To Change the World (3)

Hunter suggests that Christians hold a flawed theology of power.

The politicisation of everything is an indirect measure of the loss of a common culture and, in turn, the competition among factions to dominate others on their own terms. Our times amply demonstrate that is far easier to force one’s will on others though legal and political means or to threatened to do so than it is to persuade them or negotiate compromise with them (p.107).

World changing implies power and the implicit theories of power that have long guided their exercise of power is still influenced by Constantinian tendencies towards conquest and domination…. Thus it is not surprising that, in conformity to the spirit of the modern age, Christians conceive of power as political power. Christians, like most modern people, have politicized every aspect of public life and private life as well-from church/state issues, education, the media, entertainment and the arts, and the environment to family values, sexuality, and parenting. In this, they mistakenly imagine that to pass a referendum, elect a candidate, pass a law, or change a policy is to change culture. (p.275)

We need a new language for how the church engages the culture. It is essential to abandon altogether talk of “redeeming the culture”, “advancing the kingdom” “building the kingdom,” “transforming the world” “reclaiming the culture,” “reforming the culture” and “changing the world”. Christians need to leave such language behind them, because it carries too much weight. It implies conquest, takeover, or dominion, which in my view is precisely what God does not call us to pursue—at least not in any conventional, twentieth-or twenty-first century way of understanding these terms.

It isn’t just the Constantinian temptation the church must repudiate, but more significantly, the orientation towards power that underwrites it. The proclivity towards domination and toward the politicization of everything leads Christianity today to bizarre turns; turns that, in my view, transform much of the Christian public witness into the very opposite of the witness Christianity is supposed to offer. (p.280).

Jesus had a different approach to power (Matt 5:42-44).We need a new philosophy of power.