Last week we looked at this paragraph in Stanley Hauerwas’s essay, “Discipleship as a Craft, Church as a Disciplined Community.”

For example, one of the great problems facing liberal and conservative churches alike is that their membership has been schooled on the distinction between public and private morality. Liberal and conservative alike assume that they have a right generally to do pretty much what they want, as long as what they do does not entail undue harm to others. The fact that such a distinction is incoherent even in the wider political society does little to help us challenge an even more problematic character in relationship to the church. Yet if salvation is genuinely social, then there can be no place for a distinction that invites us to assume, for example, that we have ownership over our bodies and possessions in a way that is not under the discipline of the whole church.[emphasis added]

Our culture is highly individualistic. Christians, live others in this culture, are formed by this individualism. Individualism is the air we breath. It just seems natural. Because we’re individualists, we easily assume that salvation is an individual thing: I “get saved.” I “go to heaven when I die.” I get to live in “MY mansion” in heaven. What we looked at in this most recent class was support for the belief, put forward without argument by Hauerwas, that “salvation is genuinely social.” By looking at passages like Genesis 12, Exodus 19, 1 Peter 2, and especially Ephesians 2, we see that from the very beginning God’s objective is to have a people who are his very own. Being part of this people is part of what salvation is about.

HERE’S a link to the recording.