What a vague, clumsy, and uninspiring title! But then, that is the way some of us theologians speak, and you have in sheer charity to put up with us. Perhaps some of you who are closer to reality would suggest for us an adequate phrase which more inspiringly expresses the main point of our common quest.

It seems we have tried to load off too many of our urgent concerns into that title. First, we are all honestly worried about the loss of assurance about anything absolute in our secular culture. We want once again to affirm Him, our Lord and Master, as the Alpha and Omega of all things. The phrases in which we expressed the uniqueness or absoluteness of Jesus Christ are all worn thin ; we need a set of fresh concepts, which have some relevance to the life of the world, in which to express our Christian Faith.

Secondly, our major intellectual rivals in Asia are also challenging the Christian message precisely at this point of the Finality of Christ. Both Hinduism and the varieties of Buddhism have now come of age and refuse to be bullied by the Christian missionary condemnation of their religions. In fact they have taken the battle into our camp, and the number of Buddhists and Hindus is steadily on the increase in the West.New forms of syncretism are rising up all over Europe and America, and We have to speak clearly the message of Jesus Christ in this context.

Some of my colleagues are also worried about “religion in general,” which seems to become increasingly a concern of many good men everywhere. These good men see the need for religion and are prepared to support any kind of religion. Religion is good for morality. Religion makes good loyal citizens. Religion may be able to deal with the juvenile delinquency problem, the divorce problem, and the many other social problems. Religion gives a good emotional glow to our culture and makes us feel a bit more secure. Prosperous nations and governments also seem to be deeply interested in religion, because it helps to preserve order and loyalty, both absolutely necessary for the efficient running of the economy.

Religion is thus in danger of being prostituted to serve our human ends, and my friends are anxious to liberate the Christian message from the category of religion altogether. There may be detected in this effort, especially by a cynic like me, the attempt to rescue the old concern for “the uniqueness of Christ” from the inroads of the phenomenological and descriptive schools of comparative religion. However that may be, I feel quite sure that we cannot keep the Gospel in a vacuum. It has to be embodied in the life of a divine-human organism, the Body of Christ, and it is by no means fair or honest to make the contrast between the Gospel and Religions. We must speak about the Church and other religious societies, and it will be less than useful to create a special category called the “Christian religion” as distinct and separable from the Gospel. Our comparisons must not be between the reality of other religious societies and an abstract concept called the Gospel, which we are always tempted to equate with the whole of Christian teaching when it so suits us.

The need to find genuine meaning and significance in the other religions, and to extend the horizons of our ecumenism beyond the confines of the Church and the “secular world” which is after all only a part of the world, has suddenly become imperative, and in our understanding of the Finality of Christ in the age of universal history we must learn to assume a more positive attitude towards these renascent religions, in order to achieve a truly oikumenical ecumenism.

Another of our concerns is the new shaking of the foundations in New Testament scholarship. Of course this affects only those churches for whom the university professor is the main locus of authority in Hermeneutics, and a large part of the Christian Church may not even detect the post-Bultmannist tremors even in a sensitive theological seismograph. But some who are closer to the quake feel that something is happening to their foundations and are asking us for help. We have therefore along with our Finality study also to launch a Hermeneutics study.

But the fourth is our major concern. History is no longer a national affair. Humanity is caught up in a common destiny, so obviously. We have to find the meaning of the Incarnation of Jesus Christ in a manner that relates to the whole of humanum and not merely to those who acknowledge the Lord and are incorporated into the Body of Christ.

It cannot mean forsaking one history that has no meaning, or only negative meaning, leaving one religion that has no truth for one that has nothing but truth. It is rather to be made aware of the one history that lies in and beyond all histories, the one universal history that underlies all particular and partial histories, even the history of the Christian Church, the one history that is the history of one person, God and man, one person, yet all persons as they come to live in him, Jesus Christ.

So, finally, it is worth saying a word about “fact” and the “consciousness of fact.” History has always been “universal” for us who are Christian because God has always purposed his one purpose for the world. In varying ways men have discerned that universal purpose, sometimes as in Israel and the Church of Jesus Christ, through what we have come to call revelation ; sometimes, as in this present age, as secular men and as secular societies, by the pressure of events forcing man to realize his interdependence upon other men. To live in a given factual situation is one thing; it may not make any difference to live in the same situation and know what it is and how it works. But this cannot be true of the fact of history if what Christians say is true, that the real substance of history is the story of Jesus Christ. For that makes of history a. realm of personal relationships, not only in its inter-mundane events, but also in that area where the events of this world are related to the life of God who is Lord. To know him as the centre and the substance of all our human story is to have a new dynamic and a new hope, indeed a hope that is, as the New Testament assures us, “certain and sure.” To speak of the finality of Jesus Christ in this age of Universal History, then, is to use the language of faith about matters of fact, which is but to confess that “facts” are not always what they seem, and that we who have put our trust in Christ look not only at the things which are seen, which are temporal, but also at the things which are unseen, which are eternal. And it is because in Him, Jesus Christ, that time and eternity, history and what lies beyond history, God and man have been made inextricably one, and that our eyes have seen him, and still hope to see him, that we can speak of him as the finality of our history.

Let us not bother too much about defining “universal history” except to pass on another remark of our general secretary, which has been further illuminated by Dr. Marsh :

In a sense history has always been universal. Is our age then the first in which there is a consciousness of the universality of history? No, for that consciousness began to develop in the 18th century. Our age is an age of universal history in that the consciousness of participating in universal history has itself become universal.

That may be a slight exaggeration when it comes to the masses of Asia, Africa and Latin America, and even some supposedly educated people in Europe and America. But the point is clear enough.

Now the question that I propose to ask and suggest a partial answer is this: God is at work in history. We all accept that. But what is God doing? Here is the partial answer :

He is doing many things which we do not as yet understand. But one thing is clear. God the Holy Trinity in our time is working in all things together (Rom. 8. 28), gradually but at a definitely stepped-up tempo, to bring about an enhancement of the scope of human freedom, human community and human tragedy, in order that man may grow into the fullness of the mature manhood (Eph. 4. 13) of Christ the God-Man.

There is a further question: In what way does the Incarnate life of Jesus Christ affect the life and destiny of the whole of mankind, even those who are outside the community of faith ?

To me the latter is the more interesting question. But in this present paper, I limit myself to the first question. God the Holy Trinity. We ought to be careful not to separate too sharply the Three Persons of the Triune God. We must resist the temptation to Christo-monism and to the assertion that the Holy Spirit alone is working outside the Church. The Father, Son and Holy Spirit are working together.

Working in all things together. History is in a large measure the work of man. But man often works for his own personal, group or national interests, and not always for good. God who controls history takes the raw material of our decisions and actions and puts them together to work towards His over-all purposes for mankind.

Gradually, but at a definitely stepped-up tempo. History is outrunning our time-tables. The independence of the African nations, the sudden We may even have to include the advances in space research, and the breaking down of confessional and national barriers in the Church and in Western Europe have all caught us by surprise. We should be on the alert with eager expectation and yet with great patience to watch for His clandestine coming into the life of mankind.

Human freedom

The question of freedom has often been posed in western theology in the categories of Free-will and Predestination. Augustine started the debate in his De Civitate Dei, but nearer to the end of his life retracted his main position against free-will, a fact almost ignored by medieval and post-Reformation Theology. (See Retractations I : xxm.)

But the issue is hardly one of predestination and freewill. The nature of freedom itself has to be explored. Freedom has been subdivided in ways by many thinkers. But most of them make two assumptions which seem to me to be untenable when we speak of Christian freedom. First, most of the writers on freedom are speaking primarily of a freedom of choice; and secondly they usually speak of freedom as individual Freedom.

We need to see freedom as essential to the nature of God Himself, and reflected in humanity as Image of God in the form of a seminal potentiality. When we speak of God's omnipotence, we are actually speaking of God’s absolute freedom. Freedom is more than merely the possibility of choice, but truly the possibility of realization, of achievement.

Let me try to speak simple everyday language here. Am I free to be in India physically in the next five minutes? That of course is not a question of choice, but of power, of forces that prevent me from fulfilling what I desire, of agencies that I lack. God is free in that by the sheer act of willing He realizes His purposes. His freedom is commensurate with His power. And when we speak of human freedom from a Christian standpoint we are not speaking of free-will as over against predestination, nor are we thinking of the freedom of choice of the individual.

The Reformation set men free from the shackles of traditional authority in the medieval European world. But this was basically an individual freedom, a freedom which later paved the way for free enterprise, capitalism and the missionary and sectarian revolts against the organized Protestant Churches. The Reformation and its individualist Gospel of freedom released forces whose mushrooming and fall-out have begun to envelop the whole world. As Jacob Burkhard puts it admirably:

In the Middle Ages both sides of human consciousness -- that which was turned within as that which was turned without -- lay dreaming or half awake beneath a common veil. The veil was woven of faith, illusion,and childish prepossession, through which the world and history were seen clad in strange hues. Man was conscious of himself only as a member of a race, people, party, family or corporation-- only through some general category. (The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, 1921, p. 129, quoted by Eric Fromm, The Fear of Freedom, Routledge, 1960, p. 36.)

But in this very process of discovering himself as an individual as over against other individuals, there is alienation both from the neighbour, and from nature. And the uncomfortableness of this alienation has filled western man with doubt and anxiety, and has ever since his liberation been driving him once again to new submissions to authority, new identifications with mass movements, new urges to compulsive and often irrational activism.

While the Reformation brought freedom, it has not been able to train man for the burden of freedom — that which we too lightly call responsibility. This training of man is the crying need of the day which God is imposing on us. We cannot afford merely to develop a few super-men who are able to handle their freedom with responsibility while the others meekly accept their authority and surrender both their freedom and their responsibility. We need to develop the freedom of the totality of the human race.

So while we need to continue our fight for “the rights of man,” for the freedoms of speech, of worship, of minorities, of association, of conscience and of government, we have to expand the scope of our quest to reach two different realms of freedom as well.

The first realm still deals with the freedom of the individual, namely freedom from internal constraints. But at the very point where the intemal bondage breaks, the kingdom breaks in and community begins to emerge. This is not simply a question of believing in Jesus Christ, for it was precisely to the believing Jews that Jesus spoke His momentous words on Truth and Freedom:

Jesus then said to the Jews who had believed in him, “If you continue to abide in my logos, you shall be truly my disciples, thus know the truth and the truth shall liberate you." (St. John 8. 31-32.)

The inner constraints are manifold and we only catalogue a select list: anxiety, guilt, fear of death, fear of being different, fear of losing approval and love, fear to upset established patterns in which we find our security, the compulsive drives of passion and hatred, envy and slander, bitterness and gossip, fear of exposure, fear of loss of power and so on. Here is the tremendous need of the world —- western or eastern, Christian or non-Christian, educated or uneducated. And the break-through in this area of freedom must come from the community of love, the Church, where “for freedom Christ has set us free.” This is a question of a genuine Christian community of faith and forgiveness, of mutual accept ance and common worship and service. From the Church this freedom must spread to the world, just as the concept of service has broken loose from the Church and is spreading into the unbelieving world. There is so much to say here, but one can only find time to indicate the area.

The second realm is one which is already receiving world-wide attention. This is not freedom from, but freedom for. This is a question of considerable urgency especially in those nations which have recently become free from the colonial bondage. There remains the whole question of economic colonialism and I think, also intellectual and spiritual colonialism, which are highly loaded phrases likely to alienate the sympathy of many among you. But the positive aspect of the freedom of the new nations to be themselves can hardly be separated from these aspects of western domination. To find their own identity“ it is for this that the nations are striving. Emancipation is the first stage -- from external domination of any kind; also from the uncritical enslavement to the past. But the second stage is the slower and more laborious process of growing into full nationhood in a community of nations, where no one dominates and all are free to be members in a relationship of mutuality to other nations, in an atmosphere of acceptance, forgiveness and cooperation. The point is to be discussed under the heading of community, but the need to be free to be oneself as a nation belongs to the realm of freedom. It raises a whole series of questions: economic and technological development, the development of a pluralistic but harmonious culture within each national unit which determines the fundamental aspect of the nation’s personality, the changes and adaptations that this calls for in the areas of education, pattern of government, and social systems.

To summarize the answer in the area of freedom, God has enhanced the scope of freedom for individual and social entities within the world- wide human society. He is working to face us with new freedoms to be won, and the Church should be there to work with men outside in the common quest of freedom-- which is the power to be one’s own self in relation to other selves, and to grow by the mastery of power and by its utilization for good ends.

Human community

God has broken down many fences in our time, to throw us together. The communications media, economic interdependence of nations, the spread of education to the masses and the levelling influence of a contagious urban-technological culture have brought us together across many national, racial and class barriers.

The United Nations Organization and its allied agencies, in spite of their many set-backs and failures, have created the nucleus of a total human organization on a world-wide basis, something completely new in the known history of the world.

Just as God has been and is increasing the scope of human freedom in its internal and external aspects, so also He is now working to increase the scope of human community. The spontaneous communities of the middle ages in Europe as well as in other parts of the world were after all parochial communities. They have broken down. The urban-technological culture has demolished the old securities and has thrown us together into the Lonely Crowd. It is there that we have to rediscover community, and that not by going back to an agrarian-rural economy. God has placed us in front of a problem which frustrates us by its very magnitude. Here again God works in history to place a challenge before man which he cannot solve even in part without truly developing and growing together in the very process of finding and executing that solution.

It may be possible for us at this point to seek many easy solutions:

  1. to retreat into oneself and find a purely personal adjustment to the loneliness and meaninglessness of life-- what some delight to call “acceptance of absurdity and living with it,”
  2. or to escape into pietism and find a solution in pure “inner spiritual development”
  3. or to escape into the mass and drown the groan of inner loneliness by joining the whirl of social or political activity, or again
  4. to seek a meaning in active vocation of service in which one almost uses other people as a means of giving significance to one’s own life.

But none of these can create community-- not even the fourth alternative which is most attractive to us as Christians. Some way has to I found at the foundational levels of human association -- in the family, in the school, in the local community, in the local church, in the factory, and so on to break down the walls that divide man from fellow-man. The forgiving, accepting, sustaining, secure love of God must become richly and deeply a matter of personal and direct experience to each individual that he is enabled to face himself as he is and open himself to others. This is the grass-roots level of community -- also the grass-root level of genuine ecumenism. Ecumenism does not simply require that the local Methodist and Lutheran congregations merge into one congregation, or are in a relationship of mutuality to each other. The unity of the Church does not become a full reality until at the inter-personal level there is forgiveness and openness and mutual acceptance. This is something which has more meaning for the ordinary Christian than the merger of the denominations.

I am not suggesting that we should not do anything to bring the churches together until we have dealt with the inter-personal problems at the level of “where two or three are gathered together.” My suggestion rather is that the small group community of openness in love and concern, in common worship and common service is a neglected -area of our ecumenical work. The neglect of this level is sure to leave an enormous gap in the full manifestation of the reality of Christ’s unity, even when the problem has been solved at other levels. This is the sort of thing which cannot be tackled by the Welfare State, and at present the Church is in a better position to start a contagion of openness than any other agency that God has in the world.

But we must at the same time keep in mind the genuinely ecumenical dimensions of the problem. If the whole oikoumene has to be involved in the new human community towards which God is beckoning us, we cannot be satisfied with merely working at the small inter-personal level.The power structures have to be reconciled to each other too. And here God does place before us several concerns.

(a) The West and the East. I need not elaborate this area of concern, except to say that our faith must be equal to the risks involved in taking bold action at this point. Disarmament takes courage and faith and openness. Fear of the other still hiding his true intentions and his murderous weapons is inducing both sides to hide their hearts from each other. A break-through is necessary here. The charge of “Fellow-travelling” or in more modern lingo, of being a “Com-symp” 1 is a frightening and tyrannical force in many parts of the world today, disrupting community both at a world-wide and at national and domestic levels. The Christian faith should be able to deliver us from our bondage to this tyranny.
Christ was and is the Master Fellow-traveller and we cannot afford to be less. He was and is the “all-symp,” and we have to share in his universal sympathy. The World Council of Churches itself is hamstrung in its approach to Christians in the socialist countries by the fear of being tarred and lampooned as “coni-symps,” in fact the smear campaign has already been going on for some time. Neither can we afford to neglect one-fourth of humanity in our human community by keeping People’s China out of the United Nations. The East has also to learn to trust the West, and not to condemn it wholesale.

(b) The West and the Rest. I am not always sure that we can blame God for taking the West into the rest of the world. Imagine the year 1450. Europe is a pretty isolated place, ignorant of the rest of the world. And then suddenly it explodes. Discovery of America, discovery of route around the Cape of Good Hope, the division of the world between Portugal and Spain as areas of colonization, the wars in Europe which expand into European world colonialism lasting until about 15 years ago. I know some of my friends see God’s hand in all this; but I see also the wrath of men praising God.

But can we think that we have come to the end of Western dominance in the world today now that political colonialism is practically liquidated ? The true answer is no. And we camiot have a world~wide human community so long as that dominance lasts. Western man has slowly acquired the spirit of domination through the last 400 years. It will take him many generations to get rid of it. So he has a special responsibility to be careful ; for even when he thinks he is serving, he may actually be dominating. I will say no more, for it is a very sore subject.

We have a need to think of how the European Economic Community, the African regional federations, the Commonwealth and other regional or selective human communities and open conversations among the thinkers of all the great religions of the world can contribute to the final emergence of a genuinely world-Wide community.

Human tragedy

Suffering is the constant companion of human existence. Obviously it is hard to measure. My own general impression, however, is that its scope has increased in our time. The up-rootedness of human life is becoming more universal today than it ever was. Wars are more global in scope today. The catastrophic possibility of the dissolution of the whole planet with all life in it also has become frighteningly real in our time. In spite of our greatly increased humanitarian activities, the impressive progress in medicine and our more comprehensive care for the disabled and aged, we still have such vast proportions of human suffering to conquer yet.

It takes more optimism than facts allow to hope that the world without war and without want which we hope to achieve in a foreseeable future, would also deal with all the other aspects of suffering and that we would thus come into a golden age of no suffering at all. What then is God doing in our world by increasing the scope of suffering and tragedy in our world ? The agony of the burden of freedom itself is a major cause of suffering. Our very efforts to relieve suffering does entail voluntarily accepted sufiering. Our alienation from neighhour and nature also causes intense suffering. What is God calling us to do in the midst of this suffering ? Of course there is the imperative that springs directly out of ' the love of God, not only to relieve suffering, but also to share the suffering of men. But I wish here to speak of another aspect of suffering to which God is calling us. I will call this the “tragic mode of learning.”

Learning is of the essence of human growth. And God’s purpose is that the whole of mankind may grow into the mature manhood of Christ. That is why education is such an important concern to us. But do we learn? I suppose all experience is learning in a sense. But it may be fruitful to distinguish between the comic mode of learning and the tragic mode of learning.

Eric Bentley in his discussion of George Bernard Shaw’s Comedies (The Playwright as Thinker, New York, 1946.) makes the interesting point that the method of comedy is clarification of truth through the ironic exposure of pretentious, false or hollow ideas. Comedy as distinct from farce uses Words to analyse truth. The inspired verbal commentary and dialectic which dissects and exposes falsehood, however, asks for no identification of the onlooker of the drama with the agents in it. We can watch it in detachment and learn without pain.

Tragedy on the other hand has its power in the learning that comes to the actors through suffering, and to the onlooker through participation in the suffering of the actors. The essence of tragedy, I am told, is to affirm the dignity and significance of man in a world of suffering (The Complete Greek Drama, Oates & Neill (ed.), New York, 1938, Vol. I. Intro.,) This dignity is reflected in man’s choice and his responsibility for the consequences of the choice. But it is not the individual man who chooses, in isolation from others. His choice and action are affected by other men and other forces, which have power over him. There are limitations on the agent’s power, within himself, in his “boundness” to others and in the forces of nature. And the function of tragedy is not to offer a solution to the problem of human limitation and suffering but to provide a clarification of the situation.

The tragedy, when it is authentic drama, does not pose the issues of good and evil in black and white terms. The hero and the villain have both good and evil mixed in them in varying proportions. Of course there are the demonic forces, like Mephistopheles, the witches, Iago, etc. Their demand is for the soul of man, for the surrender of basic humanity. But the triumph of the tragedy is not in the destruction of evil, but in the dignified refusal to surrender one’s basic identity.

As Hegel so brilliantly pointed out, the tragic struggle is not between good and evil but between differing principles of right. It is unfair to oversimplify this as choosing the lesser evil. ‘The tragic probe is always to clarify the conflict in real human life between rival principles of right, and to unveil the hard and by no means clear nature of the decisions we have to make in life.

Our scientific and academic approach to knowledge, discursive and analytical, detached in general, belongs to the comic pattern of learning and is an essential component of learning for maturity. But the tragic mode of learning is the key to Christian education. One is frightfully worried about the great desire to educate the Church through an unending stream of books, periodicals and mimeographed sheets, by the virtuoso or amateurish performances of preachers for 20 minutes a week, taking advantage of the time when the congregation puts on its most civil manner, and by those who think that including or excluding a “subject” called religious instruction in the school curriculum and the shape of that curriculum are the important keys to Christian education.

If We are to serve the Church and the world which in some ways is more mature, we have to cut through the moralistic over-simplification of issues and teach our people to learn by the tragic method, by the method of identification and involvement, of suffering with and for the world, in order that we may learn wisdom. The moral uprootedness of our time is again God working to destroy our over—simplified concepts of good and evil. As Michael Polanyi so convincingly asserts, our age is not an amoral age. It is rather an over-moralistic age. We are very much concerned about moral “issues, the burning questions of value, but We have found no acceptable system. Youth is deeply interested in
morality even when it rejects the conventional form of it.

To evolve an ethic of suffering love, to embody it and thereby manifest God to the world — this is the great goal of Christian education. For this it must use the tragic mode of learning, not merely the comic. By enhancing the scope of tragedy in our time, God is forcing us to restructure our ethical vision. Our work of service must grow into a labour of suffering love. In our time We have returned to a stoic conception of suffering : suffering is to be relieved, but without ourselves sharing in it, our own suffering is to be heroically borne alone, without showing any of it to others. But suffering is the raw material out of which true faith and love can be built, and there needs to be discovered a more Christian attitude towards suffering. In this we shall ourselves grow closer to the mature manhood of Christ, but we will have to grow with the whole of mankind.

I have intentionally refrained from discussing the theological aspect of the question: “How does the Incarnate life of Jesus Christ affect the life of unbaptized man in the world? Limitations of time prevent me from doing it here. But we must get an image of humanity past, present and future as a single unit, the Great Adam, flowing through time, and of the presence of the Incarnate Christ in this Adam as a continuing phenomenon affecting the life of humanum in perceptible and imperceptible Ways.

The Lordship of Christ should not be misunderstood in this connection as an arbitrary authority over the world. Our Lord’s words to Pilate, the representative of the Roman Empire are significant: “My Kingship is not of this world; if my Kingship were of this world, my servants would fight, that I might not be handed over to the Jews.” (John 18. 36.) It is neither the law-and-order Kingship nor the welfare state kingship. It is the kingship of suffering love. It is the kingship that lays down its life for the world. And we are kings too, but by participation in his kingship of suffering love.

The Finality of Christ in the age of Universal History is a strange finality--the finality of the Cross and Resurrection—of life through death.

Will the unbaptized man be saved? God Wills that all men be saved. Christ wills that all men be saved. And He wills as He ought to will. And His will is: “When the hour of destiny strikes, to gather together into one the whole Universe in Him.” (Eph. l. 10.) Can that will be thwarted? No, for His will is commensurate with His power. But how is His will to be fulfilled ? That is a comic question. Our task is to learn the answer slowly by the tragic method, by laying down our lives for the life of the world.