Christians in the East-bloc lands are understandably cautious in speaking with visitors from the West. When a condition of trust is established, they do frequently speak of their limitations in being socially and politically prophetic, as believers in the free world dare to be. Yet, Christians have a recognized duty to express their dissent at public policies that are clearly incompatible with their convictions.
Such expression is, to be sure, regulated by the conditions of where believers live. Although making allowances for certain excesses, evangelicals don’t dare neglect, carelessly or in fear, this phase of Christian witness.
The prophets of Israel should instruct and inform our prophetic testimony. This aspect of our Western heritage is frequently taken for granted, and seems to be valued most when it is threatened. The problem is not whether believers should use the prophetic mode, but rather, where and in which issues.
Evangelicals must accept as commonplace that prophetic utterances of liberal theological thinkers and writers are far more vigorous against right-of-center issues and governments than against spokesmen and public policies on the left. We must learn to live with this and not let it goad us into rejecting the mandate to be creatively and consistently prophetic.
Thoughtful persons have sometimes been perplexed at some radical liberal prophecy: a case in point, the “new left” protests in the late sixties. At that time, a professor who was a guest in our land, the darling of the new left, proclaimed that the United States lives in a continuous prefascist condition and that all expressions from the right-of-center should be rigidly suppressed. I remember looking in vain for any criticism of this proposed denial of freedom of expression in the liberal religious organs.
It may be said that if evangelicals have at times been painfully slow in speaking prophetically to social, economic, and political ills, they have at least been consistent in their attitude toward systems of evident tyranny, for example. Certainly the principle of “A plague on both your houses” is preferable to a selective policy at this point.
There is a more current example. Liberal journalists condemn several countries, which are usually friendly to the United States and which are anti-Marxist, for the abridgement of human rights. Although such abridgements deserve criticism, there is also a place for consistency. These same journalists fail to criticize Marxist countries where human rights are systematically violated.
Such selective prophetic activity can scarcely be justified by quoting the conventional wisdom of Marxist rulers, whose familiar chant says that citizens have all they need so long as they all have the basic necessities of fuel, clothing, shelter, and employment. These are valid rights, but only the convinced materialist will hold that they constitute an adequate basis for the “rights of man.”
The lack of consistency upon the part of some churchmen does not justify a policy of silence or of inaction by evangelicals. Those people who profess to make the Bible a living basis for faith and action need to be positive about “the prophetic.” All Christians, and especially those of the First World, to be consistent must involve themselves, by attitude, by word, and by life style, with the poor of the world.
Although God is concerned for all persons, and although the poor sin just as do the prosperous, yet the thrust of the Old Testament prophets demands our deep and involved concern for the impoverished of the world. There is no justification for the gap between the living standards prevailing in the industrialized lands and those that exist in the lands of the Third World.
Again, it is difficult to understand the silence among affluent Christians about the massive and perverse forms of waste: for example, the annual rotting of 16 million tons (probably a conservative estimate) of cereal grains by the brewing and distilling industries in the United States. Or, scarcely less revolting, the grotesque and horrendous misuse of cereal grains, fish, and meat by the pet food industry. Surely God, whose heart beats with the hungry poor of the world, must revolt at these senseless forms of waste. Surely he will one day bring our nation, along with the other industrialized nations, to judgment for the existence of these and similar forms of destruction of the very resources that an underfed and hungry world needs so desperately.
Behind these more blatant forms of senseless waste is the pervasive distortion of Christian stewardship known variously as “our standard of living” or “our affluent life style.” We need vigorous, even radical, prophets to sear our comfortable consciences about the pervasiveness and tyranny of our system of planned obsolescence by which irreplaceable resources are squandered.
A discriminating and consistent prophetic stance will challenge an existing society in which a child born today in, say, the United States or Western Europe will in his or her lifetime lay upon irreplaceable resources of the earth a demand fifteen times as great as a child born at the same time, say, in an Indian village. Merely to thank God for our favorable placement without raising an effective voice against the inequities of our world will scarcely justify any claim on our part to be prophetic as Christians.
We are under obligation to be even-handed in our selection of issues to which we seek to speak prophetically. We must, further, make certain that the issues toward which we in conscience address ourselves are issues whose relation to biblical mandates is clear. But silence speaks loudly of indifference, something that a vital evangelical community cannot afford in the face of the world’s poor and disinherited.
Harold B. Kuhn is professor of philosophy of religion at Asbury Theological Seminary, Wilmore, Kentucky.
