Jesus Changes Everything — Really?

Thirty-five years ago, Stanley Hauerwas entered my life. Or perhaps, I might say, ​“ruined” my life. I was a doctoral student in the early 1980’s in an Ethics and Public Policy program at the University of Colorado in Boulder. I had great expectations upon entering this program, but when I began reading Hauerwas something began shifting inside me. 

Hauerwas argued that ethics was not about moral quandaries nor about a set of universal principles that objectively guided our decisions. I began to question what it was I was studying and what the philosophical community deemed to be the ethical project. By the time Stanley’s book, The Peaceable Kingdom: A Primer in Christian Ethics, appeared something seismic happened inside me. Bam! We’d gotten the modern ethical project all wrong. The liberal ideals of autonomy and neutrality were neither autonomous nor neutral — in fact, they imploded on the myth that we can live without myths. Disoriented and disillusioned, I eventually left the doctoral program and shifted my studies to theology. My Christian identity had been liberated and, thanks to Hauerwas, I now could do ​“ethics,” without apology, from within the Christian story and as a committed Christian.

That early disillusionment about ethics never quite went away, even after teaching at an evangelical seminary for ten years. By now, Hauerwas’ project had thoroughly shaped me. (My colleagues thought it had thoroughly poisoned me.) If I couldn’t do Christian ethics without the story of Christ, then I couldn’t do Christian ethics without the church either. And if I couldn’t do ethics without the church, then what? Which church? What kind of church? The seeker-friendly-church? The Bible-believing-church? The psychotherapeutic church? The social-justice-church? None of these options fully satisfied me. 

Hauerwas’ ​“poison” kept flowing through my veins. And so, I finally decided to simply do what Hauerwas implied I should be doing: live out an alternative social reality with others, with Jesus the Lord at the center. Ethics wasn’t a discipline, it was an embodiment of convictions formed within a concrete community.

So, my wife and I decided to leave our teaching positions. We gave away all our belongings and moved 2,000 miles away to join the Bruderhof community — an intentional, Kingdom-centered community in New York that shares all things in common inspired by Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount and the witness of the earliest Christians. ​“To be rich and a disciple of Jesus is to have a problem,” Stanley writes. In our minds, that problem had to be addressed, and we could see no other way forward than to join others who believed and practiced the good news, which Paul spells out in 2 Corinthians: ​“If anyone is in Christ there is a new creation; everything old has passed away; see everything has become new.” A new world is indeed possible, and we wanted our lives to reflect this. 

After joining the Bruderhof, I never stopped reading what Stanley wrote. In fact, I started up a correspondence with him. In my role at Plough Publishing, I periodically turned to him for feedback on what we were publishing. For over 30 years, Hauerwas has generously given us his time and insights. He has not only helped Plough to keep current, but has made some significant contributions to our flagship publication, the Plough Quarterly.

Several years ago, I felt compelled to approach Stanley about a book idea. My thought was a small book in our Plough Spiritual Guides series, which would have for its focus following Jesus. Despite his retirement, and to the surprise of both of us, we were eager to work on something together, which turned out to be the book Jesus Changes Everything. 

If you are at all familiar with the writing of Hauerwas, you might recognize some of the selections in this book. However, this is not another Hauerwas reader. It is a cohesive attempt to express both the mind and heart of Stanley. Unlike many of his other books, this one has singular focus on what has always mattered most to Hauerwas: Jesus, and what it means to follow him. Jesus is not just a savior from personal sin. He is the auto Basilea—the kingdom of God in person. He is ​“God’s parable of what God’s kingdom rule looks like.” His kingdom, therefore, is not far off. It is the power of One who, through a distinct community, radically breaks into and transforms both our lives and the existing social order. 

Because Hauerwas has written on so many topics and engaged in such a vast array of theological and philosophical sources, one can lose sight of what fundamentally forms his frame of reference: The story of Christ, and the church that tells, enacts, and bears witness to this story in the world. That church is God’s alternative society, his new language in the world — the way in which God communicates his redemptive will on earth. Without the church, character cannot be developed, and faith, hope, and love cannot be formed. Without the church, Christian witness invariably gets co-opted by the political and economic ideologies of our age. 

The church is God’s politics. As such, faithful witness is not a matter of which party or policies the church ought to support. Our allegiance lies elsewhere. This is because, ​“Whenever we try to advance a Christian ethic simply by pressuring the government to pass laws, or to spend tax money, we fail to do justice to the radically communal quality of the church.” We serve Jesus and his interests, not some democratic or economic ideal. The church — God’s reconciled and reconciling community — is God’s alternative to the state, which would have us kill to defend it. Rather than killing for freedom and prosperity, we are called to faithfulness, even unto death. 

Now, if the church, as God’s new creation, demonstrates in its life together God’s rulership as it truly is, then being the church could actually get us in trouble — ​”produce the right kind of enemies.” Only then will the world be able to recognize what the Sermon on the Mount actually entails. Once this happens, Hauerwas writes, ​“being Christian could turn out to be more interesting than we had imagined.”

Although Hauerwas’ vocational home has been the Academy, this book is written for you and for me, for the church, for anyone tired of Christianity-as-usual. It was certainly written for me, thirty-five years ago. And I have a personal stake in this book: Hauerwas continues to impact my life, along with countless others. If you find yourself confused, wavering, disillusioned, or just needing encouragement to remain faithful, Hauerwas’ understanding of the good news can make a real difference. At the very least, it will give you a fresh look at who Jesus is and how he changes everything.