If All Previous Attempts Have Failed to Change the World, Is There a Better Way?

Well, we have come to Hunter’s third essay in his book, To Change the World: The Irony, Tragedy, & Possibility of Christianity in the Late Modern World.”

  In the first two essays, Hunter has tried to analyze how various groups within the Christian community have sought to change the world (assuming that this is a worthy, biblical objective) and the strategies they have deployed, including how they have either succeeded or failed, and indeed how success is defined by these groups. Hunter throws down the gauntlet so to speak, in asking whether or not Christians as individuals can change the culture, or if this can only be achieved by influencing change through the power wielded by institutions? Hunter specifically looks at the attempts of the Christian Right, The Christian Left, and the Neo-Anabaptists in their attempts to enforce and influence change. There is no doubt that all three are sincere in their desire to see the world changed, but their methodology and underlying assumptions about what that should look like are very different.

  Hunter finally has an opportunity in the third essay to introduce a new paradigm that will result in cultural change.

  Before we look at this new paradigm, it is important to understand why Hunter believes it is important, beyond what he has explained as the inadequacy of previous models. He proposes that there are three primary challenges that must urge us forward to find an alternative to previously unsuccessful models: He looks at the challenge of pluralism (there exists no, one, dominant culture), the challenge of difference (God is less obvious today than previously), and the challenge of dissolution (in essence, there are no fixed points of reference, and the words that we use today simply fail to have the same kind of traction they once did).

  The fact that we live in a diverse society where there is no one, dominant, culture, what has emerged is that God has become far less obvious than he once was. At a time when there is an overwhelming distrust of leaders and institutions, we have the challenge of proposing that Jesus in the context of the institutional church or Body of Christ is authentically God, desires for the creation mandate to be fulfilled through each of us, and that his words and promises can be trusted. I found it surprising that Hunter spent little time analyzing this in any greater depth. For example, there is no doubt that in the time into which Jesus was born, it was also a culturally rich and diverse society, and one where there existed a distrustful and skeptical relationship with Roman rule. The Jewish establishment was given freedom to practice their religion under the authority of Caesar, while at the same time despising Roman rule and their immoral activities. It could be argued that they tolerated Roman rule merely because they were able to maintain their religious activities and festivals while holding onto their status and positions of privilege. The scene was set for Jesus to enter. As we now know, many missed seeing Jesus the Messiah because they were hoping for a political deliverer, much the same, that many today believe that if we conquer today’s governments and institutions of power we can enforce a set of principles that will make society function better. One cannot help but think that if this is the model that Jesus wanted, he was capable of implementing it himself. Instead, in the context of a culturally rich and pluralistic world where there was hatred and distrust of Roman rule, coupled with the overt hypocrisy of the Jewish establishment, Hunter would argue, that Jesus lived a life that exuded the presence of God.

  In the light of the three challenges presented by Hunter, he evaluates three paradigms of engagement. The first he calls, Defensive Against. This is where mainstream evangelicals seek to retain and defend the “distinctiveness of Christian orthodoxy and orthopraxy within the larger world.” This has a strong defensive posture. The second is called, Relevance To. A priority is given to being “connected to the issues of the day.” Finding its roots initially in theological liberalism, it has found expression in the “seeker-church” movement. Rather than focusing on distinctiveness, it downplays differences. The third paradigm Hunter calls, Purity From. In essence, this perspective tends to see the world in its fallen, sinful state and largely irredeemable. Given that the church has also been compromised by its complicity in the world’s sinfulness, then it is up to the true church “to extricate itself from the contaminating forces of the world.” This paradigm tends to be embraced more by the Neo-Anabaptists.

  Having argued the need for an alternative paradigm for how Christians should engage the world, Hunter proposes that what is needed today is a call to practicing the “faithful presence of God.” Although a little anticlimactic, Hunter’s proposal is profound and simple. In essence, his theology of faithful presence is based on human flourishing in the context of being incarnational - or living out God's word and love in our day-to-day existence. For the Christian, “if there is a possibility for human flourishing in a world such as ours, it begins when God’s word of love becomes flesh in us, is embodied in us, is enacted through us and in doing so, a trust is forged between the word spoken and the reality to which it speaks; to the words we speak and the realities to which we, the church, point.” (p. 241). In other words, our lives ought to be characterized predominantly by how they interact and speak to the truth of God’s words and how they in turn speak to the realities of the world in which we live. All else is secondary or at the very least, subservient to the goal of knowing Christ and allowing him to pursue us and changing us. It would be remiss of us to suggest that this can happen in isolation from our world or where our distinctiveness is such that it removes from us the ability to engage the needs of people around us, or where we become absorbed by the culture. We are simply called to be “faithfully present within it.” Hunter concludes that this is no better expressed than in the book of the prophet Jeremiah (Jer. 29:4-7), where the Jewish people are living in exile, away from their homeland,

  4 This is what the LORD Almighty, the God of Israel, says to all those I carried into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon: 5 "Build houses and settle down; plant gardens and eat what they produce. 6 Marry and have sons and daughters; find wives for your sons and give your daughters in marriage, so that they too may have sons and daughters. Increase in number there; do not decrease. 7 Also, seek the peace and prosperity of the city to which I have carried you into exile. Pray to the LORD for it, because if it prospers, you too will prosper."