Jeremy L. Berg

I’m sharing some noteworthy excerpts from one of my favorite, most influential little books on church engaging culture — “Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony” by Stanley Hauerwas & Will Willimon. Chapter 3 is my favorite chapter of all, recasting the entire Christian life and experience of salvation as the invitation into a new, adventurous story in the company of a peculiar people who embody that story with Jesus at the center.  The following quotes have had an enormous influence on my own thinking, were quoted often in my graduate writings, and got me hooked on the power of “narrative theology.”

“The church exists today as resident aliens, an adventurous colony in a society of unbelief. As a society of unbelief, Western culture is devoid of a sense of journey, of adventure, because it lacks belief in much more than the cultivation of an ever-shrinking horizon of self-preservation and self-expression” (49).

“The Bible is fundamentally a story of a people’s journey with God. Scripture is an account of human existence as told by God. In scripture, we see that God is taking the disconnected elements of our lives and pulling them together into a coherent story that means something. When we lack such a truthful, coherent account, life is likely to be perceived as disconnected, ad hoc. In trying to make sense of life, when we lack a coherent narrative, life is little more than a lurch to the left, a lurch to the right. This is the world seen through the eyes of the “CBS Evening News”: disaster here, insoluble problem there, and then the inevitable “now this” followed by a commercial that helps us recover our sense that our world is all right. No wonder modern humanity, even as it loudly proclaims its freedom and power to choose, is really an impotent herd driven this way and that, paralyzed by the disconnectedness of it all. It’s just one damn thing after anolther” (53-54).

“When we are baptized, we (like the first disciples) jump on a moving train. As disciples, we do not so much accept a creed, or come to a clear sense of self-understanding by which we know this or that with utter certitude.  We become a part of a journey that began long before we got here and shall continue long after we are gone. Too often we have conceived of salvation — what God does to us in Jesus — as a purely personal decision, or a matter of finally getting our heads straight on basic beliefs, or of having some inner feelings of righteousness about our selves and God, or of having our social attitudes readjusted. In this chapter we argue that salvation is not so much a new beginning but rather a beginning in the middle, so to speak. Faith begins, not in discovery, but in remembrance. The story began without us, as a story of the peculiar way God is redeeming the world, a story that invites us to come forth and be saved by sharing in the work of a new people whom God has created in Israel and Jesus.  Such movement saves us by (1) placing us within an adventure that is nothing less than God’s purpose for the whole world, and (2) communally training us to fashion our lives in accordance with what is true rather than what is false” (52).