world, in which people are faithful to their promises, love their enemies, tell the truth, honor the poor, suffer for righteousness, and thereby testify to the amazing community-creating power of God. The church knows that its most credible form of witness (and the most effective thing it can do for the world) is the actual creation of a living, breathing, visible community of faith... for the confessing church will also be a church of the cross. As Jesus demonstrated, the world, for all of its beauty, is hostile to the truth... the cross is not a sign of the church's quiet, suffering submission to the powers-that-be, but rather the church's revolutionary participation in the victory of Christ over those powers... The cross is the sign of what happens when one takes God's account of reality more seriously than Caesar's. The cross stands as God's (and our) eternal no to the powers of death, as well as God's eternal yes to humanity" (47).

[Shane Moore · Rating 1 out of 5]

Self-righteous, self-congratulatory, pompous, and unambitious: This book is a clear example of what is wrong with Seminarians. There are good ideas here (Christianity shouldn't be a slave to tradition or society), but the good ideas are underdeveloped, unsupported, and drowned in a sea of hyperbole.

The authors say things like, "God demands that we sacrifice the lives of our children and those we love to our interpretation of His will!", "Democracy and individual rights are idols!" "Biblical
authority is more important than compassion or kindness!"

I don't buy any of that and I won't endorse it.

[Ryan Chan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read as part of a church book club. Quite enjoyable, both to read and to discuss. The writing is fun to read, as it seems to be unnecessarily provocative at times but then the actual ideas behind it aren’t that crazy 😆

I really enjoyed chapters 5 and 6, where we got to see practical examples of what Hauerwas and Willimon mean by being the church and living as a colony. It isn’t necessarily what you think it is!

I think the book had many connection points to other things I was reading, which was also nice. One example is the way they define “politics” in a similar fashion to Gorman—the way of life of a people. Not too long of a read either, so would recommend to anyone thinking about what it means to be the church!

[Byran Smucker · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5 stars. The first half of the book is fantastic in describing and expounding on the church as a political body, as a colony of heaven, as a group composed of aliens living in a foreign land. The second part is more pointed toward the problems of mainline Protestant congregations and ministers.

Edited to add October 10, 2025: Here are some memorable quotes from this book.

p.12 "A colony is a beachhead, an outpost, an island of one culture in the middle of another, a place where the values of home are reiterated and passed on to the young, a place where the distinctive language and life-style of the resident aliens are lovingly nurtured and reinforced."

p.24 "Christianity is more than a matter of a new understanding. Christianity is an invitation to be part of an alien people who make a difference because they see something that cannot otherwise be seen without Christ. Right living is more the challenge 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."

p.28 "That which makes the church "radical" and forever "new" is not that the church tends to lean toward the left on most social issues, but rather that the church knows Jesus whereas the world does not. 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. These 'solutions' are only mirror images of the status quo."

p.30 "Christianity is mostly a matter of politics - politics as defined by the gospel. The call to be a part of the gospel is a joyful call to be adopted by an alien people to join a counter-cultural phenomenon, a new *polis* called church."

p.38 "the political task of Christians is to be the church rather than to transform the world."

p.38 "It is Jesus' story that ... teaches us to be suspicious of any political slogan that does not need God to make itself credible"

p.46 "The confessing church ... calls people to conversion but it depicts that conversion as a long process of being baptismally engrafted into a new people, an alternative *polis*, a countercultural social structure called church. It seeks to influence the world by being the church, that is, by being something the world is not and can never be, lacking the gift of faith and vision, which is ours in Christ."

p.47 "[The confessing] church knows that its most credible form of witness ... is the actual creation of a living, breathing, visible community of faith."

p.48 "We would like a church that once 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 a people who see clearly the cost of discipleship and are willing to pay the price."

p.55 "We cannot know Jesus without following Jesus" - a quote reminiscent of the one by early Anabaptist Hans Denck: "No one truly knows Christ, unless he follows him daily in life"

p.74 “[The SoTM is] an odd place where what makes sense to everybody else is revealed to be opposed to what God is doing among us.”

p.80-81 "Both [the Christian right and the Christian left] imply that one can practice Christian ethics without being in the Christian community"

p.83 "[In the church] we show the world a manner of life the world can never achieve through social coercion or governmental action"

p.84 "[The Beatitudes are] a vision of the inbreaking of a new society" - they show what Jesus values and blesses. They are indications of what God values, of what the KoG is like, not rules/imperatives

p.85 "the basis for the ethics of the Sermon on the Mount is not what works but rather the way God is"

p.89 My paraphrase of a point made in the book: A nation works for peace for the same reason it builds and deploys bombs - for the good of the nation. It is not self-sacrificing.

p.94 "The only way for the world to know that it is being redeemed is for the church to point to the Redeemer by being a redeemed people. The way for the world to know that it needs redeeming, that it is broken and fallen, is for the church to enable the world to strike hard against something which is an alternative to what the world offers."

p.102 "One role of any colony is to keep the young very close to the elders" - for imitation/discipleship

p.148 "No ethic is worthy that does not require potentially the suffering of those we love" + p.149 "Any ethic worth having involves the tragic"

p.157 "the challenge facing the church is political, social, ecclesial - the formation of a visible body of people who know the cost of discipleship and are willing to pay."

p.163 "both [the thinking of the fundamentalist and the higher critic] try to make everyone religious (that is, able to understand and appropriate Scripture) without everyone's being a member of the community for which the Bible is Scripture"

[Jess Lucas · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the first book I’ve read by Hauerwas and I was compelled by many of his (and Willimon’s) arguments, especially his emphasis on the Church as necessary to practice Christian ethics. In short, he argues that there can be no such thing as Christian ethics without the Church. His opposition to any formulation of Christian ethics divorced from the Church was particularly challenging for me as I have felt at times that churches are morally impotent, now more than ever. (It's been nearly 25 years since this book was published, and I wonder how Hauerwas would respond to today's Christian Nationalism). Hauerwas seems to share that frustration. For Hauerwas and Willimon, the problem is the church’s aspiration towards socio-political relevance and influence, rather than viewing itself as a social and political instution that offers a radical alternative to the powers and principalities of “the world”. Hauerwas imagines a church that actively engages society through an unashamed loyalty to the Gospel rather than the aims of social democracy, liberalism, or conservative politics. He makes this especially clear in comparing the rhetorical similarities between Jerry Falwell and Reinhold Niebuhr and the negative implications of their “accomodationist” theology.

For someone who admires Niebuhr and some theologians he has influenced, Martin Luther King, Jr. and James H. Cone among them, I was definitely challenged by his view of social “liberation” theology as necessarily accomodationist. My understanding of liberation theology does not involve liberation of the “self” as the final aim, but liberation of the poor and marginalized from imperial oppression (a consistent Biblical theme). Hauerwas does oppose the social sins of racism, imperialism, unfettered capitalism, and militarism, as I think any Christian should, but he is hesitant to claim “liberation” as an adequate eschatological moral vision of society. This claim seems to undermine and minimize the roots of liberation theology in the United States, a tradition born from American slavery and nurtured through an imaginative interpretation of the Biblical story that is heavily concerned with the Exodus story, the Jubilee tradition, the Prophets, and the Cross. In other words, the story of what God is doing in the world, which Hauerwas claims is ethically vital, is not lost in these articulations of theology. While Reinhold Niebuhr may not be a helpful comparison to Falwell in order to defend the term “liberation” (James Cone discusses Niebuhr’s complicated silence on racism in The Cross and the Lynching Tree), placing Falwell alongside someone like Dr. King may serve to demonstrate what social and political liberation means to a man gripped by the story of Jesus, committed to the struggle for Black civil rights, and faithful to the Church as a catalyst for social good and alternative to American political status-quo. Falwell’s vision of the good society pales in comparison to the vision of the church and society offered by Dr. King. That being said, the implication of arguments from some contemporary proponents for liberation theology that improved federal programs and progressive legislation are the ultimate end of Christian ethics, while important aims, does seem unsatisfactory and incomplete in comparison to Christ’s transformative eschatological vision of the Kingdom; the Church being an active participant in bringing this to fruition. In this respect, I can somewhat understand Hauerwas’s rub.

After reading this book, I am very motivated to read more of Hauerwas’s work and I’m curious to learn more about the theologians and philosophers he credits to his understanding of theology and ethics (obviously Alasdair MacIntyre is a big one). I am really compelled by his major claim that a constant retelling and communal formation around the Biblical narrative is necessary for Christian ethics, which, as he says, is not a “new” or original claim. The way he articulated this claim helped me better understand its importance. At this point in my theological journey, I still find value in critical social theory and some of the theologians that Hauerwas doesn’t regard as helpful for Christian theology and ethics (although I just found out that Tillich was a super-icky dude and a little suspect when Hitler came to power, so I’ll give him that one); however, I think there is much I can learn from Hauerwas, especially his commitment to and faith in the Church, a gift I’m learning to love again. In a recent interview with Hauerwas, he said something to the extent of, "Protestantism as we know it is dying". Based on the arguments in this book, perhaps he thinks this is a good thing for the future of the Church and Christian ethics. I think I would agree with him.

[Nate Pequette · Rating 5 out of 5]

Resident Aliens is a book that I found to be extremely important for the Church today. It is a book that the people around me quote often and I have quoted often, but have never sat down and read the whole thing. I am glad I finally did. I feel like I and maybe the church have been floundering at how to handle our world right now. We feel a panic to do something. We feel like a new sense of urgency to change the world before it crashes down on us. Ad we feel a bit hopeless. I find people like Hauerwas are important people for the church to be listening to and reading today. If I had to sum it up, I would say something like this, Don't Panic, Be the Church. Steep yourself in the Story of God and be the people of God. This is a book that is is a call to pastors and ministers to lead the people of God to be the people of God.

Hauerwas and Willimon (H&W) call the church to again Follow Jesus. In today's political climate we feel an urgency to side with the right side of history politically. And do something about that. But Resident Aliens calls us to follow Jesus. This is the heart of it all. They say, "That which makes the church 'radical' and forever 'new' is not that the church tends to lean toward the left on most social issues, but rather that the church knows Jesus and the world does not." And in order to do this we need to soak in the story of God. We need to understand and breathe the ways of the beatitudes and the sermon on the mount. This needs to become our new way of life. Not to just side with the right or the left. But to live the way of the sermon on the mount. This is the way of God.

Or this, "Christian community, life in the colony, is not primarily about togetherness. It is about the way of Jesus Christ with those whom he calls to himself. It is about disciplining our wants and needs in congruence with a true story, which gives us the resources to lead truthful lives. In living out the story together, togetherness happens, but only as a by-product of the main project of trying to be faithful to Jesus." H&W always emphasis that living this way cannot be done alone and must be about living in a community of people, to be that city on a hill. But it is a people who follow Jesus.

One of the other challenges they put forth is in order to do this, we actually have to believe that this story we are a part of is true. Does the church actually believe in God? Do I actually believe in this God? Because if we do, it changes everything. Do I believe that this God sent Jesus to live and be God among us and eventually go to the cross? And do I believe then that because of Christ's death and resurrection, that the church can now participate in the way of Christ and ourselves live in the way of enemy, non violent love?

One finally challenge i believe they give which is important. Living in the colony may not seem effective in changing the world. Non violence doesn't feel effective. Loving our enemy doesn't make sense. Living the way of the beatitudes and the sermon on the mount doesn't make sense in our world. But we have to remember that we are living in the Kingdom of God as followers of Christ. So weather we make a difference or not, we live the way of the Kingdom, not just as blind followers, but because we actually believe in this God and this Story. And we believe that one day, God will gather and make all things new. And the slaughtered lamb, Jesus, will be the one to reign.

[Dan · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great challenge

This book presents a great challenge to pastors and laypeople that want to dare to make how they live as Church “an adventure” as opposed to simply living like the world has set the rules we must live by. It was also harrowing in the challenges and response presented that a future pastor must live with to make sure his church is actually living lives together subsumed by Christ’s story. We are trapped in a matrix that demands a certain life by Christ’s true death and resurrection.
Millennial and Gen Z readers should continue to read despite baby boomer obsession/fixation of “The Bomb™️” and “The Vietnam War,” choosing to focus on the principles shown through their frequent use as illustrations by the authors.

[Jadon Reynolds · Rating 5 out of 5]

A refreshingly alternative vision for the church amidst rather muddled times that speaks as loud today as it did in 1989. The authors manage to think independently from much politically motivated ecclesiology and set forth a way of being in the world that captures the originality and significance of what is really going on in the story of Jesus.

“Tribalism is not the church determined to serve God rather than Caesar. Tribalism is the United States of America, which sets up artificial boundaries and defends them with murderous intensity. And the tribalism of nations occurs most viciously in the absence of a church able to say and to show, in its life together, that God, not nations, rules the world. We must never forget that it was modern, liberal democracy, in fighting to preserve itself, that resorted to the bomb in Hiroshima and the firebombing of Dresden, not to mention Vietnam.”

[Brian · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is great because it has a lot of stories of ordinary Christians building the kingdom through hope, courage, and perseverance despite being pressured to turn Christianity into something that doesn't offend the world.

[Nancy Nehila · Rating 1 out of 5]

Completely delusional

The authors compare clergy to being used like prostitutes. They must live a very sheltered life where issues like the need for affordable childcare are wickedly promoting non Christian values like single parent households or both parents working. They preach poverty while themselves living lives of privilege. They can’t even agree with themselves. Not sure if the run on sentences and use of specialized vocabulary add to the confusion. I was told by my pastor that the forward was supposed to be sarcastic. During which they criticize the episcopal church and Obama administration. If you want to know why people are leaving the church look to the chapter on how clergy are so abused. How dare people expect someone that’s called by God to help them in times of need?!?! They talk about the world vs Christ a lot. No. It’s the world vs church. I’ve yet to see in the New Testament where it says you need a theology degree to be called. This book is elitist crap.

[Jacob Chapman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Unbelievably relevant book for one that was written in the 90’s. Hauerwas does a wonderful job at explains a ‘third way’ (politically) for the church to be ecclesial in ways that are not about pushing a political agenda, but instead, what sort of community would be (not policy) required to support an ethic of non-violence, justice, truth, etc. This book has really shaped a new theology behind ecclesiology and the pastoral office for me honestly.

[Donna Craig · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this book with my husband. It brings up some probing questions about how we do church and Christian community. However, we both thought it lacked a satisfying answer to the question of how we should do it.

[Matthew · Rating 5 out of 5]

I finally read Hauerwas :)

"Resident Aliens" is easily one of the best books I've ever read (Thanks, Dr. Griffith, for the initial recommendation in 2019). The content is intellectually stimulating, personally challenging, and brilliantly argued. It reads as if written to Christians in 2022, though it was in fact published in 1989.

The authors describe how, in the twilight of the "Constantinian synthesis" in America (Christians compromising their witness by making the gospel credible to the world in such a way that the church becomes the "dull exponent of conventional secular political ideas with a vaguely religious tint"), faithful Christians can refocus on what we should have been doing all along: being the church--nothing more; nothing less. We can focus on being that called out community of people who, because of Christ, understand the world in a way that the world does not.

After discussing what the church is (it's Christological and eschatological foundation and purpose) the authors examine the state of Christian clergy and exhort church leaders to speak truth and embrace the countercultural ramifications of the gospel.

"Resident Aliens" is a must read for any Christ follower, in my humble opinion.

[Matthew McBirth · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great book on the identity of the church and its relation to American society. The book is dated. What I found is that some of the things said in the book were not as new/radical as they were when Willimon and Hauerwas first wrote the book. I believe that's a testament to the influence of the book on pastors and teachers over the past several decades. Though it came out in the 1980s, the message is still needed today. I recommend getting the 25th anniversary publication as the authors interact with their work. The Afterword was especially helpful as Hauerwas interacts with the criticisms from well-respected thinkers. May the church truly and always be strange/alien to the world.

[John Howard Hassmann · Rating 5 out of 5]

Probably the best book I’ve read in some time.

[Jeremy Manuel · Rating 3 out of 5]

Resident Aliens by Stanley Hauerwas and William H. Willimon is a book I remember reading in seminary. I remember not enjoying the book very much during those days, so I must admit that I wasn’t looking forward to revisiting it. However, once I re-read the book I was able to appreciate it much more than I remember appreciating it during seminary. It doesn’t mean that this is my favorite book by any means, but well we’ll get to that.

In some ways, I have a hard time encapsulating what the message of Resident Aliens is. It is a book that is about the church, primarily about how the church is called to be a unique colony within the culture and not simply another group lobbying for the support of the culture, be it government or popular opinion. Many of the examples are dated, this book was written in 1989, but the message of the book is still relevant today.

For example, it talks about abortion. The authors then talk about how for many Christians the first thoughts are trying to figure out what laws need to be enacted by the government about abortion and how to go about convincing the government to take this Christian position. The problem with this, according to the authors, is that we’re ultimately relying on the government to define what is moral and ethical instead of the church. To Hauerwas and Willimon this seems to present that we believe the nations rule the world much more than we believe God rules the world.

Now while I think that what the book talks about is still relevant today and that they do have insightful things to say, something about this book bothered me throughout. Part of it was that it isn’t the most well organized book. Maybe this is the result of dual authorship, but it just seems that they are a bit all over the place. They talk about the problems of democracy, individualism, the idea of Christians trying to transform culture, not having good reasons for having or not having children, seminary education and while these things are not bad, they tend to lack anything cohesive other than the idea of the Christian church as a colony.

This idea of Christian colony is something that I felt they talked about, but didn’t develop the most. The best presentation of it was in the giving of what one of their churches does for confirmation. Even then I felt that they deconstructed popular ideas like transforming culture or being involved with government, and talked about how Christianity and Christian ethics are not common sense and are rather peculiar, but didn’t really show how that would work on the ground. They usually just relied on saying that the church needs to be the church, which just didn’t seem enough for me.

I guess overall, I felt that Resident Aliens had some good points, but the message was just so all over the place that I had a hard time thinking about what this would actually look like. Does the fact that we are to be the church mean we shouldn’t be involved in government? They didn’t seem to say this, but then how does the church engage in politics in way that holds God as the ultimate lord? If Christian ethics are so very peculiar then how do we account for the areas of overlap within our own culture? These and other questions popped up throughout the book, it is good for a book to make you ask questions, but I felt that many of the questions were about what they were presenting, because it wasn’t always clear.

The message being all over the place also made certain chapters go smoother than others. Honestly, I felt that as the book came to a close the chapters took a dive. This was primarily when they stopped focusing a lot on the church and switched to focusing primarily on the pastor. The next to last chapter was by far the worst in my mind. Too much focus on a lady named Gladys, too narrow of a focus on the story of Ananias and Sapphira in regards to how to act as a pastor, and a good amount of critique on seminary education just wound up looking like a jumbled mess to me.

As I’ve said the book is all over the place, they have some good insights peppered throughout, but I’m not sure I’d re-read this book again. They have quotes that I’d use or ideas that I agree with, but I have a hard time knowing whether to recommend it or not. I somewhat enjoyed it, and read through it rather fast, but at the same time felt there were many shortcomings in the book too. Resident Aliens does challenge you on how you live your faith, it deconstructs a lot of how we may approach our Christian life, but I feel it puts little down as a foundation beyond the vague notion of a Christian colony.

[Crimson Sparrow · Rating 3 out of 5]

One of the most powerful and pertinent messages this book offers is its depiction of a church narrative enslaved to the doctrines of democracy and consumerism. It paints both liberals and conservatives as two sides of the same coin, both looking to the government and her articulation of freedom, human rights, power, peace, and prosperity as method and mode of salvation. They cite Yoder’s paradigm: The “activist” church desires to transform the world in a way that makes God and Christ unimportant and unnecessary, and the “conversionist” church is selfishly consumed with an individualistic saving of souls. Both are subjugated to the almighty nation-state and consumed by its heretical perspectives.

They offer instead the narrative of a Christian colony - in the world but not of the world - following Jesus the way the disciples did, worshiping God as only they can. They describe salvation as an “adventure that is nothing less than God’s purpose for the whole world” and the church as a community “training us to fashion our lives in accordance with what is true rather than what is false” (p. 52). In this depiction, elders apprentice new followers as all members remember and articulate the invasion of God into the world, “taking the disconnected elements of our lives and pulling them together into a coherent story that means something” (p. 53). As revolutionary community members, Christians bump up against one another and the world speaking this coherent meaning in direct opposition to individualistic and "worldly" wisdom.

However, the authors flail at times in their attempts to maintain the tension that is their thesis, a narrative that is neither conservative nor liberal but altogether political in an altogether different way. Their examples are poignant and helpful, but they are followed by more and more two-dimensional, straw-man arguments that venture into the very abstract conceptualizations they said they wanted to avoid. They denounce things like the helping profession, personal boundaries, and most theological and higher education, for example, as if there is no Christ there, no double-edged truth in the narratives of other disciplines confronting the idolatrous church the way the church should be confronting the world.

I disagree that it is only the church who can worship, only the church who can see and speak truth, only the church who ultimately witnesses to God. The notion runs contrary to their own depiction of the intrusion of God into the world as a fundamentally relational being that created the very world with which these authors seem so intrinsically at war. It seems to elevate the church, particularly their own vague, culturally formed and influenced articulation of the church, to god-like status - which seems dangerous considering their critique of that same church!

No, God has used “the world” to critique and correct his people over and over again. But this humility seems missing from the authors’ narrative.

[Charlie · Rating 2 out of 5]

The first several chapters present the authors' neo-anabaptist social ethic. The last few are more focused toward ministers. This is somewhat of a "movement" book. If you buy hard into the vision the authors are selling, it's great. For outsiders, there are few takeaways.

[Maria Copeland · Rating 4 out of 5]

I don't quite track theologically with Hauerwas, but there's a great deal for Christians to consider in this text about the relationship of the church to the world and the nature of the church itself.

[Christina · Rating 4 out of 5]

Provocative and readable, this is a nice introduction to the thought of Stanley Hauerwas, especially his ideas related to the Church as polis or colony.

[Jared Wilson · Rating 4 out of 5]

A challenging read but a very profitable one.

[Zack Hudson · Rating 5 out of 5]

As a Christian living in 2022, I am quite prone to yearn for 1989. If only I lived in a more conservative America, in which people were a bit more hush about their sexual sin and Reagan would occasionally quote the Bible in a presidential speech. Nostalgia is a cowardly lie, and Hauerwas’ scathing critique of the American Church in the late 1980s is a harsh, yet necessary reminder that warm sentiments of a bygone era will never satisfy. Hauerwas pronounced the death of Christendom in 1963, and I say good riddance. Gone are the days when the global west masks its individualist idolatry in polite, moralistic ‘Christianity’. Gone are the days when we imagine our neighbors as “Christian until proven otherwise”. We are the inhabitants of a strange new world.
In Hauerwas’ day and mine, the Western Church finds herself at a crossroads. Will she pick a side, right or left, make a deal with her preferred devil, and speak the language of her captors in exchange for her survival, or stand apart as the prophetic voice in the wilderness she is, and witness against the world and all its evils? Although he rarely, if ever, used the phrase, Hauerwas contends for the holiness of the Church, and her purity from the heresies of progressive and fundamentalist ‘Christianities’. The Church must once again live as an alien colony within a foreign empire.
As an aspiring pastor, I found his final two chapters particularly terrifying and comforting. The pulpit must be the platform of the prophet, not the stage of the entertainer. The pastor must be a shepherd to his people against the wolves of secular individualism, many adorned in sheepskin (Locke). The pastor must be stand upon the authority of the Word of God, and cannot be seduced by the fanciful speech of historical criticism, nor the ‘common sense’ reductionism of the fundamentalist, both of which make Christian theology inconsequential. An alien colony requires the hard-hitting truth of the gospel in its most offensive form.
I will get off my soap box now. Not that there’s much competition, but Hauerwas has earned his spot atop my ‘favorite Methodists’ list.

[Russell Fox · Rating 4 out of 5]

A powerful, classic expression of radical Christianity, what later came to be referred to as the "neo-Anabaptist" school of thought, insisting that Jesus's call was fundamentally not to call individuals to righteousness, but to build community--and not any community, but a church. The difference being that communities can, and do, find a thousand ways to accommodate themselves to, or contribute to, or resist the world, but their commonality is that they are defining themselves in relationship to the world. The church, by contrast, as Hauerwas and Willimon present it, is radically non-Constantinian; it rejects the world, and all its political, economic, and sociological metrics. That doesn't mean that human members of the church don't have a politics, an economy or a society; of course they do. It just means that they build all those things in reference to Jesus's ultimate call to holiness, to peace, or forgiveness, to grace, to love. The church, in their view, should not have a "position" on the war in Ukraine; a real church would simply send missionaries to preach Christ and Him crucified to Russian and Ukrainian soldiers alike. And would they be slaughtered? Yes--in which case, you send more. The goal here, and this is really what I liked best about the book is to be true to Jesus, not necessarily to do that which will "work." A key passage, from pg. 85:

If Jesus had put forth behavior like turning the other cheek when someone strikes you as a useful tactic for bringing out the best in other people, then Jesus could be justly accused of ethical naivete. But the basis for the ethics of the Sermon on the Mount is not what works but rather the way God is. Cheek-turning is not advocated as what works (it usually does not), but advocated because this is the way God is--God is kind to the ungrateful and the selfish.

I've read a decent amount of Hauerwas before, and I wish I'd read this book first; it helps me understood his overall perspective so much better. I can't give it 5 stars, because the final third of the book is all advice to pastors, which isn't something I can relate to at all. And the Hauerwasian perspective in general, while deeply persuasive, has its own problem; among other things, it really seems entirely uninterested in historical and critical approaches to the Bible, which for all the endless debates about them can't, I think, be simply ignored. Still, this is as close to an ur-text in radical, faithful, pacifist, anti-capitalist, localist, community-centered Biblical Christianity as I suspect anyone may find; it is definitely worth reading.

[Will Ahrenholz]

Prophetic. Provocative. Powerful.

A few quotes. Might add more later:

“That which makes the church ‘radical’ and forever ‘new’ is not that the church tends to lean toward the left on most social issues, but rather that the church knows Jesus, whereas the world does not. 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.”

“The challenge of the gospel is not the intellectual dilemma of how to make an archaic system of belief compatible with modern belief systems. The challenge of Jesus is the political dilemma of how to be faithful to a strange community, which is shaped by a story of how God is with us.”

“The confessing church knows that its most credible form of witness (and the most effective thing it can do for the world) is the actual creation of a living, breathing, visible community of faith…. Witness without compromise leads to worldly hostility. The cross is not a sign of the church’s quiet, suffering submission to the powers that be, but rather the church’s revolutionary participation in the victory of Christ over those powers. The cross is not a symbol for general human suffering and oppression. Rather the cross is a sign of what happens when one takes God’s account of reality more seriously than Caesars.”

[Christan Reksa · Rating 5 out of 5]

A provocative yet empowering account on how Christians are not meant to "change the world" as understood by both conservatives and liberals, evangelicals and progressives, but rather to live together in faithfulness through sacraments, confess, forgive, and support each other, proclaiming the Gospel through words and deeds, and stay in unity, like a colony surviving together as a resident alien in a world that does not understand God.

The flow and narrative reeks of post-modernism, yet somehow it makes so much sense because it is true that we as people of faith tend to struggle to translate our language of faith into digestible, modern, cognitive terms. Christianity as it is should be understood through life in a fellowship, or a colony, in the form of Church, where ordinary people are empowered by Christ to be saints, supporting each other, in their weakness, yet in their clarity of minds and deeds of what it means to be Christian, to be countercultural and to live a life against what society views to be "normal".

This book can be a good reminder for a lot of us who strives so hard to make Christian "relevant" or "reigning supreme" (a la Christendom) while the fact of the matter is the truth in Christianity is not meant to be "relevant" or "new". Truth is truth, that must be experienced in church as a community, and lived out against the rulers of the world who try their hardest to suppress, oppress, and co-opt those who want to live a genuine life understood through lens of Christ.

[Graham Gaines · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5/5⭐ I enjoyed the bits of this book I read for a paper I wrote in seminary, then I saw it at a bookstore for $1 and snagged it.

I enjoyed this one. Their charge for the church to act as an alternative polis is strong and helpful and perpetually needed. Some of the examples are a bit dated (written in '89), but still hold relevance today at the same time. The last chapter is definitely the best one.

I love that the authors say that the way the church practices ethics is "ordinary, unspectacular yet profound and revolutionary."(97)

Probably my favorite quote from it:

"The only way for the world to know that it is being redeemed is for the church to point to the Redeemer by being a redeemed people. The way for the world to know that it needs redeeming, that it is broken and fallen, is for the church to enable the world to strike hard against something which is an alternative to what the world offers." (94)

[Scot · Rating 4 out of 5]

A 30 year old book that is still completely relevant, I would argue even more relevant, today than when it was written.

An interesting argument for how to live as “Church” without becoming just a social club with a set of “rules.”

It is easy to agree with his prognosis but carrying out the application must be difficult as one has to imagine this would be more of a popular opinion in the church if it was easy to do.