During the past few decades Christianity versus communism has been the burden of countless publications and discourses throughout America. These for the most part have extolled the virtues of the Christian faith and of the American way of life, while on the other hand, they denounced the errors and terrors of communism. And of errors and terrors there have been plenty. Today, for all the “socialist” trends in American life, few causes so strongly unite the American people as the anti-Communist crusade.
Despite this strong opposition, however, the march of communism continues apace. Its progress since the Russian revolution 40 years ago is astounding. To the partisans of the movement this bears eloquent testimony to its validity. Its enemies recognize the fact that evil forces often seem more suited to the conditions of history (for a time) than the good. In any event, it cannot yet be supposed that the high water mark has been reached and that we shall see presently the eclipse of world communism.
Meanwhile, developments within the “free world” have not been reassuring. Despite an outer religious prosperity, there is clear evidence of the fresh growth, since World War II, of the secular stream in our own own culture. It is true that “the time of trouble”—the rise of totalitarian powers, the world-wide economic collapse during the inter-war period, two world wars and the Korean conflict—purged the West of much of its false optimism. Religion once more became respectable, and sin and tragedy returned as theological categories necessary to the understanding of history. But it was our military technology that rescued us from both our economic doldrums and our foreign enemies. God may have been introduced to the federal mint and the flag salute, but it is in our control of the atom that we trust.
Indulgent Living
The lesson has not been lost on “the masses.” No sooner had the war ended than we turned with abandon to cash in on the benefits of wartime technological progress for indulgent peace-time living. Seldom has the old proverb come so near to vindication: War is the father of all things. Where there was still a world of want to be conquered, we squandered our resources in sensate living, and sought security in tranquilizers and missiles. Admittedly, the apocalyptic fears of the atomic age have often seemed the dominant obsession of our time, and yet as we have eased past crisis after crisis, and the prospect of immediate war has receded, the old utopian dream of a world society ordered by man once more returns to encourage our couch of ease. If war is indeed averted, we stand on the threshold of the most powerful onrush of a secular world culture in history.
An astounding harbinger of the new age is this year’s Universal Exhibition and International Fair in Brussels, Belgium. With deep insight into the undercurrent of the world mood today, the planners of this technological extravaganza set out to depict man “building a world for man.” “The time has come,” they announced some months ago, when “man must build and shape this his World to his own measure.” Not content at coining their own slogans, they employed biblical phraseology. “In the beginning,” they said, “man started on a long journey.” And as they reached the climax of their rhapsody, they proclaimed, “Joy to the world.” The Brussels exhibition of 1958 is thus heralded as the “crowning of a great effort (but) above all, a new beginning.…” (Circular published by La Société de l’Exposition Universelle, 10, rue du Chene, Bruxelles).
This dream of man building the world to his own measure comes to us with a haunting familiarity, for it reminds us that the communism we abhor and the secularism of the West are blood brothers. Both are children of the Enlightenment and of scientism. Both are based on belief in evolution, progress and human perfectibility. Despite the contradiction in metaphysical symbols—there a dialectical materialism, here a theistic God—both are terrifyingly alike in their belief that men can create paradise, and in reliance upon science, technology and military might, achieve their own utopia.
The present juncture in world history therefore demands that we take a second look at the problem of communism, a look sufficiently detached to examine the foundation upon which we have built our anti-Communist defenses. This, few people have bothered to do. It has seemed far easier and rewarding to join the great chant of denunciation. As a result, many people have mistaken minor skirmishes for major battles, and perhaps very few can even distinguish the real battle line. This growth of a world-wide secularism, if clearly recognized, will drive us to the conclusion that the crucial issue of our time is not, as commonly supposed, the struggle between Christianity (as the Western way of life) and communism, but rather the confrontation of the Church of Christ by the greatest secular forces of history, before which she stands as an embattled minority. Communism as an ideology and as an historical force may be at present the most malignant form of a post-Christian secularism, but its kinship to other forms of the same secularism is not to be denied. The issue which should give us most concern, therefore, is not the internecine conflict of the two forms of secularism (and who can call our nuclear policy anything but secular?), but between the powers of this age and the Lord of glory. However serious the clash between Washington and Moscow, the front of the real conflict of history lies not on the Elbe, but between the kingdoms of light and of darkness which know no geographical boundaries.
Communism A Dangerous Heresy
This analysis does not rest on a whitewashing of communism. By this time the case has been established beyond all doubt that there can be no concord between the basic faith of Christianity and that of communism. The one is avowedly theistic and the other is avowedly atheistic. Furthermore, in the practical realm, communism has persistently employed methods which fundamentally contradict Christian morality.
Finally, the very goal of communism, namely, as a perfect society within history, to be achieved by the most imperfect means, without God, is a supreme expression of the sinful pride of man. Nor does this analysis deny that on the plane of real politics many problems facing our statesmen appear well nigh insurmountable. Taking the world as it is today, with its festering sores on the one hand, and the open and clandestine efforts of international communism to exploit these on behalf of the revolution on the other, statesmen indeed find themselves “between the devil and the deep blue sea.”
What we propose, rather, is that these facts seemed so conveniently and obviously true that it was far easier—and more profitable—to get on the bandwagon to reiterate them, than it was to face the sober reality that this simply negative analysis does not fully define the Communist problem. Accordingly, as the Communist fever has ravaged more ardently, the American remedy has exhibited ever more fully its inadequacy. It will therefore be necessary to turn to a consideration of the things we, as American Christians, so far have missed in our attitude toward communism. Though such an effort seems not a little presumptuous, it must nonetheless be risked.
The Things We Have Missed
It must be noted first of all that to place Christianity and communism in juxtaposition, as we are wont to do, is inaccurate and misleading. It implies that we are confronted with alternatives at a point where alternatives do not exist. For if communism presents us with a proposed system which incorporates all reality, including the institutions of society, in a unified field, Christianity does not. That is, we do not have before us as an alternative to the Communist proposal, a Christian pattern for world political order. True, the will of God comprehends the whole of our life, but the will of God reckons with the realities of sin and freedom, and therefore the Gospel of redemption does not offer to us a universal historical order, woven in a single cloth, which we can throw into the teeth of the Communists.
This opposing of Christianity and communism quickly leads to a second error which, from a Christian point of view, must be decried as outright heresy. It is the tendency to identify Christianity with one system of states as over against the other. If this was a feature of the pre-Christian chosen people of Israel, it is a vision that has been completely transcended in Christ. We now know that redemptive truth is never confined to one historical complex as over against another. Rather, God weighs the affairs of history in terms of those “in every nation that fear him.” Though the qualitative differences of political powers are not to be ignored, the issues of history turn, not on the relative merit of the one against the other, but on the relationship of all of them to the kingdom of God. Here all are found wanting, and there is no biblical warrant for us to wed the cause of Christ completely to one political power in a Christ-denying war against another.
A third thing which we have missed is the false view of human nature upon which the classical economic theory rests. The belief that the competition of egos in the economic struggle will of itself achieve a harmonious equilibrium runs counter to the biblical view of fallen man as well as to the testimony of history. Furthermore, classical capitalism tends to transfer the economic process from the moral realm to the realm of nature, and thereby to weaken the moral sensibility of its agents. These facts must be admitted without our falling into the opposite and doubly grievous error of Marxism which attributes to man not only goodness, in the planned society, but also (to the few at the top) the omniscience necessary to its achievement. Their admission, too, does not entail a denial of free enterprise as a superior economic system. It is rather that our blindness to these flaws in our system has led to overconfidence in its rightness and efficiency. We are thus ill-prepared to recognize the validity of certain Marxist criticisms, or to come to terms with the achievements of other economic systems. But most serious of all, we therefore bring an inadequate understanding to those people who are faced with the necessity of devising a modus vivendi with a political or economic system which may indeed deny the values they hold dear. It is sobering to realize that we Western Christians in some measure take for granted positions of economic privilege among the nations of the world, which positions are often dependent upon our superior military force, when at the same time we find it difficult to sympathize with Christians in the Communist orbit who similarly make concessions, though at different points.
Real Nature Of Revolution
In the fourth place, this false juxtaposition of Christianity and communism has blinded us in part to the real nature of the revolution on the Eurasian and African continents, and has led to an “overideologizing” of the world struggle. While in the West the scientific and industrial revolutions were achieved leisurely and organically with abundant resources, over a period of several centuries while other societies stood still—and at a cost far greater than we recognize now in our romantic view of our own history—half the world’s population still lives in want. Granted that many of the poor peoples understand their situation imperfectly and, moreover, tend to fix the blame for their plight primarily on the nations who have more. Nevertheless, having come to realize that want is no longer necessary, they are driven frantically to escape it. The pathos of this we have not understood.
While we should certainly labor, hope and pray that revolution may come to the peoples in distress without violence, we dare not be sentimental about the true dynamics of this revolution. For the stirring in the Orient means that the real “disturber” of the peace there is not Communist agitation, but the naked struggle of men for a tolerable earthly existence. And beneath the immediacy of this struggle, man being a unitary being, lies their spiritual hunger.
In the fifth place, this misreading of the struggle in terms primarily of political and military power balances has brought on a vulgarization of our own faith. In a manner reminiscent of Europe’s Thirty Years’ War, we have been coarsened and calloused spiritually by totalitarian struggles fought under slogans of deepest piety. Beneath the euphemisms of military technique we accept mass homicide, and today continue to pour our best resources into the “improvement” of that technique.
A final error antedates the Communist revolution by many centuries. It is the loss of an articulate awareness in Christendom that, while the law of God is indeed binding upon all men, Christian ethics in the full sense can be expected of Christians only. Since the fourth century of our era, it has all too seldom been clear that the unique and primary ethical significance of the Christian faith is not its mollifying influence on pagans who remain pagans still, however desirable this may be, but rather the creating of the new people of God who press forward redemptively in his kingdom, whether or not such action coincides with a particular political destiny. The recovery of the experience of personal conversion in evangelical Christianity has been a partial corrective, but there is too little evidence of a recovery of the ethical implications of this insight. Thus for all the emphasis on personal conversion, when we reach the point of political ethos we tend to glide into vague clichés of national piety which derive, not from the Gospel, but from a strange synthesis of Old Testament national Judaism and the Enlightenment.
It will be a great day when evangelical Christians come to see that the doctrine of the sovereignty of God among the nations cannot be played off against the redemptive thrust of the gospel of Jesus Christ to exempt Christians from obedience to Christ when they are caught in a struggle for national survival. Only when our lesser loyalties are subsumed under the rule of Christ can the full prophetic impact of the will of God for mankind impinge upon the world of nations.
As a result of these deep misunderstandings, historical Christianity has been brought to its knees before Communist might. True, it behooves us to be humble at this point, for we can never presume to comprehend all the counsels of God. Furthermore, we do not pretend by this analysis that Christians en toto have forsaken the faith, or that the Church of Christ has suffered lasting defeat. We are discussing here phases of Christian understanding and practice which do fall within the scope of Christian responsibility, where continuous seeking and sharing among Christians are imperative, and where every insight is subject to the correction or the improvement that another may bring.
It is in this sense that the present writer believes that we have sacrificed the Christian ministry of reconciliation, which in truth transcends our present divided world, to the promotion of the aims of Western civilization. At a time when communism has sought to cast Christianity in the role of the protagonist of corrupt regimes, American Christians play into their hands by attacks which either implicitly or openly identify Christianity with the cause of the West. Just as for decades we were virtually incommunicado with the Russian people, we are now unable to communicate with the Chinese. While there may be many reasons for such a state of affairs, the false assessment of the Communist problem by Western Christians is unquestionably one.
Christian renewal does not in fact come by the prefabrication of new structures, outside the situation, which then, like Solomon’s temple, can be assembled on the desired spot. Christian renewal comes rather when we turn to God in concrete repentance, and he then revives his work “in the midst of the years.”
The direction of that repentance lies, it would seem, in a recovery of a primary loyalty to Christ and his community, to which other loyalties—and national fears—must once more be made secondary. It lies in the discovery that the real battle line today stretches, not simply between Christianity and communism, but between the Christianity and the secular idolatry which East and West share alike, and which is mushrooming to unprecedented proportions wherever men succeed in liberating themselves from the whims of nature. That such recovery will demand a heavy price of American Christians is not to be denied. If in the West we have been granted a temporary respite in the struggle between the Lord of history and the rulers of this age, so far as the attitude of the State toward the Church is concerned, let us receive it with gratitude. But let us never make it an end in itself. It has come, perhaps because some men have been faithful, but more basically, for reasons hidden in the counsel of God. To contradict the Gospel in our effort to defend this temporal value is a spiritual hazard of the first magnitude.
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Paul Peachey is currently on leave from Eastern Mennonite College in Harrisonburg, Virginia, to study the “peace movement” in Japan, and its implications for the Christian witness. He teaches Church History and Sociology, in which fields he holds the Ph.D. degree from University of Zurich.
