Engaging the world on faith’s terms

The following quotation is from Joseph Bottum in First Things, 2010-01 issue. The last paragraph contains a comment I mentioned to one or more of you, and the comment itself is about the book that I think would be good to read together. Quoting:

In 2008 our friend John G. Stackhouse, professor of theology and culture at Regent College, published a book we would have done well to take note of at the time: Making the Best of It: Following Christ in the Real World (Oxford University Press). As the title suggests, Stackhouse addresses Christian engagement with culture as always both unavoidable and provisional, an engagement “for the time being.” Thus, as Miroslav Volf has pointed out, Stackhouse steers between the Scylla of “a whole-scale transformation of the world” and the Charybdis of “building alternative enclaves in the world.” Since neither is realistic in any case, what does Stackhouse think is realistic?

The book proceeds largely by imaginative dialogue with such twentieth-century Protestant luminaries as C.S. Lewis, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer—drawing, along the way, on H. Richard Niebuhr’s famous “five ways” of relating Christ to culture. Brisk and blunt, Making the Best of It yields what Stackhouse describes as his own “hybrid” between “Christ the transformer of culture” and “Christ and culture in paradox.” Sometimes Christians will transform culture, and sometimes they will have to be countercultural—and often they will have to do both. That is the creative tension of Christianity in the world, which cannot be resolved until the end time.

This won’t satisfy those convinced that answers are easy, but its evident fidelity to what C.S. Lewis would have recognized as the Great Tradition may enable us to distinguish between engaging the world on faith’s terms, which is the disciple’s task, and engaging faith on the world’s terms, which is merely the project of religion’s cultured despisers.

Working out how to engage the world on faith’s terms without slipping into engaging faith on the world’s terms seems like an increasingly important thing to me these days, with our increased interaction with and cooperation with non-profit and government organizations.

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