On Friday, I gave an overview of James Davison Hunter’s To Change The World. I want to go through Hunter’s material chapter by chapter over the next few weeks. My primary reason for this is purely selfish… I want to use some of this material in the future, and this is a good way to force myself to analyze it and preserve the important parts.

However, I also believe in slow cooking here in the Kitchen, so this step by step process will help us all to be able to comment on Hunter’s thoughts as we go along. To get us started, let me quote the abstract of Chapter 1 “The Christian Faith and the Task of World-Changing” from the author’s website:

Human beings are, by divine intent and their very nature, world-makers. People fulfill their individual and collective destiny in the art, music, literature, commerce, law, and scholarship they cultivate, the relationships they build, and in the institutions they develop—the families, churches, associations, communities they live in and sustain—as they reflect the good of God and His designs for flourishing.

Hunter contends that the dominant ways of thinking about culture and cultural change are flawed, for they are based upon both specious social science and problematic theology. The model upon which various strategies are based not only does not work, but it cannot work. On the basis of this working theory, Christians cannot “change the world” in a way that they, even in their diversity, desire.

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

This is a short chapter. (To be honest, the abstract seems disproportionately long). The chapter begins with a reference to creation and to the mandate given in Genesis 2:15—“The LORD God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it.” Hunter says that the two main Hebrew verbs in this sentence mean (1) work, nurture, sustain, husband; and (2) safeguard, preserve, care for, protect. (As I went through the book, I was disappointed to find that this initial use of Scripture in the opening paragraphs is not a sign of things to come. Most of the book is the analysis of a social scientist, not a theologian.) This creation mandate, the book affirms, requires Christians to be engaged with their world, actively trying to make it better.

Hunter points out numerous Christian groups that mention changing the world as one of their primary aims. He included Abilene Christian University in the list, I guess because of the “Change the World” fundraising campaign from early this century. The rest of this essay will focus on showing that Christian efforts to change the world are based on an erroneous assumption about how the world changes.