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The Problem Of Ethics Today
By Charles C. West

"The word of the church about calling to suffering service, about forgiveness and reconciliation as ways to peace, justice, and new humanity ring false because they are expressed by a church which does not find itself in the proletarian situation and which therefore belongs to a section of society that can use these Christian responses to undercut effective protest against itself. . . . Revolutionary humanism is the direct descendent of a long tradition in biblical and Christian history which in its increasingly desperate uncertainty needs both the encouragement and the correction of the full Christian gospel. But the words of this gospel are so embedded in the religious culture, against which the revolutionary criticism of religion is a weapon of divine judgment, that not only are the revolutionaries confirmed in their atheism but we ourselves are forced to ask how we may repent of our ideas of deity in order to rediscover the relationship with Christ and our neighbor which we are called to proclaim."

THE National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders reported, March 1, 1968, to the President of the United States and to the nation that the drift of events in the United States is toward two societies, "one black, one white-separate and unequal." The report identified a national crisis, which The New York Times called "dangerous, profound, and far-reaching," in all the forces which create racial ghettos, in our deteriorating cities, and in present inadequate efforts to deal with them. It spoke of the danger of large-

Charles C. West is Professor of Christian Ethics at Princeton Theological Seminary, Princeton, N. J. He is the author of Outside the Camp (1958) and Communism and the Theologians (1959).

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scale violence, white retaliation, and ultimately of "the separation of the two communities in a garrison state," if drastic steps are not taken to improve employment, housing, education, and welfare, steps which will require greatly increased taxes and expenditures.

The prospect is apocalyptic. But the Commission represented the political and economic establishment of the country. It was composed of persons of liberal but moderate views and wide reputations for successful action, for realism, and sober judgment. Its intention was not revolution but stability and progress. It appealed to the long-range self-interest of a society which it presumed would want to preserve itself and develop in continuity with the moral values and social institutions of its past. It spoke to the reason and conscience of the American people, confident that by these faculties the people would be moved.

This is liberalism at its very best, the faith by which this country has lived. It has weathered many crises before: the paroxysm of civil war, the despair of great depression, the toughening of power conflicts and compromises. It may seem therefore presumptuous to discern in the present challenge more than another episode. But the presumption is one we must risk. We are participants, not detached philosophers of history; and we are Christians who cannot rest content with a "liberal" creed. The thesis of the following discussion, therefore, is that two fundamentally opposed experiences of life confront each other in the modern world: the one of experienced peace and freedom, with the hope that it may be preserved and developed; the other of rejection, frustration, and alienation, with the hope of revolution. These two experiences have developed their responses to the world in faiths and ideologies. Theology also has made its contribution to both of them so that the conflict is internal to theological ethics itself. Today both experiences confront not only the challenge they present to each other, but also an internal crisis of doubt, of fear, and of urgent search for the meaning of humanness. This is the problem of ethics today. Christian faith is caught in its dilemmas, indeed they are the "material"¹ of theology. The task of Christian ethics therefore is to discern more sharply than ever before the form of metanoia which is demanded of all men if they are to live, the form of hope by which the future may actively be grasped, and the style

¹ In the Aristotelian sense of chaotic hyle.

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of community which might in this future deserve the epithet "human."

We proceed to elucidate this thesis in four parts: (1) the crisis of liberal humanism, (2) the crisis of revolutionary faith, (3) the paradigmatic metanoia of theology, and (4) suggestions for an ethic of hope.

I

The liberalism of modern American society is no longer the utopian optimism of Woodrow Wilson's new freedom; it is post-Marx, post-Einstein, and post-Niebuhr. The faith which it retains is no longer in the ultimate congruence of human ideas with the beneficent laws of nature, in the evolutionary wave of endless human progress, or in the eternal harmony of reasonable individual interest with the public good, but in a method of thought and action whereby the expanding horizons of human knowledge and power may be grasped and directed, the future planned, and the destructive conflicts of human interest controlled and redirected. It is the crisis of this method which concerns us here.

"The world," wrote Karl Popper, "is not rational, but it is the task of science to rationalize it. Society is not rational, but it is the task of the social engineer to rationalize it."² External reality -the form of the true and the good-is not to be discerned in the order of nature and its law, it is to be grasped by man, the subject, with a method of rational pragmatic inquiry which will bring order and meaning to it. Objectivity is maintained by common allegiance to the scientific method and its premises: that all truths are hypotheses to be tested against the experiment and experience of others, that each man's insight is relative and must be corrected in the give and take of free inquiry, and that all the problems of life are to be approached experimentally, unfettered by total worldviews. "A social technology is needed," Popper writes, "whose results can be tested by piecemeal social engineering."³

This is a chastened pragmatism. It lies under the shadow of Wittgenstein's dictum: "The limits of my language mean the limits of my world."⁴ It has learned from Einstein about the relativity of facts to the coordinate systems within which they are measured.

² The Open Society and its Enemies, vol. II, p. 357.
³ Ibid., p. 222.
⁴ Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 5.6.

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It has recognized the danger of ideological bias which creeps into every analysis of the laws of social behavior, and the impossibility of describing, or even believing in, das Ding an sich in human society or in physical nature. It lives willingly on the edge of the nihilism and instrumentalism which these qualifications imply.

But it is at the same time a confident pragmatism. It does not matter that objectivity as such has been lost; it has been replaced with an expanding universe. The planning and inventing capacities of man can interact with whatever energies operate in the external world to create and transform reality. In the words of one rhapsody on this theme: "We have the power and the will to probe and change physical nature, to control our own biology and that of the animals and plants in our environment, to modify our weather, to alter human personality, to reach the moon today and the rest of the heavens tomorrow. No longer are God, the human soul, or the mysteries of life improper objects of inquiry. . . . We are convinced again, for the first time since the Greeks, of the essential intelligibility of the universe." This intelligibility is, to be sure, not the contemplation of a static perfection, such as inspired Aristotle, but the permeability of the universe to the organizing power of human technological reason. The planning act has replaced the structure of being; unlimited freedom has replaced the search for objective truth. "We are recognizing that our technical prowess literally bursts with the promise of new freedom, enhanced human dignity, and unfettered aspiration."⁵

This, at least, is the possibility, if the method of this rationality is maintained, so the believers say. But to believe this, and therefore to look at the coming post-industrial, cybernated age with hope and not with horror, requires a second article of faith: that the powers at work in history can be balanced in such a way that all will find it in their interest to participate in the community of pragmatic reason from which technological change goes forth. It requires, in other words, faith in a democratic method of historical action.

This faith also is no longer naive progress theory. It has been through disillusion with opposing forms of historicism: the liberal faith in evolutionary development toward social harmony, and the utopian confidence that by one total transformation of existing power relations, the problem of social conflict could be eliminated.

⁵ "Technology and Religion," by E. G. Mesthene, THEOLOGY TODAY, Jan., 1967, p. 485.

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It knows that society is always a conflict of powers, and that conflict is the only alternative to total domination. Its problem is to make this conflict limited and creative, and to cultivate what Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. has called "the spirit of the center." This is the spirit of pragmatism, not ideology, of individual integrity versus mass programs, of constant struggle to create conditions in which men may live in greater freedom and creativity while rejecting all total solutions to society's problems. It is the spirit of reform, not revolution. It is the confidence that all totalitarianism is in the long run self-defeating and that there is a dynamic in social conflict and change which can, if we believe in it, bring forth free humanity. "Conflict is also the guarantee of freedom; it is the instrument of change; it is above all the source of discovery, the source of art, the source of love."⁶

This is the faith which has driven liberalism forward since the days of the New Deal. It inspired the Marshall Plan, the policy of containment, and the hope for a detente at which that policy aimed. It is expressed in W. W. Rostow's "non-Communist manifesto" for the development of nations and in Barbara Ward's eloquent plea for world-wide cooperation in aid and trade. It has its domestic expression in John Kenneth Galbraith's economic analysis and prescriptions and, despite all difference in diagnosis, in Robert Theobald's appeals to moral rationality to back the guaranteed annual income. It underlies the optimism with which the Office of Economic Opportunity continues to describe its work despite attacks from left and right. It inspires statements on Vietnam-the recent Freedom House declaration is a good example-both in moderate criticism of United States action there and in moderate defense of it. It speaks even through the strident urgency of the report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders.

This liberalism is a secularist phenomenon, a form of faith in man. But its present expression is in no small measure due to the interaction of a revitalized modern theology with it. This poses a special problem which centers in the way in which the theological insights, especially of Karl Barth and Reinhold Niebuhr, have been used by technological humanism, and the way this humanism in turn has been used to give content to Christian ethics.

⁶ Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., The Vital Center, p. 255.

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Karl Barth is well known as the leading theological proponent of an ethic of freedom and grace, based on God's election. "Freedom is the joy whereby man acknowledges and confesses this divine election, by willing, deciding, and determining himself to be the echo and mirror of the divine act."⁷ It is he who among theologians most decisively dismantled the structure of a law presumed to be known from some general source apart from the covenant relation established by God's gift of himself to man in Jesus Christ. He most vigorously has described the Christian life as one of partnership with God, of free creative experiment using biblical models and theological insights as guides in exploring the changing forms of co-humanity which the sanctifying liberation of man in this relation with God makes possible. It is he who at the same time has maintained the sovereignty of a gracious God over all of creation to such a degree that he grants no advantage to the Christian over other men in understanding "the phenomena of the human" within the sphere of secular pragmatic insight, and no advantage to theology over any other science in exploring the phenomena of human nature and society. The consequences are two: (a) Christian ethics itself is encouraged to move toward an experimental pragmatism, contributing its understanding of the relation in which man stands, as the biblical witness describes it, to the general secular search for the best way of human life; (b) Christian ethics imparts to the whole effort an assurance, a hope, a consciousness of grace continually at work, which reinforces the confidence of liberal society. It seems to me that Harvey Cox's The Secular City is a combination of Barth and liberal pragmatism in this sense.

Missing from this picture is, of course, the note of crisis, of judgment, of metanoia, of death to the (social as well as personal) self which accompanies and gives meaning to the victory of the risen one. Barth has been selectively used by pragmatic liberals, and this is partly his own fault. The crisis dimension of his theology was never repudiated by his emphasis on grace.

There is still no way from the problem of ethics as a part of man's efforts to secure and fulfill his own life to a solution in terms of God's grace and command. The absolute No to the self as center remains and must be concretized from time to time against specific idolatries, such as Nazism, or more recently the ideology of a western

⁷ "The Gift of Freedom," in The Humanity of God, p. 79.

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Christian culture. Furthermore, the freedom of a Christian to explore new forms of co-humanity with joy and hope includes the freedom to choose a revolutionary movement as a vehicle and sign of hope and thus to appear, to those who are threatened by revolutions, devastatingly negative. But the interaction between grace and crisis -the methodology of ethical perception-is never worked out by Barth himself in the field of social ethics using the phenomena of secular insight and science.

This is the point at which Barth was most vigorously challenged by Reinhold Niebuhr and accused of an irresponsible reliance on grace. But Niebuhr himself, coming from the angle of a sober Christian critique of culture, has become in another way pragmatic liberalism's greatest supporter. "A realist conception of human nature," he wrote in describing his lifelong guiding principle, "should be made the servant of an ethic of progressive justice."⁸ This was, indeed, his mature conviction. His demolition of liberal illusions about the purity of reason, the progress of history, and the goodness of man, his frank participation in the social power struggle to achieve a relative justice which must then be placed under judgment of a higher norm, his identification of the responsible humility of men who know the forgiveness they must ask for the acts they must perform as the response of human nature to the love of Christ -all were with the object of achieving a "progressive justice" in human society which would not support the status quo, but would not succumb either to the destructive illusions of revolution. Pragmatism in thought and the demoncratic process in action, were for Niebuhr unique reflections of this responsible humility on which depend the health and hope of human society and which in turn reflects the actions of a judging and self-giving God. The wisdom of experience embodied in such open flexible patterns of thought and society overrules the follies of our ideologies. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. called Niebuhr's work a "penetrating reconstruction of the democratic faith."

It is, of course, nothing of the kind. The faith is Christian, not democratic, and Niebuhr's efforts to apply it constructively have had their revolutionary as well as their pragmatic phase. The law of love embodied in the life and death of Christ poured out for men, the impossible possibility of true self-giving which is the final purpose

⁸ Man's Nature and His Communities, p. 24.

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of God for men, is always relevant to the power struggle and to the premature and relative harmonies men establish among themselves. Theology never becomes for Niebuhr mere social methodology. But the fate of Niebuhr's insights, like Barth's, when they are appropriated into the context of technological humanism, is typical of the dilemma which confronts the whole of Christian ethics in the western world today. On the level of analysis and action, it has become curiously captive to the methods and perspectives of a faith that is not its own.

One could illustrate this almost at random. It plagues the serious efforts of Christianity and Crisis to carry on Niebuhr's tradition of being at once concretely analytical and theological. The World Council of Churches, from the Amsterdam Assembly (when the ecumenical movement broke decisively with the tradition of natural law and coined the concept "responsible society") down to the Geneva Conference of 1966, has faced it continually-to the extent that it has been not uncommon practice in conferences and working groups to ask the theologians present to write a preamble to whatever economic and political ethics the rest of the group work out without reference to it. There have been a few efforts to understand "responsible society" as a theological model. Roger Mehl calls it "the analogical transcription on the level of secularized and civil society of the evangelical brotherhood given to the church and partly lived out here,"⁹ a pattern of the humanizing work of Christ in the world, in the light of the coming kingdom. From its first formulation by Dr. J. H. Oldham in 1948, it has meant the centrality of personal community and relations as a goal in the midst of technological man, combined with moral exhortation that all Christians might accept this reason and this realism. Its method has been the balancing of opposing interests and powers as a form of political and economic progress.

The problem of liberal humanism is also the problem of Christian ethics today: faith in the pragmatic rational conscience of man, the subject of historical change, is breaking down amid the awful possibilities toward which his own exercise of power is driving him, while at the same time this self-doubt is being inflamed by the basic challenge of the powerless. The nuclear arms race is not yielding to the exhortations of rational men, Christians or otherwise, and the

⁹ Pour une Ethique Sociale Chretienne (Neuchatel, 1967), p. 65.

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power stakes grow higher year by year. The gap between rich and poor nations is growing apace despite all the lucid economic and political arguments for world development, many of which, reinforced by appeals to the grace and judgment of God, have been set forth also by Christian conferences and writers. And within the United States, while the technologists dream of and plan for a totally new and inconceivably affluent pattern of the future society, the nation is falling apart into two societies, "one black, one white-separate, and unequal."

II

Revolution, like liberalism, is no longer the naive faith it once was. The absolute confidence in a theory and a strategy which characterized Lenin has been long since chastened by bitter experience, often with illusory success. The revolutionary we speak of is the proletarian man whom Marx described, the alienated, dehumanized victim of social manipulation, whether exploited and poor or securely integrated in a "closed operational system of advanced industrial civilization with its terrifying harmony of freedom and oppression, productivity and destruction, growth and regression."¹⁰ He is the one who first rebels and breaks with the system, then finds his hope and his humanity in the direction and dynamic of the rebellion itself. "The revolution our people desire," said the Nigerian lawyer 'Bola Ige to the World Conference on Church and Society, "is one that will completely knock out all existing, suffocating constitutions, systems, and the powers that keep them going" in order that the people may wrest true freedom to control their own futures from the oligarchical planners of the world.

The faith of this revolutionary experience contradicts that of technological humanism at each basic point. The method of inquiry is, first of all, not pragmatic but ideological. The dictum of Karl Marx that "it is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but, on the contrary, their social existence determines their consciousness"¹¹ is its basic premise. Structures of knowledge reflect the conflicting interests of opposing groups in society, each striving by the imposition of its analysis, its methodology in thought and action, to secure and universalize its position. The claim to have

¹⁰ Herbert Marcuse, One Dimensional Man, p. 124.
¹¹ Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy.

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either a universal system of morality and truth, or to have the only method whereby truth may be discovered and powers balanced in the interest of greater justice, is not only mistaken, it is hypocritical. It is the effort of one social group to universalize its power even in the realm of thought itself and therefore to exclude any basis on which a challenge to its dominance could be rationally conceived.

To recognize this and use it positively is the basic requirement of revolutionary thought and action. In its modern expression this faith is Marxist, even Hegelian, but it is post-Lenin, and post-Engels. It can no longer say with Lenin, "The Marxian doctrine is omnipotent because it is true. It is complete and harmonious, and provides men with an integral world conception."¹² It no longer shares Engels' confidence in absolute dialectical laws of nature and history, to know which is to unlock the secrets of the human future and of man's control over all nature-a confidence Lenin stoutly defended against all the relativity which Marx's starting point suggested. "An ideology," writes the Mexican philosopher Armand Cuvillier, "is the emergence on the plane of consciousness, under the form of representation, of a situation which until that moment had simply been lived…. That representation is, therefore, necessarily affected by a coefficient which is historical and also 'situational'; this may distort the reality, but it well expresses a reality from a certain angle, in a particular light."¹³

Ideology, then, expresses an interaction between the human subject and the objective reality which he seeks to perceive and at the same time forms and transforms. It is discernment of what the Czech philosopher, Karel Kosik, calls "the concrete totality" of things at a given time and place, and this discernment is at the same time the "realizing of truth and the structuring of human reality."¹⁴ It has as much authenticity, as much rationality and convincing power, as is expressed by the struggle of the social group whose theory and practice it represents and gives direction to. It is not surprising that the pragmatism of the affluent industrialized world expresses itself in terms of a drama of crisis and hope for ever higher levels of human development in continuity with existing institutions, for such is the social position of the scientists who think this way, and of the institu-

¹² "On Marx and Marxism," The Essentials of Lenin, vol. I, p. 59.
¹³ Quoted by Hiber Conteris in a speech to the World Conference on Church and Society, from Cuvillier's Las Ideologias a la luz del conocimento (Mexico, 1957).
¹⁴ Dialektik des Konkreten, translated from the Czech (Suhrkamp, Frankfurt, 1966).

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tions which finance their research. But the task of the revolutionary is to perceive reality from a different base in social experience-that of the victims of the process, the dehumanized, and the poor. Truth in this social context is measured by its faithfulness in expressing the profound discontinuity between what has meaning and what is, the drive toward the overthrow of existing power and structures of life.

Furthermore, the revolutionary does not believe in the balance of powers or hope for progress toward his goals by the democratic method and by piecemeal reform. His group in society has been left out of the power distribution. His experience of historical power is one of growing disparity between his hopes for a human life and the conditions in which he must exist, of increasing insecurity, if not of poverty, of the breakdown of old communities and their replacement by new impersonal forces of which he is the victim. He sees in these trends a pattern-the monolithic system to resist which becomes the meaning of his life. Once again he is a Marxist and a Hegelian in his faith that the negation of the society which is negating him will bring forth the new humanity: "By heralding the dissolution of the hereto existing world order the proletariat merely proclaims the secret of its own existence, for it is the actual dissolution of that world order."¹⁵ But he is a Marxist who has been through the disillusion of at least one great revolution that did not bring forth the ideal; he has therefore lost his faith in an absolute law of historical change, and an authoritative party to interpret its strategy and tactics. He is no longer a Leninist by faith, however much he may admire Lenin as a revolutionary tactician. The Russian revolution is not, for him, the decisive moment of history. Revolution is rather a long-term activity in the process of which the exploited masses discover, by resisting their enemies, who they are and the form of their future.

"The duty of every revolutionary is to make a revolution," declared Fidel Castro to the Latin American Solidarity Organization which met in Havana recently. Translated and expounded by Regis Debray this means that the action group, the guerrilla movement, comes first. Out of the necessities of its warfare, out of the experience of struggle and sacrifice with the comradeship it brings, strategy arises, and out of strategy, ideology. Debray likens the experience of a bourgeois, who joins the guerrillas, to death and resurrection.

¹⁵ Toward the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right.

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Beforehand he faces only the death of all that seems meaningful to him, as does his society as well, at the hands of the guerrillas. Only afterward is his true humanity revealed to him-forged in the solidarity, the suffering, and the battle.¹⁶

The Castro-type revolutionaries of today, along with their spiritual comrades among the black power advocates and the new left in the United States and their prototypes (with many differences) in China, speak basically of revolt and of violent action as the key to self-understanding and humanization. But for what do they hope? Debray reduces the ideological content of his "socialist future" to a few vague phrases and pours scorn on those he calls the "Trotskyists" who, guided by Marxist theory, demand that the socialism to be realized dictate the form of revolutionary action now, with emphasis on mass organization rather than guerrilla warfare. Marx himself believed in the spontaneous action of the proletariat as these Marxists, following Lenin, no longer do. But Lenin believed in absolute political control, by the Party schooled in Marxist theory, over the strategy and tactics of the conquest of power-which these men regard as betrayal. In what reality which controls the future do they, then, really believe?

Frantz Fanon expresses the agony of this question more profoundly in his Les Damnés de la Terre than any other document to come out of the current revolutionary ferment. Man, says Fanon, becomes human in the act of violent revolt. A new solidarity is forged in totally revolutionary action. But the revolution is constantly being betrayed, seduced by the attractions of compromise for profit to its intellectual and national-bourgeois leadership, manipulated by international revolutionary forces for the benefit of other countries and races (the Russian or the Chinese), deserted by the city masses who follow some immediate reward. Its really healthy source is the peasant masses, but they are inert and must be stirred to violent struggle by those who share their life and then kept from losing their identity again in some new cosmopolitanism which hides one more form of domination. Liberation is "a continual struggle against colonialism in its new forms, and an obstinate refusal to enter the charmed circle of mutual admiration at the summit. . . . Because it is a systematic negation of the other person and a furious determination to deny the other person all attributes of humanity, colonialism

¹⁶ Revolution in the Revolution? (N.Y. Monthly Review Press, 1967).

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forces the people it dominates to ask themselves the question constantly: 'In reality, who am I?'"¹⁷

Fanon has no clear answer to this question. His book ends with a series of clinical studies of psychological derangement produced by oppression, torture, and war, and a final, almost desperate appeal to Africans not to build an imitation of Europe but to "work out new concepts, and try to set afoot a new man." Not only the bourgeois who enters into the revolutionary situation faces death and despair, but also the revolutionary himself, in the midst of the endless frustrations of his-often partially successful-action in quest of a new humanity.

This revolutionary tradition is, in the twentieth century, atheist. It has developed in conscientious opposition to the religious traditions it knows, especially western Christendom. For this very reason the relation of theology to it is profounder than to its pragmatic opponent. The Marxist philosopher, Ernst Bloch, has demonstrated that the revolutionary consciousness as we know it today began with biblical history. "With Moses began a leap of religious consciousness prepared by an event utterly opposite to former religions of world piety or star mythology and fate: rebellion, the exodus from Egypt."¹⁸ The history of the Jews, Bloch maintains, was a history of revolutionary change, of exodus out of old structures of society with their sacred pretensions. The God of Sinai was the spirit of this exodus. Moses was a prophet of utopia, the leader of his people toward a future which must be realized by imaginative struggle. Jesus was just as revolutionary, the herald of a coming kingdom in which the last would be first, the poor raised up, and the powerful humiliated. Not forgiveness and reconciliation but the promise "Behold I make all things new" is for Bloch the center of the New Testament message.

Bloch is right in seeing this dimension, not only in the Bible but in all of Christian history; in the challenge which Augustine's heavenly city offers to the earthly, in Joachim of Flora's expectation of the coming age of the Spirit, and in the revolutionary radical wing of the Reformation. He could have carried the theme further into the nineteenth century. Hegel, discovering in the movements of the Trinity itself the dialectical process of man's spirit realizing itself through all the conflicts of historical creativity toward fulfilled union

¹⁷ The Wretched of the Earth, p. 203.
¹⁸ Das Prinzip Hoffnung, p. 145.

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with the Eternal Spirit, is its most brilliant philosopher. Nicholas Berdyaev points out that a basic theme of Russian religious history is the raskol, revolt against the world, against culture and social power, against history itself in the name of compassion with the suffering and in the hope of a transfigured community and cosmos to come. This may take reactionary forms as in the Old Believers schism in the seventeenth century which identified the westernizing czar, Peter the Great, as anti-Christ. But it may just as well, as with Dostoievsky, be a profound rejection of the suffering and the powers of this world, both political and ecclesistical, in the hope of a coming theocratic utopia of freedom and love.

Berdyaev himself became one of history's most revolutionary theologians. Far more radically than in Hegel, be opposes the creative community between God and man in the spirit to every form of objectification and to every historical fulfillment, not in order to escape from the world of objects and history, but in order that they may find their true meaning in the rebellious transformation they continually undergo when man takes his destiny seriously. "Christ's second coming presupposes intense creative activity on our part preparing both mankind and the world for the end. The end itself depends upon man's creative activity and is determined by the positive results of the cosmic process."¹⁹ Berdyaev regarded the Russian revolution as an intra-historical apocalypse, a judgment of God upon Russian Christianity's failure to realize a true personalist socialism expressing the community of the spirit. He saw it at the same time as an opportunity for further revolutionary action-the revolt of suffering love giving new spirit to a society which, caught in a materialist ideology, is threatened with a bureacratic burgeois stagnation.

Despite all these witnesses, however, the revolutionary humanism of the twentieth century has developed in opposition to the Christian faith rather than drawing directly on its resources. The reason lies, I believe, in a subtle interaction of two factors which need to be distinguished if we are to clarify a Christian ethic for the future.

The first factor is deeply rooted in the style and meaning of Christian life itself. It concerns the question of what it means to be human. Jesus rejected the way of the Zealots, and chose instead the way of the cross. The choice involved no suggestion of an accommodation to the status quo. Nor was it a non-violent meth-

¹⁹ The Destiny of Man, p. 263.

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odology for effective social change. It was rather a basic expression of the meaning of human life in relation to other human lives in the context of God's covenant promise for us all. It expressed the fact that man lives not from the solidarity of his participation in some future achievement (important as future goals are), not from his fight against oppression (important as it is to combat evil), but from the relations of personal give and take, the transforming and future-directed guidance, the forgiveness and love which are established in God's covenant. The Marxist, Roger Garaudy, puts the issue as clearly as any theologian: "For the Marxist the infinite is absence and exigency, while for the Christian it is promise and presence. There is thus indicated an indisputable divergence between the Promethean conception of freedom as creation and the Christian conception of freedom as grace and assent. For a Christian transcendence is the act of God who comes toward him and summons him. For a Marxist it is a dimension of man's activity which goes out of itself toward its far off being."²⁰

In modern times every revolutionary with a Christian background and every theologian with a sympathy for revolution has had to face this issue. Let me mention two classic examples. Karl Marx, following the left Hegelians of his time, believed that Hegel had already taken the decisive step from the personal to the generic, from belief in God to belief in man. It remained only to discern the dialectic of human self-development in material conditions rather than in the movement of the spirit. But this interpretation is an adaptation of Hegel. It chooses the revolutionary philosopher and eliminates the Christian who wrestles profoundly with the paradox of suffering love as the incarnation of the divine idea and the final reconciliation of man with God. Hegel's whole philosophy was Christian and Promethean humanism in delicate and ambiguous balance. Reinhold Niebuhr in the 1930's, on the other hand, was a revolutionary on the basis of a sober evaluation of the power necessary to re-establish rough justice in an increasingly oppressive society. The honest brutality of violent change must be supported against the hypocritical brutality of continuing oppression. The revolutionary dream "that the collective life of mankind can achieve perfect justice" is an illusion but a valuable one. "For justice cannot be approximated if the hope of its perfect realization does not generate a sublime madness in the soul. Nothing but such madness will do battle with

²⁰ From Anathema to Dialogue, p. 92.

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malignant power and spiritual wickedness in high places."²¹ But Niebuhr was never able to see revolutionary hope in a positive way as a reflection of the promise of God in Christ for this age. Understandable as they were, the hatreds and the utopian ideals of the revolutionaries were for him tragic necessities which would bring judgment on themselves in turn. The law of love embodied in Jesus Christ brooded over the events of history as a continual inspiration and judgment. Not until, in his later years, Niebuhr adopted the genius of the pragmatic democratic society as the operational reflection of divine grace, was he able to express a coherent theology of social change. But with this coherence he had lost contact with the proletarian revolution to which he had once been a minister.

This raises the second factor in the opposition we are describing. The words of the church about calling to suffering service, about forgiveness and reconciliation as ways to peace, justice, and new humanity ring false because they are expressed by a church which does not find itself in the proletarian situation and which therefore belongs to a section of society that can use these Christian responses to undercut effective protest against itself. The familiar Feuerbach-Marxist criticism of religion as the projection of an unrealized human essence against the heavens is familiar to all and needs no repetition here. Suffice it to say that the church is the victim of a curious historical irony which Gabriel Vahanian calls "the cultural invalidation of Christianity." Revolutionary humanism is the direct descendent of a long tradition in biblical and Christian history which in its increasingly desperate uncertainty needs both the encouragement and the correction of the full Christian gospel. But the words of this gospel are so embedded in the religious culture, against which the revolutionary criticism of religion is a weapon of divine judgment, that not only are the revolutionaries confirmed in their atheism but we ourselves are forced to ask how we may repent of our ideas of deity in order to rediscover the relationship with Christ and our neighbor which we are called to proclaim.

III

The essential problem of Christian ethics-the metanoia required of it so that it may be true in the modern world to the relation

²¹ Moral Man and Immoral Society, p. 224. See also Reflections on the End of an Era.

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between man and God which it tries to express-is also the central problem of humanism, liberal and revolutionary alike. What is objectively real, in the sense that it confronts us with power and truth which could not be the reflection of our own making and yet offers hope for a human future? This is the question of God, posed from the perspective of a poignant sense that the gods on whom we have depended are dead. This is true whether or not we have applied the traditional word for deity to them. Reliable objective reality is dead. This is the relentless awareness in which all of us live.

Our knowledge is related not to a structure which imposes itself on our minds but to powers which we ourselves produce and yet which control us in our increasingly complex relation to each other and to nature. We know them to be our own power and yet they may one day destroy us. In the words of Romano Guardini, "Man has power over things, but not power over his own power."²² We are increasingly sharply divided into a minority of those who participate in the control of the means of technology and more or less enjoy their fruits and a large majority who are excluded from whatever promise this technology may hold. We are increasingly polarized into one part of humanity determined to hold on to its security and power and another part more and more determined to resist and undermine that power. Each side is a challenge to what little faith the other has left, and neither is sure it knows what it really means to be human. In this situation let me suggest two directions in which theology might move to serve such a world.

First, it would be well for us to be absolutely rigorous in exploring and confessing the way in which biblical revelation itself destroys our absolutes including those to which we attach the name "God." "As Israel was born," writes Kornelis Heiko Miskotte, "as her faith was awakened, the gods were unmasked as the massive silence they had even been. There appeared in a naive fashion in the human spirit for the first time what we propound with learned facts today as a thesis: deity is a projection of the human spirit."²³ It is the biblical revelation itself which continually judges and corrects all human efforts to capture it in a verbal formula, a religious ceremony, or a way of life. The subject of this relation is not God, if the term God be understood as an object of which certain attributes can be predi-

²² Das Ende der Neuzeit, p. 90.
²³ Wenn die Gotter schweigen, p. 19. E.T. When the Gods are Silent (N. Y., Harper & Row, 1968).

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cated and verified. He who reveals himself to Moses under the name YHWH refused to be so categorized and thereby captured. He would make himself known in the events of his continuing relation with the Hebrew people, and words which describe him would be forms of human response to the events of the relationship. Old Testament history is the continuing story of the redefinition and deeper understanding of these words: holy, righteous, jealous, merciful, and the rest. It is the story of Israel's constant rediscovery of YHWH and of the destruction of misguided ideas about him. The other concepts for deity in the Old Testament, Elohim and Adonai, the former of which was rooted in pagan polytheism and the latter in everyday social experience of power and authority, were used and redesigned, emptied of their previous significance, and made to demonstrate the absolute subordination of human and divine powers to this one lord.

Martin Buber sums the matter up: "Our path in the history of faith is not a path from one kind of deity to another but in fact a path from the 'God who hides himself' (Isaiah 45: 15) to the One that reveals himself."²⁴ The relevant question then is not whether there is a God, but what is the character of the reality which governs the relations in which we live and find our future hope? It is a question never answered because the theologies men formulate are always projections of their own essences against the heavens as well as faithful responses to this reality. Martin Buber once again defines the life of faith as "the dialectic of an asking divinity and an answer-refusing, but nevertheless an answer-attempting humanity, the dialogue whose demand is an eschaton."²⁵

This dialectic is, I believe, intensified and dramatized by the incarnation of YHWH in Jesus Christ. There is in Greek a word for god, theos, and there is a word for lord, kyrios. In the Septuagint, YHWH is almost always translated by the latter word as in most of our English versions. But this is an obscuring and not a rendering. The only real translation of the Old Testament Name is the person of Christ himself, or more accurately, the relation of the Son to the Father and of both to the working of the Holy Spirit in the world. Once again we have-most vividly illustrated in the Gospel of John -a redefinition of the meaning of deity which broke through every

²⁴ The Prophetic Faith, p. 44.
²⁵ The Kingship of Christ, p. 65.

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schematized understanding in the minds of Jesus' hearers and appeared to them as blasphemy.

"The Jews took up stones again to stone him. Jesus answered them, 'I have shown you many good works from the father. Because of which of them do you stone me?'

"The Jews answered him, 'We do not stone you for a good work, but for blasphemy and because you, a man, make yourself God.

"Jesus answered them, 'Is it not written in your law: I said, you are gods? If he called them gods to whom the word of God came (and Scripture cannot be broken), do you tell him whom the father sanctified and sent into the world, you blaspheme, because I said I am the son of God? If I do not the works of my father, do not believe me. But if I do them, even if you do not believe me, believe the works, that you may know and continue to know that the father is in me and I in the father.

"So they tried again to arrest him, but he escaped out of their hands" (John 10: 31-39).

This passage follows a long dialogue (chapter 8) in which Jesus and the Jews totally misunderstood each other because for Jesus the concept of father and the dynamic working relation between father and son were the basic portrayals of saving reality. The concept of God was secondary, and even, as the Pharisees understood him, idolatrous. This is the inconoclastic paradox of Christian understanding. YHWH, he who is incarnate in Jesus Christ, is always escaping out of our hands in the very act of giving himself to us. Our responses to him in thought and action always express our will to complete our lives in our own way as well as his purpose for us. Our structures of morality, religion, and social policy may use his name but they are not divine, indeed their very pretensions to divinity may make them demonic as Jesus pointed out to the Jews (John 8: 44). This we see precisely because of and in relation to the new reality which has disclosed itself to us in the relation of the triune God to our future. "The problem of ethics contains the secret that man as we know him in this life is an impossibility," wrote Karl Barth in an early essay. "This man, in God's sight, can only perish."²⁶

This, I submit, is the real source and meaning of the "death of God" movement today. Nietzsche understood it more profoundly.

²⁶ The Word of God and the Word of Man, p. 140.

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Not only is God dead but "we have killed him, you and I." He was of course referring to those religious deities who held our civilization together in former times, to the god of the Egyptians and the Pharisees, of Spanish Catholic, German Lutheran, British Anglican, or American Protestant culture, but equally to the spirit of progress in western technology and the universal humanity of the Marxists. We are driven to kill these gods because they are idols, projections of ourselves and not the truly objective reality which can speak to us from outside ourselves.

This is the crisis into which the One who acted in biblical history has plunged all subsequent societies which take the question of man and history seriously. If we are to speak meaningfully to a secular society in which there are more profound experiences of this crisis than most Christians have today, we must start with a clear recognition of what it says to us.

IV

It is in this context that we can speak meaningfully of an ethic of hope. Let me suggest three directions which this ethic might take.

First, if God is faithful in the covenant into which he has called us, if he really presents himself to us in Jesus Christ, then we can have knowledge of how it is right and good to respond in this relation-of the torah, the teaching given by God along the way. This torah, however, is the expression of a relation among active partners. It must be verified by its faithfulness to that relation's direction and meaning. It is part of the human act of response to God in history, realizing the promise which the covenant contains. It is, in Barth's words, the form of the gospel, but a form which transforms human life by its continuing effort to express the manner of divine promise and judgment in ever new historical situations. In short the law is and should be man's heuristic vision, his ideology, of the new life promised to the world by God's acts, and of the death and transformation of the old life which this promise requires.

This is in fact the function the law has performed, in biblical history and the history of the church, where it has been creative and not the idolatrous hypostatization of one style of life.

The actual content of the laws of the Old Testament is borrowed in large part from peoples round about. Paul's ethical admonitions reflect the household codes which were common in the pagan world

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of his time. In each case, it was not the structure of the laws but the manner of their adaptation to the covenant promise, the transformation of the style of the common life and ethic by its being placed in the context of a new historical dynamic, which was important. The laws of the Bible were the social ideology of the people of God at various stages in their history. They were changed, even reversed from time to time, as new adventures with the covenant relation taught new duties and nullified old ones. And the process has continued through the history of the church. What is significant about the political ethics, the concepts of economic life, or the relations of man and woman in biblical writings is not the details of their prescriptions, but what they reveal about the transforming quality of a relation which governs our futures as well.

"The discernment by Christians of what is just and unjust in the complexities of political and economic change," says the Report on Theological Issues in Social Change from the World Conference on Church and Society in Geneva 1966, "is a discipline exercised in continual dialogue with biblical resources, the mind of the church through history and today, and the best insights of social scientific analysis. But it remains a discipline which aims not at a theoretical system of truth but at action in human society. Its object is not simply to understand the world, but to respond to the power of God which is recreating it . . . Christian theology is prophetic only insofar as it dares, in full reflection, to declare how, at a particular time and place, God is at work, and thus to show the church where and when to participate in this work."²⁷

This, the report goes on to point out, involves the church in ideology formation, in the grasping of the "concrete totality," to borrow Kosik's phrase, as a part of its calling. This is its creative task in ethics, the risk of active understanding obedience, which bears the promise and blessing of God just insofar as it knows itself to be action in the risk of faith. "Theology," the same report continues, "reflects not only action but interaction between God's revelation and man's ideological understanding of his own conditions and desires.

"Precisely insofar as the Christian is serious in seeking and acting on the command of God, believing and proclaiming it to be such, he becomes open to the correction of God out of his experience. Christians, like all human beings, are affected by ideological perspec-

²⁷ World Conference on Church and Society, Official Report, p. 202.

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tives. But their witness is the way in which they show themselves to be constantly corrected in their encounter with God and their neighbors while acting on their faith." Ideologe fortiter could be a modern adaptation of Luther's famous admonition on the Christian life.

The Christian ethic is hammered out in the conflict of competing ideological analyses of what is actually happening in human history, as that history interacts with the purpose of God, and the action of the analyst does the same. It is the encounter of active human commitments with one another and with God, which is the arena of verification, correction, and implementation of our concepts of the form of the promise by which we live.

Second, if the history of ancient Israel and the drama of the life, death, and resurrection of Christ are the models of historical events, the central task which concerns us today is the discernment of life through death, of hope through defeat, of redemptive power made perfect in the weakness of creative servanthood. It is a lesson we have to learn again because the forms in which we learned it before have been misused. The encounter is an old one-as old as the tower of Babel where men's efforts to build their own structure to reach the heavens were confounded, and followed by the calling to Abram to leave the security of his social structure to move toward an unknown promise. The history of Israel is filled with it. Called to explore the future as witness to God's strength alone, and to the unlimited human possibilities of that relation, the nation was always trying to capture the dynamic of history in some form that men themselves could see and control-the temple, the kingship, the absolute law. In the frustration of these efforts, in the new calling which came on the heels of the death of the old securities and powers, Israel learned what redemptive servanthood meant, though even in Deutero-Isaiah the picture is still mixed with her self-assertion by way of celebrating the victory of the Lord. Only in the New Testament is the paradox, which is our paradigm, unmistakably clear: "This cup is the new covenant in my blood which is shed for many."

The last structure which might have been sacred in itself-the nation of Israel-was secularized. The last illusion that man might somehow turn the power of God to his own purposes was broken. The calling to exodus becomes the command to take up the cross, and the promise is fulfilled only in the resurrection.

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But precisely here is the promise of the future. As there is no absolute structure so there is no absolute method, neither a pragmatic method of balancing powers in the interest of development, nor a revolutionary method of negating the negation, for the conquest and control of historical power. The "principalities and powers" of this world are subject to Christ but not to us, and our participation in his victory over them consists in finding the form of kenosis to which we (and this "we" can refer to a secular community, a business enterprise, a nation, or a race) are called in the midst of our responsibilities to our fellow men. In the words of Jürgen Moltmann: "Theology must take on the 'cross of our time' (Hegel), its Godlessness and its Godforsakenness, and demonstrate practically and theoretically there the spirit of the resurrection. But then God's revelation would not show itself and prove itself as the history of this society, but would open up to this society and this time the eschatological process of history. The theologian is not concerned to interpret the world, history, and human existence differently, but rather, in expectation of divine transformation, to change it."²⁸

As a corroboration of the point let me quote another authority-this time the writer, James Baldwin: "Perhaps the whole root of trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have. It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death-ought to decide, indeed, to earn one's death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life. One is responsible to live: It is the small beacon in that terrifying darkness from which we come and to which we shall return. One must negotiate this passage as nobly as possible, for the sake of those who are coming after us. But white Americans do not believe in death, and this is why the darkness of my skin so intimidates them. And this is also why the presence of the Negro in this country can bring about its destruction."²⁹

The Christian is called to be a revolutionary in a deeper sense than any secular revolutionary can grasp, because his mission is a perpetual metanoia, a continual rebirth of hope amid the ruins of old structures and methods. It is, as Barth has put it, the real

²⁸ Jürgen Moltmann, Theologie der Hoffnung, p. 74.
²⁹ The Fire Next Time, pp. 105-106.

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revolution which is "the forgiveness of sins and the resurrection of the dead."

Forgiveness is a power which breaks through the logic of power conflicts and creates a new direction in history. The metanoia it creates is the capacity for creative death which makes the death forced upon all of us-the death of our cultures, our securities, our political systems and economic plans, and not least our whiteness-the sign of a hopeful and creative future.

Third, Christian ethics is confronted with the task, as it has been from New Testament times, of discovering the style of life together, which will reflect this metanoia, and this promise, toward and on behalf of the world. This is the question of the form of the church in the light of its secular calling. In what sense is it part of the world and in what sense does it stand sharply over against the rest of the world? Our problem is that hitherto both of these questions have been so often answered wrongly. "Where," ask Hans Hoekendijk, "does the Church stand? . . . The Church has no fixed place at all in this context. It happens insofar as it actually proclaims the kingdom to the world. The Church has no other existence than in actu Christi, that is in actu apostoli. Consequently it cannot be firmly established but will always remain a paroikia, a temporary settlement which can never be a permanent home. The real autochthony of the Church, the soil in which it should be rooted, is the foundation of the apostles and prophets. . . . The Church is a function of the apostolate."³⁰

If this is taken seriously, it implies a double movement of the church. The first, a frankly sectarian direction in an effort to discern the form of Christian life and witness which the separated and often conflicting sections of society require. "The frontier for the theologian," writes Richard Shaull, "is not determined by an irrelevant orthodoxy and naive liberalism in the church, but by the defensiveness and blindness of the representatives of a frightened establishment and the confusion and near despair in the ranks of the new revolutionaries. Here is a situation in which a new prophetic community could identify with and support the new radicals, engaging with them in serious reflection on the problems they face and pointing to signs of hope that are not easily discerned at this time. And such a community, from a position of identification with the

³⁰ The Church Inside Out, pp. 42-43.

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revolutionary struggle, could also engage in the difficult but essential task of interpreting to segments of the middle class the meaning of those events and the nature of their responsibility."³¹

There is no substitute for identification. There is no position from which to be a Christian, apart from the social conflicts of our time and the sides they form. Therefore this ecclesiology is sectarian in a new sense: what was covertly true of old sects is here taken on as a calling, and with it the responsibility, which old sects did not recognize, for remaining in dialogue and fellowship, however strained, with the separated portions of the churchly and secular oikoumene. Here is the living tension, in which Christian ethics is born. There is no valid ethic for exploited, alienated man in a revolutionary mood except from within the solidarity of his experience, with all the risks this brings of partaking also of his ideology. There is no ethical help for the anxious, responsible defender and reformer of a loved and threatened social order, except through sharing his conviction that here a tradition is worth saving, and his hope that the Lord may yet be gracious to a repentant society.

The missionary task of the church, which is the dynamic of its ethic, therefore divides the church. This is dangerous for a mission whose heart is the gospel of reconciliation-even more dangerous because human conflicts may be exacerbated by the addition of Christian conviction on each side. But is also unites the church and, therefore, the world by the seriousness with which on every side the purpose of God is sought. The existence of a fellow Christian on the other side of a conflict cannot be a matter of indifference to me-as if this were our division of labor and his vocation were his private affair. He raises a question to my orientation as a whole. He lays claim on me to join him and see the future as he does. I owe to him an account of my faith and my decision, a continual wrestling for each other's soul. The Christian church is not an institution for the sedation of conflicts by a sentiment called love. It is the place where men and social forces are confronted with one another in a way from which there is no escape by the usual methods-coercion, stereotyping, apathy, and the like-so that they must take their own convictions and actions with final seriousness, the seriousness that consists in readiness to convert or to be converted.

³¹ "Theology and the Transformation of Society," by Richard Shaull, THEOLOGY TODAY, April, 1968, p. 32.