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Church against state?

September 18, 2014

Reading Resident Aliens [by Stanley Hauerwas and William H. Willimon] is a kind of Rorschach test: the way a mainline Methodist reads it will be different from the way someone like me—an evangelical (of sorts) in the Reformed tradition—does. An heir of Abraham Kuyper encouraged to "transform culture," I learned from Hauerwas and Willimon how often, under the banner of cultural transformation, we march ahead into cultural assimilation. It wasn't until I read Resident Aliens that I realized I lacked a functional ecclesiology. Hauerwas and Willimon woke me up to a sense that the church has its own cultural center of gravity. We didn’t have to figure out how to hook up "Christ" with "culture" because the body of Christ is a culture, and specifically a formative culture. For those of us breaking out of fundamentalism, the Reformed tradition offered a "common grace" license that enabled us to say yes to culture. But in our new enthusiasm for affirmation, we tended to lose the other side of Kuyper’s approach—an emphasis on antithesis. Resident Aliens was apocalyptic for me in the sense of unveiling the deformative power of those other spheres of life we were so eager to affirm and transform. Read the rest of this article at The Christian Century.