The discussion about To Change the World continues.
An excerpt from James Davison Hunter’s response:
I am mystified by how [Colson] could read this book and come to these conclusions. Let me reiterate this point of difference.
Colson and I agree that, as he says, “disengagement” is an “abdication of responsibility.” But what I have sketched is the exact opposite of disengagement. When I argue that the Christian Right and Left are overly politicized and drenched in a culture of resentement, what I am saying is that their framework for public engagement is a distinctly late-modern form of Constantinianism. What Colson is saying implicitly when he equates faithful presence with quietism is that I am separatist and, thus, anti-Constantinian. Indeed the Anabaptists are, in fact, anti-Constantinian—their engagement is defined as the opposition to all forms of Constantinianism while being dependent on it for its self-understanding. It is for this reason that I criticize the neo-Anabaptists just as heavily as I criticize the other two dominant political theologies.
Faithful presence, though, is post-Constantinian. It is so in two ways. First, it disentangles the life of the church from the life of America. Second, it decouples the public from the private. The “political” is just one way to engage the world and, arguably, not the most effective nor most humane way to do so. Faithful presence, then, is neither coercive nor quietistic. It is fully public, seeking to engage every sphere of the world by enacting a vision of shalom. This approach is not “insensitive to the social and cultural context in which Christians are called to live out their faithfulness”; it is quite simply the only way forward.