The final chapter in James Davison Hunter’s To Change The World is entitled “Toward a New City Commons.” The abstract of this chapter, from Hunter’s website, reads as follows:

Christians are to maintain their distinctiveness as a community in a manner that serves the common good. A theology of faithful presence calls Christians to enact the shalom of God in the circumstances in which God has placed them. In Jeremiah 29, the Israelites were called to practice shalom when God commanded them to pray for the welfare of their Babylonian captors. The enactments of shalom need to extend into the institutions of which all Christians are a part and, as they are able, into the formation of new institutions within every sphere of life. The church will not flourish in itself nor serve well the common good if it isolates itself from the larger culture, fails to understand its nature and inner logic, and is incapable of working within it—critically affirming and strengthening its healthy qualities and humbly criticizing and subverting its most destructive tendencies.

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

This chapter alone is worth the price of admission. If you can’t afford to buy the book, go find it in a bookstore, then read the last chapter. It contains a summary of the rest of the book and makes Hunter’s final arguments. His suggestions of how to apply his theology are based around Jeremiah 29, where God is telling the captives in Babylon that they must make the best of their time in Babylon (meaning that their return to Jerusalem would not be very soon). As Hunter describes it, “He was calling them to maintain their distinctiveness as a community but in ways that served the common good.” (p. 278) I fully agree with his application of this passage to a church living in exile, finding a way to faithfully live in Babylon. (Too many people seem to want to view the church as living in Jerusalem)

As the church waits for the restoration of Jerusalem (New Jerusalem, that will descend from heaven, not the one that men squabble over today), Hunter says that the church must live with and even cultivate certain tensions:

• With itself. This is the tension between wanting to do good and wanting to use the world’s methods to achieve that good. Hunter says that the church must abandon the old vocabulary for culture engagement: redeem the culture, advance the kingdom, build the kingdom, transform the world, reclaim the culture, reform the culture, change the world, etc. This is the language of conquest and domination, not the language of Jesus’ way of influencing the world. Instead of “winning the culture wars,” Christians need to learn to live in exile in a post-Christian culture. They must reject the desire for domination and the politicization of everything. Hunter says that “it may be that the healthiest course of action for Christians, on this count, is to be silent for a season and learn how to enact their faith in public through acts of shalom rather than to try again to represent it publicly through law, policy and political mobilization.”
• With the world. The church must affirm the good in culture and withdraw from that that is evil. The church must affirm the central role of the local church and emphasize the task of spiritual formation.

In the end, the church must see that our task is not to change the world. Hunter states, “To be sure, Christianity is not, first and foremost, about establishing righteousness or creating good values or securing justice or making peace in the world. … But for Christians, these are all secondary to the primary good of God himself and the primary task of worshipping him and honoring him in all they do.” (pp.285-286)

He ends the book with the powerful statement that “by enacting shalom and seeking it on behalf of others through the practice of faithful presence, it is possible, just possible, that they will help to make the world a little bit better.” (p. 286)