I would like to discuss with you the renewal of our faith, perhaps what we might call the ancient faith. At the Advent season we celebrate again the coming of our Lord. I think it is time for us to prepare, as in the initial instance of Christ's coming, for his appearance amongst us today. We are to be the herald or the evangel of the good news, which begins with the announcement of Christ's coming. However, the message of Christ's arrival is always accompanied by a call to repentance. When we go back and study the scriptures of the announcement that was made to Mary, when Mary received the word that she is to bear the Son of God, she proclaims the hymn of praise--the Magnificat--which reads in part:
He has shown strength with His arm; he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts. He has put down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; he has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty (Luke 1:51-53).
We see that the call for repentance and for radical change within society is interwoven with the proclamation of the coming of the Lord. The political and the social implications of the incarnation are present from the very moment of Christ's conception within Mary.
We see this same truth at the birth of Christ. Matthew tells us that when Christ was just a baby infant, he was already viewed as a threat by the political and religious establishment. King Herod takes the word of foreign astrologers so seriously, and is so fearful of one who could call into question his power and his authority, that he ordered a massacre of infants. As a baby, Jesus and his parents fled from their land because of political persecution. (If we study the gospels carefully, we see that there is no foundation for assuming that the true spiritual significance of Christ as messiah and as our savior in any way negates the radical, political and social consequences of his incarnation, his life, his death and his resurrection.)
We see that in the words of John the Baptist, who as the preparer of the way of the Lord, called for social repentance, individual and corporate. Listen to the words of John, fulfilling the prophecy of Isaiah:
'The voice crying aloud in the wilderness: "Prepare a way for the Lord; make his paths straight. Every valley shall be filled, and every mountain and hill be made low, and the crooked shall be made straight and the rough ways made smooth; and all flesh shall see the salvation of God"' (Luke 3:4-6).
In this beautiful melding of the Old Testament scriptures with the new, John the Baptist warned of God's judgment of the injustice of society. He also condemned the "establishment." When he saw many of the Pharisees and Sadducees coming for baptism, he said to them:
You vipers' brood! Who warned you to escape from the coming retribution? Then prove your repentance by the fruit it bears (Matthew 3:7-8).
His message also continued:
Already the axe is laid to the roots of the trees, and every tree that fails to produce good fruit is cut down and thrown on the fire.
So the awareness of Christ's appearance--the Word made flesh--results in proclaiming a call to individual repentance and to social repentance. Therefore, I believe that a part of being an evangelist and proclaiming the good news of Christ's life is issuing this call for repentance.
Modern calls to repentance sound a bit foreign, even in some theological circles, because as a people we have nearly lost the social and individual awareness of sin. The prophets who called for repentance and warned of God's judgment within previous citadels of corruption spent most of their time trying to get a society to recognize its own sin. In Egypt, in Nineveh, in Sodom and Gomorrah, in the 40 years in wilderness, in Jerusalem, in pagan Rome, in the Holy Roman Empire and in modern nations, prophets have tried to make people aware of their sins. They have called upon people to turn from their wicked ways; but the problem is that people living in the midst of sin usually fail to recognize their own true condition.
Modern America has nearly lost any capacity for corporate repentance, because it has so thoroughly evaded any awareness of corporate sin.
Likewise, modern Americans find any call to individual repentance strange and out of date, for they have generally discarded any relevant understanding of individual sin. This is also reflected in the erosion of personal accountability. We have gained in our modern day much valuable insight from the social sciences about what influences human behavior. Sociology, psychology, psychiatry, human genetics, and academic disciplines have all enabled us to discover much about the human personality. But there is a tendency for social science to attempt a comprehensive explanation of every human action. The result can be the diminishing and the loss of personal accountability. Generally, we try to avoid becoming individually answerable for wrongdoings on our part. We explain it away on the system, or on circumstances we couldn't control, or that we were just following orders, or that the guilt of others has wrongly tinged ourselves. Now interestingly, out of a great center of psychiatry, the Menninger Clinic, Carl Menninger has written a book called Whatever Became of Sin? He is not a theologian but a psychiatrist, and let me quote one sentence:
There is immorality. There is unethical behavior. There is wrongdoing. And I hope to show that there is usefulness in retaining the concept and indeed the word, sin.
Menninger claims that recovering the proper, healthy recognition of personal accountability and of sin is essential for bringing people and society to a state of health. This does not mean the legalistic, self-righteous moralizing that only builds up false guilt in people. Rather it means the compassionate understanding that there is always the element of human freedom, and the ability to transcend one's own personal ego and do what is right and what is loving, as opposed to what is wrong, unloving, and sinful. Social conformity can become another means of escaping the awareness of individual sin. We believe that society is the best dictate of morality, and we are doing nothing wrong if we are acting like everyone else. And many times we can say with accuracy that the church has become inculturated where it reflects the values of society rather than influencing those values. The Christian call to repentance questions and rejects the values and standards of existing society. It sets forth, as the Christian call, a person as the standard for our radical allegiance. In judging society, He calls us to live according to a new order, to turn away from sin and have our lives redirected and remade. So our message must recover the modern relevance of individual personal sin and personal accountability.
I suggest in observing the national scene today that our blindness is also so demonstrable toward national sin. Listen again to Lincoln's proclamation of 1863, issued three months after the Emancipation Proclamation and three months before Gettysburg. It was not known at that time which way the war was going to go. And yet the President of the United States, Abraham Lincoln, rejected perhaps the counsel of those who, in the name of national defense, would have said this will be a sign of weakness, and that he should not utter these words. But Abraham Lincoln issued his proclamation for a day of humiliation, fasting and prayer, which said:
It is the duty of nations, as well as of men, to own their dependence upon the overruling power of God, to confess their sins and transgressions, in humble sorrow, yet with assured hope that genuine repentance will lead to mercy and pardon. ... It behooves us then ... to confess our national sins and to pray for clemency and forgiveness.
Lincoln's act was atypical in American history. I don't think there were those in leadership in the 1970s who could even conceive of this approach. I believe that President Eisenhower once made a reference to sin in a proclamation for a day of national prayer in 1953, but he never did it afterwards. I know that in my own study and research no other president ever mentioned sin since that time. We are far too infatuated with our own supposed national self-righteousness to talk about our public corporate sin.
In my opinion, American civil religion has blinded us to our national sin. It has dulled our sensitivity to the need for corporate repentance, because a characteristic of our civil religion is that it has created myths about America as sort of a modern chosen people of God; that Washington like Moses was leading the people out of bondage to a promised land; and that the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence were written after inspired prayer meetings. "In God We Trust" is on money, of all things. God is invoked to bless us, to lead us, to bring us to victory. The relationship between the state and faith is totally destroyed in this kind of religion, because in this instance, religion is used to justify and to sanctify the status quo. The state and its rulers invoke a divine mandate.
I think the problem began with Constantine. He co-opted the Church. My belief is that he used the trappings of Christianity and Christendom to support his own political ends and to advance the Empire. But interestingly, that pattern has been repeated many times in history. And perhaps it is what we face today. If we believe in the God of an American civil religion, our faith is in a small, and very exclusive deity, a loyal spiritual advisor to American power and prestige, an exclusive defender of the American nation, and the object of a national folk religion that is devoid of moral content. Our civil religion places our nation beyond sin and above judgment. It baptizes nationalistic vain glory. We abdicate our individual responsibility and the dictates of our personal faith to corporate idolatry. We can see this both in the religious realm where the integrity of our faith is compromised by civil religion and politically when idolatry of power overcomes individual convictions.
We must recover a vivid awareness of our corporate sin as a nation and as a people. I believe that our nation will never recover its health or hold out any promise for renewal, unless we can face our darkness, our corruption, our sin. It is a dangerous pathological sickness for an individual or a nation to be utterly blind to inner failings and wrong and to believe that all of one's actions can be vindicated and are utterly righteous. "If we refuse to admit that we are sinners, we live in a world of illusion and truth becomes a stranger to us," as St. John records.
Our evangelism today must provide a meaningful sense of repentance, individual and corporate. We must build an evangelistic thrust that fully relates to our modern sins of both omission and co-omission. We must not think that our evangelistic task can be carried out in some kind of social or political vacuum. The Word was made flesh. Christ came to a real world of political upheaval, social turmoil, human suffering and spiritual blindness. His life and His ministry were relevant to all of those situations. And therefore, the sharing of His life must be related to all these conditions as they are in our society today. We must see what we are to be saved from and what we are redeemed and liberated by Christ for. The false dichotomy between the personal and the social must be destroyed. The notion that being evangelistic means that one does not have to concern himself with social problems, or that ministering to social ills is different from an evangelistic concern, is simply heretical, whichever way you look at it. I believe our task is to restore the whole Gospel. Sin is both corporate and personal, and usually both at the same time. The coming of Christ speaks both to our personal lives and to our corporate structures, just as it did in Palestine 2,000 years ago.
Let us examine our contemporary sins and the requirements for repentance today. There are many ways you can list them. This is not an exclusive list, but let me begin with war, violence, nationalism, and militarism. Christ came as the Prince of Peace. And in the words of the prophet quoted by Zechariah, father of John the Baptist, "He came to guide our feet into the ways of peace."
The Idolatry of Militarism
Yet today, my friends, we are beset with the psychology of war. We are overladen with the means of war. We are addicted to the ways of war. We are enslaved to a belief in war. All of this arises out of our own attitudes. It is nourished by our individual hatreds, our individual violence. Alexander Solzhenitsyn said "Violence is brazenly and victoriously striding across the whole world. There was a time when violence was a means of last resort. Now it is a method of communication." Our arsenals of power today in America, poised and ready to destroy millions of people, several times over, must be called a corporate form of sinfulness. R.V. Sampson expressed it in Psychology of Power--listen to his prophetic words:
Already the apologists of realism are busy exhorting us to accept the realities of life in the atomic age, and learn to live with the Bomb. According to these theorists, and they are to be found in the high councils of Church and state, we have never been so secure as we are today under the umbrella of the Bomb. The terror inspired by the equilibrium of fear is such that we can rely on the Bomb as an effective deterrent, a super-policeman guaranteeing the peace of humankind. In other words, the peace which man has been unable to gain through two millennia of the advocacy of brotherly love, will now be secured through fear. What we fail to win under the symbol of the star of Bethlehem, we shall gain under the symbol of the mushroom cloud. [People] will not act rationally from love, but they will learn to do so from fear. In fact, the atomic age has at last proved what so many [people] have always wanted to believe in their hearts: That the doctrine of the carpenter of Nazareth is of monumental irrelevance. That [Jesus'] sacrifice on Calvary was pathetic, noble perhaps, but futile and pointless. For this is the logic of the maintenance of peace through the deterrent.
Whenever we hear and accept the admonitions about being the most powerful nation on earth, being number one in all we do, and achieving a ''peace with honor," then attitudes of national, exaltation and righteousness become further ingrained as the justification for our power and violence. Arnold Toynbee has written: "Nationalism is the real religion today of a majority of people.... How can we arrive at a lasting peace? For a true and lasting peace, a religious revolution is a 'sine qua non.' By religion, I mean the overcoming of self-centeredness in both individuals and communities, by getting into communion with the spiritual presence behind the universe. ... Until we do, the survival of the human race will continue to be in doubt." These are observations of an historian.
Faith in Christ imparts to all of us this vision of our humanity. Paul writes (in Colossians) that Christ by his death on the cross has created a new humanity, has reconciled all men as one. There is no distinction, no difference, no division between Jew and Gentile, Greek and slave, free and foreigner (and all--no distinction because Christ lives in them all.) Christ brought about the unity of mankind. "If anyone is in Christ, there is a whole new creation" (1 Corinthians 5:17). So repentance today must include a call to turn from hatreds, personal and corporate, which have divided us from others so we can be remade by Christ's love for us and for all mankind.
The Idolatry of Mammon
In our nation we also have the sin of poverty. In 1974, the poorest one-fifth of families in America received only five percent of our nation's total family income. The wealthiest one-fifth of our society in America received 42 percent of the total family income. This fact had not changed in twenty-five years. Economists will have a lot of names and explanations for the existence of poverty in an affluent society, but biblically, there is one simple term to describe this reality and that is sin. Continuously, the Bible regards poverty in the midst of plenty as sin. That is the case for our own day in our own society. We have an immense gross national product, and yet there are still millions in our land who are hungry, who are improperly nourished, who live with rats in shacks, who cannot afford medical care, and who are afflicted with all of the disabilities of opportunity and knowledge that poverty brings in this society.
What was the greatest sin of Sodom? What was it that caused its destruction by God? Sexual immorality? Listen to the words of Ezekiel: "This was the iniquity of your sister Sodom: She and her daughters had pride of wealth and food in plenty, comfort and ease, but did not aid the poor and needy" (Ezekiel 16:49). Our modern call to repentance must cause us to repent from the sin of neglecting the poor, both as a nation and as individuals.
Another related sin is our materialism, our economic idols. Our wealth and our ever-increasing affluence constitutes a sin involving each of our lives, a sin that is compounding the crisis in our society. Christ warns us again and again about the dangers of wealth. He says that we cannot serve God and the power of money. He speaks about the difficulty of the rich man ever entering the kingdom of God. He tells us not to worry about what we are to eat, drink and wear. As one example in Luke, we hear Christ say, "Beware of the scribes, who like to walk around in long robes, and love to be greeted with respect in the marketplaces, to have the best seats in the synagogues and places of honor at banquets. They devour widows’ houses and for the sake of appearance say long prayers. They will receive the greater condemnation" (Luke 20:45-47). We live in a society that totally serves mammon, the power of money. Thoughtlessly we can be carried along by those values, those commitments and those priorities that serve the world, rather than our Lord.
Our wealth and our standard of living is a cause of endless other problems such as our energy crisis, the ruining of our physical environment, and our outright monopoly on the world's basic resources. But at its heart, such wealth simply manifests corporate selfishness, and individual self-centeredness. As such, it is another example of sin.
There are other sins that abound in our modern society which we could examine--lying, stealing, cheating, taking what is not one's own and all the contemporary forms of narcotic self-indulgence. These are sins that go on at all levels of society, in our corporations, in our finest schools, in our churches and everywhere else. Included are all of the compromises with integrity which are so easily rationalized in our contemporary life in the name of getting ahead or building a reputation or not rocking the boat or just doing one's job or, "to get along, you go along." In all of these matters we have discussed we must confront anew the reality of sin--social sin and personal sin interwoven together.
In every case, what is called for is a change of heart--for people to turn around, to be converted, to receive the good news, to be forgiven, to be accepted, to encounter Christ. And in each case we are called to a renewal of society, to corporate repentance, to justice, to relief of the suffering, "to proclaim the release of the captives, to set at liberty those who are oppressed," as the scripture states. That must be the shape of the evangelistic mission in our time and our land.
Idolatry of Power
May I close with one last thought? There is a great deal of focus today on Washington, the nation's capital. The focal point seems to be the White House and various actions, various inactions surrounding that position of power. I think the one last area where our message must be applied is in the way our society and we as individuals worship power. This is particularly true in the political realm. But it holds true for power in the university or in the church or any other institution. We tend to idolize power. When people gain great power, they then frequently think of themselves as idols. Power can make one totally self-centered. I know of no other profession outside of the Metropolitan Opera that massages the prima donna complex in a person more than political life. To keep one's power, we are taught by political wisdom to believe that we must always justify ourselves to others and that we can never admit an error or never admit wrong. Confession becomes equated with weakness, so one comes to believe that he is immune from normal human fallibilities. He places himself even above the law in this self-exaltation. So power is held and clung to by any means, defended at any cost, in order to maintain one's very identity. And once again we must see that sin is in this kind of psychology and this kind of action. There must be reestablished in the areas of political leadership the element of personal accountability. Without the ability to admit error and wrong-doing, power becomes tyrannical.
The style of leadership that we can emulate is again seen in the person of the Lord. Our society must come to see the whole new vision of leadership. We must understand that leadership is not the protection of power, but rather the commitment to service. There must be an ultimate commitment to this truth, whether in Christian fellowship or the political realm. When the truth of the Word of God is shared as a common possession, then there is unity. But when truth is withheld, and defined only by one claiming a higher prerogative, then there is division, suspicion and mistrust. The commitment of leadership as seen in the life of Christ is to service, rather than to self maintenance. It is an openness, a candor, a humility, a sacrifice. It places the well-being of the other ahead of his own. Christ tells us if we are to save our lives, we must give our lives away. Political wisdom of the day teaches precisely the opposite--to save one's life, he takes, he squeezes, he grabs, he accumulates, he surrounds himself with protection.
What is required in this aspect of repentance is a whole new understanding of leadership and power, one which is just the opposite of what our society would have us believe.
Again, in Luke we hear Christ say:
"The kings of the earth lord it over their subjects but it shall not be among you, for I am among you as one who serves" (Luke 22:27).
We must turn from this idolatry of power to the vision of one who is a servant leader. Then we can see a new leadership that is defined and exemplified by sacrificial service rather than the maintenance of power, marked by humility, openness and compassion. And the prophetic vision of Christ's first coming proclaimed by Mary can be realized anew in our time. "He has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts. He has put down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly" (Luke 1:52-3).
Mark O. Hatfield was a U.S. senator (R-OR) and a contributing editor to Sojourners when this article appeared.
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