In his Matthew commentary,  Hauerwas articulates something I have been contemplating ever since seeing “Theologians Under Hitler” for the first time,  and really since I started reading Bonhoeffer again after a long stretch of time since last reading several selections in Letters and Papers from Prison back in the early 80’s.

Rightly reading the signs of the times requires a church capable of standing against the legitimating stories of the day. American Christians often think that if we had been confronted with someone like Hitler we would have been able to recognize that he was evil. Yet in many ways, the church in Germany was a church more theologically articulate than the American church has ever been; still the German church failed to know how to adequately challenge the rise of Hitler. It failed because Christians in Germany assumed that they were German Christians just as American Christians assume that they are American Christians. Churches that are nationally identified will seldom be able to faithfully read the signs of the time. Jesus’s condemnation of the Pharisees and Sadducees for their inability to read the signs of the times, that is, to recognize all that has been and all that is still to be must now be read under the sign of Jonah, remains a challenge for us.

The distinction between “American” and “Christian” is getting blurrier for American Christians.  When convention halls full of Southern Baptists exhibit more emotion and shed tears over “God Bless America” than they do on matters of the church and the cross of Christ,  when churches exhibit the kind of individualism and lack of accountability between its members (after all,  faith is a “private affair”) and therefore lose one of its distinction as a place where people marvel at “how they love one another”.  In the American church,  it is often just as hard to find significant relationships as it is “in the world at large” (and for those tired ,  as was Bonhoeffer,  of the “thousand-fold hullo”;  the empty “politeness” of typical social gatherings.   To look and sound and think just like the culture at large is how I think German Christians found themselves able to be “sucked in” unaware of the failure to stand apart as a distinctive polis.  As David Fitch so ably articulates in his book The Great Giveaway,  the church has handed over the formation of Christians to various institutions of society ,  and bought into the prevailing myths about “the way things are” and “the real world”,  and allowed the empire to define what constitutes the real world.