On Being the People of God

It has become standard practice at this time of the year for dissatisfied Christians to announce that it is time we “put Christ back into Christmas.” This has provoked an even more dissatisfied pagan to retort that it would suit him fine if we just put Christ back into Christianity.

He thus shares in the widespread tendency to criticize all forms of institutional Christianity. Most of this is not as new as the critics think. Institutional Christianity has never been wildly popular. It has sometimes been respected, sometimes feared. But I do not know of any time when it was lacking in critics.

Perhaps what stamps the present mood as distinctive is the nature and volume of criticism from within the Church. It is only to be expected that there will be people outside who do not like what the Church is doing or not doing, and who will say so, loud and clear. But now more and more church people are doing much the same. Again, it is not a new thing for church members to criticize the Church. They have done so from time immemorial. But they have probably not done it as much, or in the same way.

Some of the criticism stems from a frank recognition that the Church is not doing as well as it should be. A group of young people in Holland this year even called in question the existence of the synod of their church, doubting whether it can possibly deal with the questions of conscience the church faces.

Some of it proceeds from a theology so vague that it is difficult to tell it from non-Christian humanism. But some is highly theological. It seeks to replace the traditional theology of the Church with what it thinks is more adequate for the needs of the twentieth century. But this radicalism finds itself subject to criticism, too. Bishop Robinson’s Honest to God was greeted by one skeptic with the verdict: “I don’t think the Church needs a new theology. I would just like to see it practice the one it has!”

In this spirit many of those inside the Church are looking again at the doctrine of sanctification. Among evangelicals there has always been a strong emphasis on the importance of individual repentance and faith. The Gospel has been preached, and results have been looked for in conversions.

This is all to the good, and no evangelical worth his salt would want it to be otherwise. The direction of the life is important. Through the centuries there have been many examples of people who, like Saul of Tarsus, have had a dramatic confrontation with Christ with far-reaching effects.

But preoccupation with the exciting business of obtaining “decisions” has led some to neglect the less spectacular growth in grace that is required of the Christian. But a significant part of recent evangelical thought has been directed toward this matter of Christian growth. There is no desire to downgrade the importance of calling men to put their trust in Christ; there is, however, an increasing realization that the consequences of believing in Christ cannot be played down. Being a Christian is serious business that involves the whole of one’s life. To live uprightly is not an option, not a game to be played by those Christians who like that sort of thing. It is a demand made on all.

There has been some new thinking on the evangelical’s social responsibility. The subject is not really new, of course. In earlier days evangelicals took it very much as a matter of course that acceptance of the Gospel meant acceptance of a social task. The work of such evangelicals as Shaftesbury and Wilberforce is well known.

It was probably the “social gospel” movement that side-tracked many evangelicals. There were some whose advocacy of social reforms was motivated by a theology so tenuous the those who took faith in Jesus Christ seriously could not but be repelled by it. It was not that they objected to meeting social needs; they objected to regarding such humanitarian action as identical with the Gospel. And in reaction they tended to play down the social implications of the Gospel and put all their emphasis on the faithful preaching of the Word.

We are seeing a widespread evangelical revolt against limiting the Gospel too closely to the sanctuary. It is symbolic that the Congress on Evangelism in Minneapolis earlier this year was marked by an emphasis on social attitudes, an emphasis that drew comment in newspapers like the New York Times and magazines like Time.

This does not mean that the old evangelical values are being sold down the river. What is new is that these social concerns are being pressed by men whose commitment to the Gospel is unwavering. The result is not a betrayal of the faith but a recapture of tried values that evangelicals were in danger of losing.

Sanctification is never taken lightly in the New Testament. Christians are often called “saints,” a name that stresses that the Church as a whole is committed to God. We often use the term “saint” in the singular, as when we refer to “Saint Paul” or “Saint Peter.” Or we speak of someone as “a real saint.” This is not a New Testament usage. There the word is never applied to an individual believer. It is always in the plural and it is applied to the Church, the holy community. To see the Church as “the saints” is to see it as a body whose characteristic is holiness, a group of persons wholly given over to the service of their God.

As the New Testament teaches it, the love of God is to be discerned in the way we love our fellow man. If anyone says he loves God, yet hates his brother, then, John tells us, he is a liar, “for he who does not love his brother whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen” (1 John 4:20).

The movement to emphasize this is far from being confined to evangelicals. There is a widespread interest in the way the Christian life is to be lived. But it should be stressed that this is a movement of Christian thought. It has been easy at times to take the best contemporary thinking, dress it up in religious language, and label the result “Christian.” What we are now seeing, however, is an attempt to strike the authentically Christian note. What is it that distinguishes the Christian from the non-Christian?

Sometimes young men with a great deal more hair than their fathers have (or even had) take up their guitars and sing:

They will know that we are Christians

by our love, by our love.

They will know that we are Christians

by our love.

Perhaps we can sum up the new mood among Christian thinkers by saying that there is no better way of letting them know.

LEON MORRIS

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