Category Archives: culture

Essay 3, Chapter 4: Toward a Theology of Faithful Presence

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“Toward a Theology of Faithful Presence” is the fourth chapter of the third essay of James Davison Hunter’s To Change The World. The abstract of this chapter, from Hunter’s website, reads as follows:

The incarnation is the only adequate reply to the challenges of dissolution, the erosion of trust between word and world and the problems that attend it. It is the way the Word became incarnate in Jesus Christ and the purposes to which the incarnation was directed that are the only adequate reply to the challenge of difference. Pursuit, identification, the offer of life through sacrificial love—this is what God’s faithful presence means. At root, a theology of faithful presence begins with an acknowledgement of God’s faithful presence to us, manifested through religion, vocation, and other spheres of influence, and that his call upon Christians is that they be faithfully present to him in return. This model stands in opposition to the “defensive against,” “relevance to,” and “purity from” paradigms, Hunter suggests a model of engagement called “faithful presence within.”

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

Moving forward from the above description, Hunter mentions three areas where Christians need to be “faithfully present”:

  • To each other. Hunter isn’t talking about Christians being present for other Christians; he’s talking about the Christian’s relationship to strangers. He doesn’t mean merely through benevolence, but through participation in all human institutions. Just as God has shown us, we are to pursue others, identify with them and offer sacrificial love.
  • To our tasks. Hunter says the key to this is found in Colossians 3, where Paul talks about doing whatever we do “as working for the Lord.” He asserts that what we do has value when done for God, apart from any other benefit it may have. The most important is that we do our best in order to please God and be obedient to him.
  • Within our spheres of influence. We wield “power” and must not do so thoughtlessly. We can’t conform passively to the world. Hunter explains, “What this means is that where and to the extent we are able, faithful presence commits us to do what we can to create conditions in the structures of social life we inhabit that are conducive to the flourishing of all.” (p. 247)

Hunter then compares this approach to the three political approaches he has previously described. He sees the “relevant to” approach as being insufficient because it is in the end indistinguishable from the world around it, except for maintaining high moral ideals. The “defensive against” approach sees no value to worldly tasks except how they serve evangelistic purposes. The neo-Anabaptists place no value on tasks done outside the church and can therefore offer no advice to those who have to work for a living; the heroes invoked by the neo-Anabaptists are almost exclusively people who have dedicated themselves to work supported by the church.

So what does “faithful presence” look like? In the first place, Hunter says, Christians attend to everyone they come in contact with, believer and non-believer. In our tasks, Hunter explains, we give priority to substance over style, enduring over passing, depth over breadth, and excellence over packaging. In this way, God is glorified and we gain a glimpse of the coming kingdom. Finally, Hunter says that everything we do must promote shalom, God’s peace, among those around us.

Hunter offers two more chapters that seek to explain further his view of “faithful presence”; I’ll try and save my response for then. But you don’t have to! Feel free to offer comments, questions, etc.

Essay 3, Chapter 3: The Groundwork For An Alternative Way

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“The Groundwork For An Alternative Way” is the third chapter of the third essay of James Davison Hunter’s To Change The World. The abstract of this chapter, from Hunter’s website, reads as follows:

Christians are called to relate to the world within the dialectic of affirmation and antithesis. If there are benevolent consequences of our engagement with the world, it is precisely because it is not rooted in a desire to change the world for the better, but rather because it is an expression of a desire to honor the creator of all goodness, beauty, and truth, a manifestation of our loving obedience to God, and a fulfillment of God’s command to love our neighbor. Antithesis, in contrast, is rooted in recognition of the totality of the fall. Consequently, however much Christians may be able to a affirm in the world, the church is always a “community of resistance.” The objective is to retrieve the good to which modern institutions and ideas aspire, to oppose those ideals and structures that undermine human flourishing, and to offer constructive alternatives for the realization of a better way.

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

Hunter says that Christian leadership has failed to interpret the times, spending precious energy and resources on politics while neglecting the bulk of society. What is required is formation, the “making disciples” from the Great Commission. Instead of being formed by the church, Christians have been formed by culture. The church must reclaim a presence in all of life, Hunter insists, by being both a culture and a community. The church must work at bringing God’s peace, God’s shalom, to the world around. More than that, Christians must embody this shalom in every part of their lives.

What the church must discover is how to relate to the outside world. It is to this question that Hunter applies the concept of “the dialectic of affirmation and antithesis.” (p. 231) Affirmation involves finding that that is godly in the fallen world around us. It means recognizing that there is still goodness, beauty and truth in the world. Antithesis means that the church must resist all that is fallen in the world. This resistance is not just negative; it also involves creativity and constructiveness. Rather than merely opposing society and its institutions, Hunter says that the church must offer “an alternative vision and direction for them.” (p. 235)

Rather than “defensive against,” “relevance to” and “purity from,” over the next few chapters Hunter will describe what he calls “faithful presence within” as the proper Christian stance toward culture.

Essay 3, Chapter 2: Old Cultural Wineskins

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The second chapter of the third essay of James Davison Hunter’s To Change The World is called “Old Cultural Wineskins.” The abstract of this chapter, from Hunter’s website, reads as follows:

If sincerity were the same thing as faithfulness, then all would be well, for Christians, as a rule, are nothing if not sincere—not least in their desire to be “faithful in their own generation.” However, wisdom is required. The changes that have brought about the challenge of difference and dissolution go right to the core of the ability of Christians to live out there faith with integrity.

The three political theologies are the leading public edge of three paradigms of cultural engagement: “Defensive Against,” “Relevance To,” and “Purity From.” All three approaches develop strategies to address difference and dissolution and each approach is equally problematic. So the question remains: How can one be authentically Christian in circumstances that, by their very nature, undermine the credibility and coherence of faith

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

Hunter provides a good analysis of the three leading political postures among Christians, with corresponding phrases to help us understand them. He then looks at how each of these cultural stances deals with the problems of distance and dissolution (discussed in the previous chapter).

Hunter finds that the “relevant to” camp tends to abandon the struggle for difference. The “defensive against” has maintained distinctiveness, but has done so through an aggressive and confrontational approach. The “pure from” group has withdrawn from large sections of social life. None of these approaches, Hunter claims, seems to be adequate for the pursuit of faithfulness in this world.

In the following chapters, Hunter will seek to find an alternative way.

Essay 3, Chapter 1: The Challenge of Faithfulness

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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.

To Change The World: Some Reactions So Far

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A few thoughts on the book so far:

  1. The first essay makes a convincing point. I’m one of those who believes that Christianity will never be able to dominate a culture. I also believe that nations can’t be Christian. I have little quarrel with anything Hunter says in this first essay.
  2. What Hunter says about ressentiment in the second essay really rings true with me. I can see it in myself. I am so sick of the Christian Right and their unChristian tactics that I find myself naturally gravitating to the other views as a reaction. I’m not around a lot of people who push the views of the Christian Left, so that may be part of it. But even as I try to escape from politics, I find myself continually correcting mistruths and misconstructions, while trying to find the right attitudes that we all should have in such discussions.
  3. As I’ve said before, I think Hunter works too hard at including the neo-Anabaptists in his critiques. Since his final views would be described as neo-Anabaptist by many, Hunter has a hard time separating his arguments from their views. Much of it ends up being semantic, like his discussion of power.

The third essay is excellent, and we’ll begin analyzing it tomorrow.