{"id":1206,"date":"2010-05-19T11:58:01","date_gmt":"2010-05-19T18:58:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.tgdarkly.com\/blog\/?p=1206"},"modified":"2010-05-19T11:58:01","modified_gmt":"2010-05-19T18:58:01","slug":"faithful-presence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/2010\/05\/19\/faithful-presence\/","title":{"rendered":"Faithful Presence"},"content":{"rendered":"

In his new book To Change the World<\/span><\/a>, leading faith-and-culture scholar James Davidson Hunter<\/span><\/a>\u00a0describes the misplaced efforts by both conservative and progressive Christians in recent decades\u00a0to change culture through law and politics.\u00a0 In my view, Hunter\u2019s deconstruction of the Church\u2019s complicity in fostering unproductive culture wars is nothing short of prophetic.\u00a0 But what does Hunter offer in place of political change?\u00a0 The phrase he wishes to promote is \u201cfaithful presence.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cFaithful presence\u201d does not imply that Christians should withdraw from law and politics.\u00a0 Indeed, Hunter\u00a0also critiques the \u201cneo-Anabaptist\u201d\u00a0approach to\u00a0culture, which is at turns loudly combative and unrealisticly pacifistic.\u00a0 \u201cFaithful presence\u201d does mean, however, that the\u00a0Church should not seek to \u201ctransform culture\u201d by winning in the judicial and legislative arenas.\u00a0<\/p>\n

There are two reasons why this Quixotic quest should be abandoned.\u00a0 First\u00a0this quest is, in fact, Quixotic; culture simply does not \u201ctransform\u201d when laws change, at least not in the way that Christian culture warriors suppose is the case, and certainly not in ways that anyone can confidently predict.\u00a0\u00a0Second,\u00a0this kind of\u00a0 quest is not consistent with the\u00a0missio Dei<\/em>.<\/p>\n

This latter point,\u00a0I think, is one that Christian and other religious\u00a0legal scholars should explore more carefully.\u00a0 How did legal and political change become so central to the mission of the Church?\u00a0 Why does the political discourse in American Chrisitian churches, at least at the popular level, so rarely rises\u00a0above the bar set by the Fox\u00a0News Channel?\u00a0 Why do many of the messages we receive in our\u00a0email inboxes from parachurch organizations read like\u00a0paranoid radical libertarian hate mail (or, if the organization is \u201cprogressive,\u201d like Marxist propaganda)?\u00a0 Is this what we believe life, death and resurrection of the Son of God,\u00a0and the sending of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost,\u00a0are all about?\u00a0 As religious legal scholars, how can we help shape conversations about law and culture in ways that reflect a humble\u00a0\u201cfaithful presence\u201d rather than a drive to \u201cwin\u201d at all costs?<\/p>\n

Hunter predicted that his proposal would generate significant opposition, in no small part because the warrior mentality is now so engrained in our spiritual DNA.\u00a0 Not surprisingly, for example, in a response to Hunter\u2019s book in Christianity Today<\/span><\/a>, Chuck Colson dismissed the notion of \u201cfaithful presence\u201d as \u201cquietism.\u201d\u00a0 This sort of response baffles me.\u00a0 Whatever happened to Romans 12:18:\u00a0 \u201cIf it is possible, as far as it depends on you, live at peace with everyone<\/em>\u201c?\u00a0 It seems the Apostle Paul lacked a sufficiently Kuyperian \/ neo-Calvinist take on culture and politics.<\/p>\n

I do, of course, appreciate the push-back that some great moral movements in history were motivated by a form of religious engagement that seemed like more than \u201cfaithful presence.\u201d\u00a0 The abolition of African slavery is Exhibit A in this regard.\u00a0<\/p>\n

And yet, upon closer examination, slavery is a curious case because the justification<\/em> for slavery in the American South became increasingly \u201cChristian\u201d as the country careened towards the Civil War.\u00a0 What if the Southern Presbyterians had exercised \u201cfaithful presence\u201d in the antebellum years, rather than insisting that African slavery was part of God\u2019s providential design and branding the abolitionists heretics?\u00a0 The drive to eliminate American slavery was not a case of Christian abolitionists fighting against pagan or atheistic slave owners.\u00a0 It was, tragically, in addition to all its other historical, economic and political dimensions, a contest of competing Christian<\/em> theologies.\u00a0 It seems to me that this cannot be compared to what the Church\u2019s political presence should look like in response to openly anti-Christian culture.\u00a0 (Anyone who argues for slavery as a case study in Christian cultural engagement should read John Patrick Daly\u2019s book When Slavery Was Called Freedom:\u00a0 Evangelicalism, Proslavery, and the Causes of the Civil War<\/span><\/a>.)<\/p>\n

In short, \u201cfaithful presence\u201d seems to me exactly what Christian faith requires<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In his new book To Change the World, leading faith-and-culture scholar James Davidson Hunter\u00a0describes the misplaced efforts by both conservative and progressive Christians in recent decades\u00a0to change culture through law and politics.\u00a0 In my view, Hunter\u2019s deconstruction of the Church\u2019s complicity in fostering unproductive culture wars is nothing short of prophetic.\u00a0 But what does Hunter […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1206","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-law-and-policy"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p824rZ-js","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1206","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1206"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1206\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1206"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1206"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1206"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}