IV
In the previous chapter we enquired into the foundation of the church in the person of Christ, in his threefold messianic ministry and in his promised presence. In this chapter we must now assess the breadth of the horizon of hope opened up through Christ for Christianity as it lives and suffers in history. No life can be understood from its own standpoint alone. As long as it lives, it exists in living relationships to other lives, and therefore in contexts of time and with perspectives of hope. It is these that constitute in the first place a living being’s unique vitality, openness and capacity for communication. Accordingly the church’s reflection on itself cannot be carried out merely through the exploration of its foundations and the motives that impel it. We must investigate with equal intensity the context of the time in which it displays its vitality, develops its relationships to other lives and unfolds its activities. Just because the church is given a christological foundation, its vitality must be developed eschatologically and ‘in catholicity’. The two dimensions are necessarily related to one another: ‘The more exclusively we acknowledge and confess Christ as our Lord, the more fully the wide range of his dominion will be disclosed to us’, said Dietrich Bonhoeffer. There cannot be any christological concentration unless we simultaneously go to its utmost limits. There can be no knowledge of the centre without the simultaneous knowledge of the furthest horizon for which this centre is the centre. ‘Loss of the centre’ is the dominant characteristic of a church that loses itself in time. ‘Loss of the horizon’ is the mark of a church that seeks to preserve itself into eternity. But centre and horizon will always be lost or won together.
In the following paragraphs our intention is not to develop in abstract visions the future for which the church is alive, but to discover the horizons of hope that lend meaning to the specific conditions of the church; or, to be more precise, of Christianity in the world. If the church is only interested in itself, it will only be able to see its own perfection on the horizon of its hope. But if it is interested in a different life—and as Christ’s church it is bound to be so interested—then it enters into relationships with partners in history who are not the church and will never become the church. It has therefore to ask about the future of these relationships in which it is involved. In the following pages we shall be developing the concrete doctrine of hope for Christianity’s relationships in the world—not an abstract doctrine and not an ecclesiastical or personal one either. Every relationship to another life involves the future of that life, and the future of the reciprocal relationship into which one life enters with another. When the church talks about hope, it is talking about the future of Israel, for it proceeded from Israel, and only together with Israel can its hope be fulfilled. When Christianity talks about hope, it is talking about the future of the nations—the whole of mankind—because it exists for the nations and its hope is given it for mankind’s sake. When Christianity talks about hope, it is talking about the future of the world, mankind and nature, in whose history it is, in practical terms, involved. Living hope is always connected with relationships. Even where hope is understood purely personally, it is connected with man’s relationship to himself and in this way with his relationship to God. Eschatology is always only specific as relational eschatology.
But if hope is specific in the relationships of one life to another, then it indicates a line, a tendency or a direction for these relationships: a temporal line, along which these relationships ought to be developed; a tendency which can be missed or followed in the relationships; a direction in which changes in fellowship become meaningful. The formulation of hope’s horizon therefore affects both sides, their relationships to one another and the time in which the two appear in relationship to one another. Without this comprehensive framework of hope, the relationships remain without meaning. They do not continue to live but turn into contradictions, lead to deadly conflicts, and die.
Up to now we have indicated the comprehensive Christian horizon of life by the symbol ‘the kingdom of God’. We have described the present effect of the imminent kingdom as being man’s conversion and his liberation from the godless and inhuman relationships of this world. Now we are concerned with the positive meaning of this hope and its consequences for the liberation of life’s relationships. Conversion, the new turn to the future which follows from the gospel of the kingdom, will prove itself in the new turn given to life’s relationships in the direction of the other life. That is why ‘the church of the kingdom of God’ asks about Israel’s hope, the hope of the world religions, the hope of human society, and the hope of nature. Christian eschatology is not merely eschatology for Christians; if it is to be the eschatology of the all-embracing kingdom, it must also be unfolded as the eschatology of Israel, of the religions, of human social systems and of nature.
We have now taken for granted, as if it were a matter of course, that in the context of the kingdom the church has first of all to clarify its relationship of hope to Israel, and that its other relationships of hope—to the world religions, to the social systems and to the systems of nature—must follow on that, and follow from it. But this is by no means a matter of course in the Christian tradition; it is new. In saying this we are expressing the conviction (which still has to be proved) that the task of mission, and with it the relationship to the religions of the world, is founded, in fact and in time, on the church’s relationship to Israel; that, further, the church’s relationship to the state, and the political commitment of Christians, is determined by their understanding of the Old Testament and their relationship to Jewish messianism; and, finally, that the relationship to nature and our hope for this relationship is dependent on the acceptance or suppression of Israelite thinking. Israel is Christianity’s original, enduring and final partner in history. If the church loses sight of its orientation to Israel, then its religious, political and earthly relationships will also be turned into pagan ones, indeed into post-Christian and anti-Christian ones. The church of Christ can only understand its historical consciousness of its own nature in accordance with the kingdom and messianically (that is, in specifically liberating terms) if it grasps its relationship to Israel, to the Old Testament, and to the divine future. And the same must be said of its relationships in the world to the state, society, technology and the natural environment. But for centuries the church has notoriously failed to do this. Its anti-Judaistic tendencies have paganized and corrupted it and have robbed it of the power of its hope. The crises to which these paganized and corrupted forms of Christianity have brought the world, economically, politically, culturally and ecologically, today require the church to turn back to its Israelite origin: to turn back to the Old Testament, which at the same time means turning to the messianic hope for the world. For Christianity, to turn back to its Israelite origin cannot mean anything other than the Christian release of Israelite messianism, so that Christians and Jews can turn to the world together, with the ardour of hope.
Questions about the relationship of the church to Israel and of Israel to the church have cropped up afresh in the twentieth century. The reasons are obvious:
(a) ‘After Auschwitz’ the Christian church, which gives the name Christ to Jesus, the Jew, is bound to revolutionize its thinking. Through their anti-Judaism, sometimes beneath the surface, sometimes obvious, the Christian churches have been paganizing themselves for centuries. They turned into institutions belonging to the single religion of their respective countries and persecuted people of different beliefs as the enemies of both religion and the state. Just as before the time of Constantine Christians themselves were persecuted as ‘atheists and enemies of the state’, so Christianity, once it had become established as the state religion, persecuted Jews and dissenters as godless people for whom nothing was sacred, and as ‘people with no allegiance at all’, that is, irreligious destroyers of society. The more the church frees itself today from this abuse of itself, the more clearly it will recognize Israel as its enduring origin, its partner in history, and its brother in hope.
(b) Through the triumphalism it maintained and practised for centuries, the church has set itself up as the kingdom of God on earth in absolute form. But in setting itself up as absolute through this claim, it is bound to detach itself from the history of Israel, because it is unable to recognize any other representation of divine rule on earth, or to promise the world any other future than itself. This absolutism has divided the church from its origin and its future. Christian hate of the ‘impenitent’ Jews is ultimately based on Christians’ self-hate of their own impossible claim, namely ‘hatred of one’s own imperfection, of one’s own “not yet” ’, which constantly has to be repressed through this absolute assertion. The rediscovery of the relevance of the Old Testament, the new discovery of Christianity’s own provisional nature in the framework of the still unfulfilled hope of the messianic kingdom, and the recognition of Israel in a partner-like relationship are the elementary presuppositions for a Christian abolition of ecclesiastical triumphalism.
(c) The founding of the state of Israel in ‘the land of Israel’, which was brought about by ‘Auschwitz’, has put the relationship of Christians to Jews on a new footing. When Jews encounter Christians they are no longer merely ‘the dispersion’; they have returned home. When they meet the church they are no longer merely the synagogue; they are also a nation. Judaism today lives both in the dispersion and in the land of its fathers. For the Jews, after two thousand years, this is a new situation which they have to grasp not merely practically but theologically as well. For the church, even more, it is a new situation which is fraught with difficulties for theological interpretation. Difficulties arise for the Jews in the question whether after the occupation of Jerusalem the temple should be rebuilt and the priestly sacrificial cult reintroduced, or whether this ought to be left to the Messiah who is to come. For Christians problems emerge when they consider what attitude they should take in the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians.
The significance of the church’s derivation from Israel was always a matter of dispute in Christian theology. It is true that we can simply say: ‘Without Judaism, no Christianity.’ But is that a historical reminiscence or a theological judgment? In theology the question of origin was often put as follows: Does the divine history of Israel merge into church history in such a way that Israel, as ‘the ancient people of God’, has been superseded and rendered obsolete by ‘the new people of God’? Or does Israel retain its own particular ‘vocation for salvation’, side by side with the church, down to the end of history?
The expression ‘Old’ and ‘New’ Testaments, which started with Marcion, seems to make the book of God’s promises something out of date, which is eclipsed by the splendour of the new. We no longer need the light of the moon after the sun has risen. Yet the Christian church has always understood itself and its proclamation in the light of the Old Testament and has lived from the Old Testament, as well as the New, as if the Old Testament belonged to it too. It has never actually viewed the Old Testament as out of date and superseded. The adjective ‘Old’ is open to misunderstanding. Besides, must the church not read the Old Testament as the book of the promise of present-day Israel as well?
Israel has a ‘call to salvation’, independent of the church, which remains to the end. This thesis was maintained by ‘salvation-historical’ theology, which extends from the Reformation theologian Johannes Cocceius, by way of Pietism and the nineteenth-century Lutheran school at Erlangen, down to the present day. It is based on two ideas:
(a) The messianic promises of the Old Testament are only in principle fulfilled through the appearance and history of Christ; and only provisionally and partially through the eschatological gift of the Spirit. Through Christ and in the Spirit, they are at the same time also given universal force. That is why Christianity too still waits and hopes for the fulfilment of these messianic promises. Just because Jesus is believed in as the promised Messiah, and his messianic rule is already experienced in the Spirit, the surplus of the still unfulfilled promises of the Old Testament must be transplanted into the soil of the New. The church is only moving towards their fulfilment. Consequently it has to see an expectant and hopeful Israel by its side as its partner in this history. It is only Christ’s parousia that will bring the fulfilment of both the Christian and the Jewish hope—not the one without the other—that is to say, only in the fellowship of Christians and Jews.
(b) This salvation-historical thesis is closely connected with millenarianism, the hope that Christ will rule for a thousand years in history before the end. But ‘we shrug our shoulders over the chosen people and hence over millenarianism as well’. From the time of Tyconius and Augustine onwards this thousand-year rule of Christ was continually interpreted as the era of the church following Christ’s resurrection and ascension. But if the church understands itself as the messianic kingdom of Christ, then it cannot acknowledge Israel’s separate existence alongside itself. Since in the millennium Christ and his followers are to ‘rule’ over his enemies, they must, according to this way of understanding themselves, view the unbelieving Jews as their enemies and suppress them. From the time of Eusebius of Caesarea the millennium was also interpreted as the Christian state, ruled by Christian emperors and ‘apostolic majesties’. But if the Christian state is the earthly representation of the kingdom of God on earth, if the corpus christianum is the visible body of this God, if ‘the Christian West’ or ‘Christian civilization’ is the moral and political form of the invisible kingdom of God, then dissidents must not only be put under the church’s ban but must be subject to the imperial ban as well; and then, as a condition of baptism or of emancipation within this state, the Jews must surrender their hope of a Messiah. For Jewish messianism points out to the Christian state its own unredeemed character, thus calling its Christian and religious legitimation in question. In the Reformed confessions this led to the rejection of the millenarian hope as judaicae opiniones. It was only Reformed federal theology, pietist theology, and the Erlangen school which once again won theological recognition for millenarianism in a biblical or ‘biblicist’ way. Israel will only be converted to the Lord through the direct and special intervention of Christ before the end. So just as the mission to the Gentiles developed out of the Jews’ rejection of Christ and the gospel, so the period of this mission is to come to an end when Israel is converted. Israel’s conversion in the last days will be the external sign of the transition from messianic world mission to the messianic kingdom. Out of this the following divine plan of salvation for history emerges: the mission to the Gentiles has its springtime during Israel’s obduracy; the conversion of Israel follows; then come the thousand years of Christ’s messianic kingdom on earth. During the era of mission to the nations the church has to make compromises and alliances with Christian states. But at the end all its supports in the Christian nations and states will be taken from it. For the remnant of believing Christians there will be no other place of refuge than restored and converted Israel. It is not Pepuza or Münster, not Rome or Geneva that will be the place of Christ’s second coming; it is Jerusalem. It is there that his followers must gather. For though the first shall be last, they will not be forgotten. Through his crucifixion Christ has become the Saviour of the Gentiles. But in his parousia he will also manifest himself as Israel’s Messiah. Whatever we think about this modern salvation-history apocalyptic, it has vanquished anti-Judaism by vanquishing ecclesiastical absolutism. Through it the church withstood the temptation to baptize Jews under compulsion with the assistance of social pressure, or to summon them to ‘emancipation’ in bourgeois society or a ‘humanist state’ of socialism. The future of Israel is not with Lenin but in Jerusalem.
Paul Althaus and Rudolf Bultmann have discussed the theology of salvation history in its bearing on Judaism. Althaus would like to distinguish between eschatological realism and national realism in the Old Testament. ‘The realism of the promise [points] beyond its fulfilment in the New Testament to total fulfilment.’ But Christianity breaks with national realism. Anyone who continues to maintain it as the hope of Israel is thinking ‘Calvinistically’. From this it follows for Althaus that ‘Israel has its particular … place in God’s plan of salvation: the church is built on the foundation of the history of God’s dealings with Israel. The church is based on Israel as the chosen people of God, but Israel also flows into the church.… Israel no longer has any special position or any special “vocation to salvation” in the church and for the church.’ For Christ is ‘also the end of the Messiah’. Because of this, since Christ’s coming Israel has receded of itself into the ranks of the other peoples and is included in the missionary charge to ‘all nations’. In a similar way Rudolf Bultmann was only able to view prophecy in Old Testament Jewish history as the history of shipwreck on the law. To be called by God and yet to be imprisoned in secular history—it is this which brought Israel into that inner contradiction from which only the gospel freed the believer, by ‘desecularizing’ his existence. In this way Israel’s unique history becomes an example of the shipwreck of human existence under the law in general. If this idea is isolated and stressed by itself, the Old Testament can then be interpreted in terms of human history as a whole, and Judaism can easily be seen merely as the negative foil to the gospel and Christian existence. The history of the promise recedes behind the antithesis of ‘law and gospel’. Israel is then, through the gospel of the justification of the sinner, demoted to the ranks of the nations and made ‘profane’. Its history loses its special quality, becoming a matter of indifference: all men, whether Jews or Gentiles, are sinners and fall short of the glory of God. The justifying gospel is therefore directed towards all men, Jews and Gentiles alike. No special existence in the history of salvation can be ascribed to Israel any longer, because the Christian faith is not interested in world history, but only in the individual history of the justified sinner. But in this stress on the universality of sin and grace (which is in itself correct), specific historical differences are levelled out, which is just what Paul did not do. Although both ‘Jews and Greeks’ are ‘under the power of sin’ (Rom. 3:9) and God justifies ‘the circumcised and the uncircumcised’ through faith (Rom. 3:30), the gospel none the less takes its way historically ‘first to the Jew and also to the Greek’ (Rom. 1:16). Just because God ‘has consigned all men to disobedience, that he may have mercy upon all’ (Rom. 11:32), he remains faithful to his promises to Israel and has not cast off his people (Rom. 9:4f; 11:2). That is why according to Paul Christ became a servant to the Jews ‘to show God’s truthfulness, in order to confirm the promises given to the patriarchs’. But the Gentiles ‘glorify God for his mercy’ (Rom. 15:9). The universality of sin and the gospel is by no means a leveller of the theological difference between Israel and the nations, but becomes historically specific in this remaining difference. The gospel is ‘the end of the law’ but the endorsement and fulfilment of the promise.
Historically, the church moved from being a community of Jewish Christians to being a community made up of Jews and Gentiles; and from there to becoming a community of Gentiles. The Pauline epistles reckon specifically with a community of Jews and Gentiles and this is their ‘Sitz im Leben’—their situation in life. For the almost exclusively ‘Gentile’ Christian churches today they are consequently as difficult to understand as they were then for exclusively Jewish Christian congregations. This difference must be taken into account more emphatically than hitherto in Pauline interpretation. Does this historical path which the church took justify a purely Gentile Christian theology of the church and a corresponding remoulding of the New Testament? It is precisely this that Erik Peterson has asserted in a number of provocative theses.
(a) It is a basic assumption of the church that the Jews, as the chosen people, did not become believers. It is part of the idea of the church that it is in essentials a Gentile church.
(b) It is a basic assumption of the church that the coming of Christ is not immediately imminent, i.e., that precise eschatological expectations are eliminated and are replaced by a ‘doctrine of the Last Things’. This leads to a renunciation of Semitic forms of thinking and the Hellenization of Christianity. It involves the legitimate moralization of Jesus’ eschatological sayings; e.g., ‘Everyone who exalts himself will be humbled’ becomes ‘the virtue of humility’.
(c) It is a basic assumption of the church that the twelve apostles under the guidance of the Holy Spirit took the decision to go to the Gentiles.
If we look more closely, however, the situation in the first days of the church looks somewhat different:
(a) It is true that Jesus did not found a church, but he made a fellowship of his disciples possible. Through his fellowship with tax-collectors and sinners, he broke through ‘Israel’s fence’, the law. That took place inside the nation, but in tendency it points outwards as well.
(b) The community of the disciples which gathered round the twelve apostles after Easter symbolizes the messianically renewed people of the twelve tribes. It therefore remained within the sphere of the law, which was to be fulfilled in the power of love, and in the sphere of the synagogue. It could be termed a revival movement within Israel itself. Mission to the Gentiles was rejected because the Gentiles were only supposed to come to Zion and to receive the divine law after Israel’s renewal. This, indeed, did not exclude proselytes; but it did exclude an active mission to the nations.
(c) The transition from ‘the Christian synagogue’ to the ecclesia probably first came about in the circle of the seven gathered round Stephen. It was they who discovered for the first time that Gentiles believed without first becoming Jews, that is, that the Spirit descended directly on Gentiles. It must have been in Antioch that the Christian community termed itself ecclesia for the first time (Gal. 1:14). The acceptance of this political self-designation (ecclesia originally meant the general assembly of the free citizens of the polis) contains an element that is critical of the law, and a rejection of the temple cult in Jerusalem.
(d) Finally, the mission to the Gentiles is by no means bound up with the surrender of imminent expectation and an exclusion of precise eschatological expectations, but is the reversal in practice of the Jewish order of hope. If now, during Israel’s rejection of the gospel, Gentiles are already coming to faith in Jesus the Christ, then what is already happening is what, according to Jewish hope, should only happen after Israel’s redemption at the end. In faith in Jesus the Christ, the Gentiles are now already praising the God of Israel as the God of all men. In this way ‘the last’ (namely the Gentiles) shall be ‘the first’ in the church even now, whereas ‘the first’ (namely the Jews) through their rejection will be ‘the last’. The difference between the Jews and the Gentiles is not levelled down. But the order is reversed. Even if the church becomes a purely Gentile church, it is still a church for Israel and with Israel—not contrary to Israel or without her. In spite of Erik Petersen’s view, I can find no reason why mission to the Gentiles and the praise of the Gentiles (i.e., the church) should not amount to ‘precise eschatological expectations’. There can be no question of a moralization of Jesus’ eschatological promises.
(e) If the world-wide mission to the Gentiles, i.e., the church, makes the reconciliation of the Gentiles ‘the last thing but one’ and the acceptance of Israel the very last, then the messianic expectation of a remote future turns into a present hope in action. The expected salvation of the Gentiles is already experienced now, and experienced in active mission. Expectation of the future becomes a present task. Seen against the background of the enduring Israelite origin of the church, the mission to the Gentiles and the church of the Gentiles are eschatological signs and wonders. As long as the structure of the order of salvation for ‘Jews and Gentiles’ is preserved, even in the temporal reversal into ‘Gentiles and Jews’, Christianity and Judaism remain bound to one another. It is only if they separate that ‘the first’ will disappear and ‘the last’ be all that is left. But
Paul is completely convinced that Israel will be converted when the full number of Gentiles is won for Christ. He reverses the prophetic promise, according to which the Gentiles come and worship when Zion is redeemed from earthly humiliation in the endtime. The mission of the apostle is a colossal detour to the salvation of Israel, whereby the first become the last.
The church itself is this mission of hope and its initial fulfilment through the faith of the Gentiles. Consequently the church itself is this detour to Israel’s salvation. The inmost reason for the detour lies in Christ’s self-surrender for the reconciliation of the world, but its external cause is Israel’s rejection of the gospel. If the church understands its origin, its historical path and its future in this way, then the church itself is lived hope for Israel, and Israel is lived hope for the church. Through the Christian mission to the nations Israel’s messianic hope is brought to the whole world. Through the redemption of the world Israel’s future will be fulfilled. ‘Without the redemption of all creation Israel will not be redeemed either.’ The reconciliation of the world with God through the gospel is the historical way to the world’s redemption, and it is hence the historical way to Israel’s redemption too. For ‘if their rejection means the reconciliation of the world, what will their acceptance mean but life from the dead’, declared Paul, the Jew, who for Christ’s sake went to the Gentiles in order to save Israel (Rom. 11:15).
In the long history of the Christian creeds right down to the present day, we hardly find a single mention of Israel, let alone a theological appraisal. It was only after the Second World War that the silence about Israel in the Christian creeds was broken. As far as I am aware, the Dutch Reformed Church came first with its Church Order of 1949 and the Fundamenten en Perspektieven van Belijden which are embodied in it. Article 8 of the church order divides Christian witness into three parts, the conversation with Israel, the gospel’s mission to the peoples of the non-Christian world and the Christianization (kerstening) of one’s own nation. This distinction takes account of different situations: in the case of Israel there is the dialogue which Jews and Christians carry on about the Old Testament; to the peoples of the non-Christian world the gospel is proclaiming something new. That is why we talk about mission here. In a Christian or post-Christian world the Christian witness must consider the history of its own influence. That is why the word used here is kerstening. Article 17 of the Fundamenten en Perspektieven van Belijden says of Israel:
1. Since God cannot repent of his gifts of grace and his call, we believe that the people of Israel (through whose ministry God desired to bless all generations on earth) is not rejected and forsaken by him. It is indeed true that Israel, when it rejected its king, was for a time rejected by God, the light of salvation being directed towards the Gentiles. This divine judgment consists in the fact that Israel was surrendered to the way which it chose for itself: the way in which man uses the law for his self-justification, thus shutting himself away from the shaming and liberating preaching of the grace which is in Christ Jesus.
2. Thus Israel lives among the nations as the token and mirror of God’s judgment. But both its continuance as a people, and also the bringing to faith of individuals belonging to it, are the earnest and pledge of Israel’s ultimate re-acceptance. God still has a future for his ancient people. It remains the people of the promise and the people of the Messiah. Anyone who finds this a stumbling block is making a stumbling block of God’s sovereign acts, to which he himself owes salvation. Anyone who impugns it is impugning God’s goodwill and will not escape his judgment.
3. The church of Jesus Christ has not grown to its full stature, nor has the kingdom of God arrived at its full manifestation, until Israel has been brought back to its Messiah (when and how God alone knows), so that Israel and the world of the nations both learn to acknowledge the free grace of the one who has consigned all men to disobedience, that he may have mercy on them all.
In the Catholic church the Second Vatican Council brought about the turning point. In the ‘Declaration on the Relationship of the Church to Non-Christian Religions’ we read:
As this sacred Synod searches into the mystery of the Church, it recalls the spiritual bond linking the people of the New Covenant with Abraham’s stock.
For the Church of Christ acknowledges that, according to the mystery of God’s saving design, the beginnings of her faith and her election are already found among the patriarchs, Moses, and the prophets. She professes that all who believe in Christ, Abraham’s sons according to faith (cf. Gal. 3:7), are included in the same patriarch’s call, and likewise that the salvation of the Church was mystically foreshadowed by the chosen people’s exodus from the land of bondage.
The Church, therefore, cannot forget that she received the revelation of the Old Testament through the people with whom God in his inexpressible mercy deigned to establish the Ancient Covenant. Nor can she forget that she draws sustenance from the root of that good olive tree onto which have been grafted the wild olive branches of the Gentiles (cf. Rom. 11:17–24). Indeed, the Church believes that by His cross Christ, our Peace, reconciled Jew and Gentile, making them both one in Himself (cf. Eph. 2:14–16).
Also, the Church ever keeps in mind the words of the Apostle about his kinsmen, ‘who have the adoption as sons, and the glory and the covenant and the legislation and the worship and the promises; who have the fathers, and from whom is Christ according to the flesh’ (Rom. 9:4–5), the son of the Virgin Mary. The Church recalls too that from the Jewish people sprang the apostles, her foundation stones and pillars, as well as most of the early disciples who proclaimed Christ to the world.
As holy Scripture testifies, Jerusalem did not recognize the time of her visitation (cf. Luke 19:44), nor did the Jews in large number accept the gospel; indeed, not a few opposed the spreading of it (cf. Rom. 11:28). Nevertheless, according to the Apostle, the Jews still remain most dear to God because of their fathers, for He does not repent of the gifts He makes nor of the calls He issues (cf. Rom. 11:28–9). In company with the prophets and the same Apostle, the Church awaits that day, known to God alone, on which all peoples will address the Lord in a single voice and ‘serve him with one accord’ (Zeph. 3:9; cf. Isa. 66:23; Ps. 65:4; Rom. 11:11–32).
Since the spiritual patrimony common to Christians and Jews is thus so great, this sacred Synod wishes to foster and recommend that mutual understanding and respect which is the fruit above all of biblical and theological studies, and of brotherly dialogues.
True, authorities of the Jews and those who followed their lead pressed for the death of Christ (cf. John 19:6); still, what happened in His passion cannot be blamed upon all the Jews then living, without distinction, nor upon the Jews of today. Although the Church is the new people of God, the Jews should not be presented as repudiated or cursed by God, as if such views followed from the holy Scriptures. All should take pains, then, lest in catechetical instruction and in the preaching of God’s Word they teach anything out of harmony with the truth of the gospel and the spirit of Christ.
If we compare these two texts, certain differences strike us:
(a) The Dutch confession recognizes Israel’s special position for the church and for the world. It talks about dialogue, not about mission. The Second Vatican Council, on the other hand, still talks about Israel in the framework of the ‘non-Christian religions’ and the church’s general relationship to them. It is only more recent Catholic declarations about Israel that go beyond this view of Israel as one of the ‘non-Christian religions’. But up to now neither the Vatican nor Geneva has drawn appropriate conclusions as far as organization is concerned. Israel is still allocated to the secretariats for relations with non-Christian religions.
(b) Common to both is the recognition of the abiding vocation of the people of Israel. The Reformed declaration concludes from this that Israel—according to Paul—is indeed for a time rejected and given over to its own devices as regards the use of the law, so that through this temporary rejection the light of salvation comes to the Gentiles, but that on the basis of Israel’s enduring vocation, its reacceptance and redemption are to be hoped for. The Catholic declaration sees the connection with salvation-history in linear terms rather than in such dialectic ones. The people of the new covenant remain spiritually linked with the tribe of Abraham, because the salvation of the church is prefigured in the exodus; because Christ, according to the flesh, the apostles, and most of the first disciples were Jews; and because the church waits for the day in which all the nations—Israel included—will call on the Lord with a single voice. Here Israel seems after all only to be regarded as a preliminary step to the church, even if it is a preliminary step which is preserved in all the steps that follow and which therefore recurs at the end of the road. Here the difference between the catholicity of the church and the catholicity of the kingdom of God is not seen clearly enough.
(c) According to both declarations, the question remains open: in what does the positive fellowship between the church and Israel consist? Israel’s enduring vocation ‘to be a light to lighten the Gentiles’ can be founded on the abiding faithfulness of God, who could not repent of his choice, his covenant and his promise. But does this faithfulness to Israel on God’s part correspond to an empirical fact? Here Christians like to point to the bare fact of the existence and survival of Judaism in dispersion and persecution. But that is not enough. We must also recognize how the Jews have subjectively remained alive. As the French episcopal statement, already quoted, makes clear, the special calling of this people is ‘the hallowing of the divine name’ through which the life and prayer of the Jewish people becomes a blessing for all nations. If that is true, then the Lord’s Prayer would suggest that the enduring hope of ‘the coming of the kingdom’ is also part of this people’s special calling. This messianic hope intensifies the experience of the world’s unredeemed nature and destroys the positive illusions of the self-satisfied, as well as the negative illusions of the despairing. It then follows that obedience to the will of God according to the Torah—that is to say, living commitment to the service of righteousness—is also part of the special calling of the Jews. Obedience to the Torah cannot be legalistically deprived of its legitimacy, for the Torah is the prefiguration and beginning of the divine rule on earth. If, then, we perceive and acknowledge in the Jews’ particular calling the hallowing of the divine name, in hope for the kingdom and in the doing of God’s will, we find a surprising consensus with the first three petitions of the Lord’s prayer. But this consensus can only be heard in two voices. On the Jewish side it comes from the story of the exodus and covenant, and from the teachings of the Torah. On the Christian side it comes from the history of Christ and the Spirit, and from the teachings of the gospel.
(d) According to both declarations, another question remains open: in what are the differences between Jews and Gentiles to be seen? That is the question of Christianity’s special calling. The church is not the organization that succeeds Israel in salvation history. It does not take Israel’s place. So it cannot have any desire to push Israel out. But neither is the church a revival movement within Israel, merely hoping for the national restoration of Israel and the rebuilding of Zion, and working towards that. The redemption of Israel coincides with the redemption of all creation. There is no homecoming to Israel for the church before the world is redeemed. The church of the mission to the nations proceeded from the reconciliation of the world with God in the self-giving of Christ, and was prompted to its ministry for the salvation of the nations by Israel’s rejection of the gospel. The special calling of Christianity, compared with Israel, consists in precisely this service of reconciliation between the Gentiles and God, which heralds the redemption of the world. It consists in the sending of hope into the world, so that the world may return to God’s future and may become free through this conversion and new beginning. The church cannot therefore remain within ‘the fence of Israel’ if it is to prepare mankind for the dawn of the promised messianic era. Nor can it adhere to law and circumcision. Its special calling is to hallow the name of God in the world on the foundation of the gospel of Christ, to spread hope for the kingdom, and to fulfil the will of God in liberation for love.
(e) According to both declarations it is clear that Israel and the church have different callings, which cannot be resolved in history in favour of the one or the other of them. Where Israel remains true to its calling, it remains a thorn in the church’s side. ‘This existence of the Jew forces Christianity at all periods to face the idea that it is not arriving at its goal, not arriving at truth but is always—a wayfarer.’ Judaism impresses on Christianity the experience of the world’s unredeemed nature. But where the church remains true to its calling, it remains a thorn in Israel’s side too. It testifies to the presence of the reconciliation of the world with God, without which there is no well-founded hope of its redemption. Thus the church ‘makes Israel jealous’ in order to save it, as Paul said (Rom. 11:11, 14). And thus Israel makes the church jealous in order that it may hope.
The present problem, and the one that is most difficult theologically, is ‘the land of Israel’ and the foundation of the state of Israel in that land. Anyone who recognizes Israel theologically cannot fail to know that for Israel God, people and land are inseparable. Earlier it was usual to try to separate the Jewish idea of God from the Jewish people, in order to adopt the Old Testament’s monotheism while despising the Jews; and similarly it is easy to acknowledge God and his people while despising the land and the state. But for Jewish and Christian theology the wars over the foundation and existence of the state of Israel have a double aspect. On the one hand the state is a sign of the end of the dispersion and the beginning of Israel’s homecoming. For the first time for two thousand years the Jews can live not only in an alien land but in their homeland. For the first time Jewish life can be lived again wholly. On the other hand this brings with it a recognizable danger that Israel may become a nation like all the others—not only a blessing to the nations but also a curse to the people who have been driven out of Palestine.
If Franz Rosenzweig is right, and the redemption of Israel coincides with the redemption of all creation, then the founding of the state of Israel in the land is a foretoken, but an ambiguous one. It can give Israel’s special calling the ground under its feet which it needs; but must not this ground be first sanctified through calling and through righteousness? In so far as Christians recognize that the God, the people and the land of Israel belong together, they can express, out of their own uncertainty, questions to which they themselves have no answer ready.
On the other hand, for Christianity the founding of the state of Israel cannot yet be the sign of the end of its own messianic mission to the world. It does not yet bring ‘the era of the Gentiles’ to an end. Conversely, the stagnation of the mission to the world cannot be taken as a sign that now Israel is going to repent. Paul links the redemption of Israel with ‘the resurrection of the dead’. Franz Rosenzweig ties up the redemption of Israel with the transfer of the kingdom from the Son to the Father, that is, with the redemption of all creation. The church cannot therefore rest content with a lesser fulfilment of its hope. It cannot surrender its particular mission for any other future. The Jews too will not ultimately equate Zionism with messianism, but—looking beyond the land and Zion—will wait for the coming God and his redeeming kingdom.
Having given an account of the special relationship of Christ’s church to Israel, we must now (while constantly revising our bearings in the light of this relationship) investigate the relations of the Christian faith to the world religions. The church’s abiding origin in Israel, its permanent orientation to Israel’s hope, Christianity’s resulting special vocation to prepare the way for the coming kingdom in history—all this will also give its stamp to the dialogue with the world religions. The dialogue cannot be determined by arbitrary and predetermined attitudes, but only by attitudes and judgments which are based on Christianity’s special promise and are directed towards the universal future of mankind in the kingdom of God. But just because of this we must note the changed world situation in which the world religions find themselves today and to which they are adapting themselves.
At one time every nation, every civilization and every religion on earth had its own history, its particular origin and its own future. History only existed in the plural form of all the different histories on earth. There was no world history—merely human histories in the world. Today nations, civilizations and religions unavoidably enter a ‘single, common world’. The economic, military, political and social web of interdependencies and communications is growing visibly. With the increasing density of the interweaving, the present conflicts are becoming a general threat. Because this general threat can only be overcome by common efforts, there is a demand for new community. With this the quality of history is changing too; it is making a leap, as it were, into something new: the nations will continue to have their pasts and their traditions in the plural, but their future and their hope will now only exist in the singular. This means that the future of the nations is a single humanity. Either the nations will run aground on their divisions or they will survive in new community. Consequently survival in the future will no longer be by the unaltered prolongation of national, cultural and religious pasts: it is something new, because it can only be what is in common. It has to be what is in common if mankind is still to win through to a future. The phrase ‘world religion’ has hitherto been understood to cover the great supranational ‘higher’ religions, Buddhism, Hinduism, Confucianism, Islam and Christianity. The only religions that will be able to present themselves and to maintain their ground as ‘world religions’ in the future will be the ones that accept the ‘single world’ that is coming into being and the common world history which can be created today for the first time. This is the new situation for the religions, Christianity included.
Historically, mission and the spread of Christianity created certain particular centres: the Roman empire, Europe and America. As a result a Christianity came into being which was centred on Rome; later this was followed by a Christianity centred on Europe and America. For a long time the Christian nations and states of Europe and America were the bulwark of Christianity against other nations and states, and also against other religions. In modern times, hand in hand with North Atlantic colonialism and imperialism, Christianity then spread all over the world. The other religions were either viewed as enemies or as the superstitions from which Christianity (in conjunction with Western civilization) freed men and women. This period of ‘Western mission’, with its opportunities and its burdens, is irrevocably coming to an end. The era of ‘world mission’ is beginning. But what does this mean? Christianity is more or less present in all nations. But it is frequently only present in its Western form. Indigenous forms must therefore develop, so that an authentic Indian, Chinese, Japanese, Indonesian, African and Latin American Christianity may grow up, with corresponding indigenous theologies. The centring on Europe will come to an end. It further means that indigenous Christianity will enter into dialogue, exchange and mutual co-operation with the respective indigenous religions. In this way, without the support of Christian peoples and states, Christians will enter into living relationship with people of other faiths. The dialogue between powerless Christian minorities and the prevailing religions will look very different from the dialogue carried on by powerful Christian majorities. It will be pursued without the temptation to apply force. That is a new situation for the Christianity which is scattered all over the world.
What task can Christianity have towards the other world religions? It is one goal of mission to awaken faith, to baptize, to found churches and to form a new life under the lordship of Christ. Geographically this mission proceeds to the ends of the earth. It proceeds numerically and tries to reach as many people as possible. It thinks in terms of quantity and evolves strategies for ‘church growth’. We have no intention of disputing this or belittling it. But mission has another goal as well. It lies in the qualitative alteration of life’s atmosphere—of trust, feeling, thinking and acting. We might call this missionary aim to ‘infect’ people, whatever their religion, with the spirit of hope, love and responsibility for the world. Up to now this qualitative mission has taken place by the way and unconsciously, as it were, in the wake of the ‘quantitative’ mission. In the new world situation in which all religions find themselves, and the new situation of Christianity in particular, the qualitative mission directed towards an alteration of the whole atmosphere of life should be pursued consciously and responsibly. It will not be able to diffuse en passant the atmosphere of the Christian West, nor will it desire to do so. For this is neither particularly ‘Christian’ nor very helpful; and it is not what is wanted. But it will have to direct its energies towards the climate which is essential if solutions are to be found to the most serious problems which face mankind today—famine, domination of one class by another, ideological imperialism, atomic wars, and the destruction of the environment.
Qualitative mission takes place in dialogue. If it is a serious dialogue about the most fundamental problems, then it does not lead to non-commital permanent conversations. In dialogue the religions change, Christianity included, just as in personal conversations the expressions, attitudes and views of the partners alter. The dialogue of world religions is a process into which we can only enter if we make ourselves vulnerable in openness, and if we come away from the dialogue changed. We do not lose our identity, but we acquire a new profile in the confrontation with our partner. The world religions will emerge from the dialogues with a new profile. It may be said that Christians hope that these profiles will be turned towards suffering men and women and their future, towards life and towards peace.
If Christianity is to adapt itself to this process of dialogue, openness and alteration, a series of prejudices about other religions will have to be demolished.
The church’s exclusive absolutism has made Christianity invulnerable, inalterable and aggressive. ‘Outside the church no salvation’ was the definition of the Council of Florence in 1442, appealing to Cyprian and Origen. What it meant was:
The Holy Roman Church … firmly believes, acknowledges and proclaims that ‘no one outside the Catholic Church, neither heathen nor Jew nor unbeliever, nor anyone separated from the unity, will partake of eternal life, but that he will rather fall victim to the everlasting fire prepared for the devil and his angels, if he does not adhere to it [i.e., the Holy Roman Church] before he dies’.
Here Jews, unbelievers and schismatics are lumped together into a group destined for mass perdition. The Roman church is maintained as being the church of salvation. It was at that time the imperial church as well. The crusades, the Albigensian wars and the political persecutions of the groups mentioned were both the presupposition and the result of the declaration. It was not until five hundred years later that the Second Vatican Council amended the Catholic church’s attitude. Now ‘all men of good will can achieve salvation’, including Jews, Moslems and Christians belonging to other denominations, at least in principle. For the whole group comprising all men ‘of good will’ (who are no more closely defined than that) is pronounced capable of salvation. This certainly opens the frontiers of the visible church, defined by baptism and membership, and makes them more permeable; but the problem remains unsolved. A milder, opener, perhaps even ‘more enlightened’ absolutism takes the place of the old rigorous and violent one. But must the church not rethink its position even more radically? Outside Christ no salvation. Christ has come and was sacrificed for the reconciliation of the whole world. No one is excluded. Outside the salvation that Christ brings to all men there is therefore no church. The visible church is, as Christ’s church, the ministry of reconciliation exercised upon the world. Thus the church is to be seen, not as absolute, but in its relationship to the divine reconciler and to reconciled men and women, of whatever religion.
The absolutism of faith with regard to the world religions also needs revision. Against the background of the modern criticism levelled at religion by Feuerbach, Marx, Freud and Nietzsche, the ‘dialectical theologians’ Karl Barth, Emil Brunner, Friedrich Gogarten and Rudolf Bultmann have emphatically shown that faith is not to be equated with religion. From the prophets and apostles onwards, the biblical faith itself has been conspicuously critical of religion. The enemies of faith are not lack of faith but superstition, idolatry, man’s ‘Godalmightiness’ and self-righteousness. As the successor of the prophets, true faith acts iconoclastically against the idols and fetishes of timorous man. Following the crucified Christ, it acts irreligiously and ‘atheistically’ against the political religions and idols of countries and nations. Trust in the triune God strips away the aura of divinity from actualities that have been made into idols and makes life in the world in the framework of creation possible. Faith in ‘the crucified God’ robs power and fortune of the careless confidence from which they live and the superstitious fear which is the basis of their rule. Modern philosophical criticism of religion grew up from the religion of middle-class society. Feuerbach, Marx, Freud and Nietzsche understood relatively little about the world religions or the comparative study of religions. The criticism of religion levied by early dialectical theology had in view the relationship between faith and religion at a time when the bourgeois Christian world was declining. But it deepened the conflict of faith and religion theologically in such a way that man was presented with a general alternative: religion as the self-assertion of man, who feels himself lost—or faith as man’s response to God’s self-revelation? Its Christian criticism of religion was directed against the Christianity which had become ‘religious’ in this sense, not against the world religions. For that reason we cannot deduce the absolutism of Christianity over against the world religions from the theological difference between revelation and religion, faith and superstition. The relationship of Christianity to the other religions must be defined differently. The criticism of religion is directed on a quite different level to everyone, whether he be Christian, Jew, Moslem or Hindu. If we make a clear distinction here, we escape the absolutist misunderstanding of the Christian faith on the one hand, and avoid on the other the compulsion to set up a general concept of religion which levels down all religions, including Christianity.
The absolutism of the church in Europe came to an end through the wars of religion and was replaced by the relativism of the Enlightenment and of humanism. People sought for the ‘third way’, the ‘third era of the spirit’ in the conflict between Catholics and Protestants. The more unknown continents were discovered, and the more strange religions became known, the more intensively people also looked for a general human basis in this whole field, in order to understand the things that were strange and to find peace. The tolerance of modern states towards Catholics and Protestants developed into a general tolerance towards the world religions. This tolerance, which was essential for peace, could be sustained for different reasons. It could be sceptical tolerance. If different groups claim absolute truth for very different things, then it would seem obvious to dispute such claims in general, and to hold anyone that maintains them for a charlatan. Sceptical tolerance is shown in the story of ‘the three impostors’ (Moses, Jesus and Mohammed are meant), which probably originated in the tenth century in the border region between Arabs and Christians. It has also been ascribed to the ‘enlightened’ Hohenstaufen emperor Frederick II. At all events this story acquired great influence during the period of the Enlightenment. But sceptical tolerance does not itself avoid the necessity of having to commit itself to the non-committal nature of all claims to truth. Lessing took up the story of the three impostors in his parable of the ring; but here productive tolerance replaces its sceptical counterpart:
So let each man hold his ring
To be the true one—even so
Let each man press on uncorrupted
After his love, free from all prejudice.
Lessing’s productive tolerance did not criticize the different subjective modes of faith for their certainty, but he did criticize their dealings with one another. He wanted to see the dialogue of the world religions in history as a noble contest, in which every religion displays its best, without disparaging the others. For him history as a noble contest between the religions had as its goal the revelation of truth at the end of history. Because of that he relativized the religions in the light of this future, seeing them all side by side as forerunners of the future truth, which they only think they already possess. In the present he was able to discover the hidden future truth only in the ethos of humanity. The truth itself is ‘undemonstrable’. It is only ‘demonstrated’ here and now through humanity. That is why Nathan says to the Sultan Saladin, after the parable of the ring, ‘Ah, if I had but found one more among you for whom it sufficed to be a man!’ For productive tolerance, every religion is a means of educating humanity and a transitional stage to pure morality. Lessing lived in a period of abolutist assertions of truth. ‘Possession makes a man quiet, indolent and proud’, he remarks critically. His pointer to the hidden nature of truth seemed to mobilize man’s best powers. If truth is ‘undemonstrable’, then continual striving after truth, even with the admitted risk of error, stands higher than its possession. Today, on the contrary, the hiddenness of truth does not seem to release any striving towards truth at all. The change from productive to sceptical tolerance dominates the secular age. The proposition that ‘everyone should find salvation after his own fashion’ had a meaning as long as people actually wanted salvation, and as long as one or another fashion of finding it presented itself. The relativity of ‘the religions’ which Lessing maintained in the face of the future manifestation of truth, and its relativity in view of humanity’s present ethos, are perverted into their opposites when they turn into relativism. For religious, historical and moral relativism either has no basis at all, or it is based on another absolutism. Even today, if we would like to channel the world religions towards the essential peace of the world or the necessary classless society, so as to relativize their differences, we do not escape the mutual play of relativism and absolutism. For who has the right, or who is in a position, to set up the conditions and the goal which are to determine the ethos of the religions and their functions? Whose picture of humanity is to prevail and whose image of the goal is to dominate humanity’s future? In most cases religious relativism seems simply to be a cloak for a new absolutism, even if it does not already behave absolutely itself. The truth of relativism and the tolerance founded on it is no doubt to be sought in relationality. A life and a religion are relative in that they behave relationally and enter into living relationships to other life and other religions. In living relationship ‘everything’ is not of equal consequence, and therefore of no consequence at all. The one is of extreme significance for the other. It is only out of the growing web of living relationships that something new can come into being for a wider community. Absolutism and relativism are really twins, because both view ‘everything’ from a higher, non-historical watch-tower. In the open history of potentiality one can only move specifically from one relationship to other relationships in the hope that living relations will enable us to gain ‘everything’ and to combat the threat of ‘nothingness’.
At this point we may briefly consider the traditional theological models for the relationship between Christianity and the world religions. They start from Christianity in order to define the relationship according to Christian concepts; that is to say, they still belong to the period of Christian absolutism. ‘Nature and supernature’ was one model. According to this the other religions belong to the realm of nature, the natural knowledge of God and reverence for him. But the Christian church lives from and represents a mystery which is known as ‘supernatural’. It must therefore present itself as the supernatural truth of natural truths, or as the fullness of truth behind the elements of truth in the other religions. It is true that grace does not destroy nature, but rather completes it. But just for that very reason the church must take up the other religions and perfect them in itself. Wherever the church is implanted, therefore, it will take over all the elements which according to its supernatural wisdom, it holds to be ‘good, true and beautiful’, and will heighten them, correct them and so perfect them. We can find examples in the Christianization of Greek, Roman, Germanic and Latin-American religion. There was also a historical interpretation of the same model, according to which all the heathen religions are historically interim religions. Only Christianity can term itself ‘the absolute religion’ because it lives from the absolute self-manifestation of God and the eschatological presence of the Spirit. It contains within itself the completion of the history of divine Being and it represents the end of the history of religion. This model too allows for the integration of everything which is ‘good, true and beautiful’ in the provisional religions, measured by the yardstick of the absolute self-manifestation of God. It is also syncretistically open to the aspects of truth in other religions. But it is precisely because of its syncretistic openness that the Christian religion is to excel all others, so proving itself ‘the absolute religion’.
If Christianity renounces its exclusive claim in relation to the other religions, and if it does not assume an inclusive claim either, then the formula of the critical catalyst suggests itself as a new model for its post-absolutist era. A catalyst causes elements to combine simply through its presence. The simple presence of Christians in environments determined by other religions provokes effects of this kind, provided that Christians live, think and act differently. This can be called the indirect infection of other religions with Christian ideas, values and principles. If it is true that the Indian religions think ‘unhistorically’, then their world picture is altered by the experience of reality as history which Christians present to them. This is already taking place through the historical investigation of Hinduism and Buddhism, through the introduction of, and stress on, the future tense in the Indian languages, and, finally, through the different relationship Christians have to time. If it is true that Islam produces a fatalistic attitude, then the encounter with Christianity brings about the discovery that the world can be changed and that people have a responsibility for changing it. If it is true that many religions have their faces so turned away from the world that they disseminate social indifference, then the presence of Christians makes them recognize social responsibility and the activities appropriate to it. But these indirect catalystic influences of Christianity on other religions are never unequivocal; they are always ambiguous, especially when they are linked with the spread of Western science and technology. Science and technology, capitalism or socialism, cannot be viewed as an indirect ‘Christianization’ of other religions. But these effects are there and must be noted. We must become conscious of them today so that the catalystic influences of the Christian faith can be less ambiguous than they have been, and are not confused with the influence of the West, merely under Christian auspices.
The models we have discussed are still not based on dialogue since they proceed from the Christian monologue, not from the dialogue itself. They all formulate the Christian position before the entry into dialogue. They do not formulate it in the context of dialogue. Consequently they still do not show any profile of Christianity in the context of dialogue. Christianity’s vocation must be presented as clearly as possible, but it must be a presentation in relationship, and must not precede that relationship.
The life in dialogue of the world religions is in its first modest and hesitant beginnings. It is therefore more important to formulate the first steps than to fix the comprehensive goals. Bilateral dialogues between Christians and Jews, Christians and Moslems, Christians and Buddhists, Buddhists and Hindus, Moslems and animists, etc., can lead to multilateral dialogues; and multilateral dialogues can be the genesis of the tension-fraught universal community of religions for a universal society, though no one yet knows what it will look like.
We have talked about a qualitative mission, aimed at creating a climate for life in fellowship; and we have called its method dialogue. Out of bitter experience, the expression ‘mission’ has come to be taken as a threat by many people. Christians can only talk about their particular mission if they take note of and respect the different missions of other religions. They can only enter usefully into dialogue with them if they do not merely want to communicate something, but to receive something as well. Fruitful dialogue involves clear knowledge about the identity of one’s own faith on the one hand; but on the other it requires a feeling of one’s own incompleteness and a real sense of need for fellowship with the other. This is the only way in which real interest in another religion comes into being, a ‘creative need for the other’. The dialogue itself changes the atmosphere in which the religions formerly existed, separated from or even actively hostile to each other, and creates the conditions for fellowship in which mutual participation, exchange and cross-fertilization become possible.
The first experiences of dialogue of this kind led to a catalogue of the insights which other religions can pass on to Christianity. The uniqueness of Islam’s call ‘Let God be God’, its total recognition of the divine lordship over the whole of life, and its criticism of idolatry, both ancient and modern, must impress Christians and call them to self-examination. The meditative power of Buddhism, its insight into the self and man’s inner freedom brings back to light repressed mystical elements in the Christian faith, and can lead Christians to re-examine their modern activism. Perception of the complicated systems of balance which bind together the individual, his community, the natural environment, his ancestors and the gods does not permit the prejudicial adjective ‘primitive’ to be applied to the animist religions of Africa and Asia. They probably preserve ecological and genetic knowledge which has long since been lost to modern Christianity.
The three-cornered dialogue between Jews, Christians and Moslems can fall back on common historical presuppositions and many existing parallels. The dialogue with Buddhists will first of all concentrate on the general human problem of suffering. Conversations with the popular religions can, in the first place, revolve round ‘the feast’. There are starting points enough, once interest has been awakened. But we shall only be able to discover what they are through dialogue. Here the level of the dialogue will first have to be found in each individual relationship. It is not possible to determine this level from the Christian side by means of theological scholarship; for ‘theology’ is a Christian speciality and peculiarity, and theology as a discipline has only existed in Christianity since the Middle Ages. Other religions have other forms of expression, and so will wish to choose their own level of dialogue, e.g., the cult, meditation, or other areas of religious practice. For this reason Christians cannot determine in advance that the relationship is to be one of dialogue on an intellectual level. But, like every other religion, Christianity must none the less be clear about what it hopes for when it enters into living relationships and into dialogue with others. And here the dialogue cannot be the means to an unspoken end; how far the dialogue itself is hope is something that must be clarified.
‘Dialogue strives to bring to expression the love which alone makes truth creative.’ For Christianity dialogue and the relationships to other religions are not a means to an end; they are meaningful in themselves as an expression of its life in love. For it lives in the presence of a God who is love and who desires love. It lives in a God who can suffer and who in the power of his love desires to suffer in order to redeem. In their dialogue with people of a different faith, Christians cannot therefore testify through their behaviour to an unalterable, apathetic and aggressive God. By giving love and showing interest in others, they also become receptive to the other and vulnerable through what is alien to them. They can bear the otherness of the others without becoming insecure and hardening their hearts. The right thing is not to carry on the dialogue according to superficial rules of communication, but to enter into it out of the depths of the understanding of God. In that way we testify to God’s openness to men in our openness to other people and other things. In that way we show God’s passion through our living interest in the other. In that way we manifest God’s vulnerability in the vulnerability of our love and our readiness for change. To isolate oneself and to seek to dominate even in mission are probably always signs of incapacity to suffer. The God who wins power in the world through the helplessness of his Son, who liberates through his self-giving, and whose strength is mighty in weakness can only be testified to in dialogue and in the wounds and transformations which dialogue brings with it.
It was said to be one of the highlights of the ecumenical dialogue when a Shiite Moslem, with his tradition of the sovereign God, felt the lack of God’s self-surrender to man, the God who suffers and sacrifices himself. This must not be overvalued, or stressed as a missionary success, but it can be interpreted as an indication that human suffering is the central problem in most religions. Is it solved when the Buddhist tries to extinguish the ‘desire’ of life as the ground of suffering? Is it solved if the animist sees it as a disturbance in the cosmic balance and tries to put the disturbance right through sacrifice? Is it solved when the Moslem accepts his destiny in total self-surrender to God? Is it solved if the Christian accepts suffering in the love of God and transforms it by virtue of his hope? Dialogue is not merely a way of discussing suffering; it is also a way of practising our attitudes to suffering on one another.
This complex of dialogue, vulnerability and the question of suffering leads to the step beyond inter-religious dialogue, to the human situation today. The fellowship in dialogue of the religions would be misunderstood if it went under the slogan: religions of the world unite against growing irreligious secularism or anti-religious Communism! On the contrary, inter-religious dialogue must be expanded by dialogue with the ideologies of the contemporary world. Together with them, it must ultimately be related to the people who are living, suffering and dying in the world today.
When we consider the indigenization of the Christian churches and Christian theology in any given society, this orientation also raises the question of the place of their presence in the social structure. In societies which are divided up into castes and classes, it matters very much whether the Christian churches and theology make themselves at home in the ruling castes or classes, in the lower castes or classes, or among the casteless and classless. Historically, too, it made a difference whether Christianity spread through the conversion and baptism of kings, or through the conversion and liberation of the poor. It is true that today national and social identity often overlap. But just because of that the national and cultural indigenization of Christianity is by no means sufficient. It must also come to be at home among the people; and what will be at home among them is whatever shares their necessities and works for their liberation.
This orientation towards the suffering of the present time also raises questions about the social position of the partners in the dialogue between world religions. Top-level discussions between privileged persons usually do very little to relieve the suffering of ordinary people. Dialogue is a sign of hope for these people if it is carried on in the interests of their life and liberation. In the interests of cultural indigenization, a truly Indian, Chinese, Japanese, Indonesian, Arabic and African Christianity must come into being. Moreover, in the dialogue with the world religions a Buddhist, Hindu, Moslem, animist, Confucian, Shintoist Christianity will come into being. There were Jewish reasons for believing Jesus to be the Christ. There were Greek reasons for believing in Jesus as the Logos. There were Germanic reasons for reverencing Jesus as the leader of souls. In their own period these reasons were not merely cultural; they were more religious in kind. Culture and religion cannot be separated. Consequently, today we shall also have to enquire into Hindu, Buddhist and Islamic reasons for faith in Jesus. This must not be condemned as syncretism. A Christianity coloured by different civilizations does not result in a cultural mixture; and a Christianity tinged with different religions does not simply produce a religious mixture. What is at issue is the charismatic quickening of different religious gifts, powers and potentialities for the kingdom of God and the liberation of men. The syncretism which dissolves Christian identity only comes about if people lose sight of this future, to which Christianity is called. Mere indigenization in another culture and religion looks back to what has come into existence and to what is actually present. The charismatic activation of cultural and religious forces in the interests of the messianic future looks forward. If it is Christianity’s particular vocation to prepare the messianic era among the nations and to make ready the way for the coming redemption, then no culture must be pushed out and no religion extinguished. On the contrary, all of them can be charismatically absorbed and changed in the power of the Spirit. They will not be ecclesiasticized in the process, nor will they be Christianized either; but they will be given a messianic direction towards the kingdom. For this, people of other religions, and the other religions themselves, bring a wealth of potentialities and powers with them; and Christianity must not suppress these but must fill them with hope. Then the dialogue of world religions can also become a sign of hope for the people who have no definite religion or religious practice, but whose elemental cry is for liberation, life and redemption. For Christianity the dialogue with the world religions is part of the wider framework of the liberation of the whole creation for the coming kingdom. It belongs within the same context as the conversation with Israel and the political and social passion for a freer, juster and more habitable world. Christianity’s dialogistic profile ought to be turned to the future of the liberating and redeeming kingdom in the potentialities and powers of the world religions. That is a profile which Christianity can only acquire in dialogue with others.
Now that we have looked at the church’s position with regard to Israel, and the position of Christianity in relation to the world religions, we must enquire into Christianity’s position in the secular order. Here too we shall be concerned with institutions and processes which can neither be ecclesiasticized nor Christianized, but to which the church adapts itself and in which Christians adopt particular viewpoints. As the heading indicates, here we are giving a new name to the partners who are entering into living relationship. The word ‘church’ always suggests the official church, or the regular organization; but here responsibility clearly lies with responsible Christians in their secular professions. So at this point we shall talk about ‘Christianity’. On the other hand we shall not talk in the usual way about the secular order—family, economy, state and culture—because the conceptions of this ‘secular order’ are based on the model of the state of pre-modern times with its class distinctions; and also because the expression ‘order’ sounds too static. We are really concerned with historically mobile and interdependent areas of activity where it is important not to preserve a fore-given ‘order’ but to regulate ordering processes. We shall therefore talk about processes instead of orders, processes in whose conflicts and trends Christianity is involved, and has to be involved today, more consciously than ever before. Earlier, people saw the secular order in the limited circumference of their own people, their own nation and their own society. The church’s doctrine about the secular order had in mind those societies which could be termed the ‘corpus christianum’, or ‘Christendom’. But in the age of the growing interdependence of all the peoples and societies on earth, limitation to one’s own society or to ‘Christendom’ becomes more and more provincial. Wherever Christianity is involved in economic, political or cultural processes—and that means everywhere, practically speaking—it is involved in world processes. It has to recognize this interdependence and free itself from national and cultural narrow-mindedness. Christianity does not exist for its own sake; it exists for the sake of the coming kingdom. Christians look forward to this kingdom as the future of the whole of creation; and so they can only prepare for it together with other people. For Christianity’s hope is not directed towards ‘another’ world, but towards the world as it is changed in the kingdom of God. Christian ideas about the goal of the world processes therefore do not simply belong to social ethics, either; they are a part of Christianity’s comprehensive mission in history for the kingdom. The church does not understand itself if it does not understand its mission in this world process and its hope for this world process. Notwithstanding the ever-closer interrelations of the different elements, let us differentiate the world process according to three dimensions:
1. The economic process, which is acted out in economic struggles and the exploitation of nature. Here the economic liberation of man and nature from man’s exploitation is essential.
2. The political process, which is acted out in the struggle for power and the control of power. Here the need is for man’s political liberation from man’s repression.
3. The cultural process, which is acted out in the struggle for educational, racial and sexual privileges. Here the aim is man’s cultural liberation from his alienation from other men.
Today the uneven and egoistical advances made in the different dimensions have brought the world to a global crisis in which mankind is driving itself and the natural basis of its life towards destruction. Progress is beginning to devour itself. That is why the image of the vicious circle suggests itself everywhere, in big and little things alike. Actions prompted by hope for mankind’s survival and a meaningful and humane life must be gathered together into the appropriate counter-strategies if they are to achieve anything. Statements about the theology of economic, political and cultural liberation do not mean that we should split up theology into separate sections; they simply point to the necessary differentiation of theological reflection about specific action in the various dimensions, in the light of Christianity’s special messianic mission and its all-embracing hope for the coming kingdom.
Our contemporary economic, political and cultural world crises are shaking people to the depths of their will to live. That is why what is demanded of Christianity is not merely ethical commitment to liberation from the vicious circles in which man is involved; the presence of its faith is of equal importance. These crises are not to be solved with the help of an improved morality alone, for the loss of courage is so widespread that many people are not doing what they could do, even though they know that they have to do it. In this crisis faith means the courage to be, the affirmation of life, loyalty to the earth.
Only a vigorous will towards this world permits faith in the next to germinate, after life’s crisis; the man who does not will simply does not believe.… That is the reason for the decay of religion—the decay which we cannot get to the root of. When circumstances are bearable people quite enjoy living. But the word ‘enjoy’ has no strength in it. The film ends, the picture on the television screen fades. Shall we see it again? Shall we go on watching? Why?… For the rest, the glow of the mushroom cloud spreads through the air. The sword strikes. Lucky is the man for whom it has all ended already! So if we wanted to missionize we would have to strengthen the will for this world; fear is useless. But what arguments are there?
In this situation of paralysing apathy and the creeping recession of the will to live, the Christian faith must show itself in courage for incarnation, in a passionate love of life, and in its ardent interest in existence, so that the feeble ‘enjoyment’ of life acquires the power to resist death, catastrophe and all the people who pursue them. We can break the spell of creeping acclimatization to the deterioration in the quality of life brought about by injustice, oppression and man-made catastrophes. The paralysing feeling of helplessness must be overcome if mankind is to go on promising itself a future.
The enthusiastic hopes which mobilized an earlier generation and set the industrial revolution on foot are decaying. Today the hopes which were invested in progress, growth and profit are turning into fatalism, suicidal despair and nostalgia. They have been deeply disappointed. Moreover they must be drawn out of the industrial revolution so that, newly formulated, they can be made capable of taming that revolution. It is for that that they must regain their true vitality. The power of hope is only manifested in the crisis of progress today if it leads to life even in the face of deadly crisis. In confrontation with the economic, political and ecological processes that are taking place, it must make people ready to act in time and to make the necessary sacrifices. There will be no survival for mankind without the rebirth of the power of hope, which in the face of the possibility of the world’s death wills to live and prepares to live.
Finally, the rediscovery of the capacity for suffering is part of the will to live and the power of hope. The industrial, political and cultural undertakings of modern times are splendid endeavours to overcome suffering, or at least to reduce it. But progress in the conquest of human suffering has taken place to a great extent at the cost of increased suffering for other people. If the mass of suffering is shifted, the people who have been relieved of it easily get the impression that the suffering has been conquered. But if a society only overcomes its hunger by letting other people go hungry in its stead, if it only overcomes its oppression by enslaving others, it is impossible to talk about the conquest of suffering. If it is true that the limits of growth are becoming recognizable on the horizon of an imminent and datable future—and of this there can be no doubt—then there are limits to the conquest of suffering as well. The ideal of Western progress—to lead a life free from pain or suffering—is intolerable because it inflicts suffering and pain on others. We cannot just minimize this by talking about regrettable ‘side effects’. This is the actual price that has to be paid. Consequently there can only be an equal and just distribution of the burden of suffering that cannot be overcome. The ideal of a life without suffering makes one group of people apathetic and brutal towards other groups, which are supposed to pay the price. The shifting of the cost on to other people is intolerable for both. Humanity only has a future if it looks to a common future. If humanity wants a common future, and if people are not to bring one another to suffering and death, then the people who are now capable of acting must rediscover the meaning of suffering. It is only the dignity of solidarity in suffering which makes people capable of fellowship. And here the capacity for suffering in the sense of receptivity for the other and a quick eye for what is new must be awakened too.
In this context Christianity in the world can be expected to overcome the fatal loss of courage with its passion for living. It can be expected to make life possible in face of the threat of death through the power of hope given by its faith. It can be expected to put a stop to the shifting of suffering on to others, through the capacity for suffering of its own love; and—contrary to the ‘struggle for existence’—to build solidarity within the frontiers of existence.
The church is not in a position to put itself in the forefront of the imperfect, natural orders as a perfect society. Its own hierarchical constitution is a historically developed structure eminently determined by the times in which it grew up; as such it does not as yet reflect the kingdom of God. It cannot be the church’s commission to form the world after its own image. Every direct intervention by the church in economics, politics and culture has up to now been subject to the suspicion that it was serving the church’s own interests; and this suspicion is hard to destroy. For this reason the church ought not to claim any direct power in secular matters. The model of partnership, of mutual limitation and complement, between the church and the secular order functioned as long as there was a ‘Christian world’. But since the secular order has increasingly emancipated itself from the Christian world, the limiting and complementing function of the church has ceased to work. The church’s faith certainly continues to claim the right to liberate the secular order for its true secularity by keeping it free from surrogate religious and ideological idolatries. But since reason has long since acquired an independence of its own, alike in the economic, political and cultural sphere, faith’s claim generally only acts as a subsequent justification of what has been achieved without it. The church’s claim to free the secular order for its secularity, and faith’s claim to bring reason to its secular reasonableness is based on an indirect power of the church and of faith. This claim too has become ineffectual today.
If we start from the situation of world-wide Christianity, and of Christians in their secular professions and responsibilities, then what is in question can neither be the ecclesiasticizing of the world nor a helpless respect for the inherent laws of the secular spheres; the aim can only be the perception of certain trends and lines of Christian action. For Christians these trends are motivated by the will to live, the power to hope and the capacity for suffering that are part of their faith. They are directed towards the future of creation in the kingdom of God and are actualized in the powers of the Spirit and the potentialities of history. Coming from liberation through Christ, determined by the surplus of hope that overflows every historical present, they will as far as possible do whatever is vitally necessary if we are to resist the power of death as well as the deadly powers.
Economics originally meant domestic science. In its Greek origins, economics was a part of the politics of the city state, for the larger household of a Greek citizen was his polis. That is the reason why Aristotle treats economics as part of political philosophy. Down to modern times, economics was dealt with in the framework of moral theology and moral philosophy. It was still a part of politics. It was only when natural philosophy came to be separated from moral philosophy, and the natural sciences from ethics, at the end of the eighteenth century, that the autonomy of the economic sciences grew up, an autonomy which is expressed in the concept of ‘pure economies’. It corresponds to the middle-class division between society and state and the industrial division between work and family. Rapid industrial development and the economic expansion of the industrial countries has led to a situation today when economic categories are more comprehensive than political ones, and political institutions are less and less able to regulate the large-scale economic organizations, with their power and the conflicts they evoke. World markets have grown up which escape the control of governments and inter-governmental institutions.
Practically speaking, the only ‘universal’ in the contemporary world is money. Although the rates of exchange fluctuate, the monetary system is a universal reality. It is the medium of economic communication. It makes community possible through buying and selling, because money itself is something like symbolized possibility. People do not merely ‘speculate’ with money; money itself is a speculative reality. Labour and goods stop being realities and turn into potentialities when they are re-calculated in terms of money. Money can then be transferred in different ways into the reality of goods and services. But money is speculative in another respect as well. As long as the economy was regulated by politics, coins bore the picture of the emperor (cf. Matt. 22:21). They represented the imperial sphere of influence. Even today coins and bank notes bear national emblems, for the political community is supposed to guarantee the value of money. US dollar notes are not only a claim to confidence in the nation; they are a claim to religious confidence as well, with their assertion: ‘In God we trust.’ Really, however, bourgeois industrial society has long since created a world in its own image through the world currency system and the world market. When currencies become universally convertible, they are no longer a speculum of a political ruler or an individual nation; they reflect this society which is, in trend, ‘universal’. It is our own reflection which looks back at us from coins and bank notes, and enables us to enter into relationships and exchange with every other person. But these relationships by way of the potentialities of money cannot be called ‘human’ relationships. For through them the person only enters into communication as homo oeconomicus, as labour and as a purchaser. On this level all other human designations and relationships are of no significance, because they cannot be summed up in terms of money. At the same time, ‘economic man’, reduced to his capacities as producer and consumer, is the first ‘universal man’ visible today. ‘Pure’ economics are only pure because they are confined to this aspect of man and are related to a universe in which political, cultural, sexual, national and religious differences between people have no significance.
But human reality is never ‘purely economic’ and even ‘pure economics’ are never pure. Human needs, claims and values always run ahead of the economy; they are incorporated in its systems and bound up with its progress. The economy belongs within the context of a social ethic, and lives from it. As long as this ethic is ‘a matter of course’ we need not pay any attention to it and can confine ourselves to ‘pure economies’. But if it is called in question, then the economy has to consider its ethical and political context critically, just as, conversely, ethics and politics have to subject their economic basis to a critical examination. By ethics and accepted values we mean here a society’s vital wishes, fundamental claims and ruling interests. This still does not tell us anything about its moral qualities. These wishes, claims and interests have their situation in the life of society and regulate that life. They are not unalterable, but in their own period they count as ‘absolute’ in the sense that people have the impression that things could be no different. It is only when the fulfilment of these wishes, the satisfaction of these claims and the realization of these interests lead to crises and catastrophes that a ‘revaluation of values’ becomes possible and necessary.
What values have governed the rise of modern economics? If we compare modern economics with the economics of pre-modern societies we find that the most important distinction is the difference between growth, expansion and universality on the one hand, and equilibrium in limits on the other. Earlier civilizations were by no means primitive; they were actually highly complicated systems of equilibrium in the relationship of man to man; of groups to nature; and of both to the gods. The modern world, on the other hand, is fundamentally out for growth, expansion and conquest, without inward moderation and without external scruple. For the modern world, non-expansion or ‘nil growth’ counts as stagnation. Here inflationary monetary policy can even make standstill look like progress or force it into a recession. The particular nature of modern economics presupposes in men and women an insatiable hunger for life which makes them strive beyond every state of affairs which they have already achieved. Man wants to live, but mere life does not content him. He wants an intensified, full and happy life. For him there is no such thing as life in a limited and constant dimension. There is always either more life, or less. Intensified life means being able to ‘live it up’, being able to realize to the full life’s potentialities—which are thought to be unlimited—being able to overcome everything negative which is a drag on vitality, and to acquire the positive things that enhance it. This limitless hunger for life is coupled with the will to power and the interest in rule. Life is power and the will to power.
If one is a European one can see in this unrest the unique nature of human existence per se:
At all events man in relation to the animal is … the eternal ‘Faust’, the bestia cupidissima rerum novarum, never content with the reality encompassing him, always hungry to break through the limits of his existence-as-it-is-now, always striving to transcend the reality that surrounds him.
For an African, however, this can merely be seen as the modern European’s Vasco da Gama mentality. The notion that the value of a person lies in the fulfilment of his claims and the increase of his power is a conviction which only grew up in the period of early capitalism, at the beginning of modern European times. It also led to a reinterpretation of the biblical teaching that man was made in the image of God; and this reinterpretation had disastrous consequences. According to the biblical and Christian tradition it is only the fact that he is made in the image of God that justifies and upholds man’s commission to rule over the earth. But since Francis Bacon and René Descartes this idea has been reversed: it is man’s expanding rule over nature which makes him the image of God and leads him to be like God. The goal of man’s lordship over the world through science, technology and economics is supposed to be the restoration of his position in paradise. Through this he is to become ‘maître et possesseur de la nature’. This perversion of the Christian picture of man gave rise to the conviction that man must do everything he can with the world he dominates. Lordship therefore implies a taking possession, and possession means using and exploiting for the purposes of one’s own life.
The effects of this modern ethic on economics and ecology are sufficiently well known. The scientific subjection (objectification) of nature was followed by the technical demolition of the natural systems of life and their exploitation as ‘raw material’ for human industry. Rising consumption must be followed by rising production, just as, conversely, expanding production must be boosted by rising consumer demands. As a result, everywhere processes of growth have come into being which escape our control: growth of industrial production, growth of environmental destruction, growth of populations, growth of the need for raw materials and energy, growth of man’s dependence on a flood of outward stimuli, and his inward instability. These different processes of growth goad one another on reciprocally. This results in an ever more comprehensive spiral, whose future today can be seen as no longer being life, more life and greater power, but the universal death of humanity and organic nature. Yet the ethos of the society which is perpetuating these growth spirals has not changed. The claims to life and power are as immoderate as ever they were, and accentuate the progress. Earlier, people were glad if they could satisfy life’s elementary needs. But in the imperialist society needs do not stop short at the necessities of life. As needs are satisfied, demands are stepped up, so that demand and satisfaction accelerate one another. This race between demand and satisfaction is the inward motor that drives expansionist economy.
However ‘the limits of growth’ are described today, it is obvious that unlimited growth is impossible with limited resources, and that unrestricted demands cannot be fulfilled with restricted potentialities. If the immoderate acceleration of demand and satisfaction goes on, the race will force us into a global crisis which will put an end to all claims alike. If the idols of growth, expansion and exploitation remain a part of economics, then a global destruction can be seen ahead that will make all human economics alike impossible. The limitless growth of claims for more life, greater power and expanded rule has up to now been the inner fuel of ‘progress’. We can now look ahead to the time when it will be the fuel of catastrophe as well.
In this catastrophic situation it becomes clear that economics is not ‘pure economics’. It was never a mercantile science, without any values, for it always lived from the ethos on which society was based and from the demands, claims and interests of man and of society; and this was particularly true of its so-called ‘pure’ form. Consequently respect for ‘inherent economic laws’ and their ‘factual compulsions’ is out of place. Today people are aware of the reciprocal action of human demands and the economy, because the demands built into the economy up to now are driving us into conflicts and catastrophes. Today the interaction between demand and the economy which we knew in the past has become highly dangerous. The essential point is to end the race between demand and satisfaction (a race which cannot be won in any case), through a revaluation of values, so that we may seek for other satisfactions with changed desires. For ‘economic man’ is after all not merely a hypothetical picture set up by economic science; he is also the real person who acts according to the picture. Without society’s capitalist ethos, and without the person who reduces himself, and allows himself to be reduced, to labour and purchasing power, pure economics, with its orientation towards the exploitation of ‘manpower’ and nature’s raw materials, would not exist at all.
What line ought Christianity to take in economics, and what trend ought it to pursue with the means at its disposal? The Old Testament always recognized the earth as ‘the Lord’s property’. ‘The earth is the Lord’s and the fulness thereof, the world and those who dwell therein’ (Ps. 24:1). Rabbinical exegesis used the word oikonomos at this point, and explained: ‘God is the Lord of the house, because the whole world is his property, and Moses is his oikonomos.’ When in the New Testament Christ is acknowledged as the Lord of God’s kingdom, it means nothing less than this. The ‘house’ of which Jesus is Lord and which is to be kept in order according to his will, is called oikoumene, the world, and ‘those who dwell therein’ are called katoikountes. In this sense economics cannot be excluded from the liberating lordship of Christ. In the all-embracing sense of salvation, Christian theology is economic theology as well—and, if you like, ‘materialistic theology’ too. This is not meant in a clerical sense, but every withdrawal of the presence and living testimony of Christians from any sphere of life would be the equivalent of a surrender of their hope. The change of life’s direction towards the kingdom of God, through which people become Christians, is a comprehensive one; it includes turning away from the lethal tendencies inherent in our present economy and towards a life which overcomes death.
We can take it as our premise that for Christianity it is not the will to power and to domination over the earth that makes man the image of God, but that the very reverse is true: because man is made in the image of God, his rule over the earth has its bounds and its responsibilities. Christians who take this seriously will consequently break with those values and requirements which are the driving power behind our modern economy. They will choose the path that leads away from the ruthless satisfaction of demands, to community; away from the struggle for existence, to peace in existence; away from the will to supremacy, to solidarity with others and with nature. They will strive to break through the previous social and economic ethos and to introduce changes in people’s economic and social behaviour. The catastrophe we can already see ahead of us can only be averted if people are no longer forced by their social system, and its public marks of approval and condemnation, to see one another as mutual competitors in the struggle for existence and the hunt for happiness, and if, instead, individuals, groups and nations move towards a symbiosis with one another. Ecological death can only be avoided if social and economic systems cease to be directed towards the exploitation of labour and the breaking up of natural systems with a view to their exploitation. There are always correspondences between the social relationships of people with one another and the relationship between the social system and the natural environment. For a long time the system of domination and suppression affected slaves and animals in the same way. Changes in the social relationship of people to one another will therefore also bring in their wake changes in the relationship between human societies and nature. Conversely, the change in man’s relationship to nature from exploitation to co-operation, and from suppression to symbiosis, will bring radical alterations to the social structure in its train.
The most important element for the development of a society that deserves the name ‘human’ is social justice, not economic growth. Consequently it is no longer the ideal of beate vivere which can have ultimate validity, but only the ideal of recte vivere. The will towards private or group-orientated self-realization must give way to the will to build a just society and a contented existence. The desire for the mounting satisfaction of mounting wants was not always the centre of human intentions. It only grew up out of modern European imperialism. The hunger for justice and the longing for fellowship with one another can be much stronger. Among other peoples and cultures, and among many young people in the industrial societies, solidarity is higher up the list of values than the material enrichment of life through production and consumption. For it is solidarity and fellowship alone that make even suffering and the necessary curbing of natural desires bearable. If Christians in the world understand themselves as world-wide Christianity—and that means ecumenical Christianity—they will strive for this ethic of solidarity and a corresponding new economic orientation. That includes renunciation of further economic expansion in the wealthy countries for the sake of the economic development which is necessary in the hungry ones. ‘Development aid’ cannot exhaust itself in alms won from one’s own development at the cost of people who are kept undeveloped; it must be directed towards an alteration of the economic structure in the interests of economic justice among men. We cannot consistently ‘share and share alike’ in private if we are not prepared at the same time to alter the economic structure in such a way that there will be ‘equal shares’ globally as well. In face of ‘the limits of growth’, the ecological crisis and the increasing shortage of raw materials and sources of energy, this means for Christianity in the rich industrial countries renunciation in favour of the development of the poorer ones. Such a renunciation of values will only be bearable if new values are acquired instead. The new values will have to be found in the wider community and in the symbiosis of people with people, nation with nation, and culture with culture. Today a frightened clinging to privileges that have been acquired in the past leads first to others’ starvation, but then destroys ourselves. For these forms of satisfaction of our own demands through wealth and possessions divides man from man and society from society. The poverty of riches is always social isolation. That is not only true of people and classes in a society; it applies to whole societies as well. It also applies, incidentally, to the relationship between people and the natural systems of the environment and their own bodies. Domination that suppresses and exploits isolates, and leads through isolation to lack of relationship; and that means to death. In this sense the line which Christianity in the world ought to follow seems to come down to ‘socialism’ in the relationship of people with one another and ‘socialism’ in the relationship of humanity to nature.
Independence, in the sense of liberation from oppression by others, is a requirement of justice. But independence, in the sense of isolation from the human community, is neither possible nor just. We—human persons—need each other within communities. We—human communities—need each other within the community of humanity. We—humanity—need nature within the community of creation. We—the creation—need God, our Creator and re-Creator.
Humanity faces the urgent task of devising social mechanisms and political structures that encourage genuine interdependence, and which will replace mechanisms and structures that maintain domination and subservience.
We would therefore call symbiosis our guiding line for economic action and for our support or resistance to economic trends. It is only the fellowship of men and women and of human societies, participating equally in responsibility and a just distribution of goods, which gives everyone, collectively and individually, a chance of survival. It is only fellowship in respect for the unique character and needs of the natural environmental system which gives humanity and nature a chance of survival. Such symbioses, in both limited and wider contexts, are to be seen as corresponding to and anticipating the kingdom of God in history. For it is only fellowship with the Creator in the coming kingdom that gives the coming together of men and women in the history of humanity and nature its transcendent and thus its stimulating meaning.
By politics we mean here the res publica in the widest sense; that is to say, the public affairs which a community has to order. As a member of a community of this kind man is a political being. His participation in the public processes of decision, which affect the whole community, are an indispensable part of his life and the dignity of his person. A political association of people is an association for rule, which is able to enforce its decisions with the threat of physical compulsion. For that reason ‘the monopolization of the legitimate use of physical force in the enforcement of its authority’ is generally conceded to the state and its institutions. If this covers the particular conditions and possibilities of political action, then the question of the legitimacy of political processes of decision and rule arises. Because every state is a relationship in which some of its members rule over others, this rule can only be legitimated if it is exercised for the benefit of those involved. Only the people affected can say whether this is the case or not. Political rule must therefore be justified by the people, for the people and with the people. Man’s rule over other men is only possible on the foundation of equal rights. This is the only basis on which it is possible to talk about identity between rulers and ruled. When men are governed by people like themselves, this must inevitably lead to democratic forms of government. For ‘democracy offers the opportunity to realize the best possible association between the fact of political rule and the idea of general co-operation, the greatest possible justice and social security for all.’ The principle of popular sovereignty demands self-government by the people, the participation of all in political processes of decision, the continual control of government through the separation of powers, and limitation of the period during which government is exercised. Only solidarity makes the people strong and overcomes that method of inhumane government: divide and rule. Democracy is not an ideal and not a state of affairs; it is the continual, open and incompletable process of the democratization of political objectives.
Because popular sovereignty and the self-government of a political community are really inconsistent with the assignment of sovereign rights to men to rule over other men, they can only be realized in the open process of the constant limitation and control of the exercise of power. Where power is permanently established and evades control, where sectors of life—the economy for example—evade co-determination and democratic control, conflicts arise which can only be solved through further democratization, when rulers and ruled, administrators and administered, employers and employees are to be addressed as ‘people’, in an equal and identifiable sense. The democratizing process of politics does not relieve people of responsibility and decision, but is actually an imposition, the imposition of freedom and participation. It is an imposition which is nothing less than the imposition of human existence, human rights, and human duty.
In the changing political situations of the communities in which it has lived, Christianity has always had difficulty in finding a line of its own to follow. Wholesale judgments suggest themselves all too easily and these lead either to opportunistic adaptation or to an escapist condemnation of political rule. The line of ‘critical solidarity’, combining independence with participation in political decisions, was and is hard to pursue in absolutist and totalitarian states. Of course Christianity has always used the chance which was offered in a number of countries to testify to its faith in social forms of love and to present publicly its hope of the kingdom of God. But because political constitutions and forms of government are themselves going through a process of alteration, Christianity must also encourage the forms of government which best serve human fellowship and human rights and dignity, and it must resist those forms which hinder or suppress these things. The political task of Christianity is not merely to live in an already existing political order, but actually to take part in forming it.
The Christian church sees in the history of Christ the revelation of the divine justification of the sinner and the acceptance of the one who is forsaken by God. Because justification and acceptance are intended to reach all men, they also provide the reason for the uninfringeable dignity and the equal rights of all. God has a right to every person, the right of liberating grace. In this grace everyone has his liberty and his rights before God. But what he has before God he also has before men; so it must as far as possible be put into force in the political community. ‘Man’s domination over man’ cannot be viewed as a matter of course. For according to the Christian understanding it would be the domination of God’s image by God’s image, of the pardoned by the pardoned, of the liberated by the liberated. The Christian hope has therefore limited the historically unavoidable domination of man over man by its expectation of the fulfilment of the brotherhood of Christ, anticipating from this, not only the abolition of death but also the abolition of every rule, authority and power (1 Cor. 15:24–6). In this belief and hope Christianity has pursued a particular line in political history. The early church condemned the emperor cult, replacing it by intercession on the emperor’s behalf, which set a limit to his power. In this way political rule was de-sacralized. The Reformation relativized the political orders, making them necessary orders in this world which can serve the welfare of all, and ought to do so, but do not minister to salvation. By making this critical distinction between salvation and welfare, it secularized political rule, with its promises and legitimations. In the English-speaking world, Puritanism abolished the divine right of kings, replacing it by the political contract, the ‘covenant’ or constitution of free citizens. The demand for freedom of religion and conscience was followed by demands for freedom of assembly, freedom of the press and civil liberties. Resistance to religious and political tyranny was followed by demands for the contract of rule and the social contract. Christianity must stay on this path of the secularization, desacralization and democratization of political rule if it wants to remain true to its faith and its hope. Today’s orientation towards human rights, and further work in that field, is a help here.
In their present form human rights had their genesis in the Mediterranean world—Greece, Israel, Rome, Christendom—and they took form in the course of the Christianization of Europe. Human rights are by definition rights which man as man has towards the state—man meaning every human being, without regard to his birth, race, religion, health or nationality. They are rights which have always been termed irrelinquishable, inalienable, inviolable or absolute. They are rights that are integral to man’s being man. They are therefore also termed pre-political or supra-political rights. They are not at the state’s disposal and the state is bound to respect them. They must consequently be introduced into national constitutions as fundamental and civil rights.
The arguments for human rights are many and varied. They have been traced back to a primeval state of nature, when there was complete human freedom and equality; to the biblical idea of the Garden of Eden; to the law of reason; and so forth. The sources for the beginnings of formulated human rights are more numerous than is often supposed. It is not correct simply to call on English, American and French constitutional history. Even though the Mediterranean civilizations and modern bourgeois society have a particular share, almost all continents and cultures show beginnings of the development of human rights, and have made their own contributions. It is not an exclusively European idea. For that reason Christianity can by its faith make its own contribution to the understanding of man’s humanity and his rights as human being.
1. If God the Creator destined man to be his image on earth, then human dignity, freedom and responsibility precedes every society and every established system of rule. God’s image on earth is not a king. It is man as such. Consequently man is not made for the state; the state is made for man. And political rule must be tested and legitimated against this fact.
2. Ruler and ruled must together be identifiable as ‘people’. A constitution which guarantees fundamental human rights as the basic rights of its citizens will bind rulers and ruled together.
3. If they are to claim their human rights people must be freed from poverty, hunger, contempt and persecution. Without basic economic rights to life, work and social security, it is impossible to realize human rights in the political sphere. The biblical traditions have proclaimed liberation from all inequalities of class and caste, as well as from the privileges of race, sex and health, and have looked forward to the time when ‘the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together’ (Isa. 40:5). Monotheism led to the concept of a single humanity. Remembrance of Israel’s exodus from slavery into freedom, and the expectation of a coming, universal exodus of the whole enslaved creation, led to a progressive and forward-looking understanding of human rights.
4. The traditions of hope in the Son of man are a constant reminder that human rights are irreconcilable with political orders in which hunger, persecution and deprivation of civil rights prevail. They demand that we first of all establish human rights among and for those who are oppressed and robbed of these rights. Human justice becomes concrete when it is specifically viewed as ‘the rights of my neighbour’.
5. If the rights of man are substantiated through their justification by God, and if human liberty finds its basis in the divine liberation, then human duties must be formulated as well as human rights. ‘Freedom by itself does not yet constitute anything’, said Mazzini. It is an important and indeed inalienable duty to formulate the rights of the individual over against the state, so as to limit and control the state’s power and to force it to continual legitimation; but it is equally important on the other hand to formulate the fundamental obligations which man as a human being has towards other men, when he claims his human rights. One of these is the right and duty to resist illegitimate and illegal rule. Another is to combine the rights which secure the freedom of the individual with the duty to liberate those to whom these rights are denied.
6. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948, which is part of the United Nations Charter, laid particular stress on individual human rights and the protective aspect of the state, because of the recent experience of dictatorships. Its further development will involve the formulation of the rights of humanity as a whole which society and state have to personify for the individual. Man and mankind belong together. Does mankind have rights over individuals? Who represents mankind: individual nations or the individual person? When political rule is constitutionally bound to human rights and has to respect them in its own constitution as the basic rights of its citizens, then the particular manifestations of political rule must, on the other hand, be orientated towards mankind and its rights, its freedom and its fellowship. There is no other way in which the rights of the community over the individual person can be legitimated. But that means that individual nations and societies must legitimate their rule in the context of humanity, which is still divided now, but has to be united. They must see themselves as transitions on the way to a common organized humanity and must direct their policies towards world peace, without which mankind has no chance of survival. It has been rightly demanded that national foreign policies be changed into ‘world-wide home policy’. Not ‘What good does it do my own nation, my own class and race?’ but ‘What good does it do our common peace and the coming community of all mankind?’ This is the question that must be asked in every political and economic decision. Solidarity in overcoming common economic and military world crises must take precedence over loyalty to one’s own people, one’s own class or race or nation. There can be no respect for human rights in one’s own nation without the simultaneous alignment of the nation towards humanity. Human rights are single and indivisible. They cannot be a privilege.
7. Finally, human rights are neither a possession nor an ideal. They are legal and political aids on the road to man’s becoming man and the unification of mankind. They are to be apprehended as a process, which is unfinished and, historically speaking, unfinishable. They are effective to the degree in which people are prepared to realize them for others and themselves. The more people unite and enter into wider communities, the wider the discussion about human rights will be, and the more those rights will be deepened into economic rights and expanded by the rights of humanity over individuals, i.e., by human obligations.
We can make human rights the guide-line for the political action and the political resistance of Christians, thanks both to their Christian foundation and to their orientation towards humanity as a whole. Without the enforcement of fundamental human rights to life, freedom and security, the lordship of man over man cannot be ‘human’. Without the declaration and enforcement of economic human rights, little opportunity is left for political human rights. Without the orientation of particular national groupings towards world peace and the unification of mankind, there are no ‘human’ states. It is in these three directions that Christians will proceed in their political professions, and that ecumenical Christianity will avail itself of its universal political responsibility. In their national groupings and between these groupings they will follow these trends as far as they can and will resist counter-movements. Human rights and the rights of humanity are to be viewed as answering to and anticipating the kingdom of the Son of man in the power struggles of history.
By culture we mean here the sphere of the self-representation of persons, groups and peoples in relation to one another and as a whole before the ground of their existence. Cultural self-representation is always bound up with the creation of economic bases for life and the political processes of bringing order into the community; but it is not totally absorbed by these things; it represents a human need of its own as well. The production and consumption of the necessities of life, political conflicts and associations, are also means by which people continually express themselves. They define a personality for themselves, give themselves a particular countenance, try not to ‘lose face’, justify their life, legitimate the form their life takes, seek for identity and the recognition of others. For what a person is is not fixed once and for all. ‘The human element’ is sought for in history but eludes us, it is hoped for but the hope is disappointed. Man is a ‘questionable being’ and hence a being who has constantly to put himself to the question. We can therefore find a reason for the protean forms of mankind’s cultural history in man’s constitutional amorphism, out of which he can and must perpetually give himself a new face.
In place of a general anthropology of culture, I should like here to describe a few (though typical) culture-conflicts, which are examples of the way in which the cultural record of the Christian faith and the Christian community is being challenged today.
At the present day racialism is a world-wide problem. The economic and political interdependence of peoples of different races is increasing. People of different races have to live together in societies. This confronts mankind with the task of developing foundations on which people of different races can live together. It is understandable that such situations increase people’s inner insecurity, because, and to the extent in which, their previous identity—legitimated in their own group and race—is now called in question. The person belonging to another race is felt to be a challenge and a threat to one’s own identity. ‘Like draws to like’; but those who are unlike nurse mutual mistrust and tend to draw away from one another.
By racism we mean ethnocentric pride in one’s own racial group and preference for the distinctive characteristics of that group; belief that these characteristics are fundamentally biological in nature and are thus transmitted to succeeding generations; strong negative feelings towards other groups who do not share these characteristics coupled with the thrust to discriminate against and exclude the outgroup from full participation in the life of the community.
In racialism the characteristics of one’s own race are identified with the characteristics of mankind per se; and people of other races are seen as ‘lesser breeds’. In racialism the characteristics of one’s own race are used for self-justification and to legitimate hegemony over other people. One’s own identity is built up through pride in one’s own particular race and through discrimination against other racial characteristics. Forms of racialism exist everywhere, in group egoism and the hatred of aliens. But racialism is especially dangerous where it is used to organize and defend economic, social and political systems of government which contradict the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Then racialism is not simply a group phenomenon; it is a means of waging psychological war with the purpose of subjecting others. People of other races are not recognized as people in the fullest sense at all. They are degraded to ‘second-class citizens’. The feelings of superiority enjoyed by the one race then evoke feelings of inferiority in the races that are downtrodden. In its specific form racialism always has two sides. It is an emotional mechanism for self-justification, and an ideological mechanism for the subjection of others. It can therefore only be overcome when people win through to a liberated, non-aggressive identity ‘as people’—when, that is to say, they cease to identify ‘being human’ with membership of a particular race, and then they arrive at a ‘redistribution of social, economic, political and cultural power from the powerful to the powerless’.
Another cultural conflict is often described by the expression ‘sexism’. What is meant by this is masculine supremacy on the basis of imagined privileges and the subordination of woman to man. There are cultures which see the woman as the man’s property over which he has sovereign rights, as he has over slaves, animals and land. The Hebrew and Christian traditions have often taught the subordination of woman as an order of creation and the result of the Fall: the woman was created ‘second’ and was ‘the first’ to fall a victim to sin; and this legitimated her double subordination. The man is to be the ‘head’ of the woman in creation and redemption. As a result the man counts more than the woman. With this legitimation and others like it, his claim to dominance in public life, in religion and in the family is justified. The ‘man’s world’ and the ‘woman’s world’ are both separated from and related to one another in such a way that masculine privileges are preserved. Masculine and feminine forms of behaviour are established, social roles are assigned and rights are codified which hinder the woman’s free human development and hence, fundamentally speaking, the man’s development as well. The man is decreed activity, intellect and responsibility; the woman passivity, feeling and obedience. The man’s world is supposed to be public life, the woman’s world home, children and the kitchen. We need not describe this pattern of behaviour any further here. Male discrimination against the woman and his suppression or humiliation of her is evidently based on the phenomenon that social privileges are built up on natural sexual differences and that claims to rule are derived from biological distinctions which are not inherent in these things themselves. Masculine pride in the male sex, and the higher value given to ‘masculine’ characteristics than to ‘feminine’ ones, the claims and the social positions derived from the fact that certain things are declared to be ‘men’s business’—all these therefore originate in something different. In sexism male characteristics are used for self-justification and for the legitimation of privileges. But as long as ‘being human’ is primarily identified with ‘being a man’, the man does not arrive at human identity. As long as social roles and economic privileges are justified by sexual differences, it is impossible to talk about a ‘human’ society. As in racialism, sexism breeds feelings of superiority among men and feelings of inferiority among women; and this hinders the ‘human’ development of both. Sexism has two sides as well: it is as emotional mechanism of self-justification, and an ideological mechanism of subjection. It can therefore be overcome only when a ‘human’ sense of identity takes the place of the masculine sense of identity, which then no longer needs to justify itself on the basis of special sexual characteristics. On the other hand the woman must at the same time be put on an equal footing before the law and her free human development must be made economically possible. Here too the change in sense of identity must go together with the ‘new distribution of power’ if it is to be effective.
As a third cultural conflict we may mention the relationship between the healthy and the handicapped. In this relationship defence mechanisms both of psychology and also of social psychology come into play in our society, making the situation of the handicapped unendurable, and robbing them of their human dignity too. In the suffering of the handicapped we can distinguish between the disability and its social consequences and here the latter are often worse than the former. It is true that these social consequences would not exist without the handicap; but the handicap could well be there without the social results. We ‘welcome’ some people and only ‘put up with’ others. The fate of the mentally and physically handicapped can be termed the fate of being ‘put up with’. The spontaneous reaction of the healthy person to his encounter with the handicapped can be described as follows:
The non-handicapped person is thrown off his mental balance. The strange appearance of a malformed body does not fit into the stereotype which he has of a human counterpart. The unharmonious appearance … can lead to reactions of defence and disquiet.… He does not succeed in seeing his counterpart as a human being first of all; he only sees the handicap and generalizes it into covering the total personality.
In a similar way, the world surrounding the handicapped person views him as a threat, an insecurity and disturbance of its sense of its own value; people develop defence reactions which are coupled with suppressed feelings of guilt. This produces in the handicapped themselves a ‘leper syndrome’, a feeling of isolation, subservience and inferiority. If we pursue the reason for the ‘fear syndrome’ which the healthy develop in the face of the handicapped, we again come up against the sense of identity, which builds up the sense of one’s own value out of the foregiven characteristics of health. If being human is identified with being healthy, then the sight of a handicapped person brings insecurity. In the mirror of his deformity we only see ourselves as we do not want to be. We do not see the handicapped person; we only see the handicap, because we do not want to see ourselves simply as a person, but only as a healthy person. That is why the encounter with the handicapped evokes fear and aggressiveness. With their first reactions the healthy present the real problem of the handicapped. The handicapped are only a problem for the healthy to a secondary degree. Unless the sense of identity of the healthy becomes a free human identity, we cannot arrive at a recognition of the handicapped as people, or at recognition of their human dignity and human rights. It is only when the healthy cease to present a problem for the handicapped that the practical problems of the handicapped can really be solved.
We have mentioned three cultural conflicts belonging to three different levels. At the centre of these conflicts in each case stands in different ways the fundamental question of the human identity of men and women. For every particularist and narrow-minded identification (the human being as a white man, the human being as a man, the human being as a non-handicapped, healthy person) leads in the form of racialism, sexism and the idol of health to the suppression, disparagement and pushing aside of other people, so that it is impossible for us to talk about ‘human identity’ at all.
Psychologically one can distinguish between a person’s I-identity and his ego-identity. The experience of the ego is marked by the fact that I experience myself as an object: as the body that I have, as the social position or power that I possess. Every ego-identity is based on the idea of having, whether it be membership of race or sex, or simply health. The identity of the ‘I’ on the other hand points to the category of being. The crises of identity which we have named come from making a person into a thing; and this happens where people equate their ‘I’ with race, sex or health. In this ego-identity the person remains uncertain, and consequently he has continually to defend his ego-identity against other people. For he only acquires it by having and holding fast to what other people do not have; i.e., he only acquires it through fear and aggression. ‘In contrast, the person who experiences himself not as having but as being permits himself to be vulnerable.’ The relationship in a person between having oneself and being oneself can only continue to exist without fear and aggression as ‘the act of leaving the prison of one’s ego and achieving the freedom of openness and relatedness to the world’. For ‘the basis for love, tenderness, compassion, interest, responsibility, and identity is precisely that of being versus having, and that means transcending the ego.’
Theologically we must distinguish between the person’s self-justification through having or achieving, and his justification through grace. The ego-identity described in psychological terms fulfils the theological definition of self-justification. But this goes beyond the diagnosis open to psychology. For theologically we must talk about the godless person’s compulsion to justify himself and substantiate himself over against the ground of his existence, which he has abandoned. This follows from a deep-lying primal fear of nothingness and is joined with hate of one’s own existence. Because of this it is never possible to substantiate oneself without depreciating the other. This fact finds expression in racialism, sexism and defensive reactions towards the handicapped, as well as in many other inhumane phenomena. This primal fear makes people constantly seek new ‘possessions’ to cling to; this fundamental insecurity makes them constantly cry out for new security; and it is only when this primal fear and insecurity is changed into primal trust that a person can find free self-acceptance and free acceptance of people who are different from himself.
Christian faith is faith in justification. That is to say, it is the confidence that man is already justified by God. As a result all attempts at self-justification are superfluous and contradict the life which has already been accepted by God. Human life has eternal value because it is loved and accepted by God. Consequently the whole of human reality is freed from exploitation in the interests of human feelings about the value of the self, and can be lived in its relative and fragile beauty. The being of man is justified; so having and not having are freed from their burden of ego-identity.
As faith in justification Christian faith will spread this human freedom from self-justification, contrary to what must be called the superstitious and idolatrous perversions of man through racialism, sexism and a mania about health. The freedom of the Christian faith in justification stands the test in the face of mainly white racialism and the living together of different races, in the face of sexism and the liberation of women, and in the face of the handicapped and the further handicap laid on them by the healthy.
The freedom of justifying faith is a personal reality, but it also has a social side. For if a person is justified and does not have to prove himself through racial, sexual or other prerogatives, he is free to recognize the other person in his human dignity and his human rights. It is true that the early Christian churches were also familiar with the subordination of slaves to masters and women to men. In this respect they reflect their time and are not a visible token of the gospel of Christ. But there too we have ‘the breakthrough of Gal. 3:28’, according to which in Christ there is ‘neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female’, for all are ‘one’ and common ‘heirs according to the promise’. What is being claimed here is not only equal validity, but also equal being in Christ; not only equality in faith before God, but also equality in the fellowship of Christ; not only equal pardon, but also equal rights. The first pair, ‘Jew or Greek’, touches on religious differences—the different position in salvation history, according to the Jewish-Christian view. The second pair, ‘slave or free’, means the economic and social difference. But the third pair, ‘man or woman’, goes back to the creation of mankind as ‘man and woman’ and reaches beyond the order of creation to a new order of these relationships. The intention of the declaration in Gal. 3:28 is that this conquest of differences and privileges is realized in the Christian fellowship by virtue of its hope that the promise of the inheritance of eternal life will be fulfilled (Gal. 3:29). The Christian fellowship in which the one accepts the other, just as he himself is accepted by Christ for the praise of God (Rom. 15:7), is the social form of justification by faith. It ought to be a fellowship of persons with I-identity, free from ego-identity; a fellowship of the justified, who no longer have to justify themselves on the basis of their own characteristics; and hence a fellowship of the unequal and different, held together by free and courteous recognition.
There is an old principle for the social existence of men and women. As Aristotle puts it, ‘Like cleaves to like.’ Friendship (philia) binds together people who are like-minded: freemen with freemen, slaves with slaves, rich with rich, poor with poor, the healthy with the healthy, the sick with the sick, etc. ‘Like strives with like’, ‘like is only perceived by like’ and ‘like is recompensed by like’; these ideas seem to form a natural principle underlying society, knowledge and justice. But wherever people apply this principle it implies the compulsion towards self-justification and self-corroboration. People who are like us confirm our attitudes. People who are different from us make us insecure. Things which correspond to our own ideas reassure us. Things which are strange to us disturb us. If evil is repaid by evil, then our world is putting itself in order. If evil is repaid by good, then our balance is upset. That is why we naturally love the people who are like ourselves, and dismiss from our orbit the people who are alien and different. These attitudes, intellectual processes and judgments are called natural; but in the situation of insecure, fearful and aggressive man they are not natural at all. On the contrary, they are the foundation for the segregation of person from person, for the subjection of person by person, and for the handicap imposed on one person by another. If Christian faith breaks with the compulsion towards self-corroboration, the Christian fellowship will also have to break with the ‘natural’ principle of ‘like cleaves to like’. For Christianity the basic principle of liberated humanity can only be the principle of the recognition of the other in his otherness, the recognition of the person who is different as a person. It is only this recognition which makes it possible for people who are different to live together—Jews and Greeks, masters and slaves, men and women; it is only this which makes it possible for them to be there for one another in fellowship, to share with one another and to fulfil man’s common being in hope for the kingdom. That is why the Christian fellowship is a fundamentally open fellowship and not merely a community of fellow-believers.
In cultural conflicts Christianity will live the I-identity of faith, freed from the ego, and will demonstrate recognition of the other as a person in his dignity and his rights. In this dimension I-identity and the recognition of the other, and liberation for one another through justification can all be seen as corresponding to and anticipating the kingdom of God and its righteousness.
We will end this chapter with some systematic reflections which may be a help for our understanding of the kingdom of God in the future and the present.
The eschatological fulfilment of the liberating lordship of God in history is termed the kingdom of God. The Greek word basileia can mean both the actual rule of God in the world, and the universal goal of that divine rule. It is one-sided if we merely see the lordship of God in his perfect kingdom, just as it is open to misunderstanding if we equate the kingdom of God with the actuality of his rule. In his kingdom God’s rule is undisputed and universal; no shadow falls upon it. In history God rules through the word of promise and the Spirit of freedom. Both are assailed and come up against contradiction, resistance and antagonism. In history, therefore, God rules in a disputed and hidden way. That is why his liberating rule in history points towards its own fulfilment in the coming kingdom, just as, conversely, the coming kingdom already casts its light on the conflicts of history. The liberating rule of God can thus be understood as the immanence of the eschatological kingdom, and the coming kingdom can be interpreted as the transcendence of the believed and experienced rule of God in the present. This understanding forbids us to banish the lordship of God to a future world totally unrelated to our earthly, historical life. But it also forbids us to identify the kingdom of God with conditions in history, whether they be already existing or desired.
If we view history, with its conditions and potentialities, as an open system, we are bound to understand the kingdom of God in the liberating rule of God as a transforming power immanent in that system, and the rule of God in the kingdom of God as a future transcending the system. Without the counterpart of the future of the kingdom, which transcends the present system, the transforming power immanent in the system loses its orientation. Without the transformation immanent in the system the future transcending the system would become a powerless dream. That is why in actual practice the obedience to the will of God which transforms the world is inseparable from prayer for the coming of the kingdom. The doxological anticipation of the beauty of the kingdom and active resistance to godless and inhuman relationships in history are related to one another and reinforce one another mutually.
If the coming kingdom is present in history as liberating rule, this liberating rule of God is manifest in his promises and in the proclamation of the gospel. The promises call people out of the environment in which they have settled down and put them on the path to the fulfilment of the promises. They free people from earthly slavery and call them to take the road to freedom. The gospel calls men and women out of the bondage of sin, law and death and puts them on the road to righteousness and the freedom of eternal life. Because this road is not yet the goal, it leads to tribulation, resistance, suffering and struggle. The path’s goal only sheds its light on the path: redemption in tribulation, the victory of life in the struggle against the power of death, ultimate freedom in the resistance against servitude. The kingdom of God is present in faith and new obedience, in new fellowship and the powers of the Spirit. The presence of the Holy Spirit is to be understood as the earnest and beginning of the new creation of all things in the kingdom of God. God rules through word and faith, promise and hope, commandment and obedience, power and Spirit.
Since faith and obedience, new fellowship and liberating action are now to be understood as the reality of the Spirit and as the presence of the coming kingdom in history, the subjective and objective potentialities of history, in which these realities of the Spirit are realized, also belong to the present realization of the kingdom of God. The Spirit of God makes the impossible possible; he creates faith where there is nothing else to believe in; he creates love where there is nothing lovable; he creates hope where there is nothing to hope for. But, as the Pauline teaching about the charisma says, he also wakes sleeping, suppressed or otherwise imprisoned potentialities and activates them for the divine rule. The Spirit of God works in history as the creator of a new future and as the new creator of what is transient for this future. No reality or potentiality that was in creation at the beginning is suppressed by the Spirit. As the perfecting power of God he makes enslaved creation live and fills everything with the powers of the new creation. Consequently the subjective and objective potentialities of history, which are seized upon in faith and obedience, are also part of the history of the new creation of all things. It is not a matter of indifference or insignificance whether doors open and opportunities offer themselves, just as it is not a matter of indifference whether men go through the door and seize upon the objective possibilities in accordance with the liberating rule of God.
Finally, we shall then no longer be able to see co-operation between Christians and non-Christians in their endeavours to free the world from misery, violence and despair as purely fortuitous and without theological significance. They too are made possible and are brought about by the Holy Spirit, who purposes life and not death. His saving influence on people will not replace dialogue and co-operation, let alone make them unnecessary. As the world crisis threatens, however, Christians will recognize the Spirit’s world-sustaining operations as being very close to his activity in redemption. Christian tradition has long taught the sharp division between the two modes of operation. Today their joint working must be recognized, so that co-operation with people of different religions and secular ideologies can be freely practised, without loss of identity on the part of Christians, and without any attempt at drawing a line of demarcation. The kingdom of God becomes present in history through the rule of God. The rule of God is manifested through word and faith, obedience and fellowship, in potentialities grasped, and in free co-operation for the life of the world.
If the eschatological kingdom of God enters into history in the present, disputed and hidden rule of God, then—if we look in the opposite direction—this history of the rule of God is also to be understood eschatologically. History and eschatology cannot be metaphysically divided, as this world and the next, in the world and out of the world. Nor can the two merely be brought to paradoxical identity in the single point of the eschatological moment. Through his mission and his resurrection Jesus has brought the kingdom of God into history. As the eschatological future the kingdom has become the power that determines the present. This future has already begun. We can already live in the light of the ‘new era’ in the circumstances of the ‘old’ one. Since the eschatological becomes historical in this way, the historical also becomes eschatological. Hope becomes realistic and reality hopeful. We have given this the mediating name of ‘messianic’. The lordship of Christ points beyond itself to the kingdom of God. Faith in the word hungers for the seeing face to face. The presence of the Spirit puts the new creation into force. Obedience in the body is directed towards the redemption of the body, and the signs and wonders of experienced liberation are understood as fore-tokens of the resurrection of the dead. The messianic life is in this sense not life in constant deferment, but life in anticipation. Just as the messianic era stands under the token of ‘not yet’, so it also stands under the sign of ‘no longer’ and therefore under the sign of ‘already’. Life in the messianic era no longer stands under the law and in the midst of the compulsions of this transient world; it already stands in the sunrise of Christ’s new day. Its freedom lies in its transcending of the present through the power of hope for what is to come, and the actual in the light of the potential. But this is also its pain: it has to seize the new against the resistance of the old, so that a new beginning cannot be made without an ending, and freedom cannot be realized without struggle. The dreams of hope lead to the pains of love.
The messianic concept represents a categorical mediation between the kingdom of God and history. It is Christian when, and to the extent in which, its mediations take their bearings from the history of Jesus and his mission. The first mediating category which must be mentioned in the messianic sphere is anticipation. An anticipation is not yet a fulfilment. But it is already the presence of the future in the conditions of history. It is a fragment of the coming whole. It is a payment made in advance of complete fulfilment and part-possession of what is still to come.
Epistemologically, Epicurus used the word prolepsis to describe the preliminary concepts and tentative images through which we adapt ourselves to experience and true ideas. Cicero translated the word anticipatio, meaning by it the praenotio inchoatae intelligentiae. According to Kant, every anticipation legitimated by the criticism of pure reason is valid a priori when it establishes the objects of possible experience according to their form, as the anticipation of perception. Husserl uses the term anticipation for the structure of knowledge itself which, through the perception of a single thing, perceives its outward horizon. Every individual experience is bound up with the perception of what is not yet present, but to which the manifest core of experience points. Consequently all knowledge comes about intentionally. Heidegger then based the hermeneutical structure of intentional, anticipatory knowledge ontologically on the structure of existence itself, which is ahead of itself in the existential ‘anticipation of the whole of existence’. Finally, in all living beings which are to be addressed as ‘open systems’, one can term the anticipation of future behaviour a vital primary category. It is the mode of our self-modifying dealings with future possibilities.
The mediatory character of anticipation emerges from the term’s history. If it is applied to the relationship between history and eschatology it is a defence against both fervent enthusiasm—‘the kingdom of God is already present and we are already risen’—and tragic resignation—‘the world is unredeemed and everything is still ambivalent’.
Resistance to the power of closing oneself against the other, of corroborating oneself and repeating oneself is necessarily part of the mediating anticipation of what is to come. The withdrawn and introverted person—homo incurvatus in se—has no future and desires no alteration. He is twisted in on himself, in love with himself and imprisoned by himself. He can only desire the prolongation of his present in the future. The anticipation of what is to come is bound to break this resistance and to open the withdrawn person for experience of the future in the hope of what is to come. But this also makes him vulnerable and capable of being hurt. The closed and introverted society—societas incurvatus in se—has no future and wants no prolongation. It wants to corroborate itself, to perpetuate itself and to write its possession of the present into the future. The anticipation of what is to come will break this political resistance too and will change the closed, immunized society into an ‘open’ one, open for the experience of the future in the hope of what is to come. It opens society’s institutions and society itself for others, but also makes it vulnerable and alterable. Without the price of this perilous openness to the world and time, there is no future, no freedom and no life for people or for human society. For what closes itself within itself is condemned to death and has a deadly effect on other life.
In the Christian understanding of the messianic mediation of what is to come, anticipation and resistance are bound up with representation and self-giving. If the anticipation pars pro toto represents a fragmentary taking possession of the coming whole, then the part anticipated stands in the present, not only ahead of the whole but at the same time for the whole. Anticipations are hence always a preliminary taking possession of what is to come for other people and other things. In this way they represent what is to come and not themselves. If this were not so, they would not be forms of hope but merely forms of self-fulfilment. Anticipations in both knowledge and life therefore always have a representative character for something else and for other people. Where liberty is anticipated in individual acts of liberation, these can only be legitimated as acts of liberation for others, not as the struggle for one’s own privileges. It follows from this that individual anticipations of what is to come can only prove themselves as such through intervention and self-giving for the future of others. True hope is lived in the giving of oneself to the future of the hopeless. Anticipated liberty is practised in the liberation of the oppressed. Faith is manifested in love for those in need.
In terming anticipation, resistance, representation and self-giving the messianically mediating categories of eschatology and history, we must also recognize the limits of what is possible. According to Paul, the limit of messianic activity in history is death. We are already freed from the ‘body of death’ (Rom. 7) through justifying faith; and we walk in new obedience by virtue of newness of life (Rom. 6). But we are still living in the ‘body of death’ and are still waiting with eager longing, together with the whole of creation, for ‘the redemption of our bodies’ (Rom. 8). Otherwise the messianic action would no longer be action in history; it would already be free movement in the kingdom of God. As long as people are not redeemed from ‘the body of death’ they can only practise their freedom from the body of sin in our mortal life. As long as the dead are dead, freedom is fighting freedom, but not yet freedom in its own world, in the kingdom of God. The ‘body of death’ does not only mean physical death; it also means a deadly cohesion to which all life belongs. This cohesion has been broken in principle, but not yet in fact, through liberation from the power of sin. That is why new life in the spirit of freedom has a fragmentary form. This form cannot be identified with the general ambiguity of history and the ambivalence of all historical activity, but is the particular ambiguity of historical experience and practice between life and death. If Christian anticipation is directed towards the resurrection and eternal life, then it will encourage everything in history which ministers to life, and strive against everything that disseminates death.
The church, Christendom and Christianity understand their own existence and their tasks in history in a messianic sense. Their life is therefore determined by anticipation, resistance, self-giving and representation. Everything that they are and do cannot be legitimated through themselves but must continually be legitimized by the Messiah and the messianic future, so that through their profession of faith, their existence and their influence, people, religions and societies are opened up for the truth of what is to come and their powers are activated for life. The church in the power of the Spirit is not yet the kingdom of God, but it is its anticipation in history. Christianity is not yet the new creation, but it is the working of the Spirit of the new creation. Christianity is not yet the new mankind but it is its vanguard, in resistance to deadly introversion and in self-giving and representation for man’s future. The provisional nature of its messianic character forces the church to self-transcendence over its social and historical limitations. Its historical finality gives it certainty in still uncertain history, and joy in the pains over its resistance. In provisional finality and in final provisionality the church, Christendom and Christianity witness to the kingdom of God as the goal of history in the midst of history. In this sense the church of Jesus Christ is the people of the kingdom of God.