To Change The World, Week Twelve

To Change The World by James Davison Hunter
To Change The World

Blog read­ers: Chi Alpha @ Stan­ford is engag­ing in our annu­al sum­mer read­ing project. As we read through To Change The World: The Irony, Tragedy, and Pos­si­bil­i­ty of Chris­tian­i­ty in the Late Mod­ern World by James Davi­son Hunter, I’ll post my thoughts here (which will large­ly con­sist of excerpts I found insight­ful). They are all tagged sum­mer-read­ing-project-2017. The read­ing sched­ule is online at https://xastanford.org/summer-reading

We’re almost done. One more week of read­ing and we fin­ish out the book. Wow.

So now we come to chap­ter 4: Toward A The­ol­o­gy of Faith­ful Pres­ence
The first few pages amused me, most­ly because it sound­ed like some­thing I would hear from a word-faith preach­er. The word-faith move­ment (also known as the pos­i­tive con­fes­sion move­ment or the word of faith move­ment) is a charis­mat­ic move­ment that empha­sizes the pow­er of our words as expres­sions of our faith. Hunter has got noth­ing to do with them and may not even be aware that they exist, which I found tremen­dous­ly enter­tain­ing.
And now Hunter comes to the main the­sis of the entire book: the best response to the chal­lenges of our world is faith­ful pres­ence. As a reminder, Hunter thinks the two chief chal­lenges we face are dis­so­lu­tion (per­va­sive uncer­tain­ty) and dif­fer­ence (plu­ral­ism). See my notes on week ten.
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.  page 241, empha­sis in orig­i­nal
In the rest of the chap­ter, Hunter advances his own the­ol­o­gy of faith­ful pres­ence while cri­tiquing oth­er the­olo­gies of work and voca­tion.
One com­mon view Hunter rejects is that our work is only use­ful inso­far as it direct­ly advances the gospel:

To the extent that work had “king­dom sig­nif­i­cance,” it was as a plat­form for evan­ge­lism. The mark of true piety for a com­mit­ted believ­er whether in skilled or man­u­al labor or in the realms of busi­ness, law, edu­ca­tion, pub­lic pol­i­cy, and social wel­fare, was to lead a Bible study and evan­ge­lize their asso­ciates in their place of work. In this par­a­digm, work was instrumentalized—it was regard­ed as sim­ply a means to spir­i­tu­al ends.  page 249

Instead, Hunter con­tends that work (indeed, any task) can be done in a way that glo­ri­fies God:
“What­ev­er you do, work at it with all your heart, as work­ing for the Lord, not for men” (Col. 3:22–24). What we do cer­tain­ly would include our jobs, but the real­i­ty is that our tasks are many, and they range far beyond paid labor. They involve our work as par­ents, stu­dents, vol­un­teers, cit­i­zens, and the like. But in the many capac­i­ties in which we oper­ate, St. Paul’s instruc­tion is that we pur­sue our tasks with all of our hearts. This not only sug­gests that we give our full atten­tion to those tasks but that we pur­sue excel­lence in them.  page 246

And he gives a few exam­ples of the way our work can express our devo­tion to God:

To man­age a busi­ness in a way that grows out of a bib­li­cal view of (p.254) rela­tion­ships, com­mu­ni­ty, and human dig­ni­ty before God has divine sig­nif­i­cance, irre­spec­tive of what else might be done from this plat­form. Pol­i­cy pur­sued and law prac­ticed in light of the jus­tice of God is a wit­ness to the right order­ing of human affairs. Inquiry, schol­ar­ship, and learn­ing with an aware­ness of the good­ness of God’s cre­at­ed order is a dis­cov­ery of what is tru­ly high­er in high­er edu­ca­tion. And, not least, reflect­ing the beau­ty of God’s cre­ation in art or music is noth­ing less than an act of wor­ship. (page 253–254)
So what­ev­er your major, work at with all your heart!
Next week we fin­ish up the book.

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