“The world … does not disappear when Christians withdraw from it, and it does not become Christian when Christians gain power over it.” Even so, Christians have tended to one or the other response to the world, explained James Davison Hunter during his Parchman Lectures at Baylor University’s Truett Theological Seminary, Nov. 9-10.
Hunter is LaBrosse-Levinson Distinguished Professor of Religion, Culture, and Social Theory at the University of Virginia, where he has taught for 40 years. Of his 10 books, he is perhaps best known for his 2010 book To Change the World: The Irony, Tragedy, and Possibility of Christianity in the Late Modern World.
Instead of withdrawing or seeking power, Christians need to develop a public theology that accounts for responsibilities of Christians and the church in a nihilist world.
Such a theology requires and enables the discernment needed to embrace the good God has created while resisting the world’s patterns that deform the good, thereby embodying the church’s responsibility faithfully, Hunter explained.
He grounds his call for a public theology in Romans 12:1-2: “Therefore, … do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind” (NIV).
Christian responses to the world
In his first lecture, “The World We Cannot Escape—But Must Engage,” Hunter described the world as bewildering in its complexity. Much of the complexity is manifested in the prolific institutions that structure the modern world.
Underlying these structures are culturally formed assumptions taken for granted and that form all facets of life—public and private, secular and Christian, Hunter explained. Through “familiarity and repetition,” they shape “what appears reasonable, necessary, and even faithful,” he said.
“Christians are no less susceptible to this influence than anyone else. Indeed, they may understand themselves to be resisting the surrounding culture” and in attempting to defend their faith “may become unfaithful in the name of faithfulness, not because their intentions are insincere, but because the cultural formation of their judgments has largely gone unexamined,” Hunter continued.
Christians, being shaped by the same underlying assumptions that shape the world, commonly respond to the world by retreating from it into what Hunter called “civic privatism” or by seeking to dominate the world through political power.
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Civic privatism leaves “too much of common life beyond the range of Christian responsibility,” Hunter said, while “political engagement … [interprets] too much of common life through the struggle of political power.” Both responses are inadequate, he said.
Christians shaped by the world
In his second lecture, “The World We Cannot See—But Must Discern,” Hunter elaborated on culturally formed assumptions shaping and guiding the modern world.
Culture is authoritative to the point of defining reality, Hunter said, and forms what he called “cultural logics,” or ways of reasoning. These logics aren’t about truth but are about meaning making, he said. They define what is reasonable, responsible, unavoidable, and authoritative.
Culture produces and reinforces these ways of reasoning over time and by immersion—through repetition, social institutions, and credentialing, Hunter explained.
Christian theology has the tools to deal with these cultural ways of reasoning, Hunter asserted. To bring these tools to bear, Christians must engage in discernment.
Distinguishing discernment from sincerity, Hunter said: “Sincerity concerns whether people act according to what they believe. Discernment concerns whether the beliefs, interpretations, and necessities governing their actions remain answerable to God, the God they profess to serve.”
He asserted: “Christians may understand themselves as defending the church, while accepting assumptions about authority, institutional survival, and the exercise of power that fundamentally compromises calling.”
Regarding sincerity, Hunter said, “Theological convictions do not automatically free believers from the cultural circumstances in which their judgments have been formed.”
Thus, theological judgment—discernment—is needed, he contended: “What has become obvious can be questioned. What appears necessary can be examined. What is regarded as responsible can be judged against the purposes it claims to serve.”
“The task is not to escape culture—which is impossible; there is no ‘outside the culture’—but to discern [culture’s] authority within the circumstances of the Christian life.”
As a concluding challenge, Hunter said: “The question, then, is not simply how these logics shape the surrounding world, but how they have shaped Christianity itself, including the ways Christians understand and pursue their most cherished purposes.
“The patterns of an age may be most difficult to resist precisely when they have become a part of what faithfulness is thought to require.”
Christian conformity to the world
In his third and final lecture, “The World Within Us—But Must Resist,” Hunter described political nihilism and how Christians might be faithful within a nihilistic world.
While being thoroughly convinced “ours is an age of nihilism,” Hunter said most people are not nihilists themselves and live as though truth really does matter.
He defined nihilism as “a historical condition [of modernity] in which the metaphysical, epistemological, and moral frameworks that once supplied broadly authoritative understandings of truth, goodness, human dignity, and purpose have lost much of their capacity to order common life.”
“The problem was not merely the collapse of particular beliefs, but the loss of an authoritative horizon within which beliefs and purposes could be understood as binding,” Hunter explained.
As shared norms have lost their authority, a “proliferation of competing moral claims” has taken their place, he said.
The struggle “to establish meaning and value, new claims to moral authority, and new forms of collective identification, through which people might recover a sense of direction and significance … becomes increasingly vulnerable to the exercise of power,” Hunter said.
Nihilism’s cultural logic thoroughly politicizes all aspects of life. The struggle for power leads to political domination, seeing competing moral claims as enemies that must be defeated, even humiliated, he said.
This way of reasoning rests on grievance, injury, loss, and brokenness, and “becomes a source of moral authority, transforming experience and powerlessness into an imperative to act” and a source of collective identity and solidarity, Hunter said.
This cultural logic is common to those on the left and the right, he adding, noting: “Our deeply polarized society thus possesses an emerging common culture. Each side seeks to impose its understanding of moral and social order upon the other, regarding its own pursuit of domination as the necessary defense of cherished goods.”
Christians are not immune. They also operate according to the cultural logic of nihilism and contradict their stated Christian commitments, Hunter asserted.
Christian responsibility in the world
Returning to Romans 12:1-2 and Paul’s injunction to “not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind,” Hunter called for “a public theology adequate to the historical circumstances of our age, one sufficiently grounded in Scripture [and] the theological traditions of Christianity.”
This theology should understand “the deep structures of contemporary culture and [be] sufficiently prophetic and pastoral to help the church recognize both [the church’s] responsibilities and its accommodations” in the world, Hunter said.
Such a public theology should help “Christians understand before judging, discern before acting, resist without hatred, and embrace without illusion” through a “counter-formation” as immersive as the cultural formation of this world—“communal and institutional, as well as personal,” he said.
The church’s “calling is to become more fully the body of Christ, a people united to him, formed by his love, and drawn into God’s purposes for the world,” Hunter said.
To be faithful to this call, Christians must embrace the world God created and loves and resist “the cultural powers that deform” God’s purposes for the world, he said.
Parchman Lectures
Begun in 1999, the Parchman Endowed Lectures seek to “bring world-renowned theologians to the Baylor campus and enable George W. Truett Theological Seminary to make a significant contribution to the realm of theological dialogue and the life of the church.”
Lecturers have included Rowan Williams, James K.A. Smith, Alister McGrath, Richard Mouw, Scot McKnight, Bill Leonard, Ben Witherington III, Eugene Peterson, Walter Brueggemann, and N.T. Wright.
Past lectures can be accessed here.
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