Stock phrases in the current ecclesiastical jargon make it clear that the institution thinks pragmatically of its task for the seventies. “Ministry is people.” “Church is where the action is.” “Live love!” “To be Christian is to be human.” The directives coming to the minister, now conceived as an “enabler,” seem to imply that his primary function is to build up a head of steam powerful enough to drive the people forward in good works. The area of good works is determined by the pressing need of the moment. A few months ago it was the desperate situation in Biafra. During Lent it was overseas development and relief. Right now it is drug addiction. On the horizon is environmental pollution.
The reasoning behind this frenzied activism seems logical enough. When Jesus was living in this world, he went about doing good—healing the sick, feeding the hungry, giving sight to the blind. The Christian Church is supposed to be his body and to continue his saving work in the world. If Jesus were living in the world today, surely his concern would still be with people in need of human deliverance—the victims of such hardships as war, poverty, and racial injustice. Therefore, if the Church is to be true to its function as the body of Christ, must it not be the Church that “serves a hurting world”? Hence the contempt today for stained glass and broadloom. Anything that shuts the worshiper out from the clear vision of a torn and bleeding world, or deadens the noise of human strife, has no place in Christian work and witness. Worship itself—the action by which God is praised—must forsake the passivity of inward renewal to identify with Christ in constructive (or destructive!) social action.
The reasoning is logical. Yet a question remains: Are the underlying assumptions concerning the “saving work” of Jesus perhaps an oversimplification—one great enough to be considered a tragic distortion? The Church is indeed supposed to be the body of Christ in which he continues his saving work in the world, and responsibility, both individual and corporate, indisputably attaches to Christian discipleship. But where is the real action of Christ in the world to be found? And what, precisely, is his saving work? The question that the disciples asked Jesus “on the other side of the sea” must repeatedly be put: “What must we be doing to be doing the work of God?” (John 6:28).
The answer to this question is not, I believe, to be found in the feverish social action now being forced on the body of Christ. It is found, rather, in the thrust of the Gospel as expressed in Jesus’ reply to the disciples’ question: “This is the work that God requires: believe in the one whom he has sent.”
Before looking more closely at this answer, let us glance at the distressing world situation that confronts the Church in the seventies. Over-population, ecological imbalance, racial tension, armaments buildup, the widening gulf between affluence and poverty, pollution, drug addiction—these problems are so great that any one of them appears capable of destroying society. If they are not solved speedily, no world will be left to which the body of Christ can witness. Hence the urgency of social action.
And yet, the very magnitude of these problems is forcing solutions that can be found only beyond the periphery of Christian concern. As the complexities of a technological society and the interrelatedness of its concerns become more evident, the catalytic effectiveness of programs of Christian social action becomes less evident. The greater the social problem, the less likely it is that the church will have anything very helpful to say or to do about it. Consider three examples:
1. Concern for the economic distress of “underdeveloped” peoples has now moved beyond the sphere of overseas mission boards of churches to take top priority on the agenda of secular international bodies as UNESCO and the World Bank. Involvement by the churches in areas where the experts have taken over is proving to be something of an irritant. (Witness the about-face that the World Council of Churches had to make on the Biafra situation: after urging the Christian constituency to do the “right” thing and feed Nigeria’s “enemy,” it was forced at the eleventh hour to withhold aid from Biafra so that “realistic” political action might be taken!)
2. A short generation ago the problems of addiction—drug, tobacco, and alcohol—were felt to be trivial enough to be relegated to the passion of the WCTU or the denomination’s board of evangelism and social service; now they are found on the front doorstep of health departments at every governmental level. It is somewhat amusing to discover that though university students a dozen years ago were contemptuous of the Church for worrying about liquor and tobacco, today’s students are snide for another reason: the problem of addiction is so serious that only society’s superior scientific wisdom can solve it.
3. Then there is pollution. The annual conference of the United Church of Canada here in Saskatchewan has decided to make itself relevant in the year 1970 by studying pollution. But it will hardly achieve relevance by doing this. It will merely tag behind a host of other interest groups that have latched on to the latest “in” thing in order to be heard. Its findings on this subject may be profound, but the world is not going to look to the churchmen for help. Both for analysis and for solution of the problem of environmental pollution, the world will look to its technical specialists—as it should.
Even the motivation for good works is unlikely to require Christian support in a world that is increasingly maturing in its sense of responsibility for its secular well-being. Bonhoeffer’s insight here is certainly valid. The Christian has no monopoly on good works. Caesar’s realm takes in a lot of territory—most of the territory, indeed, that bestirs Christian activists today. The Christian should not feel resentful if his moral judgment is no longer needed to press good works that secular man, motivated by self-preservation and a “live-and-let-live” philosophy, can successfully undertake himself. Indeed, secular man can plausibly argue that he has more right to clean up the world than the Christian. This is all the world he has.
Does all this imply that the message of the Christian Church no longer has social significance? Does this mean that the Christian Gospel confronts modern man with indifference and his tragic plight with resignation? Far from it! In a world “come of age,” the Church has to define more carefully than ever the nature of Jesus’ saving work for the world. It has to differentiate more clearly than ever what man can do and be without Jesus Christ and what he can do and be only in and through Jesus Christ. As Joseph Sittler has said:
[The Church] only serves that which is not itself by being most absolutely itself. Otherwise it has no reason for being. When, therefore, we ask for a permeating presence of the Church in the world, this is absolutely right, but that presence will only be a presence effective in order to its calling when the particularity of that presence, which is nothing less than God in his world, remains that which permeates, and constitutes the substance of, that presence [“Revolution, Place and Symbol,” Journal of the First International Congress on Religion, Architecture and the Visual Arts, New York, 1967, p. 65].
This brings us back to Jesus’ answer to the disciples’ question: This is the work that God requires: believe in the one whom he has sent. The context in John 6 of this surprising reply is a discussion of food, the contrast being pointedly drawn between the kind of food men need to keep body and mind together and the kind of food that nourishes a believer “unto eternal life.” In John’s Gospel, the “work” of God, which Jesus’ earthly works attest—bread for the hungry, sight to the blind, life to the dead—is represented as the gift of a new humanity that is realized in and through Jesus. Jesus in his living perfectly fulfilled the will of God and in his dying triumphed over sin and death. As a result of this achievement—an achievement unique and unrepeatable on the human scale—a new order of righteousness has been established to which the natural man is called to relate himself. The paradox is that what man cannot do and be on his own, he is called to do and be in Christ. “If any man be in Christ Jesus he is a new creature. Old things are passed away. Behold, all things have become new.” Christian faith is the acceptance of this achievement of Jesus.
Obviously, implications for man and the world follow fast and sure from this act of faith. The Christian community has the responsibility of actualizing here on earth the union with God that Jesus has achieved. But it will do this, not by identification with “one-dimensional man” in his need, but by union with Christ in his risen power. The current obsession that the Church has first to “identify with men in their needs” before it can help them finds no support in the New Testament. Man by his sinful nature is already fully identified with his fellows and shares his fellows’ plight. What sinful man needs is not closer identification with sinners but identification with the One who has overcome sin and death—that is, identification with the risen living Christ in a faith union made possible by the work of the Holy Spirit.
Traditionally the Holy Spirit has achieved this when men have been open to God’s Word and have given themselves to prayer and sacramental renewal. From this work of faith, as the Epistle of James makes clear, practical works follow—“by these actions the integrity of his [Abraham’s] faith was fully proved” (Jas. 2:23). But the order is clear: faith in Christ, and then the works that prove it. The one thing that the Church dare not do is to reverse this order. It dare not move from man’s own works to faith. It dare not take a sweeping look over the human scene, assess what is wrong with man, and then turn to the Christian faith in the hope of redeeming the situation. Since Jesus Christ has already redeemed the human situation, all that the Church can do is point to him in whose name and power men are bidden to rise up and walk.
The very last thing that the Church needs to fear is that a faithful and simple proclamation of the mighty acts of God in Christ will be irrelevant to a hurting world. It was to meet the human need that God acted in Jesus Christ. The real questions, the ultimate questions confronting men and women in the seventies, are the very questions on which the drama of the Incarnation focuses. These ultimate questions go far beyond the social concern of our time to confront man at the basic level of his being. Who am I? Where did I come from? Why am I here? Where am I going? These night questions will remain after urgent and remedial first aid has been given to social problems. Night questions confront all men everywhere and under all circumstances of life—whether they live in the black ghetto or in the white suburbs, in polluted air or clean. The pragmatic problems can be solved by sensible men everywhere, but the night questions find their answer only in the Christian Gospel. There is nothing outside the Christian Gospel to witness to the fact that man came from God and must return to the Father, and, while here, do the Father’s will.
It is both tragic and ironic that at the very time a vocal and influential segment of church leadership is trying to make the Christian Gospel relevant by secularizing it, the generation to which the appeal ostensibly is made is crying out, not so much for the solution of life’s social problems, as for an understanding of life itself. Lady Susan Glynn has remarked that “the quality of human nature is leading, as always, to two movements in opposite directions. Religious leaders are tending to speak more about corporate action and less about personal faith, but at the same time many individuals, particularly young people, feel starved of the things of the spirit.” Whether this generation’s spiritual hunger can be satisfied by the announcement of the Christian Gospel remains to be seen. There is a stage at which starved people spurn food, and it may be that the spiritual need of this day and age is not going to be met. It may be that even the most inspired “updating” of the Gospel will fail to win a response from those for whom Christ died. But this is beside the point, and it is not the real concern of the Church. The only real concern of the Church is that it be faithful to the Gospel it has been given, which is not its own but its Lord’s.
The Value Imperative
Colleges are not all as bad as the one glimpsed in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Yet there is certainly a great need for educational reforms. Although education has made great promises in methods, it is confused about goals and ends. Knowledge is like a sharp knife. It can be used to save a life in a delicate operation or to stab a man in the heart. It is just a means. At this critical moment in the world’s history, education has practically gone dead in regard to goals.
We have a disintegrating educational system in a disintegrating cultural order. A young person can graduate from even our finest universities with honors and still be broken down in health, vocationally a misfit, personally disagreeable, unfitted for home life, morally a menace to society, politically a grafter, and emotionally so unhappy as to be on the verge of suicide. There is something drastically wrong with such a system.
The great underlying issue of our time is whether we believe in a God-centered or a man-centered universe. All truth is God’s truth and should lead to God. Most education is fitted into a framework of naturalism and fails to discriminate between the facts and a naturalistic interpretation of facts. The same facts need to be fitted into a framework of theism. Instead of narrowing the fields of knowledge, religion should add immeasurable depth and height and significance. The heavens declare the glory of God. When the glory of God departs, the glory of man made in his image departs also.
The United Church of Christ gave $600,000 to a college that chose one of the main exponents of the “God is dead” theory as its only professor of religion. Some denominational leaders have advocated the separation of colleges from the Church. It is not surprising that many church-related colleges produce a lot of pagans.
The National Education Association has stated that more people have spent more hours in more schools since 1900 than in all human history before. To this we should add that more people have been killed since 1900 than in all previous human history.
Knowledge is a means. We greatly need Christian goals. What is the value of knowing physics if we use it to destroy mankind in a nuclear war? What is the value of knowing biology if we use it for biological warfare, or chemistry if we use it to produce poison gas? What is the value of knowing mathematics if we use it to cheat our fellow men, of knowing three, five, or twenty languages if we lie in every one of them? The more nuclear science we have in our heads, the more imperative it is that we have the love of God in our hearts.
The Book of Joel says, “Your old men shall dream dreams, your young men shall see visions.” Youth should accept the wisdom of age, and age should accept the vision of youth. “Without vision, the people perish.” Instead of the spectacle of youth and age scolding each other, we need to see the ripe experience and wise judgment of age clasp hands with the vision and idealism and adventurous spirit of youth.
We should help our young people to develop the love of truth and the love of man. We desperately need Christian higher education. The prayer of a student should be: “Unite my mind, O God, to know you and your universe and my purpose in it.”—Dr. WILLIAM R. BARNHART, minister emeritus, Circular Congregational Church, Charleston, South Carolina.
