Tag Archives: culture

To Change The World by James Davison Hunter

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Others have written about James Davison Hunter’s To Change The World, enough so that I almost feel like the late-comer to the party. Let me encourage you, for example, to read through Jay Guin’s analysis of the book.

Still, I feel that Hunter’s subject matter aligns so closely with matters near and dear to my heart (and oft written about in this blog), that I’d like to take some time to look at this book. Today I’ll do a bit of a review, or at least an overview. Later I’ll examine some of the ideas in a closer way.

The full title of the book is To Change The World: The Irony, Tragedy and Possibility of Christianity in the Late Modern World. The title is intended as a bit of irony, mainly because Hunter will argue that Christians can’t change the world without being changed by the world in the process. He contends that the world is changed not only through ideas (worldview) but also through elites, networks, technology, and new institutions. World-changing implies power, power that typically is defined in terms of conquest and domination. When power is seen primarily in terms of political domination, it becomes the opposite of what Christians are called to be.

Hunter analyzes three types of Christian politics: the Christian right, the Christian left and the neo-Anabaptists. He calls these views toward culture, respectively, “defensive against,” “relevance to,” and “purity from.” He sees these groups as utilizing ineffective means for engaging culture.

Hunter argues that the principal issues to be addressed are difference and dissolution: how do we relate to a world that is not our world and how do we deal with the “deconstruction of the most basic assumptions about reality.” (p. 205) The solution that Hunter proposes is “faithful presence.” Using Jeremiah 29:4-7 as his textual base, Hunter says that Christians should maintain their distinctiveness but do it in a way that serves the common good. He observes,

“In short, commitment to the new city commons is a commitment of the community of faith to the highest ideals and practices of human flourishing in a pluralistic world.” (p. 279)

In the end, Hunter says that Christians shouldn’t worry about changing the world, because the world, and history, cannot be controlled and managed. He 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)

Hunter says that Christians won’t create a perfect world, but will help to make the world a little bit better.

Chapter abstracts of the book can be found on Hunter’s website.

World Cup final

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The World Cup ends this Sunday. It’s the world’s biggest sporting event. For those of us that love to study cultures, it’s a great time.

You can see the different playing styles, watch the dress and reactions of the fans, view the ways that the announcers from different countries approach the game. The attention of the whole world is focused there (even if many in the U.S. still haven’t made the effort to try and understand why).

Still, it comes down to some soccer matches. My predictions were only 50% right last week; here are my picks for the last two games:

Consolation:
Germany over Uruguay

Championship:
Netherlands over Spain

Soccer, culture and Christianity

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Well, if you know me, you know that I can’t just let a cultural study end at noticing differences. Not even during the World Cup.

I look at how people in the United States have such different tastes in sports than most of the rest of the world. I look at how what we like in sports announcing differs from that of many other countries. And I can’t help but wonder… could we possibly see the same thing in our Christianity?

I’m not talking about doctrines so much as I am the application of those doctrines. I’m specifically thinking about worship styles, although leadership styles and evangelism methods could also be examples of differing applications. Shouldn’t we expect, for example, worship among Latinos to be much more effusive and emotional than the typical U.S. worship style? Shouldn’t we expect the preaching style in Latin America to be more similar to the style of a Latin sports announcer than that of a U.S. sports announcer? Questions like that creep into my brain.

Maybe we need to study a culture’s sports as we contemplate the best ways to take the gospel to that culture.

Soccer vs. Futbol

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It’s hard to compare soccer announcers that you hear on English-speaking television with those that you hear on Spanish-speaking networks. The announcers in English are relatively unemotional. They give lots of stats. They rely a lot on the technology of the network they are broadcasting on.

Announcers in Spanish get excited. Really excited. They speak poetically. The other day, during the South Africa-Mexico game, I heard the announcer say, “Using his heart as a compass, the goalkeeper launched himself…” During the Argentina game the following day, I heard: “He went after that ball with heart, soul and body.” You just don’t hear expressions like that on the main U.S. broadcasts.

I was seeing that as a difference between the Latin culture and the mainstream U.S. culture until… they played a replay of Japan’s goal against Cameroon, listening to the Japanese broadcast. It was more like the Spanish broadcast than the English one. That rattled my assumptions, since I don’t see the Japanese culture as being particularly expressive.

So maybe I should avoid any sweeping generalizations about culture. I’ll just say this: soccer will be a lot more fun on U.S. TV when they start hiring announcers from Latin America rather than Europe.

The Christian and Alcohol, Part 12

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wineHere’s where I venture into opinion in this series. Take it as such.

I think our culture’s views of drinking are messed up. Warped and distorted. That’s why you can’t just say, “Go ahead and drink.” In the comment section yesterday, I mentioned the article “Protestants and Catholics: Drunken Barbarians and Mellow Romans?” That article seems to explain part of it. Our culture has had influence from Germanic and Celtic cultures, more than the Latin or Mediterranean culture.

You see, I’ve lived in a Mediterranean culture, for that’s what Argentina is, to a large degree. I’ve seen people drink beer as a beverage and not as a stomach lubricant. I’ve seen diluted wine used as a regular part of meals. I’ve seen Christians drink freely with no shame and no drunkenness. I’ve known people who drank wine every day yet I never saw them anywhere close to intoxicated.

Unfortunately, their culture is changing, with the young people wanting to emulate what they see in American movies and TV. Society is becoming more mobile, and the social controls are breaking down, as they broke down here long ago.

It doesn’t have to be that way. But it is that way now. We deal with how things should be, and we deal with things as they are.

Drinking parties, keggers, night clubs and beer joints… none of those fit into what the Bible describes when it talks about enjoying God’s gifts with thanksgiving. If that’s all people know when it comes to alcohol, then it’s best to tell them to avoid it. Not because of the alcohol, but because of the abuse and because of the context. To me it’s analogous to Paul telling the Corinthians to eat meat in certain contexts and not in others. We can’t just give our young people a green light on drinking. It’s not that simple.

I also think that the church has made a mistake in abandoning that area to the devil. When the world twists and distorts what God has made, the church’s answer must be to show them what is right. For too long we allowed the world to be the only voice as to what sexuality was all about, and we’ve reaped the consequences. We’ve let the world dictate how discourse should be carried out, and Christians find it hard to deal courteously with those that disagree with them. We let the world have movies and television and are finding it terribly hard now to gain a footing in those areas. By letting the world define what the proper use of alcohol is, we’ve given the devil a formidable weapon.

When we present our young people with the traditional proof texts, it takes little for them to see them for the house of cards that they are. When we go against Paul’s advice and make “Don’t touch, don’t taste, don’t handle” our mantra, we fail to correct the excesses just as he told us we would.

My suggestions:

  • We need to re-establish the social controls. You want to drink? You do it in a planned amount, in a Christian family atmosphere, where no one allows anyone else to get drunk. No drinking parties. No frat house keggers. No wild nights on the town. One drink as part of a meal, maybe two. Or half a glass before bed. Control. Community.
  • We need to use the biblical teachings of self-control rather than the world’s teachings of “all or nothing.” That applies not only to alcohol. As someone has said, while only 20% of those who drink do so to excess, 99% of those who eat in this country eat to excess. We’ve made gluttony a joke and drunkenness a mortal sin. The Bible relates the two. We need to learn self-control in our eating, our drinking, our materialism, our political discourse, our anger, our envy, our quest for revenge, etc. (I should point out that “self-control” in the Bible is the self being controlled by the Spirit, not the self controlling the self. We need God’s help to dominate our human nature) “Do not touch, do not taste, do not handle” is the world’s way. We are called to something higher.
  • We need to give Christians the right to make the choices that are best for them. Some will choose not to drink. They need to have that right. Some will choose not to eat red meat. They should have that right. Some will opt for a life of celibacy, others for a life of poverty. Each of these decisions can be made for godly reasons. We must respect peoples rights to choose these paths and respect the rights of others to choose to participate in eating, drinking, marriage or financial safety.

Thanks to all who have joined in in this discussion. Thanks to the many more who have read without commenting here. Tomorrow I’ll share some links for additional reading, just in case I haven’t totally exhausted your patience with this subject.

Previous posts in this series:
The Christian and Alcohol (Alcohol abuse)
The Christian and Alcohol, Part 2 (Alcohol in the history of the U.S.)
The Christian and Alcohol, Part 3 (Seeing what the Bible says about alcohol)
The Christian and Alcohol, Part 4 (What the Pentateuch says about alcohol)
The Christian and Alcohol, Part 5 (What the rest of the Old Testament says about alcohol)
The Christian and Alcohol, Part 6 (What Proverbs and Ecclesiastes say about alcohol)
The Christian and Alcohol, Part 7 (What the gospels say about alcohol)
The Christian and Alcohol, Part 8 (What the rest of the New Testament says about alcohol)
The Christian and Alcohol, Part 9 (Additional passages to consider)
The Christian and Alcohol, Part 10 (Additional passages to consider)
The Christian and Alcohol, Part 11 (Modern concepts forced onto an ancient text)