Word: christiane
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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There is nothing fundamentally new about the insight that Christian ethics are corporate rather than individualistic. The medieval monasteries, for example, were dedicated to serving their communities as well as to praising God in communal prayer; the Mennonites and Quakers have always emphasized brotherly love and peace rather than dogma. The difference is that theologians now take it for granted that Christian love is something that cannot be confined to the church but is directed toward all the world. The commitment of a man who follows Jesus is not to an institution, but to life itself...
Within the churches, there is considerably less agreement on how this commitment should be exercised. Christian radicals-such as the young firebrands who dominated the National Council of Churches' Conference on Church and Society in Detroit last fall-argue that the true follower of Jesus is the revolutionary, siding with forces and events that seek to overthrow established disorder. On the other hand, Protestant Theologian Hans-Joachim Margull of Hamburg University points out that it is not always so easy to identify the secular causes that Christians have a clear moral duty to support...
...easy enough to argue that Christians have a God-given duty to work for racial equality, or for the eradication of hunger and disease in the world. The strategies to be followed in achieving these goals do not so easily acquire universal assent. For that reason, Dean Jerald Brauer of the University of Chicago Divinity School argues that churches should not necessarily be engaged in trying to hand down specific solutions to social and political problems from the pulpit. Christian creativity in trying to solve these questions, he says, "won't be a case of the churches poking their...
What this means, in essence, is that a commitment to love in worldly life cannot be separated from faith in Christ, who demanded that commitment. One argument against trying to build Christianity on moral action alone is that Jesus' teachings, unlike those of, say, Confucius, make sense only when understood as counsels of perfection in obedience to God rather than as workable guidelines of behavior. The Rev. David H. C. Read, pastor of Manhattan's Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church, points out that in facing many problems of life the behavior of the Christian and the humanist might well...
Since faith is the reason for commitment, most churchmen regard the idea of a "Christian atheist" or a "Christian agnostic" as something of a contradiction in terms. "I can't see how it is possible to be a Christian atheist," says Episcopal Bishop James A. Pike, who has been accused of being just that by some of his fellow clerics. "You cannot attack the idea of an ultimate and at the same time accept Jesus as an ultimate." Swiss Catholic Theologian Hans Kiing points out that "Jesus had no sense of himself without God. He made it clear that...