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Chapter 1: The Christian Faith and the Task of World-Changing

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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.

Which way is up?

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Did you ever wonder why the big N is put at the top of our maps? That is, why North is up? That actually goes back to the Egyptians, to the mathematician Ptolemy. He put North at the top of his maps, probably because most of the landmarks he knew were in the Northern Hemisphere.

In the Middle Ages, many maps put East at the top. That’s why the term “orient” is used to describe positioning something according to the points of the compass.

It’s interesting how the “orientation” of a map can affect our views. Have you ever seen an upside down map? It definitely gives you a different view on the world.

Others have noted a different effect that our standard maps have on us. The most used view of the world is the Mercator Projection. NASA describes the Mercator Projection this way:

A Mercator projection is a mathematical method of showing a map of the globe on a flat surface. This projection was developed in 1568 by Gerhardus Mercator a Flemish geographer, mathematician, and cartographer. Before this time, navigation charts used by sailors did not correctly account for the recently proven fact that the world was round. Mercator’s equations allowed cartographers (map-makers) to produce charts from which sailors could easily navigate. Mercator’s projection preserves exactly what sailors needed — shapes and directions; they were very willing to accept the size distortion.

The problem, as far as our view of the world goes, is that the Mercator Projection distorts the relative size of objects. Objects near the equator are compressed. Objects far from the equator are stretched. On many maps, for example, Greenland looks to be almost the size of South America; it’s actually only about 1/4 the size.

Gall-Peters projection

Because most of the land masses in the Southern Hemisphere are nearer the equator, we may think that these lands are much smaller than they really are. Something that can help, only for the purposes of comparing land mass, are equal-area projections. One that was popular in the late 20th century was the Galls-Peter projection. Many cartographers completely reject this map, but for the purposes of comparison, it is interesting.

Do you have any other tips for helping us get oriented?