Millions of people do not know God and spurn his gracious offer of salvation. Having the power of choice they cannot be coerced into God’s kingdom, and so God’s salvation ordinances do not apply to them. But God’s creation ordinances apply to all men, saved and unsaved alike. These ordinances, which include both physical and moral laws, were laid down for the good of all men and nations, and they are binding on all men regardless of their religious convictions. For God’s creation ordinances to be effective in a society the consent of the majority is required; the Christian must continually try to persuade others, Christian and non-Christian alike, to embrace these ordinances.
Among the opponents of God’s creation ordinances in our day we would include:
1. Those who wish to legitimate homosexual conduct and homosexual “marriage” on the grounds that these are matters to be decided by the persons involved, not the community at large.
2. Those who desire to legalize prostitution on the grounds that it cannot be stamped out, that it is not a matter for community prohibition, and that state control would eliminate exploitative middlemen—the “pimps” and “madams”—and Mafia involvement.
3. Those who hold that there should be no limits on freedom of speech, and specifically that pornography, whether in books, magazines, and films or on radio and TV, should not be forbidden.
4. Those who advocate abortion on demand, available to any woman who wants it.
For the Christian, what is the real issue in this moral warfare? It is suggested by a recent legislative tangle in New York State. There, abortions can be performed up to the twenty-fourth week of pregnancy. When the legislature passed a bill shortening this time, Governor Rockefeller vetoed it. The governor gave as explanation his belief that nobody has a right to impose his personal moral values on anyone else.
This statement cuts to the heart of God’s general creation ordinances. Obviously no man or nation can carry out Rockefeller’s reasoning to its full implications. That would mean that everyone would be free to do whatever he pleased. There could be no norms for all people and, of course, no penalties for violations of law, for there would be no laws to violate. As in the time of the judges in the Old Testament, every man would do what was right in his own eyes. This condition is anarchy.
Since anarchy is self-defeating for any community, there must be some prohibitions, some acts that are forbidden; current examples are euthanasia and traffic in narcotics. And just as surely there must be penalties assessed against those who violate the community prohibitions. This then leads to the question, What moral principles shall determine community standards and how far shall these standards reach into the lives of the citizens? Between the unrestricted freedom that is anarchy and the absence of freedom that is totalitarianism there must be a reasonable halfway place.
Laws will tend either to harmonize with the creation ordinances or to be opposed to them. Strangely, there are non-Christian communities whose rules on some matters are more in accord with biblical principles than are those of theoretically Christian nations or nations with Christian traditions. For example, Scotty Reston of the New York Times came home from China talking about the Chinese puritan ethic; in many ways moral sanctions of Red China are closer to the biblical ideal than are those of Europe or America.
Every society has its ethical standards, and as Christian citizens we should do everything we can to help make biblical standards normative in our society. And of course the concerns of Christian social ethics go beyond those we mentioned earlier to take in the totality of life—such areas as economics, politics, and relations between ethnic groups, between the sexes, and between labor and management.
Has not the time come for evangelicals to band together, not to pass resolutions or bemoan the drift, but to use their influence and their votes to persuade the people and the legislative assemblies to aim for a society that follows the biblical pattern? Maybe we need a Christian political party to express and work for the fulfillment of God’s creation ordinances.
In the few months remaining before our national election, let us take pains to try to judge the candidates for public office on how biblical their views are on such matters as abortion, pornography, homosexuality, drugs, and prostitution, as well as on the larger issues of domestic and foreign policy. Thoughtful use of the franchise is one good way to be salt in the earth, and a light that shines in dark places.
Anglican Assist To Gamblers
Archbishop William Temple used to declare that in its glorification of mere chance, gambling challenges that view of God and the universe which the Church exists to maintain and uphold. Speaking for the Church of England today, however, are very different voices. In 1970 the Right Reverend Ian Ramsey, bishop of Durham and noted theologian, chaired a London meeting to launch a campaign by small gambling clubs to stay alive. Dr. Ramsey (who will be a strong contender for Canterbury when Archbishop Michael Ramsey retires) said he did this because he thought that entertainment clubs in his industrial diocese were useful social amenities, and that many of them would have to close if their gambling licenses were withdrawn by the government.
More recently, a top Church of England lay official received the badge of one of the more unusual British trade unions, the Union of Bookmakers’ Employees (TUBE). Tom Chapman, 58, who for eleven years has been industrial liaison officer to the Church’s Board for Social Responsibility, was given the badge as a memento of his services in helping to found TUBE, whose members operate on racing tracks and gambling spots throughout the British Isles. The church information office was at pains to stress that Chapman was not a member of TUBE.
There are 7,000 bookmakers’ offices in Britain, and gambling, according to Chapman, is such a specialized industry that a new union seemed the best way of organizing the employees. He added that he saw nothing incompatible with the faith in churchmen’s efforts to organize a union of bookies’ clerks, managers, settlers, board men, and all the others who take bets at the race course or in street parlors, fix the odds, and pay out winnings. “On the contrary,” he said at his headquarters in Church House, Westminster, “it is our duty to help all who seek our assistance—even if they are atheists.”
With the latter sentiment there can be little disagreement, though to carry it to its logical conclusion would throw up some staggering implications (“whatever your thing is, let the church help you do it”). But there is little that is laudable and less that is Christian about actively encouraging people to do together what they ought not to be doing at all. For the Church to establish lines of communication is important, but what if it has nothing to communicate?
The Right To Be Guilty
In her provocative essay On Violence, Hannah Arendt sharply criticizes the widespread modern tendency to excuse the perpetrator of a crime and place the guilt on society as a whole. This pattern of thinking has some very serious consequences, both for the individual and for society. If the criminal is not considered guilty, then of course he cannot justly be punished; nevertheless, since his behavior is intolerable for society as a whole, he must be “treated” (C. S. Lewis also discusses this trend in The Abolition of Man).
On the secular level, this is in effect a denial of the individual’s right to be himself: instead of being a person who has made a wrong decision and who must take the consequences, he is seen as an object that as a result of circumstances has behaved in an undesirable way; the circumstances must be carefully altered by experts so that in the future the object will perform better.
On the spiritual level, the implications of the “sickness-not-guilt” pattern of thought are equally devastating. If a person is led to think he is not guilty, no matter what he does, then he will have no reason to seek forgiveness and redemption. However, since real misdeeds often do produce strong guilt feelings, he may find it necessary to seek “professional help” so that he can live with what an earlier day called a guilty conscience. The goal of all this is neither redemption nor sanctification but simply adjustment.
By contrast, the Bible teaches that an individual can be and is objectively guilty. It teaches also that God has provided a real cleansing in the objective redemptive work of Christ, which took place once for all, but which must be personally appropriated by the guilty individual—i.e., by every human being—through a commitment of faith.
When the harm an individual does to the social fabric is considered to be not his fault but that of society, then if individuals persist in committing anti-social acts, the conclusion is that society must be better controlled. In effect, society is punished when the individual is not.
The consequences, then, of denying the fact of personal guilt are devastating for both the individual and society. When people are persuaded to deny their own responsibility for their actions, they compromise their personhood. Indeed, society can and frequently does create situations in which the individual’s responsibility is diminished if not actually abolished. But this is nothing to take comfort in; it is a disgrace to society and it involves a cruel mutilation of the individual.
The Law of God, which speaks so imperatively to the individual as a responsible person, making him aware of his sin and guilt, is an uncomfortable schoolmaster. But only when an individual accepts his responsibility—his obligation to give an account of himself—can he claim to be a person and not simply a machine or animal.
Amin And The Asians
President Amin of Uganda has served notice of expulsion on his country’s 55,000 Asians who chose in 1962 to remain British. The expulsion initially covered also some 25,000 Asians who at that time had opted for Ugandan citizenship, but these have now been given a somewhat ambivalent reprieve that has done nothing to lessen their uneasiness about the future.
Asian communities abroad tend to be cliquish—a tendency not unknown among exiled Americans. Perhaps they fail to give that degree of moral support expected particularly by newly independent nations. Ugandan Asians have been industrious and reportedly control close to 90 per cent of the country’s commerce. Amin has described them as “economic saboteurs,” but this charge has been so little substantiated that it seems to imply no more than would be true of Asians in Tahiti and Fiji, whose commercial instinct (and consequent prosperity) is more highly developed than that of the more easygoing indigenous peoples.
Amin has been called a racist by President Julius K. Nyerere of neighboring Tanzania. While this suggests a certain disingenuousness on the part of one constitutionally linked with the regime of Zanzibar, it does reflect also a growing realization of non-white discrimination—a phenomenon worthy of the attention of the World Council of Churches’ much publicized Program to Combat Racism. The 1969 Central Committee meeting in Canterbury regarded white racism as “the most dangerous form”; the 1971 Addis Ababa meeting gave the impression that it was almost the only form.
The Ugandan and other African situations might well remind the WCC of a pre-Canterbury consultation on the subject, held under its auspices in London. An official statement at that time said, inter alia,
The patterns of racism have a universality that is frightening.… Racist ideologies and propaganda are developed and disseminated as tools in economic, political and military struggles for power. Once developed they have a life of their own, finding a place in the traditions and culture of a people, unless stringent and continuous effort is made to exorcise them.
There are indications that the unpredictable Amin is not impervious to foreign reaction akin to the kind of pressures long concentrated on South Africa, Rhodesia, and Portugal. Black peoples are rightly sensitive about injustice there. It would in itself be tragic discrimination, however, if WCC spokesmen accounted white mistreatment of blacks more blameworthy than Uganda’s repression of its lighter-skinned residents.
Churches In The Quiet Zone
Hardly anyone has noticed, but the exodus of North American churches from city to suburb has separated them from the marketplace, with serious consequences. Much has been said about the effects of churches’ retreat from the inner city during the past generation but little about how their new environment differs from the old. It used to be that churches rubbed elbows with stores and offices in the business districts of our cities and towns. But when they moved out, most of them settled in residential areas. Many prided themselves on having found space away from the hubbub.
Abandoning the inner city was bad enough; choosing residential over commercial areas made it worse. We will be many years outliving this mistake. The thousands of shopping centers built since World War II have become focal points in our culture; most people spend more time in shopping centers than in any other one place besides their home and places of work. But only a handful of churches have followed the trend. Most stay out of the pedestrian’s way, sitting off by themselves and not bothering anyone. Surely this has to be considered when we discuss the “irrelevance” of today’s churches.
Land is undeniably a lot cheaper in land zoned for single-family dwellings than in commercial areas. But this is cheap economy, spiritually and materially. The churches that are going to prosper both ways are likely to be those that have taken up residence where the action is.
China Vs. Bangladesh
It is ironic that mainland China’s first veto in the United Nations should be used to keep out the newly independent nation of Bangladesh. One should think that a government that for so long considered itself—not without reason—unfairly deprived of international recognition would be among the leaders in backing Bangladesh.
But from one angle it’s probably just as well. China’s reputation as self-appointed spokesman for the “Third World” will doubtless suffer more than will Bangladesh for being excluded from the U.N. for a while.
Olympic Politics
The decision not to allow Rhodesia to participate in the Olympics after all is a good example of the problems that duplicity creates. A year ago, the African nations consented to Rhodesian participation if the de facto independent nation would enter as the British colony of Southern Rhodesia and use the British flag and anthem. Apparently they never expected Rhodesia to agree to these conditions. But with a flippant attitude Rhodesia did agree to the duplicity of pretending not to be independent; hence the crisis, and its resolution on some technicalities at the expense of certain Rhodesian athletes, black and white.
If the African nations had made it clear from the first that they did not think the Rhodesian national committee was genuinely seeking the best athletes regardless of race, as the Olympic code requires, or if the Rhodesians had refused to pretend they were what they were not, the crisis would not have occurred. There’s a lesson here on telling the truth.
Following Like Sheep?
Several years ago Christian sociologist Peter Berger charged churches of every stripe, from fundamentalist to ultra-liberal, with responding to social questions just as one would expect of any secular groups of the same socio-economic composition. Now two secular social analysts and “futurologists,” Herman Kahn and B. Bruce-Briggs, have come up with a humiliating but probably apt characterization of contemporary religious leaders that shows many are anything but prophets:
Although many of the currently liberal, “concerned clergy are deeply sincere in their beliefs, many other clergy, perhaps more, seem to be espousing liberal social causes because it is presently fashionable to do so.… Ecclesiastical and theological fashions in the last decade—“the death of God,” “situation ethics,” “reparations”—have come and gone so rapidly that many of their supporters must be highly faddish. Should the tone of the times become more conservative and more traditional, many of the clergy would follow. If the dominant tone should change, and if the leadership reflect or encourage this change, many of the lower clergy, who embrace new ideas in order to ingratiate themselves with their ecclesiastical superiors, would change [Things to Come, Macmillan, 1972, p. 100].
With the Jesus revolution and such projects as Explo ’72 and Key 73 making news—and, in some cases, money—we can expect to see, according to the analysis of Kahn and Bruce-Briggs, a new follow-the-leader effect. A lot of free-floating churchmen will suddenly rediscover an interest in evangelism, witnessing, personal Christian discipline, and other things until recently consigned to the broom closet as out-of-date.
Whenever an individual or an organization is genuinely awakened to a zeal for the things of the Spirit, we rejoice. But we should be careful in this, as in the currently reigning social activism, not to mistake faddism for deep and true commitment. Let us call for—and above all try to exemplify in our own words and deeds—a truly biblical renewal of life and doctrine that goes far beyond any mere conformism.
Spiritual Blessings
“Pie in the sky,” scoff the critics of evangelical religion. And Paul himself seems to give them ammunition with his message to Gentile converts: “God … has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places” (Eph. 1:3). What about physical blessings in the here and now?
The New Testament writers were not unaware of the value of material blessings. When Jesus was telling his followers not to be concerned about food, drink, and clothing, he added, “Your heavenly Father knows that you need them all.… All these things shall be yours as well” (Matt. 6:31–33). But for the late first-century pagan world, there was a profound significance to the “spiritual blessing in the heavenly places”—and there is likewise deep significance for our late twentieth-century pagan world.
The people of Paul’s day, like the people of ours, eagerly sought material possessions and pleasures. But they were obsessed with the knowledge of the brevity and insecurity of this mortal life and had very little confidence in any other. Hence the bleak note of pessimism that pervades so much of pagan literature, even when it praises the joys of life or extols ideals such as beauty and truth. Catullus wrote to his beloved Lesbia, “There is one perpetual night that we must sleep.” Sophisticated moderns often think of first-century man as naïve and credulous, ready to leap at any doctrine, however absurd, that offered him hope. Actually, although the mystery religions and other cults that claimed to offer some sort of salvation were prevalent, most ancients were as little convinced of their reliability as Emperor Vespasian was of the official dogma that he would become divine at death—his ironic dying words were: “It seems I am becoming a God.” First-century men and women were morbidly aware that material blessings could be taken from them and that they themselves could be snatched away from their possessions by death.
Thus when Paul spoke to converts from paganism of “spiritual blessings,” he was not saying, “You haven’t achieved material blessings? Well, never mind: there’ll be pie in the sky, bye and bye.” He was talking of something securer and more reliable: “God has blessed you with every spiritual blessing.” It is not a vague hope for the future; the blessings have been achieved in the finished work of Christ. They are laid up for believers as “a glorious inheritance in the saints” (1:18). Thieves cannot steal this inheritance, the fisc cannot impound it, the beneficiary cannot die before he inherits it, as with an earthly legacy. And lest this seem to be mere wishful thinking, like the deification of the emperor, Paul reminded his readers that Jesus Christ, who was almost their contemporary, was raised from the dead to be—as he says in another context—“the first fruits of them that sleep” (1 Cor. 15:20). Without this concrete tie-in to the real world of space, time, and history, the Gospel would have offered no stronger comfort than a Gnostic myth. Very few would have become martyrs for it.
In a practical-minded, hard-hitting world, evangelicals are often embarrassed by the intangibility of “spiritual blessings.” But this very intangibility, this untouchability, is a source of confidence, as long as the reality of the blessings is founded upon the real death and real resurrection of Christ in our own terrestrial history. The world can cheat us, in the long run it always cheats us—of everything it promises. But Paul proclaims:
I am sure that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord [Rom. 8:38, 39].
