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)

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.

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.

In our survey of James Davison Hunter’s book To Change The World, we’re ready to look at the last chapter of the second essay. Chapter 7 is called “Rethinking Power—Theological Reflections.” Here’s the abstract from www.jamesdavisonhunter.com:

Only by narrowing an understanding of power to political or economic power can one imagine giving up power and becoming “powerless.” The creation mandate is a mandate to use power in the world in ways that reflect God’s intentions. Thus, the question for the church is not about choosing between power and powerlessness, but rather, how will the church and its people use the power that they have.

The church has two essential tasks. The first is to disentangle the life and identity of the church from the life and identity of American society. The second task is for the church and for Christian believers to decouple the “public” from the “political.” The way of Christ differs. His way operated in complete obedience to God the Father, it repudiated the symbolic trappings of elitism, it manifest compassion concretely out of calling and vocation, and it served the good of all and not just the good of the community of faith.

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

The first part of this chapter is one of the weakest links in all of Hunter’s arguments. He sets out to describe why power can’t be separated from human experience, then states that the reason is because anthropology has shown that power can’t be separated from human experience. Oops. Resorting to circular reasoning is one of the surest signs of a weak argument. Hunter then defines power so broadly that it encompasses all human interaction. To rephrase a line from the movie The Incredibles, when everything is power, nothing is.

Power can be rejected. People can refuse to hold power over others. As Todd said in the comment section of the last post, one can seek influence rather than dominion. Hunter could have left this section out without distracting from his argument; in fact, his work would have been much stronger had he done so. Apparently he follows this tangent to try and find something to use against the Neo-Anabaptists.

Hunter then states three facts about power:

1. Power tends to become an end in itself. “Even voluntary organizations protect their organizational interests against the interests and needs of the very members they are supposed to serve.” (p. 179)
2. Power always generates its own resistances. “Even the weak possess the power to challenge, subvert, destabilize and oppose.” (p. 179)
3. Power always seems to carry with it unintended consequences.

As the article begins to address power and theology, the Neo-Anabaptists come under fire. Hunter does make an important concession when he says, “there is subtlety, nuance and range in the theological positions of neo-Anabaptism for which a hurried summary cannot do justice.” (p. 180) This can explain some of the discrepancies commenters have pointed out thus far.

Hunter again argues that Neo-Anabaptism uses “a truncated theory of power,” while I would argue that Hunter’s definition is so broad as to be virtually useless in a discussion of theology, politics and power. When he says that “every grammar and every narrative is an imposition,” (p. 182) his desire to condemn all standard viewpoints has led him to hyperbole.

However, some of his arguments about Christians necessarily participating with the powers of this world are valid. The challenge for Christians is rightly defined as how to be in the world and not of the world. Hunter advocates the use of what he calls a postpolitical witness in the world. To achieve this, two things must be done. First, “Christians must disentangle the life and identity of the church from the life and identity of American society.” (p. 184) As Hunter points out, the way that Christianity has embraced the American political system is merely an outgrowth of the way believers have uncritically immersed themselves in American culture.

The second task is to separate what is public from that which is political. As Hunter explains, politics is a simplification of social life, and society is always much broader than the political arena. He states, “Politics is just one way to engage the world and, arguably, not the highest, best, most effective, nor most humane way to do so.” (p. 185) I’m actually a bit surprised that Hunter doesn’t do with the word “politics” what he does with the word “power,” for it would be easy to redefine both words to encompass all human social interaction. This time, however, he resists the temptation, probably because it wouldn’t advance his argument.

So what kind of “power” does Hunter think that Christians should be seeking? Well, the kind of power that isn’t really power. He says that this “power” has four characteristics:

1. It is derived from complete intimacy and submission to the Father.
2. It rejects status, reputation and privilege.
3. It is motivated by love for God and love for fellow man.
4. It is completely noncoercive toward outsiders.

(If you’re keeping score at home, this is what we mere mortals call “powerlessness”… but I guess I’ve voiced my disagreement enough)

The third essay will explore what it means to live out the model of power we learn from Christ.