How can you not love a book that is sub-titled: “How the church is to behave if freedom, justice and a Christian nation are bad ideas”?!
The crucial question is how we can make the story we believe to be true not only compelling for us but for the whole world – a world caught between such unhappy alternate stories. In short, the challenge is how, as Christians, we can find a way to witness to the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Jesus without that witness becoming an ideology for the powers that would subvert that witness. I think we can do that if we take seriously the very character required of us by the story that we believe to be the truth about our existence – that is, that we be witnesses.
– Stanley Hauerwas, After Christendom?, p. 148.
This is a book that takes this question very seriously. But Hauerwas is not about to instrumentalise the church so that we can increase our growth and maximise our religious market-share by pretending to care about avoiding ideology. This book will be deeply frustrating if you only read books to get answers.
I suppose that isn’t true, really. The answer this book gives is that there are vastly more complicated and more primary problems with wanting to share the story we believe to be true in a compelling fashion than simply “how to achieve that end”. The six essays are premised on the idea that the church is today in an “awkwardly intermediate stage of having once been culturally established but not yet clearly disestablished.” Taking on what it means to be free, what it means to be just, what it means to be a citizen, what it means to learn a craft, what it means to be sexual and what it means to be educated, Hauerwas is always pushing us back to the question “Is it true?”
Your Correspondent, Got more sneakers than a plumber’s got pliers