I recently attended a Christmas party held at a prominent, beautiful country club. The trees, which were many, stood tall and elegant; the wreaths were fresh and full. The air smelled of cinnamon and pine and Handel’s Messiah could be heard coming from the keys of a grand piano. “Fit for a King,” read one sign. On the way home, I passed by decorations of all sorts. Some, like the decorations at the club, were hung with care and taste. Others, less so—strings of mismatched lights making their way only half way up the tree; damaged, worn lawn ornaments leaning in exhausted resignment.

When I got home, I started reading Fr. James V Schall’s newest work, Reason for the Seasons. The book, which offers a poetic, playful commentary on the Christian liturgical year is perhaps Schall’s best work, something I don’t say lightly. After reading the below section on Christmas, I realized that the sign “Fit for a King” is just as appropriate a descriptor for those decorations bought two decades ago at Kmart  as it is for this year’s tree from Restoration Hardware. Says Schall:

“Christianity is a revelation not to the few but to the many, to everyone: to everyone, whether he knows it or not, whether he likes it or not. The few know how to respond to delight in a sophisticated way. The vulgar, the common, do not. But they do respond—with rough rowdiness, with gossip, with horseplay, with coarseness of speech. They do not know how to respond otherwise. But we are not to think that because of their vulgar manners and ways of expressing things that that over which they rejoice and delight does not exist. They are the ones who wave their spoons and shout when the plum pudding is lighted because they are the very ones who realize the risk that God took in dwelling amongst us.

 

The feast, which we still celebrate, is brought first to whom? The good tidings are of ‘great joy.’ They come to the shepherds and thence ‘to all people.’ The text does not say ‘unto Joseph and Mary’ is born a Savior. It says that He is born unto the shepherds and to all the people. We should note too that what is born this day in the city of David is not an idea. It is not a political movement. It is not a formula of physics. What is born is a particular Child, ‘which is Christ the Lord.’ The Word, we are told, was made flesh and dwelt amongst us. We are the ‘us’ amongst whom the Lord dwelt and still dwells.

 

This Incarnation and Nativity into the world is not an abstraction. Nor is it meant for only a few; nor are the elite few even likely to appreciate what happened in the city of David as well as do such folks as shepherds, ‘sore afraid,’ and delightful youngsters whose eyes open wide when the pudding is alight.

 

The fact that God accepted the danger of the reactions of common folks to his intervention reveals much about God. The risk of God, so to speak—and one that we encounter again at every Christmas—is that we will remain unmoved, dull, unperceptive about the greatest event in the history of our kind, which occurred in a little out-of-the-way place because of that decree of Caesar Augustus.”

Not only does Schall provide cover for chintzy Christmas lights, he also defends the act of gift-giving, what we’re often told is the underbelly of the otherwise holy season. Instead of seeing the act as mere consumerism, Schall shows that it actually incarnates the principal of incarnation, and what could be more appropriate than that? He says:

“About Christmas, an incredible concreteness is found. We most associate Christmas with a gift. A gift is not something we can demand, not something that is due to us. Ultimately, the structure of the universe is first to be understood as a gift.”

Again, I commend the whole book to you, particularly for reading this Christmastide.

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Today is election day and there’s a lot of talk about what will happen if certain candidates are elected—disaster is all but assured, ruin will inevitably befall the Republic. In each campaign ad, we’re asked to imagine another world, one in which a particular candidate loses. Occasionally, a politician will run on an optimistic message, asking us to imagine not a worse world if his opponent is elected, but a better world if he himself is elected. This platform is more rare because it’s more difficult. In a decadent culture such as ours, it’s easier to imagine more of the same—decay—rather than it’s alien feeling opposite—revitalization.

It’s certainly not wrong for Christians to imagine a worse world—to do so might just be what our fathers would call “prudence.” A missionary—and if you’re a Christian, you’re a missionary—who doesn’t recognize the dangers, weaknesses, and sin in a culture is as useless as a doctor who refuses to diagnose his patients. Yet, God gave us two eyes for a reason: we mustn’t stop at seeing the brokenness in our culture, we must also acknowledge its beauty. The same hands that build bombs can also build shelters, which is another way of saying that the same hands the build swords can bend them into plowshares.

I’m not sure anyone showed us how to dream with a prophetic, missionary zeal more than the great pastor, theologian, and missiologist of the last century, J.H. Bavinck. Bavinck (nephew to Herman) spent much of his life as a missionary to Indonesia. He wrote profusely about the people he was trying to reach with the gospel. He saw their idols and evils the way only an outsider could. Yet, he always wrote about them with compassion, affection, and, indeed, love.

As I read the aspirational words below, I felt the need to repent. In this political moment, I’ve used the imagination God gave me perversely. I’ve imagined a world where the only force at work is sociological, political, and natural. But there is indeed a metaphysical, spiritual, supernatural force at play that, if reckoned with, can infuse our imagination with an apocalyptic, missionological, prophetic hopefulness. Listen in as Bavinck dreams about what his culture, Asian, could become:

“When a living, blossoming church will certainly arise in the world of Asia, Christ will accomplish amazing things there. Asia has gifts and abilities that will then render its people exceedingly suited to understanding the meaning of the gospel. From childhood, they are more strongly convinced than we of the all-encompassing religious nature of everything pertaining to daily life, so they will then be well positioned to see the hand of Christ in all of life. They are not as far removed from the miraculous as we are, and for that reason Christ will do amazing things among them. They also listen better that we do, and they are capable of waiting more quietly for the voice of God and depending on God more submissively.

Above all, they are less attached to externals like money and material things, like honor and making a name for themselves. They know better than we that the things of this age are fleeting. The gospel of Christ will thus also enable them to see more fully that we may not despise this world, since it is God’s handiwork and is the context in which he will realize his external counsel. The same gospel will also guide them to look upward and to expect the everlasting kingdom that will one day appear and for whose coming we all yearn with great longing.

Thus, we can expect great things with regard to the faith. We stand at a point of terrible crisis, of struggle and confusion. Our modern world bears guilt of every kind; no one can tell where all of this will lead.

But blessed is the person who believes, waits, and knows that in Christ Jesus the power to accomplish great things in this amazing world has come. May we simply learn to expect those great things from him.”

America still stands “at a point of terrible crisis, of struggle and confusion.” Instead of taking this cultural moment to be pundits, may we be prophets. Yes, we can debate, but first lets dream. Lets imagine what America might be, what strengths and beauties she has that might be redeemed. And lets wait in expectant hope as we ask the God who is able to accomplish great things.

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If you follow the evangelical blogosphere, you’re no doubt aware of the most recent dust-up over the Social Justice Statement. In what follows, I want to briefly explain (1) why I didn’t sign the statement and (2) defend the use of the phrase “social justice.”

Why I didn’t sign the statement:

If you actually read the document, it’s much more reserved than you might expect. This is also its weakness, however. Words go undefined and assumed, leaving the reader unsure as to who or what is actually being rebuked. And then there’s the generally condescending attitude toward any sort of activism:

“And we emphatically deny that lectures on social issues (or activism aimed at reshaping the wider culture) are as vital to the life and health of the church as the preaching of the gospel and the exposition of Scripture. Historically, such things tend to become distractions that inevitably lead to departures from the gospel.”

The statement is full of false dichotomies such as this. Because of the inherent nature of Scripture, the preacher doesn’t have to apply the text, per se; rather, he has to show the text’s applicability. Thus, the line between expositing the passage and exhorting the people is always blurred. Indeed, the book of James demolishes the sort of hermeneutic that siloes hearing from doing. I didn’t sign the document because I can’t tell women working at crisis pregnancy centers across the country that they’re distracted. I can’t tell them that they’re on a slippery slope to gospel-departure. I can’t tell them that they should believe what Psalm 139:13 says about babies, but not act upon it.

Of course, God holds us responsible in regards to the faithfulness which we show to our work, not our fruit, but is the preacher really being faithful to his calling if he isn’t hoping and praying that the Spirit, through the word, will reshape individuals, families, neighborhoods, indeed “wider cultures?” With Nicholas Wolterstorff, I want to insist, “The church is not merely to wait with grim patience for the new age when the Spirit will fully renew all existence. It must already, here and now, manifest signs of that renewing Spirit.”

In defense of social justice:

Having said that, however, my goal isn’t to attack those critical of social justice. With those critics, I think that the identity politics being practiced on the left and right is an acid that’s leaving the fabric of our culture threadbare. The longer we soak in it, the more the societal trust that’s required for a community to flourish disintegrates. Indeed, anyone who’s read Karl Marx knows his name isn’t being invoked in vain by those critical of our increasingly tribalistic politics.

So while I couldn’t in good conscience sign the statement, I don’t think those who did are bigoted or uninformed. As I said, my goal isn’t to attack the document or its signers. Rather, my goal is to defend the origin and use of the phrase social justice. As I understand the criticism, “social justice” language is problematic because (1) it has Marxist origins thus imports, at best, problematic categories, and (2) it assumes that’s there are multiple kinds of justice, whereas Scripture only speaks of one sort—God’s.

The first point will take the least amount of space to refute. As a point of historical fact, one of the first philosophers to use the expression was the Catholic priest Antonio Rosmini, writing in Italy in the 19^th century. At places, Rosmini sounds as if he could be responding directly to the recent critics of the phrase:

“Justice is not manufactured by human beings, nor can human hands dismantle it. It is prior to laws made by human beings; such laws can only be expressions of justice. Justice is the essence of all laws to such an extent that Saint Augustine had no hesitation in refusing to name as ‘law’ anything that lacked justice. Nor does authority exist except as a servant of justice.”

The Acton Institute is to be commended in their efforts to bring Rosmini’s writings back into relevance. While no doubt others use the phrase in a way incongruent with the originator’s intent, I seek to defend the sort of social justice about which Rosmini speaks and the Acton Institute, for example, embodies.

The second point will take a bit longer than the first. In an effort to be fair to those critical of the phrase, I’ll engage with one of the chief critics directly, Voddie Baucham. Dr. Baucham sums up his point powerfully:

“There’s no such thing as ‘social justice.’ In fact, in the Bible, justice never has an adjective. There’s justice and there’s injustice, but there’s not different kinds of justice.”

Perhaps a story will be of help here. I have a good friend who recently made a compelling case for Socialism using Scripture. Toward the end of our conversation, she asked how I could read the book of Acts—in which we see believers having all things in common—and not embrace a forced redistribution of wealth. Moments earlier, I had said that I believed the government was too far-reaching as it is, so it took her off guard when I conceded that wealth should indeed be redistributed. To not redistribute wealth, I said, would be a tremendous injustice.

“Finally, you #FeelTheBern!” she shouted with joy! Not quite. You see, if a mother and father don’t redistribute their income to their children, they’re derelict. If they don’t freely feed, cloth, and house their toddler, they’re unjust. Scripture commands as much, to not obey would be sin. Likewise, giving to your church, as we see in more places than just Acts, is a divine directive. God doesn’t suggest we redistribute our income, he insists. Yet in these instances, it’s the family and the church that are the instruments of redistribution. So, to say something is demanded of a person isn’t the same thing as saying it’s the State’s prerogative to enforce said demand.

But more to the point, surely there’s a difference between how we share our money with our immediate family and how we share our money with our church community. Our kids will likely require much more than a tenth of our income, after all! Now, if you’re familiar with the Neo-Calvinistic tradition out of which I come, you’ve already anticipated the two points I was trying to make with my friend: (1) the State isn’t the only vehicle for the distribution of justice and (2) we ought not ham-fistedly apply directives given to one institution to another.

There are myriad different spheres of life—schools, cities, clubs, churches, families—each with their own system of governance, their own sovereign, their own code. Indeed, I don’t think it would be an equivocation to say each sphere has its own justice, if by that we mean that a just way to behave in one sphere might be unjust in another. For example, we should have compassion on anyone living in poverty, but our responsibility for the impoverished person correlates to how closely the person is related to us, a point Paul makes in 1 Tim 5:8:

“If anyone doesn’t take care of his own relatives, especially his immediate family, he has denied the Christian faith and is worse than an unbeliever.”

A man might be justified in passing a homeless man on the street without stopping, but if the same man were to pass by his mother begging on the street without stopping, he’d no doubt be unjust in doing so. One action can be just in one context or sphere but unjust in another. The sphere, not only the action, matters.

A pastor ought not imprison a criminal in his vestry—that’s the role of the State. A mayor ought not baptize the police chief—that’s the role of the church. Likewise, while the description of believers living a life of shared resources in Acts is no doubt prescriptive today, it must be prescribed within the appropriate sphere, namely the church.

None of this is to say that Scripture has nothing to say regarding the State. To the contrary, kings and all civil rulers are beckoned therein to rule justly and govern under the ultimate Lordship of Christ. The Bible speaks to every sphere of life, as Abraham Kuyper taught so many of us. A well-ordered society is one in which each sphere is in tune with God’s revelation, both special (i.e. Scripture) and general (i.e. Natural Law).

A just society requires more than just one sphere functioning appropriately, it requires all of them working in harmony with one another and the divine order of reality. One can be born into a healthy family that worships in an unhealthy church, just as one can go to a healthy school in an unhealthy city. Speaking of social justice, then, allows us to speak about the society on a macro level—evaluating more than just the State or the church or the family or the prison system or the school—but analyzing the economy of institutions as a whole, with God’s special and general revelation as the grid.

In conclusion, I understand that I’m not likely to convince my friends who are critical of social justice to adopt the phrase. But my hope is more modest than that. My hope is that in showing that the (1) origin and (2) usage of social justice aren’t as nefarious as is often claimed, the critics can at least allow for the possibility that not everyone is using the word to smuggle in a Marxist agenda.

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Earlier this week Donald Trump called a group of immigrants animals—“You wouldn’t believe how bad these people are. These aren’t people. These are animals.” The comment was broadcast far and wide with universal condemnation. A tweet from The New York Times was typical,

“Trump lashed out at undocumented immigrants during a White House meeting, calling those trying to breach the country’s borders ‘animals.'”

The statement, it turns out, came on the heels of a comment by Fresno County Sheriff Margaret Mims who was talking about the notorious gang MS-13. In context, it’s clear that the President wasn’t speaking of immigrants generally, but of one of the most brutal, vicious gangs in North America particularly.

Perhaps it’s still morally questionable to refer to even the most hardened of criminals in such a way, but It’s at least not a given. Indeed, it was one of President Obama’s great weaknesses that his moral imagination couldn’t—or wouldn’t—account for violent actors in such stark terms, preferring instead to qualify ostensibly evil acts with the language of mental illness, situational contextualization, etc.

To be sure, if President Obama erred in being too soft in his rhetoric, Trump has no doubt erred in being too hard. The truth is, one could imagine President Trump saying what he did about M-13 about undocumented immigrants carte blanche. He didn’t, thankfully, but it’s not beyond the realm of possibility, which is why so many were quick to believe it happened.

Of course, defenders of the President weren’t surprised by the day’s coverage—just another instance of the lamestream media spouting fake news in an effort to undermine the 2016 election. Yet, despite what Sean Hannity may insist, the problem is not, in fact, a unified, faceless conglomerate—“the media”—seeking to take down the President. Were that the case—were there really two actors, the POTUS and the media, competing against one another in a battle for the public’s trust—then the faux reporting wouldn’t have happened. There’s no doubt that this week was a net loss for the proverbial media. There is even less confidence in journalism this week than there was last week. John Wilson, former editor of Books and Culture, was right when he tweeted about the incident,

“What makes it even worse is that it is CALCULATED (calculated in part to provoke critics to say he’s contemplating genocide, etc., which hyperbole then generates more support from his base).”

So while the coverage turned out to be a win for the President, it was nevertheless a net gain for those individual journalists and bloggers who got the clicks and eyeballs they were aiming for in the first place. And that’s the rub: the problem is less nefarious and more dangerous than the current narrative grants. So long as we exclusively look for those news sources that confirm what we already believe, there will be willing and able writers to whet our appetites with half-true stories (and as our grandmothers taught us, half-truths are just whole-lies in disguise).

Take an example less infused with political heat. Shortly after the infamous Southwest Airlines Flight 1380 required an emergency landing, the front page of various news sources was striking. The top story at CNN read, “Hero pilot is a woman–of course.” Compare that with the headline at FOX, “Hero in a Cowboy hat.” Both stories were true, but both appealed to the sensibilities of their readership. In other words, the desire wasn’t to inform but to draw in readers by reaffirming biases.

This is a good example of the real problem with modern journalism, and “fake news” isn’t a helpful description—that shifts the blame to them when it belongs to us.  We’re eager to see heroes that share our sensibilities, and news agencies deliver. This can seem fairly benign, like in this case. But the converse is also true: we’re hungry to see the other villainized and demeaned, and news agencies deliver on that too, which really is corrosive to our social fabric.

You may not think Donald Trump is morally fit to be President. That’s a perfectly acceptable position to hold; it’s one I happen to hold myself, in fact. We err when we only look at news which caters to that narrative, refusing to accept troublesome data or twisting the data to fit the conclusions we already hold, which is what happened with the “animals” story. There will always be a supply for that which we demand.

It’s true, journalists indeed need more integrity, but so too do we need more empathy. Until we’re able to see the villain in our tribe (and, indeed, ourselves) and the hero in the other tribe, we’ll keep getting half the story.

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“Thus did Western Man decide to abolish himself, creating his own boredom out of his own affluence, his own vulnerability out of his own strength, his own impotence out of his own erotomania, himself blowing the trumpet that brought the walls of his own city tumbling down.” -Malcolm Muggeridge

If you could be dictator of America for one day, what would be the first thing you’d do to fix the country? In a recent interview, George Will gave a surprising response to this question, which I’ll paraphrase:

“I’d make every college student change their major to History and their minor to Contingency Studies.”

His point: America did not have to turn out the way it did. The Republic we inhabit is the result of bravery and revolutionary ideas, to be sure, but it’s also the result of an often under-appreciated element; namely, chance. In his new book, Suicide of the West: How the Rebirth of Tribalism, Populism, Nationalism, and Identity Politics is Destroying American Democracy, Jonah Goldberg takes this observation a step further. Not only is the freedom we enjoy a historical anomaly, it’s unnatural:

“Capitalism is unnatural. Democracy is unnatural. Human rights are unnatural. God didn’t give us these things, or anything else. We stumbled into modernity accidentally, not by any divine plan.”

If those of us who believe in providence dismiss his argument out of hand, we do so at our own peril. As Goldberg chronicles, for most of mankind’s history, we’ve lived a tribal, violent existence. That we now view the proverbial “other” with as little skepticism as we do is a feat of monumental proportion. A feat accomplished by what, you ask? Goldberg answers: money. Money made it possible for a person of one tribe to have an exchange with a person of another tribe that was mutually beneficial. The “other” in a free market isn’t just a competitor, he’s a customer.

Because the peace we have with one another now is incomplete and imperfect, it’s easy to view the current state of affairs with contempt. In the age of Trump, with identity politics being practiced by the Left and the Right, Goldberg sees the natural human propensity toward tribalism “coming back with a pitchfork.” We’re renovating the Republic with the sledgehammer of populism, knocking down institutions and norms at will, unmindful of which artifacts are structural and which are superficial, which are negotiable and which are load-bearing. Thus, the structural-integrity of the West has been compromised, perhaps irreparably, by those seeking to improve it. No, the current system isn’t perfect, but it’s better than an infinite number of alternatives that seemed inevitable a relatively short time ago.

There’s a famous story in which Benjamin Franklin is asked what sort of government the delegates at the Constitutional Convention are attempting to create, to which he responds, “A republic, if you can keep it.” Goldberg’s proposal for keeping the Republic lies not in specific policy proposals—he offers relatively few in the book—but in a disposition: gratitude.

Illustratively, two accounts of Aesop’s “golden goose” story are given in the book. In the first, the goose is killed out of rage because he wouldn’t—or couldn’t—lay more eggs for his owner. In the second, he’s killed by the owner so as to remove whatever mechanism is inside him that creates the gold. On a surface reading, the first telling blames passion while the second blames reason. The real culprit, however, is ingratitude, which can as easily corrupt the head as the heart.

The goose-killers weren’t grateful for the miracle of a golden egg laying goose—what an unlikely event! It’s simply not natural for a goose to lay golden eggs, and it’s simply not natural for man to live in the free, prosperous, peaceful society in which we find ourselves. No, we must not stagnate in the status quo, but neither must we take for granted the value of our free society. There has never been a better time to be alive—we’ve won the historical lottery, we should be grateful.

Another Form of Suicide

This brings me to my main problem with the book. Goldberg says on the first page that there is no God in his argument. He makes clear that he’s not an atheist, but neither does his reasoning depend on the existence of a deity. In a sense, I appreciate what he’s trying to do. He’s making a limited case for Classical Liberalism and wants the opportunity to persuade people of that argument without being tangled up in more thorny metaphysical debates.

By and large, I think his description of the situation in which we find ourselves will be compelling to those who don’t believe in a higher power. The historical, sociological, and psychological data backs up Goldberg’s argument that we’re prone toward tribalism and violence. Yet, the prescriptive portion of the book, built as it is on the notion of gratitude, is unintelligible in a godless universe. Yes, it’s good and right to be grateful for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, but to whom are we grateful? Who receives our thanks? Does not gratitude imply a personal, transcendent “Other?”

Without such a being, our gratitude for the events of the past that brought us to the present becomes neutered into something like nostalgia. In Scripture, God’s covenant people are often called to look back, but they do so with their feet in the present and their eye toward the future. Looking to God’s actions in the past will encourage and ennoble his people toward steadfastness and faithfulness in those things God is calling them to do in the moment and in the moments to come.

Nostalgia, on the other hand, is an indulgent retreat to yesteryear; leaving the real present for a glossy, sentimentalized version of a past that likely never was. Nostalgia is an existential form of suicide. Gratitude leads to good works, bravery, and life. If liberalism is the result of chance, nostalgia is the best we can hope for. If it’s the result of divine providence, the gratitude for which Goldberg calls is not only possible, it’s necessary.

Likewise, belief in God will keep us from being paralyzed with fear. It would be easy to walk away from Goldberg’s book suspicious of any talk of “progress.” But Christians live under the rule of a city that is to come. In Scripture, we find the words of that city’s King, and in those words, we find the recipe for human flourishing in the here and now. Thus we can amend and tweak the structures of the West responsibly, as happened with women’s suffrage and the abolition of slavery. We look back with thanks, but we also march forward with hope.

The quote often attributed to Tocqueville is apropos, “America is great because America is good.” Goldberg is surely correct in his claim that man’s sinful nature is always ready to reappear. He’s also right to suggest that the “Lockean Revolution” has birthed the freest, most prosperous civilization in history. He’s wrong to think, however, that the free market and all that comes with it is enough to keep our nature at bay. Our liberal democracy is dependent upon a virtuous citizenry, a virtuous citizenry is depended upon gratitude, and gratitude is dependent upon one to receive our thanks, a Giver of all gifts, a King above all kings. If the West is to be saved, she’ll need a Savior.

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Recently, a candidate for political office in my home state of Texas said his Christian faith “is personal” and went on to insist “I will not let it interfere with how I govern.” Much has been written about the man, a Ruling Elder in the PCA, and his politics; my goal here isn’t to be yet another voice hitting him over the head. Instead of addressing the particular policy issues at play—which are no doubt important—I want to take a step back and ask whether or not the Christian faith can, in fact, remain wholly private and secluded from one’s politics.

Writing in 1935, Anglican Monk A.G. Hebert insists that the doctrine of the Incarnation precludes any effort to silo off the faith from any area of life, political or otherwise. His book, Liturgy and Society, was in every way ahead of his time, anticipating the sort of work in political theology that was to come thirty years later. In my reckoning, the book deserves a place next to Kuyper’s Lectures on Calvinism, to overstate the matter only slightly. His argument is worth quoting at length:

“The incarnation of the son of God claims the Kingdom of God over the whole of human life. It is the manifestation of God’s goodness in the flesh; it involves the redemption of the body, and therefore also of the social relations of the life lived in the body, and of the whole social, economic and political structure. God has established His Kingdom, a kingdom not of this world, but very much in this world. It is wrong to assume that the concern of Christianity is only with the religious life of the individual, and the endeavor of a select circle of devout people to live a sanctified life and attain an individual perfection: it is the denial of the Incarnation.

The method of the Incarnation means that the separation of ‘sacred’ and ‘secular’ is broken down. Christianity is deeply concerned with the ‘secular’ activities of every kind: not so that the sacred becomes secularized, but so the secular activities are redeemed to God. It is impossible that he who loves not his brother, whom he has seen, should love God whom he has not seen. It is impossible because of the Incarnation; the will of the God whom we worship comes to us through our relations with the common humanity which God has taken on Himself. Insomuch as I have not served and helped one of the least of these, I did it not unto Him.”

To illustrate his point, Hebert points to how the church building relates to other structures in a city:

“In every parish the church building stands as God’s House. It is not that the church building is exclusively God’s House, and that all the other buildings, factories, shops and public-houses in the parish belong to the devil, but that the earth is the Lord’s: by the existence of a house called God’s House, these others are all claimed for Him. So the Lord’s Day at the beginning of each week claims all the other days and their occupations for God’s glory: and times of prayer are set apart, both for the Church service and by individuals for private prayer, not to imply that those times only are given to God, but to claim for Him all the rest of the day.

…The same principle is seen in a hundred other ways. In the Church service we make use of the common things of daily life: we use water in a solemn ritual washing; we use bread and wine, we eat and drink before God; we read aloud, we sing in chorus, we light candles—all these things are done in church in order to signify that the corresponding actions in daily life are redeemed to God. The fact that the Eucharist is the Lord’s Supper makes the family dinner also a holy meal.

In actual fact, we Christians sin against the Gospel of the Incarnation by our slowness to recognize the significance of these things. We are fools and slow of heart to believe: we are even ready to acquiesce to the Church becoming a preserve for the devout instead of being a home for the people.”

Hebert goes on to emphasize the ways in which the “Incarnation principle” should influence our Christian education classes. He says catechists need to go out of their way to connect the gospel with, “the boy’s actual interest, his home, his football club, his work as an assistant at a garage, and showing him how it is just these things that are to be laid on God’s alter and redeemer. We might show him the place of his little daily job within the social structure; how the things that he uses in his daily work, petrol, oil and machinery, are God’s things, used by God’s children; what the Sacrament of Baptism teaches about the people who use them, that they are human beings and not wage-slaves or cogs in an economic machine, that God has a meaning for their lives.”

To be sure, there is a wave of sound literature trying to hammer away at the sacred/secular divide within the church. But the aforementioned statement made by the politician is a fairly typical sentiment among even the most thoughtful Christians in my experience. What’s needed today is exactly that for which Hebert calls: an intentional, concentrated effort by the church to show forth Christ’s grace-filled, chain-breaking rule to every square inch of creation. In short, we need Christians with a faith that can’t help but interfere with every area of life.

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