Stanley Hauerwas and William Willimon wrote Resident Aliens in 1989.
Their analysis of both Christian and secular culture continues to be insightful and useful.
If the situations appear to have changed in the thirty something years that have passed, it is only that they have increased and strengthened, not that courses have altered.
Here they evaluate the “right” and the “left” in a way that does not look to dismiss two “houses” but rather observes a problem for Christians who don’t realise that there are not actually two houses, but one house, the house of humanity’s worship of itself as being the answer to its own problems.
That which makes the church “radical” and forever “new” is not that the church tends to lean toward the left on 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.
Stanley Hauerwas and William H. Willimon, Resident Aliens (Expanded 25th Anniversary Edition), Abingdon, 2014, pg. 28.
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