The historic Christian position is that man’s dilemma has a moral cause. God, being nondetermined, created man as a nondetermined person. This is a difficult idea for anyone thinking in twentieth-century terms because most twentieth-century thinking sees man as determined. He is determined either by chemical factors, as the Marquis de Sade held and Francis Crick is trying to prove, or by psychological factors, as Freud and others have suggested, or by sociological factors, such as B.F. Skinner holds. In these cases, or as a result of a fusion of them, man is considered to be programmed. If this is the case, then man is not the tremendous thing the Bible says he is, made in the image of God as a personality who can make a free first choice. Because God created a true universe outside of himself (or as an extension of his essence), there is a true history which exists, man as created in God’s image is therefore a significant man in a significant history, who can choose to obey the commandments of God and love him, or revolt against him.
The God Who Is There, (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1968), p136.
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But if I live in a world of nonabsolutes and would fight social
injustice on the mood of the moment, how can I establish what social
justice is? What criterion do I have to distinguish between right and
wrong so that I can know what I should be fighting? Is it not possible
that I could in fact acquiesce in evil and stamp out good? The word
love cannot tell me how to discern, for within the humanistic framework
love can have no defined meaning. But once I comprehend that the Christ
who came to die to end the plague both wept and was angry
at the plague's effects, I have a reason to fight that does not rest
merely on my momentary disposition, or the shifting consensus of men.
The God Who Is There, (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1968), p136.
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The fact that [the Christian] alone has a sufficient standard by which
to fight evil, does not mean that he will so fight. The Christian is
the real radical of our generation, for he stands against the
monolithic, modern concept of truth as relative. But too often, instead
of being the radical, standing against the shifting sand of relativism,
he subsides into merely maintaining the status quo. If it is true that
evil is evil, that God hates it to the point of the cross, and that
there is a moral law fixed in what God is in himself, the Christian
should be first into the field against what is wrong — including man's
inhumanity to man.
Communication means that an idea which I have in my mind passes through my lips (or fingers, in most art forms) and reaches the other person’s mind. Adequate communication means that when it reaches the recipient’s
mind, it is substantially the same as when it left mine. This does not mean that it will be completely the same, but that he will nevertheless have substantially realized the point I wish to convey. The words that we use are only a tool for translating the ideas which we wish to communicate.
Defense is proper and necessary because in every age historic Christianity will be under attack. Defense does not mean being on the defensive. One must not be embarrassed about the use of the word defense. The proponents of any position who are alive to their own generation must give a sufficient answer for it when questions are raised about it. Thus, the word defense is not used here in a negative sense, because in any conversation, in any communication which is really dialogue, answers must be given to objections raised. Such answers are necessary in the first place for myself as a Christian if I am going to maintain my intellectual integrity, and if I am to keep united my personal, devotional and intellectual life.
We do not need to bear our guilt, nor do we even have to merit the merit of Christ. He does it all. So in one way it is the easiest religion in the world. But now we can turn that over because it is the hardest religion in the world for the same reason. The heart of the rebellion of Satan and man was the desire to be autonomous; and accepting the Christian faith robs us not of our existence, not of our worth (it give us our worth), but it robs us completely of being autonomous. We did not make ourselves, we are not a product of chance, we are none of these things; we stand there before a Creator plus nothing, we stand before the Savior plus nothing — it is a complete denial of being autonomous. Whether it is conscious or unconscious (and in them most brilliant people it is occasionally conscious), when they see the sufficiency of the answers on their own level, they suddenly are up against their innermost humanness — not humanness as they were created to be human but human in the bad sense since the Fall. That is the reason that people do not accept the sufficient answers and why they are counted by God as disobedient and guilty when they do not bow.
Where was the conviction that to wage war against inequality is the church’s responsibility and not a political ideology? Where were those farsighted believers who could offer a voice of reason and hope to the task? Where was the manpower and funding to carry out this visible love of Christ? Why do we always settle for hindsight instead of foresight, reproducing instead of originating, getting on the bandwagon instead of leading the charge? Because a spirit of anti-intellectualism keeps us uninformed we can only attack and not contribute.
“Artistic value” or “quality” in a work of art is not merely a matter of personal opinion but to a high degree a matter of common agreement among artistically sensitive and trained observers and to a high degree objectively traceable. ¶ Our value judgment is a composite of “subjective” and “objective” elements. “Subjective” I call those which are the purely personal response of an individual; “objective,” those which are agreed upon by trained observers and therefore meet with general acceptance.
Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., delivered at New Covenant Baptist Church, Chicago, Illinois (April 9, 1967).
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What I’m saying to you this morning, my friends, even if it falls your lot to be a street sweeper, go on out and sweep streets like Michelangelo painted pictures; sweep streets like Handel and Beethoven composed music; sweep streets like Shakespeare wrote poetry; (Go ahead) sweep streets so well that all the host of heaven and earth will have to pause and say, "Here lived a great street sweeper who swept his job well."
A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. On the one hand we are called to play the Good Samaritan on life’s roadside, but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho Road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life’s highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.