The Gospel Coalition

Christianity Today interviews James Davison Hunter on his book To Change the World.

Here’s an excerpt:

How does your paradigm of cultural engagement differ from the others?

All the paradigms speak to authentic biblical concerns. Yet the desire to be relevant to the world has come at the cost of abandoning distinctiveness. The desire to be defensive against the world is rooted in a desire to retain distinctiveness, but this has been manifested in ways that are, on one hand, aggressive and confrontational, and, on the other, culturally trivial and inconsequential. And the desire to be pure from the world entails a withdrawal from active presence in huge areas of social life. In contrast to these paradigms, the desire for faithful presence in the world calls on the entire laity, in all vocations—ordinary and extraordinary, “common” and rarefied—to enact the shalom of God in the world.

Christians need to abandon talk about “redeeming the culture,” “advancing the kingdom,” and “changing the world.” Such talk carries too much weight, implying conquest and domination. If there is a possibility for human flourishing in our world, it does not begin when we win the culture wars but when God’s word of love becomes flesh in us, reaching every sphere of social life. When faithful presence existed in church history, it manifested itself in the creation of hospitals and the flourishing of art, the best scholarship, the most profound and world-changing kind of service and care—again, not only for the household of faith but for everyone. Faithful presence isn’t new; it’s just something we need to recover.

Chuck Colson responds to Hunter’s criticisms, as does Andy Crouch.

From Colson:

In my estimation, the differences between Hunter’s and my view of culture and cultural change are, in many important respects, more apparent than real. They are hardly irreconcilable.

Here’s his concern:

Faithful presence doesn’t per se require silence and indifference. But I’m hard-pressed to come up with an historical example of quietism and commitment to fighting injustice going together. And it is insensitive to the social and cultural context in which Christians are called to live out their faithfulness.

A few excepts from Crouch:

I can only conclude that Hunter has fundamentally misunderstood the intent of my book [Culture Making] . . .

The truly odd thing is that by the end of his book Hunter gives every appearance of agreeing with me. . . .

Hunter’s treatment of my book is just four pages out of more than three hundred. I hope many readers of Culture Making will read To Change the World. But I also hope that readers of To Change the World will not assume they have grasped the heart of Culture Making from Hunter’s summary dismissal.

Crouch does concede a weakness, and readers may be interested in the book he recommends:

One aspect of Hunter’s critique strikes me as right on target, and it is not a small one: I did not spend enough time in Culture Making addressing the role of institutions in culture. If I had read Hugh Heclo’s boringly-titled but brilliantly-written short book On Thinking Institutionally before writing Culture Making (both were published in the summer of 2008), my book would have been better. Hunter does an excellent job of correcting my (and others’) lack of institutional vision, something that seems to be a besetting problem for my age cohort, so-called Generation X. Hunter’s emphasis on institutions, along with so many other aspects of To Change the World (most of all its marvelous reframing of power), is an important contribution to the ongoing conversation about our cultural calling.