The Vocation of Witness
I am obliged to bear witness because I hold, as it were, a particle
of light, and to keep it to myself would be equivalent to extinguishing
it.
— Gabriel Marcel
We know something important about the Christian Church when we know that it is clearly intended to be a company. Such an understanding helps mightily in the recovery of the mood of urgency. The true inwardness of the Church is reflected, not in the Temple, which Christ said could be destroyed without loss, and not in the synagogue, which He seems to have abandoned with deliberate decision, but in the sending out of the Seventy. The Church is intended as a concrete answer to the prayer that laborers be sent forth to the harvest. The Company of Jesus is not people streaming to a shrine; and it is not people making up an audience for a speaker; it is laborers engaged in the harvesting task of reaching their perplexed and seeking brethren with something so vital that, if it is received, it will change their lives.
Once we have this understanding of what the general nature of the Church is, we need to be more specific in examining the concrete tasks to which the gathered workers are assigned. What are the members of the company supposed to do? To this Christ gives an answer which is truly
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shocking to modern man. He says that their first task is to give testimony. This is shocking to our generation because it goes directly against the grain of our most cherished ideas. Perhaps in our childhood some of us heard men and women rise in a prayer meeting to tell what the Lord had done for them. Or perhaps we went to one of the midweek sessions at a Christian Science church and heard person after person rise to tell of long illness or defeat succeeded by experiences of health and victory. We likely said that this might have been valuable to another generation but that it was not valuable to ours, and we, accordingly, vowed never to engage in such exhibitions.
This negative reaction of an entire generation is wholly understandable. As a matter of fact, many of the testimonies tended to become mere stereotypes, the same expressions appearing with repetitious and boring regularity. Furthermore, there was always the danger of ostentation and spiritual boasting. Many people decided that while they might continue as believers in Christ, they would never be caught dead telling anyone else about it. They determined to be discreet and quiet about their faith, to let their lives speak, if any speaking was required, and to avoid, at all costs, forcing their opinions upon anyone else. They did not want to emulate the people who invaded the privacy of others, because, they said, they did not want to have their own privacy invaded. Thus, the time came when the rejection of testimony seemed to be supported by highly moral reasons, including modesty, sincerity, and respect for others. Above all, the motive seemed to be the rejection of display of personal virtue.
However understandable this revulsion from testimony on the part of an entire generation may have been, it runs directly counter to the teaching of our Commander-in-chief. Indeed, Christ's first command to the little group gathered
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on the mountain is so alien to our popular mood that some readers miss it entirely. But the truth is that, according to Matthew's account, Christ's first word of command to the group was the injunction to engage in witness. After He had made the incredible prediction that their fellowship could be the salt which would preserve the world from decay, He proceeded to say that they were also the light of the world and from this observation came the direct command, "Let your light . . . shine" (Matthew 5:16). They were told that the light that was in them dare not be covered or hidden, that it must be lifted up for all men to see; in short, they were admonished to make a visible witness. And then, as though to counter in advance the expected objection of modern man concerning the danger of personal display, He said that the purpose, far from being their self-glorification, was to give glory to God.
As the contemporary Christian faces this clear injunction, he is bound to re-examine his own prejudices. Perhaps he has been wrong in his complete rejection of the theology of witness. If, believing in the Lordship of Christ, we find our views at variance with the bulk of His teaching, we are always bound to engage in re-examination of our views. At this point we find that Christ's insistence upon the priority of witness receives corroboration from a surprising source, modern secular philosophy. A striking example is found in the work of the French existentialist, Gabriel Marcel, particularly in his Gifford Lectures at the University of Aberdeen and in The Philosophy of Existence.1 His "Testimony and Existentialism" is one of the great philosophical essays of modern times. The philosopher wrote the essay, he tells us, not so much to define existentialism "as to throw some light on what seems to me its essence by
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bringing out its key notions." Consequently, the essay is one of the best introductions to existentialism as a movement of thought.
Marcel approaches the subject of testimony by examining what occurs in a court of law, which, of course, cannot be conducted without the introduction of testimony. In a trial we want to know what the objective truth is, but there is no conceivable way of finding this out except as we pay attention to persons who claim to have had particular historical experiences which bear directly upon the question being examined. Truth in the abstract or in detachment from human experience may conceivably exist, but it is never known to us. Each one who is brought to the witness stand is brought for only one reason, the supposition that some bit of evidence is included in His life experience. Marcel is particularly helpful in his analysis of the moral responsibility of the person who has some evidence which relates to what is at hand. In the first place, he is not free to withhold it; in the second place, the giving of the witness is a solemn undertaking in which the individual who witnesses binds himself under oath. Once he takes oath he is entirely committed; he cannot withdraw; he is involved; he cannot accordingly, retract without complete loss of integrity. Unless you stake everything on what you say you cannot be a witness.2
If a man is being tried for murder and I happen to possess, in my little stream of experience, the evidence that the accused man was actually at a different spot at the time of his alleged murderous act, I am not free to withhold it. If I do withhold it I am myself a murderer, for I destroy an innocent man by my silence. The failure to witness in such a situation is a highly immoral act. Thus it is clear that we
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do not avoid the moral ambiguities of testimony by mere refusal to testify. The dangers of the old-fashioned testimony meeting, which the members of our generation have seen so clearly, are real, but it is possible that the dangers of our alternative way of life, the rejection of testimony, may be equally real and ultimately more damaging.
The importance of all this for the Christian company is immense. The recruits of the company are precisely those who are called to be witnesses to their relation to one another and to their Lord. It is not that the Church is formed first and then, subsequently, is expected to witness. Rather, the original fellowship is the fellowship of witness; this is what it is formed to accomplish. "Conversion," says Marcel in a memorable sentence, "is the act by which man is called to be witness."3 The call to witness is a call which men can answer affirmatively or negatively, but one who answers it negatively, however kind and pious he may be, is not in the Company of Jesus. "Since the world of testimony is also that of freedom, it is one in which one can refuse to testify, or else in which one can be a false witness, etc., that is, a world in which there can be sin."4
It cannot be too strongly emphasized that all witness necessarily involves the use of the first person singular. My testimony bears, I believe, on something independent of me, something objectively real, but I cannot escape the necessity of my personal affirmation. It is never somebody in general who bears witness; it is always an individual with an individual consciousness. "Some person" is a highly generalized expression, perfectly suitable in abstract discussions, but far removed from the only concrete reality which we know. In the long run I cannot possibly speak for another. All that I can do is to say humbly, yet courageously, "I was there; it
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happened to me; I experienced such and such at such a point in historical time." To be meaningful, testimony must be both personal and historical.
Though it is widely supposed that natural science shows us a realm in which we are free from personal involvement, this conclusion is manifestly false. We use the intricate machines which we have made, but at the end of every scientific road is a person, the individual scientist, who affirms that he has observed. The machine facilitates the sharpness of observation, but cannot avoid its necessity. What we call natural science is possible as a reliable discipline because a number of people, with adequate and relevant preparation of their powers of observation, often succeed in corroborating the witness of one another. Astronomy becomes a science when a fellowship of careful and honorable searchers "see" what another of their number has "seen." The success of the science depends upon the cumulative agreement of the personal testimonies.
When we begin to apply this analysis to religious experience the similarity of pattern is obvious at once. The ultimate thing which anyone can say about the Living God is "I have encountered Him: He has reached me; He stood at my door and knocked, and, when I opened the door, He came in and communed with me." The person who provides such a witness could be wrong; he could be lying; but his is the ultimate evidence. We can, by careful reasoning, provide systematic support for what he reports, or we may undermine it by introducing what seem to be relevant negative considerations, but his evidence is the basic stuff of our entire enterprise. This is the point of Pascal's well-known distinction between the God of philosophers, on the one hand, and the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, on the other. The God of the philosopher can never be a substitute for the God of faith and experience. In short, philosophy may perform
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a useful service in discussing the testimony, but it is not itself the testimony.
In the long run the only answer to unfaith is the witness of those whose lives are of such a character that their witness is listened to by honest men and women. Millions of people, as in Christ's time, are "harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd" (Matthew 9:36), and they are really waiting to hear someone say, both humbly and bravely, "This I have learned. Here I stand." It is slightly shocking to some modern men and women to realize that when Christ said the laborers were few, He and those to whom He spoke were surrounded by large numbers of priests and semiprofessional religious men. The priests in Jerusalem were so numerous that they had to take turns in performing Temple ceremonies. The dearth was of persons who could give the only kind of witness that counts with those looking for help, the kind that is couched in the first person singular. The great need is for men who can say with the man who had been blind, "One thing I know" (John 9:25).
Because modern man will not listen to mere speculation but may listen to the record of experience, whether in science or religion, we may confidently assert that the theology which stresses the trustworthiness and importance of religious experience is likely to return to general favor. Increasingly, the best theology moves from the impersonal to the personal, and, even more importantly, from the third person to the second, so far as the Living God is concerned. The only God worth discussing is the "Absolute Thou," the One to whom men can pray, the One who can meet us on the way in the breaking of bread, in the recognition of our need for penitence, and in the labor of remaking some little sector of God's world. It will not be surprising if, in our troubled time, we return again and again to Marcel's memorable phrase, "a theology which is not based on testimony must
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be looked at with suspicion."5 The brilliant contemporary writer, Edith Hamilton, showed a real sensitivity to the modern mood when she used, as the title of her life of Christ (which includes a chapter on the life of Socrates), Witness to the Truth. Whittaker Chambers sensed the same potential response when he called his account of his own life story Witness.
Part of the paradox of our time lies in the double fact that we are now ready to listen to witness but are hesitant to give it. We avoid the witness stand insofar as our religion is concerned, with the odd result that although religion is popular its dominant mood is apologetic. Christian colleges want, in many areas, to hide the basic Christian commitment of their institutions, for it is something of which they are slightly ashamed. Many persons are terribly fearful of seeming pious. Something must have occurred in their childhood for them to develop what is essentially a phobia on this point. The strangest result of this phobia is that great numbers of people continue to fight against a danger which may once have been real, but is so no longer. A little realism in observation would teach us that the genuine danger we face, whatever our ancestors may have faced, is that of a mood in which people are so terribly apologetic that they refuse to witness at all. A part of wisdom about life is willingness to fight on contemporary rather than on outworn fronts.
The apologetic mood, which resists the making of personal testimony on the grounds of modesty, is surprisingly inconsistent. People defend their failure to testify by reference to their tenderness toward others, but it is easy to observe that such gentility does not extend to economics and to politics, where we express our opinions endlessly and forcefully.
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We are not reticent in saying which athletic teams we support and in announcing our support vociferously. How odd that it is only in regard to the spiritual life that we are reticent! It is hard to avoid the conclusion that what poses as a virtue is really a vice. A little self-analysis reveals the fact that what we call humility is actually fear of involvement which is costly in time, in money, and in peace of mind. We avoid witnessing because we recognize that it comes at a high price!
It is one thing to recognize that there is no vital Christianity without witness; it is another to know how a valid witness is to be made. Few are superficial enough to suppose that it can be made effectively by standing up in a crowded room to declare one's allegiance to the cause of Jesus Christ. But if not that way, then how? We can begin our answer by observing that testimony must be in both deed and word. The spoken word is never really effective unless it is backed up by a life, but it is also true that the living deed is never adequate without the support which the spoken word can provide. This is because no life is ever good enough. The person who says naively, "I don't need to preach; I just let my life speak," is insufferably self-righteous. What one among us is so good that he can let his life speak and leave it at that? We should make our lives as good as we possibly can, but at the end of the day we are still imperfect and unworthy. If our expressed faith were not better than our practice, we should make practically no progress at all. Anyone can end hypocrisy simply by lowering his principles to accord with his practice, but it is easy to see that the result would be loss rather than gain.
The more we think of it the more we are shocked intellectually by the modish supposition that verbal witness is somehow evil or presumptuous. Such an idea is always the result of shallow thinking which comes as a reaction to a
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supposed evil of the past, but fails to realize that the alternative to one evil may be another. There has to be a verbal witness because there cannot be communication of important convictions without language. "I cannot by being good," says Samuel M. Shoemaker, "tell of Jesus' atoning death and resurrection, nor of my faith in His divinity. The emphasis is too much on me, and too little on Him."6 We must use words because our faith must be in something vastly greater than ourselves. We make a witness by telling not who we are but whose we are. Though it would be ridiculous for me to try to make a witness by telling of my own righteousness, which, after all, does not exist, it is not at all ridiculous for me to confess, with candor, to Whom I am committed. This is why the Vocation of Witness belongs necessarily to the Company of the Committed, rather than to the company of the good or the wise or the prudent. The truth is that our words, which can express something of our ultimate loyalty, can be far better than we are, yet for them we are responsible. This seems to be the point of Christ's statement, which is so shocking to our generation, "By your words you will be justified, and by your words you will be condemned" (Matthew 12:37).
The purpose of witness in the law court is justice, but the purpose of witness in the life of the Church is evangelism. By evangelism is meant the deliberate effort to extend the area of Christ's influence, both in individual lives in which this influence is needed and in all areas of common life. The widespread aversion to evangelism seems to rest largely on our difficulty in distinguishing between it and proselytizing. Evangelism is the effort to facilitate the growth of new life, while proselytizing is the effort to enhance the power, prestige, or numbers of one's own particular sect or organization. It ought to be obvious that we can reject the latter while
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espousing the former, for the former is implicit in any genuine conviction. No one whose life has been truly touched by the life of Christ is free to leave the matter there; he must, as a consequence, extend the boon. We can use many figures to make this clear. One way of clarification is to point out that we dare not let the chain reaction stop with us. No one to whom the love of Christ has been mediated so that he is in some sense a new person, is free to let this stop so long as he lives. If he has been, in any sense, liberated, he must join in the eternal fellowship of liberation. If the enkindling fire (Luke 12:49) which Christ said He came to light has in any sense entered his soul, he cannot rest until he lights as many other fires as possible. In short, a person cannot be a Christian and avoid being an evangelist. Evangelism is not a professionalized job of a few gifted or trained men but is, instead, the unrelenting responsibility of every person who belongs, even in the most modest way, to the Company of Jesus.
The method of evangelism is inevitably the method of testimony. Each man has only one story that is worth telling. This is why the first book of a novelist is often fundamentally autobiographical and also why it is often his best. The best way to reach another life is by saying, as simply as possible, "Whereas I was blind, now I see." This, of course, is the justification for the great Christian journals, like those of John Wesley or John Woolman in the eighteenth century. Each is saying, in the context of his own life, "I have known, at first hand, His healing power." The cynic may ridicule, but the saint merely repeats his story, and often his story of others in similar circumstances.
The value of the individual story of Christ's healing power lies largely in the undeniable fact that each human life stands at a unique point in the total web of human experience,
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and, as a consequence, each one has an approach to others which is not identical with the opportunity of any other human being. If I do not open the door for another, it may never be opened, for it is possible that I may be the only one who holds this particular key. The worker on the production line may have an entree to the life of his fellow worker on the line which can never be matched by any pastor or teacher or professional evangelist. The responsibility of each individual Christian is to do that which no other person can do as well as he can.
While we must never minimize the value of the witness of the separated individual, we should also recognize that sometimes the best witness is that of the Church as a whole. If the Church is primarily a witnessing society, we must try to think how the joint testimony can be made. What can the group do in this regard which the lone individual cannot do? It can build a building, it can raise a spire for men and women to see as a reminder, it can hold meetings which are open to all seekers. Even the very attendance at these meetings, which seems so inadequate, may constitute a witness of a sort. If so, we must never even give the suggestion of despising it. We can paraphrase Milton by saying that they also serve who only attend. Sometimes they do it with such faithfulness that others take note and follow, perhaps after years of seeming failure to be impressed.
It is in the general setting of the necessity of giving witness and the consequent fellowship of witness that the famous doctrine of the universal priesthood of all believers begins to come alive. All Christians must be in the ministry, whatever their occupations, because the nonwitnessing follower of Christ is a contradiction in terms. If we take seriously Christ's first group order, the command to let
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our light shine, we dare not let the witness be limited to a small group of the professionally religious. Therefore the ministry of Christ must be universal. It must be universal in three specific ways. It must involve all places; it must involve all times; it must involve all Christian persons, male and female, lay and clerical, old and young.
There is no possibility of a genuine renewal of the life of the Church in our time unless the principle of universal witness is accepted without reservation. The struggle against apathy is so great a task that if we are to achieve even a semblance of a victory we cannot be satisfied to leave Christian work to ordained clergymen. The number one Christian task of our time is the enlargement and adequate training of our ministry which, in principle, includes our total membership. This is a large order, and one which often seems discouraging in prospect, but we cannot settle for anything less and yet be loyal to the idea of Christ's revolutionary company.
It must be admitted that we are now a great distance — not only in practice but even in theory — from the fellowship of universal witness. Millions are merely back-seat Christians, willing to be observers of a performance which the professionals put on, ready to criticize or to applaud, but not willing even to consider the possibility of real participation. Here is the fundamental weakness of the contemporary Church. Millions claim to have some sort of connection with the Church, but it is not a connection of involvement. The result is bound to be superficiality. Whatever the nature of the situation, only the involved ever really know anything thoroughly.
Curiously, it is in the most respectable denominations that involvement is most conspicuously absent. Groups such as Jehovah's Witnesses may espouse a confused and irrational theology, but they put the more respected Christian groups
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to shame by the quality of their participation in the total Christan enterprise. It is not always noted that the very name Jehovah's Witnesses is intended to stress the intrinsic character of the demand for universal testimony. Every member must find his way of participation in personal evangelism from the first day of his association. The shame of those who believe that they have a better theology is that they have not equaled such groups in participation and in courageous witness. Some of the groups which do not seem to us fully Christian in their theological positions are wonderfully Christian in their courage in the face of ridicule and in their willingness to be involved. Perhaps some of them enter the kingdom ahead of the wise and prudent. What is strange is that we seem so unable to distinguish between the intellectual confusion, which we ought to reject, and the admirable involvement, which we ought to emulate.
Even the language of the Jehovah's Witnesses is something to admire, showing remarkable insight. Marcus Bach says,
Local Witnesses constitute not a congregation, but a "company." The place of meeting is not a church; it is a "Kingdom Hall." Leaders of the work may be called ministers — since they are ordained of God — but it is more correct to class them simply as Witnesses. Every Witness is a publisher, for he can become a Witness only by making a covenant with God to "publish" the truth from house to house. Every publisher is expected to devote at least sixty hours a month to the work.7
The terms which Marcus Bach has stressed are terms which have been applicable to a great variety of movements in their periods of genuine vitality. It is really more than a coincidence, for example, that one of the earliest names which seventeenth-century Quakers applied to themselves was
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"First Publishers of Truth." We smile today, because the terminology is naive and slightly arrogant, but it went along with a power which their contemporary successors cannot even begin to match. These people of three hundred years ago, who suffered terribly from persecution and faced almost constant ridicule, as Jehovah's Witnesses do today, understood perfectly that a faith which a person is not trying to share is not genuine.
In the conventional pattern of recent generations it has often been assumed that witness is the vocation of the few rather than the many. These few are professional clergymen, individuals ordained in a particular fashion so that they are expected to make a continual witness to the gospel. The deep harm of such a specialized ministry — so different from anything which existed in the beginning of Christianity — has consisted not in the witness which clergymen have made, but in the freedom from witness which others have felt as a consequence of the very existence of the clergy. People have frequently said in essence that they don't have to work at evangelism because they have hired other men to do it. Donating some money in support of the professional seems to liberate the amateur from a sense of responsibility. One of the most damaging assumptions in regard to the Christian movement has been that involved in the distinction between "full-time" Christian witness and ordinary Christian witness. "Full-time" was supposed to distinguish the vocation of the clergy, but patently it does not. The Christian groceryman must give full time, just as the clergyman does — his major time being given in his store. To say that he gives a third of his time to the lay ministry is to accept the very distinction we are pledged to avoid.
It must be admitted that a few clergymen glory in the contrast between their status and that of ordinary Christians. They accept obeisance as a natural right; they monopolize
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public praying; they learn how to keep themselves in the limelight. There is something about the pastoral office which makes the temptation to egocentricity especially powerful. This is partly because the successful preacher is regularly praised to his face. His mood seems a far cry from that of Christ when He girded Himself with a towel and washed the feet of His followers. Of course, there is a little pro forma foot washing today, but it becomes a mere ceremony, and it loses its virtue by being reported in the press. Because some pastors love the limelight and prestige, which is in such contrast to the very meaning of servant or minister, they fear the emergence of the lay ministry. Some pastors see gifted lay leaders as threats to their own eminence. Sometimes they have a sense of danger which physicians feel in the distribution of home books of medicine. The pastor sometimes has some justification for his fears when lay leaders emerge without any theological education and consequently with no recognition of the heresy in their own pet opinions.
Our task now is to try and see the entire problem of the ministry in adequate perspective. We may agree that a professionalized ministry is necessary but not sufficient. The chief reason that it is not sufficient is that the job to be done is too big to be accomplished by the work of a minority, no matter how gifted and trained that minority may be. Another reason for the insufficiency of the professionalized ministry is, frankly, that the theological seminaries are not getting the ablest men. In some of our universities the contrast between the divinity students, on the one hand, and the students in law and medicine, on the other hand, is shocking. If we are to have the help of the very ablest persons in the total ministry of Christ, many of them will have to be found in occupations which we term secular. We are not
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so rich in Christian human resources that we can afford to neglect any. The need is so great that we require all of the help that we can get, and our greatest unexploited resource is the lay membership.
Almost all astute observers agree that the growth of the lay or universal ministry is the growing edge of vital Christianity today. The fact that thousands of men and women who are employed in secular occupations now affirm openly and without undue self-consciousness that they are ministers of Christ in common life is a source of tremendous hope. For many it is absolutely new, and for all who experience it the enrollment in the universal ministry is a powerful stimulus. It is the chief form in which the miracle of involvement now occurs, so far as the Christian faith is concerned. It is the great new Christian fact of our time.
Important as the lay or universal ministry is, it is beset with dangers. The chief danger is that we accept it — though gladly — in such a mild form that our acceptance is almost as harmful as rejection would be. What is meant, all too often, when men speak of the lay ministry, is that members are supposed to give support to the Church as it is. Sometimes it means little more than working on existing committees, giving money, being loyal in attendance at public meetings, and speaking up for the Church when the occasion for defense arises. The trouble with this idea of the function of the laity is that it does not appeal at all to the more adventuresome people whom we so sorely need. This is what J.H. Oldham means when he writes that, though there is now a great deal of talk about the importance of the laity, "the question is approached almost invariably from the wrong end."8
Another idea of the lay ministry which is too mild is the notion that lay members are supposed to help the pastor
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with chores around the church buildings. The idea is that the pastor has a program, a ministry to perform, and ordinary members can be of assistance in the promotion of this work. They are volunteer, unpaid helpers, and thus take the places of paid assistants. But if this is all that we mean by the universal ministry it will never provide the explosive power which our civilization so greatly needs. What we require is not the perpetuation of the current system, but a genuinely new impetus.
The only kind of lay ministry which is worth encouraging is that which makes a radical difference in the entire Christian enterprise. To be truly effective it must erase any difference in kind between the lay and the clerical Christian. The way to erase the distinction, which is almost wholly harmful, is not by the exclusion of professionals from the ministry, as anticlerical movements have tended to do, but rather by the inclusion of all in the ministry. The expanded dictum is that in the ministry of Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek, neither bond nor free, neither male nor female, neither layman nor cleric, but all are one in Christ Jesus.
At this point in Christian strategy nearly everyone who now considers the matter at all approves the lay ministry, being unable to reject it and also accept the New Testament, but undermines it by a trivial conception of what it means. Accordingly, the burning question now is not whether we believe in the ministry of all Christians, but what we include in that concept. The idea has no real life unless it involves the acceptance of a new kind of leadership, which appears especially in the professions.9 If Christianity is to be understood
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not as a retreat from life in the world but as an effort to transfigure life itself, it follows that the Church needs the service of men and women at the point where they are most exposed to the problems of our political and economic order. "It is through its lay members," says Oldham, "that the Church makes contact with the life of the world."10
The older idea was that the lay members were the pastor's helpers, but the new and vital idea is that the pastor is the helper of the ordinary lay members in the performance of their daily ministry in the midst of secular life. And always, the problem with which the members need the help of wise and compassionate pastors or teachers is that of how daily witness is to be made. Insofar as we really understand the strategy of the Christian revolution, we shall train our pastors for this highly specialized and imaginative task. It cannot be pointed out too clearly, therefore, that emphasis on the vocation of universal Christian witness, far from lowering the vision of the function of the pastorate, immensely heightens it. Concern for the universal ministry, instead of making a specialized and highly trained ministry unnecessary, makes it all the more significant.
The universal ministry is a great idea, one of the major ideas of the New Testament, but the hard truth is that it does not come to flower except as it is nourished deliberately. Indeed the paradox is that the nourishment of the lay or universal ministry is the chief reason for the development of a special or partially separated and professionalized ministry. We cannot have an effective universal ministry of housewives and farmers and merchants simply by announcing it. It is necessary to produce it. The only way in which this can be done is by the education of a gifted few, whose chief vocation is the liberation of the ministerial and witnessing power of the many. The major ministry of the pastors and
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teachers, as made clear in Ephesians 4:12, is the "equipping ministry."11
The problem of how the ordinary Christian is to witness is one of such difficulty that it requires our best combined thought to have even the beginning of wisdom on the subject. We know that we must let our feeble light shine, that we must not be apologetic and cowardly; we know we must be ready to make the only contribution of any importance that we can — to give testimony to our own personal experience; but how? To buttonhole people in the crowd is simply ineffective; to wear a cross or a yoke-pin is such a little thing as to seem almost trivial; to attend public worship involves no courage. Martyr and witness are essentially synonymous, and what probability of martyrdom is there for a citizen of a country which is nominally Christian?
We may as well face the fact that the witness which most contemporary Christians will ever make is bound to be undramatic. Frequently, it will not seem like witness at all to the person who makes it, though it may seem so to the one who benefits by it. As we consider what has been crucial in our own lives we become aware of the fact that most of the testimonies which have helped us have been virtually unconscious ones. I remember a word a man said long ago — a word which deepened my life immeasurably — and I go to him in gratitude, but he has absolutely no memory of the word or the incident. This is as it should be. In a group of twenty-five lay Christians meeting recently, each told what was the major influence which had helped him to move over from nominal Christianity to a committed faith. Every one of the twenty-five mentioned a person. Not one mentioned a public occasion. And the surprising part was that all of the
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persons mentioned as thus effective in personal ministry were inconspicuous. Most of them had made a significant witness without knowing it.
It appears to us that it is more difficult to make a Christian witness in a Christian country than in a missionary land, and this may be true. For instance, it is possible in some parts of Africa for a man who enters into Christian marriage to make a very striking witness. This he does by carrying a burden on his head just as his wife does, thus encountering the ridicule of the many because of his supposedly unmanly behavior. One man who was photographed assisting his wife in this courageous fashion stopped to interpret the meaning of his act. We say that we wish we could perform some act in which the difference which Christianity makes were equally clear, but we are hard pressed to know what act it might be.
One of the few areas in which a courageous witness is possible today is that of racial brotherhood. Perhaps the most vivid memory of 1960 that Americans will keep is that of the television scene of a young man in New Orleans walking past a jeering mob and becoming the butt of obscene remarks as he took his little daughter to school. What is really humiliating is the recognition of how comparatively rare such courage is. As the New Yorker pointed out in "Talk of the Town," there were only two parents out of two thousand who made the bold witness.
The most common alternative to a Christian witness is not something derogatory to Christ's cause, but silence. The condemnation of most of us arises not from what we have said, but from what we have failed to say. We are, let us say, in a room in which we hear some person maligned when we have evidence that the person is wholly innocent of the charge made. This happens almost constantly, because men and women love to gossip. The easy thing, of course, is to
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let the matter pass while we keep still, salving our consciences by saying that we cannot get into every fight. But it is precisely in such situations that the real test comes. The question is not, Will you go to hear Bishop X preach? The question is, Will you defend him when, at the dinner party, it is freely asserted that he is a Communist sympathizer because he believes in foreign aid? One of the most searching of all Christian queries is, Are you careful of the reputations of others?
We do not have to wait until we know the whole truth about anything to make our witness. If we were to wait for this, we should wait forever. There is a paradox in the fact that we can bear witness to the truth without claiming to be possessors of it. The truth is bigger than our systems, yet we must give testimony to the little that we now see. I must risk my reputation on the point at which I am willing to stand, even though much beyond that point is hazy. Only as we are willing to declare where we are are we likely to go beyond this unsatisfactory point. It is in this spirit that testimony is able to reconcile the two moods which seem so deeply opposed; boldness and humility. We can never say, "This I know beyond a shadow of doubt," for that kind of certainty is not given to finite men. All we can say is that "we are persuaded." What we mean is that we are willing to stake everything upon the conviction. This is the significance of Marcel's great statement that "every testimony is based on a commitment and to be incapable of committing oneself is to be incapable of bearing witness."12
The evidence of the gospel is not primarily in some document but in the lives of Christ's followers. It is the modest persons who have heard Christ's call to involvement and who try, imaginatively, to respond, who constitute the proof that the gospel is true. Since the proof is never completed, each
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person is important. Each is important because each can add, by some unique and irrevocable act, to the cumulative evidence.
There is, perhaps, no part of the gospel story more revealing than the portion of the Fourth Gospel describing the encounter between Christ and Pilate. The mood of the Roman was exactly the opposite to that of a martyr. He sought to avoid involvement by cowardly neutrality but became thereby more deeply guilty. In the course of the conversation Pilate heard Christ say, "For this I was born, and for this I have come into the world, to bear witness to the truth" (John 18:37). It was the vocation of Christ to bear witness to the truth; it is our vocation to bear witness to Him.
Chapter 4 || Table of Contents
1. Gabriel Marcel, The Philosophy of Existence (London: Harvill Press, 1948), p. 67.
2. It is perhaps obvious that the involvement is equally great if a person elects, as American practice permits, to engage in affirmation rather than in oath.
3. The Mystery of Being, Pt. II, p. 133.
4. Ibid., p. 132.
5. Ibid., p. 139.
6. Samuel M. Shoemaker, Creating Christian Cells, Faith at Work, p. 51.
7. Marcus Bach, They Have Found a Faith (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc., 1947), p. 37
8. Life Is Commitment, p. 97.
9. A striking example of the new conception was shown in a recent Layman's Festival which sought to influence the entire life of the capital city of Texas. The leaders were Tom Reavely, a lawyer, and L.D. Haskew, a professor and vice chancellor of the University of Texas. The major speaking was done by Howard Butt, a businessman of Corpus Christi. One of the meetings was with the bar association.
10. Life Is Commitment, p. 98
11. This term has been used with great effectiveness by Robert Raines in his new book, New Life in the Church (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1961).
12. The Philosophy of Existence, p. 68