Also from The Peaceable Kingdom

The Christian tradition holds us accountable, not to an abstract story, but to a body of people who have been formed by the life of Jesus. By learning to make his life our life we see we are free just to the extent that we learn to trust others and make ourselves available to be trusted by others. Such trust is possible because the story of his life, by the very way we learn it, requires that we recognize and accept the giftedness of our existence: I did not create myself but what I am has been made possible by others. Out dependence on others, of course, has as much potential for evil as it does for good that is exactly why the gospel is so remarkable, as it requires that we transform out distrust to trust on the basis of our knowledge and experience that God’s providence is working in all our trusts and distrusts

Accountable to a body of people who have been formed by the life of Jesus. There’s that word : Accountability once again. A forgotten and foreign concept in the remains of what is left of the Church (which , in itself, where it impinges upon reality in the prescence of a Peaceable Community, is a force to be reckoned with)…..but all too rare. For all the talk of being “counter-cultural”, here is where the Church , for the large part, falls right in line with the incresingly inadequate capitulation to entertainment and individualist culture.

This trust of which Hauerwas speaks is absolutely neccessary for the experience of redemption; redemption FROM the fractal nature of the world’s relationships; the rarity in which people are under the discipline of knowing one another. Having known that experience before, and “in part” or “through a glass darkly” at other all-too-fleeting moments since (a portion of that in the not-perfect but yet somewhat connective online community of Christians who share a vision of a Christ-called and Christ-life, Christ-like community. )