{"id":17121,"date":"2018-03-15T15:23:13","date_gmt":"2018-03-15T22:23:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dminlgp\/?p=17121"},"modified":"2018-03-15T15:23:13","modified_gmt":"2018-03-15T22:23:13","slug":"the-church-became-flesh-and-dwelt-among-us","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/the-church-became-flesh-and-dwelt-among-us\/","title":{"rendered":"The Church Became Flesh and Dwelt Among Us"},"content":{"rendered":"

James Davison Hunter, a faithful Anabaptist, believes that every good idea arises out of friendship. His book, To Change the World, is dedicated to a friendship out of which the book emerged.[1]<\/a> And friendship, understood as \u201cfaithful presence\u201d, is a central component to Hunter\u2019s solution to the Evangelical desire to \u201cchange the world.\u201d<\/p>\n

The subtitle of the book summarizes the three essays that make up the three main parts of the book: \u201cThe irony, tragedy, and possibility of Christianity in the late modern world.\u201d<\/p>\n

The \u201cirony\u201d describes \u201cEssay I: Christianity and World Changing.\u201d According to Bebbington, one of the defining characteristics of the Evangelical imagination has always been activism. Evangelicals have always wanted and still do desire to change the world, to make a difference, to influence society \u201cin the Name of Jesus.\u201d The irony, according to Hunter, is that the Church\u2019s attempt to change the world has been limited to evangelism, political engagement, and populist movements and has thus failed to bring the change required of the gospel. The irony is that Christians will purchase this book with zeal to receive \u201cmarching orders\u201d for how to change the world, only to be confronted with how this ambition has played out historically. The irony is that Christians are fooling themselves if they do not consider the dynamics of power in their efforts to bring change.<\/p>\n

This leads to the \u201ctragedy\u201d that Hunter describes in \u201cEssay II: Rethinking Power.\u201d The tragedy, according to Hunter, is summarized like this: \u201cWith the conflation of the history and identity of America with the life and mission of the church (for the Right and the Left), there is a fundamental distortion of theological truth and historical reality. Such a distortion is commonplace in the history of the church and when it occurs, it invariably leads to consequences that are ambivalent at best.\u201d In other words, Hunter believes that the tragedy of the Evangelical failure to \u201cchange culture\u201d in the way Hunter described, is the blindness to the truth that \u201cto change the world\u201d requires use of power, and that for Western Evangelicals, \u201cthe working theory of power is still influenced by Constantinian tendencies toward conquest and domination.\u201d[2]<\/a><\/p>\n

The \u201cpossibility\u201d that Hunter describes in \u201cEssay III: Toward a New City Commons: Reflections on a Theology of Faithful Presence,\u201d is toward a better and more \u201cChristian\u201d way of thinking and bringing about change. It is not through conquest, and it is not through revivalist attempts to bring back an old American version of Christendom to society. It is not primarily through political engagement or religious conversion. No, in our pluralist society, Hunter believes that the Church must embody a \u201cfaithful presence\u201d in all levels of society.<\/p>\n

How does the Church do this, according to Hunter? By taking on the imagination of the people of God in exile, and heeding the prophetic Word of God to Jeremiah: \u201cThus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel, to all the exiles whom I have sent into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon: Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat their produce\u2026But seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare\u201d (Jer 29:4-7). The task for the Church in this time and place is to serve the common good; to \u201cincarnate\u201d herself in the communities in which she lives, to work for human flourishing in every way; to be a sign of the \u201cnew creation\u201d that is to come. For the people of God in Jeremiah\u2019s time, \u201cfaithful presence\u201d meant suffering faithfully without expecting any sense of \u201chomecoming\u201d in their lifetime. It was a call to endure for the sake of their children\u2019s children. The modern American Church has never imagined life in this way.<\/p>\n

In the first chapter of his third essay, Hunter proposes two primary challenges to living out his theology of faithful presence: \u201cdifference\u201d and \u201cdissolution.\u201d For the purpose of this post, I will comment briefly on Hunter\u2019s discussion on \u201cdifference\u201d in an era of pluralism.<\/p>\n

Hunter believes that one of the primary tasks of \u201cfaithful presence\u201d is to deal with \u201cdifference.\u201d One of the three ways (\u201cdefensive against,\u201d \u201crelevant to,\u201d and \u201cpurity from\u201d) the Church has dealt with \u201cdifference\u201d is to take a defense posture over-against culture. He writes: \u201cWithin the \u2018defensive against\u2019 paradigm, difference is always seen as \u2018danger,\u2019 or at least a potential threat. The \u2018other\u2019 who embodies that difference is a stranger and is construed as either a potential ally (through conversion) or as an enemy. Pluralism has been massively threatening, and in the face of it the elaborate structure of parallel institutions these Christians created has functioned as a network of plausibility structures that have allowed them to live in a pluralistic world without really participating in it.\u201d[3]<\/a><\/p>\n

He poses the question of xenophobia for today\u2019s context: \u201cHow do we think about and relate to those who are different from us and to a world that is not our world?\u201d[4]<\/a> Here, Hunter is careful to include the need for awareness about power differential in this conversation of how to encounter the \u201cother.\u201d It\u2019s not only that the Church must learn to relate to the Muslim, the Sikh, the refugee, the \u201cillegal\u201d immigrant, the transgender in our midst. The Church must do this believing that this land is not<\/em> our land. The New Testament version of this same imagination is Peter\u2019s first epistle. \u201cFaithful presence\u201d means to live, in the words of Stanley Hauerwas and Will Willimon, as \u201cresident aliens\u201d in this nation that the Church used to believe belonged to her.[5]<\/a><\/p>\n

For Hunter, at the end of the day, \u201cfaithful presence\u201d means \u201cfriendship\u201d in the Anabaptist sense. When the Word became flesh and dwelt among us<\/em> (John 1), God communicated to the world that place and presence matter. To be a faithful presence of in a particular time and place, the Church must remember that she was once a stranger in a foreign land, and God was faithful and welcomed her in. Therefore, the Church must learn to welcome the stranger to a \u201cworld that is not our world.\u201d[6]<\/a><\/p>\n

[1]<\/a> Greg Gilbert, \u201cBook Review: To Change the World, by James Davison Hunter,\u201d 9marks.org,\u00a0https:\/\/www.9marks.org\/review\/change-world\/<\/a>\u00a0(accessed March 15, 2018).<\/p>\n

[2]<\/a> James Davison Hunter,\u00a0To Change the World: The Irony, Tragedy, and Possibility of Christianity in the Late Modern World<\/em>\u00a0(New York: Oxford University Press, \u00a92010),\u00a0274.<\/p>\n

[3]<\/a> Ibid., 219.<\/p>\n

[4]<\/a> Ibid., 200.<\/p>\n

[5]<\/a> Stanley Hauerwas and William H. Willimon,\u00a0Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony<\/em>, 25th ed. (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 2014), 1.<\/p>\n

[6]<\/a> Ibid., 240-1.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

James Davison Hunter, a faithful Anabaptist, believes that every good idea arises out of friendship. His book, To Change the World, is dedicated to a friendship out of which the book emerged.[1] And friendship, understood as \u201cfaithful presence\u201d, is a central component to Hunter\u2019s solution to the Evangelical desire to \u201cchange the world.\u201d The subtitle […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":101,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17121","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","cohort-lgp8"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17121","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/101"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17121"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17121\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17122,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17121\/revisions\/17122"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17121"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17121"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17121"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}