Transcript
CHARLIE: -- many ways, these last few days, I was culling through my memory of literally dozens of pictures that I could conjure up in the mind, and one picture came especially to me. It was very early in our relationship; it was either, I think it was in December, November of 1955, and there had been a cyclone -- cyclones are very common in South India
or seemed to be when we were there -- and a town about 20 miles south of the city where the Bishop was stationed, was completely cut-off, a town called Manimajra and the bishop decided he had to see what had happened to his flock in this absolutely cut-off town on the coast, and so he decided to bicycle the twenty-some miles; and I being young and energetic and [potless?] in those days went
along and we ended up carrying the bicycles more than they carried us. But I remember at one point -- just incredible, I mean, the roads were half-submerged, there were trees all across the road -- and at one point, the Bishop slipped in the mud, his bicycle did, and he fell off. He was wearing khaki shorts -- I bet he doesn't remember this -- and we went to the side of the road. He had some blood dripping down his leg, and there was one of these old village grandmothers,
know, where they're just always around everywhere, and there she was, and the Bishop and she struck up an animated conversation and she insisted that he either raise up his shorts or lower them, I can't remember which, while she applied cow dung to which, of course, American cow dung wouldn't do much good, but in India, cow dung solves all these kinds of problems because we all know that Indian cows are very special. As all my Hindu friends tell me when they come here, "well, of course we eat beef, these are American
cows." But, in any case, there she was putting the cow dung on him and we went back and we finally got to Manimajra and I remember someone shouting out of an upper-story window as we came into this town, "Where you from?" and the Bishop shouted "[Mothāla?]," and they said, "Oh, you can't be from Mothāla; only angels could have come from Mothāla," and he said, "We're the angels." But that's how I think of Bishop Newbigin, the Bishop Newbigin of "A South India Diary."
Other people think of Bishop Newbigin as scholar, teacher, but I think of Bishop Newbigin as faith incarnate, faith in action. Another vignette, very quickly, one that I did not see, but is still talked about in Madras, a much larger city that he was later Bishop of, was when a political figure of a party that was very iconoclastic, quasi-atheistic, hated by the elite of Madras and detested
by middle-class Christians, when this leader died of throat cancer, and there was a huge funeral -- no one could even describe it in this country, literally millions of people lined up to see this very popular figure -- but he was popular only with the lower classes, and there in full cassock, walking as close to the funeral cortege as he could get, often with his hand resting on it, was the Right Reverend Lesslie Newbigin, Bishop of Madras.
There's these kinds of moments that I remember, and it's faith in action and faith in relationship to politics, and that's one reason I'm so grateful that I'm able to introduce him for this particular lecture where he's going to speak about politics and to ask the question, "What is to be done?" Bishop Newbigin.
NEWBIGIN: Thank you, Charlie. I remember the trip, but I must say, I'd forgotten about the cow dung; I don't remember that. As those of you who have been attending or have managed to survive so far, know very well, I'm concerned in these lectures to ask what would be involved in a missionary encounter between the Gospel and our post-Enlightenment culture? In the last lecture, I spoke about the
encounter at the intellectual level with that which forms the mental and spiritual heart of our culture, modern science. I was speaking about the question, "What can be known and how can it be known?" but the Gospel concerns not only that question, but also the question "What is to be done?" A missionary encounter impinges not only on the ideas and beliefs of people, but also upon its ways of behaving
and these ways are of course not merely private and domestic, but public and political. It is indeed impossible to separate these two, for it is the same person who is active in both. Consequently, missionaries have not hesitated in their encounter with strange cultures to attack forms of behavior, whether private or public, which they considered incompatible with God's will as revealed in Christ; thus, to speak only
of the Indian society which I know a little, missionaries have attacked such deeply entrenched elements of public life as caste and dowry and child marriage and the immolation of widows. In Africa, they have similarly thrown their weight against polygamy and the slave trade. What would an encounter of the Gospel with our post-Enlightenment culture involve?
For the public, the political, economic, social aspects of our common life. We have to deal at the outset with the claim that the Gospel has nothing directly to say on these matters. I hardly need to remind you of the many loud voices which insist that the church has no business to meddle with matters of politics and economics; that its business is with the eternal salvation of the human soul, and that if it undertakes
to give advice at all, it should be confined to advice about personal conduct. A member of Mrs. Thatcher's government recently appealed to all the clergy in Britain to "Give up politics for Lent." The Gospel, these voices tell us, is about changing people, not about changing systems and structures. Let the church keep out of
public affairs and mind its own business. About this opinion, many things might be said in the long perspective of history, but I shall confine myself to three. Firstly, the claim that the church should not be involved in politics is clearly in line with the post-Enlightenment division of human life into the public and the private sectors. Christianity on this view is about values. As an optional set of values,
it has freedom to compete with others and to win such place as its merits can secure for it in the private sector. It cannot claim a place in the public world of politics and economics and social administration which has to be governed by those who have the expert knowledge of the facts. And this, of course, is a view which would have astonished Christians living in any earlier period of the world history.
And there is no need to repeat here what was said in the previous lecture about the essentially mythological function which the concept of fact performs in our contemporary world, in our contemporary culture. Secondly, the negative side of this claim; namely, that the church should not be involved in politics arises from its positive claim that the business of the church is with the eternal salvation
of the individual soul. Here we are dealing with a dichotomy which has been characteristic of a great deal of human religion, but which is totally absent from the Bible -- the idea that the real essence of what it is to be a human person can be found only by stripping away the visible, external, historical, contingent elements of human life. It is very common in many kinds of religion, and certainly was present
in the Greek thought within which so much of the church's first systematic thinking was done. On this view, a human being is essentially an eternal soul, dwelling for a time within a physical body, which is part of the world of nature and through which the person is tied by the bonds of physical and biological and economic necessity to this visible and tangible world. There is thus a dichotomy running right through all human
experience between the eternal world, with which he has direct contact through his rational and spiritual being, and the world of the senses, with which, during the brief period of his life on earth as part of a biological and social group, he has a fleeting relationship. Granted this dichotomy, the business of the church is not with the ephemeral world of outward happenings, but with the eternal world of abiding spiritual realities.
But, and this is my third point, if from that world of thought one turns to the Bible, it is obvious that quite different assumptions reign about the nature of the human person. From the beginning, and throughout the Bible, the human person is viewed realistically as someone always involved in relationships with other human beings and with the world of nature. The Bible is
is the story of these relationships. At the outset, human nature created in the image of God is characterized by the mutuality of man and woman, and from this beginning in the primal family, the story is about relations within the family and between families, clans, and nations. Of course, there is much in the Bible about what might be called the interior dimension of human existence; about that area
of our experience in which we are conscious of our aloneness, of our unshareable responsibilities, of the fact that although we are part of an ongoing physical and biological and social process, we also know that we are a part, and by knowing it, affirm our transcendence of it. And yet, there is no attempt in the Bible to separate out this dimension of human experience and treat it as if it was, alone, real.
The point at which we are all tempted to do this, is, of course, the point when we face the mystery of death, for death is the place at which the human subject parts company finally with the physical and social and biological process of which he has been a part. Alone among animals, it seems, human beings are aware that death is a mystery, and therefore, make provision, often elaborate provision for the respectful
disposal of the dead. And if, and it is remarkable that the ancient Israelites apparently had no belief that anything significant lay beyond death. God's purpose, as they understood it, was to be worked out among the living and their descendants here on this earth, not in a world beyond the grave. It follows from this way of understanding what it is to be human that there is no separation of the inward and spiritual
from the outward and visible and social. The Torah of Yahweh is loving guidance and instruction of His people; concerns the whole of their life as persons, as families, and as a nation. Faith, obedience, repentance, and love are not bracketed off under the category of religion. On the contrary, they are embodied in ways of behaving which cover much of what we would describe as
jurisprudence, public health, education, welfare, and economic policy. It is a simple fact, familiar to anyone who possesses a Bible, that if we want to read only the passages which are exclusively about what we call the spiritual life, we will have to leave a large part of the Bible unread. What I am saying, of course, is familiar, and it usually leads on to the assertion that we must read the Old Testament
in the light of the New, and that when we do so, we shall see that the teaching of Jesus was not about these external and ephemeral things, but about the eternal realities of the spirit, and that what is written in the Old Testament must be read exclusively in that light. I want to affirm that this spiritualizing of the teaching of the Old Testament does not do justice to the actual content of the New. The message of Jesus was that
the Kingdom, the reign of God, is at hand. Behind that message lies the faith of the Old Testament that while Yahweh had chosen one people to live under His Torah, and so to be a witness to the nations, a day would come when all the nations would come to acknowledge Him as alone God and to live under His Torah. So, behind that also lies the later molding of this faith
into its apocalyptic form under the terrible pressure of successive disasters; as generations of faithful Israelites fell as martyrs in the struggle against the enemies of Yahweh. The old disinterest in what lay beyond the grave gave way to the belief that the victory of Yahweh would bring with it also those who had given their lives for His sake. The victory of Yahweh would be His own work,
bringing the present order to an end, and establishing a new order in which those who had died in faith would also share. It is against this background of this apocalyptic expectation that we have to understand Jesus' message of the imminence of the reign of God. As we well know, this apocalyptic expectation without which we cannot understand the message of Jesus was also the cause of its misunderstanding.
The story of the ministry as it is unfolded in the Synoptic gospels shows us an initial enthusiasm gradually turning into unbelief and rejection and it became clear that the reign of God is a profoundly mysterious and paradoxical reality which it is given only to a few chosen witnesses to understand. The victory of God is finally accomplished in the rejection and the death of Jesus,
the King reigns from the tree. That fact hidden from the world is proclaimed to those chosen beforehand as witnesses and only to those by the resurrection of Jesus from the dead. These witnesses are sent forth to proclaim and to embody in their common life, the victory of Jesus, the reality of the reign of God. They are to go, in the words of Paul, "bearing about in the body the dying of
Jesus" that the life of Jesus, the life of the victorious kingdom may be manifest in their mortal bodies. They proclaim and embody the victory of Jesus, the victory of God under the sign of a cross. Thus, a new reality is brought into being; a new kind of human community in which the Torah of Yahweh is being
fulfilled by a people not only from the tribes of Israel, but from all the nations. The promise of the prophets and the psalmists is being fulfilled. The nations are coming to the New Zion to be the people of Yahweh and to live under His rule, His Torah. They have become, from many races and nations, one family, bound to one another so that they call themselves brother and sister.
The kinship bonds, which were characteristic of the household of Israel in God's intention, are now extended throughout the nations. Thus, the earliest church never availed itself of the protection which it could have had under Roman law as a cultus privatus dedicated to the pursuit of a purely personal and spiritual salvation for its members. Such privatized religions, as we know,
flourished vigorously in the world of the eastern Mediterranean as they do in North America today, and they were committed by the imperial authorities for the same reason that their counterparts are permitted today; they do not challenge the political order. Why then did the church refuse this protection? Why did it have to engage in a battle to the death with the imperial powers? Because true to its roots
in the Old Testament, it could not accept relegation to a private sphere of purely inward and personal religion. It knew itself to be the bearer of the promise of the reign of Yahweh over all the nations. It refused the names by which the many religious societies called themselves and which critics, such as Celsus applied to the church; names like thiasos, hieranos,
and called itself consistently the ekklesia tou theou, the public assembly to which God is calling all men and women everywhere without distinction. And that made a collision with the imperial power inevitable, as inevitable as the cross. But the church did not set out to create a new political order, or to take political action for the reformation of political structures.
To think that way would be both anachronistic and theologically confused. The God-given, and therefore limited, authority of Caesar is acknowledged. Pilate has a God-given authority to pass judgment on Jesus, but Jesus is King in the absolute sense that He bears witness to the truth, to the ultimate reality against which all kingship is measured.
And when, as in this case, the God-given authority of the political order is placed at the service of a lie, there can only be a head-on collision. In the cross, the ruler of this world is unmasked and dethroned. The apocalyptic passages in the New Testament are the projection through history of this conflict which was fought out
on the cross. In the end, the present order will pass away and Jesus will reign. But how is the kingship of Christ exercised in the interim? While the church is a small community living under an imperial power, the kind of questions which arise in a modern democracy are obviously excluded. The church, in the power of the crucified and risen Jesus, bears witness to the truth
and pays for the price of it with its blood. But what was the church to do when the imperial power lost its will to continue and the emperor turned to the church to provide the spiritual cohesion for a disintegrating society? Much has been written about the harm which was done to the cause of the Gospel when Constantine accepted baptism and it is not difficult to expatiate at length
on this theme. But could any other choice have been made? When the ancient classical world which had seemed so brilliant and so all-conquering ran out of spiritual fuel and turned to the church as the only society which could hold a disintegrating world together, should the church have refused the appeal and washed its hands of responsibility for the political order? It could not do so
if it was to be faithful to its origin in Israel and in the ministry of Jesus. It is easy to see, of course, with hindsight how quickly the church fell into the temptations of worldly power. It is easy to point, as monks and hermits, prophets and reformers, in all the ensuing centuries have continued to point, to the glaring contradiction between the Jesus of the Gospels and His followers occupying the seats of power
and wealth. And yet, we have to ask, would God's purpose as it is revealed in Scripture have been better served if the church had refused all political responsibility; if there had never been a Christian Europe; if all the churches for the past two thousand years had lived as tolerated and persecuted minorities like the Armenians and the Assyrians and the Copts? I find it hard to think so.
But whatever we may think -- and it is perhaps meaningless to engage in these kind of speculations -- two facts are fundamental for understanding our present situation. One is that we are the heirs of the Christendom experiment. We who belong to the Western world live in societies which have been shaped by more than a thousand years in which the barbarian and savage tribes of Europe were brought slowly, and with many
setbacks into a community conceived as the corpus Christianum, a single society in which the whole of life public and private was to be controlled by the Christian revelation. Much of what we take for granted about normal, human behavior is the fruit of that long schooling; and however much we may rebel against it, we are its products. The second fact is that this corpus Christianum is no more
and we cannot go back to it. As I suggested in an earlier lecture, the religious wars of the seventeenth century marked the final destruction of the Christendom synthesis of church and society. From the eighteenth century onwards, Europe turned away from the Christian vision of man and his world, accepted a radically different vision for its public life, and relegated the Christian vision to the
status of a permitted option for the private sector. But for the church to accept that status is to do exactly what the early church refused to do and what the Bible forbids us to do. It is, in effect, to deny the kingship of Christ, over all life, public and private. It is to deny that Christ is, simply and finally, the Truth by which all other claims to truth are to be attested.
It is to abandon our calling. We cannot accept this relegation, but equally, we cannot return to the corpus Christianum. We cannot go back on history, but perhaps we can learn from history. Perhaps we can learn how to embody in the life of the church under this new situation a witness to the Kingship of Christ over all life -- its politics and its economics, no less
than its personal and domestic morals, yet without falling into the Constantinian trap. That is the new unprecedented, and immensely challenging task which is given to our generation. The resolute undertaking of it is fundamental to any genuine missionary encounter of the Gospel with our culture. If we are to view this task in some historical perspective, I think it is good to go back to
Augustine, who, in his greatest work, written near the end of his life, painted the picture of the relation between church and world which was to shape the thought and practice of western Christendom for a thousand years. It would have been equally relevant to refer to Augustine last night in the discussion of the interface between theology and science, for it was Augustine standing at the point of
collapse of the classical worldview, who inaugurated a new approach to philosophy with the slogan "credo ut intelligam." He provided a new basis for critical thinking in the acceptance by faith of the twin dogmas of Trinity and Incarnation. I believe that Augustine's example is relevant to our situation today as we face, if not the collapse of, at least a
growing disillusionment about the modern scientific worldview. But here I am asking you to look at another facet of Augustine's extraordinary achievement. When the inward and spiritual disintegration of the classical worldview was matched in the realm of outward and visible events by Alaric's sack of the eternal city, and Augustine found his provincial diocese flooded with refugees,
pagan and Christian, from Rome, he set himself as an old man to his greatest task, the interpretation of secular history in the light of the Gospel. When Augustine writes, a century has passed since Christians sat on the imperial throne; Christians and pagans are mingled at all levels in public life; neither is the church persecuted nor has the Kingdom of God arrived in its fullness.
Christians are scattered throughout the world as peregrini, which is properly translated not "pilgrims," but "resident aliens," a well-known political category of the world at that time. They have, in other words, citizenship in another kingdom. Thus, citizens of two commonwealths are living commingled in each place: one, the earthly commonwealth is ruled by love of self; the other, by the love of
God. The latter is identified, if not exactly with the church, then with those who among its members are truly governed by the love of God. Augustine is very realistic about the evils which tear all human communities apart -- the family, the city, the nation. He has no sentimental illusions about a natural brotherhood among human beings. Yet he insists that love
is the basis of society. Even in their wars, he says, men are in fact seeking peace, but peace is only possible when there is order and order depends upon proper government; but government in which one is subordinated to another is only right if the one who is called to govern does so for the sake of those he governs, and is in fact their servant.
The motive power of order is therefore love. Augustine's conception of human society is not based on a conception of justice drawn from elsewhere; for example, the concept of natural justice. God, he teaches us, God, the instructor teaches us two main laws: love of God and love of one's neighbor. Here man find three beings to love:
God, himself, and his neighbor. He who loves God makes no mistake in loving himself. Consequently, since he is ordered to love his neighbor as himself, he advises his neighbor also to love God. He wishes to be similarly cared for by his neighbor if need arises. So far as in him lies, he will be at peace with all men in that ordered harmony which is the peace of God. Thus, love
creates order; first, in the family; then, among neighbors; and then by extension, in the city and the nation. Without this, even the earthly commonwealth cannot exist. It follows, that like the exiles whom Jeremiah urged to seek the peace of Babylon, and like the early Christians who were urged even in the days of persecution to pray for kings and rulers; those who as citizens
of the city of God are resident aliens in the earthly city, must nevertheless seek its good order. And when called to responsibility as rulers, must accept it in the spirit of servants of the common good. For this is required by obedience to the law of God, which is love. Thus, the citizens of the heavenly kingdom will actively seek the peace and good order of the earthly city;
not seeking to forestall, but patiently awaiting the final judgment when the two cities will be visibly separated and the heavenly city will appear in all its beauty. Such was the vision which controlled the relation of church and society in the western part of Europe for the thousand years from the death of Augustine. The public world of government, of education, of buying and selling,
of ruling and serving, was to be shaped as far as possible by this vision of an order in which love is expressed through the relations proper to a hierarchical order in which God, who is the Source of love, is the Head. There are no illusions about the reality of sin, which always threatens this order, but the greater reality is the sovereign Creator and Judge, who will at the end, separate out forever the just
and the unjust, and justice will be equal for all, whether for peasant or for pope. Yet, as we know, throughout the thousand year period, this order was challenged over and over again by movements which drew their inspiration from the apocalyptic strands in the biblical and post-biblical writings, which voiced the anger and despair of those who saw the contrast
between the Gospel of Jesus and the worldliness of the church, and who again and again, announced the imminent arrival of the heavenly Jerusalem. In Norman Cohn's fascinating book, "Pursuit of the Millennium," he chronicles the millenarian movements that erupted throughout this period, and the first of his examples comes only 150 years after the death of Augustine. There is a continuous line
of such movements, stretching through the people's crusades, the flagellants, the brethren of the Free Spirit, the Taborites of Bohemia, the peasants' revolts, and right through to the messianic reign of John of Leyden in Münster, and the Ranters in England. In every case, the vision is of the total disappearance of the present political order and its replacement by some sort of theocracy, whether of a semi-divine
emperor, or of the elect saints. And it is not difficult to see that the same line continues through the intellectual crisis of the Enlightenment and reappears in the heavenly city of the eighteenth century philosophers which has been so well-described by Karl Becker in his book with that title. And that vision, in the course of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, has developed into the twin visions which have dominated
the twentieth. The liberal capitalist dream of inevitable progress towards a more and more enlightened, liberated, and happy world; and the Marxist dream of the apocalypse of freedom in a cataclysm which would abolish both private property and the state, and create a society of perfect harmony. We are at a point when both visions have faded. It can be claimed, as Langdon Gilkey has said,
that the only convinced Marxists today are the dissidents in the West, and the only convinced liberals are the dissidents in the East. In spite of the conflict between these, the two ideologies which officially operate on the two sides of the Iron Curtain have this in common, that they are both atheist. The one attempts without success to enforce atheism in the private as well as the public sector. The other permits belief in God
as an option for the private life, but firmly excludes it from any controlling role in public life. We have to look briefly at the steps by which Christendom moved from the medieval assumptions that economics is part of ethics and therefore depends upon theology, to the modern assumption that economics is an autonomous science with which theology has nothing to do.
R.H. Tawney's classic study of religion and the rise of capitalism shows that the reformers, both Lutheran and Calvinist continue to take it for granted that a Christian is governed by the law of God in his economic life as much as in any other activity. Luther, as is well-known, regarded the rising capitalism of the fifteenth and sixteenth century in Germany as, quite simply, a "work of the devil." Maintained intact, the traditional teaching
which absolutely forbad interest on loans and condemned as sin the selling of goods for the highest price that they would bear, but characteristically, Luther made no attempt to revise the medieval casuistry to bring it into touch with the new economic facts. It was enough that the man set free by grace would learn how to love his neighbor in all the practical affairs of life by consulting Scripture
and his conscience. Calvin, on the other hand, much nearer than Luther to the economic forces that were changing the nature of European society recognized that credit is a necessary element in the growth of commerce and industry, therefore allowed reasonable interest on loans for this purpose, but in no way altered the ancient doctrine that all such activity is subject to the law of God. Accepting urban society
with its trade and industry, Calvin sought as is well-known to create a civic society in which every sort of activity, political, economic, or cultural, was controlled according to the purpose of all human life as set forth in Scripture -- namely, the glory of God and the salvation of men and women. Neither for Luther, nor for Calvin, would it have appeared anything other than incomprehensible blasphemy to suggest
that human behavior in the sphere of economics was outside the jurisdiction of theology. On the contrary; buying and selling, hiring labor and working for a master, amassing wealth and enclosing land; these are precisely the human activities which are in the greatest need of reminder that every human being stands under the law of God, and will be accountable to God for his treatment of his neighbor.
But of course there never has been a time when it was easy to keep these things in mind, and there were forces at work in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries which made it more than ordinarily difficult. The devastation of the Black Death had disrupted feudal society; the discovery of the New World was flooding Europe with silver and gold, producing a huge inflation of prices, such as society had never known,
destroying therefore the ancient balance in society and making possible vast extensions of trade to the far corners of the earth. Old rules governing wages, prices, interest, and land tenure became impossible to maintain. Capital was no longer primarily the adjunct of the labor of a small craftsman. It became more and more the master which controlled the economic
organization. Through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Protestant divines continued to insist that the writ of Christ ran in all the workings of economics, and to denounce the amassing of capital and the enclosure of land, and the oppression of the poor. And some, such as William Law and John Wesley, carried that same teaching right into the eighteenth century, but other forces were at hand
to provide armor for the cupidity of natural man against the thunder of a preacher like [Latimer?] or the calm advice of a pastor like Richard Baxter. One was a development of Calvinism itself; the other came from the new philosophy and science of Descartes and Newton. The Puritan development of Calvinism took over from Geneva both the assumption that economic activity falls under the rule of God, and also
the reformers great emphasis upon personal responsibility of every Christian to manifest the reality of his calling and election by a life of hard work, self-denial, order, and rigorous discipline. It was these qualities which led to success in the new, expanding world of trade and industry in seventeenth century Europe. Thus it happened, and this of course is an oft-repeated statement that for many of the most successful of Calvin's later followers
the strict limits which he had drawn around economic activity were forgotten; and to quote Tawney, "a halo of ethical sanctification was added to the appeal of economic expediency" -- with the results which the Geneva Consistory would most certainly not have approved. But the other force to which I have referred was more enduring and much more significant. It was, and is,
that view of human affairs which found its inspiration in what the philosophers of the Enlightenment called "the geometric spirit," which saw in the physics of Newton the true model for the explanation of all things, and which sought to understand economics, not in terms of man's chief end, but in terms of laws which could be stated in mathematical or mechanical form. Sir William Petty, author
of the very influential work, "Political Arithmetic," in 1619, defined his object as follows: "To express" -- the object of the new economics: "To express itself in terms of number, weight or measure, to use only arguments of sense, and to consider only such causes as have visible foundations in nature; leaving those that depend upon the mutable minds,
opinions, appetites, and passions of particular people, to the consideration of others." Here we have of course an early setting forth of that elimination of purpose as a category of explanation; that determination to seek all explanation in universally acknowledged natural causes, and that separation of the world of public facts from a world of personal opinion of which we are now familiar. The autonomous
science of economics was thenceforth to develop on the basis of assumption that self-interest is a universal, natural, and calculable force, analogous in this realm to the forces of gravity and inertia in the realm of physics, and that consequently it is possible to develop a science of economics which will be as mathematical and as independent of theology as is the physics of Newton.
And since, for the eighteenth century, nature has taken the place of God, and has inherited His benevolent character, it follows that the pursuit of self-interest will coincide with the purpose of God. As usual, Alexander Pope exactly sums up the faith of his age: "Thus, God and nature formed the general frame / And bade self-love and social be the same."
Traditional Christian ethics had attached covetousness as a deadly sin, and St. Paul had equated it with idolatry -- the putting of something which is not God in the place that belongs to God. The eighteenth century, by a remarkable inversion, found in covetousness, not only a law of nature, but the engine of progress by which the purpose of nature and of nature's God
was to be carried out. The enormous consequences which have followed from this reversal of traditional values are familiar to us. It has shattered the age-long assumption that the world which we inhabit is basically stable and finite, and that consequently, economics is mainly about the sharing out of limited resources. It has shifted the focus of economics from distribution
to production. It has made us familiar with the idea of ceaseless and limitless growth, of unending possibilities of increased mastery over nature, giving increased resources of food, materials, and energy. With a world, therefore, in which economics is mainly about increasing production and it is assumed that if everyone pursues his rational
self-interest, production will grow and distribution will take care of itself. Two hundred years after the Enlightenment, we live in a world in which millions of people enjoy a standard of material wealth which few kings and queens could have matched then, but in which the gulf between the rich minority and the abjectly poor majority is vast and growing; a world, therefore, threatened as never before by destructive violence.
In protest against the injustices of unrestrained free-market capitalism, the Marxist creed holds out the hope of an apocalypse in which the dispossessed will seize power, the oppressors will perish, and all will live forever in perfect harmony. As that vision recedes farther and farther into the future, Marxist states seek to combine the dynamism of modern science with a state control of economic activity
designed to secure some equality in the distribution of wealth. In the quest for equality, they sacrifice individual freedom as capitalist states in the name of freedom sacrifice equality. Yet, neither system can survive except by modifying the rigors of its own ideology. All Marxist governments have to give some place to free-market enterprise, and all capitalist governments
have to use state power to limit the injustices which unrestrained free-market enterprise create. And meanwhile, each side portrays the other as the very incarnation of evil, and the self-righteous fury of their ideological warfare threatens us for the first time in human history with the annihilation of the human race. The eighteenth century philosophers turned from the Christian vision of a city which would come down
from heaven to the enterprise of building the heavenly city on earth. That radical apostasy has now brought us to the place where we face another kind of apocalypse -- the imminent threat of global annihilation and the extinction of the human species. Yet, the classical, biblical, Christian belief that the rule of Christ extends to all
of life has never been totally extinguished. Christian faith has not only inspired enterprises for the relief of the victims of unrestrained capitalism, both through welfare legislation and through voluntary work for the sufferers. It has also inspired programs for the restructuring of economic life. Non-Marxist Christian socialism has an honorable history with real achievements to its credit. The Roman Catholic church
has continued to insist on its right and duty to make ethical judgments on economic affairs, and especially since the rise of the ecumenical movement, the non-Roman churches through national and world bodies have been active in doing the same. At the present time, we are witnessing a strong counter-movement which either asserts that churches have no right to meddle in matters of economics or as in the recent book of Michael Novak,
"The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism," boldly claims that capitalism is, in fact, the form of economic organization which corresponds to the Christian faith. A brief look at Novak's position will bring us, perhaps, to the heart of our problem. Novak takes as fundamental the separation of three elements of public life: the political, the economic, and the moral-cultural. These are separate
realms and any attempt of one to exercise control over the others will be disastrous. In the economic realm, the basic law is that the free operation of rational self-interest will alone secure the general well-being. Medieval ideas of the just price and the fair wage were relevant to a static economy, but are positively dangerous to an economy of growth.
Each man must be free to better his condition as far as he can, and he alone is the judge of what is better. There can be no imposed, or even generally-accepted norm of what is good. In the world of economic values, and I quote Novak, "the central shrine is empty" for no image is adequate to express what is ultimately good. Any attempt, therefore, to subordinate
economics to ethics would bring us back to the clerical control from which we had to escape in order to achieve growth. And, as any generally accepted vision of social order is a "violation of transcendence," and again I quote Novak. But alongside the economic order, there is the moral-cultural order. Novak does not tell us what, if any, is the image in the central shrine
here. But, over and over again he tells us that the proper working of capitalism requires conscientious behavior in all concerned. "Capitalism," and I quote, "depends upon a moral-cultural system separate from the state." Again, capitalism "needs strong moral guidance." Unquote. And the family where familial values are nourished, has therefore
an inalienable place in a capitalist society. But to say that capitalism requires a certain kind of moral foundation is to say that capitalism cannot survive permanently in a secular society. To quote a recent writer, "The disinterested devotion which was vital to the creation of the capitalist work order, and to the public life of industrial nations, and which rested on
a religious idea system appears now as a type of moral capital debt which is no longer being serviced." But this means that capitalism cannot be a self-sustaining system. It depends upon the moral-cultural system and cannot be separated from it. But, moral imperatives surely cannot operate merely as useful props
for a profitable economic order if moral imperatives are not rooted in some belief about how the universe in fact is, they collapse. If they are so related, then the economic order cannot be isolated from their jurisdiction. If capitalism depends upon the insights of a moral conscience, then that conscience surely must have some authority over the operations of the
capitalist system. Novak's argument thus seems to be both incoherent and where it is coherent, anti-Christian. Its incoherence lies on the surface. The conscience which is required to keep capitalism going has no ontological basis. It is a carry-over from an earlier worldview. A conscience which is forbidden to operate in the choice of goals for economic activity
is not conscience in the sense which any moralist, pagan, or Christian has ever understood the term. And the family, which Novak regards as vital to the spirit of democratic capitalism, is precisely the place where the non-capitalist virtues have to be learned; where you are not free to choose your company; where you are not free to pursue self-interest to the limit. Because capitalism pursues the opposite goal,
the freedom of each individual to choose and pursue his own ends to the limit of his power, the disintegration of marriage and the family is one of the most obvious characteristics of advanced capitalistic societies. The morality which Novak invokes to keep the capitalist system going is a fragment, a broken piece left over from the destruction of an older view
preserved for the purpose of keeping the new system going. But moral imperatives only retain their power as part of a living system of belief; some vision of what is finally good. Moral imperatives cannot be used to prop up a different set of values. I quote a sentence from Jacques Maritain, "The sorest disasters can result in the life of a people
when morality, instead of acting as consubstantial with politics, essays to act on them from without, that is, the imposition of apolitical moral laws on an amoral conception of politics." And, insofar as Novak's argument is coherent, it is anti-Christian. To say that the central shrine is empty is simply
to deny the Incarnation. The driving power of capitalism, as Novak rightly stresses, is the desire of the individual to better his material conditions. It is the unleashing of this power from the restraints imposed by traditional Christian morality which has transformed static societies into the dynamic and growing society of which we are a part. No one can deny
either the reality of the motive force, or the magnitude of what it has achieved. The name which the New Testament gives to the force in question is covetousness. The capitalist system is powered by the unremitting stimulation of covetousness. The apostolic advice that if a man has food, clothing, and shelter, he should be content, is not compatible with the
development of our kind of society and it would be better to acknowledge that frankly as Novak does. Modern capitalism has indeed created a world totally different from anything that the human race has known before. Previous ages have assumed that resources are limited and that economics, that is, housekeeping, is about how to distribute them fairly.
Since Adam Smith, we have learned to assume that exponential growth is the basic law of economics and that no limits can be set to it. The result is that increased production has become an end in itself. Products are designed to become swiftly obsolete so as to make room for new products and more production. A minority
is ceaselessly urged to multiply its wants in order to keep the process going, while the majority lacks the basic necessities for existence, and the whole ecosystem upon which human life depends is threatened with destruction. Growth is for the sake of growth, and is not determined by any over-arching social purpose, and that of course, is
an exact account of the phenomenon which, when it occurs in the human body, is called cancer. In the long perspective of history, it would be difficult to deny that the exuberant capitalism of the past 250 years will be diagnosed as a desperately dangerous case of cancer in the body politic, if indeed the cancer is not terminal and there are any doctors left to make
the diagnosis. But it must also be acknowledged that many of Novak's criticisms of socialism are convincing. It is true that socialists, Christian and others, tend to judge capitalism by its actual practice, but socialism by an ideal which has never yet been put into practice. There is a pathetic catalogue of socialist regimes which have been hailed
one after the other as models for the Christian to emulate, and then found to be full of all kinds of corruption and illusion. Novak is quite right to describe a great deal of Christian socialism as, in the strict sense, utopian. It is the politics of nowhere. The debate between the capitalism of the so-called free world and the socialism of the USSR and its allies has become as
intellectually barren as it is politically catastrophic. Each side can point with devastating effect to the failures of the other, but becomes ridiculous when it tries to conceal its own. Both parties have exhausted their moral and intellectual capital. A genuinely missionary encounter of the Gospel with our culture will go behind this futile and infinitely dangerous conflict to challenge the common beliefs
on which both sides rely; beliefs which have long been regarded as axiomatic, but which are in fact illusions. Of course, as contemporary history proves, Christians can live and bear witness under any regime, whatever its ideology, but Christians can never seek refuge in a ghetto where their faith is not proclaimed as public truth; truth for all. It can never agree that there is one
law for themselves and another for the world. They can never admit that there are areas of human life where the writ of Christ does not run. They can never accept that there are orders of creation or powers or dominions which exist otherwise than to serve Christ. Whatever may be the institutional relation of church and state, and there are many possible relationships, no one of which is necessarily the right one for all
times and places -- the church can never cease to remind governments that they are under the rule of Christ, that He alone is the judge of what they do. The church can never accept the thesis that the central shrine of public life is empty and that, in other words, there has been no public revelation before the eyes of the world of the purpose for which all things and all peoples have been
created; the purpose which all governments must serve. It can never accept an ultimate pluralism as a creed, even if it must, as of course it must, accept plurality as a fact. You cannot in fact accept the idea so popular twenty years ago of a secular society in which, in principle, there are no commonly acknowledged norms.
We know now, I think, that the only possible product of that ideal is a pagan society. Human nature abhors a vacuum. The shrine does not remain empty. If the one true image, Jesus Christ, is not there, an idol will take its place. It is not difficult to name the idol which controls our culture; St. Paul has already done so. On the other hand, there can be no return to the
corpus Christianum, to the identification of the church with the ruling power. In this respect, the movement of the Enlightenment is irreversible. We are indeed witnessing an attempt of an analogous kind in the contemporary world of Islam. What is happening in Iran today has surely much to teach us. Why do the present leaders of that country denounce America and Russia equally as agents of Satan? Because they have
seen the fabric of their society, its family life, its sexual ethos, its ideas of what human life is for, disintegrating under the influence of ideas which stem through both these channels from the European Enlightenment, and one can understand and sympathize, but not follow. Islam denies the Christian doctrine of original sin, and therefore believes that it is possible to achieve a total identification of the
laws of the state with the law of God. Church and state, in that way of thinking, are one without distinction and that way we cannot go. The sacralizing of politics; the total identification of one political goal with the will of God, always unleashes demonic powers. The full revelation of the heavenly city lies beyond the horizon of politics, but the vision of it
must control Christian action within politics and here there can be no separation of private from public life. While the church can never identify itself with the kingdom and must seek only the role of a servant, witness, and sign of the kingdom, yet the church can never admit any limitation of its role to the private sector. The church witnesses to the true end, for which all creation
and all human beings exist, the truth by which all alleged values are to be judged, and truth must be public truth; truth for all. A private truth for a limited circle of believers is no truth at all. Even the most devout faith will sooner or later falter and fail when those who hold it are not willing to bring it into public debate and test it against experience in every sector of human life.
If the Christian faith about the source and goal of human life is to be denied access to the public realm where decisions are taken on the great issues of the common life, then it cannot in the long run survive even as an option for a minority. If, as I believe, there can neither be a total identification of the church with the political order, nor a total separation between them, then there is room for much discussion of the ways
in which in any particular situation, these relations are to be ordered. The question "how?" is the Christian vision to influence the public life in a post-Enlightenment society will occupy us in the final lecture this evening, but before closing this one, let me try to suggest something of what the content of that vision must be. Both capitalism and socialism draw their strength from a vision of human life
and this vision sustains them in the face of their failures. For capitalism, it is the vision of freedom, the freedom of the human person to develop his own powers to achieve the greatest success of which he is capable to enjoy the fruit of his achievement. For socialism, it is the vision of equality. At its best, this has been a vision of brotherhood, of community; but in practice, it has often been reduced to a vision of a mere equality of rights for
each person seen as an autonomous individual. In one case, freedom is pursued at the cost of equality. In the other, equality is pursued at the cost of freedom. Both derive from the Enlightenment vision of the human person as an autonomous individual with innate and equal rights to pursue self-chosen ends to the limits of their powers. Each ideology
can therefore accuse the other of violating a faith which both hold, by the denial of freedom on the one side, and the denial of equality on the other. I believe that the Christian vision of God's purpose for the human family is different from either of these and arises from a different belief about what human nature is. From its first page to its end, the Bible is
informed by a vision of human nature for which neither freedom nor equality is fundamental, but rather relatedness. Man, male and female, is made for God, and in such wise, that being in the image of God involves being bound together in this most profound of all mutual relationships. God binds Himself in relation with covenant men and women; a relation to which He remains faithful at whatever cost and however unfaithful His covenant partners may be. And people and nations are called to live in binding covenant relationships with one another. Human being reaches its true end in such relatedness; in bonds of mutual love and obedience, which reflect the mutual relatedness in love which is the being of the
Triune God Himself. Neither freedom nor equality are words which can take us to the heart of the truth in this matter. The breakdown of relationships will destroy freedom and will destroy equality, but neither of these will be achieved by being sought as ends in themselves. True freedom is not found by seeking to develop the powers of the self without limit, for the human
person is not made for autonomy but for true relatedness in love and obedience, and that means therefore the acceptance of limits as a necessary part of what it means to be human. Nor will the quest for equality create real justice. For justice, the giving to each of what is proper to each, can only be realized in a mutual relatedness in which each gives to the other the love
and obedience which enable all to be truly human. Apart from this, the quest for justice becomes self-destructive, since it is of the very essence of fallen human nature that each of us overestimates what is due to the self, and underestimates what is due to the other. The truth that human being finds fulfillment not in the attempt to develop oneself, not in the effort to better one's own condition,
not in the untrammeled exercise of unlimited covetousness, but in the experience of mutual relatedness and responsibility in serving a shared goal. I have been fascinated by reading several recent surveys in Britain, which have brought out the fact that for great numbers of people, they will affirm that the best years of their lives were those in which they shared the experience of the war;
the bombing of cities, the destruction of homes, the absence of rest or holiday, the shortage of food and clothing, and the constant presence of death are all part of the picture. But what colors it all in the memory of these people is the memory of shared commitment to a common purpose. That is what brings human beings to their very best and most of us know it. Part of the terrible irony of war is that it enlists
the very best in human nature for the purposes of mutual destruction. But to eliminate from the public life of nations any accepted vision of a shared goal, leaving each individual to pursue self-chosen goals and making covetousness the prime mover of human affairs, is to invite destruction in another way, destruction from within. And who can deny that we are witnessing this destruction in the affluent
societies of today? What accepted vision can there be which can transcend the conflicting purposes of nations, classes, and races, and draw all humankind into mutual responsibility? There have never been lacking candidates for this place. World history is full of the dreams of a New Order which will draw all humankind together and when these dreams are ours, we call them dreams of human brotherhood
but when others try to make their dreams come true, we call it imperialism. Imperialism can be simply defined as the name we give to other peoples' proposals for human unity. And, of course, we are right, for every proposal for human unity which does not specify the center around which that unity is to be created necessarily has as its implied center
the intentions, the visions, the beliefs of the proposer. There can be no center for the unity of the human race except in Him who said, "I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself." For the cross of Jesus Christ is the place where God Himself has offered the mercy seat, the place of expiation, the place where sin is forgiven, and the sinful claims of the sinful self
to make itself and its dreams the center of the world is set aside in favor of the One whose dream, whose claim alone is valid. There is the one and only center which has been given for the unity of humankind, and therefore the one object that can bind nations into unity without setting them at enmity with one another. The church, as the one universal, supernatural,
supranational society is the bearer of the vision which alone can give to each nation a true unity of purpose, but if it is to do that, it must accept in each nation, the responsibility of placing all public life -- political, economic, and cultural in the light of its gospel. It must affirm that the central shrine of a nation's life cannot remain empty and that if Christ is not there,
an idol will certainly take His place. How the church is to fulfill this responsibility is the subject of my final lecture. That it must do so is, I believe, a necessity which arises from the very heart of the Gospel.