CHURCH
AND SOCIETY … 178
Societism and personalism … 179
The personalist ethic … 179
The societist ethic … 180
The quest for a societist ethic … 182
The Kingdom of God is the Church, not society … 183
The Church as Kingdom of God … 183
The Kingdom of God is both Church and society … 186
The relativism of William Temple … 186
Karl Barth: the denial of societism … 189
The Kingdom of God is o fthis world … 199
The call to worldliness … 202
The a-societism of Reinhold Niebuhr… 206
Conclusion … 210
NOTES
AND REFERENCES … 212
VII
WHAT OUGHT MAN TO BE?
CHURCH AND SOCIETY
It
is generally accepted that Jesus did not found a church, nor taught a doctrine
of the church. The equivalent of ‘church’ occurs only twice in the Gospels,
both times in the ‘legalist’ Matthew (see above pp.53ff). ln Matthew
18:15-17, the ‘church’ is a group of believers to whom any believer who should
‘trespass against them’ is to be referred. If the ‘trespasser’ does not mend
his ways after due counsel, Jesus (according to Matthew) advises: ‘let
him be unto thee as a heathen man and a publican’. By ‘heathen’ is here meant
‘Gentile’ or goy, and ‘publican’ can be translated as ‘tax collector’. That is
the preferred translation of the Interpreter's Bible (1951) which, on
the evidence of Jesus’ healing Gentiles and visiting the tax collector
Zacchaeus, regards the passage in Matthew as questionable (vol.7,
pp.472-3). The authenticity of the passage was denied aItogether by Holzmann
(1897, vol.1, p.212) and Wellhausen (1914, p.93), who (along with others) also
deny the authenticity of Matthew 16:18: ‘upon this rock I will build my
Church’.
Of course, Jesus did not build a church, but even the
intention to do so does not fit with Jesus’ ethical teaching. As we saw in Part
1, Jesus’ whole emphasis was on the radical self-transformation of the individual,
re-orienting in solitude the whole inner being towards God. This emphasis is
too often grossly misunderstood—especially by modern ‘social gospel’ Christians—to
mean that there is no collective or social aspect to a life guided by the teaching
of Jesus. This misunderstanding is then ‘corrected’ when it ought, instead, to
be cleared up. A typical example of misunderstanding and ‘correction’ is T.E. Jessop’s
Social Ethics: Christian and Natural (1952). Jessop clearly states his program:
‘l shall have to indicate... my reasons for rejecting... [the] contention that
the church has no direct concern with the structure and movement of earthly
society’ (p. 10). He analyzes this contention into three claims to the
refutation of which he then applies himself. These claims are first, that ‘the
Christ was not a social reformer, and the kingdom he founded is not a... state,
but a spiritual fellowship’. Second, that ‘the whole order of space-time is
transient, incapable of embodying any eternal values... and... consequently,
the Christian must sit lightly in it... ’. And third, that God ‘is concerned
with His children individually... ’, that ‘religion is a personal affair... a direct
link
--pg178--
between
the finite immortal soul and the greater soul that made it’ (pp.10-11).
On the first point, after agreeing that ‘social
reform… was the very thing that He [Jesus] most plainly avoided’, Jessop argues
nevertheless that Christians need not do the same because Jesus’ example, in
this respect, is not intended to be followed; the differences between first century
Palestine and our times require a ‘difference in our Christian range and
methods’ (pp.11-12). Against the second claim, he argues that the world is
consecrated by the entry of ‘the Son of God’ and therefore to be loved. He adds
somewhat sentimentally that Jesus took note of ‘the little spring flowers in it
and the short-lived sparrows making merry on the flat housetops’ (p. 12).
Finally, against the third claim, he argues that it implies abandoning ‘an
enlarging aspect of modern life as beyond the sphere of redemption’. He
concludes that the Christian ‘who in the love of God that has redeemed him,
loves his fellows... can[not] look inactively on poverty and sickness, simply watch
old folk shiver because their children put cars or wireless sets before even
the bond of nature, or bear to see children inadequately educated and then turned
out into a diseducating environment’ (p. 13).
These and comparable social work ‘defences’ of the
Jesus ethic are simply off the point. They start with a misunderstanding and,
by trying to ‘correct’ it, end up deepening it. As we have explained, there simply
is not a conflict between loving God with heart, soul and mind and being
concerned and caring about one’s fellow human beings: the ‘second’ commandment
(love thy neighbor) is misnamed ‘commandment’; ‘love thy neighbor’ is
materially entailed in ‘love the Lord thy God’ (see pp.53ff above). The fear
that there is such a conflict—and it is a common fear—arises from a
misunderstanding of the relationship between social responsibility and personal
responsibility. It is to the clarification of this relationship, in the light
of the foregoing discussion about the nature of man and the nature of
redemption, that we now turn. To avoid repetitive use of the phrases ‘ethic of
social responsibility’ and ‘ethic of personal responsibility’, I shall use the
terms ‘societism’ and ‘personaIism’ to mean two closely related but distinct
directions in the orientation of human life towards God.
Societism and personalism
The personalist ethic
Jesus’
ethic is personalist in that it locates ethical value in the quality of the
will of the individual person. This quality is the state of a soul radically
transformed, new-born or re-born. The soul so transformed has wholly rid itself
of the influence of the racist-Jewish ethic and the pagan Roman-Hellenic ethic,
and placed itself wholly under the influence or ‘determination’ of God. Jesus’
words ‘except a man be born again’ were directed against the predicament of man
trapped in those
--pg179--
ethics.
The general sin from which God, through Jesus, taught deliverance, is the sin
of being an instrument—an instrument for the survival or prosperity of a race—community,
or for a world empire, or for any power or purpose in the material world. And
deliverance from such instrumentality only comes by satisfying Jesus’ first and
only commandment: to love God with all one‘s mind, soul and heart.
To so love God is to invite Him to ‘determine’ mind,
soul and heart. But this ‘determination’ by God does not take effect in the
abstract. It has to have a context in which it is realized. That context is the
whole complex of relations man has with himself, with his fellow human beings,
with nature, with the cosmos. It is nonsense to speak of God ‘determining’ the
will of an individual outside this complex of relations, as though it were a
condition of wholly loving God that one must withdraw from the world. To withdraw
from this complex of relations is, in a sense, to die, to leave the medium in
which God’s ‘determination’ of man can take effect.
Human life and activity have many realms. As we saw in
the discussion of ‘render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s’ (pp.60ff, above), Jesus
was not limiting the range of God’s ‘determination’ of man to any one, or to
any one group, of these many realms. That is why it is so off the point to
argue for or against the view that Christianity is a religion which expresses
no formal concern for ‘society’. I do hold that Christianity is a ‘personalist‘
(and not a ‘societist’) religion, but only in this sense: that the Christian ethic
demands a radical transformation of the inner self as moral subject, it makes
no demand that the context in which that transformation takes effect should be
the moral subject’s attitudes or actions in this or that particular realm of
human life and activity. This does not mean to say that the Christian ethic requires
no real context—which (implying being ‘dead’ to the world) is nonsensical—or that
it requires only one kind of real context—which (implying that Christianity is
concerned with, say, the ‘religious’ and not the ‘secular’) is false.
The societist ethic
The
societist ethic is different from the ethic of Jesus; not opposed to it, nor
other than it, but different by addition. Societism accepts the Jesus
definition of what ethical value is, and then adds to that. Since societism is
the ethic, above all, of Islam, it will help to understand societism, if we try
to explain how Islam stands in relation to the ethic of Jesus.
Islam accepts, acclaims and defends the genuineness of
the ethical breakthrough of Jesus. He is revered as the prophet of God sent to
the Jews and the world of antiquity to bring to them tidings of the true road
to blessedness. His message was in every respect a divine message, God-issued
since its source was God; God-discharged since when he spoke he communicated
that which God had spoken to him, and God-oriented since Jesus’ whole mission
on earth was ordained by
--pg180--
and
for the sake of God. It is then a sad, brute fact that Jesus’ words and message
were almost all lost; that his followers disputed among themselves and,
unsuccessfully, with their enemies, as to the real substance of that message. It
was in order to settle those disputes regarding the nature of God’s religion,
of His Will and message for man, that God sent, in the revelation to the
Prophet Muhammad, a message dictated, transmitted, and preserved verbatim,
in an untranslatable idiom. This means that although, with shifts in peoples
and languages, the categories of human consciousness may change, there is no
substantial occasion for change in our understanding of God’s Word, or in our
appreciation of the values of which it is the expression. The ethical value is
judged to lie, as in the teaching of Jesus, in the degree of the self’s
‘determination’ by the Will of God and only God. It is not, therefore, from
dissatisfaction with Jesus’ ethic that Islam added its novel contribution. It
did so, rather, because of the emergence, in human life and activity, of
circumstances that did not fall, and could not have fallen, within the purview
of Jesus’ ethic.
What did societism, or the ethic of Islam, add to the
ethic of Jesus? Simply this, that when a certain action has satisfied the
ethical criterion of Jesus, it falls under the second criterion of whether or
not the ethical content of that action has actually engaged the real world. By the
first criterion, it is required and sufficient, that the moral subject willed
the action and in doing so willed in accordance with God’s Will. The ethic of
Jesus is an ethic of intent, and its tribunal is the individual conscience.
Conscience is the supremely competent judge—except in the rarest cases—of intentions
and attitudes, likes and dislikes, of the whole mood and disposition of the
person whose conscience is being exercised. Conscience is also competent to
inquire into and evaluate the complex of real relations in all their diversity
in which human life is always engaged. But according to the societist ethic of
Islam, it is not enough to place the world of real relations under the scrutiny
of conscience. That ‘not enough’ does not mean that conscience ever becomes
irrelevant. By no means; conscience is always the first tribunal and all real
relations in the world must pass through that tribunal, before they pass to any
other.
The ethic of Islam requires that the individual move
on from being a moral subject to being a moral agent, a doer, a disturber of
the flow of events and relations. The moral agent must engage in the real
world. If the person wills in accordance with God’s Will, ethical intent and value
are determined but not yet complete: completeness depends upon the quality of
commitment with which the flow of real events and relations is disturbed in
order to realize the ethical intent and value. After the first tribunal of
conscience, there is the second tribunal of the Law. Islam has not, simply
because it has a law, relapsed into the legalism of an Ezra or into a
utilitarian ethic of effectiveness. From the stand-point of the purely moral
worth or unworth of man, Islamic Law is not concerned with effects, with making
particular things happen in the real world. It is concerned, rather, with man’s
actual self-transcend-
--pg181--
ence
to the real world, with his really shifting himself from being moral subject to
moral agent, with his disturbance of the world as it happens to be poised at
the moment, with his efficacious diversion of the flow of events—regardless of
any or all particular effects.
Islamic ethic contributed, or rather discovered, a new
dimension in ethical life when it added to the breakthrough of Jesus, the
second breakthrough of the self’s transcendence to the non-self which is the real
world. Jesus demanded that man should live purely, saintly, always dominated by
the love of God, determined by His Will alone. Islam confirmed all this and
added that, in addition, man should live dangerously, should break forth from
himself, disturb and transfigure the world into that divine pattern which is
the Will of God.
It is upon this second dimension of ethical life
revealed by God to the Prophet Muhammad that societism is built. It is incorrect
to contend that the ethic of Jesus has or could have the same demand buiIt into
it. Against such contention stands all the evidence of the Synoptic Gospels
which, albeit briefly, we surveyed in Part 1. That evidence points unmistakably
to the fact that Jesus based morality squarely upon the ‘determination’ of the
individual self by the Will of God. Nowhere did he extend this base to include
the world of real events and real relations. Yet, certainly in relatively
recent times, the Christian world has shown an interest in and a taste for the
societist ethic. How that taste is, and how Christian thinkers sought to find a
basis for it in their understanding of Christianity, we shall now examine.
The quest for a societist ethic
That
the majority of Christian thinkers today, all but the naively strict individualists,
advocate an ethic that is indeed societist, should, and does, gladden the
Muslim. Societism is no less the Will of God than personalism; societist ethic
is a perfection of personalist ethic. The closer mankind comes to the realization
of it, the greater its felicity and the closer it stands to God. All to the
good then that, from within Christendom, a voice as eminent as William Temple’s
should demand, in the name of God, and on behalf of Christian conscience, that Christendom
recognize the need of a Christian social order aimed at ‘the fullest possible
development of individual personality in the widest and deepest possible
fellowship’ (Temple, 1956, p.100). And good also that, about a hundred years
before, Robert Owen, the founder of the co-operative movement in England,
planted in Christendom the seed of a will to a social order in which human
beings are all members by virtue of their humanity, and the individual
transcends self to assist fellow human beings in realizing the ideal order. It
matters less that the ideal order was more clearly formulated by Temple, a
century later, or that Owen may have been following the example of a co-operative
venture initiated by Raiffeisen in Germany: what matters more is that the need
was deeply felt, and the seed planted. But why, and how, was it felt?
--pg182--
The
noble aims of Owen were not, in fact, deduced from the cardinal principles and
doctrines of Christianity; they were prompted, rather, by the desperate plight
of the working classes. It is the Industrial Revolution which occasioned
societist thought in Christendom. It is no coincidence that that thought is not
older than the Industrial Revolution, while the miseries of mankind are as old
as mankind. Indeed, Christian societist thought is much more recent. For it
took some time before the problems created by industrialization and
urbanization could produce systematic thought.1 Events came
first and propelled the Christian mind to think out a theological basis. This
explains the patchwork character of Christian societist thought—many attempts, but
no ‘classic’ statement of substantial ideas. The thinking is dislocated—there being
little consensus about which fundamental Christian principle can serve to
construct a societistic structure of ideas. As a Christian colleague has put
it, there are many ideas, principles, events in the Christian faith, each of which
could serve as such a basis. First, their status must be changed; that is, they
must be ‘liberated’ the meanings
imposed upon them historically by the authority of doctrine and tradition and
become ‘free’ concepts for the understanding to work on. Then, for example, one
might start with the ‘Kingdom of God’ concept to develop ideas for political
order; or with Jesus’ acts of healing, of assistance to those in distress, to
develop ideas for social welfare, and so on.
The attempts, therefore, at founding a
societistically-determined society on some essential principle in the Christian
faith have been many and varied. But they have all failed: either the societism
so founded was not at all societism, but a weak dilution of social welfare or
liberal democracy; or the foundation of it on Christian principle was not
logically sound. To the first category belongs that school which identities the
Church with the ‘Kingdom of God’. To the second, belongs that school which
keeps church and society in separate categories but claims that the Christian
faith is relevant for the latter in that it furnishes society with a Christian
social ideal derived from the principles of the faith.
The Kingdom of God is the Church, not society
The Church as Kingdom of God
That
the ‘Kingdom of God’ means the church not society, is the traditional view with,
therefore, many advocates.2 It is more or less universally
believed that ‘the Church of Christ’ must be founded on some essential
principle of Christian faith. However, it is certain that the Church was a late
phenomenon, Jesus having neither founded nor planned it.3 It
was after it achieved existence that the Church began to scan the Scripture as
well as the minds of its men in search of a
--pg183--
Christian
foundation. Such foundation the Church located in the Biblical notion of the
Kingdom of God.
The Kingdom of God, the Church asserted was ‘not-yet’:
first be-cause not all of mankind are Christians, and secondly because not all Christian
lives are ruled by the precepts of Christianity. But inasmuch as the Church was
a present reality, so must the Kingdom also be. Believers grouped themselves
into an ecclesia (community) on the basis of their acceptance of Christ,
and this community was governed by episcopal authority (derived from the
Apostles) with the aim that the believers should live in this world the life intended
for them by Christ. To do this was to have the Kingdom in a lively, present
anticipation of the Kingdom yet-to-come. Because the community was intended to
live in the present expectation of the sudden universalization of the Kingdom—an
event wholly beyond their power and imposed by divine decree—their life as a
community was limited to the business of individual and collective worship.
There was little doubt that to live ‘in’ the Church of Christ was also to live
‘in’ the Kingdom of God. The coming Kingdom was not of a different order, but
the same Church extended so as to include the universe: in the Kingdom to come
man would not be leading a life different from his life in the present Kingdom,
the Church. Indeed, the history of the Church knows neither in art nor in
letters any representation of life in the Kingdom (present or future) other
than that of a communion with God in the form of church worship and praise.
That the Church is real and present means that the
Kingdom is so also. The Kingdom yet-to-come is different only in order of
magnitude—it embraces the universe. Nevertheless, there is an evident tension
between present and future. Christian theologians argue that Jesus must have
meant a future Kingdom; he taught his followers to pray ‘Thy Kingdom come’ (Matthew
6: 10); there are references to the futurity of the Kingdom in the parables of
the tares, the ten virgins, the sower, etc.; he even spoke, in one place, of
the Kingdom as ‘coming with power’ and being witnessed by the men of his own
generation (Mark 9:1, Matthew 16:28; Luke 9:27). In later
times, the futurity of the Kingdom came to be associated with other notions
such as Christ’s second coming, the Day of Judgement, a universal resurrection,
etc. But the Kingdom ‘coming with power’ never came. Its failure to do so troubled
Christian thought from the early second century on—the period from which 2
Peter dates; ‘There shall come in the last days scoffers... saying, Where
is the promise of his coming? for since the fathers fell asleep, all things
continue as they were from the beginning of creation’ (3:3-4).
Belief in the Kingdom and understanding of what it
meant was therefore insecure, uncertain. In modern times the ‘social gospel’ school
of thought undermined and then abandoned the notion that the Kingdom was, in
any degree, present, They likewise let go of the idea of a Kingdom yet-to-come
by sudden, divinely imposed cataclysm, synonymous with the ending of the world,
and proposed instead an
--pg185--
activist
program of social reform which would, gradually, improve the general conditions
of human life. This equation of the Kingdom of God with more or less utopian
programs of reform did have some foundation in the history of the Kingdom of
God idea.
That idea is a Hebrew one. For some Jews (as we saw
earlier, pp.75ff above), the Kingdom meant something worldly, specific, which
could be achieved by struggle in the world. This view certainly survived in and
beyond Jesus’ time, as is clear from the Jewish War of 65-70 and the Bar Kochba
revoIt in 134-35. For others, the Kingdom meant an end-of-the-world regime which
embodied, beyond the world of time, everything they desired socially and
politically within it. For a third group, the Kingdom was a wholly
non-political idea: it meant a present, this-world regime in which spiritual
goodness and blessedness were realized by the righteous in the sight and
presence of God.
Quite clearly, it was this third idea that Jesus
seized upon and developed. The Kingdom, he proclaimed, ‘is at hand’ (Matthew
4:17); and, before him, John the Baptist had preached that the Kingdom was near
(Matthew 3:2). But how severe the demands upon those who would enter
this present Kingdom! On the one side, radical self-transformation, absolute
dedication to the Will of God. On the other—very much a secondary demand—the giving
up of house, family (and therefore tribe, clan, political kingdom), perhaps
losing an eye or a hand (Mark 9:47), and keeping constant vigil (Matthew
25:1-3). The Jews were only excluded until they renounced their racist
self-righteousness; and the rich were only excluded until they renounced their
obsession with wealth (Mark 10:23).4 The Kingdom
belongs to those who have become profoundly humble and child-like, the
spiritually and ethically new-born (John 3:3, 5; Matthew 5:3, 10;
Mark 10:15).
On the evidence of Jesus’ teaching, the Kingdom of God
is a present (spiritual) reality: ‘the Kingdom of God is within you’ or ‘in the
midst of you’.5 The early Christian community lived and
worshipped on the assumption that the Kingdom of God was present ‘within’ them
(in their midst). Revelations 116, 9 and 5:10 speaks of a Kingdom into which
the Christians are already ‘made’. So too Colossians 1:12-13, which asks
Christians to give thanks to ‘the Father who... has translated us into the
Kingdom’. Romans 14:17 also takes the presence of the Kingdom for
granted. Against this, socialist theologians argue that Jesus merely initiated
realization of the Kingdom and that the greater part of it is still to be
achieved. But how does this fit with the doctrine that, once for all, Christ
has redeemed mankind? It makes of ‘redemption’ a son of reform program which
the reformer (Christ) got off the ground, so to speak, but could not himself
see through to completion. ‘Redemption’ is not then an accomplished reality,
but a ‘good idea’, not substantially and in itself a salvation, but an
invitation to salvation. In other words, the doctrine collapses. Similarly, the
doctrine of man’s sinfulness cannot survive any serious commitment to the
socialist theologians’ program. The practical assumption of the view that an
ideal order can be established by the efforts of human
--pg185--
beings
is that human beings are capable of the ideal. Sin is, therefore, not an
absolute, necessary part of human nature, but a contingent failure—some human
beings are always sinning, and all human beings (it may be) are sometimes
sinning, but we are not inherently sinful, depraved etc. Nor, obviously, can a
world in which the ideal order may be established, be thought of as, in its
nature, corrupt. Finally, the ‘social gospel’ view cannot be advocated without
renouncing the main substance of the Christian doctrine of the nature of God.
That doctrine represents the events of Christ’s life as a necessary expression
of the mind of God: God is not truly God except in being, from eternity to
eternity, also Christ, that is, Himself sacrificed to redeem man. If that sacrifice
does not, in itself redeem, if it is not, in itself; salvation, but only
inspires, initiates, teaches salvation, then all the mystery which Christian
doctrine has built around the person of Christ disappears. Christ must then be
seen as a divinely inspired teacher, his life a ‘book’ to be read and
understood. In sum, if the Kingdom of God is to be understood in terms of a
utopia, as the progressivist theologians claim, the whole edifice of Christian
doctrine falls.
We may therefore conclude, in opposition to such
theologians, that the Kingdom of God is not the sum of all that is desirable in
this world, gradually brought about This is a false identification, a false attempt
(made throughout Christian history after Augustine) to found a societist ethic
on the teaching of Jesus. To base that ethic on the concept of the Kingdom of
God transvalues (falsifies) the value Jesus attached to it. The Christian
socialists, by insisting on a Christian societism, confound their Christian
doctrines. That may be of little concern to mankind in general; but of very
great concern is that, in doing so, they also falsify the genuine values of the
ethical self-transformation which Jesus preached.
The Kingdom of God is both Church and society
The relativism of William Temple
The
modern theological view identifies the Kingdom of God partly with the Church and
partly with a society guided by the Church. Its best known champion is the late
William Temple, former Archbishop of Canterbury; its classic statement, his
concise Christianity and the Social Order (1956). He argues that the
business of the Church is to ‘announce Christian principles and point out where
the existing social order at any time is in conflict with them’ (p.50). Just as
the Church may remind a bridge-builder that he ought to build a sound, safe bridge
but not tell him how this may be done, so it ought to ‘tell the politician what
ends the social order should promote while leaving to him the devising of the
precise means to those ends’. By taking this stance, the Church avoids the
reproach of meddling in affairs not its own, and that of preaching
irrelevantly.
--pg186--
The principles that this type of Christian societist
thought offers are deeply conditioned by the doctrine of innate human
sinfulness. Temple understands this doctrine in much the same terms as Newbigin
(see above, p. 137), though he articulates them in a more philosophical language.
‘Our standard of value’, he writes ‘is the way things affect ourselves’:
Just the same thing is true of our mental and
spiritual vision. Some things hurt us: we hope they will not happen again; we call
them bad. Some things please us; we hope they will happen again; we call them
good. (p.52)
But this is poor psychology and poorer ethics: people
do not have their own psychic states (feeling ‘good’ or ‘bad’) in mind when
they make value judgements. Man is not the egotistical or self-centered being Temple
makes him out to be. This is as unjustified a generalization as it would be to
claim that all men are always self-sacrificing. Temple sometimes attempts to
moderate the presentation of his negative doctrine of man: ‘it is not contended
that men are utterly bad... [but] that they are not perfectly good and that even
their goodness is infected with a quality—self-centeredness—which partly
vitiates it’ (p.53). In fact, (despite his ‘not... utterly’ and ‘partly’)
Temple is hilly committed to the necessity of human sinfulness:
God’s creation of man involved the risk, amounting to
a moral certainty that they [men] would take the self-centered outlook upon
life, and then... become hardened in selfishness till society was a welter of
competing selfishness instead of being a fellowship. (pp.55-6, italics added; see
also Temple, 1934, pp.356ff, 514ff)
It is because of Temple’s commitment to this doctrine
that all he expects from ‘any political and economic system’ is a ‘reasonable
measure of security against murder, robbery and starvation’. Any demand greater
than that is condemned as ‘utopianism’ from which ‘its assertion of original
sin should make the Church’ immune (1956, p.54).
There is, not surprisingly, no such thing as a
Christian social ideal ‘to which we should conform our actual society as
closely as possible’ (p.54). The subjection of society to the guidance of the
Church does not at all mean what it might to a Muslim or a Platonist, namely
its subjection to an ideal ‘city of God’. Any ideal is impossible because of
human nature: ‘It is the tragedy of man that he conceives such a state of
affairs as the Kingdom of God and knows it for the only satisfaction of his
nature, yet so conducts his life as to frustrate all hope of attaining that
satisfaction’ (p.58). Then, echoing Augustine and Calvin, Temple indicts man:
‘It is not only that his spirit and reason have as yet established but little
control over the animal part of his nature, it is his spirit which is depraved,
his reason which is perverted. His self-centeredness infects his idealism because
it distorts all his perspectives’ (pp.58-9). Behind this assessment of human
nature Christian dogmatism and skepticism are jointly the shaping influences.
The dogmatism is evident in the anxiety to defend the doctrine of sinfulness
--pg187--
which,
as we have seen, is the necessary pretext of the doctrine of redemption. The
skepticism is evident in a mood of nihilism which would deny to man every noble
ambition, every noble scheme he has had or will ever have, to better the order
in which human beings live.
Temple’s skepticism is thorough: it infects his
estimate of human reason. ‘Within what is capable of mathematical treatment man
has this grasp of truth’ (p.59); but as regards social or political or moral questions,
‘we enter on the sphere of life where reason is very fallible’, ‘Self-interest
is always exercising its disturbing influence’ (p.59; italics added).
The only judgements which human reason can be relied on to make are analytic.
But ethical and religious judgements are synthetic, they can never be
‘absolutely’ true: anybody’s guess is as good as anybody else’s. If such
skepticism were consistently applied, nothing would be left to Temple of his Christianity
or of his social order. His pessimism about man is inevitably projected to God;
God did not reveal the ideal for man. Why? Because God knew that man could not realize
the ideal; because God planned from eternity that He would realize it for him (man)
and do so in His person, that is, in Christ. We have met this intertwining of the
two Christian dogmas before. Behind this expression of it is the self-assurance
of an Anglo-Saxon democratic temperament which offers as wisdom remarks such as
this, on Plato’s Republic: ‘No one really wants to live in the ideal
state as depicted by anyone else’ (p.59). Everyone is his own judge of value; no
one may have his self-centeredness interfered with by anyone else—except,
naturally, to prevent murder, robbery and starvation. The egotism Temple had
earlier explained as evidence of our innate moral incompetence is thus offered
as the guiding principle of society. Temple is, in the final analysis, a
relativist, and relativism is, in practice, a surrender to self-centeredness.
Christianity, according to Temple, can supply no ideal
for society to aim for, but ‘it supplies something of far more value—namely,
principles’ (p.55). These principles are of two kinds: ‘primary’ and
‘derivative’ (chs 4, 5). The ‘derivative’ principles are freedom, fellowship
and service. The ‘primary’ ones are ‘God and His purpose’ and ‘the dignity,
tragedy and destiny of man’. Under ‘God’s purpose’, Temple expounds the
doctrine of redemption and affirms the paradox of necessarily sinful man being
called to a life of fellowship with God. ‘Redemption’ is three things at once:
it is a fait accompli, a salvation achieved once-for-all; it has to be
earned by individual effort during which the ‘derivative’ principles come into
play; it can never be realized on earth. Under the ‘tragic destiny of man’,
Temple locates nationality; the nation state is, apparently, like the family, a
natural institution, ‘part of the divine plan for human life’ (pp.57-8). Each
nation is a ‘spiritually independent unit’ at liberty to develop as it will
while not infringing the liberty of other nations. Just as there is no ideal
social order for which individuals ought to strive—only not murder, rob, starve,
and generally leave each other in peace—so too there is no ‘ought’ for any
international or universal order among human groups.
--pg188--
But it is surely futile to hope that individuals or
nations may behave like lambs when, by elevating self-centeredness as a
necessary condition of individuals or nations, they have been licensed to
behave like wolves. It is futile to regulate action when the springs of action
are let develop as they will. The relativism into which Temple’s commitment to
the doctrines of sinfulness and redemption has inevitably led him, leaves no
possibility at all that human beings may be persuaded to do what they ‘ought’:
the best to be hoped for is that they not interfere with others. Though with a
shrug, with an understated English sigh, yet definitely, Temple has endorsed individual
self-interest and national self-interest as the immovable ground of any
Christian social ethic.
Karl Barth: the denial of societism
The
foregoing discussion has made it progressively clearer that a Christianity
committed to the correlated doctrines of necessary human sinfulness and
redemption by divine atonement is incompatible with a societist ethic. Where,
as in Karl Barth, those doctrines are carried to their logical conclusion, this
incompatibility becomes an outright contradiction. Indeed, there is a point in
Barth’s argument where the very possibility of ethics is itself questioned.
Following Augustine, Barth conceives of man as citizen
of two entirely different worlds: the civil community or the State, and the Christian
community or the Church. The civil community or the State is ‘the commonality
of all the people in one place, region or country in so far as they belong
together under a constitutional system of government that is equally valid for
and binding on them all, and which is defended and maintained by force’ (Barth,
1954, p.16). Its purpose is to safeguard ‘both the external, relative and
provisional freedom of the individuals and the external and relative peace of
their community’. Although it embraces ‘everyone living within its area’, the
State never reaches outside ‘its area’: ‘the polis has walls’ (p.17). Its
purpose is conceived negatively as defending each citizen against others, and
the community against the citizen or other communities. The rule of nature (including
human nature) is ‘sin and crime’; by the State ‘man is preserved and his sin
and crime confined’ (p.28). Without the force available to the State ‘chaos
comes’ (p.20); man’s sinful nature requires that he ‘be subject to an external…
order of law defended by superior authority and force’ (p. 19).
This evidently nationalistic State is concerned, and concerned
overwhelmingly, with the maintenance of law and order within or at its borders.
As members of the civil community, the people of this State do not share any
‘common awareness of their relationship to God’ (p.16), nor is the ‘spirit of God’
at all relevant to ‘the running of its affairs’. The State is ‘as such...
spiritually blind and ignorant. It has neither faith, nor love, nor hope... No
creed and no gospel... Its members are not brothers and sisters’ (p.17). They
can only ask Pilate’s
--pg189--
question,
What is truth? without ever being able to answer it: ‘every answer to the
question abolishes the presuppositions of the very existence of the civil
community’ (p.17; see also pp.22-3).
The State is useful to the Christian community or
Church because it prevents the ‘war of each against all’ breaking out (p.20).
It is therefore to be valued as an ‘external, relative and provisional embodiment...
[of] the eternal Kingdom of God and the eternal righteousness of His Grace’.
This seems curious given Barth’s earlier insistence that the ‘spirit of God’ is
not relevant to the State. He explains:
However much human error and human tyranny may be involved
in it, the state is not a product of sin but one of the constants of the divine
Providence and government of the world in its [Providence’s] action against
human sin: it is therefore an instrument of divine grace. (p.21)
Thus, the State has no relationship with the Kingdom
of God except the strictly utilitarian one of maintaining law and order. The
Kingdom is not ‘the original and final-pattern’ of the civil community but of
the Christian community (p.20). The State is very much the monster Leviathan of
Hobbes’ conception, and man the predatory hunter motivated by survival or
self-interest who needs Leviathan to hold him in cheek lest ‘chaos and
nothingness …. break in and bring human time to an end’ (p.20). Not only the
State, but all the institutions of culture and civilization in a society so
understood, perform merely a negative role. (Commenting on this view of
society, H. Niebuhr (1951) wrote, p.188: ‘Such Christians tend to think of the
institutions of culture as having largely a negative function in a temporal and
corrupt world. They are orders for corruption, preventives of anarchy,
directives for the physical life, concerned wholly with temporal matters’.)
However separately they may be conceived, Church and
State have to have some relationship since the same people are members of both (Barth,
1954, p.23). The Church must acknowledge the State by ‘subordinating itself...
to the cause of the civil community under all circumstances’ (p.24). But, warns
Barth, this Christian obligation (Romans 13:1) does not mean that ‘the
Christian should offer the blindest possible obedience to the civil community
and its official. Nevertheless, obedience is due to the State since the
existence of the individual and of the Christian community depends upon the law
and order the State provides. The Christian renders unto Caesar Caesar's due,
but (unlike the non-Christian) does not regard the State as an end in itself
but merely as a necessary means. The State is the means by which the stage is
secured for the Christian individual and community to know ‘the grace of God’
(p.94). The order of the State is therefore wholly secondary and subsidiary;
its nature temporary until the second coming of Jesus ends the need for it altogether.
It follows that ‘there is no such thing as a perfect political system’ (p.81),
not even as an idea. There cannot be a Christian theory of the state, nor can
any particular type of state be Christian:
--pg190--
The various political forms and systems are human
inventions... The Christian community, is aware of the limits of all the
political forms and systems which man can discover even with the co-operation
of the Church, and it will beware of playing off one concept—even the
‘democratic’ concept—as the Christian concept against all others... (p.25).
That said, there can and should be a Christian
preference of one political system over another (pp.26-7). The preference is
‘between the just and the unjust state’, ‘between the better and the worse
political form’, ‘between order and caprice’. On that basis, the Christian should
‘choose and desire’, ‘support’ or ‘resist’ (p.27)_ A good State is one in which
order, freedom, community, power and responsibility ‘are balanced in equal
proportions’, where none of the constitutive elements dominates and all are
kept in cheek (p.96). Thus it is possible to ‘indicate the direction in which
the proper state stands’, but ‘it goes without saying that there has never been
a perfect constitutional state and that there never will be this side of
Judgement Day’ (p.96).
Though the same person may be a citizen of State and
Church, the two orders are utterly distinct and separate. Both happen to be in
this world and both stand ‘in the world not yet redeemed’. The Church is not
the ideal of the State which must always remain ‘as such... neutral, pagan,
ignorant’ (p.31). The State is not to be expected to become like the Church;
God has not intended that ‘the state should itself gradually develop more or
less into a church’ (p.30) or into the Kingdom of God (p.31). The Church cannot
make such demands upon the State, it cannot even demand the right to preach;
being able to preach is a gift for which the Church must be thankful to the
State. If the State should refuse, the Church should not only ‘resist not
evil’, it should do penance and seek the cause for this deprivation in itself
rather than in the State.
The State is not even guided by the Kingdom of God as
by an ideal: ‘Political organization can be neither a repetition of the Church
nor an anticipation of the Kingdom of God’ (p.32). The Kingdom by its very nature
can never become a reality of political life, because it comes at the end of
time when neither Church nor State exist, nor the need for them (p.31). State
and Church are ‘annulled’ by the Kingdom which brings about pure sinlessness,
redeemedness and ethical perfection needing neither government, nor prayer,
neither peace nor preaching.
Despite this strict separation of political life from
both the realm of morality and the realm of future bliss, Barth requires the
Church to be the herald of the Kingdom of God and requires the State to heed
the warning (pp.29-30). But the State has nothing to do with the Kingdom, is
not for or against. How then can it be interested in a regime that it neither
accepts nor opposes, a regime that it can neither bring about nor prevent,
neither hasten nor delay, a regime that will be a cataclysmic transformation of
all men and all reality?
--pg191--
Still harder to understand is the about-turn Barth now
performs on what a State ought to be. He had said: ‘The state as such, the
neutral, pagan, ignorant state knows nothing of the Kingdom of God... It belongs
to the very nature of the state that it is not and cannot become the Kingdom of
God’ (p.31). He now maintains: the State ought to become ‘an allegory... a
correspondence and an analogue to the Kingdom of God’ (p.32); and: ‘its
politics... should proceed... on parallel lines [to] the politics of God’ (p.34).
In direct contradiction of his earlier assertion, he states that the State
should be called ‘from neutrality, ignorance and paganism into
co-responsibility [with the Church] before God’; that a ‘historical process
whose aim and content is the molding of the state into the likeness of the
Kingdom of God’ should be initiated for ‘the fulfilment of the state’s own
righteous purpose’ (p.34). It is obvious that, unless the Kingdom of God is
also characterized by a utilitarian commitment to law and order, the State
cannot be an analogue to it. Without the least embarrassment, Barth duly drops his
earlier Hobbesian account of the State in favor of something quite different.
The new goal of the State is to ‘clarify’ rather than
‘obscure’ the Lordship of Jesus Christ. Among the infinite possibilities of
political decision only those are worthy which ‘most suggest a correspondence
to, an analogy and reflection of; the content of faith and gospel’ (p.34). By
the quality of correspondence achieved, we can decide between ‘the just and the
unjust state’, between ‘order and caprice’, ‘government and tyranny’, ‘freedom
and anarchy’, ‘community and collectivism’, ‘personal rights and individualism’
(p.27). We should always stand on the side of equality before the law and
constitutionalism, the ‘limiting and the preserving of man by the quest for and
the establishment of law’ (p.36); on the side of welfare services for the needy;
on the side of a socio-economic order which may provide ‘the greatest possible
measure of social justice’ (p.36). In this transfigured State, there is obviously
need for teachers, warners, and reminders—the sort of job which Barth (p.33)
deems it becoming for the Church alone to perform.
The Hobbesian concept of the State as a power
preventing or containing ‘the war of each against all’, has been dropped altogether
for a State with a social and political program somehow connected with the Lordship
of Christ and the Kingdom of God. There is, after all, an ideal State. Barth
lists eleven points of correspondence between such a State and the Kingdom—in each
case, his deductions are not soundly reasoned,6 and in each
case the Kingdom turns out, in fact, to be the Church. Thus identified, the
Kingdom of God begins to appear, not otherworldly as Barth has claimed, but as
something already established in the Church as ‘the commonaIty of the people
[the Christians] in one place, region or country’.
Granted that the purpose of the State is to provide
the law and order necessary for the Church to exist, to hear and to preach the
Word,
--pg192--
why
need this State parallel either the Kingdom of God or the particular Church of
one ‘place, region or country’?
Barth strongly asserts that the Church ‘cannot have an
inner life without having at the same time a life which expresses itself
outwardly’ (p.8). But neither the ‘just state’ nor the ‘welfare state’ can be inferred
from the proposition (p.9) that ‘the church can, may and has to bear witness’
to Jesus Christ. ‘If the Church’s form of life’, he writes, ‘is the
congregation as the communion of believers in an earthly body under a Heavenly
Head... then a form of life corresponding to this her own form [must] be sought
in the political area as well’ (p.75). This is a typically Barthian ‘if this’,
‘then that’ construction, asserted without proper explanation or evidence.
Barth goes on to say that, as God intervened in human affairs to save sinful
man, so man ought to intervene and give socio-political justice to those in
need' of it (p.75; see also Barth, 1957b, vol,2, pt 2, p.571). But Jesus lived
out his life in an unjust state, not a just one. Furthermore, if the business of
Christian faith is confession, communion and mission, love and hope, and
expectation of the Kingdom of God (as Barth says it is, 1939, p.6), what need
is there for any particular kind of State, provided it allows these things—all
of which can be practised as well in an absolutist as a constitutional state,
under laisser faire capitalism or imperialist socialism, where there is
social welfare and social justice as well as where there is not?
The comparisons or ‘points of correspondence’ between
Church and State are not, Barth tells us, to be read as ‘paragraphs of a
political constitution’ but as ‘examples... to illuminate the analogical… relationship’.
Their number could be more or less; they are not necessary, and can ‘be only
more or less obvious and never subject to absolute proof (1954, p.42). But one
thing is certain: Barth is confident that ‘the clarity of the message of the Bible
will guarantee that all the explications and applications of the Christian
approach will move in one answering direction and one continuous line’ (p.43;
italics added). Let us overlook the whole of Christian history which has never
been clear about ‘the clarity of the message of the Bible’, and focus on the one
Christian approach to how that message is to be explained and applied. For this
approach must be the sum total of Christian ethics.
It turns out, according to Barth, that Christian
ethics is Christian dogmatics. Man is a ‘hopeless sinner’; God desired man’s
‘fellowship’, ‘took up his cause and sin upon Himself' and ‘justified' him. God
did this by sending ‘His only begotten Son’ to die on the cross and thus
‘atone’ for man’s sinful nature. But ‘the Son of God’ did not die for ever. He
was ‘resurrected’ and now ‘sits at the right hand of God’, and will return to bring
about ‘the Kingdom of God’ which, in another sense, is already ‘here’ and ‘at
hand’. This is God’s grace, namely, that ‘He himself has fulfilled His own
requirement’. The ethical task of man is ‘done with and settled once and for
all’ (p.78). ‘What had to happen for the reconciliation, for the redemption and
the
--pg193--
peace
of man, has happened really, fundamentally, and completely (pg.79).
What then remains for man to be doing? Even the work
of faith, Barth maintains, God has accomplished so well ‘that it no longer requires
to be accomplished for us’ (Barth, 1957b, vol.2, pt 2, p.558). ln Jesus Christ,
Barth writes:
the obedience demanded of us men has already been rendered.
In Him the realization of the good corresponding to divine election has already
taken place-and so completely that we, for our part, have actually nothing to
add, but have only to endorse this event by our action. The ethical problem of
church dogmatics can consist only in the question whether and to what extent
human action is a glorification of the grace of Jesus Christ. (p.540)
There
is much further Barthian amplification and re-statement of this basic position
(see pp.518-78). What it means is that all ethical values have already been'
determined by the redemption through atonement, the mysterious grace, as
proposed by Christian doctrine.
The only true and proper activity of the Christian is
to affirm and proclaim Christ; ‘the content of the divine command on man is
only that he should attest it’ (p.578). Once man has done that, everything else
he does is thereby rendered ethically worthy: ‘Whatever he himself does, it
will be the right if only he is satisfied that the gracious God does the right’
(p.578). The whole of divine law, all that is required of us, the whole content
of ethics, of the command and grace of God-all these ‘arc contained’, Barth affirms,
‘in what is, after all, its only requirement: that what we do, we should do as
those who accept as right what God in His grace does for us... What God wants
of all men is that we should believe in Jesus Christ’ (p.578). That would seem
to common sense to be reducing too much, but Barth is able to reduce it still
further: ‘The name of Jesus is itself the designation of the divine content of
the divine claim, of the substance of God’s law’ (p.568).
But this position is not one that can be held for
long. And Barth, never embarrassed by the need to be consistent in what he
writes, does not always hold to it strictly. Sometimes, he maintains, as an alternative
to simply affirming and proclaiming Christ, the imitation in life of Christ’s
example. Ethicality is obedience to Christ’s direct commands and emulation of
his example. Quoting 2 Corinthians 10:5, Barth writes; ‘Every thought
must be brought into captivity to the obedience of Christ’. The content of this
imitatio Christi means following Christ absolutely: ‘to take up one’s
cross’ (Barth quoting Matthew 10:38); ‘to deny oneself’ (Matthew
16:24); ‘to leave all’ (Matthew 19:27). It also means ‘the radicalism of
the necessary turning to Him and away from everything else’ in Luke
9:57, above all, to emulate Jesus by inviting and suffering persecution, evil,
self-sacrifice, and death while requiting all these with good. But,
inconsistent as ever, Barth goes on to say that what must be followed
absolutely cannot be followed abso-
--pg194--
lutely.
If anyone were to succeed in the imitation of Christ, that person, he argues,
would be God, like Jesus, and his achievement would make him a dispenser of
salvation to his fellow-men. Rather than do what Jesus did, ‘what we should and
can do is correspond to this good’, to regard it as ‘the pattern of what we
have to do’ while conceding that what we will do will always be something
different (p.578). The responsibility of emulating Christ is thus repudiated, Christ’s
magnificent imperative—‘Be ye therefore perfect as your Father in heaven is
perfect’—is refused. Elsewhere, Barth follows this through to (what appears to
us) a cynical acceptance that, at least for Europeans, the imitation of Christ
has proved impossible; only proclamation of the salvation-event remains for
Christians to do—and doing that enables them to lead not ethical lives, but
anxious lives, lives filled with bad conscience. The last chapter of Barth’s
The Word of God and the Ward of Man (1957a) entitled ‘The Christian’s
Place in Society’ concludes with the question, ‘What ought we, as Christians, to
do?’ Barth’s answer is: ‘We can indeed do only one thing—not many. But it is
just that one thing that we do not do. What can the Christian in society do but
follow attentively what is done by God?’ The one thing that Christians ought to
do (and which Barth says they don’t do) is to affirm the salvation-event, to
affirm (and thus proclaim) that they are saved. Everything else they do—and that
is a great deal—is not relevant to their being Christian. Or, in Barth’s own words:
‘… Christianity is now proved impossible as an ethic... the ways of European
man are now proved impossible in relation to the ethic of Christianity’ (1957a,
p. 147, italics added).
Whether proclamation of the event of salvation and the
imitation of Christ are regarded as alternatives—and Barth does sometimes present
them in that way—or if they are combined, they do not furnish an adequate basis
on which to build a societal morality, an account of man’s ethical business in
and with society. If, as Barth proclaims, salvation has already happened, for
any individual who ‘endorses’ Christ as God, then society is in fact a
nuisance, an irrelevance. Or it can appear as the satanic force, that which
persecutes and crucifies the conscience; truly a pagan beast, a Leviathan,
whose being and whose purpose have no link whatever with the spirit of God.
Those being Karl Barth’s ideas of society, what
conclusions may we draw from them?
Barth’s conception of society is fundamentally
irrationalistic. Instead of the laws of reason, Barth accepts contradiction and
paradox as his laws. He is aware of it. He acknowledges that there is no defence
‘against the reproach that our thought is a mere play of words’ (Barth, 1957a,
pp.175-6), He consoles himself that this reproach could be addressed also to
Paul and Luther, both equally infatuated with this mental ‘football game’ of
‘to-and-fro movement’, and Calvin’s lnstitutes, Barth notes with
delight, is ‘a veritable sea of para-
--pg195--
doxes’.
He counsels his audience of ministers (whom he is addressing on ‘The Problem of
Ethics Today’): ‘be ready to accept the criticism that our thought looks like a
mere play of words’ because it can do no more than ‘appeal to a tribunal to
which we can no more than appeal’. This tribunal is faith, at whose gates one’s
reason (and not just one’s shoes) must be shaken off and left outside (p. 177).
Ethical consciousness in man begins in the awareness
that he ‘ought’ to be what he is not yet. For Barth the gap between the two is necessarily
(that is, always and by nature) unbridgeable. ‘For us, ‘what can it [the perfect
life] mean except death’ (p.139). ‘The problem of ethics contains the secret
that man... is, an impossibility’ (p. 140). Inspired by Kierkegaardian
pessimism, Barth writes: ‘the problem of ethics is not only the sickness of
man, but is a sickness unto death’ (p,150):
Who can transform the No of the ethical problem...
into a Yes? That such a thing may ultimately be done—but not by us—is a
possibility... but so far as we are concerned, it lies deeper in the No than in
the Yes... To us, it [the ethical problem] reveals more clearly the negative of
life, the judgement upon humanity. (pp. 151-2)
Doomed before he starts, man’s only salvation must
come from the outside, from God; and all there is left for man to do is to
acquiesce in and accept what has been done for him, but never by him. Hope lies
in the fixture event (which, however, he cannot hasten or delay or otherwise
affect) of Christ’s second coming. This will achieve what has already been
achieved (in salvation through atonement) but nevertheless has not been
achieved. As well as refuge in paradox, Barth inevitably seeks refuge also in
millenarianism—for that is all that is left to man if all ethical possibilities
have been denied to him; ‘Ethics can no more exist without millenarianism...
than without the idea of a moral personality. The man who claims he is happily
free from this... has either not yet learned or has forgotten what the ethical
problem really is’ (p.158). This resignation to irrationalism is a refusal of
the supreme human duty: to find out, and then do, what one ought to do. All that
Barth requires of man is to, over and over again, repent and confess, and then
proclaim that man is relieved once for all from his ethical duty: that the
Kingdom of God has come, that it is here, and yet that it will only come at
some time at the end of the world.
Too often the negation of human value is presented by
Christian commentators as a sober judgement, a balanced appraisal, reached after
long meditation on what human beings are really like. Any optimistic view is
dismissed as ‘naive' or ‘sanguine’, as insensitive to the darkness and tragedy
of our nature. In truth, the negative judgements are rarely the result of
reflection on life, on reality; they are reflections most often on the
doctrines of the Church, believed in doggedly as the last word on mankind. It
is to such reflections that Barth’s concept of human society owes its content
and moods. Irrationalism is one of
--pg196--
those
moods; behind that are the darker shadows of relativism and the intellectual violence
of bigotry and dogmatism.
The Church imposed its dogmas as orthodoxy,
persecuting and annihilating as heresy alternative responses to the teaching of
Jesus. If doctrines grew at all it was by Church consent, within its authority,
elaborated from its dogmas. This really was religious totalitarianism. Christian
consciousness stood in need of a spirit of free inquiry and tolerance so that
genuine discoveries of ethical value could be made and presented to mankind to
guide their thinking and conduct. But the Reformation when it came did not
merely unlock the jealous gates of Church authority: it tore them down altogether,
demanding that no authority intervene between the individual mind and its
interpretation of religious truth. But the event of Jesus is, like any other
event in human history, capable of any interpretation—if separated from the authority
of the message of Jesus (what we know of what he said, what we understand from
what he did and how he lived). Barth’s insistence on the proclamation of the
salvation-event as the only truly Christian activity in human life owes
everything to this preference for the mystery of an event over responsible
thought and development of ideas. On what the Christian does after he has
proclaimed salvation, Barth keeps a sphinx-like silence except to say that,
whatever it may be, it is ethically worthy or, simply, outside the jurisdiction
of ethics.
That is why Barth’s highest conception of society is
that of a nation rooted to ‘place, region, country’, and bound not to transcend
its own borders of interests. This confinement of a society’s effectiveness (as
regards what its values and interests are) is a consequence of the profounder
relativism of belief to proclaim an event, nobody need learn more than how to
recognize the event as such. The knowledge that God has sent Jesus Christ, that
Christ has died and thereby saved (Barth, 1930, pp.45-6) is supposed to give a
form, a direction, a style of living. But form and direction can still have any
content or objective one cares to assign to them—unless they are anchored in
secure first principles. As long as the foundation is an event, there is no
escape from relativism. An example of how free the conscience can be is Barth’s
own response to the National Socialists of the Third Reich. 'They were only
understanding Jesus in their own way, ‘different' from Barth’s (Barth, 1933a, p.27).
But in this case Barth scoffed at the Church’s recourse to Romans 13 as
a guiding principle for non-intervention. Of course, the Church could not
itself wield the sword, but Barth passionately urged its members to do so. Now,
proclamation is not enough, prayer is not enough: ‘The matter cannot rest with
the prayer of the church as such... ’ (Barth, 1939, p.74). Now ‘the church in
all its members forms a solidarity with the state’ (p.78); and elsewhere, he was
to write ‘The word of God may also... call to decision, battle... to enter the
fray and soil its [the Church‘s] hands’ (Barth, 1954, p.88). The salvation event
had offered an answer to evil quite different from what Barth, in all
conscience, here proposed—and yet he would claim still, that to proclaim the
event is the be-all
--pg197--
and
end-all. How so, if it can be so wholly and systematically contradicted?
Finally, there is a particularist, separatist strand
in Barth’s thought which also betrays the teaching of Jesus, however loyal it
may be to Christian dogma. He defines the Church as ‘the commonaIty of the people...
who are called apart’. Neither Church nor State go beyond ‘all cities of the
realm’ (Barth, 1954, p.41). To explain how the Church could be conceived as a
separatist, excluding body, Barth quotes from the Heidelberg Catechism:
‘That the Son of God may gather, defend and preserve from the whole
human race a chosen congregation for eternal life... from the beginning of the
world even to the end, and that I may be and remain a living member of the same
to eternity’ (p.41; italics added). The non-Christians are ungodly, unelected,
damned to eternal fire. As for the Muslims, he says: ‘Let us pray for the
destruction of the bulwarks of the false prophet Muhammad’ (Barth, 1939, pp.59,
64). Certain not only of his own ugly rancor against Islam, but also of the rancor
of Christendom as a whole. Barth does not hesitate to use it for propaganda
purposes: ‘Where it [National Socialism] meets with resistance, it can only crush
and kill—with the might and right which belongs to Divinity! Islam of old as we
know proceeded in this way. It is impossible to understand National Socialism
unless we see it in fact as a new Islam, its myth as a new Allah, and Hitler
as this new Allah’s prophet’ (p.40). The uninformed confidence of ‘as we know’,
but especially the ‘we’ of that bigoted ‘knowing’, betray a profound aversion
to any feeling of common humanity such as Jesus taught and Islam established.
The separatism of the Christian community and, by
analogy, of the civil community is relaxed only to admit the Jews. They are,
obviously, not ‘gathered’ by ‘the Son of God... in the unity of the true faith’
(Barth, 1939, p.77). They are chosen in a different way: ‘without any doubt the
Jews are to this very day [sic] the chosen people of God in the same
sense as they have been so from the beginning... They have the promise of God;
and if we Christians from among the Gentiles have it too, then it is only as
those chosen with them, as guests in their house’ (p.200). Barth does go to the
lunatic extreme; ‘He who rejects and persecutes the Jews rejects and persecutes
Him who died for the sins of the Jews... He who is a radical enemy of the Jews,
were he in every other regard an angel of light, shows himself as such to be a
radical enemy of Jesus Christ. Anti-Semitism is sin against the Holy Ghost’
(p.51). If this sympathy for the Jews were because they were persecuted,
suffering human beings, there could be no dispute between Jesus’ teaching and
Barth’s position. In direct contradiction to Jesus’ anti-racism, Barth has embraced
the Jews only because of their status as the ‘chosen’ race. Nowhere in his work
has he expressed sympathy for the millions of negroes who perished in the slave
trade, or the sufferings of colonized peoples at the hands of their imperial
overlords whether Capitalist or Communist, or of the Poles, Slavs, Russians and
others, who were
--pg198--
equally
victims of Nazi rage, and lost many more souls than did European Jewry. If
anything, Barth has published sentiments remarkably similar to the arguments Nazis
used to obtain power; this is Barth on pre-Second World War Germany; ‘when the
negro is on the Rhine and Lenin on the throne of the Czar, and when the dollar
stands at over two thousand marks [we are in a situation] we shudder to be living
in’ (Barth, 1957a, p.144).
Irrationalism, relativism, and particularism are the
essential characteristics of Barthian thought on society. As vehemently as he
insists on paradox, he advocates myth: the myth of the millennium, of a kingdom
beyond and yet within time, the myth of election for the Christians and of
predestined exclusion for the rest. In likening National Socialism to the
Church, he describes the ‘proper church’ as one ‘of which the real and ardent
affirmation is only possible in the form of faith, of mysticism, and of
fanaticism’ (1939, p.43). As strongly as he emphasizes the relativist thesis,
he emphasizes a political absolutism of the Church. The Church (which has only
the duty of hearing and proclaiming the redeeming act of Christ), he calls ‘a
dumb dog’ when it fails to take sides in political, military struggle (p.21).
To this he joins, against the relativist thesis, the political absolutism of
the State. Against his own characterization of the State as ‘external, relative
and provisional’, he asserts that ‘according to the scriptures the office of the
state is that of the servant of God who does not carry the sword to no purpose
but for rewarding the good and punishing the evil...’(p.52). But this is an
absolutism consummating itself in struggle against a National Socialist
Germany, not against tyranny as such, since Barth never yet found enough moral
courage to condemn either capitalist imperialism by the West or Communist
imperialism by the Russians (Barth, 1954, pp.113ff). The absolutism reflects
Barth the individual and Western civilization in reality, in history; the
relativism reflects their spiritual condition. Rather than furnishing any
reliable basis for societist thinking, Barth’s work, lost in the prevarications
and equivocations of paradox, is evidence of its negation.7
The Kingdom of God is of this world
The
paired doctrines of necessary human sinfulness and redemption through divine
atonement did not deliver, nor could ever have delivered, any clear societist
thought. Yet, especially over the last hundred years, Christian consciousness
has been deeply perturbed by the need for a societist ethic. The disruption of
traditional life styles by rapid urbanization and industrialization created a
need for a new kind of social cohesion, especially as the disruption was
accompanied by the most glaring social evils. The pricked Christian conscience
looked in vain to the Church for guidance. But the Church was bound in loyalty to
its doctrines and therefore could not elaborate a new pattern of societal
order. No Christian mind had the courage to challenge the doctrines at the
point where they needed to be challenged—namely,
--pg199--
Christianity's
doctrine of Christ, its Christology.8 Therefore, Christian thought
took up the easy option of paradox, of asserting and denying the same thing, or
the easier option of saying that, ‘given’ the inherent sinfulness of human
nature, collective life must necessarily be sinful: piecemeal response to
crisis is the best that could be hoped for, the choice of the lesser evil, and
so on.
The centrality of the person of Jesus in the
consciousness of Western man has been immovable, however committed he has been
to an assertively non-Christlike cuIture and existence. The conflict between a
will committed to the affirmation and pursuit of ‘the world’ and an inner
(moral) consciousness determined by the world-denying personality of Jesus is
the key to the understanding of modern Western temperament. More precisely,
this conflict consists in Western man’s assignment of a false rank to elemental
values which Jesus had relegated to lower rank and above which it was his
peculiar message to place the properly moral and spiritual values.
Ever since he became Christian, Western man has lived
a split life and suffered from a split personality. Jesus’ ethical command to
self-transcendence on the one hand, and Western man’s self-affirming,
nature-affirming ‘worldliness’ on the other, have divided his loyalty and
being. Although he conducted his life oblivious to Jesus’ emphasis on the
spiritual over against the material, yet he invoked Jesus’ blessing for every move.
While vindicating the self-assertively nature within, now with brute force, now
with rational argument, Western man never had the courage of his conviction
that the life of nature, i.e. pursuit of ‘the world,’ was right. This process
has been going on for centuries. For centuries, Western man has acted
self-assertively and nature-affirmatively and his will and moral judgement
have, in actual reality, been fully committed to self-assertion and
nature-affirmation. But as he was also Christian, as his moral judgement had,
in formal terms, been hilly defined by the ethic of Jesus, which can in no
circumstances reconcile itself with self-assertion and nature-affirmation, Western
man had to learn the technique of representing assertion and affirmation as
sacrifice and altruism. Albert Schweitzer, a man of Jesus-like judgement in
actual reality,9 could not properly grasp (let alone) resolve
this tension. He presented the problem of Western civilization as a search for
a formula which could reconcile the message of Jesus with Western world-affirmation.
He could not see that at the very heart of that message is a condemnation of
such world-affirmation. So well entrenched in Schweitzer’s mind was
world-affirmation that he was prepared to insist high-handedly that any
world-view that did not accept the legitimacy and righteousness of
world-affirmation was, by that fact alone, inadmissible (1949, ch.7, pp.94ff.).
As we shall see more fully below, the tension could only be relieved by a
considerable effort of self-deception: it became necessary to believe that
Jesus’ ethic actually affirms ‘the world’.
This self-deception could not and did not succeed. It
left indelible stains upon the nature of Western man and affected, through his
--pg200--
deeds,
countless millions of people. In his pursuit of ‘the world’ Western man has
exploited his neighbors, colored and white, while all the time representing his
efforts to himself as utopian liberation or social progress, as much God’s Will
as his own—the Puritans even persuaded themselves that there must be a causal
link between material success and divine election (see Tawney, 1950, pp.203-5).
At the international level, Western man has carried through (and continues to
sustain) the cruellest kind of invasion and exploitation. ‘Successful’ Christian
mission always followed the imperial flag, rarely preceded it, and too often
the flag flew rather higher than ever did the cross. The point is not that only
Western man has been violent and aggressive to his fellow human beings, or that
only he has fallen short of his ideals. But an Attila or Genghis Khan made
terrible war in the consciousness that their gods did so; the monk who sins
knows that God does not approve. Our point is that Western man’s aggressions
were productive of a tension because the aggressions were both approved and
disapproved. If it were only the latter, experience could teach and bring a reform
of consciousness and thereafter of actual policies and relationships. But that
is not the case. The case is rather of a consciousness that demands that
aggressive deeds be valued as, ultimately, good, while at the same time feeling
(sometimes acknowledging) that the ethic of Jesus has been violated and insulted.
Thus, instead of getting progressively closer, the poles of Western man’s deeds
and his inward moral consciousness have continued to travel in opposite
directions. The result is anxiety, psychological and emotional excitement,
accompanied by a paralysis of the moral imagination. Western man’s conscience
thus appears to perform the duties of a valet. It does not interrogate the
master’s deeds but dresses them up to look and feel good, although they are fully
recognized as morally ugly. Conscience serves to dress up as ‘righteousness’ Western
man’s self-assertion, his quest for domination in the world, to make it look
and feel acceptable. Germany under the National Socialists became the object of
such fierce hatred (for example, as we saw, in Barth) precisely because Western
self-assertion was not, in this case, dressed up but actually professed and
believed in itself as righteous. Western man has never quite outgrown his
imperial Roman beginnings: Christianity won over his moral consciousness but
without affecting his will so that, in an important measure, it succeeded only
in giving him a bad conscience.
Except in the persons of a few saints, Western man
never rebelled against nature. Luther and Savonarola, among others of such
moral calibre, saw the personality of Jesus being slowly overcome by the world-affirming
forces of their fellow Christians in Rome. The sight of the Church’s hierarchy
being as much infiltrated by longings after wealth, beauty, and power, as were
ever Athens or Baghdad in their heyday, revolted them. Savonarola fired the
whole of Italy, and Luther the whole of Germany. Their effect on Western
ethical consciousness, however, was short-lived. The former’s cause was soon
quenched by the world-affirming forces of the Church; the latter’s cause
managed
--pg201--
to
succeed, predominantly because social, political, economic forces allied
themselves to it. Even so, it was not long before these same forces, once
victory over Rome had been achieved, gave Luther the suffocating embrace which
gave nature the victory over the original ethical character of his movement.
Within Western Christendom, it is only in monastic life that Jesus fully comes
into his own, determining man’s representation of himself as well as his
willing. Secular life, on the other hand, is so governed by nature and so free
of Jesus’ ethicizing power that men of religious sensitivity only withdraw from
it with horror. (See, for example, ‘The Russian Monk’, Bk 6 of Dostoevsky’s The
Brothers Karamazov.)
Two ways out of this dilemma suggested themselves to Western
man: to re-invent Jesus as a world-affirming teacher, or to deny him altogether.
The former has a tradition which culminated in the positive Christianity of
European Fascism and American Progressivism. To take the place of the ethical,
no-saying Jesus of history, this positive Christianity furnished an
easy-approving, yes-saying Jesus, as much intoxicated with ‘the
World-in-perpetual-spring’ as any of its Fascist and Progressivist followers.
Transvaluation, or falsification of values, is always an easy option, because
it does the job without touching the object of age-old veneration. The way of
denial is radical and revolutionary: only Communism attempted it. Jesus and his
no-saying morality, it held, are an opiate preserved and distributed by the
ruling class to support its will to power over the less fortunate classes.
The most eloquent, prolific mouthpiece of the new
attempt to deliver Anglo-Saxon Christian consciousness from this dilemma is
Reinhold Niebuhr. His choice is, in fact, that of Communism, namely the rejection
of Jesus. But unlike the Communists, he dares not reject Jesus totally; he simply
denies to Jesus’ teaching any jurisdiction at the level of societal action.
Niebuhr’s aim is to liberate society from the ethic of the Sermon on the Mount
in order that it may, without inhibition, meet evil with evil and so assert the
self-seeking will in good conscience.
The call to worldliness
The
ethical stance of Jesus’ famous saying ‘My Kingdom is not of this world’
expresses one of the profoundest values in his teaching. He said it in rebuttal
of the Sanhedrin’s accusation that he was seeking to establish a worldly
kingdom against the will of Rome and in defiance of its authority. It is
absolutely not ‘the world’ that Jesus had come to help the Jews to realize, but
the higher values that pertain to each human being as a moral subject. A
growing tendency among Western Christians has sought to transvalue (or falsify)
this teaching into its opposite: ‘the Christian is called to worldliness’ (McLelland,
1959, p.104). For Christians who support this view, involvement, success, and
progress in this politico-economic material world is desirable and necessary.
They then attribute their own worldliness to Jesus, not-withstanding its
incongruence with the whole substance of his teaching
--pg202--
as
mediated, over the ages past, through Christian doctrines. Let me again repeat
here that Jesus’ teaching and mission were not by nature incongruent with a
societist ethic, but they were not themselves societist. Jesus had a far more
grave and fundamental problem to deal with. The problems which societism raises
and seeks to solve could not have confronted Jesus; and if they did and Jesus
was aware of them, he could not have given them his attention which was needed
on the far more desperate front of Jewish racist separatism. On the other hand,
Christianity or that teaching of the Church which came to dominate Christian
thought, is incongruent with societism. It is instinctively paradoxical; and
from paradox no societist ethic whatever—except cynicism—is deducible.
Joseph C. McLelland, one of the foremost young
Christian minds who combines Presbyterian traditionalism with (in his own
words) ‘the New Look’ Christian social thought, concludes his last chapter,
‘The Reign of Christ’, with a section called ‘The World Without End’. The Christian,
he writes, ‘lives [i.e. ought to live] with his face towards the world’ (1959,
p.104). He quotes in support H. Kraemer: ‘The church, by being world-centered
in the image of the divine example, is really the Church’ (Kraemer, 1958,
pp.130, 169ff.). The ‘image of the divine example’, Christ, was
‘world-centered’ only inasmuch as his mission was to the whole of mankind. But
when McLelland uses the phrase he means ‘the world’ of socio-economic-political
values. Jesus expressed no interest in such values; and the obsessed pursuit of
them for the sake of the Jewish race, was what he expressly combated and sought
to end.
We have not misconstrued McLelland’s meaning if we say
that ‘world-centered’ means ‘socio-reforming’. There need be no dispute with
the ‘new, creative solutions’ (pp.79 ff.): ‘True Trade... Monetary Reform...
guild structure… demand that every worker should have a real voice in the
industry carried on by means of his labor’ (pp.84-5). The dispute is with the
claim that this kind of reforming is in ‘the image of the divine example’.
Christ emphatically recognized the priority of love over justice. McLelland
echoes a cry of the unemployed in England (‘Damn your charity—we want
justice’), and goes on: ‘We just add what we said above about the replacement
of the modern virtue of ‘charity’ by that Christian love that works for social
justice’ (p.86). Then, to clinch the reversal of Jesus’ priorities: ‘Since the Gospel
has its own law, love will operate through justice and this Christian insight
will become action in terms of rights’ (p.86). The fundamental ethical
vision of Jesus that love, or charity, is the higher value because it calls man
to a self-exertion (a degree of self-transcendence) not demanded by justice,
because it leads him to realms of self-giving where justice by its very nature
cannot take him, has, in McLelland’s argument, been sacrificed.
McLelland is right to demand altruism, but to
legislate altruism is to rob it of its specifically Jesus-like character, its
being freely offered for the sake of being offered. Legislated as social
reform, altruism
--pg203--
becomes
utilitarian, oriented to real-effects, to results. It does not therefore become
‘wrong’. The ‘good’ legislated does not become ‘bad'. It remains essentially as
good as it was before. But it no longer answers the ethical requisite of Jesus.
We can legislate altruism as an addition to the Jesus requisite, which would
conflict with the doctrines of necessary sinfulness and already-accomplished
salvation. But we cannot do so as an analogy with, or an expression or
definition of or as a substitute for, the ethic of Jesus.
To do more than, to excel, the law, is to realize the
moral and higher values. Ethically speaking, then, to identify the morally
imperative with such excelling and transcendence is to ‘dispose’ of the law, as
Jesus had done. As we have seen, McLelland subjects charity to justice, the
higher to the lower value, thus reversing their right order. It is certainly
not a mistake in ethical vision that is here in question, but a Western impatience
with the Christian supreme values of love and charity. This haste is dictated
by the transvaluation of the Kingdom of God that has steadily been taking root
in Western Christendom. In the anxiety to give to the worldly kingdom the first
place in man’s ethical striving and hoping, the heavenly kingdom is demoted and
made subservient to the worldly. It is a hard thesis indeed to demonstrate, from
the teachings of Jesus or from the history of Christianity which followed, that
the heavenly kingdom is an order of nature rather than one of heaven; that it
is ‘yet-to-come’ in this world rather than ‘yet-to-come’ at the end of time,
that it is realizable by human effort, rather than that it will be ‘sent’
suddenly and ‘with power’. It is to be expected therefore, when a Christian
societism tries to do so, that it will resort to all sorts of unconvincing
argument.
This argument has, first, to by-pass completely the
long discussions of the nature of the Kingdom to come at the end of the world—in
pre-Christ Judaism or in Christianity—to ignore the work of W.O.E. Oesterley
(1908), of K.H. Charles (1913), of F. Holmström (1936). It has to ignore also
the whole debate initiated by Albert Schweitzer’s revolutionary Das
Messianitäts und Leidensgeheimnis (translated as The Mystery of the
Kingdom of God, 1925), and Karl Barth’s Römerbrief (translated as Commentary
on Romans, 1933b). It has to ignore too the efforts to elaborate a
‘Dialectical Theology’ in O. Cullmann (1946), J. Marsh (1952) and S. Mowinckel
(1951/1959). Not even the ‘realized eschatology‘ of C.H. Dodd (1936, n.d.) can
be adapted to a view that the Kingdom is yet-to-come in this world and achievable
by a programmatic societal ethic.
This argument has, secondly, to ignore the authority
of the words of Jesus as reported in Matthew, and the established
authority of Paul’s words and prefer the apocryphal Revelations. Jesus
had said: ‘Come unto me, all ye that labor... learn of me... and ye shall find
rest unto your souls’ (Matthew 11:28-30), which is remembered by Paul;
‘Let us labor therefore to enter into that rest... ’ (Hebrews 4:9-11). The rest
after labor is, symbolically, the Kingdom, therefore a place of peace,
different from the toil and striving of this world. The passage in
--pg204--
Revelations on which McLelland
seeks to build his argument, in fact says only this: that, in the Kingdom of
Heaven God’s ‘servants shall serve him’ (Revelations 22:3). This expresses,
for the life to come, the standing of God’s servants in relation to God, having
no other master, and so in some degree of harmony or communion with Him. On
this bare statement, McLelland builds the conclusion: ‘the new age will be shaped
like a kingdom, that is, like a State’ (McLelland, 1959, p.102). By what
stretch of reason that can be derived from the words in Revelations, McLelland
does not explain. Contradicting the evidence of how Matthew or Paul
understood Jesus, he goes on: ‘in this Kingdom of God the rhythm will be
changed—not replaced by the rest of an eternal Sabbath but, transformed into
the final work of man, the Lord’s Day service’ (p.102). This, he had earlier
explained, means, for a carpenter for example, the actual work of producing
good tables (p.87). It is too absurd to claim that a carpenter will also be a
carpenter in the hereafter, and that, in either world, his being blessed or happy
is related to his making good tables.
Finally, McLelland’s argument lapses from such novel
absurdity into the too-familiar paradox of a Kingdom ‘present’ and ‘yet-to-come’.
He tells us that ‘the Bible thinks of reality as divided into two ages or
aeons’ (p.102). The old age is ‘passing away because it has become perverted by
the evil powers that have invaded God’s good creation... the other is new, the
New Age that is coming upon us’. And the ‘New Age has already begun in a kind
of secret and hidden way... when Christ arose at Easter’. And ‘this New Age
began in His own new Body’. This ‘Body’ which is the Kingdom, ‘brought its
power... to the Church’. ‘Therefore, the lay family of God are the People of
power... It is through this same People that new forms of society will be
created... The Bible may speak about ‘heaven above and earth beneath’, but it
speaks even more about the old heaven and earth and the new heaven and earth’
(p. 103).
Both the disregard for the principle of
non-contradiction and the easy collapse into obscurantism, the reader will
recognize as the familiar devices of Christian reflection upon Christian dogma.
This is only a singularly unworthy example. Either the salvation-event did
happen or it didn’t; either the New Age has begun or it hasn’t, and the Old Age
has either passed away or it hasn’t. But let us grant that the New Age has come
in a ‘secret and hidden way’ such that it makes sense to say that it both has
and hasn’t come. Even so, the change from one Age to the other plainly cannot
mean that the actual heaven and earth are changed, but that there has been a
spiritual change of regime in both. And yet McLelland is in fact asserting that
it is the real heaven and the real earth populated by the Christ-professing men
and women of history that constitute the New Kingdom of God. By calling Christians
to worldliness, McLelland calls them to the Kingdom of God, to the New Age, and
vice versa. It is a miserable transvaluation indeed of the noble spirituality
of Jesus that his name, his ‘Body’, is made an argument for the setting up of a
physically real, socio-economic
--pg205--
Zion—which
he spent his life to combat—albeit this new Zion is not a racist society and
its place on the map is other and bigger than Palestine’s Jerusalem.
This deliberate departure from the ‘traditionally
‘religious’ questions and conventions’. (p.104) has been gaining ground in many
quarters of Christendom. It is part of the fabric of that Western consciousness
which is gradually repudiating the ethic of Jesus for an ethic which belongs to
Western man alone, the ethic of a Germanic joyful affirmation of himself and
his world. The commitment to this pagan ethic, combined with an inner moral
consciousness that holds to Jesus, has created a tension which, in this case,
is alleviated by attributing the pagan ethic to Jesus. Such attribution is
done, often, with zest, deliberately embracing ‘heresy’. A classic statement of
it appears in a sermon—presented by a young scholar preparing a Ph.D in Divinity
in the University of Chicago—entitled ‘The Heresy of Joy’ (Warner, 1959).
Warner quotes Nehemiah 8:10: ‘Go your way, eat the fat, and drink the
sweet, and send portions into them for whom nothing is prepared: for this day
is holy unto your Lord: neither be ye sorry; for the joy of the Lord is your
strength’. These words celebrate the promulgation of the tribalist law in which
the Hebrew race was to be perpetuated separate and intact. Warner then proclaims
in unmistakably Nietzschean terms: ‘In the joy of men at the joy of life, ‘the
joy of the Lord’ there shimmers and shines through. And it is strong—as only
the ultimate can be strong’ (p.5). Against the teaching ‘My Kingdom is not of
this world’, Warner insists on an ‘essential and central fulfilment’ of man.
Man he tells us, must bring about this fulfilment because it is joy and joy is
its own justification: ‘When we know its [joy’s] fulfilling, conquering,
irrepressible celebration, we can—even in great brokenness—say ‘Yes’ to life,
to others, to ourselves, because there is nothing else to say and nothing else
we want to say’. Here, Warner might well have sung the words from Friedrich Nietzsche’s
Also Sprach Zarathustra (3, s.15, 3) where the Antichrist says:
‘The Christian conception of God—God as God of the sick,
God as a spider, God as spirit—is one of the most corrupt conceptions of the
divine ever attained on earth. It may even represent the low-water mark in the
descending development of divine types. God degenerated into the contradiction
of life, instead of being its transfiguration and eternal yes! God as the
declaration of war against life, against nature, against the will to live! God—the
formula for every slander against this world, for every lie about the beyond’!
… (Nietzsche, 1954 edn, pp.585-6)
The a-societism of Reinhold Niebuhr
European
Fascism was vanquished in World War II and, though it has individual followers,
the propaganda against it has been too well or-
--pg206--
ganized
and sustained for any large-scale or communal resurgence of it anywhere.
American Progressivism is certainly gaining ground all the time. But its gain
is the gain of mediocrity. The intelligent Christian quickly sees through its
juggling with ideas and concepts; and the sincere, Jesus-willed Christian is
repelled by its ‘worldliness‘ and withdraws to the lonely personalist heights
of Christian self-giving, love, and charity.
But Christendom is not entirely composed of sincere
Christians. There are those who are dissatisfied with the societist
transvaluation but do not accept the fact that societal ethic is not the ethic
of Jesus, though it may well, and indeed should, be added thereto. They do not wish
to understand that the ethic of Jesus, though no societism may be deduced from
it, can, must, and was meant to, be complemented by addition of the societal
dimension to the personal. Loyalty to the dogmas of sin and salvation prevents
them from making this concession, and directs them, in consequence to seek alternative
solutions to their dilemmas.
The ‘prophet’ of one such solution is Reinhold
Niebuhr. Niebuhr, like Barth, begins with Hobbes’ characterization of man in
society as ‘the war of each against all’: ‘Society is in a perpetual state of
war' (Niebuhr, 1955, p.19); ‘Man, from the very constitution of his nature, prefers
his own happiness to that of all other sentient beings put together’ (p.46);
‘man is a child of nature, subject to its vicissitudes, compelled by its
necessities, driven by its given impulses’ (1941, vol.1, p.3). Quoting Shaftesbury,
Niebuhr feels that, given ‘the end and design of nature’, man must be
self-assertive; if he lacks the ‘passion’ to be so, he is, ‘vicious’, a
failure.10 In a different vein, Niebuhr calls this
predicament of man ‘sin’ and attributes it to an excessive use of his faculties
(‘nature’ and ‘reason’) which is against the ‘harmonies of nature’ (1941,
vol.1, p.17). Both concepts, ‘sin’ and ‘harmonies of nature’, have been introduced
into what had been, before, a free-for-all, in order to make way for Christian
salvation. But man’s will to transgress the harmonies of nature is itself an
endowment of his nature: how does calling it ‘sin’ change anything? Salvation,
if it comes, is presumed to stop man wanting to transgress the harmonies of
nature, but does contradicting his own nature in this way change it?
The alternative to contradicting nature, namely
subjecting it to a higher law, a law that is not itself ‘of nature’ but ‘of
heaven’, is not an alternative that appeals to Niebuhr. He distinguishes
between ‘mutual love’—a give-and-take arrangement of mutual, reciprocated
self-interest—and ‘sacrificial love’. ‘Sacrificial love’ is the absolute demand
of God’s Will upon human life, requiring obedience regardless of consequences
or the cost to ‘nature’. This he calls that ‘impossible possibility’ (1935,
p.117). He argues that ‘the ethical demands made by Jesus are incapable of
fulfilment in the present existence of man’ (p.56). This fantastic thesis
Niebuhr defends on the ground that, when Jesus made this demand he was not
thinking of this world, not legislating for
--pg207--
moral
conduct in this world but in the next—a thesis even more fantastic. The most
naive understanding of the Sermon on the Mount could not regard its ethical
insights as directives for action in any world save this. How, in any case,
could morality be of any relevance in the next world?
Even if a Christian were to accept Niebuhr’s
interpretation of the Sermon on the Mount, he would still have to agree that
sacrificial love is somehow relevant to this world, somehow affects human
conduct. This constitutes a division of man’s loyalty. Between the two gods dwelling
within his breast, both of which are commanding, the one possible and the other
‘impossible’ duties, the Christian, as Niebuhr sees him, is torn apart. He will
make his choices on practical, utilitarian calculations, but always under the
accusing and condemning finger of the moral law. But being ‘impossible’, the
moral law of Jesus has, under this scheme, no function except to preserve for Western
man his bad conscience.
Should a person, however, resolve to go against ‘self
and ‘nature’ and fulfil the demands of sacrificial love, Niebuhr would at times
call him, (following Shaftesbury) ‘vicious’, and at other times remove his hat
in awe at the superhuman effort involved. But he has no sympathy with any
society that confuses its own welfare with the welfare of mankind, or its own
duty with the general concept of duty (1955, p. xi). For social groups, it is
necessary to pursue political policies which the ethic of the individual ‘will
always find embarrassing’ (p. xv), and which sacrificial love—or the law of
Jesus—will always be contradictory to. This sharp dichotomy between an ethic of
the individual and an ethic of society Niebuhr defends in the light of four
considerations. These are:
1.
‘Social injustice cannot be resolved by moral and rational suasion alone...
Conflict is inevitable and in this conflict power must be challenged by power’
(p. xv). ‘Collective power... can never be dislodged unless power is used
against it’ (p. xx). We must understand, he counsels, ‘the brutal character of the
behavior of all human collectives and the power of self-interest and collective
egoism in all inter-group relations’ (pp.270-1). Is this a law of ‘social
science’ or of morals? Either way its appeal is to ‘the big stick’.
2.
‘Every effort to transfer a pure morality of disinterestedness to group
relations has resulted in failure’ (p, xii). ‘It would therefore seem better',
concludes Niebuhr, ‘to accept a frank dualism in morals than to attempt...
policies which, from the political perspective, are quite impossible’ (p.268). Since
no social group has shown enough imagination to be influenced by a
disinterested love, since there is no possibility ‘of persuading any social
group to make a venture in pure love’, he adds, ‘the selfishness of human
communities must be regarded as an inevitability’ (p.272). But that ‘every
effort... has resulted in failure’ is only one way of interpreting historical
events and is not at all self-evident. Ethically, it is a counsel of morbid
despair. Why ought not a society to pursue the disinterested ethic of pure love
--pg208--
alone? There is as little reason to think that such self-sacrifice—if
that should be the outcome, though it need not necessarily be so—would be less
‘successful’ at the societal level than was the heroic self-sacrifice of Jesus,
in the Christian view, or of Socrates in the more general view, at the
individual level.
3.
The ethic of pure love, argues Niebuhr, demands sacrifices. In the case
of the individual, self-sacrifice is morally right since the self is at once
agent and victim, But it is morally wrong for a collective action to be taken
on the same principle—i.e. ‘no one has a right to be unselfish with other
people’s interests’ (p.267). Niebuhr’s argument here applies to (and probably
derives from) the managerial ethic of American corporations whose only duty is
to maximize shareholders’ profits at any cost. But in a state, the rulers do
not only serve the interests of the ‘citizens’, they also authorize (or
prevent, prohibit) certain actions—i.e. they define duties—for the citizens.
Secondly, a collective action imposes the consequences of that action on all
parties to it—including those who take the decision—in other words,’ the agent—victim
relationship obtains as at the individual level.
4.
The application of the norms of individual morality to society, Niebuhr
argues, results in undesirable consequences. ‘Such a policy easily becomes
morbid [and makes] for injustice by encouraging and permitting undue
self-assertion in others’ (pp.261-2). Here Niebuhr is oblivious to the power of
love, to the efficacy of Christian charity, and consequently, of every noble,
disinterested, unselfish deed. He has completely ignored the truth, central to
the whole message of Jesus, that, even at the public, collective level, it is
not through evil and hostility that evil and hostility end.
It is surprising that, beside such pessimism about
human collective affairs, Niebuhr holds that the ideal of society is justice.
But this ideal is severely qualified. There is so much ‘assertion of interest
against interest’ that societies are compelled ‘to sanction self-assertion… social
conflict and violence’ (p.259). Justice can be maintained only through
precarious ‘balance of power’, the division of mankind into self-neutralizing,
hostile camps (1935, p.140). What sort of justice is it that is based on
balance of power, coercion and social conflict; in the pursuit of which society
‘is forced... to sacrifice a degree of moral purity for political
effectiveness’ (p.244)?
The fact that the conduct of the nations of the world
has been immoral weighs too heavily in Niebuhr’s argument. Indeed, he more or less
approves immorality at the international level. He insists that ‘the sentiment
of nationality and the authority of the state [are] the ultimate force of
cohesion’ and therefore society’s highest principle: ‘The unqualified character
of this devotion [to the nation] is the very basis of the nation’s power and of
the freedom to use the power without moral restraint’ (p.91). Supra-national
commitments or sympathies are too weak to be effective or relevant; ‘What lies
beyond the nation... the community of mankind, is too vague to inspire
devotion’ (p.91). The Church no longer has the prestige or the universality it
once had
--pg209--
(p.91).
There is, then, nothing for society to do but ‘be self-assertive, proud,
self-complacent and egotistical.’11 Its ‘most significant
moral characteristic... is its hypocrisy... [just as] self-deception and hypocrisy
is an unvarying element in the moral life of all human beings’ (p.95; see also
pp.95-6).
The aim of Niebuhr’s argument is to establish that
relations between social groups can only be political, never ethical. It
follows that, having improperly deduced a moral value from an empirical reality
(an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’), Niebuhr has repudiated altogether the relevance of
the ethic of Jesus for the conduct of society. This acceptance of the reality
of international politics as the basis for principle is combined with Niebuhr‘s
acceptance of the Hobbesian thesis that without a coercive State man’s nature
is nasty and brutish. That leaves very little relevance for the ethic of Jesus
on the level of the individual person either: that little relevance is what
Niebuhr clings to by calling it ‘that impossible possibility’.
The problem of Western man today is radically
different from that of the first three centuries of Christianity. At that time
the personality of Jesus was struggling to invade Western man’s ethos. Today,
after twenty centuries of Christian existence, that ethos is regrouping its
forces and struggling to repel, and utterly to banish, Jesus. Thus, for Niebuhr,
the Kingdom of God is not this world, but the spiritual realm of the individual
in a small, personal moment. However, he does not stop there. He tells us that
Jesus’ ethic can and ought to have no relevance whatever for societal life where
man is free to apply the law of the jungle which is the only true law of
society. Niebuhr’s limitation of Jesus’ jurisdiction to the personal level is
not genuine. It is made with the ulterior motive of denying to the Jesus ethic,
or for that matter, to any ethic at all, jurisdiction over the societal. This,
in effect, means that Western man is right to do to others, collectively,
whatever he has the power to do.
Conclusion
Let
me recall here what was noted at the outset of this chapter, in TroeItsch’s
words: ‘Jesus did not organize a church’ (1949, vol.1, p.58). Jesus was concerned
with a deeper ethical problem—the need for radical self-transformation so as to
prepare the will to be shaped and ‘determined’ by God’s Will. He taught this
ethic against separatism, tribalism, and the consuming will to set up a
political, physical Zion. But what Jesus taught and achieved, a new road to
salvation, is not necessarily contradictory to societism. It leaves the ground
on which societism and a-societism make their stands untouched.
Christian doctrine fell under the dogmatism of
Tertullian before, and of Athanasius after, the Council of Nicea. Later it
became wedded to the ‘anti-life’ irrationalism of St Augustine at the Council
of Chalcedon. Thereafter, the doors were tightly closed. The doctrines of necessary
sinfulness and its redemption by divine atonement became
--pg210--
entrenched,
and with them habits of mind that developed a taste for paradox, for
obscurantism, for millennarianism. It was these doctrines, not the ethic of
Jesus, that blocked the development of societist thought. For how can the
societist will to the world, to life and nature, ever be reconciled with the necessary
depravity of human faculties? How can a societist activism be reconciled with
belief in a once-for-all salvation by an ‘outside’ agency? How can the
societist drive toward the future be settled with the conviction that
everything will be put right at the coming of the Kingdom ‘with 'power’, and
not by man’s effort in will or deed or consciousness? Finally, how can the
clear, serenely affirmative ethic of societism be possible under assumptions
and first principles which are affirmed on one hand and denied on the other? Is
it any wonder that Christian thinkers stammer and garble in the dark when they
attempt to deduce societism from the Christianity of official doctrine?
How wonderful if Christian thought, beginning from a
genuine, doctrine-liberated statement of Jesus’ ethical breakthrough, had developed
to the point where, transformed by the ethic of Jesus—and confronting the
predicament created by industrialization and urbanization—it felt and satisfied
the need for a societist enlargement of the Christian ethic. And if that
consciousness had made the right start to begin with, it would have acclaimed
the achievement of the Prophet Muhammad rather than regard it as a permanent
stumbling-block.12
Ernest TroeItsch wrote a monumental work for which he
is duly acclaimed (TroeItsch, 1949). He spent over a thousand pages trying to present
and establish the claim that the great men of Christianity have all been
societists of the first calibre. But he did not succeed in any instance. All
these men held to the very dogmas which militate against societism. Thus, he
wrote in conclusion: ‘The idea of the future Kingdom of God which is nothing
less than faith in the final realization of the absolute... does not... render
this world and life in this world meaningless and empty; on the contrary, it
stimulates human energies, making the soul strong through its various stages of
experience in the certainty of an ultimate, absolute meaning and aim for human
labor. Thus it raises the soul above the world without denying the world… The
life beyond this world is, in every deed, the inspiration of the life that now
is’ (vol.2, pp.999, 1002-3, 1005-6). This is certainly well said. But who has
ever denied it? Certainly not Jesus, nor those Christians of history who could
not, and persistently refused to, swallow the bitter pills of Christian dogma,
the so-called ‘heretics’, The Muslims have been proclaiming this truth for
fourteen hundred years. It was the Christians themselves, especially those
whose minds were irretrievably committed to the theses of Christian dogma but
whose hearts and wills were elsewhere, that denied it. But it was precisely
they who, according to TroeItsch, were the world’s societists par excellence.
Obviously, TroeItsch’s work is addressed to fellow-Christians who saw that the
logic of Christian dogma runs counter to reality and so accused it of going
against ‘the world’. TroeItsch thought that by convincing them
--pg211--
that
their predecessors had never been against ‘the world’, he had established (what
his title claims) that there always had existed something called ‘The Social
Teaching of the Christian Churches’.
Notes and references
Notes
1 F.D. Maurice, 1805-1872, is regarded as
the father of Christian societism. It was the events of 1848 in England that
prompted in him the first societist ideas. It was in 1850 that he began to
associate with other men such as J.M.F. Ludlow, C. Kingsley, T. Hughes, and
E.V, Neale, men similarly inclined to initiate social reform and to seek a
theological basis for it in Christian principles. The Rockdale Pioneers
Co-operative Society had then been six years in existence. But F.D. Maurice
produced no systematic thought that may be properly called societist. It was
really in the work of J.M.F. Ludlow that Christian societist thought began to
take form. See M.B. Reckitt, 1946.
2
For concise presentation of this view in modern
times, see Baillie, 1961, pp.207-10, Knudson, 1943, pp.432-72, and W.R. Inge,
1913.
3
‘There is no authentic record of such a
foundation. Everything having to do with the Church as an actually existing
society in the lifetime of Jesus is found in Matthew, and is conspicuously
absent from all the other Gospels. The word [ecclesia] appears only in
Matthew 16:18 and 18:17. The final commission in Matthew 28:19ff. is much more
general in Luke 24:47ff. and John 20:22ff. The parables which speak of a mixed
society (Matthew 13:25, 47 and 22:3ff.), insofar as they appear in the other
gospels have a different application. The night when, in Matthew 13:25, tares are
sown is, in Mark 4:27, the time when the seed springs. The good and bad in
Matthew 22:10 are in Luke 14:21 the poor, halt, maimed, and blind—moral wrecks but
genuine converts. When Matthew 16:18 and 18:17 are accepted as genuine, the
word ecclesia is interpreted simply as ‘community’, ideally in the
former, and locally in the latter, and more frequently all these sayings are
regarded as having been modified under the stress of a situation in which the
Church was still looked on as the society of the Kingdom of God, but in actual
fact was becoming very unlike it. In neither view do we find any ground for
believing that Jesus founded a society with a mixed membership and governed by
officers having external authority.’ (John Oman on ‘Christian Church’ in the Encyclopedia
of Religion and Ethics.)
4
Commenting on this passage in the second
century, Clement of Alexandria wrote (Stromateis 7, 2, 10): ‘He [Jesus]
does not, as some conceive offhand, bid him [the rich man] throw away the
substance he possessed, and abandon his property; but bids him banish from his
soul his notions about wealth, his excitement and morbid feeling about it, the
anxieties, which are the thorns of existence, which choke the seed of life.’
--pg212--
5 The
presentness of the Kingdom was given a special turn of meaning by C.H. Dodd. He
proposed that the end-of-the-world promise of the Kingdom has already been
fully achieved in the Christian understanding of Christ as incarnation of God
and redeemer (see Dodd, n.d., and 1936, esp. Appendix, ‘Eschatology and History’).
6 The eleven points of correspondence Barth lists (1954,
pp.35-42) are:
1 From
the doctrine that God ‘reclaimed' man by sending Jesus, Barth deduces ‘man’s
claim against sin and death’. He then identities ‘sin and death’ as the state
of nature, ‘the war of each against all’, from which the state delivers man by
subjecting him to law and limiting his freedom. Against this deduction, it may
be argued that the ‘sin and death’ from which Jesus saved are not the Hobbesian
state of nature, but something much more interior and more profound, and Jesus’
‘reclaiming’ man has surely got to mean more than replacing a chaotic political
system or nonsystem with an orderly one.
2 From
the notion that Jesus ‘came to seek and save the lost’, Barth concludes that
the State ought to regard as its primary responsibility cafe for ‘the poor, the
socially and economically weak and threatened’, that it should realize ‘the
greatest measure of social justice’. This interpretation limits Jesus’ mission
to ‘the lost’ of Israel, social justice to the poor and to the socially and
economically weak. It is unconvincing to maintain that ‘the lost’ meant for
Jesus ‘the poor’ rather than ‘the rich’, ‘the economically weak’ rather than
the affluent; nor are ‘the lost’ only ‘the lost’ of Israel but the lost of all
mankind.
3 From
the notion that ‘the Word of grace and the spirit' ought to be accepted freely,
Barth infers the political rights of suffrage, of free association, of
determining education, science, art, and culture. Yet, he had insisted on the
fundamental nature of the State being coercive force. He is neither for
‘out-and-out dictatorship’ nor for ‘out-and-out Laissez-Faire’, but backs a
system in which both State and citizen determine values. Here, the allegory
completely breaks down: for, under Barthian terms, man plays no part either in
the dispensing or receiving of grace (see also point 8 below).
4 From
the notion of ‘the one Body of the one Head’, Barth deduces that in the State,
neither the individual nor the collective may have the last word, but ‘the being’
of the individual and ‘the being’ of the collective, or the ‘preservation’ of
both. This entails that neither should determine the other, but that each
subsists in perfectly free dualism. But is such dualism true of the
relationship of Christ, the Head, with the opportunity, the Body?
5 From
the notion of the unity of faith and baptism, Barth concludes that in the State
there should be no restriction of ‘political freedom… of certain classes and
races... of women’. However, the unity of faith is itself the unity of truth
and the alternative of the truth, is the probable or the false. No tolerance is
ever possible here without compromise to truth. Barth had previously told us
that because the State can have no concern for truth, its highest wisdom is
tolerance (p.24). But how can the unity of truth now
--pg213--
achieve what Barth had told us was the prerogative of
the absence of truth?
6 From
the obscure notion that there is a ‘variety of the gifts and tasks of the one
Holy Spirit’, Barth infers that in the State there is ‘need to separate the different
functions and powers—the legislative, executive and the judicial’ (pp.38-9).
Aware that this piece of Barthian illogicality convinces no one, Barth tarnishes
other reasons, namely, ‘the endangering [of] the sovereignty of the law’, ‘the disrupt[ion]
rather than promot[ion of] the unity of the common enterprise’. This provides
further evidence of how utilitarian, rather than Christian, Barth’s theory of
society is.
7 From
the beautiful rhetoric of ‘the disclosure of the true God and His revelation,
from Him as the Light that has been lit in Jesus Christ to destroy the works of
darkness’, and ‘the dawning of the day of the Lord’, Barth concludes that ‘all
secret policies and secret diplomacy’ ought to be abolished. Besides the need
for logic, Barth needs the reminder that it is God ‘that sees in secret... ’,
etc.
8 From
the notion that ‘the human word is capable of being the free vehicle and
mouthpiece of the free word of God’, Barth infers that the human word must ‘be
trustworthy in the political sphere’. In matters religious, the human word is
not misled absolutely but in the measure it agrees with what is canonical. With
Holy Writ as base and check, the human word may travel far, but, Barth would
certainly grant, never as far as to contradict it. In the case of the State,
Barth has already laid down that there is no principle, no ideal, no political theory
against which the political human word may be checked. The preservation of man
from war and chaos provides but nebulous possibilities for checking the worth
or un-worth of political controversy.
9 From
the notion that ‘as the disciples of Christ, the members of His
Church do not rule but serve’, Barth deduces that the
rulers ought to be not ‘rulers’ but ‘servants’, and distinguishes between potestas,
or service under the law; and potentia, or rule before the law. But the
so-called ‘servants’ do precisely no less than ‘rule before the law’ since it
is not given for any human to approach Christ accept through them. True, man may
discover Christ by himself, but he may not ‘live in’ Christ without them. They
are then, in a sense, absolutely necessary for salvation and stand on earth as
the lieutenants of the Godhead. Secondly, from what Barth had so far told us
about the nature of the State, the notion of ‘service under the law’ is a piece
of political propaganda which the Leviathan invents to camouflage its potentia;
for all that is possible for the State is positive law, the ‘provisional’,
‘pagan’, ‘ignorant’ human invention.
10 From
the notion that the Church is ‘ecumenical’, Barth concludes ‘all abstract
local, regional and national interests in the political sphere’ must be
resisted. But the Protestant Church is always the Church of a locality, a city
or a political nation. Barth has defined the Church as ‘the commonalty of the
people in one place, region or country who are called apart... ’ That is to
say, they are called apart in contradistinction to other people. Separateness
and particularism are of the essence. Moreover, Barth al-
--pg214--
ways speaks of ‘all the cities of the realm’ meaning,
of course, not to go beyond the strictly national or political boundaries of
the national Churches. And granted that the Church is, as Barth says, in a
second thought, genuinely ecumenical, it does not follow that what obtains therein
should obtain in the State without change. For it is not a copy, but an analogy
that is being sought here.
11 From
the notion that God does show at times His anger and will certainly bring His
judgement, Barth infers that the State may, though only as a last resort, use
violence and conduct war to realize its goal of preserving itself. Barth’s reference
to God’s ‘anger’ betrays a Hebrew Jehovic conception of the deity and stands at
the farthest possible remove from Jesus who saw no reason for violence even
when his very life was the object of it. Without non-violence as an absolute principle
of all ethics, the Sermon on the Mount would be sheer hypocrisy. Barth is
careful to add not only the permissibility of a defensive war, but of an
aggressive one, as a preventive ‘against an external threat’, or ‘an armed
rising against a regime that is no longer worthy of… its task’, forgetfully
unaware that since the State was built on such unethical grounds as he had laid
down for it, it is futile to introduce distinctions of ‘worth’, or of ‘tasks’. On
Barth’s utilitarian basis, nothing can be built except the order of the jungle.
To subvert or to undermine one’s own or another’s State, to launch an aggressive
war against one‘s neighbors, can never be condemned on such a basis.
7 No
words can express better than his own Barth’s enjoyment of the air of
inscrutability his paradoxical pronouncements gave him (and his addiction to
this pleasure). For his farewell lecture in July, 1962, at the University of
Basel, Barth, then seventy four years of age, chose the topic ‘Thy Kingdom
come’. ‘Christians’, he said ‘should act not according to rigid principles, but
only according to what their faith tells them is God’s will in Jesus Christ’ (Time,
July 14, 1962). Lest anyone should mistake this as a clear statement of some
principle for action, he went on: ‘Christians
should be free to give an attenuated yes or no—according to circumstances—whenever
an absolute categorical position is expected of them, and a categorical yes or
no whenever no such stand is being asked for’. The Time reporter
understood correctly when, after quoting more of Barth’s own words, he
commented: ‘in other words, a Christian should feel free to say Yes today when
he said No yesterday.’
8 Part
of this introductory section and the discussion of Reinhold Niebuhr’s theory of
Christian society that follows were published earlier; see Faruqi, 1961.
9 Except
on the subject of French colonialism in Africa. Expressing the kind of paternalism,
now unfashionable to express publicly, Schweitzer writes: ‘There can be no
question with these peoples [the Africans] of real independence, but only
whether it is better for them to be delivered over to the mercies, tender or
otherwise, of rapacious native tyrants or to be governed by officials of
European states... Even the hitherto prevailing ‘imperialism’ can plead that it
has qualities of ethical value’ (1955,
--pg215--
pp. 147-8). In 1957 Schweitzer appealed to President
Eisenhower to intervene so as to prevent a United Nations debate on Algeria.
10 Niebuhr,
1955, p.260. This is, incidentally, the Nietzschean view which sees modern Western
man as a creature made sick, deprived of the ‘joy’ of life, by Christian
morality; or as an animal that Christian morality had tamed by means of making
him sick; ‘I call an animal, a species, an individual, corrupt, when it loses
its instincts, when it selects and prefers that which is detrimental to it...
Life itself is nothing more nor less than the instinct of growth, of permanence,
of accumulating forces, of power: where the will to power is lacking,
degradation sets in’ (The Antichrist, 3.6, trans. A.M. Ludovici).
11 The
words are those of ‘Tyrrell, the Catholic modernist‘, whom Niebuhr quotes with
full approbation (Niebuhr, 1935, p.91).
12 For
such a view of Islam see, e.g., Cragg 1959, pp.123-5, 131-6; also, Vatikiotis’
‘Recent Developments in Islam’ in Thayer (ed.) 1958, pp.170-1. A fuller
statement of this Western impatience with the societistically oriented and
community-based character of Islam is The Social Structure of Islam,
1957, by Reuben Levy. Its classic expression, however, is Wilfred Cantwell
Smith’s ‘Introduction: Islam and History’ in Smith 1958, ch.1, pp.3-40.
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--pg216--
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--pg217--
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