An International Journal for Pastors and Students of Theological and Religious Studies
PDF Version
An International Journal for Pastors and Students of Theological and Religious Studies
PDF Version
What kind of theology of culture and power, or social science and social theory of culture, best merits the dignity of human flourishing and accurately reflects how late modern culture really does change? This lead question animates James Davison Hunter’s provocative, timely, and illuminating essays in To Change the World.
Hunter is the Labrosse-Levinson Distinguished Professor of Religion, Culture, and Social Theory at the University of Virginia and Executive Director of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture. With endorsements as wide-ranging as philosopher Charles Taylor to sociologist Robert Bellah to pastor Tim Keller, To Change the World masterfully integrates Hunter’s command of social-science thinking about culture with his insightful theological reflection about the meaning of the church in culture.
Hunter’s main contention is that “the dominant ways of thinking [especially by American Christians] about culture and cultural change are flawed, for they are based on both specious social science and problematic theology,” resulting in cultural-change strategies that neither work nor can work for Christians to “change the world” in a way they desire (p. 5).
Hunter composes three well-proportioned and interrelated essays: “Christianity and World-Changing” (pp. 3–96); “Rethinking Power” (pp. 99–193); and “Toward a New City Commons: Reflections on a Theology of Faithful Presence” (pp. 197–286).
Essay One is a well-developed argument against what Hunter calls the “common view” of cultural change, which is deeply entrenched in Christian evangelism, mission, and revivalistic and political endeavors as strategies for bringing about transformation of the culture.
A popular alternative to the common view is the perspective advanced by Andy Crouch in his book Culture Making, which essentially argues that quintessential culture-change is the result of the goods or artifacts that we produce. In a qualified sense, Crouch espouses a kind of “cultural materialism” oriented by “market populism” (pp. 27–31). That view counters the so-called idealism (some have said, including Hunter, “Hegelianism”) of the over-branded, “thinking worldviewishly” emphasis of 1) above; for ideas alone don’t have consequence. But, among other things, Crouch’s view fails also to think institutionally about the production and value of material goods. Therefore, as a thoughtful alternative of the “common view,” including Crouch’s “culture making,” Hunter develops eleven social-theory propositions—a primer, really—about how culture really changes (see Essay One, ch. 4). This is one of the chapter-long gems that readers should study multiple times, mine for insights, and earnestly appropriate.
Essay Two assesses how the Christian Right, Christian Left, and Neo-Anabaptists approach political power and politics to bring about world-change. First, Hunter argues that in late modernity there is “a tendency toward the politicization of nearly everything” (p. 102) and a “conflation of the public with the political” so that “all of public life tends to be reduced to the political” (p. 105; cf. 184–87). Not surprisingly, “the final arbiter within most of social life is the coercive power of the state” (p. 106), which is indirectly related to “the loss of a common culture” (p. 107) and results in a “competition among factions” to will to power over the interests and well-being of others. Consequently, the dominant psychology and pathos of American political life is one of Nietzschean “ressentiment” as a motive for political action (p. 107). This has intentional and unintentional consequences for different “paradigms of engagement” (Essay Three, ch. 2).
Hunter argues that the Christian Right and Left routinely succumb to a Nietzschean ressentiment (filled with a discourse of domination) in their cultural power strategies with the political. In contrast, Neo-Anabaptists mistakenly think that “powerlessness” is virtuous, but that “presupposes a truncated theory of power” (pp. 181–82), which fails to see the church as having real institutional power that can be used for the good of others. All of this is both the “irony” and “tragedy” of Christianity in the late modern world (pp. 172–75). Thus, when discussing our Nietzschean moment, Hunter counsels, “it would be salutatory for the church and its leadership to remain silent [politically] for a season until it learns how to engage politics and even talk politics in ways that are non-Nietzschean” (p. 186; cf. 281). Such counsel can be discouraging to receive given the cultural strategies that habituate the Christian Right and Left, especially when reading this in an American election-year cycle enamored by “culture war” contests.
Essay Three argues that a possible and preferable way forward with Christian cultural engagement is a “post-political witness” (pp. 184–87) where Christians recover a sense of the church’s call to be a “faithful presence within” (FP) wherever they live in the ordinariness of their lives, individually and as a Christian community, within various networks and institutions in the world.
What is the basic objective of FP? The church, as culture and community, is to be in the world tangibly enacting the shalom of God—“fostering meaning, purpose, truth, beauty, belonging, and fairness” (p. 263)—seeking it on behalf of others with whom the church has effectual contact, and as such, seeking to bring knowledge and critique of any “principalities and powers” that “animate, institutionalize, and legitim[ize]” any dehumanizing tendencies that attempt to break the shalom of goodwill toward other’s well-being (pp. 281–82). But FP is not the same as evangelism; nor does it exclude it. We might want to say that FP is the very plausibility structure, tone, and texture that ought to environ our witness.
Hunter’s sense of FP is theologically underwritten mainly by
The challenges for Christian witness and presence are multiple: chiefly, the “problem of pluralism” (of all types) and the “problem of dissolution,” where the conditions of late modernity deconstruct the most basic assumptions about reality (pp. 200–212). Hunter argues that his concept of FP has a better likelihood of realistically addressing these challenges and preserving the integrity of Christian identity compared to the political theologies and cultural engagement paradigms of the Christian Right, Left, and Neo-Anabaptists.
Can Hunter’s concept of FP help to lead toward cultural change? Perhaps, theoretically, if this question should be taken seriously (pp. 285–86). But it is not change that can be directly willed, controlled, or managed into existence or ransomed by political power, or come about by treating FP as some instrumental good. Nonetheless, there does not seem to be, necessarily, a dichotomy between FP and “world-change.”
Is Hunter’s concept of FP opposed to engagement in the political if one is called by God to be in that sphere of influence? Is FP at odds with responsible Christian voting? No, for these would contradict the “whole-life” and “all spheres of life” influence that FP people are supposed to have (one can hear echoes and cheers of Kuyper here, however unacknowledged). Yet history seems to show that Christians who have achieved American political power and influence are often not who they should be (as Christians). Why? Mainly, because they are not adequately encultured in their local church within a “vision of formation” as Jesus’ disciples for the sake of the world. But Hunter doesn’t seem to make any distinction between different levels of political office and their powers. For example, would an FP-intending Christian in politics be more likely to realize FP in the context of municipal governance than say at the level of a senator, cabinet member, or President? Here further reflection is needed.
Furthermore, Hunter’s concern about the real dangers of political power seem to under-represent a non-politicized, non-ideologically partisan, or a non-Nietzschean sense of political power and will, indeed, even for the endeavor of doing political theology (p. 186). Here Hunter’s discussion would have benefitted from interaction with thinkers like Oliver O’Donovan (e.g., Resurrection and Moral Order, The Desire of the Nations) whom the book surprisingly does not mention.
Nevertheless, these issues should not detract from the value and seriousness of Hunter’s engaging discussion and proposal. Pastors, leaders of parachurch organizations, scholars, and students of theology are all direct stakeholders of Hunter’s book (pp. 199–200; cf. Essay Three, ch. 5). It behooves such readers to think deeply and act responsibly about the cultural and humane significance of “Pastors as Teachers of the Nations”—a central orientation of FP—which Hunter’s co-conspirator, Dallas Willard, has argued in such places as Knowing Christ Today. Hunter has courageous diligence toward developing a realistic and testable social theory of cultural change that takes seriously discipleship to Jesus in late modernity.