Change is inevitable. It is something that must be lived with, for if the biblical understanding of reality is correct, change cannot be prevented. Revolution is not a new thing. Every ruling class in history that has insisted that its rule was destined to last forever has been shown to be wrong. The rule of an elite is never permitted to last very long. Every oppressor and tyrant will be overthrown. The Bible calls this the judgment of God. Reality is not static; therefore, we cannot preserve what is.
Since a static society is impossible, the conservative attempt to maintain the status quo is both naive and dangerous. The most dangerous approach of all to revolution is to try to stifle it. How is it possible to mummify an old society that is pregnant with the new? If reality is not static, then we can see that violence is the result of the frustration of change. Change is inevitable; the question is whether that change will come violently or nonviolently. But that question can be answered only by those in control. Change will come, and if it cannot come nonviolently, then it will come violently. The amount of violence involved in this process depends on the determination of the oppressors to hold on to their privileged position in the world. Basically, violence comes not from those seeking change, but from those preventing change.
It is a tragedy that the
Not only is it wrong to try to stop a revolution, a revolution is actually needed. The liberal dream of reforming the old structures does not come to grips with the reality of the system that continues to oppress the people of the
The present system has proved itself incapable of solving our problems. Bureaucratic structures can be quite efficient in dealing with small problems, but seem to be totally incapable of solving the more pressing problems of our world. The most we can do in our cities is to hire more police to keep the lid on. Who is to solve these problems? The business community is so out of touch with the oppressed that it doesn't even understand the problem. Besides, its goal is incurably profit, not the humanization of society. Will governmental structures solve the problems? They show little indication of making the massive effort that would be necessary, and when they do make small efforts, they become tangled in bureaucratic red tape. The war on poverty is a classic example.
We reject the bourgeois liberal contention that all change must be rational, orderly, and within the limits of the present system. The liberal believes that the tendency for progress is incorporated into the very nature of our institutions. Thus he or she is forced to believe that continual progress is being made, even while poverty, starvation, militarism, and racism are on the increase. This view is actually a total commitment to the present system and a refusal to understand how disorderly, irrational, and violent the present system is. Because of his or her support for the status quo, the liberal fails to develop alternatives to existing structures and thus is unable to create meaningful solutions to our problems. When a train is headed toward destruction there is little point in adjusting the controls. The need is to get the train headed in a different direction.
The New Left has at this point often been charged with anti-intellectualism and utopianism. These charges are unfair. Since the radical has rejected the assumptions and definitions of the system, he or she has few resources to rely on for analysis and reflection. He or she needs to strike out on uncharted paths and must rely heavily on experimentation, for he or she has found the old answers and definitions inadequate for the future. His or her rejection of the assumptions of the present system does not make him or her anti-intellectual. Is it more dangerous to consider the impossible as possible, or so to limit the possibilities that one cannot see beyond the present? The real utopianism is to believe that the present system can solve problems that it is in fact unable to cope with.
The radical understands that the institutions of our society were developed in another era under very different conditions and in response to different needs. Today these institutions are bankrupt and unable to deal with our situation. Note the stagnation and repressiveness of our educational institutions, for example. Institutions harden as they age, and as they try to preserve themselves they close themselves to the future. For institutions to survive, they must be reproduced and continually reborn. What is needed is the development of new institutions to replace the old, just as the present institutions were developed in another era to replace the institutions of that era. We need revolution, not reform.
A Christian Theory of Social Change
The Christian response to our revolutionary age must be to stand with the exploited. To be faithful to the biblical heritage and to be a responsible member of society will mean support for those who seek to escape from their bondage. The Christian should be identifying with the oppressed, rather than with the oppressor. He or she should be more concerned about the suffering of the poor than with the "dilemmas" of the President. It is worse than hypocritical to talk about "love and brotherhood" when what is really meant is the perpetuation of a system of organized exploitation and injustice. However, while the Christian should not be in the business of condemning the oppressed people who are overthrowing their chains of oppression, neither dare he or she wholeheartedly embrace everything in the revolutionary movements. The revolutionaries stand under the same qualification as do the oppressors. The obedient Christian points to the new reality regardless of situation or consequence. He or she will compromise that vision neither for oppressor nor for oppressed.
Our task then is to construct a Christian theory of social change. There are three basic approaches to social change. First there is the individualistic approach, of changing individuals. This is often identified with both political conservatism and religious fundamentalism. This theory maintains that the way to solve the race problem is to change the attitudes of all people on race, and then the social structures will take care of themselves. In effect this approach to social change ignores social structures.
The second approach is to focus on the power structures. This is the approach of political liberalism, religious Puritanism, and the Communist Party. To solve the race problem, they would legislate new laws and outlaw discrimination. The communist approach, of course, would be the most radical attempt at changing the power structures. They are all the same, however, in that they see change as coming from the top down. Centralization of power is seen as a solution to most any social problem.
The third approach, which will occupy the remainder of this chapter, is a synthesis of Anabaptist and New Left strategy. This approach sees change as coming from the bottom up, through the establishing of new alternatives within community, and the inbreaking of a new order. This approach will seek to avoid the false debate between those who would work with structures and those who would work with individuals.
Radical change must come from the bottom up. The most positive hope within the New Left concept of revolution is the rejection of top-down reform and centralization of power. One of the tragedies of communist revolutions has been their reinforcement of the power of the state and greater centralization. With the increased threat to freedom that comes with centralization, it is significant to stress decentralization and participatory democracy. The picture of one who would subjugate the entire universe in order to establish new values is not a happy one. Its means and ends would necessarily be totalitarian. The point of the New Left is not to try to take over the power structures (the liberal dream which makes no sense anyway), but to question the presuppositions of the structures, to show that they are in fact irrelevant, and that they have no power.
Both guerilla movements and the movement in the
There are at least three aspects to working at change from the bottom up. First comes a clear understanding and analysis of the system that controls us. Then we must begin the creation of a new self-identity. This involves getting rid of bourgeois values and the development of new life styles and relationships, both personal and societal. Third, we need to discover actions that will disrupt the old and help point to the new. The sit-ins during the Civil Rights Movement are one example of this. We need to begin to set in motion forces that the larger society will find impossible to ignore.
Although there is a centralization of power in our society, the problem must not be attacked from the center. The action should be on the periphery. The real center of power is with creative minorities who operate on the edge, on the cutting edge of society. They are closer to the real action than those who are in the power centers. The important changes in history have come not through people getting themselves in power, but through people who had the courage to break from the existing structures and begin to create new alternatives outside the system. We now call them pioneers. Radicals will not work through the power structure in order to take it over. Neither will they wait until the establishment is ready to accept their ideas, for they may very well spend their whole lives waiting as so many have done. They begin to act now on the vision. They are building a new society that will replace the old.
The Christian vision of the now reality includes not only a new society, but also new people. This also is no vague hope for the future, but can be a present reality. The revolutionary is one whose life has been changed. Guilt, despair, or hate are not motivation for the true revolutionary. To repudiate the old is not enough to liberate humankind for a new life style. His or her action must be based on a new reality that he or she has experienced. He or she must begin to live in a new reality that gives him or her strength and vision. If the only way really to confront the system is with one's life, then it is most important that radicals begin living lives that are revolutionary.
One problem of revolutions in the past has been that they separated liberation of whole social classes from liberation of the individual. If the social class is liberated from domination from the outside but continues to dominate people, liberation has in reality not taken place. We must talk of both personal and social salvation, for they cannot be separated.
The true revolutionary is one who knows who he or she is and why he or she is rebelling. Thus he or she does not easily fall into a trap of bitterness, unscrupulous ambition, or pleasure in seeing others destroyed. The one who is concerned about revenge for past wrongs is not revolutionary, for he or she is living in the past, not in light of the new that is coming. Camus writes that rebellion against evil is a search for unity. But for the Christian, rebellion is based on a unity that has already been found. Sin is the opposite of radical. As Eagleton puts it,
The vagrant and the sinner are the precise opposite of the rebel, who needs to be an authentic human to rebel, and establishes him or herself as such in the act of rebellion. To sin is to be a tramp, a revolutionary.
Radicals act not out of guilt, but for liberation. The concern is not so much getting for others what they have, but getting rid of what they should not have. They must go beyond being able to identify the oppressor out there to realizing that I am also being oppressed, and that I must act not because I believe I should do something about that problem, but because I feel that oppression myself and now act for my own survival. We need a politics of liberation rather than a politics of guilt.
The revolutionary is one who is free, and to be free means to be defined by the new reality. When the slaves define themselves as children of God rather than slaves, they are rebels, for their slavery is not what gives them their identities. Slaves who rebel simply deny that anyone is their master. They refuse to be defined in terms of a slave-master relationship, for they live by a new reality. This is the message of the gospel: that humans can be set free. The theologian Emil Brunner, describing the divine-human encounter, writes,
… What happens is not something that short-circuits humans as free subjects, that estranges them from themselves, but something to the contrary that alone makes them really free and truly active. The reason for this is that it frees them from a life in contradiction to a life in the truth, and heals and integrates their wills and makes them genuinely their own, wills which when sinful were never truly their wills, but lay under the domination of an alien power. To be led by the Spirit of God is not to be possessed. On the contrary, it is to be liberated from possession, from the domination of evil.
Rebellion is the refusal to be considered an object. It is to know that one has worth in spite of any historical phenomenon. The rebel is one who refuses to live in the box assigned to him or her. He or she has discovered freedom. Even chains or prisons cannot enslave a free person.
Arthur G. Gish, The New Left and Christian Radicalism. Reprinted by permission, William B. Eerdmans, Co.
Got something to say about what you're reading? We value your feedback!