Personalia Update: November 02, 1979

Church growth specialist Paul Benjamin has been appointed executive director of the American Festival of Evangelism, a July 1981 evangelism strategy session sponsored by the Lausanne Committee for World Evangelization. Benjamin, the director of the National Church Growth Center in Washington, D.C., has written extensively and directed seminars on the subject of church growth.

New Miss America Cheryl Prewitt of Ackerman, Mississippi, professes a born-again faith, which she says was strengthened by miraculous healings of her left leg, shattered in an auto accident. Prewitt, 22, a gospel music composer and singer, says she won’t use her position to proselytize, but will have no qualms about discussing her Christian faith.

Stacking Sandbags against a Conservative Flood

Evangelicals for Social Action, a small group of politically moderate-to-liberal Christians, huddled last month to map plans for a modest counterattack on the formidable conservative barrage that is shaping up this election season.

(The ESA calls itself “Christians committed to justice and liberty,” and has its headquarters in Philadelphia. ESA president Ron Sider, Eastern Baptist seminary professor perhaps best known for his book, Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger, heads a 40-member board of directors that includes college, denominational, and political figures. The fledgling organization recently began publishing a series of tracts on justice issues that will be made available to churches, and will sponsor workshops to train local pastors for “social justice ministries.”)

Since its formation in 1973, ESA has attempted to prod evangelicals to turn from a largely passive approach to society to an active effort to influence it. This, it acknowledges ruefully, is now happening, but in directions not to its liking. It points to dangers in the current awakening: “American Christians have too often mixed their zeal for building the Kingdom of God with a narrow and uncritical allegiance to partisan political goals, either liberal or conservative. Politicians, in turn, have used evangelical leaders for their own ends.”

Meeting in Northbrook, Illinois, the board drafted a “Call to Responsible Christian Action” and probed the possibilities of a consultation to help bridge the wide communication gaps it perceives between pastors, theologians, and political activists within the church.

The call says, in part, “Today we are increasingly concerned that the resurgence of evangelical concern for public policy is not sufficiently biblical. There is a danger that evangelicals will be preoccupied with a selective list of concerns that does not reflect truly biblical priorities and emphases.…

“The gospel of Jesus Christ must not be bound in any singular political philosophy, program, party, or leader. It always stands above these and judges them. Christ’s lordship over all these realms, including the political, must not be limited or compromised. We therefore strongly warn against the efforts of religious leaders, however sincere and well meaning, to affirm conservatism, liberalism, or any other political party line as distinctively and uniquely Christian.…

“We call on all Christians concerned for our society to search out biblical principles to govern and direct that concern, and to allow their inherited prejudices to be judged and transformed by these principles. Among these we would especially call attention to the following:

“1. Each individual is created in the image of God and is the object of his loving concern. Anything which degrades or does violence to the integrity of the human personality is antithetical to divine purposes.

“2. God commands us to be especially concerned for the weak and powerless in society.…

“3. God has appointed us to be stewards of his creation, even though it is presently marred by sin. We are to care for our physical environment in as loving and responsible a fashion as possible because it belongs to him. Biblical teaching on justice summons us to work against the individualistic, materialistic idolatry of our age, which has led both to despoilation and depletion of God’s creation and to an unjust distribution of wealth, power, and income within our country and among the nations of the world.

“4. Our Lord calls his followers to be peacemakers.… We must endeavor in every way possible to promote peace among individual human beings, social classes, and even nations.”

In other action, the ESA board issued a strong condemnation of the renascent Ku Klux Klan, skirted approval or disapproval of SALT II, but approved the Hatfield amendment to SALT II that rules out development and deployment of new weapons systems, and decided not to endorse the Sojourners magazine-sponsored “Call to Faithfulness” because of its unilateral disarmament tendencies. (The Sojourners and Other Side constituencies tended to disengage from ESA after its 1977 reorganization, in which it explicitly focused its attention on evangelicals and placed a higher priority on influencing change in the existing system than on advocating radical alternatives to it.)

For several years there have been extensive explorations of the limits that may/will be imposed upon technological and economic growth in our world. Impetus to this was given by the success of the Apollo project, which enabled mankind to view the earth in terms of a spaceship or, less dramatically, as a sphere with built-in boundaries.

Out of this newer perception of the nature of planet earth has emerged what may be called a “science of limits” by which the frontiers of the use of resources and of the attainable limits in production of goods (i.e., economic growth) may be determined. Since 1972 there has developed a sizeable body of literature in which environmental scholars have sought to determine the factors that serve to set such boundaries.

In response to the somewhat shadowy Club of Rome, a panel (including authors Donella H. Meadows, Dennis L. Meadows, Jørgen Randers, and William H. Behrens III) wrote the volume, The Limits of Growth (1972). This book developed the thesis that technological and economic growth is limited basically by physical factors. It offered what may be called a material-growth-limitation model. The so-called Second Report to the Club of Rome (Mankind at the Turning Point, by Mihajlo Mesarovic and Eduard Pastel, 1974) added a dimension to the discussion in terms of man’s environment. Attention was called here to the fragility of the ecological setting of human life.

A further refinement in the discussion of the physical and environmental limits set upon production to satisfy man’s material comforts was offered by a team of scholars under the direction of Wassily Leontief. In The Future of the World Economy (1977), this group of thinkers proposed a series of scenarios, based upon world economics, and including a series of goal projections, pointing to the year 2000.

Leontief’s volume is highly sophisticated, and introduced a wide range of considerations into the discussion of the fateful gap between the per capita gross production of the developed and the developing countries (with which previous models had been compared). Emphasis was laid upon the complex of economic activities that lay between available resources on the one hand, and the end result (including possible environmental disaster) on the other.

Each of the models projected in these volumes concentrated on the physical factors that affect and limit economic growth. As a consequence, too little attention was given to the sociological and spiritual elements that enter into the dynamics of the growth situation.

In 1976 there appeared a carefully written volume, the result of a study sponsored by the Twentieth Century Fund, and written by Fred Hirsch, earlier a research fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford. The volume incorporating this study, under the title Social Limits to Growth (Harvard University Press, 1976 and 1978) comes to grips with the human, as opposed to the merely physical factors that affect economic growth. The author analyzes today’s economic predicament in terms of “three issues: (1) the paradox of affluence, (2) the distributional compulsion, and (3) the reluctant collectivism” (p. 1).

In developing his analysis, Hirsch underscores the anomaly contained in current developments: away from the fashionable “onward and upward”; the “beyond” as Daniel Bell calls it. He sees a resultant view of limits that suggests retrogression rather than advance.

There surface at this point the frustrations that affluence, especially in its present day form, is producing in the developed countries. Our author sees this malaise as a result of the inability of quantitative goods and services to meet needs that are qualitative in nature. Hirsch sees this factor as being especially significant for the discussion of the social limitation of consumer scarcity goods (pp. 20ff).

This accounts, of course, for much of suburban boredom, and for the frequent assaults against property by the children of the affluent. It is also pointed out that there are few areas in which surfeiture-through-affluence cannot occur—whether in possession of luxury commodities, in the acquisition of education, or the gaining of such intangibles as success or prestige occupation.

Throughout the volume, Hirsch emphasizes the manner in which increase in the production of goods turns back upon the consumer at all levels. The major losses in society are in interpersonal relations, within which elements “such as love, trust and mutual obligation” deteriorate (p. 96). The deterioration extends, notes our author, to sexual distortion. This occurs not only extramaritally but within marriage, as typified by contractual marriage which, in effect, places marriage within the category of a consumer commodity.

The reader feels that the line of thought moves, slowly but surely, to deeper considerations. In chapter 10, under the caption, “The Moral Re-entry” the author examines the “social virtues” that ought to underlie a humane social economy. He lists these as: truth, trust, acceptance, restraint, obligation” (p. 141). These social virtues are, as Hirsch suggests, grounded in religious belief, with their altruistic elements directly rooted in Christianity. Further, he notes that merely socialized norms are totally inadequate as a basis for justice in the area of community action.

In my view it is left to Christian faith to provide substantive answers to the major issue which is raised at the end of chapter 10. Mr. Hirsch recognizes that individuals are unable to put into practice that which they know, deep down, to be either “right” toward themselves or “just” toward others in their use of material goods and possessions.

Could it not be that any adequate Science of Limits will need to accept as basic at least two of the key points in the biblical understanding of man? The first and most obvious of these would be the statement of our Lord, that “a man’s life does not consist in the abundance of things he possesses” (Luke 12:15).

A second key motif appears pictorially in the parable of the rich fool, spoken by our Lord in the same context. A bounteous land suddenly projected a farmer into a new and unexpected affluence. Responding to this appearance of success, the man committed a tragic and fatal error. Bidding his soul (as he thought) to adopt a new and luxurious lifestyle, he confused soul with body, saying “take your ease, eat, drink and be merry” (Luke 12:19).

Here our Lord sets profoundly spiritual boundaries to “economic growth.” It would seem that any adequate Science of Limits should accord a place of high prominence to the kind of insights which express the deepest reality of the life of “man under God.”

Harold B. Kuhn is professor of philosophy of religion, Asbury Theological Seminary, Wilmore, Kentucky.

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