C. Roy McKay - "Christian Responsibility in a Secular Age" (July 24, 1960)
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| (worship music) | 0:03 | |
| - | The lesson is taken from St Luke's Gospel, | 0:27 |
| the fifth chapter, the first verse. | 0:33 | |
| "While the people pressed upon him to hear the word God, | 0:39 | |
| he was standing by the lake of Gennesaret." | 0:44 | |
| - | Thine O Lord is the greatness and the power and the glory | 0:53 |
| and the victory and the majesty. | 0:58 | |
| For all that is in the heaven and in the earth is thine. | 1:01 | |
| Thine is the kingdom O Lord, | 1:04 | |
| and thou art exalted as head above all, amen. | 1:07 | |
| - | My theme, the subject which is on the service paper, | 1:51 |
| Christianity in a secular age, | 1:59 | |
| implies a tension. | 2:06 | |
| Now, it's true that there is always in every age, | 2:13 | |
| some tension between the Christian gospel | 2:17 | |
| and the world. | 2:24 | |
| In every age of history, this has been true. | 2:27 | |
| But they're all in a modern world, | 2:34 | |
| some special features, | 2:40 | |
| which give to this tension a form, | 2:45 | |
| which is new, | 2:49 | |
| in the history of man, | 2:54 | |
| since the Christian Era began. | 2:57 | |
| Therefore demands from thinking Christian people, | 3:03 | |
| a fresh understanding | 3:11 | |
| of what Christian responsibility is. | 3:15 | |
| That it is my purpose, | 3:22 | |
| to try to set before you, | 3:25 | |
| what I conceive to be those new features | 3:28 | |
| in our society of the West, | 3:34 | |
| and how I think, | 3:39 | |
| a Christian can responsibly face | 3:43 | |
| those new features. | 3:51 | |
| Let us consider first, very briefly some of the forces, | 3:59 | |
| which condition and dominate all our lives, | 4:06 | |
| and to a very large extent determine our point of view, | 4:14 | |
| the way in which we look at life. | 4:20 | |
| All these things are quite obvious, | 4:26 | |
| it is in the first place in age of power. | 4:30 | |
| We know quite well how the resources of the earth | 4:35 | |
| have been tapped in the last a hundred years | 4:40 | |
| and how man's knowledge and skill has been bent | 4:45 | |
| to use to the full, these resources of physical power. | 4:50 | |
| As a result, we have had all the amazing developments, | 4:59 | |
| scientific and technical for the last a hundred years, | 5:04 | |
| creating and generating some parts of the world, | 5:11 | |
| a material wealth never known | 5:15 | |
| in the history of mankind before. | 5:19 | |
| Certainly, a multiplication of goods, | 5:25 | |
| so that was quite easy for the British Prime Minister | 5:32 | |
| to say recently, "we have never had it so good." | 5:37 | |
| Those are my question, | 5:44 | |
| what exactly he meant by the term good. | 5:47 | |
| Again, it is an age | 5:54 | |
| of highly developed organization and control | 5:56 | |
| because the society in which we live is a complex one, | 6:02 | |
| economic and the social order | 6:09 | |
| need specialized planning and control. | 6:13 | |
| I take a journey by public transport from my home, | 6:22 | |
| some two miles from Piccadilly Circus in London, | 6:27 | |
| to Piccadilly Circus. | 6:31 | |
| I'm involved in a network of relationships, | 6:34 | |
| which include those who are responsible for driving the bus | 6:40 | |
| and collecting my money, the London Transport Board, | 6:46 | |
| those who control the traffic | 6:51 | |
| to allow the bus to get through, | 6:53 | |
| those who manufacturer the lights of the light controls, | 6:56 | |
| those who send the oil from this country or the near East, | 7:01 | |
| and many other people besides. | 7:08 | |
| So when in fact that is a bus strike, | 7:12 | |
| some 75% of the population of London, | 7:18 | |
| their lives are set out of order by it. | 7:23 | |
| Same is true in every sphere of our modern life, | 7:29 | |
| industrial, economic, even in the sphere of education, | 7:35 | |
| which is becoming a highly technical and controlled process. | 7:41 | |
| Thirdly, the age in which we live is the age of the mass | 7:50 | |
| of life dominated by the crowd. | 7:55 | |
| A majority of people work in a crowd, | 8:00 | |
| they take their leisure in a crowd | 8:04 | |
| and play in a crowd | 8:11 | |
| and our communications, our crowd communications, | 8:14 | |
| radio, television, the popular press. | 8:19 | |
| So that there is created in every country | 8:27 | |
| and across the countries, all kinds of popular images | 8:30 | |
| of people and events, which are known to vast millions | 8:35 | |
| as second hand. | 8:40 | |
| From Princess Margaret to the latest film star | 8:42 | |
| in the Los Angeles. | 8:48 | |
| Now the general effect of all these forces | 8:53 | |
| that work in our modern society is to create an ethos | 8:56 | |
| an outlook and attitude to life of climate of thoughts, | 8:59 | |
| which may be summarized by the word, second arrest. | 9:04 | |
| May I give you an example of what I mean, | 9:09 | |
| that this outlook, this way of looking at life | 9:12 | |
| which these forces create, sees man, | 9:15 | |
| we see ourselves as masters of our fate, | 9:18 | |
| as captains of ourselves. | 9:22 | |
| And we believe, that with given the proper planning, | 9:25 | |
| education, control, use of the forces at our disposal, | 9:28 | |
| we shall in the end, arrive at the goal of human happiness, | 9:33 | |
| that cancer will be defeated, | 9:39 | |
| we shall travel as safely in outer space | 9:41 | |
| as we do along the road, | 9:45 | |
| we shall speak with people in Mars. | 9:47 | |
| History will show it to be a continual climb of a scent, | 9:50 | |
| a great Mount Everest, | 9:55 | |
| the top of which we shall all finally reach. | 9:57 | |
| If this is in some sense, to parody and to pillory, | 10:03 | |
| the point of view, nevertheless, | 10:07 | |
| there is a large substance of proof, | 10:08 | |
| this is the way we look at life. | 10:12 | |
| We are not more at home in the world, | 10:17 | |
| than our great grandfathers were. | 10:21 | |
| The Pilgrim image, evokes nothing except nostalgia | 10:25 | |
| and the difficulty about heaven and hell | 10:33 | |
| is not that the pictures means a little | 10:38 | |
| but is that for whether the realities stand | 10:42 | |
| for anything at all. | 10:45 | |
| Again we may say, all this shows itself | 10:51 | |
| in what we may call the depersonalization of life. | 10:56 | |
| The individual is lost, in the vast machine. | 11:01 | |
| The roots of community disappear | 11:09 | |
| from the social order. | 11:17 | |
| Now in the time at my disposal, | 11:20 | |
| I can only give what I believe to be a correct, | 11:22 | |
| but a very brief account of the kind of forces, | 11:24 | |
| which are shaping whether we like it or not, | 11:28 | |
| the world in which we all live, | 11:32 | |
| whether we are professing Christians or atheists. | 11:35 | |
| This is becoming the dominant outlook | 11:39 | |
| and culture of our time. | 11:41 | |
| And the question I ask myself and which I ask you, | 11:44 | |
| what is the nature of Christian responsibility | 11:48 | |
| at such a time, in such an age, | 11:53 | |
| when people look at life in such a way? | 11:57 | |
| Generally speaking, there are two attitudes | 12:06 | |
| in the phase of this situation, | 12:09 | |
| neither of worried me to challenge. | 12:11 | |
| One is to ignore the tension | 12:18 | |
| between the Christian gospel, | 12:21 | |
| the tradition of what we inherit in this place | 12:23 | |
| and the world in which we live | 12:27 | |
| and to make the value and attempt | 12:30 | |
| to gear the gospel into the secular order. | 12:33 | |
| In other words, we accept the scale of values engendered | 12:39 | |
| by this secularist attitude, | 12:47 | |
| without any fundamental questioning of it. | 12:53 | |
| But we like to give the whole thing a religious veneer | 12:56 | |
| and as attitude express itself | 13:03 | |
| in all kinds of well-meaning ways, | 13:05 | |
| we're very much concerned to make the church a success, | 13:09 | |
| even to make the gospel a success. | 13:15 | |
| Indeed, we are inclined, | 13:20 | |
| in the extreme of this point of view, | 13:23 | |
| to regard religion as likely to be most successful, | 13:26 | |
| when we conduct it along the lines of big business. | 13:32 | |
| For such an enterprise, of course, | 13:37 | |
| God is not rarely, necessarily at all. | 13:39 | |
| We are abandoning one side of the tension, | 13:46 | |
| we are abandoning the gospel altogether. | 13:51 | |
| But the other era is equally unfortunate, | 13:56 | |
| it is to withdraw or generally to withdraw its thought | 14:01 | |
| to attempt to withdraw from the tension | 14:05 | |
| and to accept two worlds | 14:10 | |
| and to live a deeper mentalized life | 14:13 | |
| as between the sacred and the secular. | 14:16 | |
| To keep religion in quotes in one department | 14:21 | |
| and daily life in quotes in another, | 14:26 | |
| this leads to all different types of peyotism | 14:30 | |
| and ecclesiasticism for which there are many fashions | 14:34 | |
| in all countries. | 14:38 | |
| We attempt to construct a religious system for its own sake, | 14:41 | |
| as a means of escape, | 14:48 | |
| which will bring comfort to ourselves | 14:51 | |
| and ease our consciences | 14:55 | |
| and make us feel good inside ourselves, | 14:58 | |
| but abandon the world, | 15:02 | |
| the secular world in which we live. | 15:06 | |
| Well, you may well ask me at this point, | 15:12 | |
| what then does Christian responsibility means? | 15:15 | |
| It is always more difficult to be positive | 15:22 | |
| than to be negative, but I think in this matter, | 15:24 | |
| one can't be positive at all, | 15:27 | |
| unless one is negative in the first place. | 15:29 | |
| I think Christian responsibility means first of all, | 15:40 | |
| being ready to accept, | 15:44 | |
| to understand and to enter into as fully as possible, | 15:49 | |
| the whole secular point of view, | 15:56 | |
| and the same time, be aware of the tension between this | 16:00 | |
| and the gospel. | 16:08 | |
| And we should do this not only because, | 16:12 | |
| and this is a point I have not attempted to elaborate, | 16:17 | |
| these processes which I have call | 16:22 | |
| the secularizing tendencies | 16:25 | |
| have in fact bought many very good things in their trade. | 16:27 | |
| But it is not because of those things simply that I say | 16:35 | |
| Christian responsibility means first accepting this world | 16:41 | |
| as it is fully, | 16:46 | |
| but for the much deeper theological reason, | 16:51 | |
| that this is of the very essence | 16:56 | |
| of our faith as a Christians | 16:58 | |
| which tells us that it is the world as it is, | 17:02 | |
| which is the object of God's love, | 17:06 | |
| not the world as we think it ought to be, | 17:09 | |
| nor as the world will be | 17:13 | |
| when we have so busily reformed it. | 17:16 | |
| But the world as it is now, | 17:20 | |
| with it's mixture of good and evil, | 17:24 | |
| which is the supreme object of the love of God. | 17:30 | |
| And this is the setting in which we must respond. | 17:37 | |
| This is the setting which God has chosen for us | 17:45 | |
| for the exercise of our Christian responsibility. | 17:51 | |
| May I use the story which I read | 17:58 | |
| as our scripture readings this morning, | 18:00 | |
| the story of the call of Simon Peter, | 18:03 | |
| to illustrate briefly what I mean | 18:06 | |
| by this Christian responsibility. | 18:12 | |
| This story seems to me to express in symbolic truth, | 18:16 | |
| something which is final | 18:24 | |
| about the nature of our calling as Christians. | 18:26 | |
| The disciples had been fishing, | 18:32 | |
| they'd given up the attempt | 18:34 | |
| because the fish were not in that part of the lake. | 18:37 | |
| They had been mending their nets. | 18:41 | |
| Jesus had been teaching the people from the beach, | 18:44 | |
| He then tells Peter to get into the boat | 18:48 | |
| and to launch out in the hope of making a catch. | 18:53 | |
| And Peter says, "well, we've been at it all night. | 18:58 | |
| What's the object? | 19:01 | |
| Nevertheless, at thy word I will let down the nets." | 19:04 | |
| This is the recognition of responsibility. | 19:12 | |
| Beginning where he was with what he knew his boat, | 19:18 | |
| his fishing, the act of fishing | 19:23 | |
| and doing it with a new awareness, | 19:26 | |
| the same act with a different reference, | 19:34 | |
| not a different kind of act. | 19:37 | |
| Our Christian responsibility begins with a thing | 19:45 | |
| which is exactly to have in our everyday situation. | 19:49 | |
| And it begins nowhere else. | 19:54 | |
| And if we don't find it there, | 19:57 | |
| what we do find, will not be the real thing. | 20:00 | |
| In his 'Theology of Culture', Paul Tillich | 20:10 | |
| writes as follows, "Religion," he says, | 20:17 | |
| "is not a special function of man's spiritual life, | 20:25 | |
| but it is the dimension of depth in all it's functions." | 20:33 | |
| Not a special functioning man's spiritual life, | 20:40 | |
| but the dimension of depth in all its functions. | 20:44 | |
| All life's functions are potentially religious | 20:50 | |
| in a Christian service. | 20:54 | |
| And that leads me to the second mark | 21:00 | |
| of Christian responsibility, | 21:05 | |
| which is this awareness of depth | 21:08 | |
| in many different functions of human life. | 21:15 | |
| What is this which prevents our acceptance | 21:20 | |
| of the secular world as it is, becoming just acceptance? | 21:23 | |
| Again, this is beautifully illustrated, | 21:32 | |
| in the story of the call of Simon Peter. | 21:36 | |
| What happened to him was that he became aware | 21:40 | |
| of a new dimension of depth in a familiar experience. | 21:44 | |
| He was amazed and quiet, | 21:52 | |
| "Depart from me, O Lord, for I am a sinful man." | 21:56 | |
| And this has nothing to do | 22:01 | |
| with acts of commission or omission. | 22:02 | |
| This is his standing in the presence of a depth of life | 22:05 | |
| of which he was previously unaware of. | 22:09 | |
| Taken out of his depth | 22:13 | |
| as he was to be later on in the story. | 22:15 | |
| This is responding, | 22:22 | |
| to what God has to say to us | 22:26 | |
| in the here and now. | 22:29 | |
| And that is no field of experience, | 22:33 | |
| which is barred from this kind of visitation. | 22:36 | |
| Though we cannot command it, | 22:41 | |
| it's not in our will, but of His. | 22:45 | |
| it is the awareness of the ultimate concern | 22:50 | |
| as Tillich puts it. | 22:55 | |
| As the architect who's speaking | 22:59 | |
| of the Cathedrals of Europe said, | 23:01 | |
| "There are the good cathedrals | 23:05 | |
| and there are other cathedrals | 23:09 | |
| which are very beautiful indeed, | 23:11 | |
| and there is Chartres. | 23:15 | |
| This is the dimension of depth into life, | 23:19 | |
| in the aesthetics sphere. | 23:24 | |
| You may remember the old familiar story | 23:28 | |
| from the old Testament of Jephthah and his daughter. | 23:30 | |
| Jephthah, who was the leader of the Israelite troops, | 23:36 | |
| took a solemn vow before Jehovah, | 23:40 | |
| that if he was given victory over his enemies, | 23:45 | |
| he would sacrifice to the Lord, | 23:48 | |
| whatever first met him from his home, | 23:50 | |
| as he returned in triumph. | 23:53 | |
| And as he returned, it was his little girl | 23:57 | |
| who ran out to meet him. | 24:00 | |
| He felt bound by his vow to keep, | 24:03 | |
| I have opened my mouth unto the Lord and I cannot go back. | 24:07 | |
| Now, we may say at one level that this represents | 24:13 | |
| a pre-Christian idea of relationship to God | 24:16 | |
| and what God demands, | 24:20 | |
| but at another level, this is profoundly true, | 24:22 | |
| that a vow made to God is something which takes man spirit | 24:26 | |
| and soul into a new depth. | 24:31 | |
| I have opened my mouth unto the Lord and I cannot go back. | 24:34 | |
| You may know the old story, | 24:42 | |
| that there was a coast on the wreck, | 24:44 | |
| a wreck on the coast of New England. | 24:46 | |
| And the lifeboat was to be launched, | 24:52 | |
| and a young man in the crew came to the captain and said, | 24:56 | |
| "well, the wind is off shore, | 24:58 | |
| the tide's riding out, we can launch the boat, | 25:02 | |
| but we'll never get back." | 25:04 | |
| The captain says, "launch the boat. | 25:07 | |
| We have to go out. | 25:11 | |
| We don't have to come back." | 25:14 | |
| An ultimate concern. | 25:19 | |
| And when man ceases to recognize | 25:21 | |
| in many different spheres of life, | 25:25 | |
| this part of the transcendence, | 25:28 | |
| of an awareness of depth, | 25:31 | |
| then his life is less than human. | 25:34 | |
| But we do not need these picturesque examples. | 25:39 | |
| This is something which is close of heart, | 25:44 | |
| which is the experience of human friendship and love | 25:47 | |
| at its best. | 25:51 | |
| Which is most evocative of this experience | 25:53 | |
| of the transcendence hand of God. | 25:59 | |
| There are two ways beautifully illustrated | 26:03 | |
| in the story of Peter's call. | 26:05 | |
| Well, his acceptance of responsibility meant | 26:08 | |
| a new relationship, | 26:11 | |
| both to his master and to fellow men. | 26:14 | |
| "Fear not, henceforth, thou shall catch man, | 26:19 | |
| take them alive, win them," | 26:23 | |
| and the only way to win them, | 26:27 | |
| because there was this perception | 26:32 | |
| and this understanding awakened in him. | 26:34 | |
| Our responsibility means meeting people as people | 26:40 | |
| for their own sake. | 26:48 | |
| It means taking quite literally, | 26:51 | |
| au pied de la lettre, | 26:57 | |
| our Lord's words. | 27:01 | |
| That in as much, as we do the act of kindness, | 27:04 | |
| of mercy, of compassion, | 27:09 | |
| to the least of our brethren, we do it to Him | 27:14 | |
| If we don't do it to them, we do nothing for Him. | 27:20 | |
| May I give you two example of two, | 27:33 | |
| the modern Christians who I think have faced | 27:39 | |
| this kind of responsibility. | 27:43 | |
| There is now, first, Albert Schweitzer, | 27:49 | |
| now an old man. | 27:53 | |
| A man who was a pioneer at one time in theological thought, | 27:57 | |
| theological thought which straight | 28:04 | |
| and narrow path of Ops Orthodoxy, | 28:09 | |
| are set on one side, | 28:12 | |
| but which was and remains in many of its aspects, creative. | 28:15 | |
| A man who was one | 28:20 | |
| of the greatest delivering interpreters of Ops. | 28:21 | |
| A man who decides to devote himself to a life of compassion | 28:26 | |
| for the lepers on the West Coast of Africa, | 28:32 | |
| who built into practical terms his own philosophy, | 28:36 | |
| of reverence for life, | 28:43 | |
| being the heart of Christian responsibility. | 28:46 | |
| A more recent example is that of the Abbe Pierre, | 28:55 | |
| whose work in Paris, perhaps you know, perhaps you do not. | 28:59 | |
| The Abbe Pierre took to himself the down and out | 29:05 | |
| who lived under the bridges of the Seine. | 29:07 | |
| Many of them with a criminal record, | 29:11 | |
| all of them out of work, | 29:13 | |
| many of them lousy. | 29:16 | |
| He collected these people into a community, I visited it. | 29:20 | |
| I went to the junk yard where trucks went out every day | 29:24 | |
| into Paris to collect old glass, | 29:29 | |
| bottles, china, paper, wood, | 29:31 | |
| everything that the inhabitants of Paris | 29:34 | |
| was prepared to throw out their houses. | 29:36 | |
| They brought back to this yard to be sorted and sold again, | 29:38 | |
| made something off in order that they might begin | 29:43 | |
| to build houses for some of these people. | 29:45 | |
| And this was the Abbe Pierre's concern too. | 29:49 | |
| And there was the man in his habit, as a man of God, | 29:52 | |
| walking about in the midst of this junk, | 29:56 | |
| and there is symbol, | 30:00 | |
| a living symbol of Christian responsibility | 30:02 | |
| in a secular age. | 30:07 | |
| If you haven't read it, | 30:17 | |
| may I finally recommended your attention, | 30:19 | |
| to the 'Letters From Prison' written by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, | 30:23 | |
| whose name is perhaps as well known | 30:28 | |
| and loved in this country as was in Germany. | 30:30 | |
| Well, he was here just before the outbreak of World War II. | 30:36 | |
| Indeed his friends and his country | 30:41 | |
| tried to persuade him to remain, | 30:43 | |
| but he felt his duty to go back | 30:46 | |
| and to suffer along with his fellow countrymen. | 30:49 | |
| If you read his letters from prison, | 30:53 | |
| written during the 18 months, | 30:56 | |
| that he was in a concentration camp, | 30:58 | |
| before he was finally executed by the Nazis. | 31:01 | |
| They will, I believe, give you a tour insight | 31:04 | |
| into my theme this morning. | 31:07 | |
| And the more prophetic understanding of the times | 31:10 | |
| in which we live than any other book I have read | 31:13 | |
| in the course of the last 25 years. | 31:16 | |
| He speaks of the world's coming of age, | 31:20 | |
| it's only another way of putting | 31:24 | |
| and he develops thoughtfully | 31:25 | |
| that which I summarized in the first part of my talk, | 31:28 | |
| the secularizing process that has been going on | 31:32 | |
| for the past 300 years. | 31:35 | |
| So that God has been so to speak pushed out | 31:37 | |
| onto the confines of existence. | 31:40 | |
| But when religious people call in God, | 31:43 | |
| it is the DSX machine that they are calling. | 31:46 | |
| The God who is going to meet some special need, | 31:50 | |
| either individual or national or social, | 31:53 | |
| not the God who is the ground of all being, | 31:55 | |
| the creator and sustainer of time, moment to moment. | 31:58 | |
| Dietrich Bonhoeffer asked the question, | 32:11 | |
| "what is the place of Christianity | 32:16 | |
| in a religionless world?" | 32:21 | |
| That is the question which we ought to be asking, | 32:27 | |
| whether our churches are packed full | 32:32 | |
| or whether they are competitively empty. | 32:36 | |
| He says, "it is only by living completely in this world, | 32:42 | |
| that one learns to believe." | 32:48 | |
| I would have that written over the porch | 32:52 | |
| of every place of worship throughout Europe. | 32:55 | |
| It is only by living completely in this world, | 33:00 | |
| that one learns to believe. | 33:05 | |
| "Church," he says, | 33:11 | |
| "stands not on the boundaries of existence, | 33:13 | |
| but in the center of the village." | 33:18 | |
| Let us pray. | 33:27 | |
| Eternal God who commits to us, | 33:39 | |
| the swift and solemn trust life. | 33:42 | |
| Since we know not what a day may bring forth, | 33:46 | |
| but only of the hour for serving thee is always present. | 33:50 | |
| May we wait to the instant claims of thy early will, | 33:54 | |
| not waiting for tomorrow. | 33:59 | |
| So do by the persuasion of the thy spirit, | 34:02 | |
| the resistance of our passion, indolence or fear, | 34:06 | |
| consecrate with thy presence the way our feet may go, | 34:12 | |
| in all things, draw us to the mind of Christ, | 34:17 | |
| that thy last image may be traced again, | 34:22 | |
| from the same Jesus Christ our Lord, amen. | 34:26 |