The nature and degree of the Church’s involvement in the social order has never been a simple problem. The stepped-up rapidity of social change in this decade has served to give the question an increasingly urgent character. There are times in which, in the urgency of the situation, segments of the Church act without a great deal of self-consciousness, and certainly without taking adequate time for self-examination or self-criticism.

Those who believe in the basic integrity of the Judaeo-Christian tradition must recognize that unless the Church is to disown the tradition of the Hebrew prophets, she must incorporate into her total ministry something of the prophetic—something of the socially responsible—in regard to the world about her. Admittedly the relation between the Old Testament prophet and the Chosen Nation is not wholly the same as that between the Church and the world in general. If it were, then the concept of “Chosen People” would be meaningless.

Basic to the prophetic message is the element of responsibility. This inheres in the very nature of an ethical religion. But a perennial problem faces the Christian Church: To what extent must she stand outside the world as the fellowship of those who “are not of the world,” and to what extent must she allow herself to be immersed in the world’s life to serve as “salt of the earth”?

In answer to this question, some are appealing to history in general, and to the life of our Lord in particular, to see whether some direct guidelines may be found there. Some interpret the fourth century of the Christian era as being one in which the decadent powers of imperial Rome threw up their hands and left the Church to bear primary responsibility for the social order. Others of different orientation have liked to view our Lord as a political (and perhaps proletarian) rebel, whose major role was to challenge the existing socio-political order; his followers maintained this stance, these people say, until the movement was captured and domesticated by Constantine, whose minions transformed it into “a theological system of esoteric redemption” and thus destroyed the dynamic of its Founder.

G. K. Chesterton, in his book The Everlasting Man, develops the former view. He concludes that the Church proved inadequate in the face of her new responsibility and that as a defense she retreated into herself and became content with what is called the “monastic protest” against the world. The latter view has, of course, been characteristic of the left wing of the “historical Jesus” movement.

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The dialectic implied by the expression “in the world but not of the world” haunts all the major segments of the Christian Church. Massive forces for social change, some of which seek social justice for the disinherited of the earth, present a challenge that no Christian can ignore. And it may be fateful for the Christian Church that she tends to permit herself to be polarized around one of two hardened centers, thus causing each position to seem exclusive of the other.

To put the matter baldly, there are those who, while professing full loyalty to the teachings of their Lord, assume a stance that not only smacks of social irresponsibility but also at times allies itself with the forces having a vested interest in maintaining social injustice. The sensitive evangelical cannot close his eyes to the fact that while all elements of the Christian Church have been timid when they ought to have been courageous—and we select the question of race and color as a test sample here—yet the area of our land in which men of color continue to be most conspicuously disadvantaged is also an area which is traditionally “Bible-believing” and in which a general adherence to evangelical Christianity is the order. This is, to say the least, embarrassing and humbling!

It must likewise be acknowledged that those who theoretically ignore or repudiate great sections of the historic creeds of the Church do nevertheless manifest a moral sensitivity and a willingness to “stand up and be counted” for social righteousness, even at great personal cost. Evangelicals simply cannot shrug this fact aside. It may be true, of course, that such crises as that of voter registration in the deep South do afford a visibility feature that makes social action appealing. But this cannot be legitimately used by those of theological orthodoxy to excuse any lack of social sensitivity on their own part.

This writer is aware that some evangelicals will shrug off the involvement of those of more liberal persuasion by an appeal to some such theory as that of Harold D. Las-well, expressed in his Power and Personality. Laswell develops what may be called a “power view of politics” that tries to explain social and political involvement as resulting from an immature and frustrated personality rather than genuine ethical and social ideals. This simply will not do! It does not and cannot explain, for example, the dynamics of such persons as Dr. Martin Luther King.

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Certainly we welcome any movement that seeks to assert the view, classically expressed by Aristotle, that ethics and politics are inseparable. The severance of these two elements, making ethics to be purely functional and instrumental, is the feature that makes Communism so brutal and so insidious. Christianity rightly understood stands squarely athwart the path of Marxism at this point.

The burning question for evangelicals is, How can the prophetic message (and at the core of this lies the insistence that the heart of God is concerned for justice among his creatures) be made effective at the level of the individual Christian in the life of the world? It avails nothing to throw verbal stones at the Russian Orthodox Church for her inability to be prophetic. It is tragically possible for evangelical Protestantism in America, not faced by any governmental constraint, to retreat into a purely “priestly” form of ministry. To fall into this trap, she need only limit her emphasis to a narrowly confined advocacy of purely personal pietism. She can succumb to the pressures of her environment and feel exceedingly righteous in doing this, especially if she does so while avoiding the doctrinal errors of other segments of the Church.

Has the Church any directive from her Lord at this point? Both evangelicals and liberals might well “try this one on for size”: “These ought ye to have done, and not to leave the other undone.” And until those of evangelical persuasion correct the imbalance between private and public piety, they act in poor grace as they excuse their contemporary monastic withdrawal, their pious resignation from the human race, by an appeal to the defective theological basis of those whose social consciences seem more sensitive than their own.

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