The Essence of Christian Humanism

Peter Edman

While updating things for our Online Store this morning, I had to mark a Reading as out-of-print (Amazing Grace) and was reminded of the other Readings that have sold out and that we’ve decided for various reasons not to reprint. 

One of those is “You Are the Man,” the second Reading we ever did, an excerpt from sociologist Peter Berger’s book The Precarious Vision: A Sociologist Looks at Social Fictions and Christian Faith (Doubleday 1961) with a foreword by Os Guinness. Os wrote:

Unquestionably, our greatest challenge is not the fictions of totalitarian tyrannies or of Western consumer fantasies. It comes from the rationalizations of our own minds, the fictions of our own imaginations, and the deceptions of our own hearts. “Living in truth” is a prerequisite of personal integrity before it is one of public life. All of us who do not wish to be exposed some day should live by submitting ourselves to truth every day. The way of faith turns the way of the world upside down. Instead of concealing our worst and revealing our best, we are called to do the reverse. After all, as Jesus taught and modern psychology underscores, we are our secrets, not our PR. It is truth in the hidden life that counts. The story of David is worth pondering.

Our excerpt, apparently postscript to the book, is a meditation on the story of David and Bathsheba, and the prophet Nathan’s method to get David to recognize his own guilt. The ending deserves a wider audience. I’ve highlighted a couple phrases below, but first, another quote to whet your appetite (echoes of Postman, anybody?):

The natural inclinations of man lead him to take society for granted, to identify himself fully with the social roles assigned to him, and to develop ideologies which will organize and dispose of any doubts that might possibly arise. There is an instructive affinity between Christian faith and the analytic enterprise of the social sciences in that both serve to disturb this happy state of affairs . . . The debunking effect of social-scientific analysis is far from contradictory to this prophetic mission. Indeed, it might be called its profane auxiliary. The smashing of idols, with whatever hammers, is the underside of prophecy. (p. 204)

And now the closing of the book:

David’s sin is pitilessness. It is the sacrifice of what is dearest in another’s life for the routine needs of one’s own existence. Bathsheba’s virtue and safety are sacrificed to David’s momentary lust, just as the poor man’s lamb is sacrificed for the miserly ostentatiousness of his rich oppressor. And Uriah’s life is sacrificed for the temporary exigencies of royal prestige and raison d’état. What is life or death to one man becomes a matter of convenience or inconvenience to another. And so the life of Caryl Chessman was spared for the convenience of President Eisenhower’s trip to South America. When there was no more danger of the President being even slightly inconvenienced by Chessman’s death, the way was open for the gas chamber. With all the relativities of time and history, the way is not so long from the walls of Rabbah to those of San Quentin. And the voice of God’s judgment remains the same now as then.

The story does not end with Nathan’s condemnation of David. David acknowledges the odious identification with the rich man in Nathan’s story. David repents and he is forgiven. Dietrich Bonhoeffer once referred to David as a shadow of Christ in the Old Testament. The story of David’s sin is not only one of judgment but also one of grace. What concerns us most, however, is the relationship of both judgment and grace to the process of David’s perception of himself. The encounter with God brushes aside all the pet illusions with which men hide themselves from their own conscience. Nothing but the truth is good enough then. As men confront God’s address they also perceive themselves in a new—that is, a more truthful—way.

We would venture to argue that in this “You are the man” of our story lies the essence of Christian humanism. And this Christian humanism involves not only moral imperatives but also perception. It means to see men as men and to address them as such. It means to ground all moral imperatives in men and not in institutionalized fictions. It means to see through the deceptions of social structure, through the web of bad faith and rationalization. There is a very great liberation in acquiring such perception, though even this liberation pales compared with that which comes from God’s eternal recognition of ourselves as men created and men redeemed—as Nathan said to David, “The Lord also has put away your sin; you shall not die.”

Fodder, Character and Ethics, Meaning and Calling, Tue 05 Jul 2005