Mission in a Pluralist Society
Mission in a Pluralist Society
o society is totally pluralist. In every society there is what Peter Berger calls a "plausibility structure"-a set of beliefs and practices that render some beliefs plausible and some implausible in that society.' Every society has certain agreed-upon ways of doing things, and certain assumptions that are normally not questionedperhaps not even consciously held. And, thank God, no society can completely destroy human freedom. Modern totalitarian states in Europe and elsewhere have made, and are making, strenuous efforts to do so, but the human spirit still finds some place for the exercise of free choice, even if it is the choice of martyrdom. On the other hand there is no society in which freedom of choice is unlimited. It is well known that the Christian faith shows more vigor and expansive power in many societies that place severe limits on human freedom than in many societies-such as those of western Europe-that claim to be both pluralist and free.
Christianity was born into a religiously pluralist world, and in that sense pluralism does not present a new problem for the Church. But that world did not have as its "plausibility structure" the assump tions and practices that prevail in the free pluralist democracies of western Europe. In this situation, the Church does confront something new, something it has not yet learned to come to terms with. It is in the free democracies of western Europe that the Church has been in steepest decline for more than a century. The Church seems to cope with tyranny better than with freedom.
A contribution to the Festschrift for Lukas Vischer.
We have to confront the paradoxical relation between freedom and truth. In the "free" societies of western Europe it is axiomatic that free inquiry is the necessary condition for the attainment of truth. Truth, it is held, will be found only where there is freedom to question all assumptions, and therefore will only be found in a society that grants that freedom. Yet it is one of the marks of contemporary European thought that there is a profound skepticism about the possibility of knowing the truth. Indeed pluralism is celebrated as the proper social implication of the fact that truth is unknowable. This typical assertion of the liberal democratic society contrasts with the saying of Jesus: "If you continue in my word, you are truly my disciples and you will know the truth and the truth will make you free" (John 8:31f.). Is it freedom that enables us to find the truth, or is it the truth that enables us to find freedom? That saying of Jesus precipitated the most furious attack by his hearers, an attack that led straight into his further declaration that these hearers were not free as they supposed, but were the slaves of sin. They were not free to know the truth; only the truth could set them free.
When this claim is really understood, the response of the liberal Western intellectual is no less angry. The basic dogma of liberal society, which when questioned may also provoke extreme anger, is the dogma that the human reason and conscience have the freedom, and the capacity, to search out and know the truth. European societies have in general accepted the invitation of Descartes to seek indubitable certainties upon which could be founded a structure of knowledge formulated with the clarity of mathematics. But this Cartesian program, so far from resting on indubitable knowledge, concealed a vast and unproved assumption - namely, that the cosmos and human nature are such that it is possible for us to know the truth of things without dependence on any word from the Creator. When one thinks about it, it is an astounding assumption. But it is normally unques tioned in the "free" societies of western Europe. Free inquiry, unfettered by any dogma, is seen as the way to establish truth. If there be divine revelation, it must produce its credentials before the bar of free inquiry. The human person, apart from divine grace, has the freedom to know and also the right to know the truth. When this fundamental dogma of liberal society is questioned, there is the same anger as that which erupted at the words of Jesus I have quoted.
The Cartesian program created a dichotomy in the human quest for truth. It created on the one hand the idea that there is a world of objective facts that can be known without the involvement of any subjective commitment, and on the other hand the idea that what falls outside of this category is personal opinion and unreliable. It created a dichotomy between public doctrine and personal opinion. In respect of things falling into the second category. one could only say "I believe"; in respect of the first category one would say, "I know," or rather-to eliminate the subjective element altogether - "it is the case." In respect of the first category, Western society is not pluralist. All educated people are expected to know "what is the case." The element in our liberal culture that occupies the scientific part of the university campus does not accept pluralism. Here there are, of course, differences of judgment about many matters, but these differences are not accepted as mere matters of taste or personal preference. They are the occasion for vigorous debate, experiment, testing, and argument. Scientists who differ do not say to each other, "That may be true for you but it is not true for me." In the other part of the campus, the part occupied by the arts and humanities, it is different. Here pluralism reigns. The words true and false are out of place. Here the talk is of "experience." And here, of course, is where, at least in British universities, theology is located. Here we do not talk about "what is the case," but about "experience," about "values," about what is personally "meaningful" to oneself. Here, even in the theological faculty, we no longer say "God spoke to Moses," but rather "Moses had a religious experience." We do not say "Jesus rose from the dead and the tomb was left empty," but rather "The disciples had a series of religious experiences." And here, therefore, pluralism reigns.
Thus the two poles of our knowing-the objective and the subjective - have fallen apart. In truth, of course, all knowing has both a subjective and an objective pole. It is subjective in the sense that there is a knower, who is a subject, and the range and accuracy of his knowledge will depend on factors personal to himself-his diligence, his honesty, his imaginative power, and of course the cultural tradition by which his mind has been formed. But there is also the objective pole, that which the knower seeks to know, that for which he gropes and struggles, that which alone can give him the satisfaction of saying, "Now I know." This falling apart of the poles is the disaster that threatens our culture with disintegration. It has created on the one hand the illusion that there is a world that can be known without the knower accepting any personal responsibility for his knowing, and on the other hand the skepticism that concludes that everything falling outside this kind of knowledge is merely personal opinion. And it is inevitable that this skepticism begins to infect the more confident half of our culture, the scientific part, so that we reach the stage at which any claim to know the truth is regarded as merely a disguised assertion of power. Inevitably also such a world becomes a meaningless world because the self is alone in a wide sea where there are no fixed points from which one could take bearings. Of course, whatever the literary theorists and the philosophers may say, most people most of the time will live their lives on the assumption that there is a real world about which one can be either well informed or else mistaken, a world about which one may make statements that are true or false. People will also continue to use this knowledge to manipulate the world with ever-increasing ingenuity to serve the purposes they choose to embrace. But when it comes to the question, "What purposes are in fact appropriate for a human being to choose?" there can be no answer. It is a matter of personal opinion. The truth about human nature and destiny is not a matter of knowledge; it is just a matter of belief. And belief is seen as what we have to depend on when knowledge is not available.
Yet, as Augustine said (in his famous Credo ut intellegam), we believe in order to understand. All knowing of a reality beyond the self is a venture of faith for which we have to take responsibility. Responsibility is a personal category, and all knowing is personal, because it is persons who know, or seek to know, or claim to know. The Cartesian program of impersonal knowledge, seeking a basis for indubitable certainty within the human mind itself and without de pendence upon grace, has led to skepticism about the whole possibility of knowing the truth. And if truth is ultimately unknowable, we are left only with the will -the will to power. And so instead of speaking about "true" and "false," we talk about "values." "Values," as we understand them, are not "facts." They are a matter of personal choice. They are an expression of what we want, of the will. The pluralist society thus becomes a battleground for conflicting wills. We do not seek to convince one another of the truth of what we believe, because truth is unknowable. We can only fight for space to practice our chosen values.
What is the mission of the Church in a society that is pluralist in this sense?
The first thing to be said is negative. The mission of the Church in this kind of society is not to promote "values." This is the role society tends to cast us in. In my own country at least, the Church is widely regarded as a "good cause" that deserves some support, even if one does not accept its dogma. And it is easy for the Church to accept this role casting, for we are all part of the wider society. It seems to me that there are two dangers in this situation. The first is that we try to justify ourselves by our good works. The churches are engaged in a wide variety of social services. This is, of course, right and proper. But it can lead to a blunting of the sharpness of the challenge that the Church's dogma offers to the prevailing dogma of society. If it is not clear that the Church is affirming and offering as public truth a belief about the nature and destiny of human life that is sharply at odds with the assumptions of society, the "good works" will lose their proper character as signs of the presence of another regime, another jurisdiction.
The second danger is that our understanding of evangelism is distorted. If the Church is a "good cause" standing for certain "values," then the important thing is to increase the number of people who support these "values." Evangelism, against a background of declining numbers, begins to look like a rather desperate effort to support this "good cause." It becomes tinged with anxiety. It loses its character as the announcement of good news, as the proclamation of truth, saving truth, truth that is true and decisive even if those who acknowledge it are a small minority.
In seeking to commend the Christian faith as public truth, we have to consider how it is to be communicated in ways that can be effective in the pluralist culture of which we are a part. A missionary going from his native culture to communicate the gospel to people living in another culture has to steer a path between two opposite dangers. By asserting the radical newness of the Good News he may fail to communicate at all; his message remains incomprehensible. Or, in the effort to be understood, he may so adjust his presentation to the culture of those he addresses that it fails to challenge that culture and is simply absorbed into it. The gospel is comfortably domesticated within the culture. A foreign missionary must learn the language if he is to communicate at all, and that means that he must use words and phrases and concepts that have been wholly shaped by the receptor culture. The words he uses will not mean exactly what he intends them to mean until the gospel has been accepted and the life of the Church has begun to develop, and the old (pagan) words begin to be filled with new meaning. Crucial to this process is the translation of the Bible. It is when the Bible is available in the language of the people that the old pagan words become filled with new meaning because they are used in a new context. They become part of a new and different story, and therefore of a new and different way of understanding the whole human situation. I am thinking of my own experience among the Tamil churches in South India. It is obvious that Christians use such words as God, sin, and grace with a meaning different from the meanings that the same Tamil words have for Hindu neighbors. A former colleague of mine pointed out that the biblical verse `Jesus Christ came into the world to save sinners" has for a Tamil Hindu the meaning "Jesus Christ came into the world to provide free food and lodging for dropouts." It has the meaning that is has for Christians only because it is understood from the story of the Bible as a whole. The Hindu will come to understand them in this sense only by becoming part of the community that shapes its life by the story the Bible tells. If the Bible story ceases to have the decisive place, then the words will revert to their old meaning.
The foreign missionary, going from one culture to another, is unable to escape these issues. If we think of a missionary approach to Western pluralist society, the problem is much more difficult. The culture we have to address has grown out of originally Christian roots. Although most of the philosophers and other writers who were the leaders of the movement of Enlightenment in the eighteenth century were quite consciously setting out to attack and destroy the Christian belief system, the churches have to a large extent conceded the ground those leaders claimed. The main intellectual effort of Christian thinkers has been to establish the "reasonableness" of Christianity. The effort has been to show that Christian belief-with some adjustments - could be accommodated within the belief system of the "modern" world. "Religion" could be and must be kept "within the limits of reason." The churches (or at least the non-Roman churches) largely surrendered control of education into the hands of governments who were primarily concerned to train young people in the science and technology that would equip their nations to compete in the world markets. Christian teaching became a marginal part of public education or was excluded altogether. The intellectual framework of public life, which had been shaped by the biblical story, was now shaped by a quite different story- namely the stories of the rise to greatness of the various nation-states of Europe and, later, the story of the rise of civilization. European Christians, like other citizens, are formed intellectually from the earliest stages of their education within this understanding of the human story. It is very hard for them to question it. The missionary problem here is not one of communication. We already know the language because it is our own language and we use words every day with the meaning that our culture gives them. The problem is domestication. We are so much a part of our culture that it is hard to question it. We largely accept the "plausibility structure" and try to adjust our beliefs to fit it.
Why, then, does the Bible not function in our culture in the way that I have described its functioning in - for example - the culture of the Tamil people? I suggest that part of the answer lies in the fact that both "fundamentalists" and "liberals" have read the Bible through the spectacles provided by post-Enlightenment culture. Because that culture has created a dichotomy between "facts" and "values," the former being matters of impersonal knowledge, known without the possibility of doubt, and the latter being matters of personal experience and choice, it has perhaps been natural that the Bible should be interpreted in one or the other of these two ways. Both parties to this lamentable dispute about the Bible are children of the Enlightenment. For the fundamentalist, the Bible is a collection of indubitable facts of the same kind as those which scientific textbooks claim to provide. Where they differ, the Bible is right and science is wrong. The character of the Bible as a summons to the adventure of faith, calling for interpretation in different circumstances, requiring the exercise of fallible human judgment at every stage through the original writing and the many translations to the contemporary reader-in fact, all the subjective elements in the formation and reception of the Bible - are played down. By contrast the liberal sees the Bible as a record of "religious experience," with all the variety that this implies. The emphasis is not on the Bible as a canonical whole, but on the many different threads of human experience that have gone into the making of it. The Bible represents simply an element in the story of human culture. It cannot confront and address human culture. If the dialogue between fundamentalists and modern culture is a dialogue of the deaf, with the liberals there is no dialogue at all, only a variety of voices within one human society.
It seems to me that the gospel can only be communicated to our pluralist society by communities that take the Bible as the fundamental framework of their thinking, as the way they understand the world and the human story. To live in this way is not to pretend to know the whole truth or to be possessed of indubitable knowledge. All knowing (and it cannot be repeated too often) is a venture for which we must take responsibility, knowing that we can be wrong. To live in the world of the Bible, with all the tensions that are within the Bible story, to take it as the framework within which we try to understand and find our way through the perplexities of living now, is to be embarked on a journey with the confidence that we have a reliable clue for our exploration - not that we know the whole truth.
In my experience the great difficulty we face in commending this way to others is the persistence of the Cartesian illusion that there is available to us a kind of knowledge that cannot be doubted. When one seeks to commend the Christian faith to people in our society, one is met by the question "But can you prove that it is true?" It is obvious that if one were to offer some "proof," something supposedly more certain than the Christian story, something by which that story could be "proved" to be the truth, there would have to be further search for the proof that the alleged certainty was certain. One would be embarked on an infinite regress. What has to be challenged is the assumption that there exists some basis for knowledge that is more reliable than God's revelation in Jesus Christ and in the whole story of which his story is the crucial part. And when it becomes clear that there is no such indubitable certainty, the easy move is a relapse into skepticism. All claims to know the truth are discounted. If we cannot have the whole truth so guaranteed that we need accept no responsibility and take no risks, then we will abandon the search for truth altogether. This is the final failure of nerve, and it is already manifest in the kind of pluralism that regards all ultimate beliefs as equally acceptable and equally unreliable. It is a sign of approaching death.
The Church is called to bear witness to the gospel not only as truth for the personal life but as public truth. It goes without saying that in our pluralist society Christianity is tolerated as a personal opinion, and Christians are free to associate together for the expression of their belief. But Christianity is not tolerated as a factor in the argument about public truth. I have already referred to the role of the schools - the primary factor in the dissemination of public truth. There was a time when the Christian faith provided the overall framework within which children were intellectually formed. This is no longer so. Even where provision is made for "religious education," this is marginal, and - at least in contemporary Britain - it is concerned with the world religions, among which Christianity is only one among equals. But the important point- as Muslim parents in Britain are saying with increasing anger -is that the curriculum as a whole is based on the assumption that the world can be understood and can be satisfactorily managed without reference to the hypothesis of God. It is not that education is neutral. There is no possible neutrality. As the result of their schooling children come to believe some things and not others. They do not leave school with minds unshaped by any creed. Their minds are indeed shaped by a very definite creed, but it is not the one Christians repeat in church.
One could multiply illustrations of the point I am seeking to make about public doctrine. A psychiatrist, a sincere and practicing Christian, was asked whether in her dealings with patients she made reference to her Christian faith. She replied that this would of course be unprofessional conduct and therefore forbidden. Asked if her psychiatric training was a help in her life in church, she answered that it was. The church was an arena where she was free to be a psychiatrist, but the profession was not an arena where she was free to be a Christian.
There are economists who are sincere Christians and who (in a Christian milieu) will discuss the bearing of the Christian faith upon the theory and practice of economics. They would not have the same freedom to make the Christian doctrines about economic behavior part of their public teaching. Birmingham University is shortly to appoint a lecturer in Muslim economics - financed from Muslim sources. I have not heard that any university has appointed a lecturer in Christian economics, or that any Christian agency has offered the funds for such an appointment. There are sincere Christians in the British Parliament. It would be very unusual to hear a theological argument used in a parliamentary debate on an issue of economics or social welfare.
When a Christian writer puts forward arguments such as those of the preceding section, it is often assumed that what is being proposed is some sort of theocracy, a return to the "Christendom" synthesis in which the Church could employ the coercive power of the state. Such a return is of course impossible, and would be undesirable even if it were possible. It is of the very essence of the gospel that it calls for a freely given personal response. We touch here again on the paradox of freedom. According to the word of Jesus in the passage quoted earlier, we are not naturally free. Freedom is Christ's gift because he is the truth. But God gives us freedom to refuse the gift of freedom. Yet the freedom is still his gift, for we have nothing that is not his gift. Perhaps the crucial word is another from St. John's Gospel: "No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him" (John 6:44). The fact that the cross stands as the central Christian symbol must forever forbid the identification of the gospel with political power. The Church's witness to the gospel must always be made in the knowledge that the manifest reign of God can only be at the end when he brings all things to final judgment, that for the present age the reign of God must be veiled in the weakness and foolishness of his Church, and that it is God alone who can reveal to people his presence within this veil. Here is the crucial difference between Christianity and Islam.
We do not have to choose, however, between two alternatives -between a Christian theocracy on the one hand and, on the other, a society in which Christianity is merely an option for private opinion. There is another possibility. At this point it seems essential to distinguish between two kinds of pluralism. I would like to call them "agnostic pluralism" and "committed pluralism." By the former I mean a situation in which it is assumed that ultimate truth is unknowable and that there are therefore no criteria by which different beliefs and different patterns of behavior may be judged. In this situation one belief is as good as another and one lifestyle is as good as another. No judgments are to be made, for there are no given criteria, no truth by which error could be recognized. There is to be no discrimination between better and worse. All beliefs and all lifestyles are to be equally respected. To make judgments is, on this view, an exercise of power and is therefore oppressive and demeaning to human dignity. The "normal" replaces the "normative." What is acceptable depends upon statistics. If a majority of people do this or believe that, then this is "normal" and no higher norm is available.
As an example of "committed pluralism" I would like to take the scientific community -what Michael Polanyi used to call "the republic of science." 2 The scientific community is pluralist in the sense that it is not controlled or directed from one center. Scientists are free to pursue their own investigations and to develop their own lines of research. They are free to differ from one another and to argue with one another. There are indeed "orthodoxies," but these are developed in the course of the cooperative work of scientists, not imposed from a commanding center. This kind of pluralism is very different from the "agnostic pluralism" I have described. It is different because there is a commitment to search for the truth, a commitment that implies the belief that the truth can be known- not fully and completely, but in part and with increasing depth and range and coherence. It is therefore not an anarchic pluralism, but a directed and committed one. It follows that the freedom to explore is exercised with recognition and respect for the limits established by the work of previous scientists. Some things have been learned and are accepted as true. They provide the guidance for what is still to be discovered. Scientists therefore rely upon and work within a very strong tradition. Because they believe that truth can be explored and to some extent known, and because some things have been learned and can be accepted as true, the scientist works within the tradition of what has already been established. Once again, because it is believed that truth may be known and because there is a commitment to seek to know more, where different scientists come up with different opinions, they are not simply left as the personal preferences of these different scientists. Because truth is at stake, the differences become a matter of argument. Experiment, testing, and further argument continue until one of the two views prevails or else some fresh way of seeing things enables the two views to be reconciled.
Granted that there are important differences between the data scientists work with and the data theologians work with. But these do not justify the huge discrepancy between the way scientists pursue their quest for knowledge and the way differences of religious belief are handled. After all, science is simply a very far-reaching development of the ordinary common sense we use to try to deal with the world. Our effort to know, to understand the world we live in and our situation within it, cannot be totally bifurcated into one area where truth is knowable and another where it is not. The universe is in some sense one, and the human knower is one person, not two. The idea that there is no third way between an agnostic pluralism and a despotic theocracy is another by-product of the split between a false objectivism and a false subjectivism. It is surely possible to envision, and therefore also obligatory to work for, a society that is pluralist in the sense that the scientific community is pluralist, a society that believes in the possibility of knowing the truth about human nature and destiny and that is committed to seeking further understanding. Within such a society the Christian Church would be free and would be in duty bound to put forth its belief with the fullest confidence into the public argument about all human affairs. It would not be "unprofessional conduct" to profess the Christian faith in the school classroom, or the university lecture room, or the psychiatrist's consulting room. There would always be room for other views, but they too would have to sustain their part in the public debate.
One of the conditions for the Church's faithful participation in such a pluralist society would be that the Church would have the same kind of respect for its tradition as the scientific community has for its scientific tradition. It must no longer encourage those who are "radical" only in the sense that they have lost their roots and are drifting with the current of contemporary fashion. While recognizing that all traditions are open to correction and development, it must ensure that those who undertake these tasks have first had a thorough apprenticeship in the tradition. I realize that this will be attacked as a recipe for authoritarianism, but I shall not be unduly worried by the attack. To question and criticize specific exercises of authority is a necessary duty, but to reject all authority is folly. Of course if truth is in principle unknowable, then any claim to speak the truth will be denounced as a mere attempt to exercise power. Science has become the most dynamic element in our culture because the scientific community has continued to believe that truth is knowable and that, insofar as it is known, it has authority. Science thrusts powerfully forward because it has strong traditions. The relatively anemic state of theological studies has arisen because we have so largely accepted the division of human knowing into two areas - one where knowledge is supposed to be objective, impersonal, and valid for all human beings of whatever culture or temperament, and another where all is subjective, dependent upon personal and cultural factors -and because we have allowed theology to be located in the second of these two wrongly demarcated areas.
I have argued that a claim that the Christian faith must be affirmed as a public truth does not mean a demand for a return to "Christendom" or to some kind of theocracy. It does not mean that the coercive power of the state and its institutions should be at the service of the Church. I have taken the example of the scientific community as one whose findings are emphatically part of public doctrine, not private opinion, but that does not seek the coercive power of the state in its support. But it will be immediately obvious that, in our society, as in any human society, there is no escape from the exercise of power. Governments take the advice of scientists in making laws about the conditions under which food is produced and sold, drugs are marketed, and houses are built. Moreover- and this is much more important-insofar as governments control the educational system they exercise a very powerful control over what the majority of people think and believe. There was a time when entrance to the universities of Oxford and Cambridge was conditional on professing the faith of the Nicene creed. The removal of that requirement was hailed as a great liberation. But, of course, it was not that all credal tests were removed. In effect another creed replaced the Nicene - the set of beliefs about the world and about human life that were inculcated in the curriculum of the schools. No one can now enter the universities without having mastered and internalized those beliefs.
The question about the use of the power of the state in matters of ultimate belief is being raised in an acute form in Britain at this time. There has already been strong dissatisfaction among Muslim parents who claim that the present school curriculum is systematically indoctrinating their children with beliefs that they regard as false. The reference is not at all to what goes on under the title of "religious education." The reference is to the curriculum as a whole that, to put the matter briefly, leads their children to live in a world from which God has been banished. Under the name of "assimilation" they are being prepared to be part of an atheist society. This smoldering resentment has been fanned into flames by the publication of Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses, and by the failure of the British courts to condemn this as blasphemy. To Muslims, blasphemy is the most serious of all possible crimes. To the vast majority of British people it is not a crime at all. If it has any importance it is merely that it may offend the sensitivities of a minority of Christians, Christians being themselves a minority of the population. For most British people the most serious crime is treason against the state, because the state has long ago replaced God as the ultimate authority. Words that threaten to undermine the state are punishable - and of course the business of spies and traitors is with words. But words that mock the authority of God are not punishable. To Muslims this seems wrong.
Certainly in a society that has effectively banished the Christian faith from its public doctrine, blasphemy laws could not be enforced. And laws that cannot be enforced are bad laws. But it is difficult to see how a society that acknowledges nothing as sacred can long remain a coherent society. If I may refer again to the example of the scientific community, it is clear that within this community, truthfulness in dealing with the fact is a matter of sacred obligation. A scientist who knowingly tampers with evidence would be excluded. Other communities have points of ultimate commitment, issues that are matters for expulsion. If these points were made a matter of mockery within the community in question, it would disintegrate. When Western Christendom fell apart in the seventeenth century and Europe's intellectual leaders turned to another vision of the human story, Europeans were driven to see the human story in terms of the stories of their several nations. The nation became the focus of ultimate commitment. And, as we know from bitter experience, the nation - even the best-is not a fit object for ultimate commitment. Can European society endure if nothing is sacred?
The Pope has called for the reevangelization of Europe. There has been a wide response to the call. What will a response require? What will be the nature of the Christian mission in and to this pluralist society, in which the last remains of total state control are being dismantled? Certainly it cannot mean an attempt to restore the hegemony of the Church over public life. Nor can it only mean the multiplication of the number of believers, although it must certainly not mean less than that. There certainly can be no reevangelization of Europe without the conversion of a great many Europeans to the Christian faith. But what will be the implications of such conversion? What, if one may use an ugly phrase, will be its behavioral content? It cannot be confined to the part of behavior that concerns personal and domestic affairs. It will have to include a questioning of the whole "plausibility structure" that governs the public life of the European democratic societies. And this is a formidable task that will call for both an immense intellectual effort and much courage.
What we are looking for is not a new "Christendom," but a society in which those whose thought and practice set the tone and direction of the different sectors of public life include a large number of Christian men and women who have thought through the implications of the Christian faith for those areas of the life of society. This requires, I think, the following:
1. Something that I can only call a recovery of nerve in the Church as a whole. The Church has been too eager to adapt its teaching to the creed of modernity and not energetic enough in challenging that creed. Plausibility structures are strong, and to those dwelling in them they seem eternal. And yet if one stands outside the structure for a moment, its fragility becomes apparent. What, for example, could be more absurd than the idea that the whole universe has come into existence by a series of accidents, and that it functions like a machine - constructed by nobody for no purpose? These absurdities are taught and accepted as public truth. The Christian faith, taken as a whole, gives an infinitely more rational account of the universe and of our experience in it than does the contemporary creed. Perhaps we are at a point in history similar to that in which the fathers of the Church did their great work in the first four centuries. They were part of a world that had lost the belief that truth was knowable. They were locked in the dualisms of matter and spirit (the "sensible" and the "intelligible"), and of human freedom and determinism ("virtue" and "fortune"). Through their profound reflection on and living out of what had been given in the incarnation of the Son of God, they were able to offer a new model for understanding the total human situation -the Trinitarian model-that provided the starting point for a whole new flowering of human culture.
But for anything similar to happen in our own day, we need courage. Specifically we need the courage to know that all knowing involves risk, and to hold as true what can be doubted and what a majority of our contemporaries do doubt-to hold it as true not jest for ourselves but for all. As in every claim to know something, the claim is made by a subject. It is saved from mere subjectivity by the fact that we make it public, proclaim it and test it out in all the situations and all the cultures of the human story. In that sense the mission of the Church is not only a proclamation of the gospel, but also an exegesis of the gospel, because it is by testing it out in every situation that we learn what it involves. We only know what it means to say, `Jesus is Lord" when we have embarked on the enterprise of obedience to him in all the infinite various contexts that make up the tapestry of human life.
2. That leads into the second requirement, which concerns the equipping of Christians to bring their secular employments under the obedience of Christ. This is a matter in which there are hardly any accredited teachers and we all need to be learners. I know this is nothing new. It has often been said (in Britain most notably by J. H. Oldham3), but little has been done. There is urgent need for the Church to give higher priority to the formation of groups of Christian men and women in particular sectors of public life. These would include education, industry, commerce, politics, drama, the arts, natural and social sciences, and historical studies. The groups would explore ways in which a Christian perspective can be developed in these areas, and ways in which this perspective can challenge and redirect contemporary practice. The object of the exercise, of course, would not just be to bring the participants to some greater clarity, but also to equip them to bring a Christian contribution to current practice by their speaking, writing, and action. The very fact that this has been so often said with so little result is evidence of the difficulty of the task. This is reason not for giving it up but for giving it more attention. And I wonder whether our relative failure in this matter has something to do with the timidity I referred to in the preceding paragraph. Such efforts by individual Christians in their secular work can be very lonely and difficult. They need the backing of a Church that is confident in its faith.
One could legitimately hope that efforts in this direction could lead to a situation in which leadership in many fields of public life is being given by those who are committed Christians and who are seeking to discover what Christian obedience means in these areas. Such leadership would help to convert society as a whole from an agnostic and anarchic pluralism to a committed and truth-seeking pluralism. And if the word leadership provokes the charge of "elitism," I am - once again - not seriously alarmed. To be elite (elect) is to be chosen for a task and to be responsible to the one who has chosen you. Elitism has become a bad word because those who should have seen their calling as one for responsibility have seen it as one for privilege. Such self-serving elites have brought just condemnation. But no society can be healthy without responsible leadership. To evade the calling to leadership out of fear of the charge of elitism is unworthy.
3. But the Church is much more than its leaders. Perhaps one of the weaknesses of former "frontier" activities such as I sketched in the preceding section was that they did not take seriously enough the ordinary life of the local congregation. It is easy to talk about "the Church" but to ignore or despise the ordinary local congregation, which can often be so slow moving and so inward looking. Yet this is where the Church actually exists, and it is futile to replace this concrete reality with an ethereal entity that is not visible in flesh and blood. It is in the local congregation of believing Christians that the courage is to be nurtured that will enable us to challenge our culture with the gospel. It is a well-established fact, at least in Britain, that the great majority of those who come to faith in Christ come through the witness of a local congregation. Here, in the midst of a world of illusions, is the place where truth is spoken and celebrated, where God is praised and thanked, and where God's grace is given and received to be poured out in care for the neighborhood. Here is where we learn to live in the story that the Bible tells, to affirm it as our own story, and to see our contemporary world in the light of the true story. Here is where we can learn (and this calls for study in local groups) to question the assumptions that are taken for granted in the world outside, where we can develop a certain godly skepticism regarding the things that are praised and celebrated in our societies. The local congregation is the only effective hermeneutic of the gospel. Europe was originally evangelized from the top down. Kings were converted and their peoples followed. If it is to be reevangelized, it will be from the bottom up. The thousands of local congregations throughout Europe need to be reaffirmed, encouraged, and enabled to be the centers from which a new way of seeing the world can dawn on a society that has lost the belief that truth can be known.