Week 25 Sunday
Week 25 Sunday
Will the Converted Necessarily Convert Society?
Luke 11:42; 24:52-53; Acts 17:6
That society is made up of individuals there is no doubt. That if you change a sufficient number of individuals, you can change society there is also no doubt. Changed individuals have changed society.
But these are only half-truths. It is not wholly true that individuals make up society. Society is made up of individuals, but it is also made up of inherited customs and attitudes that have become a part of the social structure and that exist apart from the will of the individual. To change the individual may leave entirely intact this inherited social structure. To change individual slave owners did not get rid of the slave system. That could be accomplished only by what John C. Bennett calls “a wide-scale frontal attack.” Both in England and America slavery was ousted by the frontal attack of legislation. It is true that the converted William Wilberforce was a big factor in getting rid of it in England, but it was only after he had persuaded sufficient people to attack it on a Parliamentary front that it was abolished. An attack on a personal front alone would have left the slavery system to this day. Parliamentary coercion for recalcitrants had to supplement personal change.
Even where the converted individual will is directed toward the change of a system, that change will not take place unless you have this wide-scale, concerted, frontal attack. But suppose, instead of this converted will being directed toward social change, it stops at the halfway house of contentment in the fact of its own change, then the case is still worse. This it often does. Conversion, instead of becoming the life of social change, often becomes in lieu of social change. It often makes our attention glance off either toward ourselves or toward heaven and leaves the essential problems of life untouched. Half-conversions may become whole perversions. Conversion must be fully converted.
O Christ, I pray you to convert my conversion into the wide sweep of your purposes for myself and all people. Put the content of social change into my individual change. Amen.
Week 25 Monday
Can You Change Society without Changed Individuals?
Proverbs 4:23; Isaiah 1:16-17; Jeremiah 1:6-10; Matthew 12:33
Another half-truth is that you can change society without changed individuals. The individually minded say that the greatest necessity is for changed individuals, and the society-minded say the greatest necessity is for a changed society. Each contains a half-truth, but only a half-truth. It is only a half-truth to say that you can change society and neglect individual change.
For a changed society needs changed individuals to sustain it. The whole of the outer structure of life rests on that imponderable and subtle thing called character. If the character breaks, the confidence breaks, and if the confidence breaks, the society breaks.
Marxian Communism, if it fails, will probably fail at this place: there will not be enough dynamic in it to change individuals, so that those changed individuals will undergird and support the structure of society resting on them. The best of schemes need changed people to make them work.
“For the remaking of the province I need two things,” said a Chinese governor to a friend of mine; “I need money, and I need men who will honestly expend that money. I can get the first, but I cannot get the second. If you can produce the men, we can remake the province.” He put the situation in a nutshell, not only in China, but everywhere.
Today I came upon a vehicle for sale belonging to a former motor syndicate, a syndicate that was obviously in the interests of all those in it, but which broke down on account of one simple thing: a lack of character in the people who made it up. Whenever individual members saw a smaller immediate advantage as against a larger long-term advantage, they didn’t have enough character to resist the immediate in behalf of the more remote. A changed society needs changed people to keep it changed.
O Christ, it is here that we need your power. For how can we go into the new day with the old life? Cleanse us at the heart, that we may cleanse society to its utmost limits. Amen.
Week 25 Tuesday
A Correction
Deuteronomy 16:18-20; Isaiah 59:1; Habakkuk 1:4
Yesterday we insisted that you cannot change society without changed individuals to sustain those changes. But a correction to restore a balance needs to be made at this point. A changed society would tend to change individuals. That is a point that the evangelicals have largely missed. They should welcome these wide-scale basic changes in the structure of society in the very interests of individual conversion.
We now know the power of environment in the making of the individual. Many things we think to be innate are socially conditioned at a very early stage in life, so early that we mistake them for the innate. This can be seen in India very vividly where caste lines are sharply drawn. Take children out of outcaste sweeper-homes at birth, and let them be subjected to a new social heredity in which they would know nothing of their so-called inferior birth. Let them be given the privileges of education and culture of other children, and in nine cases out of ten you can make almost entirely new personalities; whereas, had they stayed in the sweeper-home, in nine cases out of ten, they would have taken on the likeness of the surroundings, caught the average outlook and con-formed to it.
A competitive order works against individual conversion at every point; a cooperative order would work toward individual conversion at every point. For you cannot make a cooperative order work except by the very things inherent in spiritually changed character, namely, a change from the egocentric to the kingdom-centric, from self to God and others. In preaching conversion in such an order you would be working, not against the grain of the social order as now, but with it.
O Christ, we pray you to help us to have a changed society, that we may more easily have changed individuals. For we want people to be changed, and so do you. Amen.
Week 25 Wednesday
The Half-truth of Moral People and Immoral Society
Exodus 23:1-8; Leviticus 19:13-15
The insistence that individuals are comparatively more moral than society has a truth within it. For individuals are not prepared to do many things that, as a member of society, they are prepared to do: ruthlessly compete to the ruination of others, and collectively butcher in war, for example. This is a truth, but is only a half-truth.
For the matter might be reversed. In a cooperative order, the very reverse would be the case. Society would be the comparatively moral and the individual comparatively immoral. In our ashram, this can be seen in miniature. There the organization is on the basis of a sharing community: to each according to need and from each according to ability. The collective order in its organization is just and collegial, but now and again individuals break this justice and community by individually wrong moral acts. They are judged by the spirit and organization of the ashram. They are less moral than the collective order. It would be the same on a wider scale when society comes to a cooperative order; it would be moral society and immoral man.
The insistence by Reinhold Niebuhr that, because society is immoral, this is all rooted in nature and must be dealt with as such, is again only a half-truth. What seems rooted in nature may be rooted in a wrong social organization, namely, a competitive collective order. Change that order to a cooperative one and many things that now appear rooted in nature will be seen to be rooted in a wrong social organization and are not inherent, but collectively imposed. Much that seems to be nature is nurture under an order that produces wrong attitudes. This gives us a basis of hope rather than a basis of pessimism, for we can change what we have made, namely, a wrong social organization.
O Christ, we come to you for strength and nerve and clear-sighted love, that we may not sink back into the pessimisms of nature, but that we may rise to the optimisms of your redemptive grace and power. Amen.
Week 25 Thursday
The Half-truth of the Coming of the Kingdom as Only Gradual
Matthew 11:23; 24:42-51; 25:1, 13
Modern liberalism has insisted that the coming of the kingdom will be by gradual changes. It has drawn its inspiration from two sources: modern democracy and certain teachings of the New Testament that teach gradualism. Modern democracy has committed itself to a faith in democratic processes of change according to constitutions. This means by vote instead of by sudden, catastrophic revolution. Liberalism has felt that the processes of the kingdom would be the same.
In this they have been supported by passages in the New Testament: the leaven that leavens the whole lump, the kingdom like the growth of the corn—first the blade, then the ear, then the full corn in the ear. These passages seemed to fit in with the spirit of democratic, evolutionary change.
But with the recent decay of faith in democratic government, much of this faith of liberalism in gradualism has decayed with it. The spirit of these last few years is that changes in government should come suddenly and by compulsion from above. Dictatorships, veiled and overt, have arisen. Now liberalism is partaking of that changed outlook. It is saying in many quarters that change can come only suddenly and in a catastrophic manner.
This about-face shows how liberalism is dependent on modern culture; in fact, liberalism is modern culture turned religious. It is most unstable. It should hold to its principle of gradualism. For that lets the responsibility rest where it should rest, namely, on us, to bring in that kingdom by individual and collective endeavor cooperating with the redemptive God. This outlook holds us from flying off at tangents of various shortcuts and keeps us with our souls against the task. For gradualism is in the New Testament as a living part of the outlook of the gospel. It is ineradicable.
But it is only a half-truth. We should remember that. There is another side.
O Christ, keep us from evading responsibility by throwing it on you, on future circumstances, and help us to take our tasks like mature adults. Amen.
Week 25 Friday
The Half-truth of the Coming of the Kingdom as Only Sudden
Matthew 13:31, 33; Mark 4:26-28; Luke 17:20-21
Modern fundamentalism in many cases has rejected the principle of gradualism, and has said that in the Second Coming of Christ the kingdom will in fact be set up. This coming will be sudden and catastrophic.
In this, they have been supported by passages in the New Testament that teach his coming as a thief in the night, by the nobleman who went into a far country to receive a kingdom and to return to set it up, and so on. That the New Testament does teach this sudden and catastrophic phase of the coming of the kingdom there is no doubt whatever.
But it is a fact that the holding of this phase alone has produced a mentality that has withdrawn interest from social change by gradual processes, has made those who hold it discount those changes, and has made them look for a worsening of things in order to reach a final, sudden triumph at the coming of Christ. This has been a moral and social drain.
Christian thought has moved from the catastrophic to the gradual and back again: thesis producing antithesis. It is now time for us to come to the synthesis. And the synthesis is this: There is in the pages of the New Testament both the teaching of gradualism and the teaching of the apocalyptic. Both are there and are integral to the account. They cannot be explained away. And in the interests of the kingdom, they must not be explained away, for we need both phases of the kingdom. Each is a half-truth that needs the other to complete it. We need to understand that the task is ours and must be assumed as such, and we must also see that it is God’s and that God will complete it, perhaps even when we least expect it.
O Christ, we thank you that you have taught us that the task is ours and the consummation is yours, and that the task is yours and the consummation ours. We shall work it out together, and together we shall triumph. Amen.
Week 25 Saturday
The Synthesis
Matthew 25:14-30
From many angles, we have been working toward a synthesis. Modern liberal emphasis on gradualism by the endeavors of individuals has produced its Barthianism,* with its demand that we cease this humanism and humbly accept the kingdom as a gift of grace. We have felt the truth in each contention, but each is only a half-truth. The Christian world is working through these half-truths to a synthesis, a larger truth.
That larger truth is that the New Testament teaches both. Modern minds have hesitated to take the apocalyptic at face value. They have thought it was something read into the account, but extracting it has been impossible. It is an integral part. Albert Schweitzer says the New Testament taught a future kingdom only, that Jesus died mistaken, believing to the last that the kingdom would come by catastrophic intervention. We feel the half-truth in this position. Why not say that he was mistaken as to the time. He said, concerning that hour, that no one knows, “not the heavenly angels and not the Son. Only the Father knows” (Matt. 24:36 CEB). And was he not right, even in being mistaken as to the time? Are we not to look on every hour as the possible hour? And while mistaken so far in human history, would it not have been a mistake if we had not looked on every hour as the possible hour?
But will he finally be right in the fact of catastrophic intervention? Why not? History has not proved him to be wrong, for history is not exhausted as yet. Jesus was so right in everything else, will he not be right in this also?
To accept this synthesis of gradualism and apocalyptic would leave us just where we should be as Christians: within the stream of human history and yet above it, within the world process to suffer and bleed and thus remake it and yet above the process as its judges through Christ who is to be its final Judge.
O Christ, you are leading us into the larger truth of the kingdom. We accept it, for the kingdom is our one hope. Amen.
*Barthianism was a theological movement associated with the work of Swiss theologian Karl Barth.