Prodigal Kiwi(s) Blog: God’s Distinctive Alternative

Paul writes – Good friend Steve Taylor very helpfully, and unknowingly in terms of timeliness, directed to me to an essay by Miroslav Volf that I haven’t read for years. It couldn’t be timelier as I continue to engage Stanley Hauerwas and themes of missional “distinctiveness”, “transformation”, “discipleship”, lived ethics, and gospel and culture engagement. It’s at this intersection that today’s reflection extends the first post in this series.

Johann Baptist Metz (liturgy and the implications of the churches “dangerous memory”), Daniel Hardy (thinking and practising Christian faith with the world), William Cavanaugh (theopolitical imagination), Kenneth Leech (subversive orthodoxy), Graham Ward (Cultural Transformation and Religious Practice), and Herbert McCabe are all helping, but it’s Steve’s timely reference to Volf that is helping me more helpfully hold these various voices in conversation with my own.

“Christian difference is always a complex and flexible network of small and large refusals, divergences, subversions, and more or less radical alternative proposals, surrounded by the acceptance of many cultural givens. There is no single correct way to relate to a given culture as a whole, or even to its dominant thrust; there are only numerous ways of accepting, transforming, or replacing various aspects of a given culture from within…”

From Miroslav Volf "When Gospel & Culture Intersect" - Pentecostalism in Context: Essays in Honor of William W. Menzies edited by Wonsuk Ma and Robert P. Menzies, Sheffield Academic Press, 1997, pp. 223-236).

“Christians do not come into their social world from outside seeking either to accommodate to their new home (like second generations immigrants would), shape it in the image of the one they left behind (like colonizers would), or establish a little haven in the strange new world reminiscent of the old (as resident aliens would) …. Christians are the insiders who have diverted from their culture by being born again…” (From here, and again a reminder via Steve).

Volf talks about the importance of “soft difference” – distinctiveness, most certainly, but with the kind of “softness” that opens space for the other. We live our Jesus-following identity from a place of genuine conviction, or as Graham Ward writes, from a particular “stand point” (defined by Ward as: the place from where I negotiate my Christian living and thinking in conversation with the contemporary word (p.4). I encounter and engage my ‘world(s)’ from a situated standpoint, from within particular narratives, beliefs, and relations (pp.72-85). It is the sum of who I am; of all that has shaped and formed me. This of course means I do operate out of multiple standpoints, because the Christian standpoint isn’t the only one I operate out of.

We read in the second quote above that we are distinct within culture (“in”, but not “of”). Further, we are not in culture for the sake of ourselves nor are we “resident aliens”, as Volf notes above.

We are distinct, but not in the sense of being apart from, or somehow not fully present within other communities. We are in culture, but our distinctiveness is in our informing narrative – that which shapes, informs, and gives significance to how we are in all the small, everyday, and ordinary ways; the “numerous ways”, as Volf reminds us, that we make a difference because of our having been caught up in God’s unfolding drama.

By means of “a complex and flexible network of small and large refusals, divergences, subversions, and more or less radical alternative proposals, surrounded by the acceptance of many cultural givens…” (Volf, above)

“…To make a difference, one must be different…” (Volf: ‘Soft Difference: Theological Reflections on the Relation between Church and Culture in 1 Peter’).

That “difference” however, is ever cognisant of and deeply immersed in the everyday challenges of being (and becoming more fully) human in the midst of both the power of death, brokenness and dysfunction, and, at the same time, the joys of life.

More on Volf’s article, “When Gospel and Culture Intersect: Notes on the Nature of Christian Difference”, in my next post.