Let’s consider Hauerwas’s understanding of the gospel —
That through Jesus Christ, very God and very man, we Gentiles have been made part of the promise to Israel that we will be witnesses to God’s good care of God’s creation through the creation of a people who once were no people that the world can see there is an alternative to our violence. There is an alternative to our deceptions. There is an alternative to our unfaithfulness to one another [through] the creation of something called church. That’s salvation.
Not your standard evangelical understanding. How can he express gospel without even mentioning forgiveness of sin or heaven and hell? What’s going on?
Well, I think that what it means to have our sins forgiven is you’ve been made part of a narrative that you do not have to justify the path in a way that means the past continues to haunt you because you’re determined to live righteously. Interestingly enough, forgiveness of sins does say you do not have to be determined by the path because you’ve been given a future that is so compelling you don’t have to constantly try to renegotiate a world in which you are trying to be righteous even though you’re not.
Hmm … In other words, we’re forgiven so that we can live in a new and better way as new creations of God built into the temple called the church (or maybe I’m reading N.T. Wright into Hauerwas; he can be frustratingly vague). Forgiveness is not the end but the means. The goal isn’t forgiveness. Forgiveness is the beginning.
So what do Christians do?
Just tell the truth and see what kinds of tensions that produces. I think Augustine’s “Two Cities” have too often resulted in an apology for Christians not really being Christian because the church is really made up of sinners and non-sinners or at least people who are not quite as sinful and therefore you can’t tell that much difference between the church and the world. Well, we are sinners and that is a great achievement. That and the world doesn’t know that it is possessed by sin in the way that Christians do. So, there is a truthfulness to being able to be a Christian in a world that knows not God. This is our gift to the world, to be able [to tell the] truth.
And so a key part of our mission is to testify to the truth (sounds like John’s Gospel, doesn’t it?). And the truth is that the world is sinful and needs to find an escape from its sin. The church isn’t cured of sin, but the church is at least aware of its sin and so struggling against it.
Regarding the future of the American church, Hauerwas says,
I think that the church will be leaner and meaner and that will be a very good thing. I think that we will discover how much we need one another for survival and that is a very good thing.
In other words, as the church disassociates itself from nationalism and secular politics, and as nominal Christianity loses its appeal to nominal Christians, the church that is left will be truly committed to its mission, part of which is unity.
When asked to summarize his view of eschatology, Hauerwas responds,
Be a person of joy because you are God’s good creature who was created for the glory of God which is joy.
Not exactly what we expect to hear when we ask about the Eschaton, but we should live what the scholars call inaugurated eschatology, that is, the in-breaking of the Eschaton today so that the church is already moving in the direction of Rev 21-22. The joy of the Second Coming is today’s hope but it nonetheless joy. We will not be entirely transformed by God until Jesus returns, but the transformation is already underway. We belong to God — and his ownership will only become more and more plain as time passes and the end nears.
