The objective social-political-economic situation that exists in our country and the world at large today has determined a revulsion in large segments of the people. Liberation movements that span many classes can be found worldwide that are motivated by the blatant injustices of a concerted and organized fight by the established powers against any attempt at revolution from below. In our country two general responses to existing conditions can be seen. The predominant one has been a willing acceptance of values, needs and satisfactions that have been generated by a corrupt society that seeks to reproduce itself. This is voluntary servitude. A second response that is becoming more widespread is a rejection of this game that is rigged against us from the start. More people are refusing the hand-me-down values of bourgeois American society and rejecting co-option of practicality, participation, and success as defined by the society. They are refusing to adapt to the competitive ethic required for well-being under domination.
The Christian church has become invisible in the midst of these objective conditions. It has retreated to the reductionism of an exclusive personal and private ethic where individual purity has displaced responsibility and witness. The salvation of humanity has become a matter of fitting in, contentment, complacency, and in the end, captivity to the values and lifestyle of our culture. In making no recognizable difference between itself and our existing conditions, the church has tacitly become counter-revolutionary.
It is the secular radicals today who are calling for a liberated human being motivated by a radical morality that counters cruelty, brutality, and ugliness down to the very way he sees, hears, feels, and understands things. Marcuse has named this morality the "new sensibility" in the "infrastructure" of humanity that aims at a "radical transvaluation of values." He describes this as a disposition, "perhaps rooted in the erotic drive to counter aggressiveness." This instinctual foundation is the hope for true solidarity among human beings which establishes the possibility for a new person and a new objective order.
Beyond the question of whether there is really such an instinctive morality in the hidden person is the question of the adequacy of this instinct as a foundation for a liberated person and a new and elaborate social order. Sooner or later, to establish a comprehensive ethic that is also uniformly held by all people, one will find only two alternatives. Either there must be value beyond the whole human situation, i.e., ethics is transcendental as Wittgenstein said, or we are left with competing forms of totalitarianism.
Jesus Christ taught an ethic that was both transcendental and comprehensive to all human life. He commanded, "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself" (Luke 4:27). The absolute quality of this command removes it from the instinctual level of humans, whose inclinations, desires, needs, thinking, will, and feelings are plainly hostile to a holy God who judges them by an absolute law that by definition is impossible to live by. Jesus Christ taught an uncompromising responsibility for ourselves and our neighbor. He demanded his followers to go two miles instead of one, to pluck out eyes that disturb, to risk death and die, to love enemies and to pray without ceasing. God's command for the human to conform to the divine, the finite to the infinite, what is to what ought to be, means perpetual judgment. It is a paradox that marks a fundamental split in creation. Humanity's own consciousness tells it that God is its enemy. This recognition brings the condemnation of hopelessness, resignation, apathy, and guilt. Absolute law is a curse.
Is Christian radicalism credible? Is it more than a closed word-game system of theology? If radical morality calls for more than what is instinctual but in the end is a curse, what does this have to do with a liberated person who by his or her very nature combats the objective injustices of our world? Jesus Christ's call of humanity to divine perfection is absurd unless simultaneously the external despair brought on by God's judgment is negated, unless the split between what humanity is and what it ought to be is abolished. Nothing less that a new creation will do. The existential credentials of Christianity must empirically manifest themselves in a transformed person whose being and action is governed by transcendent truth and value.
We are not here returning to an individualistic emphasis. It is precisely relevant to speak of the new person in the context of the state of humanity because humanity is not a mass of separate individuals. If we could see history we would see everyone connected with one another and humanity could be seen as one single growing thing. We are speaking of the new person as an individual tightly connected on a macroscopic scale with humanity at large. The Christian solution is radical because in dealing with the change on the level of the new person it is at the same time inferring a transformation on the level of societies, civilizations, humanity at large, and in the end, nature herself. Christianity is saying that in human history a new step has been taken that marks a new kind of difference for humanity. Something other than the development of greater brains and greater mastery over nature has occurred. A change has come about in a totally different direction that does not arise out of the natural processes of events. The new difference is that the time has come when humans can be transformed from being creatures of God into being children of God.
The first instance of this new person has already occurred when the uncreated Son of God entered human history in Jesus Christ. In this one instance the natural human creature in him was completely and perfectly turned into the uncreated life of the Son. The great arrival involved perfect obedience to the righteousness of God and death to creaturely autonomy. Christ's life was the representative of the one for the many. In this case, God descended to bring all people back up to God. The human creature in Christ, because it was united to the Divine Son, came to life again. The old nature was not destroyed, but recreated, it was taken up fully into the new nature, the uncreated, eternal life of God. Jesus Christ lived, died, and was resurrected in history to spread to all other people the kind of life he had by "good infection." The business of becoming children of God has already been done for all humanity. Christ's life started an effect on the whole human mass that spreads to all humanity before and after him. The fact is that one of our race has this new life and he is the origin and center of the life of all new people. We can share in this life with him who always has and always will exist and then we also shall be children of God. If we get close to the living Christ now, we can catch the new life from him; it is not something God hands out to everyone like a prize; one must get into what has it; one must be united with the living Christ.
The new person has been created "after the likeness of God … in righteousness and holiness of the truth" (Ephesians 4:24). It is only because of this that we will in the end obey the command, "Be ye perfect." Life as children of God is inseparably connected to obedience to the Creator, but we don't just carry out what Christ said. The real person, Christ, here and now is killing our old natural self and replacing it with the kind of self he has. The creaturely life of the old creation that comes to humans through nature disintegrates and dies. It is something self-centered that wants to take advantage of other lives and exploit the whole universe. The old life wants to preserve itself and be kept away from anything higher or stronger that would expose its smallness. That is why it must be killed and taken up into a new life. It is a long and painful process of growing into the full stature of Christ, but once we commit ourselves to God's program, God will not stop for anything less. God really intends to submit every fiber of our being to God's life which shares God's power, knowledge, and eternity.
Becoming one with Christ, the new person is freed from the bondage and fear that obedience to a holy God imposes on the natural person. Now being in Christ, the new person knows him or herself to be reconciled to God and acts on the basis of the person he or she is in Jesus Christ. In giving him or herself to Christ, he or she is making him the starting point and goal of his or her thinking, speech, volition, and action, quite simply because in truth Christ is within the new person and has made his or her being a being in him. As the new person grows into Christ, righteousness and holiness cease to be mere obedience and become the bases which establish him or her as the most truly human and the freest possible person. The power of infinite desire and unlimited will to power whereby a person longs to rid him or herself of individuality in death are broken and changed into love and justice. This is the liberty of a child of God that in giving up his or her whole being to Christ he or she finds him and finally his or her own true self raised from death to life.
The visible qualities of the new person that manifest his or her new life as a child of God in contrast to the old life as only a creature are largely of a communal nature. God's plan of total revolution involves the perfecting of true community in the body of God's liberated people who live according to the values of the new order while they are still in the midst of the old. This is God's instrument for teaching one another of God's self, and for showing God's creatures outside the community what God is like. The community of the children of God consists of many members with many functions all united under Christ in love, commitment, and work. Diversity and individuality are for the richness of the community, instead of the separation of humans from one another as in the old order. All individuals in the community are members of one another in that they work in their unique capacities for the service and building of the whole body to the goal that "we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the perfect knowledge of the Son of God, to a mature person, to the measure of the stature which belongs to the fullness of Christ" (Ephesians 4:11-13). The fourth and fifth chapters of Ephesians have long lists of the qualities of the new person in the true community of the body. Some of these qualities that are to be norms for the new person in the new order are humility, gentleness, patience, forbearance, unity of spirit, peace, love, and overcoming evil with good. If these qualities are hard to be seen among those who call themselves followers of Christ today, it merely serves to show the distance the church has fallen into an individualistic cult from the true body that has Christ as its head.
Now that the eternal has invaded the old order in Jesus Christ, the principalities and powers of this world have been defeated and their fall is guaranteed. The structures of government, class, toilet training, race, and genes need not determine us. Humanity is free from them. The revolution has already begun and by living out the values of the new order in the midst of the old, we hasten its fall. The Christian message is about the future of humanity that has already come in Jesus Christ. A new era has already invaded history and will eventually come to fulfillment. We who are children of God are free from being resigned to the present, clinging to the past or defending the status quo. This confidence in the future that comes from the reality of our own transformation into new people is a radicalism that cannot be crushed by any opposition. We have been freed for others, freed to create new alternatives because our nature is now of the new order. As this new era is coming, it is important that we be prepared for it, that we begin to live already in its promise.
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