Section 15
There was a period when thinkers like Jacques Maritain in France, Hermann Dooyeweerd in the Netherlands, T. S. Eliot in England, and John Baillie in Scotland were sketching their visions of a Christian society. They looked at the movements in Russia, Italy, and Germany that had succeeded in taking over the whole ordering of national life on the strength of an ideology passionately believed by a vigorous minority. They saw the corrupt and hopelessly lethargic democracies of Italy and Germany transformed into dynamic societies by the power of these ideologies. They asked themselves whether it could not be possible for Christians, as a dedicated group even if a minority, to do something comparable: to give the rudderless democracies a sense of direction and purpose, yet without the repression and intolerance that marked the totalitarian movements. It was a noble vision, and it was not without effect. In Britain one can certainly point to great changes that were made possible in considerable measure by the exercise of explicitly Christian conviction in the field of politics. But the 1960s saw a sharp swing in the opposite direction. Munby’s book The Idea of a Secular Society, published in 1963, was a direct rebuttal of Eliot’s Idea of a Christian Society. “Secularity” became the blessed word for theologians of the 1960s. The accepted vision was of a public world totally liberated from its tutelage by the church, and of a state that eschewed any religious or ideological commitments, holding the ring equally for all. This view regards Gladstone’s position, to which I referred in the first chapter—that the state is a moral personality and therefore responsible to do the right and to acknowledge the truth—as a mere survival of medievalism.
But Gladstone was surely right when he pointed out that the Roman Empire could give equal tolerance to all religions just because it could be quite adamant about something much more important than religion, something required to keep society from disintegrating, namely, the veneration of the emperor. On that there could be no compromise, and I think we have to acknowledge at least some truth in Gladstone’s argument. No state can be completely secular in the sense that those who exercise power have no beliefs about what is true and no commitments to what they believe to be right. It is the duty of the church to ask what those beliefs and commitments are and to expose them to the light of the gospel. There is no genuinely missionary encounter of the gospel with our culture unless this happens. Here we must face frankly the distortion of the gospel that is perpetrated in a great deal that passes for missionary encounter. A preaching of the gospel that calls men and women to accept Jesus as Savior but does not make it clear that discipleship means commitment to a vision of society radically different from that which controls our public life today must be condemned as false.
The South African missiologist David Bosch has pointed out how much damage has been done by the usual English translation of dikaiosune as “righteousness” and the consequent insulation of an idea of inward and spiritual righteousness from an outward and manifest justice in social relationships. Spanish-speaking Christians are less tempted to fall into this trap because the one word justiia is universally used to translate dikaiosune. It is easy to see how the use of the two different English words righteous and just for the single biblical word dikaios, and the consistent translation of dikaiosune in the New Testament as “righteousness” while the Hebrew equivalent tsedeq is translated both as “justice” and as “righteousness,” has seduced evangelical Christians into a mental separation between righteousness as an inward and spiritual state and justice as an outward and political program. But to accept this dichotomy is to abandon the gospel and surrender to the pressure of our pagan culture. As we have seen over and over again in this study, this dichotomy between the private and the public worlds is the central clue to the ideology that governs our culture. To accept it is to make the surrender the early church refused to make—at the cost of the blood of countless martyrs.
A private religion of personal salvation that did not challenge the public ideology was perfectly safe under Roman law, as it is safe under ours. On these terms the church of the first three centuries could have flourished under the rule of Caesar precisely as this kind of evangelicalism flourishes under the protection of our kind of society. But the authentic gospel cannot accept this kind of relegation. The sovereign rule of God requires that the state acknowledge its responsibility to reflect in all its ordering of society the justice of God—a justice that is primarily embodied in covenant relationships of mutual responsibility. To make disciples is to call and equip men and women to be signs and agents of God’s justice in all human affairs. An evangelism that invites men and women to accept the name of Christ but fails to call them to this real encounter must be rejected as false.
But how is it to happen? How, in practice, is the church to challenge our culture in its public as well as its private aspects in the name of Christ? What kind of churchmanship will enable us so to preach the gospel that men and women are called to be disciples in the fullest sense—men and women and children whose personal and corporate life is a sign, instrument, and foretaste of God’s kingly rule over all creation and all nations? How, in particular, are we to do this, we who are sent not to one of the ancient world religions but to a society nourished in its deepest roots by a Christian tradition but governed in its explicit assumptions by a pagan ideology? And how can we be missionaries to this modern world, we who are ourselves part of this modern world? As has often been remarked, we are at a point in history comparable to the one occupied by Augustine. He stood at the point where the classical vision had lost its power over people’s minds, and society was disintegrating. He was the one who formulated for the Western half of Christendom a vision based on the twin dogmas of Trinity and Incarnation, which was to shape public life for a thousand years and to create a community in which the Christian life could be nourished. Alasdair MacIntyre, who invokes the memory of that moment to illuminate our situation, adds, however, that there is one great difference between Augustine’s time and ours: then the barbarians were waiting outside the gates, but now they are already in the seats of power. And, says MacIntyre, “it is our lack of consciousness of this that constitutes our predicament.” If that is true, as I think it is, we must ask what the conditions are for the recovery by the church of its proper distinction from, and its proper responsibility for, this secular culture that we have shared so comfortably and so long with what MacIntyre would call the barbarians. I want to close by listing seven essentials for the answering of this question.
1. The first must be the recovery and firm grasp of a true doctrine of the last things, of eschatology. The gospel is good news of the kingdom, and the kingdom is an eschatological concept. A true understanding of the last things is the first essential.
We are very familiar with the way language about the kingdom of God has been used to domesticate Christianity within the post-Enlightenment world-view. The thinkers of the Enlightenment believed that the liberation of the human mind and conscience from the shackles of dogma would lead to the gradual elimination of ignorance and of evil and thus to the progress of humanity toward the heavenly city—a perfect commonwealth of free and happy people. The underlying ideas here are not biblical but classical. What is presupposed is an inherent power within history that leads toward perfection. The opposing power is not sin, not a radical distortion at the center of human reason and conscience, but just the inertia of nature. We are familiar with the way liberal Protestant Christianity used the biblical language of the kingdom to give a pious coloring to the dominant ideology. Seeking the kingdom meant working for social progress. We are also familiar with the way the Marxists—more biblical here than the liberal Protestants—gave an apocalyptic twist to the Enlightenment scenario and proclaimed the classless society only on the other side of the final Armageddon, in which the messianic proletariat will destroy the kingdom of evil. The problem with both these views is that they marginalize the human being. The men and women who now serve and fight for the new society will not see it themselves. In regard to the ultimate goal of history, they are expendable means, not ultimate ends. And so, inevitably, alongside the doctrine of progress there comes back the ancient pre-Christian idea of the immortality of the soul. The individual person finds the true end of his living and striving not in the perfect society, which only the remote posterity will see, but in an afterlife in another world, which has no relation to this. The two histories—my personal history and the history of the world—go their separate ways to different ends. My personal future and the future of the world have no essential relationship to each other. Human life is no longer a unity; it falls apart into two divisions: the private and the public, the spiritual and the political. We are back again at the dichotomy with which we have become so familiar in looking at our post-Enlightenment culture.
Yet the human person is a unity. I am the same person in my most private prayers and my most public acts. Whence comes the splitting apart of what we experience as a unity? It comes, of course, from the fact of death, the fact that at a point that is as unknown as it is certain I who pray and work must leave behind all my work, cut all those bonds that have from my birth bound me in one bundle of mutual responsibility with family, society, and world, and face alone the last horizon. This creates the split, tempting me to turn my back on the outward world of shared responsibilities and to find meaning exclusively in the pilgrimage of my own soul. Yet as a human being who still lives, I live not as a solitary individual but as one who depends for every day’s living on a human world of shared responsibilities. I can only live as part of society, and I can only act in the light of some vision of the goal of the human journey as a whole. It is death that creates that fatal dichotomy between two worlds of meaning—one that sees ultimate meaning only in the destiny of my immortal soul and thus makes the public history of the world a story without meaning; the other that sees meaning only in the march of humanity toward a shared future, and thus makes the human person marginal and finally dispensable.
It is death that drives in this wedge and splits our vision of the future in two. And death is not, for human beings, merely a biological necessity; it is, as the Bible teaches us, the wages of sin—the outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual fact, namely, that nothing in my life is fit for God’s perfect kingdom. Because this is so, there can be no straight road from this life to the goal that alone gives it meaning. The gospel is good news at this point because Christ has overcome the power of sin and death. Entering completely into our shared humanity with all its burden of sin, he has gone down into the darkness of death and judgment for us, and, in his resurrection, given us a sign and foretaste of total victory. As united with him we are enabled to follow the same way. We do not see the future of either our own personal selves or the world we share with all people. The curtain of death shuts off our view. But Jesus has gone before us through the curtain. The road disappears from view down into a dark valley, into whose depth we cannot peer. Jesus has gone down there before us and has appeared victorious on the other side. He is himself the path, the way that goes through death to life (John 13:36–14:7). As we follow that way, we have before us, beyond the chasm of death, the vision of the holy city into which all the glory of the nations will be brought and from which everything unclean is excluded (Rev. 21, 22). Following that way, we can commit ourselves without reserve to all the secular work our shared humanity requires of us, knowing that nothing we do in itself is good enough to form part of that city’s building, knowing that everything—from our most secret prayers to our most public political acts—is part of that sin-stained human nature that must go down into the valley of death and judgment, and yet knowing that as we offer it up to the Father in the name of Christ and in the power of the Spirit, it is safe with him and—purged in fire—it will find its place in the holy city at the end (cf. 1 Cor. 3:10–15).
This faith heals the split between the public and the private. There is no room for a political fanaticism that supposes that my political achievements will establish God’s kingdom, or declares a holy war against opponents, or tramples on individual human beings in the pursuit of a political millennium. The public political act has its real meaning simply as a kind of acted prayer for the coming of God’s reign. Equally, there is no room for a piety that seeks personal holiness by opting out of the struggle for a measure of justice and freedom in public life. This faith enables us to be politically realistic without cynicism, to be sensitive to the supreme rule of love without sentimentality. It enables us humbly to acknowledge that even the best social order is—in God’s sight—an organization of sinful men and women and therefore always prone to corruption; and yet not to use this knowledge as an excuse for political quietism, but rather as an inspiration to work tirelessly for the best possible among the actually available political alternatives.
2. Second on my list of essentials for the quest of a Christian social order I will put a Christian doctrine of freedom. Surely the greatest gift the Enlightenment has left us is the recognition of the right of all people to freedom of thought and of conscience. It is a gift we can never surrender. And we have penitently to acknowledge that it was won in the teeth of determined opposition from the churches. We have to confess also, if we are to be honest, that the same churches that demanded freedom of conscience when they were in a minority have, when they became majorities, denied to others the freedom they claimed for themselves. How, if we are to think of a Christian society, can we ensure that the same sins are not repeated when and if Christians are in a position to impose their views on others? If we insist, as I have done, that the state has an obligation to recognize truth, how can the same state offer protection to something it recognizes as error? If there were a Christian state, would it not necessarily be intolerant? These are real questions to be faced.
We must begin by distinguishing toleration from neutrality or indifference. The latter was well described by Gibbon when he said that in Roman society all religions were to the people equally true, to the philosophers equally false, and to the government equally useful. It would be difficult to deny that this is true of some of today’s “developed” societies. But that kind of neutrality is evidence either of impending collapse or else of the fact that some other ideology has taken the place usually occupied by religion as the overarching “plausibility structure” for intellectual and political life. Since total skepticism about ultimate beliefs is strictly impossible, in that no belief can be doubted except on the basis of some other belief, indifference is always in danger of giving place to some sort of fanaticism that can be as intolerant as any religion has ever been. Tolerance with respect to what is not important is easy. How is it possible to combine real commitment to the truth in matters of supreme importance with tolerance of falsehood?