In a time of ethical relativism, when social and moral problems beset us on every hand, evangelicals need to give careful thought to their position respecting public affairs. Committed to the Word of God and to a Lord who is the greatest of ethical teachers as well as the only Saviour from sin, they are spiritually among those to whom much has been given. Yet they have no occasion for pride, because humility is at the heart of the Gospel. If evangelicals rejoice in personal knowledge of Jesus Christ, their rejoicing must ever be mingled with honest realization that apart from any merit of theirs, the divine Son of God who came to seek and to save the lost has sought and found them. Motivated not by fear of rejection by God but rather by love for him who has given them life everlasting—and love is always a stronger motive than fear—they are obligated to serve their Lord through serving their fellow men. Christ’s saying, “Every one to whom much is given, of him will much be required …” (Luke 12:48b, RSV), applies with irresistible logic to them because of the riches of their spiritual heritage.

This being the case, there rests upon evangelical Christians a mandatory responsibility for unflagging interest in public affairs and for informed participation in them. That this is not nowadays a responsibility consistently discharged is a reproach to the evangelical cause and a denial of an important part of its heritage.

History bears voluminous witness to evangelical participation in public affairs. Reformation leaders, such as Luther, Calvin, and Knox, were concerned for the material as well as spiritual welfare of their fellow citizens and also for just government. In fact, Calvinism must be reckoned along with the French Enlightenment as a prime influence upon the development of American democracy. According to Bancroft, “The Revolution of 1776, so far as it was affected by religion, was a Presbyterian measure. It was the natural outgrowth of the principles which the Presbyterianism of the Old World planted in her sons, the English Puritans, the Scotch Covenanters, the French Huguenots, the Dutch Calvinists, and the Presbyterians of Ulster.” And Horace Walpole, on hearing of the beginning of the Revolution, said in Parliament, “Cousin America has run off with a Presbyterian parson.” The parson was John Witherspoon, president of the College of New Jersey (now Princeton University) and the only clergyman to sign the Declaration of Independence.

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Moreover, as J. Wesley Bready has shown in This Freedom, Whence? (American Tract Society, 1942), in early nineteenth-century England moral and social advances, such as the abolition of the slave trade, the restriction of child labor, and the mitigation of an inhumanly harsh penal code, came out of the Wesleyan revival through such evangelical leaders as Wilberforce, Shaftesbury, and Howard. As for nineteenth-century America, Timothy Smith has demonstrated in Revivalism and Social Reform (Abingdon Press, 1957) the same intimate relationship between evangelicalism and the amelioration of social abuses.

Although twentieth-century evangelicals in America have not always been so socially concerned as their predecessors, the accusation that they are almost devoid of such outreach is superficial. Aside from the foreign-missions movement, in which evangelicalism has been and still is the single most active force, the rescue missions dotting the nation’s cities and offering physical as well as spiritual rehabilitation to human derelicts almost unreachable by other agencies are largely the product of evangelical initiative. Similarly, in the extremely difficult field of juvenile gangs, the most effective work, like that of Jim Vaus in Manhattan, is the direct result of evangelicalism. Despite their refusal to equate the social gospel with the Gospel of salvation through the work of Christ, evangelicals have always maintained some continuance of social concern.

Nevertheless, as Carl F. H. Henry showed in The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism (Eerdmans, 1947), they have lagged behind what is required of those to whom so much spiritual and doctrinal wealth has been committed. Today, seventeen years after Dr. Henry’s book was written, their conscience is still uneasy, mostly because of sins of omission. That theirs is not the only uneasy conscience—for who in this day of multitudinous problems can claim a conscience completely unburdened—is beside the present discussion. Sufficient to say, evangelicals need to accept a greater share of responsibility for public affairs.

This they can do within the framework of their basic convictions and in a way wholly compatible with the clear teaching of the Bible. It is a principle held by many evangelicals that the Church should not enter into politics because the mission of the Church is the spiritual one of preaching the Gospel. Evangelicals believe with the Apostle Paul that there is only one Gospel—the Gospel of salvation through Jesus Christ who “died for our sins according to the scriptures … was buried, and … rose again the third day according to the scriptures” (1 Cor. 15:3, 4). It is no unfounded fear that preoccupation with other matters, such as prohibition in the early decades of this century and now racial desegregation (important as it is), can almost usurp the primacy that belongs only to the Gospel. Nevertheless, the pendulum can swing too far in the other direction. And that this swing has occurred in the case of some evangelicals must be admitted.

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According to much evangelical conviction, it is not fitting for the Church to inject itself into politics by taking sides in political campaigns, by telling members how to vote, or by lobbying in Congress and in state legislatures. But this does not mean that ministers and laymen must keep silent about the injustices that cry for remedy and the evils that infest our society, or that they must look with callous unconcern upon human suffering and remain indifferent to crucial national and international problems. To do so is to repudiate an integral part of Christian responsibility and to run the risk of severing two vital aspects of the Christian life that God has joined together.

Says the Apostle Paul in one of the greatest of New Testament passages, “By grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: not of works, lest any man should boast. For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus unto good works, which God hath before ordained that we should walk in them” (Eph. 2:8–10). Therefore, to deny or repudiate Christian social concern and participation in public affairs is not only to sever what God has indissolubly united but also to thwart the divinely willed purpose of our regeneration as children of God. It is significant that such great New Testament epistles as Romans, Galatians, Ephesians, Colossians, and Hebrews begin with saving doctrine and end with the obligation to practice it.

Acceptance of civic responsibility; loyal participation in government (including the duty of speaking out against policies that seem wrong); personal and self-sacrificial action in behalf of the oppressed and underprivileged, the sick and helpless, regardless of color, nationality, or creed—these, while not the Gospel, are the inescapable outcome of the Gospel and thus part of the Christian vocation binding upon clergy and laity alike. As the beloved disciple said, “But if any one has the world’s goods and sees his brother in need, yet closes his heart against him, how does God’s love abide in him?” (1 John 3:17, RSV). Or, in the incomparable words of Christ, “Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me” (Matt. 25:40).

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The principle that the Church may not enter into politics does not mean that either the individual churches or their ministers and members may remain comfortably aloof from injustice and remote from human oppression and suffering. The calling of the Church is indeed spiritual. Its primary obligation is to proclaim the great Good News of salvation through Jesus Christ. It must be utterly convinced that the ultimate solution to the problem of humanity is regeneration by the Holy Spirit.

For evangelicals these things are not debatable. Yet they are accompanied by some corollaries. Chief among these is the principle that not all proclamation of the Gospel is verbal. Deeds of compassion done in Christ’s name also make him known and open the door for him to do his saving work.

It may well be that some evangelicals need to learn that social work is not necessarily sub-Christian; that, for a believer, public service and politics may be a God-given vocation; that civil rights is a moral problem; that Christian youth may be called to the Peace Corps; that teaching retarded children may be as Christ-like a calling as leading a class in child evangelism. Witnessing is not a disembodied activity. When clothed with deeds of mercy, it may become fully as effective as when dressed in the attire of the pulpit.

The Old Testament prophets were deeply involved in public affairs. In burning words they spoke out against the injustices of their day. Yet they were not remiss in pointing to the coming Messiah, who would save his people from their sins. The God who inspired them guarded their ministry against imbalance. Our Lord Jesus Christ came to seek and to save that which was lost and to give his life a ransom for many. Yet his daily teaching and activity were also directed toward human need. The apostles preached the Gospel and also ministered to individuals, as have God’s servants in every age. And if this is a time for evangelicals to reconsider their responsibility for social concern and public affairs, let them do so according to the biblical pattern.

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Realism By The Reel

There is a growing concern over the influence of current movies upon the morality of the American people, especially upon that of its youth. Even the advocates of a “new moral code for the twentieth century” are shocked by the delinquency and lawlessness that attends the breakdown of the nation’s traditional moral standards. The frightening increase in crime of all kinds is a matter of statistics, and statistics seem like something more than mere numbers since the assassination of President Kennedy. No less frightening is the decline of that ordinary honesty and integrity on which the conduct of life’s everyday affairs depends.

It would be folly to place most of the blame at the door of the movie industry. Many factors contribute to our collapsing moral situation, not least the rejection of those Christian truths upon which the morality of the Western world is based. But while no one can gauge with precision to what degree today’s movies reflect rather than create our moral predicament, they do make a sizable contribution.

Hollywood and its counterparts across the world have never been candidates for Oscars of moral achievement. The incentive of the industry has come more from the desire to give the public what it is willing to pay to see than from the demands of either art or morality. Hard hit by television and by the human inclination to see movies from the ease of the armchair at home, the industry has met the challenge by making films on new, daring themes and with a degree of realism never before equaled. A bold treatment of racism, rape, violence, homosexuality, murder, alcoholism, and narcotic addiction, and an open exposure of the psychotic personality and of the futility and nothingness of life, are presented today as “the adult film.”

Attempting to meet the challenge of television by representing the kind of movie that cannot be seen at home, the industry has produced many commendable films. But many of the “adult films” are created by a realism that is nothing but an unrelieved preoccupation with naked evil, violence, and sexuality in its normal and abnormal forms.

Constant exposure to such movies, especially when they are viewed as entertainment, is bound to affect the moral fiber and spirit of a nation. Although threatened by television, movie attendance the world over is now nineteen billion a year. Movies are shown on land, at sea, and in the air, and are still the most popular form of entertainment on earth. People who love their country and their youth do well to consider what it is that entertains them. Christians know that “as a man thinketh in his heart, so is he.” They know, too, that if there are wholesome consequences to Paul’s admonition to think on things that are true, virtuous, lovely, and of good report, the opposite is no less true. No people can feed on violence and immorality without being adversely affected.

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The Christian answer is not a rejection of realism. Nor is it an insistence on mere “good taste,” for this itself requires a moral standard by which to be judged. A realistic treatment of evil should possess what Aristotle called “catharsis,” a cleansing, corrective influence. The Bible itself at times is realistic enough. Yet in the biblical treatment of evil, realism is tempered by the reality and aims of redemption. Nothing exposed human evil more realistically than the biblical law; yet in the biblical realism there is no law without Gospel, no exposure that does not point to correction. The playwrights of many current realistic movies are prophets of human doom; like the law, they expose evil, but having no Gospel, they can lead only to despair, to a narcissistic fixation and perverted fascination with raw evil, which is a sickness unto death.

Adult, realistic movies that present unrelieved evil are evil enough. But worse, such films often justify the evil they present, making immorality, homosexuality, violence, drunkenness, and prostitution an acceptable and normal way of life. They often show life as ultimately meaningless and irrational, and within that perspective, moral rebellion is presented as an excusable and justifiable response to universal, cosmic irrationality. This is the end of the road for moral disintegration; immorality can go no further in evil than its self-justification. When the most popular form of entertainment on earth makes evil acceptable and justifies sin, it bears a heavy responsibility for the inevitable consequences upon the moral life of a nation.

If the realistic treatment of life’s evils continues, modern movies (and modern literature as well) will soon have no place to go. When evil is portrayed with a stark unrelieved realism, without the dimensions of correction and redemption and in a form that suggests its acceptability and justification, evil has run its course. It is only when realism is tempered by redemption that it possesses those infinite dimensions of variety where it can still be both entertaining and wholesome to the human spirit and to human society. For what is most real in human life is not evil, but the redemption in Jesus Christ that has overcome evil.

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Freedom And Morality

Will Durant has looked up from the eighteenth century, the current subject of his amazing historiographic labors, long enough to level a steady gaze at the twentieth from the perspective of one whose familiarity with all the centuries has given us the monumental panorama of The Story of Civilization. Philosopher-historian Durant, in an article for the Associated Press, considers the perennial problem of freedom, which has through the ages plagued politician, statesman, moralist, philosopher, and theologian alike. Probing the elusive boundary between liberty and license, Durant asks searching questions concerning the limits of freedom. He writes as one who approved the post-1850 revolt against authority—of child against parent, of pupil against teacher, of man against the state—and now wonders “whether the battle I fought was not too completely won”:

Have we so long ridiculed authority in the family, discipline in education, rules in art, decency in conduct, and law in the state that our liberation has brought us close to chaos in the family and the school, in morals, arts, ideas, and Government? We forgot to make ourselves intelligent when we made ourselves free.

Should we be free to commit murder and escape punishment on the ground of “temporary insanity”? Have our parole boards been too gentle, humane, and approachable? Should we be free to sell, to any minor who has the price, the most obscene—the most deliberately and mercenarily obscene—book of the 18th century, while we deplore the spread of crime, unwed motherhood, and venereal disease among our youth?

Should divorce be so easy that marriage loses its function of promoting sexual order and family discipline?…

These are difficult questions … and I have no dogmatic answers.… I know that severity of punishment does not always prevent crime—though I believe that surety of punishment would deter it. I know how hard it is to say who should judge what is right or wrong, obscene or decent, and where censorship should stop once it has begun.…

But with all these excuses and doubts, public opinion has been guilty of criminal and cowardly silence in the face of growing crime, moral disorder, and deteriorating taste. We have been afraid to speak out lest we be considered old fashioned.… We make idols of screen celebrities who deliberately break up home after home. We give not only money but honors to writers who peddle sexual stimulation. We pass in wonder by some of the modern art exhibited in our museums, and we dare not speak out against it as turning our stomachs with the odor of decay. Our ears are deafened and insulted by cacophonous music, but we fearfully recall that Beethoven was condemned by traditionalists, and without protest we go to be deafened and insulted again. We hear the wits laugh at the old copybook maxims, and we haven’t the nerve to say that those maxims are still true.

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… Let us say, humbly but publicly, that we resent corruption in politics, dishonesty in business, faithlessness in marriage, pornography in literature, coarseness in language, chaos in music, meaninglessness in art.

It is time for all good men to come to the aid of their party, whose name is civilization.

As Durant well knows, every civilization has faced the problem of balancing liberty and law, freedom and restriction. To have a highly ethical society, one must have high individual morality or be faced with the necessity of passing so many laws that the legal structure eventually collapses under its own weight, and the society with it. Herein lies the relevance of the Gospel of Jesus Christ to culture. While the Gospel does not set out with the goal of saving civilization, its effect upon society through the remaking of men has tremendous effect upon the moral level of civilization and the degree of freedom that may be maintained within it. Were the Church to be removed today, the scene would be bleak indeed. Were the restraining grace of God to be withdrawn, what desolation would soon greet the eye!

For the key to the noblest culture is Christ. Let not the Church or her ministers heed the charge that preaching Christ is irrelevant to the great moral crisis of the day. It is no less true today than in Augustine’s day that true freedom is found in and bounded by servitude to God. Regenerate men need fewer human laws and thus have greater freedom to express their personal wills to the glory of God, “whose service is perfect freedom.” The Church must shout from the housetops and echo and re-echo words once spoken by our Lord in the quiet of the night to a ruler of the Jews: “Ye must be born again.” It is in this context that we must understand his words, “The truth shall make you free,” which he further expounds: “If the Son therefore shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed.”

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Ecumenism’s Neo-Colonial Compromises

Ideally the ecumenical movement is a unifying force binding the fragmented Christian enterprise into a single spiritual thrust. In practical outworking, however, ecumenism deteriorates at times into a variety of ecclesiastical propaganda and politics that undermines the possibility of translating ecumenical ideals into reality.

In Africa some spokesmen for the World Council of Churches are now venturing to promote ecumenical inclusivism by attacking long-established evangelical patterns that initiated and nourished many of the most virile mission efforts on that continent. The propaganda line runs something like this: “European” or “American” evangelical opinion is keeping African nationals from the blessing of the ecumenical movement; the “foreign” missionaries who retard this ecumenical commitment are “neo-colonial” agents of “foreign” mission boards who wish to perpetuate a sort of ecclesiastical isolationism that sunders the world church. This kind of propaganda takes hold readily where an anti-colonial temper is apparent. But for all its effectiveness, its use by ecumenical spokesmen for the Geneva office of the World Council of Churches amounts to the sowing of discord when they oversimplify the ecumenical debate into the bald thesis that Western missionaries are trying to keep Africans out of “the main stream of Christianity.”

Inevitably evangelicals who find ecclesiastical liberalism repugnant have reacted to this kind of propaganda and are probing alternative alignments uncommitted to theological inclusivism. Regrettable as such developments may be, one can understand why evangelicals should meet the ecumenical pressures with pressures of their own. Some evangelical leaders abroad—both “foreign” missionaries and nationals—are now depicting the ecumenical movement as an ecclesiastical United Nations with endless foreign resources that are administered with the proviso that their educational and ecclesiastical use conform to the promotion of ecumenically inclusive objectives.

The irony of this debate is that the World Council of Churches, rather than the unaligned evangelicals, thus takes on the character of an ecclesiastical version of the colonial era through its neo-colonial methods of purchasing ecumenical cooperation. This complaint is not confined to African sectors like Kenya, Southern Rhodesia, and Congo-Leopoldville. It may be detected in the Middle East as well.

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In Beirut, Lebanon, for example, the Near East School of Theology has been exposed to a series of ecclesiastical pressures that, from any ideal standpoint, can only be regarded as highly unecumenical. The Theological Education Fund offered $99,000 to assist in relocating the Near East School of Theology institution nearer the campus of the American University of Beirut on the two following conditions: first, that $100,000 matching grants be assured by the United Church of Christ and by the Theological Commission of the United Presbyterian Church in the U. S. A.; second, that the school’s president (a national) be succeeded by a non-national. The United Church of Christ and the United Presbyterian Church (through leadership that overlapped representation on the Theological Education Fund) in turn pledged the grants in fulfillment of the first requirement, but on the condition that the second proviso also be met.

The displacement of a national by a non-national, at a time when ecumenical leaders elsewhere were loudly deploring the supposed neo-colonialism of “foreign” evangelical voices, is an indefensible goal. Pulling the leadership of a theological institution in the Middle East out of the hands of the local church could hardly be defended as ecumenical. But even less defensible is the subsurface tying of ecumenical foreign aid to theological objectives that further the inclusive goals of the World Council of Churches while the apparently evangelical aims of this movement are propagandized to the church at large for spiritual ends.

Poverty Amidst Plenty

In its presentation of some sobering end-of-the-year statistics, the Saturday Evening Post states that almost one-third of all American families have an annual income of less than $4,000; 22 per cent earn less than $3,000; 13 per cent earn less than $2,000; and, incredible fact, 5 per cent of families earn less than $1,000. “We are the richest nation on earth,” comments the Post, “yet one American in five is without adequate food or shelter or medicine, and nobody seems to care.” Shortly before his assassination President Kennedy said, “Poverty in the midst of plenty is a paradox that must not go unchallenged.” At a press conference held during his first month in office President Johnson pledged his administration to an early consideration of “poverty legislation for the lowest income group.”

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In their 1963 Christmas messages, Pope Paul, Queen Elizabeth, and the Archbishop of Canterbury all made a point of underlining the well-nourished West’s responsibility toward the world’s needy. Poverty knows no frontiers of nationality, race, or religion, but it goes without saying that the circumstances of the 36 million under-privileged Americans referred to above are seen from a very different angle when compared with the utter destitution and misery so commonly found in China and India. The plight of these unfortunates, incidentally, might help us to understand why democracy appears to such people, as Professor Ritchie Calder points out, “a word which grumbles meaninglessly in empty bellies.”

It is not true to suggest that nobody even seems to care. People do care, and there is a growing awareness that they do not care enough. Some who have been long inactive, resigned to having the poor always with them, are showing signs of having awakened to the other part of the Markan verse: “… and whenever you will, you can do good to them.” Many Christians, however, still need stirring up to the fact that here is a work of mercy very dear to the heart of the Gospel. They think in terms of spectacular activity and still regard Abana and Pharphar as having the edge on Jordan, forgetting that concern for the poor is an integral part of “true religion and undefiled.”

Long ago a wise Jewish injunction realized the frailty of human nature and decreed that none should live in a city where there was no alms-box. In Britain the Oxford Committee for Famine Relief, which by discerning and imaginative methods of presentation keeps the problem always before the public eye, receives more than one million dollars a year in pledged subscriptions alone. Before its present World Freedom from Hunger Campaign ends in 1965, Oxfam is already assured of considerably more than five million dollars for its various projects—three times the target set in 1961. It is a creditable achievement; yet what is even that among so many?

Other religious systems have traditionally shown solicitude toward the poor; Jesus stands alone by insisting on the necessity for right motive, “in My name.” During these opening weeks of 1964 many Christians will be reconsidering the whole question of stewardship of money, time, and talents. Dr. Norman Macleod of the famous Barony Church in Glasgow was always suspicious of those churchgoers who took great care that no one should know what they gave, and who covered a niggardly spirit by declaring that the left hand ought not to know what the right hand does. Commented the veteran preacher; “I believe that if the fact were communicated, the left hand would not be much better for the information!” Most people apportion their giving according to their earnings. If the process were reversed and the Giver of All were to apportion our earnings according to our giving, some of us would be poor indeed.

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Rome, Constantinople, And Jerusalem

Until the mid-eleventh century Eastern and Western sections of Christendom maintained the appearance of one united church. That this involved an uneasy alliance could be seen in Constantinople’s charges against Rome; the Roman church fasted on the Jewish Sabbath; allowed milk and cheese in the first week of Lent; forbade clerical marriage; held that none but bishops could anoint or baptize; and adulterated the Constantinopolitan Creed by suggesting that the Spirit proceeded from the Son as well as from the Father. The union was now to end. As the culmination of his wranglings with the Patriarch Michael Cerularius, Pope Leo IX excommunicated his adversary. Moreover, the manner in which he did so was calculated to give the maximum offense: on a June day in 1054 the papal emissaries entered the Patriarch’s own cathedral of St. Sophia in Constantinople and audaciously laid the letter of excommunication on the high altar. The Patriarch responded by excommunicating the Pope. One church became two, and the situation has remained so to this day, apart from a brief reconciliation in the fifteenth century. Now, 910 years later, Pope Paul VI has set foot in Jerusalem. He has disclaimed any political significance for his visit to what has been truly described as the divided capital of a partitioned country, but the potential impact must not be underestimated. It has already been felt in the assurance now given by King Hussein of Jordan that his people and the Arab world generally will preserve the holy places and ensure the rights of pilgrimage to all—denial of which was a major reason for Pope Urban VI’s proclamation in 1095 of that Holy War which sent the West crusading. If there is, in addition, any possibility of healing that medieval breach in Christendom, what better place to begin than at Jerusalem!

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