Church's Antithesis to Political Unity

"In seeking to achieve peace without grace (a correlate of an original war without sin), the state not only pretends to be a church or soteriological institution but must also save us from the church. If the telos of the state's mission is a unity without difference, a peace without faction, then 'the Church is perhaps the primary thing from which the modern state is meant to save us' (RONT, 188), for the church, as a transnational body, must necessarily both transcend the boundaries of the state and also be a fractive force within the state precisely because it asserts difference - an antithesis."


James K.A. Smith, Introducing Radical Orthodoxy, p. 134

Worship Challenging Caesar

'every worship service is a challenge to Caesar' (Leithart, Against Christianity, 67)

Quoted in: James K.A. Smith, Introducing Radical Orthodoxy, p. 133

The State As Salvific Institution

"Thus, 'the modern state is best understood... as a source of an alternative soteriology to that of the Church' (RONT, 182). The advent of modernity and the birth of the secular, therefore, do not entail the creation of a secular public space where the state merely manages temporal goods, distinguished from a private sacred space where individuals and communities are free to pursue a supra-temporal telos. The state does not take a merely temporal regulatory role and leave salvation in the hands of the church; rather, the modern state seeks to replace the church by itself becoming a soteriological institution."


James K.A. Smith, Introducing Radical Orthodoxy, p. 132

The Church IS the Politics

"But the Church does not have a cultural critique; it is a cultural critique. Its politics is an ecclesiology. "

James K.A. Smith, Introducing Radical Orthodoxy, p.80

More Consistent Postmodernity

"What we need is a more consistent postmodernism, one that follows through on the internal deconstruction of the Enlightenment project rather than halting it at the point of liberal politics and the classical critique of religion. The church, authentically conceived, should be the quintessential site of such a post-secular engagement."


James K.A. Smith, Introducing Radical Orthodoxy, p.61

There is No Secular

"In short, there is no secular, if by “secular” we mean “neutral” or “uncommitted”; instead, the supposedly neutral public spaces that we inhabit – in the academy or politics – are temples of other gods that cannot be served alongside Christ."

James K.A. Smith, Introducing Radical Orthodoxy, p. 42

How Church Acted in Power

"We have to confess also, if we are to be honest, that the same churches that demanded freedom of conscience when they were in a minority have, when they became majorities, denied to others the freedom they claimed for themselves. How, if we are to think of a Christian society, can we ensure that the same sins are not repeated when and if Christians are in a position to impose their views on others?"


Lesslie Newbigin, Foolishness to the Greeks, p. 137

Death's Division of Values, Unity in Christ

"It is death that creates that fatal dichotomy between two worlds of meaning - one that sees ultimate meaning only in the destiny of my immortal soul and thus makes the public history of the world a story without meaning; the other that sees meaning only in the march of humanity toward a shared future, and thus makes the human person marginal and finally dispensable.
... The gospel is good news at this point because Christ has overcome the power of sin and death. Entering completely into our shared humanity with all its burden of sin, he has gone down into the darkness of death and judgement for us, and, in his resurrection, given us a sign and foretaste of total victory. ... Following that way, we can commit ourselves without reserve to all the secular work our shared humanity requires of us, knowing that nothing we do in itself is good enough to form part of that city's building, knowing that everything - from our most secret prayer to our most public political acts - is part of that sin-stained human nature that must go down into the valley of death and judgment, and yet knowing that as we offer it up to the Father in the name of Christ and in the power of the Spirit, it is safe with him and - purged in fire - it will find its place in the holy city at the end."


Lesslie Newbigin, Foolishness to the Greeks, p. 135-136 (emphasis mine)

One Man's Unity, Another's Imperialism

"Imperialism is the name we give to other people's proposals for human unity. And, of course, we are right: every proposal for human unity that does not specify the center around which that unity is to be created, necessarily has the will, the vision, the beliefs of the proposer as its implied center."


Lesslie Newbigin, Foolishness to the Greeks, p. 123 (emphasis mine)

Religious Right, Sacralized Politics

"The sacralizing of politics, the total identification of a political goal with the will of God, always unleashes demonic powers. ... This confusion of a particular and fallible set of political and moral judgments with the cause of Jesus Christ is more dangerous than the open rejection of the claim of Christ in Islam, just as the shrine of Jereboam at Bethel was more dangerous to the faith of Israel than was the open paganism of her neighbors, for the worship of Ba'al was being carried on under the name of Yahweh. The 'Religious Right' uses the name of Jesus to cover the absolute claims of one national tradition."


Lesslie Newbigin, Foolishness to the Greeks, p. 116

Christian Public Truth

"Christians can live and bear witness under any regime, whatever its ideology. But Christians can never seek refuge in a ghetto where their faith is not proclaimed as public truth for all. They can never agree that there is one law for themselves and another for the world. They can never admit that there are areas of human life where the writ of Christ does not run."


Lesslie Newbigin, Foolishness to the Greeks, p.115

The Guidance Capitalism Needs

"To say that capitalism requires a certain kind of moral foundation is to say that capitalism cannot survive permanently in a purely secular society. To quote a recent writer, 'The disinterested devotion which was vital to the creation of the capitalist world order and to the public life of industrial nations and whic rested on a religious idea-system appears as a type of moral capital debt which is no longer being serviced.' ... If capitalism depends on the insights of a moral conscience, then that conscience has to have authority over the working of capitalist economics. ... The conscience that is required to keep capitalism going has no ontological basis. It is a carry-over from an earlier world view."


Lesslie Newbigin, Foolishness to the Greeks, p. 112 (emphasis mine)

The interior quote is B. Wilson, quoted in Habgood, Church and Nation in a Secular Age p. 47

Resident Aliens Working for Common Good

"Faith working through love is the foundation of justice, and without justice there is no commonwealth. It follows that, like the exiles whom Jeremiah urged to seek the peace of Babylon, and like the early Christians who were urged to pray for kings and rulers, those who - as citizens of the city of God - are resident aliens in the earthly city, must nevertheless seek its good order, and, when called to responsibility as rulers, must accept it in the spirit of servants of the common good. This is required by obedience to the law of God, which is love. Thus the citizens of the heavenly city will actively seek the peace and good order of the earthly city, not seeking to forestall, but patiently awaiting, the final judgment when the two will be visibly separated and the heavenly city will appear in all its beauty. Meanwhile, the monastic communities, such as the one to which Augustine belonged, are a visible sign and preliminary realization of a world ruled solely by the love of God in the midst of a world ruled by the love of self."


Lesslie Newbigin, Foolishness to the Greeks, p. 104-105

Bureaucracy's Blind Rule

"Bureaucracy applies the mechanical model to this task. It provides machinery in which there is a high degree of division of labor, of specialization, of predictability, and of anonymity. It is of the essence of bureaucracy that it sets out to achieve a kind of justice by treating each individual as an anonymous and replaceable unit."

"In its ultimate development, bureaucracy is the rule of nobody and is therefore experienced as tyranny."


Lesslie Newbigin, Foolishness to the Greeks, p. 33 (emphasis mine)

Church as Interest Group

"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 in this society, push for the legislative embodiment of our point of view. ... 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."

Stanley Hauerwas, Resident Aliens p. 70-71

The Demonstrative Church

"The confessing church moves from the activist church's acceptance of the culture with a few qualifications, to rejection of the culture with a few exceptions. The confessing church can participate in secular movements against war, against hunger, and against other forms of inhumanity, but it sees this as part of its necessary proclamatory action. This church knows that its most credible form of witness (and the most 'effective' thing it can do for the world) is the actual creation of a living, breathing, visible community of faith."

Stanley Hauerwas, Resident Aliens p. 47

(Incidentally) Faith-based Politics

"The moment that life is formed on the presumption that we are not participants in God's continuing history of creation and redemption, we are acting on unbelief rather than faith. ... Most American Christians [assume] that the key to our political effectiveness lies in translating our political assertions into terms that can be embraced by any thinking, sensitive, modern (though disbelieving), average American."

Stanley Hauerwas, Resident Aliens p. 36-37

Radical, Illiberal Church

"That which makes the church 'radical' and forever 'new' is not that the church tends to lean toward the left on most 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, Resident Aliens p. 28