Evangelicals and Social Ethics
Harold O.J. Brown
For it is God who works in you both to will and to do of
his good pleasure.
— Philippians
2:13
Introduction: Faith and Life
Theology is traditionally divided into dogmatic and moral theology, or dogmatics and ethics; the Germans say Glaubenslehre and Sittenlehre: what to believe and how to behave. The concept of ethics involves knowing the good, but involves more than merely knowing the good; it involves the exercise of the will to choose, and then to carry out that which has been chosen. Ethical theory is worthless without ethical practice. Between the knowledge of facts, principles, and theories on the one hand and acts on the other come decisions: decisions must be made to choose a general approach or theory of ethics by which one will be guided, to settle upon the principles that are to be followed, and to determine the facts, or to sort out the relevant facts from the available evidence. We often refer to these distinctions as first principles, middle principles, and applications. After the determination of principles and the establishment of facts, the will is once again involved in the decision to apply one's professed principles to the facts. The challenge of ethics may be put succinctly: To Will and to Do.1 Ethics involves knowledge, will, and action. It involves human responsibility; all these imply the question of the freedom or bondage of man's will.
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"Faith," in "the Christian faith," involves much more than merely assent to a system of dogmas. It involves obedience. The old hymn, "Trust and obey..... for there's no other way," states it quite well. There have always been those who would reduce the Christian religion to a system of morality without dogmatic requirements, but these are at best liberals, not Christians. As J. Gresham Machen said in his classic little book, Christianity and Liberalism, this is another religion. But we dare not reduce Christianity to a set of articles of faith or dogma without obedience. Can Jesus be Saviour and yet not Lord? Those who think so need not trouble themselves about principles of Christian ethics.2 I am reminded of the criticism that I received from a Swiss teenager when discussing principles of Christian conduct. She said, "You say that because you are a Calvinist. We are Zwinglians and do not have to have any rules." That is a drastic misinterpretation of Zwingli, who believed very strongly that Christian principles should influence not only individuals and the church but all of society.3
Why "Evangelicals and Ethics"? — Who Are These "Evangelicals"?
Do evangelicals have a distinctive posture with regard to ethics? Should they have such? Let me answer this rhetorical question flatly from the outset: No, they do not; and yes, they should. Evangelical ethics should not be distinctive vis-à-vis biblical Christian ethics, but it should and must be distinctive vis-à-vis the world. Accepting for the moment the contention that evangelicals must be concerned about obedience to Christ, i.e., about conduct, is it our duty to be concerned about social ethics?
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Is there such a thing as ethical responsibility for the Christian community? Few would have trouble answering this question in the affirmative. But does Christian ethical responsibility also extend to attempting to shape the laws of the larger community of secular society? Again, not to leave the assembly too long in uncertainty, let me answer in a word: Yes.
Because the label "evangelical" has a history, and often a disputed history with variant readings, we must spend a bit of time in defining our terms. The name says that we want to be identified with the Gospel, with the Good News that salvation is a gracious gift, freely offered through faith in the finished work of Christ. In a fundamental sense, it is impossible to be a Christian without being evangelical (by which we do not mean without belonging to a party claiming the label "evangelical"). It is also impossible to be a consistent evangelical and be indifferent to ethics. Unfortunately, it is very easy to be an inconsistent evangelical.
Evangelicals are not indifferent to ethics in practice. Indeed, in the realm of individual behavior, many evangelicals are characterized by a zeal for personal morality bordering on legalism. But evangelicalism has been weak in developing a distinctive and coherent pattern of ethics, particularly in the social realm. As long as the surrounding culture was Catholic, Protestantism could take most of its ethical principles straight from the Catholic tradition. When evangelicalism developed as a movement within Protestantism, Protestant doctrine was turning liberal, but Protestant ethics were not. Evangelicalism did not need to show a distinctive profile in the area of ethics. It could simply try to be faithful to the Protestant heritage.
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The conflict between evangelicals and other contenders for the name "Christian" has been chiefly in the area of doctrine, not morals — at least until the last generation or so. We have fought our doctrinal battles, content to stand with the liberals in the moral area, for little divided us there, or so it seemed. In fact, since the Western world was nominally Christian, not only was it not necessary for evangelicals to "profile" themselves vis-à-vis other Christians, it was hardly necessary for them to do so vis-à-vis bourgeois society.
This historic fact has resulted in a stunted growth of evangelicalism in the area of ethics, a fact which is coming to trouble us more and more as the world system is ever more clearly revealing that it "lies in the power of the evil one" (1 John 5:19) and is bent on exterminating Christianity, or at least to reducing it to impotence.
A Brief Historical Reflection: How Did We Get Here?
The first to use the word "evangelical" to designate a specific party or theological persuasion within Christendom was Martin Luther. Luther wanted the Reformation which he set into motion to bring the good news of justification by faith apart from the works of the Law back to the people. He sought to liberate them from bondage to human traditions and regulations and from the necessity to have recourse to a host of human intermediaries — the clergy and the saints.
In the sixteenth century the "evangelical" movement was identified by contrast with Roman Catholicism. In dispute was the way of salvation. In terms of fundamental stands on ethics, there were no significant differences between Catholics on the one hand
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and Lutheran and Reformed Protestants on the other. As they turned away from expressing religious faith largely in terms of sacramental and devotional life, Luther, Calvin, and the other leaders of the Reformation made vigorous if not uniformly successful efforts to foster consistent Christian living. What was new was the shift of emphasis to action, but not the principles, for they were little different from those of traditional Catholicism. But Luther and his successors, despite their efforts to reform the moral life of the people, were so preoccupied with doctrinal controversy that their work produced more polemics than practical piety. After five centuries, something similar has happened in our own day. The need to make a stand on doctrinal issues has drawn too much attention away from ethical questions. Unfortunately in our day — unlike Luther in his — we now confront fundamental ethical errors in ethical principle as well as practice, which threaten to swamp our evangelical ark despite all we can do to insure doctrinal correctness on inerrancy and all related matters.
Following the Protestant Reformation, a century and a half of bitter theological polemics, culminating in the Thirty Years' War, gave impetus to "syncretistic" (ecumenical) impulses that sought to find a common ground in practical morality and to minimize dogmatic disputes. (In our own day, we are in danger of finding a "syncretistic" ecumenical unity by leaving practical morality out of the picture altogether. In fact, if we want ecumenism today, we must not only be prepared to coexist with doctrinal differences, not to say with gross doctrinal errors, but also with perverse deformations of biblical Christian ethics, such as the approval of abortion, of homosexual conduct, and of other practices that the church had hitherto condemned.)
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In the sixteenth century the Reformers, especially, but not only Calvin, operating on the assumption that society was Christian, used church and civil discipline in an effort to create a pattern of community life and responsibility consistent with Scripture. It foundered on the resistance of major sectors of the population, combined with the extravagant expectations of its advocates. Menno Simons and other "radical" Reformers tried a different approach, summoning individuals and families out of the compromising patterns of society and the established churches to a serious life of consistent discipleship, but their movement remained limited to small, often isolated clusters of followers. their efforts went largely unrecognized in the confessional conflicts between Roman Catholics, Lutherans, and Zwinglians.
In the nineteenth century, evangelicals on the Continent were no longer so concerned to set themselves off from Roman Catholics, but rather from liberal Protestants. At issue were questions of fundamental doctrines, particularly those of inspiration and authority — but not questions of ethics. On ethics there was still no disagreement. At about the same time, in England "evangelical" meant "opposed to the High Church" — to its traditionalism and sacramentalism, but not to its ethics.
The Twentieth Century Divide
In our own late twentieth century, the situation has changed in two respects. First, among evangelicals the concept of what makes one an "evangelical" has shifted away from right doctrine, but not over to ethics. Instead, without disregarding doctrine, it has concentrated on what we might call personal, existential commitment ("Have you accepted Christ as your personal Saviour?").
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This leads to a lessened interest in ethics in general and in social ethics in particular, especially because social ethics seems to have become the province of Protestant liberals. Second, evangelicals must come to terms with the fact that their ethics no longer reflect that of the general culture, but are in opposition to it. This means that we can no longer swim with the ethical tide but must swim against it.
Only in our own era, and especially since World War II, has there been such a marked difference about ethical principles between conservative evangelicals and the others who claim the Christian name.
Unfortunately, evangelicals have been slow to recognize the degree and the rapidity with which the ethical ground has shifted under their feet. There have been two great moral / ethical transformations in the United States since World War II: the civil rights movement and abortion on demand. In the civil rights movement, where evangelicals should have been active, they were slow, while the general society led the way to a positive transformation. Evangelicals let secular society lead them in the right direction. In the abortion situation, as well as with the infanticide and euthanasia that are coming in its wake, evangelicals have been, incredibly, even slower to react. Can it be because the media do not support them on this one? Initially, they let secular society lead them, this time in a dreadfully wrong direction. Prior to World War II, there would have been no doubt among Christians of any tradition that deliberate abortion is a homicidal act. In 1973, however, when the Supreme Court handed down its decision in Roe v. Wade, many evangelicals were so befuddled by their habitual need to oppose whatever the Roman Catholics seemed to support, as well as by
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the traditional tendency of American evangelicals to regard the political doctrine of a "wall of separation between church and state" as virtually divinely inspired, that they failed to denounce the decision (Roe v. Wade) and in a few cases actually applauded it. Finally, most evangelicals have taken a stand on this issue, but hardly in time to be considered as spiritual guides in a disoriented society.
Evangelicals are so used to having to articulate the doctrinal distinctives of their faith while not needing to distinguish their morals much from those of the better aspects of bourgeois society that they have been tardy and negligent in articulating and defending distinctive ethical standards consistent with their evangelical faith. Until World War II, evangelicals were in a position to accept general Christian ethics more or less as they found them, and limit their controversy to Glaubenslehre — dogmatic theology. As a consequence evangelicals as a group are encountering difficulties today in defining and defending ethical principles that are consistent with their doctrinal positions, which latter are, by contrast, comparatively better articulated, more fully defended, and generally consistent with one another. The sluggishness of so many evangelicals in the civil rights struggle and the long delays and compromises of many others on the prolife issue reflect a general evangelical insecurity in the ethical area. This is also making itself felt with regard to sexual ethics, where many of us, although still giving lip service to biblical standards of premarital abstinence, marital fidelity, and the condemnation of homosexual acts, are in some danger of being swept along with the current of social degeneracy.
Until recently, evangelicals stood out from among the mass of "generic" Christians by virtue of emphasizing faith over
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against works, ceremonies, and structures — in other words, by majoring in doctrine rather than in ethics. The great temptation is to delude ourselves into thinking that right doctrine, orthodoxy, could be enough, either that there is no need for "orthopraxy," or no need to worry about it, as it will come (super)naturally.
As far as their perception by the public is concerned, evangelicals today often want to be distinguished from "fundamentalists" and to have no truck with what is deemed "fundamentalistic legalism." This desire to avoid a "fundamentalistic" image — a desire made even more burning by the insistence of the media on calling the Ayatollah Khomeini and other fiends "fundamentalists" bear the brunt of moral conflicts in which they are too discreet or too delicate to engage themselves. In our twentieth century, then, the term "evangelical" identifies its wearers first theologically or doctrinally, with regard to soteriology and bibliology; secondarily, at least among evangelicals themselves, if not among the general public, it identifies them morally, suggesting a distinction from the legalism and separatistic attitudes of a certain kind of fundamentalism, not from Roman Catholicism or High Church sacramentalism. (Because the "evangelical" distinction is defined over against liberalism first and fundamentalism secondly, we hear of "Catholic evangelicals" — not a contradiction in terms — but never, or hardly ever, of "fundamentalist evangelicals," a term which ought to be a tautology but is widely regarded as an oxymoron.)
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Faith Instead of Morals?
Because of the absolute need to stress true doctrine, especially over against the pernicious errors of biblical fallibility and of universal salvation, which are destructive of both the life of faith and of the moral life, evangelicals still tend to identify themselves only, or at least primarily, in terms of doctrine. While this identification is fundamental (if that word be permitted us in the context of this conference!), it cannot be sufficient and exclusive. (One of the unintended side-effects of the evangelical / fundamentalist distinction has been a dangerous tendency for "evangelicals" to conform to the world, leaving it to the "fundamentalists" to conform to Scripture.) And additional embarrassment to evangelicals lies in the fact that, because ethics governs conduct, and conduct can also be regulated by laws, which are formulated as part of politics, an interest in ethics, both personal and social, brings one into contact with secular laws and with politics, both of which appear somewhat dangerous to the heavenward-bound evangelical.
It would be catastrophic for us as evangelicals to emphasize faith to the exclusion of morals, or doctrine to the exclusion of ethics. Unfortunately, this is what sometimes seems to have been happening. The only justification for even appearing to let evangelicalism mean so much doctrinally and so little ethically and morally is the fact that until just recently, the major assault of liberalism against historic Christian orthodoxy lay in the area of doctrine. Doctrine was attacked, so doctrine was defended — morals were not under attack, and morals were left undefended. Thus evangelicals, like the Catholics in the old joke, may be said to have faith but no morals, leaving it to the Unitarians to have
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morals with no faith. (Actually, most evangelicals have rather presentable morals, but often they cannot tell you exactly why.)
To sum up: doctrines were disputed, but ethics was not. Until after World War II, the ethical teachings of liberal Protestants as well as of the far less visible liberals among the Roman Catholics — did not differ in any essentials from those of the conservative evangelicals. Consequently, there appeared to be no need to defend the frontier in ethics as there was in theology in general, especially in the areas of the doctrines of inspiration, the deity of Christ, the Trinity, and the Atonement, as well as other important doctrines.
In fact, up until World War II Western Christian societies in general promoted the moral standards of Judeo-Christian ethics. When individuals were converted to a personal faith in Christ, they needed exhortation and instruction only in the area of doctrine that Christians believe. As far as practice — their ethics — was concerned, they needed only to be encouraged and helped to adhere to the standards of society as a whole, to which the whole culture was at least paying lip service.
La traison des clercs
From World War II onwards, at the latest, however, the general culture of the nominally Christian world has been turning ever more massively away from Judeo-Christian, biblical ethics, a disastrous development that has been approved if not pioneered by liberal clergy — la traison des clercs. We must beware of the temptation as biblical Protestants to follow them in this deflection from the right path. We will not long be able to hold biblical doctrines if we drift far from biblical ethics.
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The liberals' turning away has two aspects in the area of personal ethics. First, one begins to say, "Chacun à son goût," — loosely translated, "It depends on your taste." Of course, we all want to have good taste, but we don't take "taste" as seriously as we did God's Law. We no longer feel that the moral life is essentially one with the life of faith. In the area of social ethics, liberals do not say, "Chacun à son goût." Some social-ethical tasks are taken with the utmost seriousness. But the tendency is to want to take things out of the hands of the individual and of the faith community and to put them into the hands of the provider state and its welfare system. This second phenomenon affects evangelicals too — not that the tasks have been repudiated, but rather that the tasks that Christian ethics hitherto assigned to the individual Christian, the family, and the community of faith are usurped, or taken over by default, by the secular commonwealth. This sometimes happens because Christians fail to perform them; sometimes it is done in order to prevent Christians from performing them.
In the so-called socialist, i.e. Communist, countries, Christian communities are rigidly prohibited from engaging in works of social welfare, because the government knows that the social ministry of the church has been one of its attractions from the dawn of Christianity and is determined that the people shall be beholden to the State alone. In the Western democracies, the welfare state has accomplished much the same thing by substitution rather than suppression. Christian social ethics appear unnecessary when, "All good things come of thee, O State."
Liberals have been calling on the state to do many of the things that really are tasks committed by the Lord to the family or
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the church; evangelicals have been ignoring the expansion of the state or pretending to think that it will not affect them. Both practices allow the state to expand its scope at the expense of the church and of other intermediate communities, with the state becoming the defacto censor (in the Ciceronian sense), prescribing the principles of moral conduct to the public.
The Social Component of Christian Ethics
In the early days of Christianity, the social component of Christian ethics was exhibited almost exclusively within the Christian community, just as Paul seems to require in Galatians 5:10. After the Emperor Constantine, the church became more and more contiguous with society as a whole. What the Christian community held to be right, society did, and what society did, it did for Christian reasons. But society in those centuries was not yet the state. Now, with the rise of the pluralistic provider state, the situation has changed dramatically. The society in those centuries was not yet the state. Now, with the rise of the pluralistic provider state, the situation has changed dramatically. The state hampers, rather than promotes, Christian personal ethics, and supplants Christian social ethics. New converts as well as children growing up in believers' families are frequently launched into very stormy ethical seas with no other guidance than the residual moral teachings of the general culture. Under such circumstances, many Christians will sooner or later be swamped and go down, never to surface again. An evangelical proclamation that does not supply ethical standards and provide encouragement to behave ethically has fulfilled only part of its mission. This partial fulfillment can hardly endure by itself, unless the second component of the Great Commission is also performed.
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Trust and Obey
That conduct is a vital concern for Christians is evident from the teachings of Jesus himself, which contain more morality than dogma, at least at first reading. The Sermon on the Mount illustrates this amply. This dual emphasis is very evident in the Great Commission of Matthew 28, which gives us our marching orders as evangelicals. Jesus' parting charge to his disciples makes the unity between faith and morals, between doctrine and ethics quite apparent: "Make disciples of all the nations . . . teaching them to observe all that I commanded you, and lo, I am with you always . . ." (verses 19-20). If verse 20 is an essential part of the Great Commission — and it is — then a substantial part of the evangelical community must be out of commission, because while we are eager to make disciples, we are slow to teach them to observe. It is to this problem of an incomplete fulfillment of the Great Commission that we address ourselves today.
Success and Shortsightedness
Why have modern evangelicals been sluggish in developing and implementing a consistent program of Christian social ethics? Part of the answer lies in the fact that the culture out of which the evangelical movements grew had been Christianized for seven hundred to one thousand years. In the United States, we have been occupied with individual conversion, mass evangelism, church growth, and the charismatic renewal, all of which have been more or less successful; and we have failed to see what is happening to the culture around us. In our century, the falling away of individuals has been noted and counteracted by vigorous evangelistic and discipleship efforts. The full impact of the falling away of whole
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cultures has not yet been recognized, much less effectively resisted. A culture can become Christian without taking the people with it. This has happened often enough in the past. But a culture may cease to be Christian and effectively turn pagan for quite a while before the Christians to whom the culture once belonged notice what is happening and begin to react to it.
Early Patterns
The first Christians, who lived in a hedonistic, jaded, cynical, pagan culture, were very clearly aware of the fact that their distinctive faith called for distinctive conduct, for distinctive ethics in the individual and in the social realm. It was necessary for pastors and teachers to tell new converts and their children how to live as followers of Christ, for the culture certainly would not tell them. The early history of the church shows that the first generations of Christians heard and heeded the moral side of Jesus' message, the call to repentance and a changed way of life, just as they heard the call to faith in him as Lord and Saviour. Thus the church of the second and third centuries — centuries of persecution, as we all know — was characterized by a great interest in the moral quality of the Christian life. To be redeemed means to be obligated to obey "the law of Christ."4
The early Christians did not sense a conflict between obedience of this kind and the freedom for which Christ has set us free (Galatians 5:1). The concern to keep ethics central is already to be found in the New Testament itself. We are familiar with the example of the Epistle of James, which Luther, in his zeal for justification by faith alone, lampooned as a "right strawy epistle."5 Luther's hatred for everything smacking of works righteousness
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led him to a number of oversimplifications and exaggerations, such as the contention of Nicholas von Amsdorf that good works are injurious to salvation, rejected by orthodox Lutheranism in the Formula of Concord.6
An Immediate Post-Apostolic Decline?
Ethical transformation and consistent Christian living were such a concern of Christians in the second and third centuries that the Apostolic Fathers of that period are accused of having re-Judaized Paul's Gospel of salvation by faith and replaced it with legalism. Paul's Gospel, about which he expressed concern in Galatians 1, was supposedly adulterated and lost almost immediately. This is a misconception. Would it not have been strange indeed if those closest in time to Jesus and the Apostles had so promptly reverted to Pharisaical legalism? It is important to recognize that the early Christians found no incompatibility between justification by faith on the one hand and consistent obedience on the other.
The idea that the church almost immediately forgot the true meaning of the Gospel, promoted by Ferdinand Christian Baur (1792-1860), was based on the concept that Christian faith, like all movements of the human spirit, had to follow the principles of the historical dialectic.7 It is not necessary to describe this trend here, other than to say that if it were correct, it would mean that true Christianity was very short-lived indeed, having come into existence with Paul only to be made obsolete by the resurgence of legalistic moralism during the next generations of disciples. If Baur were right, there would be no such thing as a true continuity of the Christian faith through the ages. Instead of saying, "Plus
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que ça change, plus que c'est la même chose," we would have to say, "Plus que ça change, plus que ce n'est plus" — the more it changes, the more it is no more.
Speculative theories such as the one that we are discussing foster the erosion of the conviction that there is anything that is identifiably and reliably Christian doctrine. Where that erroneous attitude prevails, it is self-evident that we will not have authoritative doctrinal teachings. What may be less self-evident is the fact that because doctrine and ethics do go together, if we ever reach the point of really losing ethics, a fatal loss of doctrine will not be far behind. Indeed, this contention is being illustrated by what is going on in much of evangelicalism today. An increasing softness in the realm of ethical standards, especially sexual morals, is being accompanied by a growing tendency towards universal salvation.
We can be sure that Baur's attempt to force the story of the Christian faith into the procrustean bed of Hegel's historical dialectic does not do justice to the fullness of Paul's vision of faith. For Paul faith is not a substitute for good works, but the only motivation actually capable of producing God-pleasing works. Paul excluded neither active obedience nor good works from the life of faith. Although he is the great preacher of justification "by faith alone, apart from works of the Law" (Romans 3:28), Paul devotes extensive passages to ethical instruction: "For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision means anything, but faith working through love" (Galatians 5:6). Paul spends a fair amount of time telling us what "faith working" implies in several
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specific areas of ethics. It is true that it is James, not Paul, who warns us that faith without works is dead (James 2:26), but Paul would have said that faith that does no works is not faith at all. Is this so different? 1 Corinthians offers several explicit examples of Paul's deep concern that the life and practice of Christians conform to their profession of faith: in effect, Paul calls upon Christians to "Trust and obey." Obedience alone would be insufficient, but faith without obedience would not be faith.
The Retreat from Praxis
The interest of the early church in ethics was not contrary to Paul's interest or example. It was typical not only of the second-and third-century church but also of every great epoch of the life of the church until — but unfortunately not including — our own. The great revivals of living faith that have shaken the church out of lethargy from time to time in the course of her long history have — until the present century — always been accompanied by energetic efforts towards a reformation of morals. The Cluniac Reform of the tenth century, the rise of the mendicant orders in the thirteenth, the Protestant Reformation, Pietism and the Wesleyan movement — all were accompanied by a significant resurgence of interest in the Christian life, and all produced major treatments of ethics. Our own century is deficient. We look at the highly-publicized moral lapses of a few of our celebrated Christian media personalities, and say, "How could this happen?"
There are many factors that contribute, and certainly the chief among them is the fact that even regenerate men and women have a sin-weakened nature that remains susceptible to temptation. In addition to this deeply personal weakness which menaces
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all who seek to live a godly life, there is a structural vulnerability. For a generation evangelical Christians have been forgetting that spiritual renewal without ethical reformation cannot be lasting. It is no more viable than ethical reformation without spiritual renewal. Such ethical reformation necessarily involves the reformulation of ancient ethical principles in contemporary idiom.
It was not until our own century that major movements of spiritual revival have concentrated so exclusively on "soul-winning" to the neglect of the moral reformation of individuals and the transformation of society. Twentieth-century revivalism is the first great revival movement that has failed to generate a true moral reformation.
In the 1950's and 1960's it was possible to assume that when an individual experienced conversion or spiritual renewal, it did not place him in conflict with the ethics of society and of the general culture. Evangelical Protestantism, as both Karl Barth and Francis Schaeffer charged, strongly tends to individualism. Its moral challenge was directed specifically towards the area of personal morality, and simply firmed up the existing professed ideals of bourgeois culture. It has tended to view social problems as the result of individual failings, to be dealt with by individual reform and voluntary assistance. It has always assumed that transformed individuals will transform society. I remember hearing this message quite explicitly at Billy Graham crusades in which I participated. This attitude was never entirely adequate, because it paid no attention to the intermediate steps and structures necessary to permit personal changes to change society. It has become increasingly inadequate as two things have happened: first, the transformation of social structures has created social problems
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that go beyond the ability of individuals to correct; second, the transformation of bourgeois culture has put evangelical personal ethics into conflict with the general culture instead of in alliance with it. At the end of the twentieth century, we are paying a high price for this deficiency.
Ethics Social and Political
Must Christians work to change social conditions and to renew society? May or must Christians work through the political process to achieve Christian ends even when the political structure is both formally secularistic and practically pluralistic? I answer, yes, on the grounds that Christ's moral demands reach out to include society as well as the individual, and that when an individual has the legal right and responsibility to help society structure itself, he has the Christian duty to help it to do so in line with the demands of Christ.
There is no way to deny that the call to follow Christ includes a call to a distinctive kind of life. The Christian life involves a personal relationship with Christ, and consequently it must transform the individual into conformity with Christ (Romans 12:2, 1 Corinthians 11:1, Ephesians 5:1, 1 John 3:2). But it is not the individual alone who is addressed by the demands of Christ: they flow over naturally into the community of faith, and — or so I believe — almost as naturally will have an impact on the surrounding society as well. Ernst Troeltsch states it well: "The message of Jesus also deals with the formation of the community based on the hope of the Kingdom and the preparation for its coming in Jesus himself . . . His fundamental moral demand is the sanctification of the individual in all his moral activity for the sake of God . . . The
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command to love one another is at least bound to influence a small and intimate community."8 In other words, there is no way for Christians to be a community at all unless their community is shaped by Christ's fundamental demands. Even this limited vision, i.e., the idea that there has to be a practical social ethic for the little Christian community, goes beyond some of the tacit assumptions of individualistic Protestant pietism. Where the Christian community expands and starts to interact on various levels with the general society, the Christian ethic must start influencing society, even if only as a warning voice, as otherwise society inevitably starts to influence it.
As long as the Christian community was small and ostracized, it made no sense for it to try to effect changes in the standards of the pagan culture that surrounded it. With the conversion of the Emperor Constantine, however, that changed. Christian convictions gained acceptance. A succession of Christian emperors wrote many aspects of biblical law into the civil code. To those radicals who hold that any Christian entanglement with the state involves capitulation to the world, this would be highly objectionable. But what is an emperor to do if he is converted to Christ? Abdicate because he is a Christian, or reign as a Christian? Can a senator who is converted do less?
Even before this happened, Christian attitudes began to change general behavior. According to historian William Lecky, from the moment Christianity became a moral force in the ancient world, abortion declined and finally all but disappeared before civil legislation was enacted against it.9
Christian ethics will change not only the Christian community but society at large. Nevertheless, it is evident that the spread
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of Christianity did not change everything. The institution of slavery endured for centuries. Even though it was gradually abolished in Christian Europe, Christian Europeans kept slaves and fostered slavery in their overseas dominions. Similar examples can be multiplied.10
It is self-evident that the Christian doctrine of the Kingdom of God and the Christian love ethic will transform not merely the personal life-style of individual Christians but must also have an effect on the pattern of behavior of the Christian community. What is less self-evident is what should happen when Christianity begins to affect those in power in what was a previously secular, non-Christian society. The Emperor Constantine did not significantly change the social policies of the Empire after his conversion, but several of his successors introduced reforms based on Christian principles, notably Justinian I and Leo III. Nothing could be more natural than for an emperor to use his power to legislate according to his best judgment and convictions, to pattern his legislation on his Christian beliefs about justice. Although it is never possible for a ruler, even a complete autocrat, totally to ignore the wishes of the people, the autocrat does not have to balance his own convictions with a host of pluralistic ideas. But what are Christians to do when no one Christian is the autokrator with the power to change things, but rather many individual Christians would have to enter the political arena in order to affect the ethics of society? Shall they dare less than Constantine?
The Impasse of Pluralism
In this democracy we are required to set our own legal standards. There is no emperor to whom we could leave the task.
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Our society is more Christian than anything else, but it is not Christian enough to permit us easily to enact Christian social ethics into law. We confront the impasse of what Johann Millendorfer calls value pluralism (Wertpluralismus). If evangelical Christians are to have any impact for the transformation of this society, in which they constitute one of the largest and most highly motivated minorities, but in which their influence is largely felt by default, it will be necessary to kill the sacred cow of pluralism.
Tolerance is an ideal which evangelical Christians can endorse. It requires respect for those who hold differing convictions. "Pluralism" is different. It used to be a descriptive term that merely indicated that many different convictions coexisted within a given social structure: Now it has come to mean value pluralism, namely, that all convictions about values are of equal validity, which says in effect that no convictions about values have any validity. In other words, there is no agreement about the nature of the good life.11 When Constantine came to power, there was no moral consensus — Christians may have made up only a tenth of the population — but when there is an emperor, he alone constitutes a consensus. In the early days of the American republic, there was no emperor, but there was a moral consensus. Now we are in the situation where there is neither an emperor nor a consensus, and it is likely that we cannot get along indefinitely without both.
From Euphoria to Aporia
The Reagan years, just ended, created a sense of euphoria: "It's morning in America!" The euphoria was shared by evangelicals, who responded to Reagan's optimism even though their analysts — such as the late Francis Schaeffer, and more recently,
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Charles Colson — kept on warning that the fundamental problems were still growing. After Reagan, it is becoming more and more apparent that instead of euphoria our society is in a condition of aporia (bafflement, impasse) — an awareness of incompatible views: there seems to be no practicable way out of our social, economic, and political predicaments. We cannot agree on the solution. We cannot even agree on the diagnosis.
Are we in that situation gloomily predicted by Oswald Spengler in The Decline of the West? Are his predictions at the point of coming true? "This, then is the conclusion of the city's history . . . it sacrifices first this blood and soul of its creators to the needs of its majestic evolution . . . and so, doomed, moves on to final self-destruction."12 Is this to be the destiny of our "Christian" civilization? Spengler predicted a time in which moral discourse will be impossible, and instead of arguing moral questions, people will debate questions of alcohol and diet. (He predicted this in 1918. In 1989 we have a committed, evangelical Surgeon General who rages about smoking, grumbles about red meat and alcohol, and regularly warns us about cholesterol but preserves a discreet diffidence about his personal "pro-life bias" when it comes to abortion, finding "no evidence" that it is harmful to the mothers who have had the abortion.)13
Johann Millendorfer reports a conversation with a futurologist of the Club of Rome, who told of his fears that it will not be possible to change the course of development, because there is no type of human being capable of doing it. He asked: "Is it still possible to hope?" Millendorfer answers with an emphatic "Ja," provided that we make the following statement about the type of human that we need: "The type of man that we need in order to
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change this development must be free of the system-immanent compulsions of society. In other words, fame, power and wealth may not mean very much to him. Instead, this type of human has to assume responsibility for this earth and above all for the brother who lives on it, and generate his own activity from this responsibility. This polarity is found in the redeemed man of the Gospels, now as before, the valid pattern of a fulfilled life. Also, as long as there are real Christians, this world will constantly renew itself. As long as the salt of the earth has not lost its savor, this world will not be ruined."14 As Millendorfer commented in a lecture in Vienna at Easter last year, "The future will be Christian, or it will not take place."
We need to have such confidence, and to express it. Only Christian, evangelical action on a broad scale can rescue our society from its plunge into self-destruction. But Christian action presupposes Christian ethics, to will and to do.
To effect such a rescue, it will be necessary to overcome a century of neglect among evangelicals as well as the massed obstacles of pluralism and secularism in our society as a whole. We must squarely face the phenomenon of a double degeneration, degeneration of Christianity and degeneration of society. Knowing, as Paul says, "the terror of the Lord," we must remind ourselves that for Christ's followers, this "terror" should produce obedience, not the paralysis of fear. We must lose our dread of legalism to the extent that we are willing to make obedience to the law of Christ an altogether natural part of our message.
Our fulfillment of the Great Commission must include "teaching them to observe all things." We must get over the idea that the Law of God and Word of God are something only for converted Christians of evangelical persuasion: Paul himself advised Timothy that "the Law is not made for a righteous man ... but for the ungodly" (1 Tim. 1:9). And believing that the Law is good, we must "persuade men." Our task is to proclaim "the whole counsel of God," and a major part of that counsel involves the proclamation of ethical standards for the people, as well as for the church. Whether many will listen, whether many will be persuaded, is their problem. Whether we try is ours.
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1. Jacques Ellul, To Will and to Do (Philadelphia: United Church Press, 1969)
2. The personal and social ethics of those who repudiate "Lordship salvation" may be exemplary, by a happy inconsistency.
3. See Robert C. Walton, Zwingli's Theocracy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1967) pp. 103-138.
4. This theme is prominent in the Apostolic Fathers, especially, but not only, I Clement, Barnabas, Polycarp. See H. Dermont McDonald, The Atonement of the Death of Christ (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1985), pp. 115-124.
5. Martin Luther, Werke, Weimarer Ausgabe, DB (Deutsche Bibel), VI, 10.
6. Formula of Concord, Art.IV, Negative, ii.
7. This thesis is found throughout F.C. Bauer's main works, Paulus (1854) and Das Christentum und die christliche Kirche der ersten drei Jahrhunderte (1853).
8. Ernest Troeltsch, The Social Teachings of the Christian Churches, tr. Olive Wyon (New York: Harper, 1960) Vol. II,pp.51,52,62.
9. William E.H. Lecky, A History of Western Morals (New York: Braziller, 1955), pp.20-24.
10. One curious practice that long survived the establishment of Christianity is that of castration. Jesus takes note of the practice of castrating boys in order to create a class of eunuchs, without explicitly condemning it (Matthew 19:12). The Old Testament forbids eunuchs from serving as priests (Leviticus 21:20), a rule that was taken over by the
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Christian church and which prevented the celebrated theologians Origen and Peter Abelard from being ordained as priests. Nevertheless, the practice of castration, so common in the Near East, was practiced in the Byzantine Empire during its entire history without effective opposition by the church.
11. Christoph Gaspari and hans (Johann) Millendorfer, Konturen einer Wende. Straegien für die Zukunft (Graz, Vienna, Cologne: Styria, 1978) pp.340-343.
12. Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West, 2 vol. (New York: Knopf, 1926, 1928), Vol. II, p. 107.
13. Documentation can be obtained from the major media almost weekly, e.g., TIME, April 25, 1989.
14. Christoph Gaspari and Hans (Johann) Millendorfer, Konturen einer Wende. Straegien für die Zukunft (Graz, Vienna, Cologne: Styria, 1978) pp.343-344.
