Associate Professor Michael Horsburgh

When I was first asked to give this address, the topic was described to me as ‘an overview of the justice issues facing the Australian churches’. The temptation presented by such a topic is to prepare a list of issues and examine them one by one. I am determined to resist that temptation. In the first place I will almost inevitably get the list wrong. According to some of you I will have omitted a significant issue or included an less significant one. According to others I will have evaluated one or other of them wrongly. Even if I say that the order of the list does not signify importance, some of you will not believe me. I have no intention of negotiating that minefield.

In any case, knowing and doing justice involves more than constructing a list of candidates for the worst problems that we now encounter. Actually, the list is probably fairly static over time. In preparation for this paper I took down from my shelves a volume entitled Australian Social Issues of the 70’s (*1), published in 1972, the year in which I began to teach at the University of Sydney. After a foreword by E G Whitlarn, then about to become Prime Minister, the book discussed the issues of health, education, drugs, immigration, Aborigines, women, the environment and poverty. The topics of youth and rural Australia are missing from this list, but it sounds remarkably like one that I might construct today. What will vary is not the list itself but the context in which it appears.

Such a list, however accurate and agreed upon, falls short of assisting us to act. Knowing and doing justice are dependent on much more than recognising which are the relevant issues. It is for this reason that I have not adopted as a title the topic I was invited to address. This address is not only about how we evaluate our situation, but also about who we are and why we might act.

I also speculated at the first how this address might fit in with the national election we all knew was coming. I wondered what difference it would make if I were to speak either before or after an election. As it has turned out I speak while the voting is going
on. This has effectively prevented my address from receiving any press coverage whatsoever. But it has, at least, protected me and, I might say, you, from any accusation of political interference by the church.

The millennium

I want first to say something about the concept of the millennium. There is no particular reason to think that the date affects social justice issues in any way.  Nevertheless, such a date provides us with an opportunity in a context where evaluations seem appropriate.

My electronic search of the text of the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible brought up only four passages in which the words ‘a thousand years’ appear. Three of those passages talk about how time is perceived by God (*2). The most easily recognised of the three is Psalm 90:4:

For a thousand years in your sight are like yesterday when it is past, or like a watch in the night (*3).

There is a similar verse in 2 Peter (*4).   A verse in Ecclesiastes suggests the futility of long life since a similar fate awaits both the short and long lived (*5).   There is, I suggest, a need to take these verses seriously. The concept that everything can be remedied by judicious and well designed policy is not only distinctly modern, it is manifestly false. In theological terms it is the heresy of Pelagianism, the view that our salvation is in our own hands (*6).  Our capacities are undoubtedly well behind our imaginations when it comes to successful policy. Justice in any perfect sense awaits not our desires or actions but God’s time. As the realist author of Ecclesiastes put it:

I said in my heart, God will judge the righteous and the wicked, for he has appointed a time for every matter, and for every work (*7)

This scepticism is not simply a transfer to God of a responsibility that is properly ours, neither is it a form of fatalism. If it is true that ‘the fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge’ (*8), it is because ‘we know only in part, and we prophesy only in part’(*9).   Just as we quite properly criticise our Christian forebears because of their blindness about such issues as slavery, our descendants will also marvel at our blindness and lack of understanding. They will also marvel at our unwillingness to tackle even those things about which we had some understanding.

The final reference to a thousand years is, of course, the one that has alerted Christians to the significance of this time period and created specific cults and sects that have dwelt upon it. It is the passage in the book Revelation that refers to the thousand year rule of Christ on earth (*10).   However this passage might be interpreted, it stands as yet another testimony to the power of God to judge and order the world (*11).   It is, like the others I have already mentioned, a warning against the pride that afflicts our political life, encouraging both politicians and citizens alike to pretend to capacities that they do not have, to make promises that they know they cannot keep and to demand performances that are not possible.

You might think that this is a poor beginning to an address that is supposed to concentrate on beneficial social change in the interests of justice. I may seem to be saying that there is little that we can do. I assure you that I have not vacated the field by what I have said. On the contrary, a clear sighted approach to either knowing or doing justice will not be helped by anything other than an appropriate humility in the face of both the justice that God demands of us and the size of the task that confronts us. The search for justice is not helped by any form of utopianism.

How can we know what is just?

I want first to ask how we might know what is just and what is not. It may seem that the answer to this question is self evident. Yet there are many disputes about justice. Just outcomes are by no means clear. Competing interests, the inevitability that there will be winners and losers, should alert us to this. Since there is probably no situation in which all the interests and desires of diverse groups and individuals can be equally satisfied, disputes about justice are to be expected rather than not.

Indeed, it might be argued that Christianity itself is ambivalent about justice. It is ambivalent because, in principle, Christianity seeks to ground its social program in ideas about God’s love for us and the love that we should consequently have for each other. Such a view opposes moral propositions against political realities. In that conflict, the purely moral forces inevitably have a hard time of it. The American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr has warned us about the problems inherent in this approach.

Writing in 1935, Niebuhr’s words have survived the passage of time extremely well. He said,

Living as we do, in a society in which the economic mechanisms automatically create disproportions of social power and social privilege so great that they are able to defy and evade even the political forces which seek to equalize and restrain them, it is inevitable that they should corrupt the purely moral forces which are meant to correct them.. Christian love in a society of great inequality means philanthropy. Philanthropy always compounds the display of power with the expression of pity. Sometimes it is even used as a conscious effort to evade the requirements of justice, as, for instance when charity appeals (are) designed to obviate the necessity of higher taxation for the needs of the unemployed (*12)

There is an inevitable tension between the concepts of love and justice. It is not easy to bring into a comfortable relationship an ethic based on love, goodwill and fellowship (faith, hope and charity) and a coercive social order which must meet demonstrable need and enforce basic human rights. Nièbuhr did not deny the important place of ideals such as love. What he did was to reverse their order in our perception.

The problem of politics and economics is the problem of justice. The question of politics is bow to coerce the anarchy of conflicting human interests into some kind of order, offering human beings the greatest possible opportunity for mutual support ... All these opportunities represent something less than the ideal of love (*13).

Ideals and actual policies are also quite different entities. Interposed between our ideas and the policies we espouse are levels of investigation, assessment and decision. There are many opportunities for both error, in the sense of simple mistakes, and for unwisdom in the sense of making a judgment that turns out to have been ill-advised.  Michael Knight, a writer about the welfare of children, points this out in a sharp paragraph.

……attempts to translate (altruism, love and kindness] into terms which have meaning for society via its social systems succeed only in transforming them into something very different. The resonances they produce within the systems of modern society reproduce them in economic terms as unpaid labour or ‘budgetary savings’, in law as rights and duties, in science as measurable factors to be subjected to scientific truth-testing, and in politics as attributes that have no place in politics (*14).

The art of politics is no different for churches than for anyone else. It will inevitably involve us in choosing something less than we desire and believe in. It will involve us in assisting a society to be as just as it can, even when we know that it will not be as just as it should.

If we turn to biblical sources for guidance, we come upon some important observations. The book Deuteronomy set out some laws about caring for the needy members of the Hebrew community. Who these persons were likely to be is described in this way:

For the LORD your God... executes justice for the orphan and the widow, and... loves the strangers, providing them food and clothing. You shall also love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt (*15).

The basis of the care to be exercised for the needy is shared human experience. You were strangers in the land of Egypt, so bow can you not understand the plight of the dependent? The widow, the orphan and the stranger were, in the society of those times, the persons most likely to be poor and needy. Why this was so is related to the nature of that society. The organisation of the society was strictly patriarchal. Everyone belonged to a family under the control of the senior male. This is why the widow, the orphan and the stranger were at such risk. They were without the support and protection that living in that society required. The widow’s husband had gone; the orphan’s father likewise. Being outside that protection limited their access to the resources that their society offered. The stranger did not belong at all.

I have pointed out how disadvantage in biblical society came about because it emphasises to us that the risks to which we are subject are largely the result of how our society is organised. Being a widow, an orphan or a stranger is still a risk today, although not to the same extent as in ancient times. Our society has its own distinctive contribution to make to the existence of human need. Justice, on this analysis, is closely related to the capacity to have a share in the good things that the society can produce.

In our society, the principal causes of disadvantage are lack of employment and lack of access to affordable housing. These are the two issues that your Social Justice Network has concentrated on in the past year. Whilst the patriarchal aspects of contemporary society may be debated at length, it is clear that general wellbeing is no longer dependent on that structure. The resources to live are, for the most part, dependent on access to an income generated through employment or through the redistribution of that employment over the life cycle. Housing is the major single expense on that income. Thus the lack of either or both of these resources creates extreme relative disadvantage.

Such disadvantage is far from being a simple misfortune, it extends into all aspects of a person’s life. Writing in the Sydney Morning Herald on 21 September 1998, Fred Ehrlich, Professor of Rehabilitation, Aged and Extended Care at the University of New South Wales, commented on the cumulative effects of social disadvantage in the areas of health and mortality. He said

Low self-esteem, social isolation, poor job satisfaction or employment insecurity are sources of stress, and the lack of control over work and home life has powerful effects on health.  Once again, these are cumulative through life and eventually result in poor mental health, often physical disability and premature mortality (*16)

In making this claim, Ehrlich is saying nothing new. Rather he is reporting the results of extensive research both here and in other countries into the consequences of social disadvantage. The risks of disease amongst those who are socially disadvantaged are routinely reported as being twice the level of the norms in most communities. I do not need here to comment on the fact that indigenous persons are at a still greater risk. For indigenous persons the risks associated with lack of employment and housing are compounded by the consequences of dispossession. Such research emphasises that social causes lie behind disadvantage. It is for this reason that we may clearly label them as justice issues.

If we wish to deal justly with those in need, we must legitimate their claims upon us. One of the most distressing features of contemporary political culture is the tendency to regard the socially disadvantaged as enemies. Thus, for example, success in the administration of our social security system is constructed to be the detection and prevention of welfare fraud. In the pursuit of this desirable but greatly exaggerated risk, every downward adjustment of a social security payment is represented as a strike against fraud, even though the rate of prosecutions remains constant.

In public discourse, the use of the term industry to describe the public presentation of the claims of the  disadvantaged is a signal that a dangerous stereotyping is entering the ongoing consciousness of the nation. Those claims can then be seen as the self interest of the persons thus disadvantaged or of their supporters. Thus the welfare industry or the aboriginal industry. We need to be alert to the fact that our society offers us both the opportunity to promote justice and the opportunity to escape from doing so if we wish.

These considerations lead us to the conclusion that justice consists in empowering people to participate in the society, not in binding them to continuous occupation of the lowest positions. There is a price to be paid for justice, but it should not be paid  principally by the victims of injustice.

What I have been talking about so far may seem to refer principally to events, to things that happen to people. The proper response to need arising from accidents or events is charity or welfare. However important such responses are, they are not equivalent to justice. The question of justices arises not from the response to need as it occurs but from the observation that the incidence of need is not always, or even mostly, accidental. Since, as we have observed, need arises principally from social and structural causes, its redress requires structural change and thus becomes a matter of justice.

Since also churches exist in the same structures as produce the injustice, they are implicated in that injustice as much as they can participate in its redress. The economic capacity of the church to resource the fight against injustice cannot be divorced from the capacity of those economic resources to share in the creation of the injustice itself To revert at this point to my opening comments, there can be no pride for us here, only a humble joining with others. We have surely learnt this lesson when we have faced our complicity in the stolen generation of indigenous Australians, or the victims of abuse within our own institutions.

Commentators tell us that the first appearance of the term social justice in Christian discourse was in Pope Pius Xl’s encyclical Quadragesimo Anno in 1931 (*17).  In that encyclical His Holiness said:

Now, not every kind of distribution of wealth and property amongst men is such that it can at all, and s~i1l less can adequately, attain the end intended by God. Wealth, therefore, which is constantly being augmented by social and economic progress, must be so distributed amongst the various individuals and classes of society, that the common good of all, of which Leo XIII spoke, be thereby promoted. lb other words, the good of the whole community must be safeguarded. By these principles of social justice, one class is forbidden to exclude the other from a share in the profits (*18).

Leaving aside the social changes that have occurred between 1931 and today, this concept of social justice supposes an active process by which a fair distribution of resources is achieved. It assumes the existence of community as distinct from separate individuals and seeks to ensure the wellbeing of that whole. Such a concept stands in stark contrast to contemporary approaches that suggest that justice is a consequence of a properly ordered economic system. I am here drawing attention to Pius Xl’s distinction between justice as a consequence of a process and justice as something to be achieved by action. There is nothing in Christian teaching or, indeed, in human experience to suggest to us that the consequences of social and economic processes are necessarily, or even likely to be, just. On the contrary, it is because such consequences are patently unjust that an active intervention is necessary.

Why it should be supposed that a system that specifically excludes moral propositions from the direction of policy should result in justice is hard to understand. Perhaps such a conclusion can arise only from the loss of community unity to which Pius XI referred and the lessening of confidence in our soda] capacity to make any difference at all.

The reality is actually worse than I have described. Not only is morality excluded from the initial equation, that equation is already built upon injustice. As Roger Ruston notes:

…..the way things are is always the product of some previous injustice. In the market on which our world-society is founded, we make bargains with people who are already disinherited, already pauperised by the appropriation of their ancestral common lands, already made slaves of by some single-product economy such as motor cars or sugar, already proletarianised and reduced to the status of people who have nothing to bargain with but their bodies (*19).

The dominant economistic thinking of today’s social policy actively discourages the consideration of justice issues. It does this first, as I have already noted, by excluding such issues from the original equations. It does so, secondly, by assuming that there is only one motivation, that of self interest. Thus both persons and organisations are assumed to respond only to threats or enticements that affect their narrowly conceived interests. This reductionism both degrades the human person and questions the validity of community organisations. It makes community into a transient product of accidental conjunctions of interest. It is this kind of thinking that is transforming community welfare organisations into competitors for government contracts, replacing cooperation with ‘commercial-in-confidence’ considerations.

Paradoxically, we also see the major economic institutions becoming the promoters of apparent moral virtues. Thus the National Australia Bank pretends to support our most intimate desires, and an instant coffee marketer creates family unity. A canned fruit processor attacks racism by a commercial in which some of their products exhibit hostile views against other of their products. A health insurer tells us that the most important person in the world is oneself It is indeed a paradox when the processes of the market exclude moral considerations while the players in the market, both overtly and covertly, manipulate the moral values that they perceive the community still to possess. In a more subtle way they shape those values by processes that reduce the capacity of nations to determine their own destinies or the capacity of families to determine their own daily programs (*20)

Roger Ruston, from whom I have quoted, asserts that a fundamental part of a Christian concept of justice is the preservation of community. What we are witnessing, however, are fundamental changes to our understanding of community.  We have come a long way from the organic communities of the past. We have seen how those communities have operated to limit the capacity of individuals to forge their own way in the world. There is no need for us to adopt any romantic view of a golden age of community in the past. We have embraced functional communities that support individual aspirations and we have come to believe that community is a social form that is open to constant manipulation. We can, we now think, have any kind of community that we wish, probably composed of individuals whom we have designed.

We are now seeing the limitations of that view. Ways of life cannot be destroyed at will without deep consequences for human welfare. We are seeing this played out now in rural Australia. Economic and structural changes are stripping rural communities of those very features that enabled them to support life in what were and are difficult and demanding environments. The consequences in terms of’ political reactions are clear to see. The capacity to live in a supportive and sustainable community is surely one of the most fundamental of human rights. It is an issue of basic justice.

How can we do what is just?

How then, can we do justice? First we must listen. At the centre of the original act of biblical deliverance is a God who hears the cry of the afflicted.

The cry of the Israelites has now come to me; I have also seen how the Egyptians oppress them (*21)
You shall not wrong or oppress a resident alien, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt You shall not abuse any widow or orphan. If you do abuse them, when they cry out to me, I will surely heed their cry; (*22)

There can be no justice if those who experience injustice are not heard. It is a marked feature of our present political climate that the voices from the bottom are devalued. This occurs when their protests are described as ‘the politics of envy’, when their protection is described as being against the national interest. Thus the sacrifice of the tights of the disadvantaged is justified by a narrowly conceived economic interest. Although described as national, such an approach simply equates the interests of the powerful with those of the whole.

Secondly, we must accept that justice comes with a price. We must collectively be prepared to pay that price. This inevitably involves some limitations on the acquisition of wealth and on personal consumption.

I am reminded of a television commercial for Johnny Walker Red Label whisky. In that commercial a bartender sought to persuade his customer to buy the product even though it was more expensive than some of its competitors. He said, ‘Do you want the whisky you want to drink, or the whisky you want to pay for?’ I will not enter into a debate about whether this commercial represented a good evaluation of the merits of the particular whisky. But the commercial sets out for us the essential problem of seeking a just and civil society. There are inevitable costs and many people do not want to pay them. Yet the question still remains, ‘Do you want the society you want to live in, or the society you are prepared to pay for?’

The analogy goes further than that. We will inevitably have to pay the price of the society we actually live in. That price may ultimately be higher than we think. If we develop an underclass, a group of persons who are permanently barred from a just participation in the society, we will pay the price for that. The price includes a growing fear about personal security, increasing social division, a growing prison population and the self-defeating promotion of retribution under the guise of justice for the victims of crime.

Populist pressures seem to require political parties to promise tax relief in societies where the living standards are already higher than any that the world has hitherto known. This is necessary here even when Australia is not a highly taxed country.

We need next to develop a spirituality that will support our endeavours for justice. I do not speak lightly when I say that the greatest challenge facing the Christian churches of Australia in the new millennium is not whether we will be able to discern what is just or what is not just. It is whether we will be able to speak to our fellow Australians with integrity. Will we be able to speak and will we be able to say anything that can be heard?

In his book, Reaching Out, Henri Nouwen talks about the three movements of the spiritual life. All three of these movements involve a form of reaching out. The first he calls ‘From loneliness to solitude’. In this movement we reach out to our innermost self The third movement is ‘from illusion to prayer’, in which we reach out to God.

Between these two movements Nouwen places ‘from hostility to hospitality’. This is a reaching out to others. He says:

In our world full of strangers, estranged from their own past, culture and country, from their neighbours, friends and family, ,from their deepest self and their God, we witness a painful search for a hospitable place where life can be lived without fear and where community can be found.  Although many, we might also  say most strangers in this world become easily the victim of a fearful hostility, it is possible for men and women and obligatory for Christians to offer an open and hospitable space where  strangers can cast off their strangeness and become our fellow human beings (*23).

In Nouwen’s view, hospitality is a fundamental spiritual value. Its place in the middle of his three movements is deliberate. Only persons who have found themselves can reach out and find others. Only those who have found themselves and others can confront the illusions that separate them from God.

Much of the present turmoil in Australian social and political life can be linked to our national failure to move from hostility to hospitality. Surfacing in our present discord are those hidden hostilities from which we all suffer. Even though we may reject much of the extremism that we see and hear, we need to recognise in ourselves the very origins of that extremism, our own unresolved fears and uncertainties.

Writing in the Sydney Morning Herald on 29 August this year, Hugh Mackay commented on a growing tendency to hide our guilt under hostility towards the disadvantaged. He commented on hostility towards indigenous Australians, one parent households and the poor. His column concluded with these words:

How will we reconcile our desire for tax cuts with the knowledge that, sooner or later, the tax burden will have to increase if we are to carry with us those for whom we simply can’t find work? One solution, obviously, is to become less tolerant towards the poor.  “Bugger them!” (There, that feels better.) (*24)

What price a nation dominated by fear and hostility, a nation that rejects the stranger? Such a nation will soon lose the capacity to tell who is a stranger and who is not. It will be divided against itself and be unable to stand (*25).

I do not underestimate the difficulties that we face in speaking today. We will not be able to speak with integrity unless we are firmly anchored within an appropriate spirituality. Having such an anchor does not, however, guarantee that we will be heard.

At the end of his massive work on the future of Christianity, Christianity: essence, history and future, the German theologian Hans Küng comments on the disappearance of a language in which to conduct our common discourse. He says that we will never recover a world in which there will be a uniform world view. There will always be a multiplicity of views. But, he says, ‘this multiplicity does not exclude the quest for a fundamental social consensus.’(*26) That consensus, in Kung’s view, can be achieved only through the development of a concept of partnership. And this is the point at which I come to the list that I said at the beginning I would not produce.

Now for the list

Küng’s big questions for the future are:

• partnership with nature. He argues that we must move from the modernistic exploitation of nature to a partnership with it.
• partnership of men and women. Küng characterises inequality between the sexes as the major human rights issue on a global scale.
• international distributive justice. Here Kung places social and economic inequality on an international scale (*27).

Given his global focus, these forms of partnership would seem appropriate. When they are translated to a national and Australian scale, however, some other partnerships become important. First, without any doubt, is a partnership between indigenous and non-indigenous Australians. To a certain extent this is contained within Küng’s concept of international distributive justice, since what we see in Australia is a local manifestation of the colonisation that covered the whole globe and is partly the origin of the massive inequalities we now see.

Implicit in any new partnership between indigenous and non-indigenous Australians is a new partnership with the land. Australia as a whole cannot ignore the deeply spiritual relationship that indigenous Australians have with the land. We ought to accept and endorse that relationship out of respect for it in itself More fundamentally, however, we cannot ignore it because it exemplifies the idea of partnership to which Kiing has directed us.

Kung’s concern about human rights exhibited by his reference to the need for partnership between men and women is entirely appropriate for our own circumstances. On our more local scale, however, we need to include other partnerships: a partnership between young and old, a partnership between employed and unemployed, a partnership between rural and urban Australians.

I need finally to say that, even when we have done all of this, doing justice is hard work. It is hard work because it takes serious attention to data and policy formation. There is no cheap road to justice in Australia or elsewhere. The justice contribution of this council is dependent on the resources that its member churches are prepared to devote to the task.

Justice is not only hard work, it is risky work. It exposes us to criticism. Some of the criticism is that we do not have the competence. On the contrary, we have access to as much competence as any one else in our community, providing we are prepared to do the necessary work~ Other criticisms revolve around claims that we are only, after all, a sectional voice with our own interests to pursue. This is a fundamental claim against our integrity.

Finally, a strong justice stance is likely to be internally divisive. There is no particular reason why Christians should all agree about specific social policy proposals. Nevertheless, the most fundamental threat to our capacity comes from within when members of our own communities consider themselves to be affected by what we say. I always operate on the view that the attitudes of Christians are more likely to be closer to those of their neighbours than to those of the gospel, so this comes as no surprise. Nevertheless, we must take care not to fail to understand the diversity of our own membership and the legitimate interests there represented.

Can we then know and do justice in a new millenniurn?  We can and we must. But we will only do so if we can both expound and model the justice that we seek to do. We cannot expound and model the justice that we seek if we will not pay the costs and run the risks.

****

(*1)  Paul R Wilson (ed), Australian Social Issues of the 70’s, Sydney, Butterworths, 1972.
(*2)  Psalm 90:4; Ecclesiastes6:6; 2Peter3:8.
(*3)  This text was taken up by Isaac Watts in his 1719 hymn ‘O (Our) God, our help in ages past’
        (No. 46 in The Australian Hymn Book), one verse of which runs:
        A thousand ages in thy sight are like an evening gone:
        Short as the watch that ends the night before the rising mm
(*4)  2 Peter 3:8 But do not ignore this one fact, beloved, that with the Lord one day is like a thousand
        years, and a thousand years are like one day
(*5)  Ecclesiastes 6:6 Even though he should live a thousand years twice over, yet enjoy no good—do not
        all go to one place?
(*6)  ‘Pelagianism is the heresy which holds that man can take the initial and fundamental steps toward
        salvation by his own efforts, apart from Divine grace.’ F L Cross and E A Livingstone, The Oxford
        Dictionary of the Christian Church, 3rd edition, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1997, pp. 1248-9.
(*7)  Ecclesiastes 3:17
(*8)  Proverbs 1:7
(*9)  1 Corinthians 13:9 (NRSV)
(*10) Revelation 20:2-7
(*11) See ‘Millennium’  in D L Jeffrey, A Dictionary of the Biblical Tradition in English Literature, Grand Rapids Ml, William B Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1992, pp. 509-512.
(*12)  Reinhold Niebuhr, An Interpretation of Christian Ethics, San Francisco, Harper & Row, 1987, p.112
(*13)  Niebuhr, p.85.
(*14)  Michael King, A Better World for Children: Explorations in morality and authority, London, Routledge,     1997, p. 107
(*15)  Deuteronomy 10:17-19NRSV
(*16)  Fred Ehrlich, ‘In sickness and in wealth’, Sydney Morning Herald, 21 September 1998, p. 17.
(*17)  Alister McGrath (ed), The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Modern Christian Thought, Oxford, Basil Blackwcll, 1993, p. 291.
(*18) Pius XI, Quadragesimo Anno, para 57.
(*19) Roger Ruston, A Christian View of Justice, Blackfriars Publications, Peace Preaching Paper No 2, 1993.   (Available on the internet at www.bfpubs.demon.co.uk/justice.htm
(*20) Max L Stackhouse, ‘Beneath and beyond the state: social, global and religious changes that shape welfare reform’, in Stanley W Carlson-Thies and James W Skillen (eds), Welfare in America:  Christian Perspectives on a Policy in Crisis, Grand Rapids MI, William B Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1996, pp. 2048.
(*21)  Exodus 3:9(NRSV)
(*22) Exodus22:21-23(NRSV)
(*23) Nouwen, p. 63.
(*24)  Hugh Mackay, ‘The poor intrude on the wealthy’s comfort zone,’ Sydney Morning Herald, 29 August 1998, p. 32.
(*25)  Matthew 12:25.
(*26)  Hans Ktlng, Christi tinily: essence, history andfuture, New York, Continuum, 1996, p. 774
(*27)  Kung, (pp. 776-7)

Bishop Michael Putney

In 1981 the Joint Working Group between the Roman Catholic Church and the World Council of Churches produced a report entitled, Common Witness. I would like to quote a paragraph from it:

When he prayed that all be one so the world might believe (John 17:21), Jesus made a clear connection between the unity of the Church and the acceptance of the Gospel. Unhappily Christians are still divided in their churches and the testimony they give to the Gospel is thus weakened. There are, however, even now many signs of the initial unity that already exists among all followers of Christ and indications that it is developing in important ways. What we have in common, and the hope that is in us, enable us to be bold in proclaiming the Gospel and trustful that the world will receive it. Common witness is the essential calling of the Church and in an especial way it responds to the spirit of this ecumenical age in the Church’s life. It expresses our actual unity and increases our service to God’s word, strengthening the churches both in proclaiming the Gospel and in seeking for the fullness of unity.

I would like to repeat the second last sentence: “Common witness is the essential calling of the Church and in an especial way it responds to the spirit of this ecumenical age in the Church’s life.” In describing what common witness might involve, the text emphasised two different dimensions. Firstly: “Through proclaiming the cross and resurrection of Christ, they affirm (i.e. those engaged in common witness) that God wills the salvation of his people in all dimensions of their being, eternal and earthly.” Secondly, it recognised: “(Common witness) means Christian involvement in matters of social justice in the name of the poor and the oppressed.”

Right throughout the history of the World Council of Churches there have been tensions between the different movements which brought it into being. For example, there is a tension between the Justice, Peace and the Integrity of Creation (JPIC) stream/movement/programme and the Faith and Order or Christian Unity movement/stream/programme. In their earlier forms, these two movements were present and participated in the formation of the World Council of Churches fifty years ago. However, it was only in 1961 that the International Missionary Council became part of the World Council of Churches. As someone who has been most involved in the Faith and Order stream I have continually argued for its importance, indeed its necessity, in the World Council of Churches and the larger ecumenical movement. However, I have to say that whatever marginalisation I may have imagined had occurred for Faith and Order or the quest for Christian unity, such marginalisation is nothing in comparison with the marginalisation of the missionary movement within the larger ecumenical movement and the World Council of Churches. The missionary movement has always been “the poor relation”.

Many ecumenists seem to be either focussed on the world and its need for justice, peace and the protection of the environment, or on the churches and their need to come together in Christian unity. I do not deny that working for justice, peace and the integrity of creation is integral to the mission of the church and unity between the churches is crucial to its mission. However, I believe that the foundational missionary dynamic of wishing to proclaim Jesus Christ to the world very seldom comes to the forefront in ecumenical programmes or even, I fear, in the heart of many ecumenists. Everyone easily points to the Johanine text containing Jesus’ prayer that we would be one so that the world might believe that it is the Father who sent him, but we are too easily side-tracked into affirming only the first part of his prayer: “that they/we may be one”; or unconsciously concluding it only with: “so that the world will exist injustice, peace and protective of the integrity of creation.”

Last year, the fourth phase of the International Dialogue between the Roman Catholic Church and some representatives or members of classical Pentecostal Churches came to a conclusion. The topic for the phase, from 1990 to 1997, was Evangelisation, Proselytism and Common Witness. It’s a very interesting document because, as many would know, in parts of Latin America there can sometimes be great tensions between the Roman Catholic Church and Pentecostal Churches because of the rapid growth of the latter at the expense of the former. In paragraph 118 of the Report, a kind of definition of ‘common witness~ emerges:

Common witness means standing together and sharing together in witness to our common faith. Common witness can be experienced through joint participation in worship, in prayer, in the performance of good works in Jesus’ name and especially in evangelization. True common witness is not engaged in for any narrow, strategic denominational benefit of a particular community. Rather, it is concerned solely for the glory of God, for the good of the whole church and the good of humankind.

There is no suggestion in the report, in fact the contrary, that such common witness between Roman Catholics and Pentecostals would be easy. Later in No. 122 the report indicates that when it speaks of common witness it is not suggesting that there should be any compromise involved in making this possible. On the contrary, “Common witness is not a call to indifference or to uniformity” it says. The report clearly affirms that common witness does not prevent individuals, communities or churches from witnessing to their own distinctive heritage and, indeed, witnessing separately on matters about which they disagree. “However,” as it says, “this can be done without being contentious, with mutual love and respect.”

I think this document stands as a testimony to the fertility of the ecumenical movement through the generous loving activity of the Holy Spirit. It also stands as a challenge to churches like our own which are very often willing to bear common witness on issues of justice, but sometimes less willing to bear common witness to the gift of salvation in Jesus Christ. I believe both forms of witness are essential and integrally related. To offer Jesus Christ to a society is to offer the way of life which he came to initiate in our world and that means to offer justice, peace and care for the environment.

But common witness does mean offering Jesus Christ. Have some of us perhaps become just a little reticent about this? Is one reason for such reticence the fact that we have entered into dialogue with our culture and with other World Religions? If reticence is a result of such dialogue, we have misunderstood the nature of dialogue. Authentic dialogue presupposes genuine witness. There is no value in dialoguing with “the other” whoever that may be if we are not truly ourselves, and to be truly ourselves is to be truly Christian, to be truly disciples of Jesus Christ. In our case it means being truly convinced that he is the way, the truth and the life.

I would hope we go much further than we already have as Christian churches in our dialogue with World Religions. I would hope that we have enormous respect for the gifts of our culture and the signs of the Spirit that are there before we even utter one word of the gospel. At the same time, I believe we carry within ourselves and in our communities an enormous treasure which is the knowledge and love of God revealed to us in Jesus Christ, and I would hope that we are willing to offer this gift, the greatest of all, to our society —and to do it together.

If we are so willing, and presumably many are, the question arises of how we might deal with those matters about which we disagree. There is already a common faith which all could proclaim and to which all could bear witness which has become obvious in our ecumenical dialogues, both bi-lateral and multi-lateral. I have in mind especially the results of the WCC Faith and Order Commission project “Towards the Common Expression of the Apostolic Faith Today.” This study has explored our common faith as expressed in the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed and has thereby laid a rich and broad foundation for common witness by a very wide range of Christian churches.

Some churches might not see the need for even all that has been discovered in this very important study. They would be content for churches to come together around a simple message of salvation in Jesus Christ. Some of these would not consider many of the different beliefs and practices of churches outside of this core as affecting the essentials or the fundamentals of the gospel. Common witness for these Christians only becomes difficult if they believe another church has compromised this basic message by their doctrines or practices. They would need to be assured of this first.

Others would want to affirm the essential interconnectedness of the various truths of salvation as found in the scriptures and proclaimed in the credal formulas of the Church through the ages. While they too would begin with a simple message of salvation and also believe that this was a non-negotiable essential core, proclaiming the fullness of the gospel for them would lead them deeper and deeper into the full faith of the church through the ages as they have come to understand it. So there would be other essentials for them, less central but still integrally part of the gospel or the Apostolic Tradition or the Word of God as they understand it. They would not want any partners involved in common witness to suggest that other truths of the faith which they hold dear are peripheral or even questionable. These latter churches would want any common witness to draw people back to the church of their baptism, if such people have already been baptised but have drifted from the church. Such matters would need to be addressed with sensitivity before common witness could take place in an effective way.

Evangelisation, or evangelism, with all the challenges which I have just outlined has to be an integral part of the common witness of Christian churches. But it is not all of it. Integral to bearing witness to or living the gospel is the way in which we live and the kind of world we are called to work for by the grace of God. To proclaim Jesus and not also to be willing to proclaim reconciliation with Indigenous Australians, for example, is to proclaim a Jesus who is not the Jesus of the gospels. At the same time, to proclaim justice and peace and the integrity of creation but not Jesus is to offer only the fruits and not the source of the new life our world needs so desperately.

Our very coming together here and our very willingness to worship together is itself a common witness to Australia that we are in earnest about what we share and our desire to share it even more deeply — and in common. However, we need to ask what it is that Australians might expect to hear from us as a result of these three days. Perhaps they would expect to hear about our steps towards unity or about our social concerns and their social failures. Would they expect to hear about God and about the life and hope that Jesus Christ came to offer us? Sadly, I do not think Australians would be expecting too many of such words from us any more. Mind you, the right words are not easy to find. I find it hard to find them myself, because I would want Jesus himself to be heard and encountered in any proclamation I offered, and I know how easily I convey something less than Jesus Christ by my lazy, simplistic or individualistic account of him and what he desires to offer our society. Only he can show us the way Only he can enable us to discover the right words. Maybe we could reflect together on why we sometimes appear so tongue-tied — and he might even loosen our tongues.

I would like to repeat by way of conclusion, the point made in the paragraph first cited from the Joint Working Group: “Common witness expresses our actual unity, increases our service of God’s word, and strengthens each of our churches both in our proclamation and in our seeking of the fullness of unity with each other.” In other words, to struggle with all the issues that arise in trying to bear witness together will not only strengthen the witness itself, our proclamation of the gospel itself, but also our movement towards Christian unity. Not to struggle with the issues that arise around common witness is to seek Christian unity as an end in itself, forgetting the prayer of Jesus: “Father, that we may become one so that Australia will believe that it is you who sent him.”

QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION:

I wish to acknowledge a number of things before opening up this question for discussion.

Firstly, I have been deliberately provocative, at least thought-provoking, in order to stimulate discussion on what I consider a very important question.

Secondly, I have spoken out of my own Catholic tradition and my own position in that church. There may be others here who would see the question quite differently and may have found my language or approach unhelpful. I am sorry if I have caused any disquiet for them.

Thirdly, I especially acknowledge that I am a Western Christian and have not in any way tried to address the approach or the concerns of Orthodox Christians. It would be good if we could hear them in our discussion.

Fourthly, I wish to emphasise again that I am deeply committed to working for Christian unity and for justice, peace and the integrity of creation.

All these things having been said, I now would like us to discuss the following questions:

- Am I right in my analysis of the priority given to evangelism/evangelisation in the ecumenical movement and in the NCCA?
- Are we truly tongue-tied?
- If you answer “yes” to the above question, please consider the following questions:
- Ought proclamation of Jesus be more central to the NCCA and to the ecumenical movement in general?
- What can we do to make that happen?

If you answered “no” to the above question please bring forward examples of how we are giving due weight to this dimension of the ecumenical movement. You might also consider how we might do this more fully or with greater enthusiasm.