Summary: <p>3 Paradigms of Engagement with Culture and Politics (Hunter, p. 213): <br>Defensive Against- Conservatives of all confessions have been angry about their loss of prominence, as well as anxious, on guard, and self-protective in ways that have created walls between themselves and the outside world. They have pursued this ideal by constructing a complex empire of parallel institutions in music, education, media, law, and the like that functions as a parallel universe to the secular world. <br>Those who embrace the Defensive Against paradigm continue to believe that the main problem in the world is secularization: if only God cold be re-enshrined in the social order, they assume, the culture would be restored. The church wold raging its standing in society, the family and local community would recover its Christian character, and the leading spheres of social life, including law and government, social welfare and reform, hospitals, education, etc. would again be influenced by the categories and codes of Christian moral understanding. Hunter p. 215. <br>Difference is always seen as danger and in creating alternative institutions they live in a pluralistic world without really participating in it. The engage in culture in ways that are often aggressive and confrontational.<br><br>Relevance To: The priority here is to identity with people’s felt needs and resonate better with the world around them. Theology is seen as divisive and is replaced with pseudo intimacy with celebrity Christians. <br>Their strategy is to downplay any difference between themselves and nonCHristians and the tendency is to lose their Christian distinctiveness.<br><br>Purity From: These take the view 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. The Church itself has been compromised by its complicity with the world’s sinfulness. The central task of the Church therefore is to extricate or dismiss itself from the contaminating forces of the world and by so doing, return to its authentic witness. Their engagement with culture and society is ironically a certain kind of disengagement. <br>The Church doing church within its own walls is seen as the only legitimate Christian expression. Christian witness exists exclusively in the in the Community of Christian believers when they meet together to worship and fellowship. The result is cultural disengagement and withdrawal from active presence in huge areas of social life.<br><br><br>Faithful Presence: <br>In so far as Christians acknowledge the rule of God in all aspects of their lives, their engagement with the world proclaims the shalom to come. Such work may not bring about the Kingdom but it is an embodiment of the values of the coming kingdoms and is thus a foretaste of the coming Kingdom. Even while believers wait for their salvation the net effect of such work will be a contribution not only to the good of the Christian community but to the flourishing of all. <br>Any good that is generated by Christians is only the net effect of caring for something more than the good created. if there are benevolent consequences of our engagement with the world, it is precisely because it is not rooted in a desire to change the world for the better but rather because it is an expression of a desire to honor the Creator of all goodness, beauty, and truth, a manifestation of our loving obedience to God, and a fulfillment of God’s command to love our neighbor.</p>
