1.  The Reformational Conception of the Labor Union⤒🔗

In our story of the Anglo-Saxon pragmatist-humanist theory of labor relations in modern society, we saw that such positivistic sociologists as Frank Tannenbaum and W. E. J. McCarthy were forced by their pragmatic sociological method to stay with the so-called facts; that is to say, they adjusted their thinking and analysis to what there was about them. But in doing so they lost hold of the facts. For in every so-called positive "fact," including a trade union, there is not only some inescapable structure of the creation ordinances (e.g., one cannot set up a form of trade union that is not somehow bound to the structural requirements of a trade union as a form of human association), but there is also a degree of conformity to or deviation from God's creation norm for the labor union, which has been operative in the cultural-forming activity of the men who built the modern trade unions.

Lacking a true ordering principle for human society in God's structural creation ordinances for human society, and without any proper insight into God's creation order, it is not surprising that there has developed a levelling tendency in modern man's experience of and insight into the nature of the various associations and institutions which together constitute human society, with the tragic result that we look upon these social bonds as pressure groups, interest groups, and functional groups. Nowhere has this levelling tendency been more apparent than in the field of labor relations. Thanks to the influence of collectivistic theories of the state, the defenders of compulsory trade unionism claim that the union is at least a quasi-public legal institution. That is, even as the government has the right to compel, so also the union has the right to force the men who work in the shop or factory to join the union and pay dues as a condition of employment.

We shall not be able to reject this totalitarian claim unless we see it as an unjustified attempt on the part of a voluntary association of workers, which makes up only a segment of society, to grasp the power of the sword of government. In claiming to be the only "true society" the "neutral" unions have exceeded their just bounds. Freedom for all the workers in modern society is possible only upon the basis of the recognition of the autonomy of the various spheres of life. Compulsory trade unionism is in effect governmental power exercised by a private organization. No Reformed Christian questions the necessity for labor unions in our modern industrial world. But the Reformed Christian does dispute the right of neutral unions to dictate to Christian workers the terms on which they may accept employment. The great problem today, as Sylvester Petro has made abundantly clear in his book, Power Unlimited – The Corruption of Union Leadership, is the excessive power of the big international labor unions. It is here that the Reformed theory of human society can make an invaluable contribution. As Bernard Zylstra points out in Challenge and Response:

Power in human hands is a dangerous weapon. A union must have power, but where are its limits? That question can only properly be answered when we have a religious interpretation of power. In a man centered universe, it is extremely difficult to bind power within boundaries. In a God centered universe, any human manifestation of power is limited. This is the essence of the Christian principle of sphere sovereignty which implies that social organizations are related to each other in a coordinate fashion and not in a hierarchical or subordinate way. It is typical that in an environment where men have no deep respect for the Creator, they do not know the limits of their might. The extreme form of social disharmony or unrighteousness is totalitarianism in which all human functions are part of the state. Totalitarian tendencies are also in evidence when unions try to control press, politics, and education. A Christian labor union must oppose such tendencies by a balanced view of its task. Unionism can be most effective in achieving a better place for the worker by minding its own business. That business concerns economics not politics.¹

It is because modern post-Christians have failed to "see" the specific task of the various associations of human society that today we find so much injustice and inequality in modern industry. A voluntary association of workers has no moral right to compel membership in its organization as a condition of employment. Compulsion must be reserved only for the state, which is an involuntary structure.

The Reformed Christian distinguishes between authoritative societal relationships which are institutional in character and do not owe their existence to human initiative and free societal relationships into which men may enter freely for a variety of purposes. The former possess an internal communal character that is to a certain degree independent of the interaction of its members and is marked by authority, e.g., the immediate family, the church, or the state. The institutions of marriage, the family, the state, and the church are established by God as part of His divine ordering for human happiness. According to divine prescription, marriage binds the parties together for their entire life, and one is born into a family, a church, and a state without making any choice. The apostate humanist attempt to explain these relationships as a voluntary association of self-sufficient individuals is thus false, betraying the desire to become independent of God and to achieve religious certainty in the sovereign individual. Free societal relationships, in contrast, are of an external character and they are much freer. Dooyeweerd therefore defines a community as "any more or less durable societal relationship which has the character of a whole joining its members into a social unity, irrespective of the degree of the intensity of the communal bond."² An association is either an interindividual or intercommunal relationship, "in which individual persons or communities function in coordination without being united into a solitary whole. Such relationships show the character of mutual neutrality, of approachment, free competition or antagonism, cooperation or contest."³ In an association, individuals are coordinated next to each other without the relation of authority, as for example in the case of a buyer or seller. Dooyeweerd holds that each community or association is characterized by two functions, a foundational and a leading function. An insight into the proper connection between these two tells us what the structural principle of the community or association is.

For this reason the church, state, and society must never be placed on the same level of authority. Church and state are both authori­tative societal relationships but society is not, since it is defined as the broad field of personal freedom, outside of authoritative social relationships, in which men associate with each other as equals and freely organize together. Such free societal relations have in the course of the unfolding process of history given rise to innumerable associations between free men and between free societal relationships, and these must be seen as sovereign in their own sphere. From the organization of free persons, such various free societal relationships as the universities and the trade unions have sprung into existence. These relationships have been historically grounded since they originated through positive formation on the basis of a specific power. A business, for example, is formed on the basis of the power of capital.⁴

With this Reformed doctrine of sphere sovereignty we may compare the political pluralism advocated by John Neville Figgis in his influential work, Churches in the Modern State. Thus Figgis writes:

The State did not create the family, nor did it create the churches, nor even in any real sense can it be said to have created the club of the trades union, nor, in the Middle Ages, the guild or the religious order, hardly even the universities: they have all risen out of the natural associative instinct of mankind, and should all be treated by the supreme authority as having a life original and guaranteed.⁵

In this pluralism Figgis stands midway between F. W. Maitland, who introduced Gierke's theory of the reality and autonomy of the personality of the various associations of society to the English-speak­ing world of scholarship, and Harold Laski, who used Gierke's doctrine of the autonomy of the non-political and lower political associations in his "pluralist" phase of political thought to defend the freedom of industrial groups from control by the state.

Maitland pointed out that the emergence of such free societal associations as the medieval universities and guilds posed a problem for political thinkers because the state was the only association clearly recognized in the classical theory of Natural Law. The state, it was supposed, arises according to the will of God for the ordering of society, the restraint of the evil tendencies of men, and the furtherance of human well-being. The state and the individual were the two entities with which classical, political, and legal thought was exercised. Hence there was the combat "in which the Sovereign State and the Sovereign Individual contended over the delimitation of the provinces assigned to them by Natural Law, and in the course of that struggle all intermediate groups were first degraded into the position of the more or less arbitrarily fashioned creatures of mere Positive Law, and in the end were obliterated."⁶ Natural Law, in fact, found no place for the Corporation; hence, "the Corporation could find a place in Public Law only as a part of the State and a place in Private Law only as an artificial Individual."⁷

Gierke sought to justify the existence of these Corporations or free societal associations in terms of his famous theory of group personality. For Gierke every true human association becomes a real and living entity animated by its own individual soul; of all such leagues, state organized nations are the greatest, and the corporate spirit, the People-spirit, is the very core of the separate personality which each possesses.

As Gierke himself explains his theory:

The development of law lies in human action. But the subject of this action is not individuals, but communities. The individual man who cooperates in the process always acts as a component member and in furtherance of a human community.⁸

According to Gierke, then, a corporate body is, or can be, a real person or a real super person. As such he conceived of the different types of human associations as full organisch-gegliederte personalities, i.e., as persons with a spiritual organic expression, to which he ascribed a separate soul or spirit in the will of the corporation, and a separate spiritual body in the organization. Thus, he coordinated the corporate persons with natural persons, as living beings. In Gierke's view, each such corporate grouping of society is independent and autonomous. Autonomy, says Gierke, is the power of a properly organized association, which is not a state, to make a law for itself. The law which is thus established is, in the true sense of the term, objective and binding, and must be clearly distinguished from mere subjective law. It may, in other words, be properly described as legislative. In Germanic law many associations have had this power, subject always, however, to the limitation that it must not conflict with the law of any higher authority, especially the state. Autonomy was thus a fruitful source of law in the Middle Ages.

Unfortunately, Gierke's theory of autonomy and of the essence of human organized communities does not really discover the inner structural principles of the latter because of his metaphysical collec­tivistic theory of organized communities which seeks the substance of the latter in a common or general will. Dooyeweerd points out, "The most Gierke could attain to on the ground of this theory was a formal juridical autonomy for the internal law of the Verbande (organized association). There could be no room for a real juridical sphere sovereignty."⁹

Since neither Gierke, Maitland, Figgis, nor Laski had any real idea or belief in God's creation order, they looked upon the independence and autonomy of social bonds from the empirical rather than the normative structural side of reality given at creation. As a result they were unable to point to the normative qualifying functions of social bonds or human associations which alone enable us to distinguish one type of social bond from another.

As long as modern sociologists remain entangled in the dilemma of collectivism or individualism they will never be able to understand the structural correlation of communal and intercommunal or inter-individual relationships. This is even the case with Gierke, who was fully aware of the fundamental differences between these two kinds of social relations. As Dooyeweerd suggests, "The coordination of individual persons and collective persons led Gierke to a sharp division between 'private law' and 'public law.' But when we detach this coordination from its speculative metaphysical foundation and reduce it to a separation of external and interindividual and internal communal relations, it appears to be in conflict with the structural coherence between them."¹⁰

Neither collectivism nor individualism recognizes the true structure of societal relationships. The dilemma only arises when the structures of individuality, which alone present a basis for the solu­tion of the one and the many, are neglected. The principle of sphere sovereignty alone presents us with a proper insight into the connection between man and his social forms, since the individual is never defined or absorbed into a temporal social bond. These are limited in the expression of their authority by their structural principle.

The error of individualism is that it constructs the communities and associations of human society out of the elemental atomistic relations between individuals conceived as sovereign agents with the result that it does not recognize that these communities also have their own peculiar structural principles. But collectivism absolutizes one of the many temporal communities, namely the one that is made to embrace all the others as the whole which embraces and enfolds the parts. This was true of the classical city-state and of all modern totalitarian regimes and of the neutral labor unions in their attempt to become the "only true" society. The error of such collectivistic solutions is that then this single all-embracing community is given the place of the religious basic community, the Kingdom of God, which transcends time and place. Man cannot and must not thus be confined by any such absolutized earthly community, be it a church, the state, or a labor union, since man in the center of his personality, his "heart," also transcends time, while as long as he remains in history, he functions in a multiplicity of equally significant communities and associations.

The biblical view of man in society can alone provide a way out of the dead end apostate humanistic street of individualism versus collectivism, for it alone clearly reveals that man is an individual created together with other men to live in such communal groups as families, churches, and states. Man's personality can develop only in fruitful relations with God and with his neighbor. Man is called by God to love the Lord with all his "heart" and his neighbor as himself.

The common error of individualism and collectivism, in typically humanistic fashion, is that they take their starting point in man, whether that be the individual or the group. The biblical view of man in society transcends this dilemma, since it reveals to us that God created man for community with his fellow men and as a social being. This means that man does not find his purpose in himself as the economic individualists such as John Locke supposed nor in the group as the economic collectivists such as Karl Marx supposed, but in the God who created him. The individual and the community are equally called to live in obedience to the divine ordinances and structures laid down by the Creator. As Brunner well says:

Opposed to all forms of collectivism, as well as to individualism, stands the Christian conception of the individual and the community in all its inward consistency and completeness. It is not a synthesis, still less a compromise, but the original unity. The other conceptions stand revealed as fragments torn out of it. For the Christian understanding of the individual and the community is not human wisdom, but the wisdom of God manifested in creation. It is the justice which befits the human being as an individual and in community because it is in accordance with the creative plan of Him Who created individuals and communities alike…

In the Christian understanding of man, a communal structure based on a contract is neither necessary nor possible. Communities are just as much established in the divine order of creation as the independence of the individual. They are innate in the God-created individual with his capacity and need for completion. Their prototype and standard is the family founded on marriage…

The absorption of the individual in the collective whole is just as impossible in Christian thought as the construction of the community on the basis of a social contract. The independence of individuals is just as much God's creation as the community founded on their diversity. The dignity of man, which is his by reason of his creation in the image of God, is not bestowed on him by the community. He brings it with him, so to speak, into the community. It is given him direct by God, by that divine call which makes him, the individual, a responsible person. It is be­cause the individual is directly responsible to God that he possesses an independence transcending all community. A human person is more than marriage, more that the state (more than a trade union)…

There will be human beings when marriage and the State (and we may add trade unions) are no more. Man alone, not marriage not family, not the State, is predestined to eternity. The State, marriage, and all institutions are there for man, not man for them…

The Christian view of the relationship between individual and community may be formulated thus: fellowship in freedom, freedom in fellowship.¹¹

It thus becomes the primary duty of the Reformed theory of the labor union or trade union to discover the internal structural prin­ciple of the labor union as this is founded in the creation ordinances. The normative structural principle of the labor union rests upon God's will and purpose for man in society and not upon the will of the state or the "general will" of the people.

What then is the structural principle of the labor union which distinguishes this particular form of free human association from all other societal relationships? How may we best define a trade union? The answer is by discovering its foundational and leading functions. Dooyeweerd defines the internal leading function of a trade union, in its typical coherence with the foundational function, as

a moral bond of solidarity between the labourers typically founded in their organized historical vocational power to elevate labour to an essential and equivalent partner in the process of production.¹²

The modern trade union is grounded in history and rests upon the historical formation of economic power. It does not arise in history until in the process of differentiation a division of labor has taken place and a distinction arises between the ownership and the control of the means of production. In the precapitalistic form of domestic industry trade unions could have no place since each man tended to possess his own instruments or tools of production. Lipson has shown that the fundamental trait of capitalism is the wage system under which the worker sells, not the fruit of his labor, but the labor itself. The wage system did not arise in industry on account of the introduction of machinery. Lipson finds the origin of the wage system in the divorce of the workers from the ownership of the material on which they worked. He continues:

When the material became the property of a capitalist employer, he thereby secured the right to dispose of the finished product, and the manual craftsman was transformed from an independent producer into a labourer working for hire. This change of status was attended with momentous consequences; it created the basis for the perennial struggle between capital and labour. The antagonism of these two forces was not the outcome of the "Industrial Revolution," as it is often supposed … In one form or another "labour unrest" has manifested itself in industry for five hundred years. The workman's labour is a perishable commodity; he cannot withhold it for any length of time or he will starve. Hence there easily arises the possibility of exploitation, and from the fifteenth century down to our own day the energies of the working classes have been absorbed in the effort to establish and maintain a "standard of life." The conflict of capital and labour was fought out over three main grievances – low wages, payment in kind, and unemployment.¹³

Lipson then points out that the British government took over the function of regulating wages and maintaining the "standard of life" of the working community between the end of the Middle Ages, when this function had been performed by the medieval guilds, and the nineteenth century when the exercise of this right fell into disfavor thanks to the influence of the laissez faire teachings of the classical economists. For nearly two hundred years the great Statute of Apprentices, passed in 1563, governed this state regulation of wages and conditions of work.¹⁴

Under the influence of a growing economic individualism, fostered by the development of capitalism, the state began to assume a different attitude towards labor problems, especially those relating to wages, unemployment, and technical training – with the consequence that the industrial legislation of the sixteenth century was allowed to fall into disuse. Lipson holds that it was "this change of public policy" which "was one of the factors in the rise of trade unionism"; another factor being the increasing difficulty of attaining master-ship of a craft. The change in attitude on the part of the government forced the workers to shoulder responsibilities which had hitherto been the province of the state alone and to rely upon their own efforts for the maintenance of the "standard of life." Lipson believes that this development "transformed the relations of capital and labor, which were no longer shackled by an external authority, but were left free to determine, according to their strength, the rates of wages and the general conditions of employment."¹⁵

Only by combining together into trade unions were the workers able to meet the new owners of capital upon anything like an equal basis. As Tannenbaum well puts it, "The employer became the catalytic agent that crystallized the workers into a self-conscious group" and the social atomization resulting from the payment of an individual money wage was overcome by the fusing of men together in labor unions.

The great tragedy is that the trade unions fell under the evil influences of the selfish greed of the capitalists, and instead of seeing their associations as qualified by the leading function of morality they tended to see it qualified by the economic function. As W. F. De Gaay Fortman says: "There is the fact that the spirit of capitalism, with its unlimited stimulation of self-interest and with its scorn of all moral considerations in the economic sphere of life, has had its destructive effect on the working classes. Countless workers have learned the doctrine of unrestricted self-interest from their employers and how they did learn it!"¹⁶ In other words, the workers themselves succumbed to the pernicious apostate humanist doctrine of economic individualism and of the worship of homo economicus. Instead of seeing their work as man's worship and service to God and their neighbor they saw it as a means of self-gratification. Instead of seeing the trade union as a necessary association of workers called into being by the economic unfolding process of history, and therefore to be qualified by moral and human considerations, the workers have seen the trade union as an instrument of the class war by means of which they can obtain a bigger share of the productive cake.

2.  The Necessity for Christian Labor Associations←⤒🔗

For the Reformed Christian, at any rate, the labor union is the response of the laboring body of Christ to God's call to share in the great cultural mandate to have dominion over the earth and to produce goods and services that human needs may be satisfied. Thus, Christian trade unions are principally distinguished from all so-called neutral humanist unions by reason of the fact that the Christian worker is looked upon as homo religiosus and not as homo economicus. The Reformed Christian locates the dignity of the worker as well as of the employer in man's place in the creation as servant of God and not in his own so-called "natural rights." Both employer and workers are called to serve God in the industrial realm and thus the class struggle is in principle rejected. But this does not mean that the workers do not need to become organized into their own labor associations. It does mean that such Christian labor associations are not going to become exclusively concerned with such purely material considerations as higher wages, shorter working hours, and better material living standards obtained by wielding the strike weapon. Christian trade unionists together with Christian employers are concerned to reverse the process of secularization in industry today which has resulted from the service of the false gods of mammon and homo economicus.

Unlike the Roman Catholic labor or employers' associations, which are expressions of Catholic Temporal Action, and therefore in principle, if not always in fact, subservient to the higher organs of state and church of which in Roman Catholic social theory they are considered to be only a part of the greater whole, the Reformed labor and employers' associations are in principle as well as in practice directly responsible to Almighty God and to His Kingdom norms. Thus, it must be clearly understood that when we state that a trade union is a voluntary association morally qualified and founded upon the historical vocational power to elevate labor to an essential and equivalent partner in the process of production, we understand the word "moral" not in any Roman Catholic sense of natural law discernible by the human reason, but in the sense of God's moral commandments revealed to us in His Word and Law.

The Christian Labor Association of Canada, therefore, speaks of its basis as the Christian principles of social justice and love as taught in the Bible. It further speaks of its aim as the organization of workers in trade and industrial unions, "for the purpose of propagating, establishing, and maintaining justice in the realm of labor and industry, and promoting the economic, social, and moral interests of the workers through the practical application of Christian principles in collective bargaining and other means of mutual aid or protection." It defines these Christian social principles as "basic concepts for just and charitable relationships among men which are taught in both the Old and New Testament of the Bible, and are given expression in society through adherence to ethical and moral standards that reflect such social principles." Moreover, it points out that in the field of labor "these principles have bearing especially upon the dignity of human beings and their equality before God; their rights in regard to sharing in the benefits of creation resources and cultural progress; relationships of men among one another and responsibilities toward each other and to society as a whole."¹⁷ A full statement of the Principles and Practices of the Christian Labor Association of Canada is given at the end of this book as Appendix No. 3, and the reader should read them for himself.

From this it will be obvious that the Reformed Christian trade unionist is not opposed to the idea of labor associations as such but only to the apostate direction taken by the so-called humanist "neutral" unions. Above all he wants to make the Word of God the ordering principle of his economic as well as personal and private activities. As he sees it, it is the very honor of the Lord's good name which is at stake in economic and industrial life.

For this reason the Protestant trade union movement has always promoted collective labor agreements between management and workers, since it sees in this a realization of its goal for a worker to have his own responsibility and of its goal to effect joint consultation and cooperation with the employers. The advantages of a col­lective labor agreement are summarized by De Gaay Fortman, a leading Dutch Protestant trade unionist, as follows:

1. It should be seen in the first place, as evidence of the employers' recognition that, in settling wages and other labor conditions, the workers have rights equal to theirs. Cooperation between employers and laborers has stimulated a greater harmony in the same industry.
2. It brings about stability in labor relations so that labor conflicts are avoided and a regular process in production is promoted.
3. Although it maintains its civil law character and expires periodically, it does, however, have strongly durable character, for where once labor relations planning has been begun by means of collective agreements, cooperation between employers and workers toward agreement as a rule continues.
4. It has vigorously strengthened the confidence of the workers. Through collective agreements they have learned how it feels to have a share in the responsibility and to be able to reach something. Numerous collective agreements have grown to be real law codes, in which not only fair wages have been established, but also old age pensions funds, improvements of the rules of dismissal, vocational training, organs of cooperation in the undertakings and holidays.¹⁸

In the opinion of the members of the Christian Labor Association of Canada, founded in 1952, the time has come for all Christian workers in the English-speaking world to join forces in striving to establish a Christian organization of labor and industry, which is not the same as unions and business organizations, consisting exclusively of devout Christians. These faithful followers of Christ are simply trying to establish a condition of industrial and labor organization which will give the maximum opportunity for men and women to practice their Christian faith at work as well as in the home, and to restore dignity and meaning to their lives by resisting the abuses and injustices of the "neutral" unions and by establishing conditions of work such that all workers may in freedom work with direct responsibility to God as His stewards, prophets, priests, and kings.

The Christian trade unionists in both America and Canada are fully conscious of the necessity of organizing labor unions to combat the injustices of monopolistic and competitive capitalism and to eliminate low wages and poor working conditions which unfortunately still exist, but they are determined to make it possible for Christian workers to practice their religion at work by basing their union activities upon the sound biblical principles of work. In the opinion of these gallant soldiers of Christ, the solution to the problems facing us in the field of labor relations is not to be found in the present neutral trade union habit of combatting one injustice by another, nor in the present use of violence, intimidation, secondary boycotts, stranger picketing, racket picketing, mass picketing, and strikes to attain labor's ends. Two wrongs have never yet made one right. Neither will peace and prosperity come to industry and agriculture by the use of such methods. Prosperity will come to our nations only when we eliminate the present injustices prevailing in labor relations in our industries by the application of Christian principles of mutual cooperation between management and workers and by giving both employers and employees a sense of belonging and of loyalty to a common enterprise in which each has its proper and vital role to perform. Ways must be found to improve the industrial climates of our countries, enabling men and women to play their full part in industry and commerce and to restore a sense of responsibility and true community in these fields. Just as the strength and good morale of industry is of the highest importance to the very survival of the Anglo-Saxon democracies, so the conduct of industry affects the moral welfare of all those engaged in it. Both sides of industry must become more and more directed by God's law and norms for human work so that the Spirit of Christ can grow to full stature in both managers and workers, and the Risen Christ can express himself through each and all.

3.  The Case for Union Pluralism in Modern Industry←⤒🔗

Given the pluralistic and multi-religious character of society today, Christians should not only seek to establish their own employers' and labor associations, but they should also unite to secure the enactment of right to work laws in the labor legislation of their respective nations. Most nations of the English-speaking world today guarantee complete freedom of religion to all their citizens and treat all citizens equal before the law. Such freedom is of the utmost importance for the continuance of our free existence as persons. But such freedom of religion should not only mean freedom to attend the church of one's choice, but also the freedom to practice what each citizen believes to be in accordance with his deepest convictions regarding fundamental issues. Freedom and justice for all the citizens of a nation must involve, among other things, the right to work with the religious differences between citizens kept intact, the right to work under fair and equal conditions, the right to work without having humanistically oriented unions allowed by the law of the land to force their brand of secular pragmatic-humanist trade unionism upon Christian workers and without having to leave one's religion and worship of God at the factory or shop door.

At present, industries in Britain and North America, in most cases, have their workers represented by only one union and cooperation between unions within the same shop or industry is not considered to be the Anglo-Saxon way. Only one faith, that of pragmatic-humanists, is allowed to structure and to determine labor policies. The demand that every worker in one concern or plant must have his rights defended before management by one union is an expression of the Anglo-Saxon view that in public matters there must be no division in the community. This is a result of the demand for unity at all costs – even at the expense of a Christian solution to labor problems. A Christian trade union is allowed to exist but it must fit the existing legislative pattern laid down in Canada by the infamous Rand decision. On January 29, 1946, Justice I. C. Rand awarded the International Union, United Automobile, Aircraft and Agriculture Implement Workers of America (U.A.W.-C.I.O.) the right of the compulsory checkoff of union dues from the wages of all workers at the Ford Motor Company at Windsor, Ontario, whether they were union members or not. Rand gave his reasons as follows:

I consider it entirely equitable then that all employees should be required to shoulder their portion of the burden of expense for administering the law of their employment, the union contract; that they must take the burden along with the benefit. The obligation to pay dues should tend to induce membership, and this in turn to promote that wider interest and control within the union which is the condition of progressive responsibility. If that should prove to be the case, the device employed will have justified itself. The union on its part will always have the spur to justify itself to the majority of the employees in the power of the latter to change their bargaining representatives.¹⁹

The Rand formula only adds insult to injury. It makes the Christian worker support with his dues secular humanist organizations in which he cannot possibly join because of his religious convictions. It is a blatant example of taxation without representation. Would Rand compel Christians also to support a synagogue?

Because of the division of men in their basic convictions about human life, there is an antithesis between them that affects not only their ecclesiastical institutions but also their economic organizations. For Christian workers to organize their own trade unions is simply to indicate that they can have no part in today's secular unions, for their Christian principles must lead them to build their own forms of labor life. Thus, in industries, where there are workers with contesting life-and-world views, justice requires that there must be provided by law a pluralistic rather than a unitary method of representation so that all workers may enjoy the freedom to live out of their own convictions. For this reason all lovers of the Lord Jesus Christ who wish to witness for Him at work must demand of the American, British, and Canadian government that changes be made in the existing legislation in the field of labor laws to permit plural representation in labor contracts. The present practice of granting exclusive bargaining rights to one so-called "neutral" union for all the employees in any given plant or shop must be abolished. In a free and "open" society such a practice is most unjust. The state should not delegate the power of the sword to any one particular association of workers, but it should recognize and protect the emergence and growth of a variety of voluntary free associations, including labor unions. When, for example, a Christian labor organization is formed as a result of the desires of a number of Christian workmen, such a formation should not be hindered by the state, but on the contrary it should be made possible and even encouraged. The role of the state in such an instance is not that it forbids or commands such a formation, but that it provides the legal possibilities and conditions for such a formation. Unless such spontaneous and free associations of this kind are possible, we are in effect living in a closed rather than an open society. Indeed, the very survival of freedom in the English-speaking world depends upon such spontaneous and free activities of the people. A Christian labor organization should no more be discriminated against by the state than a church or Christian school. Men may be born into the state and the family without any choice in the matter, but to my knowledge no one has ever yet dared to suggest that men are born into secular neutral trade unions. For these reasons Christians should agitate for the adoption of plural representation of workers in accordance with their life-and-world views in collective bargaining at their places of work.

In a report submitted by the Reverend David F. Summers to Bishop H. R. Hunt of Toronto Diocese, it is claimed that such a system of plural representation of workers in the process of col­lective bargaining is something peculiarly of Dutch origin and that it would not work in Canada. Summers points out that in Holland organizations of industry and labor are established on religious or ideological lines. Each employers' and employees' organization starts from certain premises concerning the most desirable social order, from which are derived rather specific ideas about the respective responsibilities of management, capital, labor, and government. The Dutch organizations are concerned not only with wages, hours, and conditions of work, but also with political, cultural, and ideological matters. As W. F. de Gaay Fortman explains it:

The idea that lies at the base of this relationship is as follows: every employers' organization and every trade union starts from certain premises concerning the most desirable social order. Each of them wants to make the structure of industrial life conform to certain cherished ideals about the relation of the state to industry, about the respective responsibilities of management, capital, and labour, and about the relation of nationalized sectors of industry to private sectors. The trade unions are concerned not only with attaining material improvements for the workers; they seek also to give them an independent, responsible place in the industrial process. Apart from this, they take an increasingly active interest in the cultural development of their members. In all this work, they start from premises of a religious or ideological nature. The patterns of society derive their forms from the philosophy of life on which they are based.

This way of thinking has led in the Netherlands to the founding of Catholic and Protestant employers' and trade unions alongside those which call themselves general. Given the existence of organizations with a religious base, the other, "general" organizations also tend to take on an ideological cast.²⁰

In the conduct of collective bargaining:

1. Representatives from the central organizations of Catholic, Protestant and neutral management groups plus a few unaffiliated groups meet with…
2. Representatives from the three central trade union groups (aug­mented by a few independent groups), and
3. Representatives from the Dutch Government.

Wage rates and social security matters are discussed, and policies are agreed to at national, industry wide levels. So, too, at the plant level the various ideological groups meet first separately and then jointly to work out the application of the general pattern. Local working conditions that are too specific to be dealt with at a higher level are discussed by local committees representative of all the groups concerned.

Comparing this Dutch pluralistic system with the unitary Canadian one, Summers said in his report to Bishop Hunt:

The differences between the Dutch and Canadian systems of collective bargaining are immediately apparent. In our industrial relations the plant or shop is the basic unit. Each employer deals with his own employees, so it is at this level that the cooperation of all employees is required. Our system is posited on an approach which would make it difficult if not impossible for employer and employee groups of the Dutch pattern to operate effectively. One bargaining unit of employees is represented by one union which is chosen by democratic vote of the employees concerned. Our law makes no provision for two or more organizations to represent the employees concerned, nor does it allow for these to be proportionately represented by a bargaining committee – a proposal the C.L.A.C. has put forward. Indeed, certification expressly forbids such an arrangement. Industry wide bargaining, though suggested by a few unionists, is not well received as an idea, and does not exist in practice in Canada.

The C.L.A.C., in beginning from the premises of the Dutch system described by Fortman, and attempting to operate within the framework of our Labour Relations Act, has run into some very difficult problems. It is posed with a dilemma which can only be resolved by a considerable alteration in their approach or a radical change in our legal provisions. Either system is workable, but a mixture of the two contains elements of contradiction which make any apparent compromise unworkable.²¹

Summers then continued in his report to argue in favor of retaining the present North American labor relations legislation which expressly makes it impossible for more than one union to represent the workers. In reply, let it first be pointed out that Christian influence in industry is likely to be strong only to the extent that Christians are a strong and organized force, made up of workers and employers soaked in Christian principles, and in a legal position to demonstrate their principles in action. Such organized witness counts far more than all the pietistic moralizing in the world. One could accept Summer's plea for Christians to remain within existing neutral labor unions if the unions had not become so blatantly socialistic or pragmatic in their aims and objectives. Summers ob­jects to the Christian Labor Association because of its religious orientation but he does not express similar objections against the humanistic coloring of the neutral trade unions. However, he is less than fair when he accuses the C.L.A.C. of seeking to use the union meeting as a forum for the conversion of people to Calvinistic theology. On the contrary, the C.L.A.C. welcomes every worker who desires to apply "the Christian principles of social justice and love as taught in the Bible." The organization is not limited to people who are committed to a certain theological position, but it is open to all who "pledge to uphold the Constitution and by-laws of the C.L.A.C." Nor is the C.L.A.C. an organization under the direction of Reformed clergymen, but an organization of the workers themselves. Any worker is free to join, provided he can support its aims and objectives.

On this very matter of supposed religious discrimination the C.L.A.C. has won a resounding legal victory against the Ontario Labour Relations Board which had for so long refused to certify it as a bona fide legal bargaining agents for its Christian workers because of its supposed discrimination. On May 2, 1963, Chief Justice J. C. McRuer quashed the O.L.R.B.'s refusal to certify the C.L.A.C. In his judgment McRuer pointed out:

In my view the Board made a grievous error in the application of judicial principles by placing on the applicant for certification an onus to establish that the present union as reconstituted does not discriminate on the basis of creed because an officer in the union as previously constituted gave evidence on which the Board based a finding of discrimination. To accept such a principle of judicial determination would place on any union that had been discredited by its officers at a previous hearing the onus of proving that it was non-discriminating in a subsequent application. This would leave it open for irresponsible officers to completely discredit a union and shift the onus of proof in all future applications. There is no legal basis on which the Board could place on the applicant any special onus in the case.

The Chief Justice concluded by saying:

In this matter the Board erred in the discharge of their judicial duties. They were doing worse than giving a decision in the "teeth of the evidence," and thus acting unjudicially and in a manner not authorized by the statute.²²

McRuer then proceeded to examine the C.L.A.C.'s constitution to see "if there is anything in it to support a finding that the union discriminates within the meaning of the relevant statutes." He referred to the statement made by the Labor Board's counsel who had said during the hearing "he was hard put" to point to anything in the constitution on which one could have found a decision that the union discriminated against a person because of his creed. After reviewing the meaning of the word "creed," the judge examined the C.L.A.C.'s constitutional provisions to see "if it discriminates against any person because of its creed" and he concluded that the Labour Board "misconstrued" its clear language and the law.

To the Board's objection and contention that the requirement and practice "that every meeting held in the interest of or under the auspices of the C.L.A.C. shall be opened and closed with prayer, with Scripture reading and the singing of an appropriate hymn at the option of the presiding officers," were inconsistent with the obligation not to discriminate, Justice McRuer said:

It cannot be said that in law a requirement that the meetings of a trade union must be opened with prayer makes the trade union discriminatory within the meaning of section ten of the Labour Relations Act or section Four of the Fair Employment Practices Act. Prayer is a supplication for divine guidance. It is true that it is a recognition of a supreme being. However, the Legislature that passed the Labour Relations Act opened its sessions the day the Act was passed with prayer. Likewise the Parliament of Canada opens its daily sessions with prayer. The British National Anthem, used as the Canadian National Anthem, is a prayer. The Bill of Rights, Statutes of Canada 1960, chapter 44 affirms "that the Canadian nation is founded upon principles that acknowledge the supremacy of God." The oaths of Her Majesty's Judges and Ministers together with the oaths of office of all public officials, all acknowledge the supremacy of God.

Prayer is not a subscription to any creed in the sense that the word is used in the relevant statutes nor is the practice of singing hymns and psalms at the meetings of the union a subscription to a creed. Psalms as sung and hymns, are merely poetry set to music and for the most part they are prayers. If I supported the Board's refusal to certify the union on the ground that its members engage in prayer, read passages from the Bible and sing psalms and hymns at their meetings, the result would be that a union that required no standards of ethical or moral conduct and opened its meetings by reading from Karl Marx and singing the Red International might he certified but one that permits the practices here in question could not be. I do not think that this was the intention of the Ontario Legislature nor do I think that the express terms of the relevant statutes prevent unions from engaging in devotional exercises of the character set in the constitution of the applicant from being certified.²³

It would thus appear that Justice McRuer has a truer understanding of these matters than does the Reverend David Summers, Executive Secretary of the Religion and Labor Council of Canada.

What ulterior motive did Mr. Summers and Bishop Hunt conceal when they refused the writer's request for help for the Christian Labor Association in its struggle against the Ontario Labour Relations Board in 1962? Can it be that Bishop Hunt and Mr. Summers would rather see the C.L.A.C. destroyed than survive?

After examining relevant sections of the Constitution and its statement of principles and practices Justice McRuer concluded that he could discover no evidence of unlawful discrimination:

My conclusion is that neither the Constitution nor the declared practices and principles of this union bring it within the prohibitions of the relevant statutes. It is not to be overlooked that the statutes do not prohibit discrimination, but only discrimination on certain stated grounds. All trade unions discriminate against members who will not subscribe to certain doctrines or beliefs of trade unionism. In the broad sense these could be called creeds, but they are not creeds as I construe the meaning of the word "creed" in the statutes … As I have emphasized, what is prohibited is certification of a trade union that "discriminates against any person because of his creed." This is a restrictive clause and must be interpreted accordingly. My conclusion is that the Board erred in three main respects:

a)   In coming to its decision it resorted to evidence that was given before the Board at hearings of applications for certification by the same union in 1954 and 1958 when the union was differently constituted…

b)   The Board misinterpreted the meaning of the statute as applied to the Constitution and bylaws of the union.

c)   There was no legal evidence on which the Board could base its findings that the union was discriminatory within the meaning of the statute.

An order will go quashing the order of the Board with costs.²⁴

Against the necessity for Christian labor organizations it has been argued that Christians would do better to witness in secular unions. To this the reply is of course Christians in neutral organizations can and do meet other Christians for discussion at the level of principles. But, being involved to the extent that, they are with non-Christians, they are not so steeped in Christian principles as people who belong to the Christian labor unions. It must be pointed out that the various institutional expressions of the Christian life-and world view depend on and support one another. In this regard, writing of the Dutch situation, Fogarty well points out:

As Dutch Christians of all denominations traditionally insist, the various institutions of Christian life depend on and support one another. The press supports the unions and the unions support the party, and so on: all combining to ensure that members' political, economic, and social decisions are taken against a thoroughly Christian background. Each influence gains in strength from its combination with others. And this argument also works in reverse. Breaking away from the Christian parties may be the thin edge of the wedge. Those who take the first step may take others, to the non-Christian trade unions or press or schools, and the whole Christian environment of decisions then breaks up.²⁵

While not denying that there is need for small numbers of highly trained apostles and specialists to live amongst and penetrate neutral or humanist organizations, it is also necessary to remain aware of the danger that even specialists may fail to maintain a genuinely Chris­tian line in a "neutral" or even anti-Christian environment. The most striking example of this was the collapse in 1953 of the first phase of the worker-priests' movement in France. Worker priests were launched into a largely pagan environment subject to highly organized Marxist influence. Many of them had little opportunity of maintaining contact with their base. A number as a result were penetrated by their environment instead of penetrating it, and the Pope rightly had to stop the dangerous experiment.²⁶

For these reasons it is imperative that Christians strive to establish their own distinctive Christian organizations, and to do so they must first establish a system of plural representation of workers in collective bargaining. Naturally, the introduction of such a multiple bargaining system would not work if it were not accompanied by a genuine sense of cooperation and a mutual respect for differences in fundamental values and viewpoints. Such conflicting viewpoints might not seem to be conducive for much cooperation. But that is exactly why the development of independent Christian organizations is so necessary if the Christian workers in America, Britain, and Canada are ever to enjoy the freedom to serve God in their jobs. With a willingness to cooperate on the part of neutral and Christian workers much could be achieved. Many of the more technical problems related to collective bargaining could he tackled together. There are undoubtedly areas of activities which lend themselves to such cooperative efforts between workers of differing life-and-world views. Yet this need not interfere with the independence of the various organizations. Each organization could work for the realization of those goals it considers desirable. Thus, the possibility of the development of various organizations in accordance with the deepest wishes and convictions of different people would be made possible. Such an opening up process would be of great advantage to the people directly involved and to the development of a truly free society.

It might be further objected that such a proposal would make for a cumbersome and more complex labor relations situation, and should thus be rejected. In reply, let it be said that our entire democratic system is equally complex and exactly for the same good reason, viz., because it gives an opportunity for different people to seek to realize divergent aims and values in life. The burden of freedom is heavy, as Eric Fromm has explained in his Fear of Freedom. But the burden of slavery is much heavier because in totalitarian and "closed" societies, such as Red China and Soviet Russia, the attempt is made to reduce each individual person to a part of the uniform whole. Yet such uniformity is deadly to the human spirit, and what is more, it can never achieve real community between men. The human person was not created by God for such experiments in "social engineering," and the state cannot create real community among all its citizens by compulsion. That is why attempts to do so such as that advocated by Rousseau in the "Social Contract" never will meet with success.

What would such a system of plural representation involve? First, let it be pointed out that it would not mean that the employer would have to bargain separately with each union and conclude separate and possibly different collective labor agreements. Such an arrangement would indeed be cumbersome and impractical. It is essential that the same wages and conditions should apply to all em­ployees of the same employer; otherwise the employer might be tempted to play one group of workers off against the other.

The system would involve a representative council or works committee being elected in each place of employment where different unions would be allowed by law to exist and to recruit their members. Such a council would be composed on the basis of the relative membership strength of the total number of workers in any given shop, plant or works. This council, in consultation with its own groups of employees, could then work together in framing policies and in bargaining with the employer about conditions of work, wages, etc. This would require that the multiple groups should reach agreement among themselves before a bargaining ses­sion with the employer takes place. Each group could also provide whatever service would be required, e.g., the processing of agreements for its own members. This arrangement would solve the problem of the one union incurring expenses and providing benefits for non-members. An added advantage would be that some workers who presently have no voice in the affairs of their employment would be enabled to join in union activities. Above all such a system of plural union representation of workers in one plant or shop would keep each particular union competitive and on its toes. The union which rendered the best and most efficient service to its members would tend to obtain the greatest number of workers.

If such a principle of proportionate representation of workers could be enacted into existing labor legislation, it would greatly reduce the internecine struggles for power between the bigger unions; for example, the struggle for power between two unions for the right to represent the employees of the International Nickel Company in Sudbury, Ontario. Those who favor the Communist-led union over the United Steelworkers of America could belong to the Mine-Mill organization. The others would be free to join the Steelworkers. Such a method of plural representation would give all the workers a real choice and they would not be forced, as they now are, to accept the decisions of a union which obtained representation only by a small majority. Only by such means of plural representation can the existing pluralistic character of post-Christian Atlantic society be adequately and justly reflected in the field of labor relations. Only by such a method of union representation will there be freedom and justice for all workers, including Christian workers. Such industrial pluralism alone can reform the present deformed labor relations presently existing in the American, British, and Canadian economies.

In support of this principle of plural union representation of workers in one plant or shop, Evan Runner in a speech titled "Can Canada Tolerate the C.L.A.C." concluded with this appeal to the humanist leaders in government:

The majority of western men today are not Christian believers. The error of the rationalists was that they continued to hold on to the medieval idea of a single monolithic society. And T. S. Eliot is still thinking along these lines. Instead of his Idea of a Christian Society we would propose that we develop a Christian idea of society, where the fact of a plurality of faiths (including the rationalist's faith in ratio or the scientist's faith in operationalism) is recognized. … Toleration is really possible to the greatest degree only in a pluralist society. We Christians no longer wish to impose our views on others who do not agree with us. We simply do not wish the humanist dogma to be imposed on us. We want each faith to be free to organize the several areas of life struggle, at least those where the crucial struggles of a particular era are concentrated. This has been the Achilles' heel of the humanist society. Humanism made what it called Reason absolute, and permitted it to set the limits of toleration. It failed to see its view of Reason as a kind of religious commitment, and in fact identified its own private, partisan, sectarian and subjective faith with the universal and necessary rational equipment of human beings. It saw its own faith as axiomatic and of the very structure of scientific method, thus as public, universal and objective, in contrast with the Christian faith and other faiths as private and subjective. This was simply to secure to the humanist faith an apparently impregnable position in human culture and to make its own impregnability the criterion and measure of toleration. As Walter Lippman, speaking for humanism, put it in his book The Public Philosophy: "Originally it (the meaning of freedom) was founded on the postulate that there was a universal order on which all reasonable men were agreed; within that public agreement on the fundamentals and on the ultimates it was safe to permit and it would be desirable to encourage dissent and dispute." For the organization of contemporary society we Christians find such a position intolerant and intolerable.

We appeal to the humanists in our society not to allow an old dogma to get in the way of true humanity. There have always been a large number of people in Anglo-Saxon countries who consider themselves beyond any particular ideology or system of belief and wish to see squarely the existing states of affairs. We appeal to all such to recognize the characteristics of absolute religious commitment in the old rationalism, to acknowledge that it will be impossible to remove the plurality of faiths that at present exist, and to work with us towards a truly pluralist and humane society.²⁷

4.  The Reformational Understanding of Race Relations←⤒🔗

Of all the intractable problems now facing mankind none is more serious than that of the relations between the different races and nations of the world. In the last book he wrote before his assassination Martin Luther King said in Chaos or Community:

There is the convenient temptation to attribute the current turmoil and bitterness throughout the world to the presence of a Communist conspiracy to undermine Europe and America, but the potential explosiveness of our world situation is much more attributable to disillusionment with the promises of Christianity and technology…

Once the aspirations and appetites of the world have been whetted by the marvels of Western technology and the self-image of a people awakened by religion, one cannot hope to keep people locked out of the earthly kingdom of wealth, health and happiness. Either they share in the blessings of the world or they organize to break down and overthrow these structures or governments which stand in the way of their goals.²⁸

In spite of some moves toward a just solution of the problem, the main trend of the twentieth century has been toward racist solutions of intergroup problems. Never in the world's history has there been so much mass slaughter, expulsion of minorities, and division of territory along ethnic lines as during the past sixty years. Among the humanist solutions proposed and used we distinguish the following.²⁹

1.  Annihilation or Genocide←↰⤒🔗

Looking at the most wicked of the apostate humanist solutions, we find that carried out by the Nazi Party of Germany under Hitler's leadership. Between coming to power in 1933 and their defeat in 1945 by the Allied armies of the West and Soviet Russia, the Nazis destroyed more than five million Jews, with a brutal and scientific efficiency. Hitler looked upon the Jews as a kind of germ infecting the body politic and thus justified his terrible final solution. Another example of mass extermination occurred in the Hindu-Moslem dispute over the partition of India in 1948, a conflict which resulted in the death of over three million people. Such a method of solving racial disputes no Christian could ever contemplate, since he believes that God has created all men of every race, colour, and nation under heaven in His own holy image. As the Book of Acts puts it, "God that made the world … hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth, and hath determined the times before appointed, and the bounds of their habitation" (Acts 17:24, 26). God did not originally create several independent human races or nations. He created one human pair, from whom have descended all the nations of the earth. All men as creatures are, therefore, brothers, related to one another by ties of blood and common creaturely origin. Moreover, God ordained that the human race should live in accordance with His Law. Legally, morally, and spiritually the several nations and peoples of the world have been given a common law, the law of God, which binds them together and should determine their relationships. On the basis of this common law, genocide is prohibited as an affront to the majesty of the creator, and because man is made in God's image (Gen. 9:6).

2.  Expulsion and Partition←↰⤒🔗

A less barbarous solution to the problem of race relations also much used in our terrible twentieth century has been partition and expulsion. Owing to nationalism, the idea that a nation should be composed of those who share a similar ethnic and lingual background has been especially popular in recent times.

A mass shifting of population has resulted from the attempt to make political boundaries coincide with ethnic groupings. People whose families have lived in certain areas for hundreds of years suddenly found themselves declared undesirable aliens and they were forced to move elsewhere. Examples of this solution may be found in the expulsion of the Greeks from Turkey and of Turks from Greece, the partition of Palestine into a Jewish state and an Arab state after the Second World War – with the expulsion of over a million Arabs – the division of Ireland into a Roman Catholic part and a Protestant part, the partition of India between Moslems and Hindus. Proof that no group is secure against the effects of such a policy is seen in the fate of the Germans living outside the boun­daries of Germany. Over ten million Germans were ordered, after World War II, to leave areas in Central and Eastern Europe where their families had lived for centuries. It is possible that white minorities may one day be expelled from parts of Africa.

During World War II both Russia and the United States forced ethnic groups to move from one part of the country to other areas. The Russians broke up the Volga German Republic and transported its inhabitants to Siberia. The United States placed thousands of West Coast Japanese in detention camps located hundreds of miles from their homes. Little is known of the ultimate fate of these Volga Germans, whose ancestors had been invited to Russia by Peter the Great. The United States eventually reversed its policy and allowed the Japanese to live where they wished when the government realized that they were entirely loyal.

3.  Segregation and Discrimination←↰⤒🔗

This type of solution to the problem of race relations, though much less brutal than the methods just described, is even more widespread. In a great many countries the attitude toward members of subordinate groups is that they should be allowed to function only in a way that serves the interest of the dominant group; in other words, discrimination. The essence of discrimination in this sense is a practice that treats equal people unequally, in that members of different ethnic groups do not have the same opportunities to compete for social rewards.

The practice of segregation implies that contacts between the subordinates and the dominant group will be confined to those which are essential for the direction of the subordinates in their labors.

Subordinates may come into contact with the dominant group as household servants or as workers in farming and industry. However, purely social contacts are greatly restricted, or, if possible, altogether eliminated.

The segregation-discrimination pattern is probably most perfectly developed in the traditional Hindu caste system of India, in which the occupations that people may perform are carefully defined by one's caste, intermarriage is taboo, eating at the same table as a member of a different caste forbidden, and separation is the rule in most social relations. Ely Chinoy points out in Society:

Indian society is usually divided into four inclusive castes – the Brahmins, or priests, the Kshatriya, or warriors, the Vaisya, or merchants, and the Sudra, or peasants. There are, in addition, the outcasts or untouchables, those who have been expelled from their caste, either in their own persons or in that of their ancestors, for violations of the rigidly enforced codes of caste behavior. In 1931, the most recent date for which figures are available, approxi­mately 6 percent of India's Hindu population were Brahmins, just over 70 percent belonged to other castes, and over 20 percent were untouchables.³⁰

In Southern Africa there have been three distinct approaches to the problem of race relations: (a) the South African approach of separate development or apartheid; (b) the Rhodesian approach of multi-racism, and (c) the Portuguese approach of full integration.

The strange thing is that all three approaches have evoked the concentrated hostility of the United Nations and so-called world public opinion. Thus the impartial observer can only conclude that race is not really the issue at all, but merely the ogre created to whip up emotion and trouble in the councils of mankind.

What, then, is South Africa's real crime? The answer must be that she has dared to call in question that great sacred cow of our revolutionary age, the godless dogma that sovereignty over the individual resides in the general will of the majority rather than in the revealed will of Almighty God written in the Holy Scriptures.

It is tragic that many Christians in America, Britain, and Canada have condemned South Africa and Rhodesia in identical terms, that is, the necessity for majority rule and the sovereignty of apostate man's rational will rather than in terms of a Christian doctrine of culture, government, and society. After twenty years experience of working with black Christians in Rhodesia the Venerable A. R. Lewis, Archdeacon of Inyanga, Rhodesia, writes this comment upon this issue:

A Christian, presumably, should be concerned with the actual merits of the case. Is there anything specially Christian, or morally imperative, about the "majority rule" which is demanded at once or in the very near future? Since majority rule is probably an impossibility, if not strictly a contradiction in terms, it would perhaps be better to speak of "universal adult male suffrage." That is what is meant. This has only to be stated for it to become obvious that there have been Christian societies in the past, as there are Christian societies today, conducted on quite different lines. Britain herself had a limited and qualified franchise until quite recently, and this at a time when she was more, not less Christian than she is now. It is simply untrue to suggest that a just and Christian society must practice universal adult male suffrage, though of course in some circumstances it may do so. One would suppose that the welfare of the majority and the protection of minorities ought to be the primary Christian concerns. If this is so, much of the criticism directed against Rhodesia (and we may add South Africa) might be more relevantly levelled at the new black-ruled one party states and military governments…

If it is true that an essential difference between Britain and Rhodesia concerns the "sixth principle" advanced in negotiation by Britain – that any settlement must be acceptable to the people as a whole – two questions must be asked at once. Why does this principle not apply to black-ruled states? And, since it has been accepted long ago by the Rhodesian government anyway – are we not back, in practice, at the demand for one man one vote? Is it not assumed that the majority must decide what is good for the people through the ballot box?

This assumption takes no account of the fact that the ballot-box is a western device which is not the natural mode of self-expression for non-western peoples … It overlooks the practical consequence of forcing this device on simple semi-literate communities_; the demagogue can get himself into power by threats and extravagant promises; and once in control can establish a tyranny which it may be impossible to bring down without violence. This is a demonstrable fact, and Rhodesians are entitled to ask British Christians to take it into account. It is noteworthy that those churchmen who stridently demand "one man one vote" now are usually either not in Rhodesia at all, or are in a position to depart hastily if they wish when the bloodshed begins. Unlike the ordinary African they have no stake in the country.³¹

4.  Assimilation←↰⤒🔗

The solution which most appeals to apostate "liberal" humanists is full racial and cultural integration. In Race and Ethnic Relations Brewton Berry defines assimilation as follows:

By assimilation we mean the process whereby groups with different cultures come to have a common culture … Assimilation refers to the fusion of cultural heritages, and must be distinguished from amalgamation, which denotes the biological mixture of originally distinct racial strains. It must be distinguished, too, from naturalization, a political concept denoting the act or process of admitting an alien to the status and privileges of a citizen. Americanization, of course, is simply a special case of assimilation, and refers to the process whereby a person of some foreign heritage acquires the customs, ideals and loyalties of American society, just as Europeanization, Russianization and Germanization denote a similar process with respect to these cultures.³²

The classic example of the assimilation of disparate cultural and ethnic groups into a common society is seen in the integration of European immigrants in the United States. Such immigrants came from a number of national cultures with a wide variety of languages, customs, dietary habits, family patterns, and general attitudes towards life. The first reaction of immigrants was usually to settle in ethnic colonies, either in small towns or in urban neighborhoods. Often they viewed the United States as a temporary refuge where they might stay until an unfriendly political regime in their European homeland had disappeared, or until they had saved up enough money to retire in comfort in their homelands. Many immigrants did spend their entire period of sojourn in ethnic colonies surrounded by fellow nationals, and a considerable number were able to return to Europe as they had planned. The majority of immigrants, however, remained in the United States, and either they or their descendants moved out of the ethnic colonies as their assimilation progressed to such an extent that their European background became only a faint memory.

In the opinion of American "liberals" it is unfortunate that non-white Americans did not become as easily integrated into the common humanistic society. Instead, the prevailing pattern in America has been the integration of Caucasian immigrants and the segregation of other groups. The "liberals" have therefore embarked upon the dangerous policy of forcible assimilation of whites and non-whites. On May 17, 1954, the Supreme Court, in Brown v. Board of Education, held that segregation in state public education was inherently discriminatory and unconstitutional. In a companion case, the Court struck down school segregation by federal authorities in the District of Columbia. These rulings at one stroke transferred the legal sanction and moral authority of the nation's basic law from the segregationist forces to the civil rights advocates and unleashed a Pandora's box full of troubles, of which the black students' riots at America's "Ivy League" universities and colleges in 1969 are only a harbinger of worse troubles to come.

The black students are rightly demanding all-black studies departments on college campuses along with other forms of black separatism. They do not wish to see the American Negro suffer the same fate of extinction as the Maoris of New Zealand, whose culture has been killed by kindness. Negroes in America were from 1619 to at least 1868 deprived of their African languages, culture, and identity. Black college students today want desperately to find that identity.

Black colleges have to date been the most successful in rediscovering African culture and in giving to black students a collective self-assurance and a sense of cultural unity. Well over 50 percent of Negroes who attend college, however, go to predominantly white institutions. Such black students in white colleges perceive their loss and demand that black studies be added to the curriculum. They are calling for separate dormitories and autonomous racial schools within colleges and universities. Of these demands the Rev. Robert F. Drinan, S. J., Dean of Boston College Law School and a close observer of the civil rights scene, writes:

The New York Times termed this phenomenon "a militant black withdrawal into campus ghettoes" and called it "a disease." This type of misleading rhetoric does not take account of the profound apartness and lack of self-identification which the Negro student feels on a predominantly white campus.

The fact is that black students, almost always confined to a separate and unequal world prior to their coming to an all-white campus, should be expected and encouraged to harmonize their past experiences with their present training.

The excruciating nature of the search for identity which confronts the black student on a white campus can be only dimly perceived by a white observer. This writer, recently talking to a Ne­gro student from Virginia at one of New England's prestigious colleges, asked him how he liked it. He replied "Most of the time I wish I had gone to Fisk or Tuskegee or More house. It would have been easier there to find out who I am."

That poignant statement illuminates the depth of the frustrations which prompts appeals for black dormitories and cries for all-Negro departments.³³

5.  Cultural Pluralism←↰⤒🔗

It is also a classic argument for cultural and ethnic pluralism. Of all the methods considered so far cultural pluralism would seem to be the one most in line with the scriptural view of race relations. The great Council of Jerusalem ruled that it would be an infringement upon the Christian's newly found freedom in Christ to enforce cultural and racial integration between Jewish and Gentile Christians by requiring circumcision of the latter as a condition of membership of the Universal Church (Acts 15). It was laid down that Gentile Christians should continue to live according to their own cultural laws, customs, and ceremonies. As Adolf Schlatter says in The Church in the New Testament Period:

The chief result of the agreement between St. Paul and the Jerusalem Church was that in the Church the Jews and the gentiles were not assimilated, but each kept their own traditions unimpaired by any attempt at uniformity. Thus the Church became heir to both traditions. Having taken over from the Jews their Scriptures and their ethic, the Church was no less open to the priceless contributions of their Greek tradition.³⁴

It is the failure to distinguish between assimilation and integration in the sense of equal rights before the law which is responsible for most of America's present racial troubles. As Sir Mark Bonham Carter, Chairman of Britain's Race Relations Board, said in The Sunday Telegraph on July 30, 1967:

The Americans never made up their minds about what they were trying to achieve. Until very recently assimilation and integration were almost interchangeable words. Here the present Home Secretary's first statement on race relations made it quite clear that the Government's policy was not a flattening process of assimilation, but integration, which he defined as equal opportunity, accompanied by cultural diversity in an atmosphere of mutual tolerance.³⁵

The idea of human equality before the law should not lead us to overlook the differences between individuals as well as between groups and races. Injustice has often occurred in the past by treating unequals in an equal manner as by treating equals in an unequal manner.

America is surely mature enough to allow full freedom to each of her various and wonderfully diverse cultural groups to develop in accordance with their own deepest aspirations. Why should the "liberals" seek to push their philosophy of drab uniformity down the throats of other groups? Only by means of cultural pluralism can freedom now be preserved in America. If Switzerland and Canada can make such a policy work, surely it is not beyond the wit of Americans to do the same.

In Switzerland, Protestants and Catholics have been able to live agreeably together under the same government, while speaking German, French, and Italian. Since the Swiss citizen does not feel that his religious loyalty or his ethnic identification is threatened by other Swiss, he is free to give a complete allegiance to the Swiss nation as a common government which allows for the tolerance of distinctly different cultural groups. Canada, with the division between the French and the English, and Belgium, with a division between the French and the Flemish speaking population, are other examples of cultural and ethnic pluralism. The different groups who make up a pluralistic society in these nations frequently engage in a struggle for influence, but the essential idea is that national patriotism does not require cultural or racial uniformity, and that differences of nationality, religion, language, and race do not preclude loyalty to a common national government and are in fact to be welcomed.

In America both the Indian and Jewish segments of the population have rightly resisted attempts to become assimilated into the great American "melting pot." The Orthodox Jews in America, who constitute the majority of Jews, certainly are not assimilationists. Rabbi Milton Steinberg believes that most assimilatory efforts in the past have resulted only in the dejudaizing of the Jew without winning for him gentile acceptance. Nor does he believe in Jews withdrawing from active participation in public life. "I do not now envisage, nor have I practiced, withdrawal from the general life of America." He insists, instead, that one may remain loyal to Jewish religion and tradition without its militating in the least against full participation in the common political life of the nation. He calls this "cultural dualism," and says of it:

Any program for the Jewish group must meet a twofold test of acceptability – the welfare of the Jewish group, and the welfare of America … America is best served by its Jews when they strive to exploit the special resources of their group.³⁶

Do Jews and Negroes need to be assimilated to escape minority status? And do they want to be assimilated, to be forced to give up their own cultural identity? James B. McKee answers these questions in his Introduction to Sociology. He writes:

To suggest assimilation into the majority culture is to imply the superiority and desirability of the cultural ways of the majority, and to denigrate the contrasting cultural life of the minority. But a new sense of appreciation of the diversity of cultures, a new value orientation to ethnicity suggests to some that the loss of diversity through assimilation will lessen the cultural richness of America.

But the crux of pluralism lies, not in whether the majority sees the preservation of diversity as a cultural asset, but whether the minority group sees it as a viable and meaningful objective. The Jewish community has long accepted pluralism as a dominant value, for it constitutes a way in which the Jewish group can maintain its own integrity, while continuing to have an equality of life-chances in that society. Perhaps more significantly, the new Negro objective of a black community, the often aggressive rejection of the goal of integration of the "white liberal" leadership of civil rights, the explicit call for separatism by some militant leaders, and the new pattern of cultural preference for things black and African, suggests that a racial version of pluralism may be emerging as a new and significant aspect of American race relations.³⁷

In view of the failure of the "liberal" policy of forcible assimilation of different ethnic groups in American society and the confusion of assimilation with the political principle of integration in the sense of providing justice for all, let us pray that all Americans come to realize and to accept the advantages of a policy which openly accepts unity in diversity. Such a cultural and ethnic pluralism is in fact the only one in accordance with God's revealed will in the Bible, and so the only policy that will really work.

6.  The Scriptural Basis for Cultural and Ethnic Pluralism←↰⤒🔗

The Church of Jesus Christ both as an institution and as an organism functions in the social modality of God's creation. Inherent in the life of faith is communion with God and with our fellow be­lievers. This fellowship is of a spiritual nature and it must not be reduced to social intercourse in the ordinary sense, in which it is subjected to the peculiar norms of chivalry, conviviality, tact, and fashion. It does, however, point back to the modal moment of the social aspect and binds the faith aspect to it.

In the social sphere the church as the Body of Christ is qualified by its faith in Jesus Christ as the Lord and Savior of human life in its entirety and not by any rationalistic doctrine of "liberty, equality, and fraternity," apart from Him. It is at this point that Christians who accept the Word of God as the ordering principle of their lives will part company with many "liberal" and modernist Christians as well as ecumenists. Beguiled by Harnack's reduction of Christianity to the universal fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man, these persons seem to think that the Kingdom of God is pretty much equivalent to the moral, legal, and political unification of the whole human race. For them religion has become only a new aspect of moral activity with the result that the Kingdom of God has become stripped of the eschatological transcendence that belongs to it in the Gospels, a purely present and mundane commonwealth.

It is not, therefore, surprising to find such liberals, ecumenists, and modernists ardent supporters of the present attempt now being made in certain quarters to bring about full assimilation of races within the states of the English-speaking world. Such an attempt is no doubt motivated by the best intentions. Unfortunately, the road to hell has been paved with good intentions and the present campaign to bring about togetherness without God is no exception. It is not only impossible but anti-Christian to try to bring community be-between races by compulsion.

In The Basic Ideas of Calvinism H. Henry Meeter says in this regard:

Although all nations form a racial unity, there is also, according to Scripture, a definite place for such natural group formations as distinct nations. This important fact must not be overlooked. Had the human race remained sinless, there would have arisen in the organic life of men larger and lesser groups, each with its own cultural task and sovereignty in its own sphere commensurate with the task assigned to it. Sin, which has disrupted human life generally, has also worked havoc with the cultural demand of God to each of these groups, that they subdue the earth and accomplish the special task assigned to each of them. Instead of the unity which God had intended that organic groups should attain through diversity, each developing its own distinctive task, there arose an attempt at uniformity without distinctiveness. The classical biblical example of such godless uniformity is given to us in the story of the erection of the tower of Babel on the plains of Shinar. Had this project been executed, there would have arisen a godless world-empire, in which the subjugation of the earth and the development of the diversified talents of men and cultural tasks generally would have been retarded greatly, not to say defeated…

There are two basic factors inherent in the very nature of things which affect the way in which the several peoples of the earth should live together … The unity of the human race obliges them to live together as members of one family, but the distinct characteristics, the tastes and cultural tasks of the several nations and peoples call for a corresponding independence and sovereignty in their own spheres. This their God-given cultural duties demand.³⁸

If Americans now accept religious pluralism as the condition of peaceful relations between different churches and sects, why can they not accept cultural and ethnic pluralism as well, as the only workable solution to the problem of race relations. Why be ashamed of being born white or black? Why not accept the fact gladly and then work to build up pride in one's own race so that each race can make its own distinctive contribution to one's own country and then to mankind as a whole. As C. H. Dodd said in his lecture, Christianity and the Reconciliation of the Nations:

The New Testament ends with a glowing picture of the destination of human history. There is a vast concourse before the throne of God, from every nation, tribe, people and language, and there is the Holy City, with all the nations bringing their glory and honour into it, and walking in the light of the city where night never falls…

From this passage at least we may safely deduce that Christian­ity recognizes the grouping of mankind according to nationality, race and language as a fact of history falling within the divine purpose, but not as an ultimate fact about man, since it is to be transcended as history reaches its goal.³⁹

Although all nations form a basic unity in terms of a common descent from Adam and Eve, there is also, according to Scripture, a definite place for such natural groupings as distinct nations and races.

This important fact must never be overlooked. In the poem of Deuteronomy 32 we read:

When the Most High gave to the nations their inheritance
When he separated the sons of men,
He fixed the borders of the peoples
According to the number of the sons of God.
For Yahweh's portion is his people;
Jacob is his allotted inheritance.  Deuteronomy 32:8-9

Commenting on this passage in Principalities and Powers, G. B. Caird says:

Each nation, that is to say, has its own angelic ruler and guardian, except Israel, which comes under the direct sovereignty of God. The Deuteronomist does not seem to have been disturbed by the knowledge that the pagan nations worshipped their angelic rulers in the place of God. These rulers had been allotted to them by God alone and, provided that Israel was not seduced by their worship, the order of God's providence was not disturbed.⁴⁰

The Scriptures suggest that before the Flood mankind was not divided up into races, but was one race with a unity of speech (Gen. 11:1). It was also united in its purpose of defying God's command to fill the whole earth. Instead, mankind resolved "to build a city, and a tower, whose top may reach into heaven" (Gen. 11: 4). The Lord's verdict upon this attempt to achieve world peace and unity apart from Him by domination and exploitation (Gen. 10:9), was to "go down, and there confound their language that they may not understand one another's speech," and to scatter them "abroad thence upon the face of all the earth" (Gen. 11:7-9). In the Table of Nations we are told that this division of mankind into different language groups took place in the days of the patriarch Peleg (Gen. 10:25).

In the course of time this linguistic difference between the descendants of Noah was reinforced by ethnic differences. The Scriptures do not explain how and when these ethnic differences appeared. What God did was to change mankind's habits and tastes, as well as speech, so that these people no longer desired to live together. They were now living in distinct worlds of thought. Hence one went out in one direction, another in a different direction. This fact is clearly indicated by the genealogies of Genesis 10 and 11. In a fascinating article, "Racial Dispersion," R. Laird Harris points out that: "race is a physical term. The A.S.A. Symposium quotes Boas's definition that race is the 'assembly of genetic lines represented in a population.'" In terms of this genetic definition Harris then writes:

We need not adopt the view that has sometimes been expressed that the three sons of Noah were black, yellow, and white. If they were so, what were their wives? Rather we would say that in these six people were all the genes which have separated out into the modern races. … Shem may have had the genes for kinky hair and yellow skin, Ham for white skin and Mongoloid eyes, etc. But the genes we would have to say were all there whether in evidence in the body characteristics or not.⁴¹

The racial differences that exist today, according to W. Smalley, were probably brought about by mutations that "occurred in small, isolated groups which, because of their small size and isolation at rather extreme positions in the Europe, Asia-Africa land area, inbred the new factor. Both cultural and environmental selection could have operated."⁴² Negroes are considered by anthropologists to have migrated from Southern Asia into Africa in comparatively recent times. According to Genesis 10, descendants of all the three sons of Noah were living in Western Asia after the Tower of Babel. Therefore it is impossible to say from which son or sons of Noah the Negroid and Mongoloid peoples have descended. In his work, Mankind So Far, Professor William Howell says that the Australian aborigines probably reached their island continent "at roughly the time that the Indians were going to America, perhaps 10,000 B.C."⁴³

In discussing the problem of the original distribution of Negroes and Nigritoes, Howells has this to say:

They are doubtless "newer" races than the Australian, because they specialized, particularly in hair … Their final outward spread, however, would have been recent, because the Negritoes would have needed true boats to arrive in the Andamans or the Philippines. The Negroes would have made their Asiatic exit still later, with a higher (Neolithic) culture, and probably also with boats. A relatively recent arrival of Negroes in Africa should not shock anthropologists … And there are no archaeological signs of pre-Neolithic people in the Congo at all, and it might have been empty when the Negritoes and the Negroes came.⁴⁴

After emphasizing the "stupendous growth of the last 10,000 years," and "the recent spread of man," Howells states: "If we look, first of all, for that part of the world which was the hothouse of the races, we can make only one choice. All the visible footsteps lead away from Asia."⁴⁵ Similar testimony to the historicity of the Genesis account is borne out by William A. Smalley in his essay, "A Christian View of Anthropology," in Modern Science and Christian Faith. He says:

The Scriptural record is of the spread of peoples from their origin in the approximate center of the great Europe, Asia-Africa land mass. The Biblical picture is so close to the best anthropo­logical reconstructions of the original dispersion and divergences of races that it is used as the allegorical picture of scientific findings by Dr. Ruth Benedict and Miss Gene Weltfish in their population booklets combatting race prejudice, and is basic in their map.⁴⁶

In the efforts of the integrationists to unite the various races of mankind upon a purely "secular" basis we may see an attempt to reverse the consequences of God's judgment upon mankind which He made at the Tower of Babel. Once more we are witnessing an attempt upon man's part "to make a name" for himself (Gen. 11:4), that is, trying to set himself up in opposition to God's Name, to which alone praise and glory properly belong.

At the United Nations and elsewhere godless men are seeking to erect a secular "City" or civilization that reckons little of God's grace and therefore of His law. The Word of God makes clear that all such attempts are doomed to end in catastrophe and confusion. Throughout the Bible we read first of one city, now another becoming the type of man's reckless defiance of God's purpose and law for humanity – Sodom and Gomorrah (Gen. 18:19); Tyre (Ezek. 26-28); and above all Babylon. Indeed, Babylon is depicted in the Bible as the great prototype of all the cities and empires of the world that despise God's grace and law. Thus at the beginning of the Bible Babylon is raised in pride and brought down in confusion, and also at the end of the Bible it is Babylon whose hour of judgment is come. The author of the Apocalypse clearly has the judgment of God upon the men of Babel in his mind when he writes: "Thus with a mighty fall shall Babylon, the great city, be cast down, and shall be found no more at all" (Rev. 18:21).

Unlike integrationists, the Bible teaches that the disunity of mankind is not caused by race, but by sin. It is men's sinfulness rather than their different colored skins which divide them. The Tower of Babel emphasizes that it is man's exaltation of himself as over against God which is the prime cause of divisions and rivalries, of which the different languages are symbolic. Men cannot speak to one another in a common tongue because they have no common interest or mutual regard.

God has appointed His own method of creating real community between men and that is by incorporating them into His own one great family, the universal Church, uniting them in one covenant of love in the blood of the Lord Jesus Christ, and speaking one common language of the Holy Spirit of God. Upon the great Day of Pentecost God's power was revealed as great enough to reverse the Babel confusion of the languages so that men became bound together in love for God and for each other in the New Covenant of grace (Acts 2:5-11). The story of the gift of tongues at Pentecost is nothing more than the Babel story in reverse. Integrating people by the brute force of the state is therefore a violation of God's free sovereign grace in Jesus Christ – the saving grace of the shed blood of the Lamb of God by which alone men, races, and classes can be saved from the dreadful consequences of sin, including the sin of pride in one's own race and prejudice against other races. The integrationists now declare that God's appointed method of reconciling races at the foot of Christ's Cross is not sufficient or adequate. Instead of being saved by Christ alone, something more is needed, namely, miscegenation of races. Men are not to be made spiritually one in Jesus Christ, but they are to be united biologically and psychologically by the brute power of the eugenic expert and the psychiatrist assisted by the police (Col. 3:10-13).

The true Christian answer to the problem of racial and cultural conflict was provided for all Christians at the first great Council of the whole Church, held in Jerusalem and described for us in Acts, chapter 15. Under the guidance of God the Holy Ghost, the Apostles ruled that it would be an infringement upon the Christian's newly found freedom in Christ to enforce cultural and social and racial integration between Jewish and Gentile Christians by requiring circumcision of the latter as a condition of membership of the Church. Therefore it was laid down that the Gentile Christians should continue to live according to their own historic traditions and customs, and in the conditions of the flesh in which they had been born. The Jewish Christians, with equal favor, were to hold fast to their own Jewish laws, customs, and ceremonies, especially circumcision. Just as Jewish Christians were not saved from the power and guilt of sin by obedience to the accretions which had grown up around the Law of Moses (The Torah), but only by God's sovereign grace in Christ, so the Gentile Christians were not to be saved from sin by coming under the discipline of the Jewish ceremonial law.

In his profound study of the primitive church, Jew and Greek, Gregory Dix writes of the Council's decision as follows:

The Jewish Christians at the Council of Jerusalem in A.D. 49 finally accepted the fact that the Old Israel as such had lost its Covenant and in the pathetic phrase of the Epistle to the Hebrews, "They went forth unto Jesus without the camp, bearing His reproach." The same historical situation which had forced Jesus Himself to choose between the Cross and the betrayal of the truth of the Old Covenant had speedily brought the Jewish-Christian Church to the same choice between ensuring its own rejection by Israel and a betrayal of the truth of the New Covenant. It chose His solution … The Jewish Christian Church chose to be rejected and to die that this "gospel" might continue, once it was sure that "the Gospel preached among the Gentiles" was identical with "the Gospel of the circumcision." The end was swift. Jewish Christianity vanishes into obscurity with a startling suddenness in the sixties, and thereafter dies obscurely in the shadows.⁴⁷

It was St. Paul, the great Jewish Apostle to the Gentiles, who had forced the issue. The Council, without publicly endorsing the Pauline principle, had the courage and wisdom to allow Gentile converts to be received on equal terms without imposing on them either circumcision or the Law. Gentile Christians would henceforth be accepted as full partners in the Christian Covenant without Judaizing.

The Gospel of the revelation of God in Jesus Christ, cut off from its Jewish roots by the Jewish revolt, stood forth on its own merits as a third and catholic culture, to be henceforward the target alike of unconverted Jews and unconverted Gentiles, who hated it with equal intensity. Within the holy catholic and apostolic Church all races could now find their own proper place and make their own distinctive contribution in the building up of the Body of Christ.

Until the fulness of the mystery of Christ has been filled out by all peoples and races in terms of their own traditions and languages we shall not be in a position to comprehend the full glory and greatness of the Christ (Rom. 11:1-25; Eph. 3:1-10; Col. 1:24-29). But this religious unity of the human race in Christ does not mean that one race should try to dominate all other races. It means that all races and nations must be allowed full freedom to work out their own destiny in fear and trembling before the Lord. If the religious unity of the entire human race means at the same time the destruction of all the separate spheres of life, then marriage, the family, the school, the state, and the Church would disappear as communities of a peculiar character. Then it would be enough as the godless French revolutionaries supposed, to celebrate the "Feast of Fraternization" upon the ruins of all these spheres.

If a person cannot come to Christ just as he is without one plea, if he must first become integrated before he can become a Christian, then we deny that Christ alone of His own sovereign grace is able to save us. By claiming that we have first to be integrated before we can be saved the humanists and the ecumenists have perverted and destroyed the glorious Gospel of God. If we cannot be saved even as we now are, black, white, red, or yellow, but must first lose our racial, national, and cultural and psychological identities, then Christ has been dethroned and God's grace mocked (Eph. 2:8-22; 2 Cor.4:16-18).

To argue that Christian love and brotherhood requires the destruction of all racial and cultural differences between people is to deny the essence of Christlike love. Nowhere in the Gospels does Christ teach that one's neighbor must become as we are before we can love him. If we cannot love our neighbor without first demanding that he becomes as we are and without first demanding that he commit racial and cultural suicide, then we do not really understand the meaning of Christlike love which involves accepting people as they are and not as we would like them to be (Rom. 5:6-11). After all, that is how God has accepted us.

The most dangerous fallacy to which the Anglo-Saxon democracies, under the levelling influence of apostate "liberal" and rationalist standards of justice, have succumbed since 1945, is that peace between nations and races can be forcibly brought about by internationalism and integration; that is to say, by destroying all local and national ties of loyalty to one's own family, locality, and nation. Yet a person is not more likely to live at peace with his foreign neighbors because he is devoid of natural ties of affection for his own family and nation. On the contrary, the good brother, the devoted father, and the loyal patriot are more likely to make friends with people of other lands than the person who hates his own family and fatherland.

Writing in the Church Times on February 28, 1966, Denis Shaw asked the question, "What do we mean by 'integration'?" He replied:

It needs a lot of thought. Too often we mean that, with any luck, the strangers in our midst will in time become indistinguishable from ourselves – apart from the colour.

We overlook centuries of a strange, wild history; miles of unruly rivers; an age-long war against nature; shadows of a lost mythology; the still-echoing thunder of the Prophet's wrath…

Integration must not mean the gradual imposition of anonymity. A country which, by implication, indifference or social pressure, requires her adopted children to become paltry parodies of her own true born is impoverishing the whole family.

Likewise, the Roman Catholic Archbishop William Whelan of Bloemfontein, South Africa, points out in his statement on race relations in his country that "The Church regards as immoral any policy aimed at levelling ethnic groups into an amorphous cosmopolitan mass. The Bishops of the United States have even gone so far as to say that these heterogenous racial and cultural groups have an innate right to exist" (Times, February 20, 1964).

The Scriptures teach that permanent and lasting peace between races and nations will never be realized until the Prince of Peace returns to rule the nations of the world. In the New Testament we are given no picture of peace on earth among the nations. On the con­trary, prophecies abound of the most terrible wars among the peoples of the world before the end of history and the final consummation which transcends history. The hope of peace outside of faith and trust in the Lord Jesus Christ is alien to the New Testament. The hope of an earth in which dwells righteousness and peace is bound up with the expectation of a new heaven and a new earth. The reign of absolute peace belongs to eschatology, the realm of eternal life.

In the meantime, all that the state can hope to achieve is a relative measure of justice between its various cultural and racial groupings.

As far as relations within the same nation between differing racial groups are concerned, the experience of South Africa and the Southern States of the U.S.A. shows that the government is unable to bring about an absolute and total integration within the same national territory. We also learn from these examples how essential is the dependence of the political integrating activity of the state on the leading function of justice. All that the state can be expected to do is to maintain the public legal interest and justice between the differing races within its borders.

Christian justice requires that the various racial groups within a given society and their often mutually conflicting interests should be carefully balanced against each other according to the criterion of the legal public interest. Any exploitation or discrimination against one section of the community must be considered as a tyrannical exercise of power. This implies that the different cultural positions of the ethnic groups within the body politic should also be considered, though at the same time the cultural level of underdeveloped groups should be elevated as much as possible. As Whelan says, "The public authorities have an obligation to assist the cultural and racial groups in a pluralistic state in their distinctive development."⁴⁸

From this truly Christian standpoint the state must protect the freedom of cultural or racial minorities to develop in accordance with their own spiritual aspirations and values but not at the expense of the majority.

Fundamentally the question of the so-called "integration" or "segregation" of races or cultural minorities within the same nation involves the deeper question of the nature and purpose of the various structures of human society and of their relation to each other and to the Kingdom of God. It also involves the relationship of the individual to the state. Does the individual obtain his right to exist from the state as Communists suppose, or does he obtain his right to live from God as the Bible teaches? God's Word teaches that the individual's right to live comes as a gift from God, and that the various spheres of society such as the family, business, church, etc., do not owe their origin, existence, or structural principle to the state. They have an inner principle and cultural task all their own entrusted to them by God. Upon this sphere sovereignty given to them by God the state may not infringe. For this reason it is presumptuous and immoral for the state to dictate to its citizens how or where they shall work, eat, or play. The social basis of all law implies the competence of the legislator, but this competence must be limited by the proper correlation of all the other institutions and associations of human society which may not be infringed by the supposed absolute competence of the state. The individual does not enjoy an absolute legal competence or absolute rights, but neither does the state enjoy absolute sovereign rights in deciding, for example, on behalf of parents which school their children shall attend and which they shall not.

Integrationists are infringing upon the God-given responsibility of parents to decide which school they shall attend. The state as such has no business to interfere in the education of one's children, since children are born by reason of the natural powers of reproduction and not because of permission to procreate by the state. For this reason parents have the right to decide the kind of education their children shall receive (Deut. 6:4-9; Eph. 6: 1ff.). It is contrary to God's cultural mandate to bring up their own children in accordance with their own values and custom, for the state to use schools for the political purpose of integration.

The true Christian gladly accepts all the diversities and differences which abound in the creation and in society, realizing that all these have been created after their own kind (Gen. 1:24-31) and yet they all find their ultimate unity in the sovereign will of the Creator. Rationalists and collectivists in both church and state, on the other hand, find such diversities between races, churches, and other human associations intolerable, since they are forced by their own apostasy from the Living God to find the meaning and purpose of life within the narrowed down horizons of the material universe. Since it is only within the phenomenal world that perfection can be attained, unity too must be achieved within the terms of this world at any cost, regardless of peoples' cherished feelings. Hence their apostate religious drive to achieve assimilation of races, churches, schools, etc., and to abolish all differences between men and women. As Robert T. Ingram well writes in Essays on Segregation:

Integration is not an end in itself, but a supposed step toward the end of achieving heaven on earth. Integrationists, therefore, like all Utopians … are widely determined to remove from their path, all who obstruct their progress toward ultimate unity and heaven on earth.⁴⁹

In short, they are determined to achieve unity at the expense of all human freedom and human diversity and difference. Integrationists and ecumenists have mistakenly identified the Kingdom of God with man's biological, psychological, political, and legal functions because they have absolutized these aspects of human existence, since they lack a true ordering principle in the Word of God.

The real road to peaceful relations between and within nations lies in an individual religious awakening on the part of ordinary people all over the world to the problem of getting on with other people – of forgiving and being forgiven; of being patient enough to try to understand others when we cannot like them; and above all of seeking God's grace and light whenever we feel only prejudice and malice. It does not lie along the road of forcible integration, or forcible segregation which an African colored bishop has well said will only land us all in Hell.

Instead of trying to reduce the races and nations of mankind to a squalid level of equality of mass cosmopolitan misery, Christians must strive to achieve the greatest possible variety in unity and differentiation of achievement, between men, races, and peoples.

As a missionary amongst the Red Indians in the Yukon the writer observed with great sorrow that the younger generation of Indians were tending to depart more and more from their own Indian customs, culture, and language. He heard old Indian grandmothers shake their heads ruefully when they admitted that many of their grandchildren could barely speak or understand their mother tongue. He was reminded of similar observations of African grandmothers living in the former Belgian Congo, made to his own parents who worked there as missionaries just before the Second World War. Where is this awful process of the industrialization of the world going to finish? Can we expect a world of mass men all thinking the same torpid thoughts and doing the same dingy things and eating and dressing alike?⁵⁰ I hardly think that was the Creator's intention when He made us of different colors, races, and languages under heaven.

In his vision of heaven the apostle St. John did not report that he saw all differences between men and races abolished. Instead he says: "I beheld, and, lo, a great multitude, which no man could number, of all nations, and kindreds and peoples and tongues stood before the throne, and before the Lamb … and cried with a loud voice saying: Salvation to our God which sitteth upon the throne and unto the Lamb" (Rev. 7:9-10). It is salvation the races and peoples of mankind so desperately need today and not integration by the brute force of governments and by the brainwashing techniques of the scientific elite.

7.  Civil Disobedience and the Right to Resist Tyranny←↰⤒🔗

Unwilling to work for reformation of the present deformed social order, many people, especially students, are resorting to civil disobedience and violence. The present wave of demonstrations and street riots sweeping the Western world is justified by those taking part in them on the grounds that an individual or a group is entitled to disobey the laws of the land if he believes them to be unjust. In support of their argument they quote with approval Henry Thoreau essay On the Duty of Civil Disobedience. Thoreau had written his essay after being imprisoned in Concord jail for refusal to pay his taxes because he objected to the Mexican War. The war, to Thoreau, was a hateful thing – stupid and unjust, waged for the extension of the obscene system of Negro slavery. Under the stress of his experience in prison Thoreau was driven to examine the whole theory of the relation of the individual to the state. As a man who would not compromise with his conscience, he reacted to the government's resort to coercion over him by applying the counter principle of passive resistance and civil disobedience. In the event of a clash between political expediency and the higher moral law, Thoreau argued that it is the duty of the individual citizen to obey his conscience rather than the state. He went even further, and asserted the doctrine of the individual contract, which in turn implied the doctrine of individual nullification: "No government," he said, "can have any pure right over my person or property but what I concede to it … The only obligation which I have a right to assume, is to do at any time what I think right." According to Thoreau, the individual is the source of all moral, legal, and political obligation in society, from which all civil power and authority are derived.⁵¹

For Martin Luther King, civil disobedience meant the same thing. In his "Letter from Birmingham Jail," published in his book, Why We Can't Wait, King wrote: "One may well ask, 'How can you ad­vocate breaking some of the laws and obeying others?' I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws … A just law is a manmade code that squares with the moral law or law of God. An un­just law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law."⁵²

For King a good end may justify the resort to evil means. "It is right to break laws if we think that they are unfair and can get pub­licity for a good cause by doing so." Upon this basis King advocated disobedience of the segregation ordinances of various American states. Because they are morally wrong they should not be obeyed. In pursuit of this policy King met his tragic death, thereby proving that civil disobedience invites a counter appeal to force, and if indulged in by everyone will soon reduce society to anarchy. While approving of King's great personal courage and his Christian stand for justice, we must reject his appeal to violence. The means one adopts to achieve a given end will always determine the nature of the end achieved. King allowed himself to be used by groups in society who exploited him for their own evil ends. Let his terrible fate be a warning from the Lord not to follow his example of playing with fire from Hell. At the same time, let us continue the struggle for justice in race relations for which he gave his life, using more Christlike methods to attain the same end for which he struggled. It is for reformation of society that we must work, not for revolution.

Ever since the French Revolution proclaimed the revolutionary doctrine of popular sovereignty instead of God's sovereignty summed up in the confession "no God no master," the crucial dis­tinction between power and authority has been blurred or lost. Frightful tensions and rifts in society are bound to develop when­ever the state or the general will of the majority or the party claims to be sovereign, that is, the source of both authority and power in society. Authority over men can be vested only in Almighty God, who allocates to the various separate spheres of society their own respective functions of power. All governmental authority has a divine and not a human origin which alone can keep it within bounds. What is true of governmental authority is also true of all other kinds of authority.

The police do not have authority because they carry weapons of self-defence, but because they exist to uphold the majesty of the law and maintain peace and order in society. The father does not have authority because he is bigger than his child, but because God has appointed him to that office in creation. Nor does the teacher exercise authority over his pupils because he is stronger than they, but because he acts in the place of the parents when they are at school. The authority of the government over its citizens, of parents over their children, of employers over their workers, is directly derived in each case from God alone. As the Lord told Moses from the midst of the bush that burned but was not consumed, "I AM THAT I AM" (Exod. 3:14), the source of all that exists outside himself. Apart from Him nothing could exist.

As sovereign Lord of His own creation the Lord God has only delegated to each sphere of society the authority necessary for it to carry out its own proper function. Thus God has delegated some of His authority to husbands and commanded that wives must obey them (Eph. 5:22). He has also delegated some of his authority to parents and commanded children to obey them (Exod. 20:12; Eph. 6:1).

Likewise, God has delegated to the state the power of the sword of justice so that it may restrain the evil doer. For this reason Paul teaches in the Epistle to the Romans, "Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers. For there is no power but of God" (Rom. 13:1). In other words, all civil authority has its origin in God, whether it realizes the fact or not. Of the state Dooyeweerd writes:

In the divine structural principle of this societal relationship the power of the sword is unbreakably bound up with the typical end-function of the state, that is, the maintenance of a public jural community of rulers and subjects. All the intrinsic matters of state ought to be directed by this juridical function … A state where the power of the sword becomes an end in itself degenerates into an organized band of highwaymen, as Augustine and Calvin remarked.

A public community of law which, as end function, qualifies the state, is utterly different from the internal jural community of other societal relationships, such as family, school or church. In all of these the internal jural community is directed by the peculiar end function of the relationship concerned…

Only in the case of the state does the jural community function as the end function, but always founded upon the territorial organization of the power of the sword. The internal community of law of the state is a community of jural government, where the government, as servant of God, does not carry the sword in vain. The government may, in accordance with the state's inner law of life, never allow itself to he led by any other point of reference than that of justice. But here is no talk of a private community of law, as in other societal relationships, but a public one, subject to the Dural principle of the common good. And exactly here, in the understanding of the principle of the common good the difference between Christian and pagan or humanistic ideas of the state becomes clearly evident.⁵³

Dooyeweerd then explains in The Christian Idea of the State that this difference between the Christian and the apostate humanist idea of the state lies in the fact that the former Christian idea "has principally broken with any absolutization of either state or individual. It alone can grasp the principle of the common good as a truly Dural principle of public law because it is grounded in the confession of a supra-temporal root-community of humanity in the kingdom of Jesus Christ, and because it accepts therefore the principle of sphere-sovereignty for the temporal societal bonds."⁵⁴

It is the state as limited by God's absolute sovereignty and not to the totalitarian state of modern society that the Christian is to be obedient. Since the authority of such a limited state is derived from God and not from the will of the majority or the will of the party, God demands that we respect and obey its officers.

In this matter of obedience to governments, Peter says: "Be subject to every ordinance of man for the Lord's sake, whether to the king as supreme or unto governors, as sent by him" (1 Peter 2:13-14). Civil obedience to the limited state under God is thus a fundamental moral obligation laid upon every citizen of the land, and to disobey the civil authority is to disobey God. The civil authorities are "holy servants" of God whether they believe in God or not, since they have been instituted to hold in check man's sinful tendencies. In terms of this plain teaching of Scripture, civil disobedience is revealed as a policy of the anti-Christ. Without obedience to the law-enforcing functions of government, society must inevitably collapse. For God's Word that which defines the anti-Christ, the man of sin, the godless man is precisely his will to live without any law at all (2 Thess. 2:3-8).

Yet the Bible itself also teaches that there is a time to disobey the government. The divine right of kings and rulers is always qualified by that divine right to the obedience of men's hearts which is unlimited, final, and absolute. In the last analysis we must always obey God rather than the governmental, parental, or economic authority when it commands us to sin. As Peter says, "We ought to obey God rather than men" (Acts 5:29).

For example, if a drunken father tried to force his son to sin, then it would be the child's duty to disobey. Or if the government commands the Christian to sin, he must refuse to obey.

When Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego were commanded by King Nebuchadnezzar to fall down and worship the golden image they rightly refused. With marvellous courage they told the king, "Be it known unto thee that we will not serve thy gods, nor worship the golden image which thou hast set" (Dan. 3:18). As a result they were cast into the fiery furnace, from which God miraculously delivered them.

How terrifying is such power to the mere individual. It is usually arrayed in terrifying conformity, as in Babylon of old. All have to think the same thoughts and to act in the same way most favourable to the dictator of the day. Thus in the days of King Nebuchadnezzar, all the princes, the governors, the captains, the judges, the treasurers, and the counsellors had to conform; all except three young men who refused to fall down and worship the golden image. In this clash between the powers of heaven and earth it is obvious that the earthly king had no idea of power except that of brute force. He, knowing his strength in this direction, found it most disturbing that there should be anyone who would attempt to resist him. This was a new experience for King Nebuchadnezzar. He could not believe his ears when it was reported to him. When finally he did understand he could not conceal the rage that welled up within him. Such opposition could not be tolerated. It must be crushed, burnt out, and destroyed.

Even so have the mighty spoken throughout all history. In a fit of rage the emperor Nero burnt thousands of Christians in the gardens of his palace. Ivan the Terrible murdered whole families to gratify his rage.

John Calvin made resistance to unjust princes not only permissible but an absolute obligation, but only when undertaken by duly constituted representatives of the people. While deprecating in the strongest terms the right of resistance on the part of "private persons," he exhorted municipal authorities, estates-general, and parliaments to call rulers to account as part of their vocation as God's magistrates.

In some countries or states, he taught, there have existed magistrates specially instituted to restrain the doings of the chief magistrate. Such were certain officials of Athens, Sparta, and Rome, and such, he declared, "are possibly, nowadays, in each kingdom the three estates assembled."⁵⁵ It would, by hypothesis, be lawful for such magistrates to resist tyrannical action and, therefore, it would be their duty to do so. Failing to do so they would betray the liberty of their people.

In a letter to the French Huguenot leader, Coligny, written in 1561, Calvin applied this principle of the duty of resistance on the part of "minor magistrates" such as members of Estates-General.

He had, he said, been asked beforehand, whether in view of the oppression of the "children of God" in France, active resistance would not be justified. He had answered, he declared, that it were better that all the said children of God should perish rather than that the Gospel should be dishonored by bloodshed. But he had added that if the Princes of the blood took action to maintain their legal rights and if the Parliaments of France joined with them, then indeed all good subjects might lawfully aid them in arms, in defence of their legal rights, even against the legitimate sovereign.⁵⁶ This doctrine was suited to the special needs of the Huguenots. Though they were only a minority in France and could not hope to control the Estates-General, many of them were noblemen or wealthy merchants, who held the chief magistracies and controlled the highest courts of their own provinces. Calvin's doctrine of active resistance by lesser magistrates to the sovereign or supreme magistrate justified their using their local privileges in defence of their faith. John Plamenatz in Man and Society comments on this doctrine as follows:

Calvin's doctrine, slightly altered to meet the needs of the Huguenots, was at bottom only the medieval theory of resistance, as we find it in Aquinas, which asserts, not a right of individual or even popular resistance, but a right of official or privileged resistance. According to this theory, only those who already have authority have the right to resist authority. The mere citizen or subject has no such right.⁵⁷

The first important group of political Christians to oppose absolutism were the British refugees from the persecution of Bloody Mary in the 1550's. John Knox, Bishop Ponet, and Goodman, in particular, fled to the Continent and from there urged resistance and the deposition of England's queen. They justified Wyatt's Rebellion against Mary on both biblical and constitutional grounds, appealing to the compact between ruler and people in natural law. The Geneva Bible, with its annotations, was to disseminate these ideas widely in England. Calvin himself rather guardedly followed the current, trying to moderate the more turbulent. Goodman reported that Calvin had censured his How Superior Powers Ought to Be Obeyed as "somewhat harsh" to rulers, but nevertheless essentially true. And in the year in which Knox left to take part in the revolution in Scotland, Calvin brought out the last edition of the Institutes with the famous paragraph inculcating the duty of resistance on the part of "minor magistrates." The decade closed with declarations of constitutional rights against tyrants by the Scots Assembly and a group of the French Reformed. In the First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women, John Knox declared it was the duty of the English people to depose Mary Tudor, who was persecuting the true faith. Though her title to the throne might be good by English law, that law stood for nothing against the authority of Scripture.

In terms of this Reformed doctrine of the right to resist tyranny the lesser magistrates of the Netherlands in 1581 deposed Philip of Spain on the grounds of a broken contract in natural law and justice. Philip's attempt, through Cardinal Granvelle and the Duke of Alba, to reduce the Low Countries to the status of a Spanish province met with determined opposition among all classes of society, Roman Catholics and Protestants alike. And no wonder. The number of those who were put to death for their Reformed faith in the Netherlands alone, during the reign of Charles V, has been estimated by Sarpi in his History of the Council of Trent as 50,000, while Grotius put it at 100,000. At least half as many perished under King Philip II. Motley points out in The Rise of the Dutch Republic:

Upon the 16^th of Feb. 1568, a sentence of the Holy Office condemned all the inhabitants of the Netherlands to death as heretics. From this universal doom only a few persons especially named were excepted. A proclamation of the king dated ten days later, confirmed this decree of the Inquisition and ordered it to be carried into instant execution. Three millions of people, men, women and children, were sentenced to death in three lines.⁵⁸

The Calvinist federalism or pluralism of the consequent United Provinces became the working model of free institutions to seventeenth century Europe. Neville Figgis points out in From Gerson to Grotius the Dutch Republic became the pioneer of liberty in modern as distinct from medieval Europe. In the age of the Roman and Anglican absolutists, Richelieu, Bousset, and Laud, the Dutch jurist Althusius stood out as the great representative Reformed political theorist, who built a rounded political system uniting popular sovereignty with the medieval Christian principles of the inherent and inalienable natural rights of communities within the state. The social community, as it existed in the thought of Althusius, is a community of communities, an assemblage of morally integrated lesser associations and groups. Its unity does not result from being permeated with sovereign law, extending from the top through all individual components of the structure. Of the profound significance of Althusius' contribution to political and social theory Dooyeweerd writes:

It is no accident that it was a Calvinistic thinker who broke with the universalistic conception of the State in a period in which Bodin's concept of sovereignty had introduced a new version of this universalistic view. In opposition to the entire medieval-Aristotelian tradition Althusius gave evidence of taking account of the internal structural principles of society in his theory of human symbiosis.

It was the famous jurist, Johannes Althusius, in his Politica, who made the following remark: "I do not call 'members of the State,' or of the universal symbiotic community, the separate single human beings, or the families, nor even the colleges according to their being constituted in a particular private and public association, but a number of provinces and districts agreeing to form one whole by mutual conjunction and communication."

The foundation of this view, which clearly contradicted the Aristotelian teleological conception of the State's parts, is to be found in the first chapter of his work. Here he summarized his anti-universalistic standpoint with respect to the inter-structural relation between the different types of social relationships as follows: "Every type of social relationships has its proper laws peculiar to it, whereby it is ruled. And these laws are different and divergent in each kind of social relationship, according to the requirement of the inner nature of each of them." This utterance may be considered the first modern formulation of the principle of internal sphere-sovereignty in the societal relationships. ⁵⁹

Summing up, we may claim that legal wrongs must be redressed by legal means. In an "open society" resort must always be made to reasoned discussion of grievances. Such legal processes may be slow, but they are still available, and any attempt to by-pass them only creates contempt for law, and, if pushed to excess, can bring about the collapse of society itself when all rights would go by the board. The present type of civil disobedience is a far cry from the right to resist tyranny of the lesser magistrates taught by our great Reformed forebears.

The real answer to the terrible problems now facing America is not revolution by an appeal to the guns of men but reformation by the Word of God. Let Christians work to elect men into the lesser and higher offices of government who will abide by God's great ordinances for human society, especially the great principle of sphere sovereignty. The answer to the growing bureaucratization and centralization of power in all Western states is not civil disobedience but associative pluralism which will restore to the various spheres of society their divinely given power and authority to carry out the tasks for which they were created by God himself.

Unless the nations return to obedience to God's structural principles and norms for society in all spheres they too will undergo His judgment just as the Roman, Babylonian, and Egyptian empires did in the past. It is by obedience to God's laws, not by civil disobedience to "the powers that be," that we shall be saved from the dreadful consequences of human sinfulness of which racial prejudice and discrimination are only the symptoms. To get rid of the evils which afflict our lands it is not sufficient to combat its outward symptoms, but to remove the germ. That germ is the modern belief that man's reason and will, rather than God's, are supreme in the universe. The only lasting antidote to man's inhumanity to man is belief in God as man's Creator and in the Lord Jesus Christ as his Savior.