Christianity must deliberately apply its warm spirit of compassion to the frustrations and vexing needs of modern man. Deep and selfless concern for unreached multitudes and a passion to right social injustices should mark the Christian witness in the world no less than a determination to preach the Gospel. The Church’s thrust must somewhere intersect and penetrate the driving aspirations of restless, clamoring masses.
Today people’s needs are measured almost entirely in material terms, and in relation to economic status and strength. The Church on the other hand offers eternal security and abundant life. Do these orbits interact at any point? Can the Church maintain relevance when its God, and not Marx or twentieth century social theorists, defines the content of love and justice? How must the Church meet alien philosophies that attach strange expectations to “Christian social action”?
Communism meets the disparities in modern society with a crisis technique that in the seemingly beneficent act of equalizing wealth places men’s lives under total state regimentation. Professing to function in the name of the proletariat an elite cadre (the dictatorial party organization) freely resorts to violence to repress and destroy all opposition. Communists, however, hesitate to actually ameliorate economic inequities, since any improvement of conditions only decreases the discontents which Communism appropriates for revolutionary ends. Among the masses, Communist tactics of propaganda and violence are more effective in advancing: totalitarian goals than are Communist doctrine and theory. People may challenge Communist philosophy as fallacious, may recognize Communist practise as inconsistent (even Khrushchev’s regime compromises at numerous levels). But they dare offer no rejoinder to tyrannical repression.
The Free World has sought to meet the social problems that feed Communism’s aggressive exploits by financial aid, by assailing economic disparity and by promoting the redistricting of wealth. In other words, while it actively resists Communism by cold war at the military level, the Free World makes peace with socialism at the politico-economic level. The Free World today is prepared for a nuclear war it may never need to fight (pray God!). Khrushchev wants to inherit America, yes—but not in ashes; nor does he want Russian industrial development set back a generation. Only some peculiar miscalculation could possibly outweigh the deterring force of these considerations. With each passing day, however, by being forced to voluntarily extend its compromise with socialism and to strain its abundant but not illimitable resources, the Free World is losing out more and more in the politico-economic war. The greater its provision of material benefits to the underprivileged masses abroad, the more the West seems to experience that one set of corrected conditions can swiftly worsen another. The actual facts are sometimes cold and cruel; it is true, for example, that medicine, food and money have meant longer life, population increases, and hence multiplied needs which in turn leave the basic situation relatively unchanged. In seeking to relieve multiplied conditions of dire distress, the Free World is draining its resources to the point where ultimately it may default on its ideals through sheer inability to nourish and sustain those ideals.
Although the masses in poverty (more than the vaulting ambitions of underdeveloped nations) pose problems of conscience to their more wealthy neighbors, anyone who thinks that today’s major problem is one of money and property is uncritically swallowing the Soviet line. Despite Communism’s announced hostility to private property, for example, the Communists since World War II have gained 30 million acres of land by “liberation,” and without putting a single Russian soldier on the battlefield Communists now control 800 million people.
The Free World’s program of “economic amelioration” therefore is far too simple. Its effect is merely to postpone major crises. In fact, by nonviolent rather than revolutionary methods it even promotes certain Soviet goals.
The Church of Jesus Christ should not suffer the illusion that material benefits prompt men’s loyalties to truth, justice and love, any more than dollar diplomacy binds nations to continuing respect for freedom and justice once monetary support is exhausted and removed.
In this era of communications proficiency one of the greatest tragedies is the Church’s conspicuous failure to propagandize her historic values and achievements. Across the years thousands of missionaries tore themselves from their families and the material comforts of the West (which they esteemed inferior to life’s greatest treasure) to carry the hope of the Gospel to fallen creatures, and to promote man’s recovery of his true dignity and destiny in Christ.
An even greater tragedy is the Church’s failure either through indifference or distrust—to apply her distinctive supernatural dynamic to the social order.
What is her mandate?
She is to pray for a lost and doomed world, and certainly no amount of social activism on her part will compensate for neglect of prayer.
She is to preach the Gospel by word and deed, and certainly social activism on her part is no legitimate alternative mission.
She is to get the revealed and inspired Word of God to the restless masses, and certainly no amount of other ecclesiastical literature on contemporary problems (or even on mission) discharges this obligation.
Above all, the Christian is to love God with his whole being and his neighbor as himself. This responsibility is quite different from mastering a dozen handbooks on the social crisis in order to delineate the universal brotherhood of man.
The Church of Jesus Christ is to cement and to maintain the bond between passion for the lost and compassion for the needy.
Prayer and evangelical mission are not alternatives to social responsibility but are means for deepening the sense of justice and kindling the fires of love. The Church misunderstands her own mission if she allows evangelistic effort in the narrow sense to cancel social concern.
Several years ago a Brethren group in a Scottish industrial town refused to vote on the liquor issue (for or against public houses) because it wanted no part of local government affairs, and believed virtually in shutting itself up in its little mission hall against the “Coming Crowning Day.” These people did, however, call a special prayer meeting to beseech God against a victory for king alcohol. Alcohol won out, but by such a narrow margin that if these Christians had exercised their right to vote, the outcome would have gone the other way.
In every generation God calls dedicated men to specialized tasks of social service which ministers and missionaries cannot fulfill. Sometimes these workers lay themselves open not only to the defilement of the market place but also to the sneers of certain evangelicals who consider them suspect. Social passion born of biblical motivations, hallowed by biblical dynamisms, should encourage a wide range of activity that merits respect as Christian vocation. Christians cannot with good conscience deplore social service as secular if they themselves ignore or desert this arena of responsibility. In fact, ought they themselves not be in the very forefront of such social concern?
The Church must minister to the needy according to her ability. When they cannot care for themselves she must feed the hungry and heal the sick. While she must meet such survival needs she has no excuse for confusing human desires and wants with human rights, however. Teaching men how to raise their standards of living and how to develop technologically is neither an imperative nor a primary task of the Church. But caring for the hungry and the cold is no matter of choice or deliberation. And she must help the hungry not only out of concern to preach the Gospel to them, but also out of compassion for the hungry as physically hungry.
On the other hand, whatever she does in compassionate awareness of basic human needs she must do in the name of Christ. The Church’s compassion after all is really the compassion of Christ for the hungry. If she belabors this point, however, her compassion may easily become something less. Yet the principle of “a cup of water in my name” must always characterize her ministrations to the needs of both body and soul, of both the hungry and the lost.
She is not called to encourage totalitarian states to dispense welfare in the name of welfare statism. She ought not even align herself with government welfare on the assumption that while the state pays the bills she can preserve her reputation for benevolence by merely administering the services. Christ never asked Caesar to fulfill the Church’s responsibility in whole or even in part. Those who believe such alignment is the way to reach the masses may know how to strike a short-term bargain with modern social theory. They know little, however, of the Christian meaning of passion and compassion.
Preaching The Prince Of Peace While ‘Peace Talks’ Go On
The sudden and unexpected return of Christ to this earth, Paul wrote the Thessalonians, will come when people are unaware of their impending doom, when they are saying “there is peace and security” (1 Thess. 5:3).
Not since Jeremiah’s day has there been so much ceaseless prattle about peace and so little evidence of it. Politicians claim credit for preserving the peace and churchmen promote the United Nations as the world’s best hope for peace. Jeremiah reproved even the religious leaders of his day for saying “peace, peace” to heal the hurt of God’s people “when there is no peace” (6:14; 8:11). It is remarkable that while the visionaries today are writing of a world without war, so many professed realists fail to see that ours is a world without peace.
“Condemned to Talk” is Time Magazine’s apt caption for the endless cold-war attempts to achieve peace. The test-ban talks begun in Geneva in October, 1958, by the U.S., the U.S.S.R., and Britain, we are reminded, “finally broke up, after 353 sessions, without the slightest sign of substantive agreement.… Yet … discussion … has positive values. It can furnish clues to developing Communist policy … (and) … keep the Kremlin fully informed of basic Western positions.… In a strong sense, then, the great cold-war adversaries are condemned to keep right on talking.
Absent from such summitry is not only the Messiah who carries peaceful government upon his shoulders, but also modern men who personally know the Redeemer’s peace in a troubled world. While it is true that Russia’s unwillingness to allow meaningful inspection jeopardizes every plan for nuclear weapon control, it is far from true that the basic problem of war centers in supervising the atom. Even the atomic age has not lifted us out of the Adamic age, and there’s the rub. To shape a new society we need not merely control of the armaments race but regeneration of the human race. When secular leaders are “condemned to talk” the Church may with benefit search her soul to rediscover what she is under orders to preach.
Student Interests Demonstrate Need For Guiding Principles
What is happening with students today? If the recent descent upon Washington by thousands of college and university students to picket for disarmament may be taken as any indication, the dominant principle of academic detachment is being shaken in our day by a rising interest in moral issues and by a deep concern for social justice. This surge of interest has been characterized by such diversity, however, that it emerges in its essential nature as a search for principles rather than a vision of a cause. Against this recent spectacle in Washington, evangelicals may note with wisdom another student gathering, of similar proportions, in Urbana, Illinois—the Sixth Annual Missionary Convention of the Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship. Here, with a parallel emphasis upon the problems of the world, went the prior demand for a personal experience with Jesus Christ. This is to declare that the regeneration of society must begin with the regeneration of the individual. It is a reminder that the principles being sought by students are only to be found in Jesus Christ.
No End In Sight For Agony In Algeria
Algeria may long continue as one of the world’s most agonized spots, with indiscriminate murder and bombings a way of life—and of death. To the rest of the world it is a blurred picture. Frenchmen and Algerians are arrayed in strange enmities. French troops and installations are attacked by their own nationals even while Moslems and whites engage in senseless killings.
The situation is all the more puzzling when one realizes that many French people have resided in Algeria for generations and now their descendants are caught in the maelstrom of rising Moslem nationalism. For these Frenchmen Algeria is home, while for the Moslem majority it is a native land.
After years of warfare without victory for either side, DeGaulle determined to work out a peaceful solution. Official cessation of hostilities may decrease major conflicts but only time and death will wipe out the hatreds and frustrations of thousands.
It is at this point that Christians may have failed Algeria almost completely. How many pray daily that the balm of love and toleration may be poured out on this troubled spot? The works of nations, no less than of men, do follow after them. Caught in the ambiguities of her earlier colonization, France can neither stay in Algeria nor get out.
