The third essay in James Davison Hunter’s To Change The World is entitled “Toward a New City Commons: Reflections on a Theology of Faithful Presence.” The first chapter of this essay is called “The Challenge of Faithfulness.” The abstract of this chapter, from Hunter’s website, reads as follows:

Two overriding characteristics of our time are difference and dissolution. The problem of difference bears on how Christians engage the world outside of their own community, while the problem of dissolution bears on the nature of Christian witness. Pluralism creates both a fragmentation among worldviews and the social structures that support these worldviews. These are social conditions that make faithfulness difficult and faithlessness almost natural. For pluralism creates social conditions in which God is no longer an inevitability. There are key aspects of contemporary life that take us into radically new territory; into a social and cultural landscape that has very few recognizable features from cultures, societies, or civilizations past. The negative aspect of difference and dissolution is that they present conditions advantageous for the development of nihilism: autonomous desire and unfettered will legitimated by the ideology and practices of choice.

http://jamesdavisonhunter.com/to-change-the-world/chapter-abstracts/

Hunter identifies two principal challenges that Christians have to face in the world today: difference and dissolution. He sees difference as affecting the way in which Christians engage the outside world and dissolution as complicating the nature of Christian witness.

The challenge of difference is about how Christians consider and interact with a world that is different from us. It arises from the reality of pluralism in our world today. People have always had to interact with those that are different from them, yet not to the extent that people do today. Hunter argues that what exacerbates this problem in the U.S. is that there really isn’t a dominant culture. There was a time when the Protestant culture dominated our country, but that is no longer true. Hunter states, “Fragmentation not only occurs among worldviews, but in the social structures that support those worldviews.” (pp. 202-03)

The social conditions no longer exist which made the existence of God an inevitability. One has to work harder to believe in God. And those that do no longer have a common language of faith to use with those outside.

The challenge of dissolution speaks to this absence of a common language. Dissolution refers to the disconnect between language and the realities it represents. In other words, the meaning of words is continually called into question. If words can mean anything, there is no possibility of a common meaning. (Sort of like Hunter’s use of the term “power” in the previous essay, where he changes the meaning to fit his argument) In such a world, we can never really be sure of what is true and what is real.

Both difference and dissolution have their positive aspects, but they also present great challenges for the church. The world is not the way it was. Christians need to learn to live out their faith in the new reality in which we find ourselves.