Section 13
But they will not be prevented from doing so by ideologies that rest on the same mythological beliefs about the equal right of every autonomous individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Falsehood can be overcome only by the truth, and the truth has been manifested once for all in Jesus Christ. It is the business of the church to bear witness in the public realm to that truth.
Human beings find fulfillment not in the attempt to develop themselves, not in the effort to better their own condition, not in the untrammeled exercise of unlimited covetousness, but in the experience of mutual relatedness and responsibility in serving a shared goal. Recent surveys in Britain have brought out the fact that great numbers of people have affirmed that the best years of their lives were those in which they shared the experience of the war. The bombing of cities, the destruction of homes, the absence of rest or holiday, the shortage of food and clothing, and the constant presence of death were all part of the picture; but what colors it all is the memory of shared commitment to a common purpose. That is what brings human beings to their very best, and most of us know it. Part of the terrible irony of war is that it enlists the best in human nature for purposes of mutual destruction. But to eliminate from the public life of a nation any accepted vision of a shared goal, leaving each individual to pursue self-chosen goals and making covetousness the prime mover of human affairs, is to invite destruction in another way, destruction from within. Who can deny that we are witnessing this destruction in the affluent societies of today?
War may provide for a time the sense of shared commitment and responsibility, but it is at the cost of dismembering the human family as a whole. What accepted vision can there be that can transcend the conflicting purposes of nations, classes, and races and draw all humankind into mutual responsibility? There have never been lacking candidates for this place. World history is full of the dreams of a new order that will draw all humankind together. When these dreams are ours, we call them dreams of world brotherhood; when others try to make their dreams come true, we call it imperialism. Imperialism is the name we give to other people’s proposals for human unity. And, of course, we are right: every proposal for human unity that does not specify the center around which that unity is to be created, necessarily has the will, the vision, the beliefs of the proposer as its implied center. There can be no center for the unity of the human race except in him who said, “I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all men to myself’ (John 12:32). For the Cross of Christ is the place of expiation, a place where sin is forgiven; and the claim of the sinful self to make itself and its dream the center of the world is set aside in favor of the one whose claim alone is valid. Here is the one and only center that has been given for the unity of humankind and thus the one object that can bind nations into unity without setting them at enmity with one another. The church as a truly universal supranational society is the bearer of the vision that alone can give to each nation a true unity of purpose. But if it is to do that, it must accept in every nation the responsibility of placing all public life—political, economic, and cultural—in the light of its gospel. It must affirm that the central shrine of a nation’s life cannot remain empty, that if Christ is not there then an idol will certainly take his place. How the church is to fulfill this responsibility is the subject of my final chapter. That it must do so is, I believe, a necessity that arises from the very heart of the gospel.