Does the world exhibit a standard superior to Christianity? How do I reflect my faith?
No talk here of “the crushing burden of piety,” as it has been called, or of religion as a “life sentence” instead of a life. Our walk with Christ, well learned, is a burden only as wings are to a bird or the engines are to an airplane. The mature children of light are like their Master. They know God and his Word, they think straight, and they live in the truth, because every essential dimension of their being has been transformed to serve God: heart, soul, mind, and strength.
We can understand the subsequent course of history only if we see it as a combination of the successes and the failures of those who became identified with Christ to be the light of their world in the character and power of Christ himself.
DARKNESS DECLARED TO BE LIGHT NOW,
MODERN HUMANITY—say since the late 1800s—has lived in a rage of moral
self-righteousness. In its intellectual leaders it has lived in an attitude of
superiority and condemnation toward the morality of the culture that is,
supposedly, “Christian.” Its “greatest” prophets—a line of those thought to be
among our greatest thinkers—have weighed Jesus in the moral balances and found
him wanting. In fact, they have found ways of treating him as inaccessible and
have then concentrated on finding those who profess to be his followers
wanting. Fearsome “Christian” types—the Enforcer, the Proper-Above-All, the
Propagandist, the Happy Yappy, the Obsequious Self-Promoter, the Cowardly
Faithful, the Heartlessly Successful, and on and on—are relentlessly hammered
on as proving the moral bankruptcy of the way of Christ, though in fact these
are human types, found in all cultures. Nevertheless, modern humanity has
officially, in its governing institutions, forsaken the true light of the
world, Jesus himself. In times of desperation they may still turn to him in
prayer, but they do not think of him as the only one who knows reality and how
the world should go. Meanwhile, all of the horrendous political movements of
the twentieth century, from the Soviet form of Communism to Hitler’s Fascist
state, from Maoism to Pol Pot—pled moral righteousness on their side and
unrighteousness in their opponents as the justification for brutalities that no
one would have thought possible before the fact. And the leaders of worldwide
terrorism do the same. (The Nazi, for example, saw himself as morally superior
to the Jew, the Gypsy, and others. That was the basis of his actions toward
them. If there is to be an accurate history written of the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries, it will have to give prominence to the fact that the
highest ethical teaching the world has ever been given was rejected by the
intellectual leaders of humanity in favor of teachings that opened the way to
forms of human behavior more degraded than any the world had seen to that
point. It is certainly no justification for all that historical horror to say
that it was partly due to the failure of those who have professed Christ to
stand throughout the earth as the manifest children of light. And yet that is a
very essential part of the truth about our modern world. Still today those who
are concerned about contemporary culture do not seem to fully realize what has
happened—that those identified with Christ, and Christ himself, have come to be
seen as morally inferior. They do not realize that the attacks on what we might
call traditional Christian morality—or just “traditional values”—is a moral
attack: an attack from the point of view of (supposed) moral superiority. pp. 228-230 SOURCE
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