Introduction: Peace, Justice & Reconciliation
Derek Poole

Comment
Lesley Macaulay

From the Director
David Porter

Now and Not Yet
Stephen Williams

Grace: An Attribute of Reconciliation
Graham Cheesman

Reflections on ECONI
Ken Wilson & Brian Moore

Stanley Who?
Alwyn Thomson

Justice
Billy Mitchell

Peace
Ethel White

Reconciliation
Brian Cruise

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STANLEY WHO?
One of the pleasures of student life was wandering around bookshops. The shelves were full of potential. New books by authors unknown to me appeared regularly. Often they would turn out to be inspiring or just dull. But every once in a while I found a real treasure - a new title or new author who spoke to me.

One book I picked up in 1984 stood out. It had a bright orange cover, an appealing title and it was published by SCM - the 'unsound' opposition to IVP. I felt I should have carried it home in a brown paper bag. That book is sitting on my desk as I write. Its orange spine is now a sickly yellow and its pages have lost their pristine whiteness. But of all the books I bought back then I believe it's the only one I still have.

The book is The Peaceable Kingdom and its author is Stanley Hauerwas . I'd like to tell you that it became my constant companion and changed my whole way of thinking. But it didn't. It spent a lot of time t sitting on the shelf. But when I periodically cleared the shelves of those volumes surplus to requirements The Peaceable Kingdom remained. There was something about it that made me sure it had to stay, even when other better-known volumes were on their way to the second-hand dealer.

Some years later Hauerwas began developing and applying the vision outlined in The Peaceable Kingdom in a series of books aimed at a wider audience in the church. The best known of these, co-authored with William Willimon, is Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony . This was followed by After Christendom with the provocative subtitle, How the Church is to Behave if Freedom, Justice and a Christian Nation are bad ideas.

Born in Texas, raised in a Christian home and brought up in a Methodist church, Hauerwas ended up at Yale Divinity School. Switching from theology to ethics, he set out on a teaching career that started with the Lutherans. It continued with the Catholics at Notre Dame where, ironically, the greatest influence turned out to be Mennonite scholar John Howard Yoder. He is currently teaching with the Methodists, at Duke Divinity School .

Among the other influences on his thinking was Karl Barth. "From Barth," he writes I learned that theology is not just another discipline in the university. To be a theologian is to occupy an office, admitedly a lesser office, in the church of Jesus Christ. Accordingly, I am not in service to a state, or a university, but rather I am called to be faithful to a church that is present across time and space." Thus, in his teaching and writing he is happy to be 'aggressively Christian'. This leaves him somewhat out on a limb in academic religious studies, for "religion departments ... are more likely to be made up of people who most fear being caught with religious conviction". He continues, "Religion professors usually are willing to study a religion if it is dead or they can kill it. They may be 'personally' religious, but they think it would be 'unprofessional' for their students to get a hint that they may actually believe what they teach. We live in an academic world where some professors can enthusiastically promote capitalism between consenting adults, but the same professors would be outraged if they heard that Christian theology was being taught, as if what Christians believe and practice might be true".

Hauerwas believes theology should be taught as if it were true. He also believes that doing so has more profound implications for the church and society than most of us realise. For, as he remarks in The Peaceable Kingdom , "I am challenging ... the very ideas that Christian social ethics is primarily an attempt to make the world more peaceable or just ... The first social-ethical task of the church is to be the church - the servant community. Such a claim may well sound selfserving until we remember that what makes the church the church is its faithful manifestation of the peaceable kingdom in the world. As such the church does not have a social ethic; the church is a social ethic".

The church for too long has been content to shore up existing social structures on the assumption that they are broadly Christian. The church's role was to offer to do a little bit of fine-tuning where necessary. However, this piece of self-delusion has stripped the church of its ability to be the church and left society without a witness to the Christian alternative. As a result Hauerwas is angry - not so much at secular society or liberalism. "Rather", he writes, "I am angry at Christians, including myself, for allowing ourselves to be so compromised that the world can no longer tell what difference it makes to worship the Trinity."

What would this church, liberated from bondage to the social status quo, look like? Drawing on Yoder's depiction of a confessing church Hauerwas and Willimon write in Resident Aliens , "The confessing church ... calls people to conversion, but it depicts that conversion as a long process of being baptismally engrafted into a new people, an alternative polis, a countercultural social structure called church. It seeks to influence the world by being the church, that is, by being something the world is not and never can be, lacking the gift of faith and vision, which is ours in Christ. The confessing church seeks the visible church, a place, clearly visible to the world, in which people are faithful to their promises, love their enemies, tell the truth, honour the poor, suffer for righteousness, and thereby testify to the amazing community-creating power of God. The confessing church has no interest in withdrawing from the world, but it is not surprised when its witness evokes hostility from the world. The confessing church moves from the activist church's acceptance of the culture with a few qualifications, to a 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.

"Yoder also notes that the confessing church will be a church of the cross. As Jesus demonstrated, the world, for all its beauty, is hostile to the truth. Witness without compromise leads to worldly hostility. The cross is not a sign of the church's quiet, suffering submission to the powers-that-be, but rather the church's revolutionary participation in the victory of Christ over those powers. The cross is not a symbol for general human suffering and oppression. Rather, the cross is a sign of what happens when one takes God's account of reality more seriously than Caesar's. The cross stands as God's (and our) eternal no to the powers of death, as well as God's eternal yes to humanity, God's remarkable determination not to leave us to our own devices. The overriding political task of the church is to be the community of the cross."

As we face changed times in Northern Ireland, what role will churches play? Will we prop up a new status quo, cheering from the sidelines and offering the odd bit of constructive criticism? Or shall we take the opportunity to create in our churches a different kind of community?

Stanley who? You many never have heard of him before, but perhaps he has something to say to us at this crucial time as we seek to discern the place and role of the church in our society.

Alwyn Thomson - Research Officer with ECONI and is currently involved in the 'God, Land and Nation' Project.