12. The Gospel In The Public Square
12 THE GOSPEL IN THE PUBLIC SQUARE
In this final chapter, let us consider what part the gospel of the church has played in the public square – in the civic, political and economic life of society. The church once dominated the public square: the very architecture of such places demonstrates this fact.
The nineteenth century was a time of vigorous movement affirming that science now provided the guidance society needed while religion was relegated to the level of private personal opinion.
When we say that the gospel is truth, that it is therefore public truth, the truth that ought to govern all our lives, public or private, does that mean or imply, for example, that the church ought to seek to recover the kind of role that it had in the Middle Ages or in the Byzantine world of the first millennium?
Perhaps the first approach would be to look briefly at the ministry of Jesus and the relationship of his earthly ministry to the worldly powers. The first thing to be said is that Jesus obviously did not seek to control the world.
That was one of the temptations he faced in the wilderness. The devil’s questions, when he tried to tempt Jesus in various ways, are graphically described in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke: ‘If you are the Son of God, what are you going to do? How are you going to bring in the kingdom of God?’ These temptations, including those typical of worldly power, to provide food and demonstrate spectacular examples of power and so forth, were refused by Jesus, who then went unarmed to his ministry. That is the first point.
Then secondly there was Jesus in his teaching. He constantly warned the holders of power that their paths were leading to destruction. He could use harsh words when necessary. When somebody brought word from Herod that the king sought to destroy him, Jesus replied, ‘Go tell that fox, “I will drive out demons and heal people today and tomorrow, and on the third day I will reach my goal”’ (Luke 13:32).
Jesus repeatedly warned the holders of power in those times that unless they repented, their nation would be destroyed. And we know with what agony he gave that warning: ‘O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, if you had known the things that belong to your peace, but now your house is left to you desolate’ (Matthew 23:37–38 paraphrased). That terrible warning was fulfilled forty years later when the Romans wiped out the Jewish nation.
Thirdly, in the trial of Jesus before Pontius Pilate we see that Jesus acknowledged Pilate’s authority over him because that authority was granted by God. Jesus accepted the power and authority of Pilate as given to him by the Father, but adds: ‘… the one who handed me over to you is guilty of a greater sin’ (John 19:12). It is the abuse of that power and authority to create injustice which is the sin.
So three simple things could be said about Jesus: he did not seek worldly power; he warned those who held it that they were accountable to God; and, when he was being unjustly charged before a Roman governor, he acknowledged that the power and authority of Pilate was granted by the Father.
And so we come to this question: Who rules the public square? Who has the final authority? The Bible speaks about ‘the ruler of this world’. There is much in the writings of St Paul, as we know, about principalities, powers, dominions, authorities and rulers (Ephesians 6:11ff). In the teachings of Jesus there is a great deal about ‘the ruler of this world’. And remember the parable of Jesus about the strong man who was armed: only if a stronger man could overpower him would he be able to plunder his goods (Mark 3:26–27).
The coming of Jesus was the coming of the kingdom of God into this world. But the rulers of this world did not recognise him. As Paul said in his first letter to the Corinthians, ‘None of the rulers of this age understood it, for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory’ (1 Corinthians 2:8 paraphrased).
Those rulers – the principalities and powers – were people such as the priests and Pontius Pilate who between them represented the law and political authority. These were the representatives of ‘the ruler of this world’.
And when we come to Romans 13, that famous chapter, where Paul said that all the established powers were ordained by God – ’ordained in order to reward the good and punish the wicked’ – we find something of relevance to our times. They had an authority from God, they carried the sword; in other words they had the final power, and therefore it was the duty of all Christians to obey and pay taxes to them – something quite relevant to political discussions.
It is interesting to note that later in Romans 13 the Roman empire is described as ‘God’s minister to maintain justice and to punish the wicked’ – and then compare that with Revelation 13 where the same Roman empire is portrayed as ‘the beast out of the abyss’ recognisable by the seven horns, the seven hills on which the city of Rome was built.
These are two completely different pictures of the political order. Something similar occurs in the first book of Samuel where the people complain that they want to have a king like other people, and not just have prophets. Samuel is told to tell them what a disaster kingship could be in the ways kings exercised their powers over people.
But then in chapter 9, the next chapter, God tells Samuel to go and anoint Saul as king. So there is this ambivalence about political power. On the one hand, it is established by God. God anoints Saul. The political power and authority is ordained by God, says Romans 13. But on the other hand, political power and authority could become an instrument of demonic power.
How are we to understand this language of the New Testament where principalities, powers, dominions, rulers and authorities all play such a prominent part both in the Gospels and the Epistles? Let us consider what is said about them. In Colossians (1:15–20) we are told that all the principalities, powers, authorities and dominions were created in Christ and for Christ. They were therefore part of God’s good purpose for the world.
But in Colossians 2 we find that in the cross, Christ disarmed the powers and made a public exhibition of them. He did not destroy them; he disarmed them. So in the cross, the powers, the political order and religious order, the moral law – all those things that were part of the powers – were found to be the enemies of the living God, which meant that they had been unmasked and shown up. They had, as Paul said, been disarmed. They were not destroyed; they still existed, and they still exist.
In Ephesians 6, we read that our wrestling is ‘not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world’ (v. 12) and so forth. So these powers are on the one hand created for a good purpose, but on the other, they can become instruments of evil. It is essentially the same point we saw in the answer Jesus gave to Pilate on the question of power and authority.
Let us take some examples of how the gospel stood in relation to those powers. Slavery was part of the economic order of the first-century Hellenistic world. It was as integral a part of their economy as usury is of ours. The Bible forbids usury – the taking of interest on loans (Nehemiah 5:15). In modern usage usury means the charging of iniquitous rates of interest, but the charging of reasonable rates is nevertheless integral to our own present economic system. So in a similar way slavery was an inescapable fact, and one that could not be abolished overnight.
How did the gospel stand in relation to slavery? On the one hand, Paul said that in Christ there were neither slaves nor the free. The free were the slaves of Christ, and those who were slaves in society were the free sons and daughters of God. So in one sense, slavery was abolished within the church but in the economic order it still existed.
In we referred briefly to an almost perfect example of what this means in practice. In the little story contained in the letter to Philemon – that beautiful little letter at the end of the Pauline letters – there was a runaway slave called Onesimus. The name Onesimus means ‘helpful’. Apparently he had defrauded his master, probably by stealing money (at least reading between the lines, that is what it looks like).
He came into contact with Paul and through Paul was brought to the Christian faith and became a believer. So what did Paul do with him? He did not urge him to run away and become a free man. Instead, he sent him back to his owner, but with that wonderful letter, one of the most beautiful pieces of literature in the whole Bible. Paul wrote, ‘Formerly he was useless to you, but now he has become useful…’ (Philemon v.11). The message continued, ‘Now he is really what his name implies and I am sending him back to you in my place, as my representative, because I cannot come immediately. He is the one I am sending in my place’ (vv.16–17 paraphrased). So Onesimus returned to his master, still a slave, but at the same time with the status of an apostolic ‘nuncio’. He was the apostolic representative in the household of Philemon. This is a beautiful example of the relationship of the gospel to one of these powers.
We know it took a long time for the church to recognise that slavery must be completely abolished, not merely in the church. But there are many contemporary issues of a similar kind. We have to recognise the reality of these powers and structures of corporate life, which we cannot immediately abolish, and we have also to realise that they can become demonic.
Another very good example is race, which is a good thing in the sense that kinship and family ties are a good thing. Race is a kind of extended family. We are not all mutually interchangeable snooker balls. We exist as members of families and ethnic groups. This kind of bonding is a precious part of our being.
This was realised by English missionaries in South Africa who faced the issue of whether African converts were to be assimilated into English culture, as the Portuguese and the French had insisted, so that these converts should speak English and be part of English congregations. The English missionaries did not insist. These people would be free to have their own congregations where their own racial group could meet and worship in their own language; and that was good.
But when that understanding is made into an absolute that takes precedence over the unity that we all have in Christ, then it becomes an instrument of the devil. It becomes the sin of apartheid. So something which is good in itself, can become evil, an instrument of demonic power. One could give many similar examples.
We have been considering an economic order where slavery was integral to a society’s economy, and you could no more immediately abolish it than we could wipe out interest rates in the societies of today. Yet the gospel introduced into that economic order something which must eventually radically transform it and lead to the point where slavery would become intolerable.
Now if we view the political order in Romans 13, we see the bald statement that the powers that be were ordained by God, and that in practice meant the Roman empire, so these powers were to be obeyed and taxes were to be paid.
But, as Paul said, that also meant that they were ordained for a certain purpose. This was to establish justice, punish the wicked and support the good. Accordingly, it became the duty of Christians to remind those powers of the one to whom they were responsible, and of the purpose for which they existed. One of the saddest things of our time is that the churches are so timid about doing this.
I shall always remember the time I was a student taking part in a great conference. Two thousand students were being addressed by that great Archbishop of Canterbury, William Temple, whose speech was being broadcast live on BBC radio. The news suddenly broke of government action, which was a flagrant breach of promise.
I have always remembered that moment. I was sitting in a gallery looking sideways at the archbishop when he suddenly abandoned his notes and spoke straight into the microphone, live on BBC, and proclaimed, ‘The whole British people should rise up as one and say that a government which does this is not fit to exist for a day.’
We do not have many church leaders like that today, with the sort of courage to do that. But what he did was part of the duty of the church. This involves supporting the government, obeying laws passed by the elected government, paying taxes. That duty further involves constantly reminding the government of the purpose for which it exists. Governments must be reminded of the authority to which they are finally responsible – of the judgment seat before which they will finally stand.
And when political orders, governments of whatever kind, claim absolute power and authority for themselves, then they become the instruments of the devil. They become demonic.
To return to economics. Until perhaps the eighteenth century economics was regarded as a branch of ethics. It considered how one should behave in the getting and spending of money. It was a subordinate part of ethics, warning people against greed and covetousness and about fair wages and fair prices.
The medieval church tried, with considerable success, to ensure legislation was in place to provide for both fair wages and prices. The aim of economic life was not endless growth and the multiplying of goods and services beyond limit. It was to secure fairness, absence of covetousness and greed and the fair distribution of power.
The Old Testament prophets spoke vehemently against the unjust use of political wealth and in particular, of course, opposed the practice of usury, of taking interest on loans. And the medieval church sought to maintain that position.
The Jews, who by law were allowed to charge Gentiles interest, became the great early capitalists of the late medieval age because they could lend money on interest. But it was still regarded as contrary to clear biblical teaching that Christians should charge interest on loans.
It is interesting to note that even as late as Martin Luther, the German Protestant reformer who died in 1546, this prohibition on interest was absolutely maintained. John Calvin, the Genevan religious reformer who died in 1564, represented a more urban society and was prepared to agree that in some circumstances a modest charge of interest was legitimate for a Christian. But this whole arrangement was upset by the enormous and unprecedented inflation which followed the discovery of gold in the New World.
The vast quantities of available gold and silver, the two metals used for monetary exchange in Europe, sent prices rocketing and completely upset the whole attempted balance of wages and prices. The later exploitation of India and the Far East added to that explosive inflation so that the old medieval laws became unworkable.
But Christian preachers, right up to fairly recent times, still insisted that the economic life of a nation must be subject to biblical and Christian laws. But then we come to the Enlightenment, that Age of Reason in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries which eliminated divine revelation from the public sphere and taught that rational argument and rational calculation, not divine revelation or moral law, were the ways to guide economic life.
The great paradigm, the great model that controlled the thinking of the eighteenth century, was Sir Isaac Newton’s model of the universe, which was seen as a vast mechanism where particles of matter in atomic form moved ceaselessly in accordance with the laws of gravity and momentum.
By this marvellous balance this vast cosmos, from the stars to the falling of an apple, was maintained – in accordance with those laws – in perpetual harmony and perpetual motion. That model captivated the mind of the eighteenth century. And it was inevitable that it would also be applied in other fields.
And so we have the work of Adam Smith, usually thought of as the father of modern economics. He developed the concept of capitalism, or the capitalist system, which would operate on a similar basis.
Society, according to this concept, consisted of an infinite number of atomic individuals who were moved, not by gravitation but by self-interest. Every human being was a unit of self-interest who therefore sought to gain as much wealth for as little labour as possible. There you have the human equivalent of the law of gravity. It was the continual interaction of those individuals in accordance with this mechanical system, which enabled society as a whole to flourish.
In the famous illustration that Smith gave, when the butcher provided you with good meat for your Sunday dinner it was not an act of philanthropy. He was not trying to serve you, but rather make a profit for himself, but in making that profit he served you. There was, as Smith said, an invisible hand which had so ordered human affairs that the operation of self-interest in a free market would bring the maximum good to everybody.
It is important to note, however, that before Smith started on that enterprise he was a moral philosopher. He made it clear in his writings in the eighteenth century that this system would only work for the good of society as a whole if society was permeated by moral sentiments. He was a moral philosopher and those sentiments would have to prevail in society if that system was to work with the perfection Newtonian physics ascribed to the cosmos.
When we move on to the late nineteenth century, the century when a deliberate attempt was made to suggest that science had replaced religion as the ultimate arbiter of the public square, we find the works of Alfred Marshall. He was the first economist to attempt to elevate economics into a self-standing science and detach it completely from morals and ethics. He affirmed that the free market system would operate automatically for the good of society without regard for moral sentiment.
When that idea was combined with the Darwinian theory of evolution, that the development of society, and the human race in particular, was the result of natural selection or the ‘survival of the fittest’ in a struggle for existence, then ultimately there would be a price to pay. This was called Social Darwinism.
The theoretical laws of economics were absolute and could not be tampered with. For example, when around one million Irish peasants died of starvation and disease in the mid-nineteenth-century potato famine, the economists and the British government both believed that charitable aid would interfere with those theoretical laws of economics. And that, they reasoned, would be disastrous. So up to a million people, out of a population of eight million, were allowed to die in the name of economic science. We are still paying the price.
In England children crawled through tunnels in coal mines, dragging coal carts. Chimney sweeps used small boys, street urchins, to climb and clean the internal chimneys of middle class houses. Any interference with those inhumane practices in the name of charity would have been condemned as ultimately harmful to the system. It would have interfered with the beneficent workings of the theory of economic law.
And so there occurs this great paradox, this irony, that at the precise time when Britain was becoming, and did become, the wealthiest nation in the world, the condition of its masses was that of a subhuman existence. The novels of Dickens vividly remind us of that fact. So The Wealth of Nations – to use here appropriately the title of Adam Smith’s book – was to be built on the misery of human beings.
Consequently, at the end of the nineteenth century, the rise of Marxism occurred, which I believe was essentially an explosion of moral outrage against the injustices of capitalism. But because it was a nineteenth-century movement, it had to camouflage itself as a science. So we have this nonsense of economic science as understood in Marxist economics. But I am certain that fundamentally Marxism was an expression of moral outrage against the iniquities of the nineteenth century.
The collapse of Marxism as a world power in the past few years has created an entirely new situation where the free market operates on a global scale. With the enormously enhanced power of communication and efficient use of information made possible by modern computers, this global economic system operates increasingly as a self-governing entity, which has become a market that even the most powerful of governments cannot control.
It was a lady not accustomed to accepting dictation from higher powers who declared: ‘You can’t buck the market.’ It was as if the world had been put on automatic pilot making the human pilot redundant. But the problem with the global economy is that we do not know its destination. An Indian bishop told me that Indian villages were being devastated by globalisation. The Indian government’s change of policy, which opened up the whole of India to the free markets, has simply made India part of this global mechanism, and we are familiar with the consequences.
People are so much shaped and influenced by their own cultures that they often forget the fact that there are many societies in the world which are still what the economists call ‘autonomous economies’. I have been familiar with them in my work among Indian villages.
By an autonomous economy I mean a largely self-sufficient society which has learnt to live within its own means. Such societies have very little trade or barter with the outside world. They have little need for money and have accepted a certain standard of living which they do not wish to change. These autonomous economies do not regard covetousness as a virtue but rather regard it a virtue to accept things as they are.
Obviously that is entirely subversive for the global economy. Indian villages are now being invaded by high-pressure advertising from global multi-national companies seeking to persuade people that they need things without which they have lived for thousands of years, and been quite content.
I remember once preaching in a little Anglican church in Geneva, a city which is one of the great centres of world capitalism. It happened to be the second Sunday in Lent when the collect for the day was a prayer that God would ‘grant us the gift of godly abstinence’. I asked the congregation if they realised what they were doing when they offered that prayer, because if God answered it on a large scale the capitalist system would collapse.
But there are negative effects of globalisation, of a single free market. First there is the massive destruction of the environment, of which we have only become aware in the past forty years or so. It is extraordinary how recent that awareness is, dating from around the mid-1970s.
A book of futurology was first published in 1970 entitled Future Shock, by Alvin Toffler. It was widely read and commented upon. It professed to paint a picture of the world we could expect to see in the next hundred years or so.
It had, however, absolutely not one word to say about the environment. Later, after this book had become a bestseller, the report of the Club of Rome came out which warned us, for the first time, that we were exhausting the resources of the planet at a rate which could not be sustained. To put it in its simplest terms, if the globalisation of the free market should succeed to the point where all humanity had the standard of living that we have in the West, then the planet would become uninhabitable within a few decades.
The next unwelcome effect is that of polarisation between rich and poor – between nations and within nations. We have seen this demonstrated adequately in Britain during the nineteenth century. One of the simplest ways of making the point is to quote statistics published by the United Nations.
In 1960, the year of the ‘development decade’, when development became the key word in economics for the first time, it was reported that the richest one billion of the world’s people had an income thirty times that of the poorest one billion. Thirty years later, after three decades of development, the factor had risen from thirty to one hundred and fifty.
Furthermore, this process of globalisation, of the free market, destroys the autonomous economies and inevitably results in mass migration from those previously autonomous villages into the enormous urban sprawls with which we are so familiar in places such as Calcutta and Bombay. In those cities no one really knows how many millions of people live on the streets.
The final result is what is called ‘anomie’, which we see everywhere in the so-called developed world. This loss of meaning and sense of purpose, this condition of hopelessness, is what drives people to seek immediate satisfaction in drugs or other forms of escape.
And in these circumstances the one global power that is challenging the dominance of the free market, now that Marxism has collapsed, is Islam. Its resurgence, as a global power, is now of prime importance in world affairs.
I believe it was the British Ambassador to Tehran who declared in 1979, after the Shah of Iran was deposed and replaced by Ayatollah Khomeini’s Islamic Revolutionary Government: ‘This event might, in world history, come to be recognised as equally significant with the French revolution of 1789 or the Russian revolution of 1917.’
That might, or might not, turn out to be true but there is no doubt that Islam is challenging globalisation. With its doctrine of the rule of the Sharia, the path to be followed in Muslim life, including economic life, Islam – which still accepts the prohibition of usury and proposes and seeks to operate a radically different economic order – is now challenging the supremacy of the global free market.
In doing so it is able to call upon the kind of groups to which Marxism once appealed – the poorest victims of the free market. So one finds that powerful Islamic movements are now being directed against those Arab countries such as Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states which have simply accepted the free market system. The political and religious ideology of Islam is now a major factor in international politics.
This broad sketch shows where we are and the road we have travelled. What can we say about the Christian response to all this in the field of economics? As I said of slavery in the first century, we cannot simply opt out of our world. We cannot simply remove those elements in society which are in conflict with God’s will.
For us, just as it was with Paul and Onesimus, we have to recognise that we are part of this world and cannot simply migrate out of it. But at the same time we have to inject into it those things which will eventually transform it. And perhaps the first thing to be said is exactly the point I made about the collect for the second Sunday in Lent.
Is it not necessary that Christians should be explicit dissenters from the ideology of consumption? Should not Christians encourage others to disabuse themselves of the illusion that the goal of human life is increased production of goods and services, that increased gross national product is in itself a good thing? Is it not necessary that we should return to the basic biblical teaching which underlies that collect, that a godly abstinence, or to put it the other way round, that the cultivation of greed and covetousness, is incompatible with Christian discipleship?
Should we not recognise that we are most certainly on a collision course with a great part of our economic life? For we know perfectly well that almost all advertising in our culture is simply the attempt, by increasingly sophisticated means, to persuade us that we need things which we do not have and to encourage us in the culture of covetousness. It seems to me that at this point we have to be explicit and avowed dissenters.
We must do all we can to humanise the free market system. It is certainly not an evil in itself. The free market is the most efficient way of balancing supply and demand in a continually changing market. In that sense it is a good servant.
But when the free market is made absolute and we are told that it has the final word and that even the most powerful of governments cannot ‘buck the free market’ – when it is made into an absolute power – then we have to be frank and recognise that it is demonic and has fallen into the hands of the devil.
The free market as a servant is a God-given blessing, like all the other powers of which Paul spoke. But when it is made into an absolute, it becomes an instrument of demonic power. It seems to me that we must recognise that only the living God can confront demons; we in our own power are not able to do so. It is only the worship of the living God that can displace idolatry. It will not do simply to use moral arguments.
Part of our Christian discipleship, in which we acknowledge publicly that God and God alone is Lord, should be to use every influence available to humanise the free market system, just as Paul humanised, or began to humanise, the institution of slavery by sending Onesimus back to Philemon’s household with the status of a representative of the apostle.
I am not sufficiently expert to go much further than that, except to suggest that there are certain steps that can be taken and advocated.
For example, the need to develop the whole system of auditing so that it is no longer simply a method of checking that all funds have been correctly used but becomes instead a means of estimating the real costs: the price that we are paying for what has been done, and is being done, to the environment and to societies.
Can we be ready to offer to our dying culture the framework of understanding that has its base in the gospel? If the gospel is to challenge the public life of our society, it will not be by forming a Christian political party. Transformation will take place by movements that begin with local congregations being faithful to a message which concerns the kingdom of God and his rule over all things and people. Such congregations, formed by the reality of the new creation, are thus called out by the Holy Spirit to claim every section of public life for Christ, exposing it to the illumination of the gospel and unmasking the hidden illusions of our secular society. It is time for the church to make the claim which it made in its earliest centuries, but which it vacated in the time of modernity, that it can provide the public truth by which society can be given coherence and direction.
We can be confident as we do this because God is faithful, he knows what he is doing, and he will complete what he has begun.