Section 12
The debate between the capitalism of the so-called free world and the socialism of the Soviet Union and its allies has become as intellectually barren as it is practically perilous. Each side can point with devastating effect to the failures of the other, but each becomes ridiculous when it tries to conceal its own. Both parties have exhausted their moral and intellectual capital. But a genuinely missionary encounter of the gospel with our culture can go behind this futile and infinitely dangerous conflict to challenge the common beliefs on which both sides rely, beliefs that have long been regarded as axiomatic but are in fact false. Of course, as contemporary history proves, Christians can live and bear witness under any regime, whatever its ideology. But Christians can never seek refuge in a ghetto where their faith is not proclaimed as public truth for all. They can never agree that there is one law for themselves and another for the world. They can never admit that there are areas of human life where the writ of Christ does not run. They can never accept that there are orders of creation or powers or dominions that exist otherwise than to serve Christ. Whatever the institutional relationship between the church and the state—and there are many possible relationships, no one of which is necessarily the right one for all times and places—the church can never cease to remind governments that they are under the rule of Christ and that he alone is the judge of all they do. The church can never accept the thesis that the central shrine of public life is empty, in other words, that there has been no public revelation before the eyes of all the world of the purpose for which all things and all peoples have been created and which all governments must serve. It can never accept an ultimate pluralism as a creed even if it must—as of course it must—acknowledge plurality as a fact. In fact, it cannot accept the idea, so popular twenty years ago, of a secular society in which, on principle, there are no commonly acknowledged norms. We know now, I think, that the only possible product of that ideal is a pagan society. Human nature abhors a vacuum. The shrine does not remain empty. If the one true image, Jesus Christ, is not there, an idol will take its place. It is not difficult to name the idolatry that controls our culture; Paul has already done so. On the other hand, there can be no return to the era of the corpus Christianum, of the identification of the church with the ruling power. In this respect the movement of the Enlightenment is irreversible. We are indeed witnessing an attempt to restore a kind of society analagous to the corpus Christianum in the contemporary world of Islam. What is happening in Iran today has much to teach us. Why do the present leaders of that country denounce America and Russia equally as the agents of Satan? Because they have seen the fabric of their own society, its family life, its sexual ethics, and its ideas of what human life is for disintegrating under the influence of ideas coming through both these channels that stem from the European Enlightenment. We can understand and even sympathize, but we cannot follow. Islam denies the Christian doctrine of original sin and therefore believes that it is possible to achieve a total identification of the laws of a state with the law of God. Church and state in Islamic thought are one, without distinction of function. That way we cannot go. The sacralizing of politics, the total identification of a political goal with the will of God, always unleashes demonic powers.
We are witnessing the same thing, but under Christian auspices, in the emergence of what is called “the Religious Right” in the United States. The leaders of this movement, while accepting the biblical doctrine regarding the radical corruption of human nature by sin, in effect exempt themselves as “born-again Christians” from its operation. They identify their own cause unconditionally with the cause of God, regard their critics as agents of Satan, and are apparently prepared to see the human race obliterated in an apocalyptic catastrophe in which the nuclear arsenal of the United States is the instrument of Jesus Christ for the fulfillment of his purpose against the Soviet Union as the citadel of evil. This confusion of a particular and fallible set of political and moral judgments with the cause of Jesus Christ is more dangerous than the open rejection of the claim of Christ in Islam, just as the shrine of Jereboam at Bethel was more dangerous to the faith of Israel than was the open paganism of her neighbors, for the worship of Ba’al was being carried on under the name of Yahweh. The “Religious Right” uses the name of Jesus to cover the absolute claims of one national tradition. (See 1 Kings 13; and see Karl Barth’s extended commentary thereon in Church Dogmatics II / 2, 393ff.)
But the rhetoric of the “Moral Majority” is only a further development of the ideologizing of politics that stems from the Enlightenment. Ghita Ionescu, in Politics and the Pursuit of Happiness, has traced the story from what he calls the “Jacobin proto-system of political happiness” through its liberal-utilitarian and Marxist developments to the situation we are in now. Politics, as Ionescu understands it, is “the regulation of the coexistence of human beings within a unit of rule, with a view to improving it in the present and in the future.” The Enlightenment gave birth to a new conception of politics, namely, that happiness can be provided by a political system and that the goal of politics is happiness.
The project of bringing heaven down to earth always results in bringing hell up from below. The full revelation of the heavenly city lies beyond the horizon of earthly history. But the vision of it must control Christian action within history, and such action can admit no separation of private from public life. While the church can never identify itself with the kingdom and must seek only the role of a servant, witness, and sign of the kingdom, yet the church can never admit any limitations of its role to the private sector. The church witnesses to that true end for which all creation and all human beings exist, the truth by which all alleged values are to be judged. And truth must be public truth, truth for all. A private truth for a limited circle of believers is no truth at all. Even the most devout faith will sooner or later falter and fail unless those who hold it are willing to bring it into public debate and to test it against experience in every area of life. If the Christian faith about the source and goal of human life is to be denied access to the public realm, where decisions are made on the great issues of the common life, then it cannot in the long run survive even as an option for a minority.
If, as I believe, there can neither be a total identification of the church and political order, nor a total separation between them, then there is room for much discussion of the ways in which their relationship is to be ordered. The question of how the Christian witness is to influence the public life in a post-Enlightenment society will occupy us in the final chapter. Before closing this one, however, let me try to suggest something of what the content of the vision should be. Both capitalism and socialism draw strength from a vision of human life, and this vision sustains them in face of their failures. For capitalism it is the vision of freedom—the freedom of the individual person to develop his own powers, to achieve the greatest success he is capable of and to enjoy the fruit of his achievement. For socialism it is the vision of equality; at its best this has been a vision of brotherhood, of community, but in practice it has often been reduced to the vision of a mere equality of rights for each person seen as an autonomous individual. In the one case, freedom is pursued at the cost of equality; in the other, equality is pursued at the cost of freedom. Both derive from the Enlightenment vision of human beings as autonomous individuals with innate and equal rights to pursue self-chosen ends to the limit of their powers. Each ideology can accuse the other of violating a faith they both hold by the denial of freedom on one side and by the denial of equality on the other.
I believe that the Christian view of God’s purpose for the human family is different from both of these and arises from a distinct belief about what human nature is. From its first page to its last, the Bible is informed by a vision of human nature for which neither freedom nor equality is fundamental; what is fundamental is relatedness. Man—male and female—is made for God in such a way that being in the image of God involves being bound together in this most profound of all mutual relations. God binds himself in a covenant relationship with men and women to which he remains faithful at whatever cost and however unfaithful his covenant partner is. And people and nations are called to live in binding covenant relationships of brotherhood. Human beings reach their true end in such relatedness, in bonds of mutual love and obedience that reflect the mutual relatedness in love that is the being of the Triune God himself. Neither freedom nor equality are words that can take us to the heart of the matter. The breakdown of relationships will destroy freedom and will destroy equality, but neither of these will be achieved by being sought for itself. True freedom is not found by seeking to develop the powers of the self without limit, for the human person is not made for autonomy but for true relatedness in love and obedience; and this also entails the acceptance of limits as a necessary part of what it means to be human. Nor will the quest for equality create real justice, for justice—the giving to each of what is proper—can only be realized in a mutual relatedness in which each gives to the other the love and obedience that enable all to be truly human. Apart from this, the quest for justice becomes self-destructive, since it is of the very essence of fallen human nature that each of us overestimates what is due to the self and underestimates what is due to the other.
The fact that the argument between the political right and left—the argument between freedom and equality—has become as intellectually futile as it is practically lethal is illustrated on a small scale by the contemporary debate in Britain and elsewhere about the viability of the welfare state. The welfare state is an attempt to achieve a synthesis, or at least a balance, between freedom and equality. It accepts the operation of the free market, but it attempts to lessen the resulting inequalities through government action. It is attacked from the right by those who say that the cost of welfare provision for the disadvantaged is crushing the economic infrastructure. It is attacked from the left by those who say that the inequalities created by the free market are too great to be rectified by present welfare policies. Both sides accept and use the language of rights—the right to freedom on the one hand, and the right to a reasonably equitable share of resources on the other.
The argument of the left assumes that need creates a right that has priority over the wants of those who wish to pursue personal happiness in the way they choose. Two difficulties immediately appear: 1) Needs can be accorded priority over wants only if there is some socially accepted view of the goal of human existence. My wants may be (and often are) irrational; I can (and often do) want things that would not in the end bring me lasting happiness. My real needs, what I need to reach my true end, may be different from the wants I feel. But there cannot be a socially accepted priority for needs over wants unless there is a socially accepted doctrine of what human needs really are, in other words, a socially accepted doctrine of the nature and destiny of the human being. Such a socially accepted doctrine is excluded by the dogma of pluralism that controls post-Enlightenment society. 2) In the absence of a socially accepted doctrine of human destiny, how can needs be assessed? Students of the problem of poverty in affluent societies generally agree that poverty has to be defined in relation to the standard of living of society as a whole. A family in the deprived area of an English city may be wealthy in comparison with a family in a Bangladesh village, but if it is deprived of the things most British people enjoy, it is poor. The “poverty line” in an affluent society thus rises as the well-to-do find more and more ways of satisfying their wants. This leaves us with our initial problem unmet. If the needs of the poor are measured by the wants of the rich, we are left without a basis for determining which needs have priority over which wants.
Defenders of the welfare state seek to meet these difficulties by pointing to basic needs that must be met whatever our view of human nature and destiny may be, needs that must hence in all circumstances be accorded priority over wants. Professor Raymond Plant and his colleagues define these basic needs as “survival and autonomy.” This is clearly a rephrasing of the classic “life and liberty.” One must agree that these needs are basic and must be met if any other needs or wants are to be considered, but this definition reduces human need to the merely biological level. And that is what must happen if equality is taken as the governing principle for life in society. We are all equal in our basic need for survival; this is the need we share with the animals. But to be human means to need other things—respect, honor, love. These needs, social rather than merely biological, call precisely for differentiation rather than for equality. Respect, honor, love—these terms have meaning only in the specific contexts in which they denote the particular kinds of respect, honor, and love one owes teachers, colleagues, parents, friends, wife, husband, children. It is this kind of differentiated respect, honor, and love that makes life human. An undifferentiated acknowledgment of the basic biological needs of a human being does not. And these things—respect, honor, and love—can not be claimed as rights. The descent of King Lear from the position of king and father to that of a “poor forked animal” in the wild heath began when he claimed the love of his daughters as a right. It is only within a shared community of mutual respect, honor, and love freely given that needs are acknowledged as the ground for claims of right. To affirm the abstract and undifferentiated right of every autonomous individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness does not lead to a humane society.
But the counterarguments of the right are equally unsustainable. The myth of the “invisible band” that ensures that the untrammeled exercise of covetousness by each individual will produce the happiness of all is surely one of the most malignant falsehoods that has ever deceived the human race. It is a matter of history that, since the rise of capitalism, no freely elected government has been able to stand aside and leave society to the working of the forces of the free market. The obscene cruelties of the early phases of the Industrial Revolution in Britain under the ideology of capitalism compelled governments at an early stage to intervene for the protection of the victims. This is because no society can cohere and no government can continue to govern indefinitely when the exploitation of the weak by the strong passes a certain point and the political order has lost its moral credibility. The contemporary attempts of the governments of Prime Minister Thatcher in Britain and of President Reagan in the United States can only destroy our societies.