Like what you've read?

On Line Opinion is the only Australian site where you get all sides of the story. We don't
charge, but we need your support. Here�s how you can help.

  • Advertise

    We have a monthly audience of 70,000 and advertising packages from $200 a month.

  • Volunteer

    We always need commissioning editors and sub-editors.

  • Contribute

    Got something to say? Submit an essay.


 The National Forum   Donate   Your Account   On Line Opinion   Forum   Blogs   Polling   About   
On Line Opinion logo ON LINE OPINION - Australia's e-journal of social and political debate

Subscribe!
Subscribe





On Line Opinion is a not-for-profit publication and relies on the generosity of its sponsors, editors and contributors. If you would like to help, contact us.
___________

Syndicate
RSS/XML


RSS 2.0

Church welfare takes the well-paved road

By Peter Sellick - posted Tuesday, 11 October 2005


The Church has always been involved in social welfare. The prophets of Israel were concerned that the widows and orphans be cared for, and that there was social justice. No one was to be left out of the community’s care.

The churches of our day are involved in large welfare organisations from hospitals, nursing homes and retirement villages to children’s homes and other agencies. But these roles have become problematic with the rise of the secular welfare state (no doubt taking its cue from our roots in the Christian tradition).

Church agencies now get most of their funding from the government, and often find themselves doing its work at less cost than the government could do it itself. They have, effectively, become an arm of government.

Advertisement

While all this is well and good, and our society has the benefit of agencies that act out of something other than the profit motive, it raises the question of the Church’s central role in our time. Many mainline churches find their congregations are dwindling while their agencies expand with the help of government money.

The modern Church’s activism began in dire social circumstances at the end of the 19th century, when capital exploited labour. This produced the socialist Christian who identified with Jesus’ association with the poor - the little ones. The idea that salvation was a private affair disconnected from the world was challenged and the social gospel born.

This movement coincided with liberalism in theology brought about by historical critical study of the Bible and a subsequent devaluing of its authority. The most important loss was the understanding that the New Testament pointed towards the end time - the Eschaton, or second coming of Jesus - in which a new heaven and earth would be revealed.

This is understandable given the many figures in history, such as Isaac Newton, who had gone to great trouble to calculate the exact date of the end. As is even now the case, liberalism reacted against literalism and threw the baby out with the bath water.

The idea of the Kingdom of God, however, was retained in a secular form as social activism - the attempt to improve the conditions of men and women through trade unions, education and various causes. Men would establish the kingdom with their own hands.

Although good in itself and laudable, this attempt tended to leave Jesus behind, seeking instead to produce its own hope rather than hoping in God and His coming. They read the kingdom parables in the New Testament, annealing them with the idea of progress and coining admirable phrases like “God helps those who help themselves”.

Advertisement

Nowhere was this more apparent than in the New World in which the frontier spirit of self-reliance was elevated to the pinnacle of the virtues.

In this scheme, the Gospel was thought of as a complete set of insights that could be applied for society’s betterment. The tension between the present and the future coming of the “Crucified One” was lost. Instead of understanding Jesus as the “One who comes”, He became a being in history from whom we can learn the lessons of life. The Church was more like a memorial society than a people who worshipped a God who was present and who would come.

Unfortunately, the ensuing polarisation traded individual self-reliance against quietism, painted as passive and superstitious. Christians were to be active in the world with the Gospel as their armoury.

But when we read the kingdom parables of the New Testament we find they do not fit the idea of human progress as produced by our activity. Compared with what the New Testament calls hope, this utopian version can only be described as a fabrication, however well-meaning and attractive.

Rather, the Kingdom of God is the consummation towards which all God’s ways and works are moving. It is not a development within previous possibilities, but the new possibility of life. It is the kingdom of God, not man.

It is tempting to identify the West’s enormous progress with the establishment of the kingdom, and we must admit there is a connection between that progress and our Christian inheritance that other non-Christian nations seem to lack.

As is shown by the now almost complete secularisation of our society, however, scientific and technological progress continue to expand to produce wealth that lifts many out of poverty while being antagonistic to the Christian inheritance. We can do all that we do without waiting on God.

It has been the mark of the liberal Church that it turns to psychology, sociology and social work to find its place in the community. A misunderstanding of the result of historical critical study of the Bible has devastated its theology and reduced Jesus to the good guy whom we should all emulate.

Because Jesus as the “One who comes” has been replaced by the good moral teacher, preaching finds little to say that is not patently obvious. It is remarkable to hear a sermon based ostensibly on the most confronting text that tells of the coming of God and the fulfillment of all things, ending with unremarkable bits of spiritual advice.

When the liberal Church jettisoned the New Testament’s end-time orientation, it rendered it indecipherable. If the preacher has a social conscience, sermons inevitably become a bandwagon for all kinds of causes. The social justice committee has a habit of establishing a new kind of pharisaism that happily gives us a catalogue of issues and its judgment of what side we should be on.

The parables of the light set on a stand and of the leaven in the dough are interpreted in terms of what we can do for society rather than what God has done in us that can be shared with the world.

Our greatest gift to the world is not to be found in our activism but in our witness to the Word that makes all things new. This is why the Church traditionally has built beautiful churches complete with wonderful stained glass and thundering organs. This is why the celebration has been replete with vestments, silverware and incense, and a liturgy that melts our hearts. Public worship was meant to be astonishing because the gospel under which it lived was astonishing.

When the Church loses its faith and turns towards the betterment of the conditions of men and women, it is inevitable expenditure on the luxuries of worship will be condemned as wasteful and irresponsible. We must remember how the feet of Jesus were anointed with pure nard and how some complained that the act was extravagant: it should have been sold and given to the poor.

One of the delights of touring Europe is to visit parish churches and medieval cathedrals. The love and expense showered on places of worship by communities that had little compared to our excess puts the modern Church to shame. The idea that we should sell our places of worship to be where the people are is fanciful.

The loss of the New Testament’s end-time orientation, filled out in terms of the coming of the “Crucified and Risen One”, has given us a church that can only mouth the truisms we find in everyday life.

Paul used the word “apocalypse” to indicate the world-shattering nature of the Gospel. It was not just good advice or social insight, but the germ that brought down all our attempts to forge our own life. It was a summons to obedience and the entry into a slavery in which we could be truly free.

Israel’s apostasy traced out in the pages of the Old Testament, and the rejection, framing and murder of Jesus in the New Testament spell out our natural inclinations to us. This has been writ large in the last century with the rise and fall of National Socialism and Soviet Communism, both defined by their insistence that the future lay in our own hands.

In the face of this disastrous insistence, the Church must be faithful and insist the future is not in our own hands, but in God’s. This affirmation does not have to lead to disconnection from the world and a concentration on individual spirituality (surely a dead end), but to a fundamental orientation to the “One who comes”, without whom we are stupid in the world.

Surely we are to act decisively in the world, but can only do so effectively in obedience to the truth that is revealed in the Word made flesh. That is, as John says, when He is in us and we in Him. The grain of the universe is revealed in the person of Jesus. To go into the world without being transformed by that knowledge is foolishness.

It is also to risk foolishness of a different sort in that we know there are some things we would die for - that we would risk all by hiding the Jew in the attic and standing up against the dictator.

Charity can never be general; only particular. We find ourselves in a situation in which we can only act in a particular way even if it brings danger to ourselves and our families. It can never be a general commitment to the poor but an act born of necessity eliciting a response in us that we do not have to think about.

When we launch ourselves in a general way to help humanity, we will walk the same tired path to a utopia that turns to ashes in our mouths. We will begin to resent those we seek to help, and it is possible they will be worse off than before we started.

“I am the vine, you are the branches. Those who abide in me and I in them bear much fruit, because apart from me you can do nothing.” (John 15:5 NRSV) We live in a society that has learnt and continues to learn this the hard way. We have discovered helping the poor is difficult, and indeed much of our help is not help at all but the nurturing of dependence.

The mistake those involved in welfare often make is to think they know what is the good. This is nowhere more obvious than the West’s failure to alleviate impoverished Africa.

Of course the church must take the side of the small people who are done down by the powerful, but again this cannot be done by general promptings to make a difference or to be an agent of change. It can be engaged only by those who have welcomed obedience to the Word.

Without the wisdom of the Word we do not know what spirit engenders our humanist promptings. The road to hell is paved with good intentions. Without the Word we are stupid in the world, and our stupidity will hurt those we seek to help.

Any hope we try to generate for ourselves or others is illusory compared with the hope that comes from Him. Is this not the engine that drives those who strive for the general good of humanity? Is it not hope that is in short supply, and that our striving hopes to provide?

This is practical atheism. We do not, in the end, believe in the power of God to bring about the kingdom of justice and peace. We may say we work in His name, but I fear we march on without Him.

  1. Pages:
  2. 1
  3. 2
  4. 3
  5. All

Article edited by Allan Sharp.
If you'd like to be a volunteer editor too, click here.



Discuss in our Forums

See what other readers are saying about this article!

Click here to read & post comments.

10 posts so far.

Share this:
reddit this reddit thisbookmark with del.icio.us Del.icio.usdigg thisseed newsvineSeed NewsvineStumbleUpon StumbleUponsubmit to propellerkwoff it

About the Author

Peter Sellick an Anglican deacon working in Perth with a background in the biological sciences.

Other articles by this Author

All articles by Peter Sellick

Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

Photo of Peter Sellick
Article Tools
Comment 10 comments
Print Printable version
Subscribe Subscribe
Email Email a friend
Advertisement

About Us Search Discuss Feedback Legals Privacy