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In Good Company: The Church as Polis, by Stanley Hauerwas (Universityof Notre Dame Press, 268 pp.; $29.95, hardcover);

Where Resident Aliens Live: Exercises for Christian Practice, byStanley Hauerwas and William H. Willimon (Abingdon, 124 pp.; $12.95,paper);

Two Cities, Two Loves: Christian Responsibility in a Crumbling Culture, by James Montgomery Boice (InterVarsity, 271 pp., $19.99,hardcover);

Here We Stand: A Call from Confessing Evangelicals, edited by JamesMontgomery Boice and Benjamin E. Sasse (Baker Book House, 208 pp.; $16.99,hardcover). Reviewed by Robert W. Patterson, associate editor of PrisonFellowship's Wilberforce Forum in Reston, Virginia.

When New Testament scholar J. Gresham Machen bolted from Princeton TheologicalSeminary to form Westminster Seminary in Philadelphia in 1929, a movementamong selected conservative Protestants, christened as evangelicalisma dozen years later, was born on the presumption that theology was the watershedissue of the twentieth century. Yet as Presbyterian historian D. G. Harthas revealed, to the surprise of conservatives and liberals alike, what motivatedMachen was less a matter of theology per se and more a matter of the natureof the church and her relationship to society.

If Hart's analysis is accurate, the issue that rattled Machen remains everybit as unresolved nearly 70 years later. What has changed, however, is thatdescendants of those early battles are conceding that they may have morein common than meets the eye, and that the defining issue for faithful Christiandiscipleship at the end of the twentieth century is the taxing intersectionbetween church and society. Theological differences notwithstanding, Protestantsfrom mainline academics in the South to evangelical parish ministers in theNortheast are placing the issue on the table, challenging the faithful torethink critical assumptions about the relationship of the Christian faithto American society with all the force that accompanied themodernist-fundamentalist controversy decades ago.

Prominent among the voices in this discussion are Duke University professorsStanley Hauerwas and William Willimon, two United Methodists whose writingshave highlighted these themes for years. Relatively new to the debate isJames Montgomery Boice, the urbane pastor of historic Tenth PresbyterianChurch in Philadelphia and author of more than 45 other books.

All three authors seek to challenge the very nature of their respectivecommunities. With In Good Company and Where Resident Aliens Live,Hauerwas and Willimon extend the argument of their controversial 1989bestseller, Resident Aliens, which encouraged mainliners to acknowledgethe radically "sectarian" demands of their faith. "The very idea that Christianscan be at home, indeed can create a home, in this world is a mistake," theywrite.

Boice's new titles, Two Cities, Two Loves and Here We Stand,pursue a slightly different, yet equally problematic, mission: admonishingevangelicals to end their love affair with American pragmatism to pursuea courtship with the classical Christian tradition as mediated through Augustineand the Protestant Reformers. Unfortunately, the structure of all fourvolumes—more hodgepodges of essays and sermons than carefully crafted booksin their own right—may deter readers who would profit from these sharplydiffering reflections on the church.

This weakness is especially pronounced in Hauerwas's In Good Company,a heterogeneous collection of occasional pieces, including afterthoughtson Resident Aliens, a keynote address to an Anabaptist conferencein Pennsylvania, and commentaries on papal encyclicals. Still, several recurringthemes give the book coherence and bite. Hauerwas vigorously defends hisefforts to reverse the paradigm by which Christians have traditionally viewedboth church and society. To him, the church is less a pillar of society thana "polis" in its own right, reprogramming believers from the destructivepatterns and practices (not so much the thinking) of the world. "What weChristians have lost," he laments, is the sense of "just how radical ourpractices are, since they are meant to free us from the lies so characteristicof the world."

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January 6 1997, Vol. 41, No. 1