Intense media and political attention is forcing Canada’s ruling party to catapult a balanced, albeit a delayed, budget in this election year.
Nationally, the regular monthly unemployment or inflation numbers often frighten ordinary bread earners, not just economists or social planners.
Locally, we continue to fight such vigorous issues as the proximity of a mine, such as the proposed one near Kamloops, with its untoward effects on our health and neighbourhoods.
What’s the perceived role of the church in such moral and divisive issues?
Ideally, the church’s impact upon society at large should be twofold.
First, the church must announce her Christian principles and point out where the existing social order is in conflict with these.
Second, it must then pass on to her Christian members, acting in their civic capacities, the task of reshaping the existing order in closer conformity to their principles.
This is a point of first-rate importance and is frequently misunderstood.
If Christianity is true at all, it is a truth of universal application, affecting multifarious issues of the society in general.
All things should be done in biblical spirit and in accordance with Christian principles.
Suppose our communities and leaders want a Christian solution to the problem of unemployment.
The Christian faith does not by itself enable its members to verbalize how a vast number of people within an intricate economic system will be affected by a particular economic or political idea.
Those who want to uphold the status quo would perhaps want us to “keep off the turf.” They would term us as out of place in complex situations.
Then, the church ought to humbly reply, “We cannot tell what the remedy is, but we can recognize a society with chronic unemployment as a diseased society.”
If we are not doing all that we can to find the remedy, we are guilty before God. The church is likely to be attacked from both sides if she does her duty.
She will be told that she has become ‘political,’ when, in fact, she has merely stated her principles and pointed out when these have been breached.
The church, then, is sure to be told by advocates of particular policies that it is futile because she does not support their policies.
If the church is faithful to its commission, she will ignore both sets of complaints and will continue, as far as possible, to influence all citizens and permeate all parties.
Political issues are often concerned with people as they are, not as they ought to be.
Part of the task of the church is to help people to order their lives in order to lead them to be what they ought to be.
People are not utterly bad, but they are neither wholly good. Even our ‘goodness’ is infected with self-centredness.
For this reason, we are exposed to temptation of obtaining as much power we can get.
The church’s belief in original sin should make us realistic and free us from trying to create a utopia.
There is no such thing as a Christian social ideal to which we should try to conform the society we live in, as closely as possible.
After all, no one wants to live in the ‘ideal’ society as depicted by anyone else.
All true Christian thinking begins not with man, but with God. The world is not necessary to God in the same way as God is needed by a broken world.
If there were no God, there would be no world. If there were no world, God would still be who He is.
God was impelled to make the world because of His love. The world resulted out of His love.
In making the world, He brought into existence vast numbers of things like electrons. These have to obey His law and do so.
But, He made creatures, men and women, who could disobey His laws for them, and they have done from the beginning.
He did this so that, among His creatures, there might be some who answer His love with theirs by offering to Him their obedience freely.
This involved a risk in that they would naturally take the self-centred outlook on life and then increasingly become hardened in that selfishness.
To win them out of this, He came on Earth and lived out the divine love in human form.
The fundamental facts about human beings are two: First, we are made in the image of God.
Second, that image has been stamped upon an animal nature.
Between these two, there is constant tension, resulting in perpetual tragedies.
Our true value is not what we are worth in ourselves, or what a balanced budget would do for us, but what we are worth to God.
We must be treated as to what we actually are, but always with a view to what, in God’s purpose, we are destined to become.
For the law of God, His social order, is our schoolmaster, to bring us to Christ and God.
Narayan Mitra is the pastor of Merritt Baptist Church.
