Peculiar People

The Sermon on the Mount was not designed to cultivate right attitudes but to form a visible people of God.

When United Methodists Stanley Hauerwas and William Willimon urge Christians to take the Sermon on the Mount seriously as a model for the church, they represent a new trend in mainline Protestantism. On page 13, Charles Scriven discusses that trend in “The Reformation Radicals Ride Again.” Here, an excerpt from Resident Aliens, Hauerwas and Willimon’s new book, gives CT readers a chance to sample an emerging mainline theology of church.

It would be difficult for us to open a discussion of Christian ethics in a more questionable way than to cite someone who, to many mainline, moderate-to-liberal church people like us Methodists, is anathema—Jerry Falwell. We cite Falwell not to support his agenda, but to suggest that the fundamental issue of Christian ethics is not whether we shall be conservative or liberal, but whether we shall be faithful to the church’s peculiar vision of what it means to live and act as disciples. To our minds, there is not much difference between Jerry Falwell’s ethical agenda and that of the American Protestant Mainline. Whether they think of themselves as liberal or conservative, American Christians have fallen into the bad habit of acting as if the church really does not matter as we go about trying to live like Christians.

Not long ago, on one of his television broadcasts, Jerry Falwell did something typical—he asked for money. He was pleading for funds for his “Save a Baby Homes.” According to Falwell, his organization is establishing homes, all over the nation, where a young woman who decides to continue a difficult pregnancy may receive free, caring support. She can live at a Save a Baby Home through her pregnancy rather than have an abortion. Roman Catholics have conducted a similar program for some time.

Falwell said something to the effect that “If we do not give our resources to this venture, if Bible-believing Christians do not demonstrate through our gifts that we are willing to sacrifice for and to support these young women, then we have no right to stand by self-righteously and point to them, saying, ‘sorry. Tough luck. Abortion is a sin. It is your problem.’ ”

More than Falwell might have known, his statement begins to move toward a Christian point of view—in the sense that any Christian ethical position is made credible by the church. The way most of us have been conditioned to think about an issue like abortion is to wonder what laws, governmental coercion, and resources would be necessary to support a “Christian” position on this issue. The first ethical work, from this point of view, is for Christians to devise a position on abortion and then to ask the government to support that position. Because we are fortunate enough to live in a democracy, we Christians can, like every other pressure group, push for the legislative embodiment of our views.

Liberal Christians will argue that this is what Falwell and his Moral Majority tried to do with their efforts to pack the Supreme Court with “Right to Life” ideologues. If they cannot play fair and convert everyone else in America to their point of view, they will force all of us to adopt their view through legislation. Yet liberal Christians have the same point of view, expecting society to uphold their ethics.

A Colony Of Witness

What impressed us about Falwell’s statement was that it recognized that Christian ethics are church-dependent. In acting as if the church’s ethics were something that makes sense to every thinking, sensitive, caring American despite his or her faith or lack of it, the church is underestimating the peculiarity of Christian ethics.

Christian ethics, like any ethics, are community dependent. They arise, in great part, out of something Christians claim to have seen that the world has not seen—the creation of a people, a family, a colony that is a living witness that Jesus Christ is Lord.

Christian ethics only make sense from the point of view of what has happened in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. But because we do not appreciate how dependent Christian ethics are upon the Christian story, our tendency has been to water down Christian ethics, filtering them through basically secular criteria like “right to life” or “freedom of choice,” thinking that we can push our ethics upon the whole world as universally applicable common sense.

How bland and unfaithful such ethics appear when set next to the practical demands of the gospel.

It might be possible for Christians to argue that our ethics are universally applicable, that the way of Jesus makes sense even to those who do not believe. Christians could then join hands with all people of good will who want peace, who affirm life, and who work for justice. You do not need a strong community, the church, to support an ethic everyone else already affirms. It might be possible for Christians to take this approach to ethics (indeed, many contemporary Christians have), until we collide with a text like Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. There, even the most casual observer realizes that he or she has been confronted by a way that does not “make sense.” In the Sermon on the Mount, the boundaries between church and world are brought into clear relief: “You have heard it said, … but I say to you.”

Here is an invitation to a way that strikes hard against what the world already knows, what makes sense to everybody. The Sermon, by its announcement and its demands, makes necessary the formation of a colony—because the Sermon, if believed and lived, makes us different, shows the world to be an alien, odd place where what makes sense to everybody else is revealed to be opposed to what God is doing among us.

Jesus was not crucified for saying or doing what made sense to everyone. People are crucified for following a way that runs counter to the prevailing culture. If Jesus had argued that it makes good sense to make peace with someone who has wronged you because such behavior will bring out the best in the other person, or that it makes sense to carry a Roman legionnaire’s pack because such an act will help to uncover the basic humanity even among the occupation forces, then Jesus might justly be accused of being a naive romantic who had not even the slightest inkling of how human beings really behave.

But Jesus makes no such “common-sense” claims. Rather, disciples turn the other cheek, go the second mile, avoid promiscuity, remain faithful to their marriage vows because God is like this.

This is the God who is specifically revealed to us in Jesus, a God we would not have known if left to our own devices. Our ethical positions arise out of our theological claims, in our attempt to conform our lives to the stunning vision of reality we see in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. For the Sermon on the Mount to push a lifestyle based on the assertion that we mere mortals are to act like God borders on the absurd. How is it possible for vulnerable, finite, and mortal human beings to be nonviolent, utterly faithful, and perfect even as God is perfect?

It is here that we often say things like, “Well, Jesus was speaking for himself. He was the best person who has ever lived. He never intended for us to follow this way literally.” Yet what impresses about the Sermon is its attention to the nitty-gritty details of everyday life. Jesus appears to be giving very practical, explicit direction for what to do when someone has done you wrong, when someone attacks you, when you are married to someone. Clearly, Jesus thought he was giving us practical, everyday guidance on how to live like disciples.

Or we say, “The Sermon on the Mount is intended for individual saints, heroic ethical superstars. It was never meant to be embodied in social structures.” Most of us first had this point of view articulated by Reinhold Niebuhr in Moral Man and Immoral Society. His argument was that, at best, Jesus’ ethics apply directly to the individual or relations between two persons. In groups, a more realistic, practical approach is required. Jesus may have talked about loving our enemies, but we more sophisticated modern people know the impracticality of such love when applied to the complicated social questions of our day. So we work for justice, which, Niebuhr said, is a kind of embodied, realistic, socially applicable form of Jesus’ simpler, more individual love. Fortunately, justice is something good to work for, because even those sophisticated modern people who know nothing of the claim that God “makes his sun to shine on the just and the unjust, his rain to fall upon the good and the bad,” do believe in justice.

Unfortunately, such theological rationalization is typical of a severely compromised church. The Sermon on the Mount is after something that most of the contemporary church has forsaken—the formation of a visible, practical, Christian community. The Sermon is not primarily addressed to individuals, because it is precisely as individuals that we are most apt to fail. Only through membership in a nonviolent community can violent individuals do better. The Sermon on the Mount does not encourage heroic individualism, it defeats it with its demands that we be perfect even as God is perfect, that we deal with others as God has dealt with us.

True Community

We are not advocating community merely for the sake of community. The Christian claim is not that we as individuals should be based in a community because life is better lived together than alone. The Christian claim is that life is better lived in the church because the church is the only community formed around the truth that is Jesus Christ, the way, the truth, and the life. Only on the basis of his story, which reveals to us who we are and what has happened in the world, is true community possible.

It is tempting to seek community as a good in itself. Our society has a way of making us strangers to one another as we go about detaching ourselves from long-term commitments, protecting our rights, thinking alone. Our society is a supermarket of desire in which each of us is encouraged to stand alone, to get what the world owes us.

In this atmosphere, Christians must be very suspicious of talk about community. In a world like ours, people will be attracted to communities that promise them an easy way out of loneliness, togetherness based on common tastes, ethnic traits, or mutual self-interest. There is then little check on community becoming as tyrannical as the individual ego. Community becomes totalitarian when its only purpose is to foster a sense of belonging.

Christian community is not primarily about togetherness. It is about disciplining our wants and needs in congruence with a true story, which gives us the resources to lead truthful lives. In the process of living out the story together, togetherness happens, but only as a by-product of trying to be faithful to Jesus.

It is important to recognize that all ethics, even ethics that are not Christian, arise out of a community that depicts the way the world works. Most modern ethics begin from the Enlightenment presupposition of the isolated, heroic self, the allegedly rational individual who stands alone and chooses. The goal of this ethic is to detach the individual from his or her tradition, parents, stories, and history, and thereby allow him or her to decide, to choose, and to act alone. It is an ethic of great value in our type of society because the corporation needs workers who are suitably detached from communities other than their place of work, people who are willing to move at the beck and call of the corporation. Growing up, becoming a mature, functioning adult is thus defined as becoming someone who has no communal, traditionalist, familial impediments. This heroic, radically individual, and subjective ethic was best articulated by Kant and survives today in perverted form in Situation Ethics—as well as in the conventional ethical wisdom of the average person in our society: “What I do is my own business. First be sure in your heart that you are right, and then go ahead. What right have you to judge me?”

The life together of this post-Kantian community begins, not by an announcement of the inbreaking of God’s kingdom, but rather by the proclamation that each of us is free to discover our own ethics for ourselves, to grow up and become adult—liberated, autonomous, detached, free individuals. The Sermon implies that it is as isolated individuals that we lack the ethical and theological resources to be faithful disciples.

Why Her Problem Is Our Problem

Back to the opening example of Falwell’s Save a Baby Homes: Whenever Christians think that we can support our ethics simply by pressuring Congress to pass laws or spend tax money, we fail to do justice to the radically communal quality of Christian ethics. In fact, much of what passes for Christian social concern today is the social concern of a church that seems to have despaired of being the church. We content ourselves with ersatz Christian ethical activity—lobbying Congress to support progressive strategies, asking the culture at large to be a little less racist, a little less promiscuous, a little less violent. The erstwhile Moral Majority was little different from any mainline Protestant church that opposed it. Both groups implied that one can practice Christian ethics without being in the Christian community.

Yet Falwell is right if, in his Save a Baby Homes, he implies that there is no way for Christians to think of an issue like abortion without at the same time thinking about the church. The Sermon on the Mount cares nothing for the Enlightenment infatuation with the individual self as the most significant ethical unit.

So our response to an issue like abortion is something communal, social, and political, but utterly ecclesial—something like baptism. Whenever a person is baptized, the church adopts that person. The new Christian is engrafted into a family. Therefore, we cannot say to the pregnant 15-year-old woman, “Abortion is a sin. It is your problem.” Rather, it is our problem.

We ask ourselves what sort of church we would need to be to enable an ordinary person like her to be the sort of disciple Jesus calls her to be. More important, her presence in our community offers the church the wonderful opportunity to be the church, to examine honestly our own convictions and see whether or not we are living true to those convictions. She is seen by us not as some pressing social problem to be solved in such a way as to relieve our own responsibility for her and the necessity of our sacrificing on her behalf (for our story teaches us to seek responsibility and sacrifice, not to avoid it through governmental aid). Rather, we are graciously given the eyes to see her as a gift of God sent to help ordinary people to discover the church as the body of Christ.

The old debate about whether or not Christian ethics should emphasize the personal or the social, individual conversion or social transformation, was misguided. In trying to make sense out of the demands of the Sermon on the Mount’s advocacy of not resisting evil, Augustine claimed that such action requires “not a bodily action but an inward disposition.” He thus began a long history of attempts to solve the dilemma posed by the Sermon by moving its demands from the outward and the practical to the inward and the subjective. But such interpretation is not supported by the text itself. The function of the text is not the cultivation of a subjective attitude but rather the formation of a visible people of God. Our ethics do involve individual transformation, not as some subjective, inner, personal experience, but rather as the work of a transformed people who have adopted us, supported us, disciplined us, enabled us to be different. The most interesting, creative, political solutions we Christians have to offer our troubled society are not new laws or increased funds for social programs—although we may find ourselves supporting such national efforts. The most creative social strategy we have to offer is the church. Here we show the world a manner of life that the world can never achieve through social coercion or governmental action. We serve the world by showing it something that it is not, namely, a place where God is forming a family out of strangers.

Feeling Poor

The Sermon begins with “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” Martin Luther comments that this is the first Beatitude because, even if one feels spiritually rich at the beginning of the Sermon, one will feel terribly poor and needy by the end. How meager is our righteousness when set next to this vision of God’s kingdom!

That insight would bring great despair were it not that we also believe our God forgives us. We have learned, in the church, that it is not only difficult to forgive, it is difficult to receive forgiveness, because such an attitude reminds us of our utter dependence upon God. We are poor in spirit. Every time we come to the Lord’s Table, we are given important training in how to forgive and to receive forgiveness. Here is a community in which even small, ordinary occurrences become opportunities to have our eyes opened to what God is up to in the world and to be part of what God is doing. If we get good enough at forgiving the strangers who gather around the Lord’s Table, we hope that we shall be good at forgiving the strangers who gather with us around the breakfast table.

God has promised to form a new, a peculiar people through the Cross of Christ. The Sermon, like the rest of Scripture, is addressed neither to isolated individuals nor to the wider world. Rather, here are words for the church, a prefiguration of the kind of community in which the reign of God will shine in its glory.

So there is nothing private in the demands of the Sermon. It is very public, very political, in that it depicts the public form by which the church shall witness to the world that God really is busy redeeming humanity, reconciling the world to himself in Christ. All Christian ethical issues are therefore social, political, communal issues. Can we so order our life together that the world might look at us and know that God is busy?

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