The love of a sovereign God drives us into concern for the social order. The shape of that concern is at least partly a critical one. God does not simply tell us to accept the existing order. The bindingness and the vitality of our concern for the shape of society will be fed at more than one stream within the salvation story:
To affirm God as a loving creator, the earth as our home to be stewarded, and the life of our neighbor as entrusted to us is one way to say it;
To affirm the covenant with Noah, with its divine protection of life, was a promise of the seasons as the structure of cultural life and divine protection of blood as the presence of personal life is another;
To affirm the covenant with Abraham with its call to faith and its promise of a blessing for all the nations. It is still another;
To affirm the Mosaic covenant whose Torah is an abiding testimony to the wholeness of God’s concern for the shape of the life of his subjects is another;
To recount the Hebrew history with its repeated rhythms of obedience and disobedience, temptation and renewal, is yet another;
To respond in faith to the Kingdom proclamation of Jesus as reordering of the relationships of those who hear and follow him, and potentially of others as well, is still another;
To recount in faith the story of the apostolic missionary community as it spread a new life style across the Mediterranean world is another;
To proclaim the hope of a new city whose builder and maker is God, where a tree grows whose leaves are for the healing of the nations, is yet another;
All of these drive us into active social concern.
Few of us would declare there must be but one way of stating the mandate for Christian social concern, in only one verbal form.
But that still leaves us with our present agenda. There would not be the need we now acknowledge for a process of common search and formulation which has not yet been completed. if “Bible believing Christians” had not somehow failed to put their thoughts together on this subject, in a way which would responsibly illuminate their obedience, and protect them against the temptation of Constantinian conformity to which we have been especially subject in recent generations.
So the biblical mandate we are to be looking for must be more than the imperative to love the neighbor too locally and individualistically. It must not only explain that it is our duty to respect the powers that be, but also provide leverage for formulating the limits of that respect and articulating our resistance when those limits are over-run. It must not simply affirm the obligations of community and of righteousness. It must also equip us to respond when the very structures of community and righteousness become destructive.
All of the themes noted above in passing will be of substantial usefulness in this task. I hope we all affirm them all, even if in different sequences and proportions. My search is for those which can be the most formally constitutive of that understanding of the social task which can provide the instruments of its own self discipline.
THE PARADIGM OF PEOPLEHOOD
Evangelical preaching and practice in certain classical forms trusts the will of the regenerate individual to be the bridge between grace and structure. The individual in a position of authority whose heart has been changed by the Gospel will, it is claimed, use his power more unselfishly, more creatively, more industriously, for good. This is not false but it is far too small an answer and one which is more modern than biblical. Among its limitations are the following:
--it provides no substantial information about what are the particular more righteous in which power should be used. It must assume either that they are self-evident to the whole society, or that they are known somehow intuitively by the converted statesman. Neither of these assumptions can be supported either by experience or by theology.
--it ascribes little significance to the ethical concerns and decisions of people who are not in power.
--it fosters the already too great evaluation of coercive power and prestige in society. It makes it still harder than before to put the question whether certain particular powerful positions should not exist at all.
Certainly, as Frank Buchman argued, if Mussolini had been converted he would have great power which he could have used for good. But if you place your hopes for the welfare of Italy and the glory of God in Italy on the conversion of Mussolini, you are no longer free to ask whether Fascism itself is wrong.
--it dodges the fact, which a truly honest individual in a high position is very clear about, that many evils are matters of structure and not of inner disposition, so that the most unselfish heart in the world cannot necessarily “use for good” or “clean up” a fundamentally vicious structure.
--this approach when taken straight fosters an un-evangelical understanding of the “station” or “office” as a relatively autonomous vehicle of moral insight. That the liberty of the Christian man consists of his being released from inauthentic constraints and irrelevant laws, in order to do what belongs to his station, was in the 16th century an understandable corrective against clericalism, and a potentially useful fulcrum to criticize the crusading glorification of the state as an instrument of divine righteousness. But when taken alone it is not true. The insight, or the role definition, of the banker, of the businessman, of the legislator, of the educator is not sufficiently sanctified that he can read off the surface of the social order a definition of. the duties of the man of God in that slot as the celebration of the effectiveness of the sanctified important individual would lead us to try to do.
Now I have suggested that the Christian church as a social reality is the needed corrective. The alternative to the focus on the redeemed individual is not to pay attention only to structures or to massive movements of the mob and the media, but rather to recognize that there is a particular point where the redeemed individual and social structure are both present, namely in the Christian community as a visible body within history. In an earlier work, I made the statement “the primary social structure through which the Gospel works to change other structures is that of the Christian community.” How can it be claimed that the choice of God to work with man in community rather than alone provides correctives for the shortcomings indicated above?
Sometimes the experience of the Christian community is a paradigm in the simple sense. The Christian community does things which the world may imitate. The Christian community feeds the hungry and cares for the sick, in a way which may become a model for the wider society. The Christian community makes decisions through group process in which more than one participates, and moves toward consensus rather than decision by virtue of office and authority. Historians of democracy have already suggested that the basis for the concept of town meeting in Anglo-Saxon democracy was the experience of disputation and decision-making in the independent puritan congregation. Today, even secular business management circles are adopting the concept of decision making through conversation which stems from the radical reformation.
The Christian who does have a position of relative power in the wider society, far from claiming autonomy in that station by virtue of God’s having made it an authority unto itself, can be relatively trusted in his role only if he will listen to the admonition of his brethren regarding the way he discharges it. Thus the Christian community is not only a model as community; it is a pastoral and prophetic resource to the person with the responsibilities of office, precisely to keep the office from becoming autonomous as a source of moral guidance. Sometimes the function of the community will be simply to encourage him to have the nerve to do what he already believes is right. Other times the church member through their participation in other parts of society will bring to his attention insights he would have missed; sometimes (at least we can hope that) the community’s proclamation of the revealed will of God might provide for him leverage to criticize the present structures.
Serious sociological and psychological analysis should have made it clear to us that there is no such thing as an individual functioning all by himself out of the definition of who his “self” is standing alone. The person is aware of his being himself and being alone precisely because he is the member of more than one group, and because at some points the claims of several groups upon him conflict. The service of the Christian community to the business man, the politician, the communicator, the worker, or any other molder of the shape of culture, is not to promise and to glorify heroic individual integrity, but rather to provide a reference group which is both accepting and demanding, more reliable and more critical than the other groups and structures in which the socially responsible person is otherwise bound.
The peoplehood which the Apostles after Pentecost led in self- understanding called itself the ekklesia. That did not mean what “church” means in modern usage: it meant parliament or town meeting: a gathering in which serious business can be done in the name of the Kingdom. In other words, the Christian community is a decision-making body, a place where prophetic discernment is tested and confirmed, the organ for updating and applying the understanding of the revealed law of God, the context for the promised further guidance of the Spirit.
Evangelical thought in recent decades has often been hampered by too naive an understanding of how the Bible can function authoritatively in social ethics. On one hand there has been naive trust in the insight of the regenerate man of God; just as naive on the other side has been the trust that a few phrases from the Bible could be translated directly into social policy without any discipline of translation across cultures. The alternatives to these over simplifications is not relativism or selling out to some contemporary social science insight, but rather the functioning of the congregation under the guidance of the Spirit. The New Testament does not claim that Scripture contains all the answers. It rather promises us (John 14:26ff, 16: as samples only) that there will be adequate and binding further guidance given to the church as it goes along, and that this further guidance will be subject to the judgment of the community, oriented by the fixed points of the apostolic witness in the canon.
The peoplehood called ekklesia is different from other peoples in its composition. It includes Jew and Gentile (not simply two ethnic groups but two cultural types). It includes both masters and slaves and makes them brothers “not only in the spirit but also in the flesh” (Philemon v. 15). It includes men and women, replacing their hierarchal relationship in pagan society with mutual subordination (Ephesians 5:21). It shares money and bread and the gifts of the Spirit in a Way that is a radical alternative to the authority structures of Gentile society. In all of these respects and more, the Christian community provides both a place to stand from which to say to the world something critically new, and a place to keep testing and exercising the understanding of that critical Message.
The Christian community is also a means of influencing other groups. The simple fact that the church is intractably present on the social scene as a body with her own authority, economic structure, leadership, international relations, openness to new members, conscientious involvement in society at some points and conscientious objection at others, means that social process cannot go on without taking account of her presence and particular commitments.
Permit me to recount a personal experience of a decade ago. We were discussing in an ecumenical conversation circle in Evanston what might be the Christian responsibility for the racially segregated housing picture in that town. The self-evident need, from the point of view of some of the participants in the conversation, was for the ministers of the community to deal with the mayor and city council to ask for municipal administrative measures in favor of open housing practices. This would be “the church” operating, in the person of the ministers, to discharge her social responsibility. The conversation was brought into some disarray when one of us asked whether the real estate dealers and the sellers of houses are,not mostly members of the protestant churches in Evanston. The answer was that they probably were, but that the preacher was powerless to get his own members to take Christian ethics seriously without the coercion of government to get “the church” as membership involved in lay professions to be less unchristian.
This anecdote is a specimen of the recurrent temptation to expect other forces in society to be more effective, or other authorities to be more insightful, than the body of the believers in their structured life together. As Franklin Littell analyzed the failure of Prohibition:
...politicians in the churches attempted to secure by public legislation what they were unable to persuade many of their own members was either wise or desirable... Lacking the authenticity of a genuinely disciplined witness, the protestant reversion to political action was ultimately discredited, and the churches have not to this day recovered their authority in public life.
The lesson drawn from the defeat of prohibition could be that political action is self-defeating. That would be to misread the point. The point is rather that legislative implementation is only meaningful when it represents the extension of a commitment on the part of the Christian community which has already demonstrated the fruitfulness of that commitment.
I could go on with the list. The church as a network of complimentary charismata is a laboratory of social pluralism. The church as educational community is a nurturing ground for counter-cultural values. The church as community of forgiveness is a live alternative to a society structured around retributive sanctions.
So the foremost political action of God is the calling and creation of his covenant people, anointed to share with him as priests, prophets, and in the servanthood which he revealed to be the human shape of His Kingship. The Church is both the paradigm and the instrument of the political presence of the Gospel.
But now around that center, let us round out the picture. In seeking to organize what more there is to say, I have followed two formal concepts. One, already stated, is the awareness of past unfaithfulness and failure. This is not an area where we can start simply from the beginning, unfolding either right ideas or right strategies straight out of the Scriptures.
Parenthetically, it might clarify the picture for us to recognize a tension widely present in evangelicalism, between formation and reformation as ways to see oneself. Often the claim is made to be unfolding the truth straight from the center, timeless and unconditional. Yet in actual historical experience, the need has more often been to critique and restore: to admit unfaithfulness and seek renewal. It is this latter view of our task that I assume. I am not asking why Christians should care about the political realm, but why they so often have been involved wrongly. I propose to develop my outline by itemizing some of the challenges, beginning with the questions not the answers.
Secondly, I have chosen for this introduction multiplicity not simplicity. Both preacher and theologian look for one key thought to bring all the rest into line. It could be done. Everything could be seen in the light of Creation, or Covenant, justification by Faith, conversion, love, or hope--or the church. For two reasons I here avoid the path of simplification:.
a) it might invite fruitless denominational debates about whether one center is better than another;
b) it might leave unchallenged the trend to intellectual compartmentalizing, which would see social responsibility as one ministry beside many others, or one good deed beside others, or one chapter of ethics beside others.
I thus willingly pay the price of a certain scattering of’ my remarks in testimony to the roundedness of what, we are trying to describe.
“POWER” IS THE NAME OF THE GAME
The political realm is the realm of power. Power is the ability to make things happen. The political process channels and distributes this ability. If bad guys have power bad things will happen. So we good guys must get power to make good things happen. But unfortunately, to get the power for good uses, even the good guys must do some less good things. This way to open the problem leads to some unhelpful blind alleys:
--it may lead to arbitrariness in judging how much evil is necessary to attain how much good, in which the privilege of person or party rate higher than the competing values.
--moral leadership may be replaced by finesse in drawing lines between shades of gray, as estimates of “how much” and “how far” replace “why” and “whether”;
--to say “no” to the process may seem--to those who say no as well as those who go along--like just another reading on the “how far” kind of question and as having chosen as the better part the purity of non-involvement.
I must already object to this analysis as naive political theory. He who in a given situation withdraws o, is defeated is not necessarily any less responsible, active, involved, than the one who makes it to the top.
But a deeper cost of the call for the good guys to get power is the quantifying of what they may sacrifice to get it.
--the just war theory quantifies the lives you may take for the sake of some other political good;
--“national security” justifies the crimes you commit to weaken your critics.
--the “safety of our troops” justifies unconstitutionally expanding a war.
--that peace must be “with honor” justifies prolonging a war.
But the focus on the good guys getting control does not first become wrong when they cheat or kill to win. It becomes wrong when control itself is seen as goal, and when power is seen as a neutral quantity easily usable for good. Seen politically, power tends to corrupt: you need no theology to be more realistic than the American mood has been about “government by the people” through their elected representatives.
But you do need the New Testament to see Jesus’ alternative:
The rulers of the nations lord it over them
Those who exercise authority let themselves be called benefactors.
This is not the way it should be with you.
Jesus recognizes--as Luke reports it--that “doing good” is claim the powerful make for themselves. He doesn’t say outright that the claim is false. Nor does he affirm it. He simply sets the issue aside in favor of servanthood as his way to be the expected King, and therefore His disciples’ way as well.
But servanthood is not a position of non-power or weakness. It is an alternative mode of power. It is also a way to make things happen, also a way to be present. So it is that when we turn from coercion to persuasion, from self-righteousness to service, this is not a retreat but an end run. It brings to bear powers which on balance are stronger than the sword alone:
--the power of the truth rediscovered when obscured;
--the power of the dissenter willing to suffer;
--the power of the people to withhold confidence;
--the attraction of an alternative vision;
--the integrity that accepts sacrifice rather than conformity to evil.
In sum: we can be protected from absolutizing power for its own sake, and from the betrayals of good causes which such thinking has justified,
--by a vision of Christ’s servanthood as a live alternative to Lordship,
--by awareness of the many other kinds of power on the side of truth and humanness;
--and by realism about the precariousness, the real weakness and the temptations, of the top of the heap.
THERE’S NO PLACE LIKE HOME
Another besetting sin of the political realm is Provincialism: the limitation of one’s love to one’s own kind of people. One of the main reasons Reinhold Niebuhr could rightly say that groups tend to be more selfish than individuals is that a leader’s bid for recognition most easily appeals to group interest against those of some other class race, nation…
Narrowness of world awareness may be the fruit of misinformation, of traumatic experiences of migration, or of oppression. A wider than provincial vision may be fostered by education, by travel, and by good experiences with people of other cultures. But the alternative vision which it is our business to proclaim is more than cross-cultural education: it is a spiritual mandate.
“If any one is in Christ,
--there is a whole new world!”
The NEB properly translates not “a new creature” in the individualistic sense but “new creation”. Paul says that about Jews and Greeks. He says it as well by expansion about the divisions between classes and between the sexes. It is just as true by implication of the divisions of tribes and tongues, peoples and nations, which Revelation 5 tells us are overcome by the power of the Lamb that was slain.
We already know, from the development of secular culture, that wider unities are economically and culturally imperative We have learned to see the region as a wider unity than the village, the nation than the state. But unless the wider vision be spiritually rooted, it will not hold in the crunch against the instincts of group enmity. It is not enough when a few groups join--as in the American “melting pot”--against a more distant common enemy. Cosmopolitan vision is not enough. Unless the positive love of the enemy stands behind the affirmation of the dignity of other groups, unless divisions are transcended by a dynamic rooted in the divine nature (Luke 6:36) and in the reconciling work of Christ (II Cor. 5:16f), it cannot tame our demonic native ethnocentrism.
This may be a good place to stop for a question that goes beyond the Bible itself. Jew and Gentile are reconciled in Christ; but can that “whole new world” be implemented in the political realm? Jesus’ disciple will love his enemies: but can that love be imposed on the world? Of course it cannot be imposed; nothing of the meaning of the Christian faith can be imposed upon the unbeliever. But that! is not the question. The question is whether, when the Christian acts according to his faith in this way, by relativizing provincial selfishness and defending the rights of other parties, he is thereby being apolitical or irrelevant. The answer would seem to be clear: how you see -the adversary and ‘the wider human community is the very substance of politics. Love of the enemy, respect for the out-group is not politically popular but it is politically relevant and politically right.
MEANS AND ENDS: PRINCIPLES OR PROVIDENCE
When I speak of what is “right” I have identified another abiding issue; what is the place of pragmatic compromise? Are “right’’and “wrong” timeless and clear? Or situational and calculating? The justification for specific political activities which are not evidently expressive of the love of God and welfare for immediately productive of the neighbor, is usually given in terms of calculation of the projected effects of a given action or of the evil events which would take place if such questionable action were not taken.
To use a traditional label, contemporary political ethical thinking practically without exception “utilitarian.” The structure of utilitarian calculation may be complex or simple, long or short range. One may speak immediately of some particular threat to be warded off, or one may use long range prudential considerations like “honesty is the best policy” or “I do not want to be responsible for the erosion of the constitutional prerogatives of my office.”
Utilitarianism as a style in ethics is so prevalent in our culture as to be hardly challengeable. It would be too long to argue carefully here the philosophical inadequacy of simple utilitarianism as an ethical system.
Among the logical shortcomings of utilitarianism as a full system are the following:
Effectiveness in reaching a goal can only be measured if the goal itself has been justified by some other criterion than utility, and if the price that must be paid for reaching the goal can also be quantified in terms that reach beyond them in order to permit weighing the price and the goal against each other.
There is a hidden non-utilitarian assumption when I say “I should make the course of events come out right.”
Dealing with the effects of a decision in terms of causal process presupposes a closed causal system permitting me to evaluate my action in terms of its predictable results; yet the fact that I am making a decision whose effects have not been calculated assumes in my own person an openness within the system. If I am to take seriously that the system is open where I make my decision (even it be on the basis of my calculation of utility), I can hardly justify assuming that all the other agents within the system are completely docile to mechanistic causation.
Right now, as this nation rehearses daily the destructive effects upon our community of the liberties taken by those who felt that whatever they needed to do for the sake of a very good cause was justified, we have again begun to see the human side of the argument for a morality of principle. But now our question is the narrower one. Is there anything particular about the biblical message or about evangelical protestantism which could speak with a fitness of its own to this question? Does biblical theology push us toward a particular mood or structure in ethics, as well as setting basic ethical norms?
I suggest that it does; and that the correction for a self-justifying and self-accrediting pragmatism is a mood of doxology or trust, in which believing behavior is seen as an effect and not only a cause. Right action is a reflection of a victory already won, as much as it is a contribution to a future achievement. It is more an act of praise rather than of simple servile obedience. We do not enter responsibly into the structures of social concern because we are sure what we can get done there, but because we are proclaiming the Lordship of Christ and predicting the day when every knee will bow before him. Thus our conviction and our commitment are not dependent on our predictable effectiveness, nor on our confidence in our analysis of the mechanisms which we are attempting to manipulate. I do not mean to suggest any lack of concern for the study of the structures and the mechanisms of social change; but we do not canonize our interpretation of those structures in such a way that it could at certain times tell us to do the wrong thing for a good cause. If we see our obedience more as praising God and less as running His world for Him, we will be less prey to both despair and disobedience.
The other side of the corrective for self-serving pragmatism is the ancient Hebrew denunciation of idolatry. Idolatry means the willingness to honor and to sacrifice for other values, other loyalties than God Himself. Radical monotheism exorcises the spirit of compromise by challenging the merit of the causes which are absolutized when truth or life or health are sacrificed to them. But idolatry means more than that. The difference between the true God and an idol is not only that one is worthy of honor and the other not. The idolater uses his prayers and offerings to manipulate the powers of fertility and strength. The Canaanite did not sacrifice to Baal because Baal was holy, worthy, or righteous. His cult was for the sake of his culture. Ancient Near Eastern idolatry, in other words, was the pragmatism of that age. The gods were used for human purposes, whereas Yahweh was to be honored for his own sake.
None of these considerations sets aside the need to think, to weigh the likely effects and the relative costs of available strategies. But they may help diminish the arbitrariness, the self-confidence, and the short sightedness with which deeper values tend to be given up for immediate advantage.
ADDENDA
This should be sufficient to exemplify--though not to exhaust--my claim that many strands of Christian faith point us into responsible, distinctive social presence. More examples, no less fitting could be added: let me name only one more without elaboration.
Open, true communication in places of the fabrication and management of information is a prerequisite of social health. Truth-telling as moral ultimate is rooted in God’s own nature; truth telling as social sine qua non has yet to be firmly anchored even in the most civilized democracies. When a press secretary can without apology declare his prior statements “inoperative,” when secrecy is so self-evident that breaches of secrecy are considered a worse offense then the misdeeds they betray, we see again the need for what Jesus meant when, sweeping away all asservations as coming “from the Evil One”; he proclaimed “let yes be yes and no be no.”
POST SCRIPT
I have dealt with form more than content, with the why of social concern more than the what. I have not itemized liberation, violence, peace, economic justice, productivity, ecology . . . Not that the Bible would not speak as well to these matters of content: it certainly does. But what has been holding us apart from one another and holding us away from the task has been more the debates about the whether than unclarity about the what, and because the what will vary according to context. The why is the same hope as of Old; but a hope whose fulfillment we claim Jesus began:
It shall come to pass in the latter days that the mountain of the house of the Lord shall be established as the highest of the mountains, and shall be raised up above the hills; and peoples shall flow to it, and many nations shall come, and say; “Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of the God of Jacob; that he may teach us his ways and we may walk in his paths.” For out of Zion shall go forth the law and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem. He shall judge between many peoples, and shall decide for strong nations afar off; and they shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more; but they shall sit every man under his vine and under his fig tree, and none shall make them afraid; for the mouth of the Lord of hosts has spoken. (Micah 4:1-4)
When this article appeared, John Howard Yoder taught ethics and theology at Goshen Biblical Seminary, was a contributing editor, and is author of The Politics of Jesus. Much of Yoder's theological work came under review in 2014 after evidence surfaced indicating years of predatory behavior by Yoder and sexual abuse of women. (See "The failure to bind and loose: Responses to Yoder’s sexual abuse" by Rachel Waltner Goossen in The Mennonite magazine.)
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