What If God’s Will Isn’t a Mystery?
Faithful presence in a world built for flash.
We’ve been reading through To Change the World by James Davison Hunter. This is the final installment in this series. To catch up, read part 1, part 2, part 3, and part 4.
My first experiences with the sensation of panic came as I made the volatile transition from childhood to adulthood and began to consider what it was God might want me to do with my life. The idea that there was a thing He wanted me to do, a mission He wanted me to accomplish was an assumption embedded deep in my evangelical understanding of the world. As the months and years ticked closer to adulthood, I was sure time was running out to crack the code and solve the puzzle of my one mysterious calling.
In the final third of To Change the World, James Davison Hunter once again summarizes the three primary postures of modern Western Christians toward secular culture. He uses these shorthand labels:
“Defensive against”
Hunter calls this “a model of cultural engagement that seeks to create a defensive enclave that is set against the world” and which is practiced by Protestant Fundamentalists, mainstream Evangelicals, and some conservative Catholics (214).
“Relevance to”
Those who “make a priority of being connected to the pressing issues of the day”, including Evangelicals in the “seeker-church” movement and other progressive Evangelicals and mainstream Protestants (215).
“Purity from”
Those who desire to preserve historical Christianity, but who also believe that “there is very little that can be done for the world because, in its fallen state, the world is irredeemable this side of Christ’s return”, including neo-Anabaptists and some Pentecostals (218).
To these postures, Hunter offers an alternative, what he calls “faithful presence within.” While his aim is not to lay out in great detail what this posture might look like in every situation or life circumstance, Hunter offers a brief theological foundation for this posture and posits that it finds its distinctiveness in the virtues of faith, hope, and love.
Hunter uses God’s instructions to the exiles in Babylon in Jeremiah 29 as a biblical example of this posture. Just as the exiles are urged to contribute to the good of the city where they live as a minority, a diaspora with limited political and social power, so Christians today can seek the common good of our communities as a demonstration of our faithfulness to God.
Hunter calls for the church to recognize the tensions that exist in this approach and to “deliberately and actively cultivate” them. First, the church will face tensions with itself. Hunter traces a theme of instrumentalization through this third part of the book. As we seek to live into our new identity as the body of Christ all Christians—Western or not, modern or ancient—struggle to accept the extravagant grace of our Savior, without working for His approval. Our aim is to be
“…fully present to him as he is to us—not for what we get out of it or what he can do for us but simply because he is God and worthy of our adoration. As he does not pursue us for instrumental purposes, so we do not pursue him for instrumental purposes”(244).
And yet, we Christians who are both modern and Western struggle with the instrumentalization of our faith—our identity—perhaps more than any others. Hunter acknowledges this and goes so far as to suggest that we may need to take a season of silence in the public square so that we can learn how to engage our world beyond the narrow specter of politics.
The second source of tension Christians will encounter is with the world, where we must both affirm the centrality of the church and spiritual formation as an antithesis to the “principalities and powers” active in our society, while also acknowledging that God’s common grace is evident in many of the pursuits and activities of our fellow citizens.
Those operating from the paradigms of “defensive against”, “relevance to”, and “purity from” have done a poor job managing these tensions. Some have given in to the temptation of instrumentalization like a pendulum that has wrenched them from one paradigm to the next. A few weeks ago Katelyn Beaty outlined the curious case of the Q Conference as they have shifted from a “relevance to” posture to a “defensive against” one.1 Even the late Tim Keller’s quite balanced posture toward the role of the church in society has been attacked as naive and ineffective, an instrument unfit for the task of shaping culture for Christ.
Ultimately, Hunter’s theology of faithful presence challenges the notion that we should be aiming for world change at all, and he makes a strong case. All in all, I’m inclined to agree with him. There is only one point on which I wish he had taken a stronger stand. Hunter’s ecclesiology is not as robust as I believe is necessary to disabuse Christians of their need to change the world. Hunter understands that the church needs to be set apart, and he understands that it can offer something to people that the world cannot. However, he isn’t clear about what makes the church theologically distinct.
He (somewhat understandably) seems timid in his ecclesiology, perhaps concerned that he might lean too far into the “purity from” paradigm of the neo-Anabaptists who would sequester themselves completely from secular culture (see pages 282-3). But I think we can draw more from their rich ecclesiology without isolationism being the inevitable result. The correction I would offer is to resist diluting the unique, world-changing reality of Christ’s body on earth and to emphasize the importance of faithful presence, not just as individual Christians, but as a new family in Christ. Afterall, it is “through the church [that] the manifold wisdom of God might now be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places” (Eph 3:10).
Just inside the door to my childhood bedroom was a framed print of Jeremiah 29:11:
“‘For I know the plans I have for you,’ declares the Lord, ‘plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.’”
If I had read the whole of Jeremiah 29, if I had understood the church as an extension of the people of God first established in Israel, I might have realized that there was no code to crack, no mysterious calling I had to uncover. I would have understood that the very plans laid out for the Hebrew exiles in Babylon—to build houses and plant gardens and marry and raise children and seek the peace and prosperity of their neighbors—might in some way also be God’s plan for his church in the 21st century. I might have been content to embed myself in the beautiful complexity of a local church instead of constantly looking outside of it for my “calling.” And I might have experienced a lot more peace than panic.
Thank you for reading through To Change the World with me. I’d love to hear from you in the comments: what was your biggest takeaway from this series?
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In fact, Hunter quotes Gabe Lyons, one of the founders of Q as an example of the “relevance to” paradigm on page 279.
I remember having the same issue - what’s my calling? I never spoke to anyone about it much - like it was going to magically arrive in my head - but I somehow found multiple ‘callings’ or something that I was somehow equipped to do. As I reflect on my experience, I see that little has changed in the evangelical community - unfortunately.