To Change the World: The Irony, Tragedy, and Possibility of Christianity in the Late Modern World

by James Davison Hunter

It is difficult to discover the quality of intimacy in a friendship or in love that is nurtured through time and attentiveness to the subtleties of need, memory, joy, and hurt.

A world created by these technologies may not occlude depth in these ways but it will war against it.

The power of will first becomes nihilistic at the point at which it becomes absolute; when it submits to no authority higher than itself; that is, when impulse and desire become their own moral gauge and when it is guided by no other ends than its own exercise.

DEFENSIVE A GAINST Theological and political conservatism are often linked in a model of cultural engagement that seeks to create a defensive enclave that is set against the world.

“Well we just need to be there. For too long we’ve left the culture. We just need to be part of the culture, to be friends, to be thoughtful Christians, [to be] aware of the issues that are at stake and just going for it.”14 In the end, these initiatives, while well-intended and rooted in a deep longing, take their cue from the culture around them, and offer little clarity for the confusion of the times.

mean by dissolution is the negation of the trust that connects human discourse to the “reality” of the world.

I’m looking for a second reformation. The first reformation of the church 500 years ago was about beliefs. This one is going to be about behavior. The first one was about creeds. This one is going to be about deeds. It is not going to be about what the church believes, but about what the church is doing.18

In April 1995, Christianity Today ran a cover story called “Cyber Shock,” that insisted that “new ways of thinking must be developed for the church to keep pace in the information age.”19 Evangelicals probably did not need the encouragement, since no religious movement has ever exploited these technologies more fully than they.

In some parts of the Christian community, the great commission is understood as evangelism tout court and thus, once converted, the work of sanctification is in God’s hands—spiritual growth is assumed to be a natural process guided by the Holy Spirit. Formation, in short, will happen as an expected outgrowth of conversion. In other parts of the Christian community, formation is understood as learning to practice the spiritual disciplines, such as participating in regular worship, engaging in daily prayer and scripture reading, regular tithing and periodic fasting, and enjoying periods of quiet and solitude.

Christians have faith in God and, by and large, they believe and hold fast to the central truths of the Christian tradition. But while they have faith, they have also been formed by the larger post-Christian culture, a culture whose habits of life less and less resemble anything like the vision of human flourishing provided by the life of Christ and witness of scripture.

To achieve a formation that seeks the renewal of all of life presupposes a culture that in fact expresses and embodies the renewal of all of life. If, for whatever reason, the culture of a local parish and the larger Christian communion of which it is a part does not express and embody a vision of renewal and restoration that extends to all of life then it will be impossible to “make disciples” capable of doing the same in every part of their lives. In formation, it is the culture and the community that gives shape and expression to it that is the key.1Healthy formation is impossible without a healthy culture embedded within the warp and woof of community.

And so until God brings forth the new heaven and the new earth, he calls believers, individuals and as a community, to conform to Christ and embody within every part of their lives, the shalom of God. Time and again, St. Paul calls Christians to “shalom” (I Cor. 7:15), to “follow after the things which make for shalom” (Rom. 14:19), to “live in shalom and the God of love and shalom will be with you” (II Cor. 13:11) for He is “the Lord of shalom” (II Thess. 3:16). In this Christians are to live toward the well-being of others, not just to those within the community of faith, but to all.

The task of world-making has a validity of its own because it is work that God ordained to humankind at creation.

there are benevolent consequences of our engagement with the world, in other words, it is precisely because it is not rooted in a desire to change the world for the better but rather because it is an expression of a desire to honor the creator of all goodness, beauty, and truth, a manifestation of our loving obedience to God, and a fulfillment of God’s command to love our neighbor.

Sounds Refeormed

And so it is that the city is a poor imitation of heavenly community;13 the modern state, a deformed version of the ecclesia;14

How is any form of government comparable to Christian community, the church etc.

Institutions can only be effectively challenged by alternatives that are also institutionalized—either alternatives that are developed within existing institutions or alternatives that are altogether new.

But every bit as important, the church, as it exists within the wide range of individual vocations in every sphere of social life (commerce, philanthropy, education, etc.), must be present in the world in ways that work toward the constructive subversion of all frameworks of social life that are incompatible with the shalom for which we were made and to which we are called.

As Walter Brueggemann has put it, Christians must renounce the dominant script of the world and embrace the alternative script that is rooted in the Bible and enacted through the tradition of the church.15 This task, however, presupposes that Christians are capable of discerning the difference between the two scripts. Making disciples, in other words, means that the people of God will learn to live with and reflect in life the dialectical tension of affirmation and antithesis.

Needless to say, for the Christian, the incarnation is not only a manifestation of the reality of God and the trust they can put in his word, but also the most breathtaking demonstration in history of the reality of God’s love for his creation and his intention to make all things new.

This, in short, is the foundation of a theology of faithful presence. It can be summarized in two essential lessons for our time. The first is that incarnation is the only adequate reply to the challenges of dissolution; the erosion of trust between word and world and the problems that attend it. From this follows the second: it is the way the Word became incarnate in Jesus Christ and the purposes to which the incarnation was directed that are the only adequate reply to challenge of difference. 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. In all, presence and place matter decisively.

First, God’s faithful presence implies that he pursues us.

As J. R. R. Tolkien puts it, As the hound follows the hare, never ceasing in its running, ever drawing nearer in the chase, with unhurrying and steady pace, so does God follow the fleeing soul by his divine grace. And though in sin or in human love, away from God it seeks to hide itself, divine grace follows after, unwearyingly follows ever after, till the soul feels its pressure forcing it to turn to him alone in that never ending pursuit.3

A second attribute of God’s faithful presence is his identification with us.

A third attribute of his faithful presence is found in the life he offers.

Finally—and inextricably intertwined with the preceding—the life he offers is only made possible by his sacrificial love.

Pursuit, identification, the offer of life through sacrificial love—this is what God’s faithful presence means. It is a quality of commitment that is active, not passive; intentional, not accidental; covenantal, not contractual. In the life of Christ we see how it entailed his complete attention. It was whole-hearted, not half-hearted; focused and purposeful, nothing desultory about it. His very name, Immanuel, signifies all of this—“God with us”—in our presence (Matt. 1:23).

Two points that are implicit need to be made explicit here. The first point is that in this drama, we are the “other.” Though we are irreducibly different from him and, in our sin, irreducibly estranged from him, he does not regard us as either “danger” or “darkness.” We neither threaten him nor diminish him in any way. The second point is that though he is all powerful, he pursues us, identifies with us, and offers us life through his sacrifice not because he needs us to do something for him but simply because he loves us and desires intimacy with all his creation. In other words, he does not use his power instrumentally in ways that force us against our will.

At root, a theology of faithful presence begins with an acknowledgement of God’s faithful presence to us and that his call upon us is that we be faithfully present to him in return.

First, faithful presence means that we are to be fully present to each other within the community of faith and fully present to those who are not. Whether within the community of believers or among those outside the church, we imitate our creator and redeemer: we pursue each other, identify with each other, and direct our lives toward the flourishing of each other through sacrificial love.

To welcome the stranger—those outside of the community of faith—is to welcome Christ. Believer or nonbeliever, attractive or unattractive, admirable or disreputable, upstanding or vile—the stranger is marked by the image of God. And so St. Paul also exhorted believers in this way. “Keep on loving each other as brothers,” he said. “Do not forget to entertain strangers, for by so doing some people have entertained angels without knowing it. Remember those in prison as if you were their fellow prisoners, and those who are mistreated as if you yourselves were suffering” (Heb. 13: 1–3). And elsewhere, he declared, “We who are strong ought to bear with the failings of the weak and not to please ourselves. Each of us should please his neighbor for his good, to build him up. For even Christ did not please himself” (Rom. 15: 1–3). Scripture does not teach that the stranger is not strange to us or that the differences among us are somehow insignificant. But however different, the stranger or the “other” represents neither metaphysical danger nor darkness. When one’s life is “hidden in Christ,” the existence of the other neither threatens nor diminishes.

I would suggest that a theology of faithful presence first calls Christians to attend to the people and places that they experience directly.

In our tasks, the call of faithful presence implies a certain modesty that gives priority to substance over style; the enduring over the ephemeral, depth over breadth, and quality, skill, and excellence over slick packaging or “high production values.” It would encourage ambition, but the instrumentalities of ambition are always subservient to the requirements of humility and charity.

But the great commission can also be interpreted in terms of social structure. The church is to go into all realms of social life: in volunteer and paid labor—skilled and unskilled labor, the crafts, engineering, commerce, art, law, architecture, teaching, health care, and service. Indeed, the church should be sending people out in these realms—not only discipling those in these fields by providing the theological resources to form them well, but in fact mentoring and providing financial support for young adults who are gifted and called into these vocations. When the church does not send people out to these realms and when it does not provide the theologies that make sense of work and engagement in these realms, the church fails to fulfill the charge to “go into all the world.”

Another way to put this is to say that the social dynamics of status are really fundamentally about the dynamics of exclusion. This is, of course, why—at least on the face of it—it is so pernicious and antithetical to the gospel.3

the extent that Christians exercise leadership, then, they face an unavoidable paradox between pursuing faithful presence and the social consequences of achievement; between leadership and an elitism that all too often comes with it. The paradox is that all Christians are called to a life of humility, of placing others’ interests ahead of their own, of attending to the needs of “the least among us.” Yet leadership inevitably puts all in relative positions of influence and advantage. There is no way around this paradox and it is especially acute the more social influence one has.

The practice of faithful presence, then, generates relationships and institutions that are fundamentally covenantal in character, the ends of which are the fostering of meaning, purpose, truth, beauty, belonging, and fairness—not just for Christians but for everyone.

Many Christians would undoubtedly object to this broader understanding of faith, hope, and love and, even more, object to creating common space in which those outside of the Christian community can also appropriate meaning, purpose, beauty, and belonging.

It is against the invasive nihilism of the late modern world and the cultural logics that produce them, then, that we see the significance of faithful presence in practice. The covenantal commitment at the root of faithful presence cultivates faith, hope, and love, and as such, it radically challenges the cultural foundations of much of the late modern world. Put differently, the practices of faithful presence represent an assault on the worldliness of this present age. However, as I have argued throughout, this assault does not manifest itself as mere negation of nihilism. If this were the primary expression of this challenge it would be, in its means and method, of a fabric with the nihilism it seeks to repudiate. It would simply be one more negation. Rather, the primary nature of the assault is, as I have argued, more of a bursting out of new creation from within it. To the extent that Christians have any influence and exercise leadership in whatever sphere of life they inhabit, to that extent Christians have a covenantal obligation to actively and concretely realize faith, hope, and love in all that these ideals mean.

Against this view, I have argued that cultural change at its most profound level occurs through dense networks of elites operating in common purpose within institutions at the high-prestige centers of cultural production.

They want to change societies and civilizations. It is this ambition that is not even distantly linked to realistic strategies or positions capable of achieving those ambitions.

First, the working theory of power is still influenced by Constantinian tendencies toward conquest and domination. As we have seen, these tendencies play out among Christian progressives as well as among Christian conservatives: though guided differently by powerful mythic narratives, most Christians cannot imagine power in any other way than toward what finally leads to political domination.

In this, they mistakenly imagine that to pass a referendum, elect a candidate, pass a law, or change a policy is to change culture. In truth they probably know better, but in terms of the amount of energy expended and money spent, the net effect is a view much like this. While Christian activists (conservative and progressive) have been fairly influential in the political sphere at different times in recent decades, they have embraced a means to power that seethes with resentment, anger, and bitterness for the injury they believe they have suffered. The public and political culture of contemporary Christianity have become defined by such negations.

Yet it also leads to a postpolitical view of power. It is not likely to happen, but 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.

The first implication is that a vision of the new city commons rooted in a theology of faithful presence would lead believers to hold many of these differences lightly.

Christians must cultivate tension with the world by affirming the centrality of the church itself and the parish or local congregation in particular. The church is God’s gift to his people and part of what makes it a strategic gift in our time is that it is a community and an institution.

This particular description is found in a famous letter written by an unknown “disciple of the apostles” to Diognetus, in all likelihood, the tutor of Marcus Aurelius. Though clearly romanticized, the letter nevertheless provides an ideal picture of how Christian believers relate or aspire to relate to the world. Christians are distinguished from other men neither by country, nor language, nor the customs which they observe. For they neither inhabit cities of their own, nor employ a peculiar form of speech, nor lead a life which is marked out by any singularity. The course of conduct which they follow has not been devised by any speculation or deliberation of inquisitive men; nor do they, like some, proclaim themselves the advocates of any merely human doctrines. But, inhabiting Greek as well as barbarian cities . . . and following the customs of the natives in respect to clothing, food, and the rest of their ordinary conduct, they display to us their wonderful and confessedly striking method of life. They dwell in their own countries, but simply as sojourners. As citizens, they share in all things with others, and yet endure all things as if foreigners. Every foreign land is to them as their native country, and every land of their birth as a land of strangers. They marry, as do all [others]; they beget children; but they do not destroy their offspring. They have a common table, but not a common bed. They are in the flesh, but they do not live after the flesh. They pass th...