Public Theology & Christian Living

By Ervin S. Duggan

So dire is the state of the American culture as it slouches toward the end of the twentieth century, that even the most lurid description of its moral, intellectual, and spiritual decay is likely to seem understated.  The nation’s urban streets and its popular media explode with violence.  Underage drinking and an epidemic of drug use swamp law enforcement agencies and treatment centers.  Teenage pregnancies feed triple epidemics of abortion, illegitimacy, and child abuse.  Sexually transmitted diseases are now common among the monied professional classes, not just the underclass.  The poor are encouraged by state legislatures to squander their hard-earned dollars (or welfare checks) on state-run lotteries and numbers games.  A suicide doctor and his lawyers persuade successive juries that for depressed terminally ill patients, execution is as desirable a treatment as hospice care, and carbon monoxide a medically acceptable agent for the relief of pain.

In the nation’s high schools, teachers less competent than their predecessors create a generation of graduates less competent than their predecessors, while outside their classrooms security guards and police officers monitor the halls.  Small wonder that for years now, students have been arriving on university campuses with lower test scores than the entering freshmen of previous generations.  Before they graduate, many students are led to believe that the university’s proper role is to be not so much an arena for study and reflection as a cockpit for power struggles over gender and ethnicity.  On many campuses, the literary and historic canon once accepted as the source of civilized and humane learning is now derided as a corrupt device for perpetuating the hegemony of oppressive European males.

America’s religious life is equally chaotic.  A recent poll pegged the proportion of Americans describing themselves as regular churchgoers at its lowest level in memory: 37 percent.  Once flourishing mainline religious denominations flirt with apostasy, hemorrhage members, and collapse toward bankruptcy, while cults, covens, and New Age mumbo-jumbo thrive.  Media coverage of religion seems to oscillate between stories of controversy (abortion, school prayer, the ordination of homosexuals) and stories of corruption (Catholic clergymen molesting altar boys; Protestant evangelists fleecing their contributors, patronizing prostitutes, or both).  In a bookstore not long ago, I saw a sign above a display that seemed to sum up the nation’s spiritual confusion: “Psychology, Religion and the Occult.”

Should orthodox Christians despair?  Not at all.  The Apostle Paul faced a situation arguably as bad.

It is my purpose in this chapter to put forward three arguments:

• First, American culture is in decline and chaos because it has become unmoored from two noble traditions, one religious, one secular.
• Second, many Christian churches, and many individual Christians, are responding to this cultural decline and chaos in disastrously ham-handed ways.
• Third, the situation presents an exciting opportunity for Christians to do their work on earth more gently, shrewdly, and effectively.

The Culture of Chaos

The defining characteristic of our culture is chaos.  There are few agreed-upon rules of moral, aesthetic, or civic conduct, and the existing rules are often the subject of angry, unresolved debate.  Amid this chaos, perhaps the most universally accepted rule is that every individual has the right to devise his or her own rules, and that one person’s self-devised standards are as good as another’s.  The cheerleaders for such radical personal autonomy, of course, do not acknowledge that it produces anarchy or chaos; they prefer terms like “freedom” or “pluralism.”

Their forebears who launched the American experiment in democracy, however, would surely find the notion of unfettered personal freedom and self-invented rules uncongenial; the Founders in their day deplored the unrestrained license of the mob.  They celebrated self-restraint, and warned that individual liberty must be tempered with republican virtue—a word whose present meaning denotes moral purity, but whose ancient Latin root suggests strength and competence.

Our contemporary culture of chaos and moral relativism, then, which increasingly we accept as normal, is not normal, if we reach back in history to compare.  Today’s culture of chaos is a twentieth-century phenomenon, linked to a collective loss of faith in transcendent values and to our resulting loss of a common moral vocabulary.

When we read the essays and speeches of our eighteenth- and nineteenth-century forebears, one of the most striking revelations is the extent to which they shared a common moral vocabulary.  For all their lively debates and disagreements, the Founders’ public lives and discussions were conducted in the context of a shared moral culture to which virtually all gave assent.  If we imagine culture to be a river in which everyone swims, or from which everybody drinks, the culture of our forebears was created out of two great tributaries: the Judeo-Christian biblical tradition and the Greco-Roman classical tradition.

Thomas Jefferson, for example, was not conventionally religious: “I am a cult unto myself,” he wrote.  Yet Jefferson clearly believed in a Creator—an “Author of Liberty”—and he pored over the New Testament in an effort to devise an ethical system based solely on Jesus’ actual words.  Benjamin Franklin likewise was not conventionally religious.  Yet he, too, was knowledgeable about biblical religion and friendly to it, and his writings are replete with biblical references.  Franklin spoke without embarrassment of the infant United States as “the new Israel,” for example.

References by our political forebears to the classical tradition are equally commonplace; America was also called “the new Athens.”  And what is striking to the modern reader is not only that our early leaders were steeped in biblical and classical lore: They were, after all, members of an educated elite.  What is remarkable is that these leaders assumed a similar knowledge of these two great traditions among the plainer people to whom they spoke.

Both of the principal speakers at the dedication of the Gettysburg cemetery, Abraham Lincoln and the scholar-diplomat Edward Everett, drew from the two great tributaries in their remarks.  And both appear to have been totally confident that their audiences— the immediate audience at the dedication and, later, the reading audience—had also drunk from the same double stream.

As Gary Wills suggests in his richly fascinating book of 1992, Lincoln at Gettysburg, Lincoln could be certain that when he used the phrase ”a new birth of Freedom,” his words would resonate deeply with a populace who knew by heart the language of spiritual rebirth in the Gospel of John.  His Gettysburg Address was also patterned, Wills writes, upon the classical form for funeral orations laid down by the ancient Greeks.  Lincoln, railsplitter and backwoodsman though he may have been, was familiar with the rhetoric of Pericles.  Everett also filled his two-hour oration at Gettysburg with rhetoric gleaned from both great tributaries.  He used cadences derived from the King James Bible, and direct biblical language, quoting the prophet Amos and the Apostle Paul.  He evoked scenes from ancient Greece, comparing the dead at Gettysburg to the Athenian heroes of the Battle of Marathon, as if he expected his listeners to know exactly what he was talking about.

I emphasize the importance of these two traditions to an earlier America in order to arrive at a crucial point: Both traditions, the religious and the secular, had an important feature in common.  Each accepted the notion of objective, even absolute, values; each asserted the reality of something called Truth, with a capital “T.”  The religious tradition asserted that the God of Moses was the source of ultimate authority; this tradition arrived at objective values and Truth through the instrumentality of divine revelation.  But the Greeks also believed in objective truths and absolutes; the dialogues of Plato show Socrates and his proteges searching for the summum bonum and for objective ideals of justice, beauty, and truth, discernible through reason and rational discourse.

The two tributaries of Western tradition, in short, gave our forebears a common moral culture and a common moral vocabulary: a culture that generally accepted the notion of transcendent truths and values; truths that existed whether or not mortals chose to acknowledge them; rules that had authority, whether or not mortals chose to obey them. Even the moderate and pragmatic Aristotle derived a set of coherent rules of aesthetics and politics that he believed to be objective, not self-invented.

Today’s culture and today’s style of angry but inconclusive moral and political discourse, exist, by contrast, with little or no reference to these two great traditions.  Indeed, today’s lack of moral consensus—today’s culture of moral relativism and near-worship of the uninhibited, unfettered Self—suggests that twentieth-century America has been drinking from some other cultural stream than the river formed by the biblical and classical tributaries.

Dr. Gene Edward Veith Jr. has suggested what that other source may be.  In a thoughtful and disturbing book, Modern Fascism: Liquidating the Judeo-Christian Worldview, he puts forward the idea that the secular culture of modern America can be traced to dark and turbid headwaters that start with the nihilists and Nietzsche and course through Heidegger and the European existentialists.

This stream of thought, Dr. Veith reminds us, has as one of its objects the total overthrow of both the classical tradition and the Judeo-Christian heritage.  It was Nietzsche, for example, who proclaimed dramatically that since religion is a mere projection of human wishes, “God is dead.”  It was Nietzsche who denounced both Judaism and Christianity as “slave religions.”  And it was Nietzsche who advanced a new version of the summum bonum: an Aryan ideal of “race, of breeding, of privilege,” whose chief exemplar would be a New Man—a Superman—who would be “capable of creating pain and suffering, and must experience pleasure in so doing.”

Modern scholars, Dr. Veith notes, tend to underestimate Nietzsche as a sort of operatic prose stylist, forgetting that his thought attracted serious adherents and had real consequences.  The celebrated existentialist Martin Heidegger, for example, expanded on the idea of the death of God in his rectoral address at Freiburg University: “If God is dead,” he said approvingly, “there is no longer a transcendental authority or reference point for objective truth. . . . [T]o make one’s own rules is the highest freedom.”

Heidegger became a Nazi—one so radical that his Nazi superiors finally parted company with him over his desire to persecute Catholic students at Freiburg.  And Heidegger, like his fellow European existentialists, seized upon the idea of self-invented values as liberating.  For them, rebellion—against the classical tradition and against Judeo-Christian religious tenets—was a creative act.  They celebrated the immanent, the earthly and immediate, deriding older notions of transcendent norms and objective values.

Such ideas have had far-reaching consequences.  Ten years after the end of World War II Walter Lippmann complained, in his Essays in the Public Philosophy, that although the Western democracies had triumphed militarily in that great conflict, they may have been defeated spiritually and morally.  Certain alien ideas had crept into Western life and thought, Lippmann observed—ideas that caused postwar civilization in the industrial democracies to be philosophically and politically “deranged.”  Lippmann, himself not at all religious, nevertheless deplored the West’s modern loss of faith in transcendent values, the loss of what he fondly called “the mandate of Heaven.”

“If what is good, what is right, what is true, is only what the individual ‘chooses’ to ‘invent,’” he wrote, “then we are outside the tradition of civility.  We are back in the war of al1. . . against all.”  Lippmann traced the derangement of traditional values to a new philosophy that was emphatically not drawn from the two great tributaries of Western thought—a malign new philosophy that argued the primacy of the human will, that gloried in power, that found glamour in violence.  Such notions, he wrote in 1955, eroded the notion of citizenship, sapped the power of leaders to govern, and made civilization dysfunctional.

Writing in the relatively calm air of the 1950s, Lippmann defined the twin tributaries—Judeo-Christian thought and the classical tradition, reaching down through the Enlightenment—as part of America’s essential “public philosophy.”  Without a firm grip on that shared public philosophy, he wrote, civility, and perhaps even civilization, would die away.  “The crucial point,” he wrote, “is not whether naturalists and supernaturalists disagree. . . . It is that they [should] agree that there is a valid Law which, whether it [is derived from] the commandment of God or the reason of things, [is] transcendent[:] not someone’s fantasy, wish or rationalization, but there objectively. . . . It can be discovered.  It [has] to be obeyed.”

The Political Temptation

Is America unwittingly fascist, as Dr. Veith avers?  Or merely “deranged,” in Lippmann’s melancholy view?  One need not agree totally with either author about the sources or degree of our moral and spiritual dysfunction to acknowledge that today’s cult of the imperial, autonomous Self has been disastrous in social terms.  Unmoored from ancient traditions, “liberated” from fidelity to the idea of objective truth, our modern culture of chaos values self-expression above self-discipline.  The rise of moral relativism and enthusiasm for self-invented rules has produced, as Lippmann predicted, a culture of chaos and perpetual contention, recalling indeed the specter of Hobbes’ “war of all against all.”

How should Christian churches (and individual Christians) respond to this cultural challenge?  Christian faith, of course, is first and foremost about the well-being of immortal souls, about the relationship of individual souls to an eternal God: “A charge to keep I have; a God to glorify; a never-dying soul to save, and fit it for the sky.”  But Christians should not shrink from the reality that their tradition is also a cultural treasure for this world, and that “this world” is the arena given by God to Christians for acting out their faith.  Charles Wesley’s great hymn quite properly turns, in its second verse, to that temporal arena: “To serve the present age, my calling to fulfill; O may it all my powers engage, To do my Master’s will.”

It is a sad irony, however, that a time of maximum need for the redemptive work of the church in this world has too often found churches stumbling toward precisely the wrong solutions.  America’s mainline Protestant churches, for example, have suffered their greatest decline in members, contributions, influence, and effectiveness during precisely the same years that they have struggled most avidly for political and cultural power.  For years, the denominations once accurately described as “mainline” have selected their agendas almost totally from the steam-table of hot issues in the secular political culture: Nuclear disarmament.  The nuclear freeze.  Women’s rights.  Gay rights.  Farmers’ rights.  Workers’ rights.  The Cold War.  Universal health insurance.  “Empowerment” of the poor and dispossessed.  Various soi-disant liberation movements at home and abroad.

Desperately eager to be seen as “prophetic,” wistfully desiring to be “relevant,” mainline church professionals over three decades have beckoned their flocks willy-nilly to the partisan political barricades and pell-mell into corporate disaster.  A nadir of sorts was reached when mainline social-witness activists marched hopefully to Central America in the 1980s, in support of revolutionary movements later proved to be so violent, coercive, and corrupt that even the most earnest defenders of social-witness politics were shocked into embarrassed silence.

The self-destruction of the mainline churches by succumbing to the political temptation over the past thirty years, however, is apparently not a sufficient cautionary example to evangelical churches.  As if in imitation, their clergy and professionals are marching to the right-wing barricades today as eagerly as their mainline siblings marched to the left-wing ramparts: joining “Christian” coalitions, manning phone banks, endorsing candidates, and advocating specific legislative remedies with the same naive fervor that brought their mainline brethren first to distraction from their true mission, then to irrelevance and near-ruin.

Christian theonomists and Christian reconstructionists are seeking to establish, through coercive legal and political means, a political simulacrum of the kingdom of God, as surely as mainline “fraternal workers” sought to establish their version of that kingdom arm in arm with the Sandinista Party.  In the process, they abandon the eternal for the evanescent, exactly as their mainline counterparts have done; they distract themselves and their flocks from the legitimate mission of the church in this world; and they bid—unwittingly, perhaps, but blasphemously nonetheless—to substitute political coercion for the free working of God’s grace.

Can anyone doubt that the evangelical dalliance with the political temptation will be fully as disillusioning and damaging as the mainline’s similar flirtation?  Three wise maxims should be posted on the walls of every evangelical church—or tattooed, perhaps, on every evangelical forearm—as warnings against succumbing to the political temptation.  The first is from the New Testament: “Put not your faith in princes.”  The second is from Martin Luther: “I would rather be governed by a wise Turk than a stupid Christian.”  The third is from the winsome and incomparable C. S. Lewis: “Jesus tells us to feed the hungry, but He does not give cooking lessons.”

Ministering in the Culture of Chaos

If marching to the political barricades is the wrong mission for the church in this world, what is the right mission?  What, precisely, should be the cultural mission of the church?

Let me suggest three answers to this question.

The first answer is deceptively simple-sounding.  It is that the church’s task in this world is to be the church.

I say “deceptively simple-sounding” because the temptation is so great for the church to transmogrify itself into something else: today a Broadway theater, tomorrow a protest movement; next Saturday, a social club or singles bar, the next day a political party decked out in choir robes and priestly vestments.

The tasks of the church are worship, education, the equipping of the saints, pastoral care, and evangelism.  If churches allow themselves to fail at these tasks, success at other, lesser tasks will mean nothing.  If they hold faithfully to these tasks, on the other hand, nothing can hold them back, and their redemptive influence on the culture will be mighty indeed.

The long collapse of the mainline churches into confusion and irrelevance, remember, took place in tiny increments: this amateurish symposium on health care costs piled atop that muddled debate about nuclear deterrence; this divisive, half-informed squabble about the regime in North Korea added to that earnest, chin-rubbing denominational study of labor policy in East Anglia.  Every hour wasted upon such distractions was an opportunity lost—an opportunity lost to steep Christians in the essential lore—the powerfully transforming lore!—of their faith and their tradition.  Over time, confusion about mission led to more serious complications: biblical illiteracy and spiritual ennui.  People become malnourished in two ways: by eating too little, and by eating too much of the wrong things.

A second task (and opportunity) for the church in this world is to redouble its efforts in education, especially higher education.

The “equipping of the saints” is not just a task for the Sunday school classroom.  America’s small liberal arts colleges, many of them denominational institutions, have for nearly two centuries had a favorable impact on the culture out of all proportion to their size and wealth.  A nation suffering an intellectual and moral crisis needs more such institutions now, and better ones.

1. S. Lewis was right: Jesus does not offer cooking lessons—there is, in other words, no such thing as “Christian cuisine,” and no such thing as “Christian politics” or “Christian engineering.” But Lewis must have known a Christian cook or two, and surely it is possible to train Christian politicians, Christian physicians, Christian film-makers, Christian journalists, and Christian engineers. Not “Christians” trained to be narrow, sectarian, and piously intolerant in the mode of the church lady of “Saturday Night Live” fame, but educated Christians who are humane, broadly cultured, formidably competent, and self-assured about the contributions they can make to a lost and hungry world.  Producing such leaders is the exciting challenge facing a new generation of church-linked colleges and universities.

Those colleges and universities must be the sites where the biblical and classical traditions are recovered, rehabilitated, joined to one another, and proudly taught again.

Those Christian institutions of higher learning, incidentally, will do well not to do battle with science and the scientific way of knowing.  Their ambition, instead, should be to persuade science and scientists not to be arrogant: not to imagine that science, which is a valid and useful tool for understanding the material world, has anything at all to tell us about the immaterial world.  The hopeful task for Christian professors in Christian colleges is not to defeat science; it is to score a victory for other valid ways of knowing that science arrogantly ignores, marginalizes, or rejects—the aesthetic way of knowing, for example, and, importantly, the religious way of knowing.  The religious way of knowing, after all, has been accepted and employed by such intellectuals as John Milton, John Donne, John Calvin, and Gerard Manley Hopkins, and has given the world the Sistine Madonna of Raphael, the Divine Comedy of Dante, the St. Matthew Passion of Bach, and the poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins.

A third task for the living church in a dying culture is to communicate an important truth to faithful Christians: that “spiritual warfare” must not be the same as actual warfare.

The biblical admonition that we Christians should put on the breastplate of righteousness and gird up our loins with truth is important, but clearly metaphorical.  And the operative word in the opening line of that beloved old hymn about Christian soldiers is that we should march as to war, not actually to it.

Why is this an important point?  Because too often today Christians are adding to the angry combativeness that is a lamentable mark of our chaotic contemporary culture.

It is true that the provocations to Christians from that culture are serious and reprehensible.  In particular, Christians who describe themselves as orthodox or evangelical find themselves contending these days against a hostile, even aggressively hostile culture.  And surely, facing that culture of aggressive unbelief, Christians have a duty to persevere—to live lives of persistent, unrelenting assertion.

The style and tone of that assertion, however, must be wisely and carefully calibrated to comport strictly with the commandment of love that is the first rule for Christians.  Muscular Christians who love the rough and tumble of spiritual warfare will instantly retort, correctly, that true Christian love must have high standards and be demanding, like the love of a good father; that true Christian love must have nothing resembling that flabby, anything-goes tolerance that pretends to be love, but is actually mere indifference.  They deserve a response, and it is this: Even the demanding love of a father is still recognizable as love; it is not so strident, censorious, arrogant, and angry that it resembles something called hate.

What specific lessons might churches and Christian leaders teach believers about the right way to contend with that hostile, unbelieving culture?

One, surely, is that human freedom is central to the gospel; that the gospel recognizes and accepts a degree of human freedom that will lead some humans to wreak tragedy and ruin upon themselves and others.  In one of Jesus’ parables he describes the propagation of the kingdom of God as resembling a sower casting seed.  Not all of that seed finds a fertile place to grow, Jesus reminds us; some seed, inevitably, falls on rocky ground.  Jesus is warning us, is he not, that access to God’s grace can only come through free choice.  He is warning us, moreover, that not every free person will make the right choice.  Christians should grieve over every soul who refuses to make a saving choice, as Jesus wept over Jerusalem.  But we must never imagine that we can coerce such choices or find political and legal shortcuts to the kingdom of God.

Another lesson about how to respond to a hostile and anarchic culture can be found in the rich language of family love that permeates the Scriptures.  In our own families, do we not find ourselves contending with brothers or daughters or sons who refuse to bend to our beliefs and our ways?  If we are wise Christians, we do not expel them from the circle of our love: We pray for these prodigal children; we exhort them, and we love them, with a demanding and sometimes impatient love (as indeed we should love our prodigal, disobedient selves).  Should it be any different with a prodigal world—a world over which we are given “dominion, ‘ which suggests fatherly affection?

A final lesson to temper us as we confront a culture that is increasingly hostile to Christian faith is the reality that God truly holds sovereign and ultimate power over the universe.  Given the state of contemporary culture, it is tempting to become discouraged.  Too much discouragement, however—too much rage at the world’s waywardness—may be a symptom of overweening dependence upon ourselves and our human powers.  Do we truly believe that God is the King and Sovereign of the universe?

There are three tasks, then, for the church and its people in a fallen, failing, and hostile culture:

First, the evangelical church must hold to its historic priorities of worship, teaching, pastoral care, and evangelism—and not imagine that political shortcuts can further the work of the kingdom.  To renounce such shortcuts will not diminish the power of the church to do good in the world; it will enhance it.

Second, the evangelical church must become a force in education, especially higher education—a force determined to reclaim and reassert the intellectual traditions, biblical and classical, which are the basis for true civilization.  To do so will seed the world with individual Christian leaders, strikingly competent in their fields, who will act out the drama of “overcoming evil with good.”

Third, the evangelical church must teach its people the true arts of spiritual war, whose weapons are the persuasive power of superior ideas coupled with a gentle, unrelenting love.  Those who teach and learn this lesson will discover the true excitement of Jesus’ admonition to be “wise as serpents and gentle as doves,” or of C.S. Lewis’ observation that the true Christian is like a secret agent, parachuted by God behind enemy lines.

A Role Model

I said at the outset that the Apostle Paul almost certainly faced a culture as wayward and difficult as our own.  That fact should surely give heart to any Christian weeping over the secular city of today.

Paul faced, first of all, a new and largely unformed church, riven with disputes between the Judaizers, who wished to impose old Hebraic rules, and the Hellenizers, whose message was more universal and whose understanding of human freedom was certainly more profound.  Paul faced a world with no agreed-upon scriptural canon to rely upon or even to argue about.  He confronted a world which, like ours, worshiped many gods—but one, moreover, in which monotheism, the powerful idea of One True God, had nothing of the reach and power it has attained today.   Paul faced conditions of moral and sexual libertinism at least as troubling as those of today—and they stared at him not just from within the general culture, but from within the church at Corinth.

If it is possible for Christians to follow Jesus, then surely we can follow Paul.  And if Paul could succeed in setting in motion the transformation of a culture, then surely we face an exciting project, and one with at least some possibility of progress and success.

Ervin S. Duggan is President and CEO of the Public Broadcasting Service, Washington, D.C.  This article is reprinted from Here We Stand: A Call from Confessing Evangelicals, eds. James Montgomery Boice and Benjamin E. Sasse (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1996), 43-56.  Used by permission.