Salt and Light: The Church in the World

From discussions here to those on Faith and Practice (see comments) and The World from My Window (3-part series) to a couple of Mark Driscoll's sermons, I've been giving more thought recently to the nature of the Church's interaction with and relationship to the world as a gospel-proclaiming voice. I hope to flesh out some of my conclusions in the coming days in contrast with Carl Henry's approach in The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism.

For the meantime, Tim Keller of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Manhattan discusses Christians as "Salt and Light in Culture" in another of the Desiring God Conference video interviews. At the end of the day, I don't know whether his vision of Christianity as salt and light would look like mine, but I really like the way he describes his vision:

I think that the "cultural transformationalists" have underemphasized the importance of thick, strong Christian communities who serve as counter-cultures. The Anabaptists and the Hauerwasians and all that—they've put all the emphasis on really, really strong Christian counter-cultures that show the world how people ought to live, rather than trying to get out there into the culture and bring your Christian worldview into it.

I don't know why you can't do both. I have never been able to understand why you can't do both. I think that the traditions tend to . . . each tradition tends to be weak because it doesn't do the other.

It seems to me that the worst of all worlds is when 1) cultural redeemers live in culture and think they're redeeming it when they're really just wallowing in the world, while 2) separatists create a counter-culture and think they're confronting mainstream culture with true spirituality when they're really just wallowing in religious pride.