1.  Recovering our Integrity as Christians⤒🔗

How may Christians restore meaning to work in modern society? How can workers and employers recover the will and zest to work without which our civilization must surely soon break down?

Before Christians can hope to make any impact upon modern industrial society as the social and economic church militant, it is imperative that every Christian worker and employer recover his or her personal integrity as one of Christ's new men and women, as well as a living faith in the total authority of the living Word of God over every aspect of human life. The reason why the first Christians succeeded in turning the Roman Empire "upside down" (Acts 17:6) was because their spirits had been struck as by lightning and they proclaimed a new message of the divine reformation that had already taken place in their own lives. As the apostle Paul put it: "The old things are passed away; behold they are become new" (2 Cor. 5:17). Since the early Christians had been given the meaning and purpose of human life in the life, teaching, and above all the death of Jesus Christ, they no longer had any fear in their hearts of any earthly powers. Without fear or guilt they were enabled by the Holy Spirit of the Risen Christ to confront the apostate Roman Empire with the challenge to believe in Christ and to make a fresh cultural start. Since they challenged unbelievers and exposed the bankruptcy of their pagan scientific, political, and social presupposi^­tions about man in society, they were listened to. All this was made possible because they were gripped by the powerful living Word and Spirit of God.

The Word of God became the power of God unto salvation by giving new cultural form and shape to their lives. God's Word taught them that the root of the troubles afflicting Graeco-Roman classical culture sprang from its ancient humanism and its defective logic. Writing of this Christian counterattack upon classical humanism, Charles N. Cochrane says in Christianity and Classical Culture:

The Augustan Empire … was merely the culmination of an effort begun centuries before in Hellas, the effort to create a world which should be safe for civilization; and, from this standpoint, such originality as the emperor (Augustus Caesar) exhibited was merely one of method. In this sense, however, his settlement may well be accepted as the last and not the least impressive undertaking of what we may venture to call "creative politics."

The history of Graeco-Roman Christianity resolves itself largely into a criticism of that undertaking and of the ideas upon which it rested; viz. that it was possible to attain a goal of permanent se­curity, peace, and freedom through political action, especially through submission to the "virtue and fortune" of a political leader. This notion the Christians denounced with uniform vigour and consistency. To them the state, so far from being the supreme instrument of human emancipation and perfectibility, was a straight jacket to be justified at best as "a remedy for sin." To think of it otherwise they considered the grossest of superstitions.

The Christians traced this superstition to the acceptance of a defective logic, the logic of classical "naturalism," to which they ascribed the characteristic vitia of the classical world … It is im­portant to notice that their revolt was not from nature; it was from the picture of nature constructed by classical science, together with its implications for practical life. And what they demanded was a radical revision of first principles as the presupposition to an adequate cosmology and anthropology. The basis for such a revision they held to lie in the logos of Christ, conceived as a revelation, not of "new" truth, but of truth which was as old as the hills and as everlasting. This they accepted as an answer to the promise of illumination and power extended to mankind and thus, the basis for a new physics, a new ethic and, above all, a new logic, the logic of human progress. In Christ, therefore, they claimed to possess a principle of understanding superior to anything existing in the classical world. By this claim they were prepared to stand or fall.¹

The early Christians believed that the Scriptures alone can provide us with a true knowledge of God, of one's own selfhood, and of the great law-structures of God's creation. Such knowledge can be worked only by the Holy Spirit through the operation of God's Word upon the human heart, as the religious root and center of human existence. The Scriptures thus give us knowledge of God, knowledge of each other as persons created in His image, and knowledge of nature. Though the Bible does not give us exhaustive truth about reality, it does give us "true truth." The Word of God is the divine spiritual power which regenerates our hearts and therefore reforms our minds. It is the central ordering principle of human life and the key to all true knowledge of reality and hence the foundation of a truly human, culture economy, and society. God's Word alone can provide us with a unified field of knowledge upon which to base our theoretical and practical lives. In this way alone we obtain the truth about God, the truth about man, and the truth about nature. Thus on the basis of Scripture, while we do not have exhaustive and complete knowledge, we have true and unified knowledge. Any dualism between form and matter, between nature and grace, between nature and freedom is in principle entirely excluded. Hendrik Hart writes in The Challenge of Our Age of God's Word as follows:

The uniqueness of the Bible is that it is an authoritatively inspired inscripturation of God's Word-revelation to his people. These are the scriptures which cannot be broken, which are cited by themselves as authoritative … They are not themselves to be believed in, but to be believed. We believe in God, in His Word, according to the Scriptures. They are not themselves divine, though divinely inspired. The clue to the Scriptures, therefore, is that they point beyond themselves, that they need to be opened. When the Scriptures are opened to us by the Spirit of the Word, it is the Word in its directive power that comes to us in its restorative order.

What we have to avoid at all cost, if biblical living is to be meaningful living, is on the one hand to undermine the full authority of the Bible and on the other hand to reduce the Word of God to a set of truths, a collection of infallible propositions. For both stand in the way of God's Word-revelation in the Scripture … Having seen the Bible primarily as the authoritative revelation of God's Word, we can also understand why it is called the canon … For a canon is an authoritative rule. It has the meaning in which Paul uses it in his letter to the Galatians: Neither circumcision nor uncircumcision count but a new creation. Peace and mercy will be with those who walk according to this rule, this canon of the new creation. This is what we have in the Bible, the canon of the new creation.²

It is because the early Christians were gripped by this canon of the new creation that they were enabled by the Risen Christ in the power of His Holy Spirit to change the spiritual direction of the society in which they lived. This same canon alone can provide us modern Christians with the spiritual dynamic necessary to reform apostate modern industry and society. Only by returning to this canon or yardstick can we hope to rebuild modern industrial society upon a truly God-centered basis. Except the Lord build our industry we labor in vain that build. Thus the question facing us is this: Does industry today reflect biblical principles of economics and of labor relations, or purely man-centered ideas of the nature and the purpose of the economic system? Are the solutions pro­posed for industrial relations in harmony with God's law for human work?

The true Christian will surely be guided more in his political, social, and economic activities by a biblical motivation and an evangelical criterion of value than by a secular humanist, socialist, or capitalistic one. A person can no more avoid being religiously committed in his political and social behavior than he can avoid breathing the air around him. If he is not consciously being directed in his behavior by a Christian motivation, then he will be directed by a humanistic, communistic, or materialistic motivation, whether he is conscious of the fact or not, and whether he admits it or not.

If the Christian worker or employer really acknowledges that God rather than man or the state or the party or the dollar or the union or the bank is sovereign in this universe, then he will surely seek with all his might and main to establish God's sovereignty and dominion over every aspect of his life, political, social, economic, and industrial as well as private. God cannot be shut up within the walls of our church buildings. Do the Christian neutralists and pietists really believe that Jehovah God has abandoned the world outside^. the Church to Satan and the powers of darkness? If they do, they are no longer Christians but dualists, who in effect proclaim that God is not sovereign in His own cosmos. The consistent Christian believes that God's sovereignty and supremacy are at work in the life of that unbaptized world outside the Church by reason of the Lord's common grace, and for that reason the child of God, redeemed by Christ from the power and guilt of sin, cannot and must not summarily with­draw from that life in the world without committing treason against Christ the King and thus denying the Redeemer of His crown rights over the whole of His creation (John 1:1-11). If the Lord God is at work in that unregenerate world by means of his temporal conserving and restraining common grace, then the Christian's hand, too, must be put to the plow in that world in order that there also, as well as within the circle of the faithful few, the name of the Lord may ever be glorified.

If God is supreme and sovereign, His divine norms and standards of justice, truth, goodness, holiness, and love must have the final control and motivation in everything the Christian thinks, wills, and does. These norms rather than those of an apostate political, legal, social, and economic science must become the directives by which the Christian is guided by God the Holy Ghost as a citizen, as a worker, as a scientist, as a teacher, as an employer, as an artist, and as a parent; and they ALONE must constantly enlighten us in solving the problems with which we are faced in ALL areas of life.

The apostle Paul teaches that God the Father in Heaven has entrusted all power and authority upon earth to His Son through whom He now rules all things (1 Cor. 15:24; Phil. 2:1-10). The risen and ascended Christ has been entrusted by the Heavenly Father with the great task of transforming not only individual lives but all cultural, legal, political, scientific, economic, and industrial life. As Lord of history and of space and time, Jesus Christ can be satisfied with nothing less than the Christian reformation and organization of human society as a whole, and it therefore becomes the bounden duty and glorious privilege and task for all Christians as Christ's Body in the world to struggle for a condition of modern society and industry which will give the maximum of opportunity for others as well as for Christians to live the full, free, and abundant life which our Lord promised (John 10:10) and to make sure that Christians are never controlled by an apostate and rebellious world, but that they direct and control that world in the strength and in the power of their sovereign God. Did not our Lord say on the Mount of Ascension, "All power is given unto me in heaven and in earth" (Matt. 28: 18)?

The Word of God teaches us that our life on this planet in its integral wholeness is the service of either the one true God or of various idols and absolutizations of one or more aspects of reality. Thus the Christian's social and industrial life is one aspect of our single hearted service of the Lord. The Christian cannot avoid the duty of reforming human culture and industry after the new pattern of human relationships revealed in God's Word. All human power is derived from God, and it is the Christian's duty to use power in the service of God's Kingdom. The horror of power formation for the sake of the fulfillment of the Christian's task in the cultural development of mankind is, consequently, unscriptural. The Church itself is historically founded in power over men by means of the organized service of the Word and the Sacraments. Doubtless every power given in the hands of man implies a serious risk of abuse. But this state of affairs can only accentuate its normative meaning; it can never justify the opinion held by so many Christian pietists that power in itself is evil. The question neutralists such as Karl Barth fail to ask is this: to what ends will power in fact be used? for used it will be. Either political and economic power will be used in the service of Jesus Christ, or it will inevitably be used in the service of some idol and false god.

If the kingship of Christ is real and true, and if it is true that at our baptism we promised to fight against "the world, the flesh and the devil," ought there not be some evidence of this warfare that is going on? To restrict this warfare to the arena of the soul, to the conflict within, is certainly an unwarranted assumption made by far too many Anglo-Saxon Christians today. And, furthermore, to argue that this conflict between the two kingdoms comes to expression fully only in the individual Christian's witness and personal evan­gelism is an illegitimate conclusion drawn by far too many Christian pietists today. In the great and terrible warfare presently going on between Heaven and Hell and between God and Satan, the forces of darkness and of the Evil One are well organized in their struggle against God and His Christ, and not just in countries behind the Iron and Bamboo Curtains. Most modern Anglo-American-Canadian institutions and organizations that claim to be neutral – e.g., the state schools, the labor organizations, the banking houses, and great busi­ness corporations – are by that very reason and token implicitly if not explicitly denying Christ's claim of absolute lordship over all things. As such these institutions and organizations are serving the cause of the Anti-Christ, even if they are doing so unconsciously. To deny this is either willful blindness or woeful ignorance of Satan's strategy and devices and of the Lord's claims and demands for surrender to His sovereignty.

If Christ is truly our King, then we His modern subjects must acknowledge that sovereignty, not only in the church building, but in the field of labor relations, education, business, banking and finance, medicine and law, communications, and government. As long as we remain in the body of our earthly flesh we are called to be the Church Militant. Only in the hereafter are we promised the rest from strife of all the saints who from their labors rest. Let us rise up and engage in battle against all the ungodly hosts presently opposed to Jehovah God and His Christ, and let us become properly organized as the Lord's mighty army instead of as a pietistic rabble.

The Christian's economic task must be concerned with the reformation of his nation's industrial and social life as an aspect of the integral renewal of our whole way of life in obedience to God's new law for human existence revealed in the Person and work of Jesus Christ. For this reason we must never think of our economic and social task as Christian workers in terms of some one particular question of this or that particular or economic issue, e.g., nationalization versus private enterprise. Christian economics and politics are economics and politics that are based upon divinely revealed principles of God's Word; motivated and directed by the principle of Jehovah's sovereignty over the whole of life. Christian economics and a Christian doctrine of work take their origin in the Christian's recognition of the total sovereignty of the Lord Jesus over the whole of life.

For this reason it should be clear why no Christian can be satisfied with merely voting for a labor leader in a trade union who happens himself to be a Christian. Many English and American Christians seem to suppose that they have done their Christian duty in a union election when they have voted for a Christian candidate regardless of whether or not the trade union's platform or constitution openly acknowledges the sovereignty of Christ over its affairs. Does Mr. Cousins or Mr. Meany or Mr. Reuther accept God's sovereignty over British or American industry or do they trust in their own reason, planning, and scientific methods? Does Mr. George Woodcock or James Meany really make the Word of God the ordering principle of his collective bargaining agreement? If the answer in both cases is in the negative, then I do not see how any Christian worker could vote for them, since his duty as a Christian worker requires that he shall only support that labor union or trade association which really seeks to apply the will of the Lord as revealed in the Holy Scriptures in the economic and social spheres of human life.

Our glorious privilege as Christian workers is to bring to our workshop, industry, shop, or business the blessing of Christ's redemptive concern for the world. Such Christian economic and social action will be genuinely Christian only if it is an activity of service. For this reason it must never be a camouflaged effort to further merely special denominational or ecclesiastical interests. It must be for the good of the whole economic and social body. Christian economic and social action will thus seek reform in Parliament and the Congress, in industry and the labor unions, in the farms and the schools so that there may come an acknowledgement of the good and holy ordinances of the Lord in all spheres of society. Only in this way may we expect to receive the blessings that follow obedience to God's holy ways.

2.  The Biblical Understanding of Work in God's World←⤒🔗

It is plain that a wholehearted acceptance of the biblical view of man as a person created in God's image and for God's service, finding the fulfilment and satisfaction of his life relations with other persons, would have a far-reaching effect upon the conduct of modern industry. It would make it impossible to treat men solely or mainly as anonymous interchangeable units in a mechanical industrial process. It may be necessary so to treat them in certain contexts, but this would not matter if such treatment were merely incidental to a relationship in which they are regarded fundamentally as human beings. It must surely make all the difference in the way in which industry is run whether the underlying assumption is that the primary purpose is maximum production and profits, to which human beings must be subordinated and if necessary sacrificed; or that man in community is the central reality. In the latter an industrial undertaking is an association of persons cooperating in a common enterprise for the common good, in which responsibility is shared according to the capacity of each, and each is allowed his say in matters in which his experience and skill entitles him to express a judgment.

As a result of this view of man as created in God's image and for community with his fellow men, work is not looked upon in the Bible as constituting a problem. "Man goeth forth unto his work, and to his labour until the evening" (Ps. 104:23). In these words the psalmist of old takes human labor for granted as part of the natural and normal lot of mankind. That man should work for his daily bread is as much a part of the regular order of things as that the sun should rise or that lions should hunt. The Word of God does not consider that work is degrading. Unlike the ancient Greeks, who thought that working for one's living was beneath the dignity of a gentleman, the Hebrews looked upon daily work as a part of the Lord's ordering of the world, and no man was exempt from it, not even the king (1 Sam. 11:5).

While Hebrew workers were often slaves, their status as such was not dishonorable, nor were their conditions of service irksome or de­grading; they were often the trusted and responsible managers of their lord's household affairs or business interests. It was expected that workers would be honorably treated by their masters; the Book of the Covenant, in fact, expressly lays down directions for the treatment of Hebrew slaves. Unlike the situation in contemporary heathen polytheistic societies such as ancient Egypt and Babylon, every Hebrew worker was considered to be a legal person in his own right. As a social order grounded in God's goodness and love, Israel's primary concern was to reflect Jehovah's justice within her borders. Employers were to treat their workmen justly because the Lord was just, and because they who worshiped Him must be just. Each Israelite enjoyed his or her own rightful portion or position within the Covenant established between the Lord and Israel. The king, the priest, the firstborn, the worker, the wife, and the maid each had his mishpat or "justice," that is, a rightful and privileged place within the covenant. David gained a mishpat in the covenant by his privileged position as king, but the prophet Nathan warned him that he was uncovenanting himself by his breaking of Uriah's justice by stealing his wife Bathsheba. Everyone in Israel had a justice in the covenant; or in other words, everyone was supposed to occupy a definite status within the covenant structure of Israelite society involving both rights and obligations. Each had his mishpat to be faithfully fulfilled, secured against aggression, and restored when it was damaged. As a result of this concern for upholding jus­tice and reflecting God's righteousness within her borders, the prin­ciple of the equality before the law of all citizens was established in Israel for the first time in human history. Unlike pagan Egyptian and Mesopotamian societies, in which a system of class legislation was in force which judged an offense quite differently according to whether it involved a royal official, a priest, or a slave, all Israelites were equal before the Covenant Law of Almighty God. As Walther Eichrodt well says:

In this law God himself speaks to His people, and in His sight the poor man is as precious as the rich one, the member of a small tribe or of a despised family is worth just as much as the representative of an influential family or the bearer of a high office.³

Unlike surrounding heathen societies, capital punishment ceased to be inflicted in Israel for crimes affecting property, e.g., theft, because it was felt that the life even of a thief is worth more than the richest possessions. For the same good reason we seek in vain in the laws of ancient Israel for any sort of punishment by mutilation, by cutting off the nose or ears or like cruelties, which were often per­petrated in ancient times in the name of justice upon innocent workmen. In Israel's legal code the master of a slave pays dearly for such harm occasioned by bodily maltreatment by having to set the slave free; and the murderer of a slave "shall himself be surely put to death" (Exod. 21:12). Writing of this legal code Eichrodt says: "If we compare this with the almost unlimited power of the owner over his slave through the rest of the ancient world, then we may trace this encroachment on an otherwise unquestioned privilege to the power of the idea of the person."⁴

From another angle clear light is cast on this moral personalism of Israel's labor legislation. This may be seen in the provision made for the poor, the needy, the outcast, and the stranger within the gates. Thus the widows, orphans, and strangers, who cannot assert their rights before the law, partly because of their sex, partly on account of their youth or social insignificance, are all protected by law. In the Book of the Covenant (Ex. 21-24) it is the judge himself who is called to provide such protection. "Ye shall not afflict any widow, or fatherless child. If thou shalt afflict them in any wise, and they cry unto me, my wrath shall wax hot and I will kill you with the sword." The anger of Israel's prophets was especially aroused by the ill-treatment of Hebrew workers, especially failure to render to them their due wages. Thus Jeremiah says: "Woe unto him … that useth his neighbor's services without wages, and giveth him not for his work" (22:13). Protected by religious sanctions, the prophets of Israel were a reforming political force which has never been surpassed and perhaps never equaled in subsequent world-history. As direct spokesmen or heralds of the living God, they created an extraordinary atmosphere of social and political reform entirely unknown in ancient Near Eastern polytheism.

Thanks to their efforts the Lord's justice, goodness, love, and grace made themselves felt in Israel's legal and political ordering of society. For the first time in the history of mankind, workers enjoyed the protection of the rule of law, and they could expect to be treated fairly by their employers; for the equality of all the members of the nation of Israel before the Lord God, who is no respecter of persons, demanded and obtained the protection of the freedom and the security of all citizens. Such labor legislation was entirely the outcome of the Israelite faith in the sovereign lordship of the living God, who as Creator and Redeemer has chosen a people of His own, and who demands that their outer life, economic, political, and social, no less than their inward life, personal and private, should be shaped in accordance with His declared law and purpose for man in society.

Summing up, we may say that in the Bible no stigma is attached to being a worker; on the contrary, work is not looked upon as a necessary drudgery for the purpose of making a living, but as a way of life in which the nature of man should find its proper exercise and delight, and so fulfil itself to the glory of the Lord. Work is in fact thought of as a creative activity undertaken for the love of the work itself; and because man is made in God's image, he should make things for the sake of doing well a thing that is worth doing. To do one's appointed work well is to put oneself into the state in which one may receive God's blessing. Happy is the man, says the psalmist, whose labor is blessed by God, and wretched is the man, declares Isaiah, whose work is not blessed and whose labor is in vain (Ps. 128:2; Isa. 65:23). For the men of the Bible, then, work is a God-appointed "office" and service rendered by man to his Creator.

Since to labor is the common lot of mankind, it is important that men should accept it without complaining and so fulfil with cheerful obedience God's intention for man. "Hate not the laborious work, neither husbandry, which the most High hath ordained" (Ecclesiasticus 7:15 [Apocryphal]). The basic assumption of the biblical viewpoint is that work is a divine ordinance for man's life on earth. As such it falls within the sphere of law and of God's requirement for man. Work, that is to say, is a part of the divinely ordained structure of the world of human nature.

In his study, The Biblical Doctrine of Work, the Dean of York, the Very Reverend Alan Richardson, points out that the Decalogue takes work so much for granted that it commands man to rest from labor on the seventh day because it is assumed he will have worked the other six days of the week. He says:

The very fact that the Fourth Commandment of the Decalogue is an injunction to rest from labour gives the clearest possible indication of the biblical point of view – that man is by his very nature a worker. All through the Scriptures work is regarded as a divine ordinance for human life … as something given by way of what we today might perhaps speak of as "natural law"; man is made that not only can he not satisfy his material needs without working but also he cannot satisfy his spiritual needs, or fulfil his function as a human being.⁵

Human work is thought of by the psalmist (Ps. 146) as man's best way of praising Jehovah.

Work is not something optional to men; it is something built into human nature, a command of the Lord laid upon every man. That is why without work a man soon deteriorates. Whether it be forced old age retirement, prolonged unemployment, or idleness and sloth, lack of work soon breaks a man into doddering pieces and no self is left to respect. This is because work is peculiarly inherent to being a man.

The Fall of Man and the invasion of God's creation by Satan and sin did not obliterate this God-given structuration of man as worker; he remains a worker even though his work now comes under the curse. Under the domination of sin work becomes labor, troublesome, tiring, frustrating under the punishing curse of weeds and sweat, sorrow and other demonic forces and influences. Outside Paradise man remains a worker, but his work is radically deformed, prone to vanity, a betrayal of his lordship over the world under the sovereign God of the Scriptures.

As a result of man's fall into sin, his cultural task and his daily work becomes doubly difficult. Whereas before Satan penetrated God's creation there was nothing to hinder man in his cultural task, today the earth is cursed (Gen. 3:17). The thorns and the thistles of which the Book of Beginnings speaks are types of the numberless distorting forces at work in nature which were not there originally. Instead of all things working harmoniously together, we now have soil erosion, deforestation, hunger, famine, fire, and flood.

Worse still, man's heart has itself become corrupted and God's image defaced and ruined and as a result man no longer reflects the image of God, but that of whatever false god he now chooses to worship.

Instead of serving and loving God and his neighbor, man now uses his science and technology and social institutions to exploit God's creation and his fellow man to his own selfish advantage. Again, sin has disrupted man's social life. The task which organized society must fulfil in culture by united action is hampered and often destroyed by innumerable conflicts between men, social classes, races, and nations. What one man builds up by patient statesmanship another tears down. Mankind, since sin corrupted human na­ture, is working at cross purposes.

In no sphere have the effects of sin been greater than in the sphere of work and of labor relations. Unless man's work in time since the Fall is redeemed by the Lord Jesus Christ, and unless it is actually and intrinsically a praising of Jehovah, work does indeed become a curse, a terrible distraction, a useless activity that ends only in the grave. As Calvin Seerveld says in his address delivered before the Christian Labour Association of Canada at Toronto on April 25, 1964:

Those sophists who say "yet unredeemed work is not useless to civilization," have turned the truth into a lie and are ascribing what God salvages from his sinning creatures to the proud justification of man. The Bible is clear on this matter; man's work is a built-in opportunity to praise God; if his work is not genuine praise of Jehovah God borne out of faith, then it is a dead work, damned and dead … Only when human work is worship of Jehovah … only then does work lose its human chains; only then does that narrow-minded daemonic drive to get and get … become stilled, converted into an open-ended rush of joy. Only when Grace covers the Toil, the rising up early, the sitting up late, eating the bread you worried about providing, only under and out of Grace does work find meaning, and can a man go content.⁶

Yet, even in spite of the invasion of God's world by Satan, sin, and the forces of darkness, man is called to serve God and his neighbor. No Christian teacher did more to restore the biblical doctrine of the "calling" than Martin Luther. He rebelled against the medieval Catholic departmentalization of life by declaring that the whole "secular" realm is as much under the Lordship of Christ as the "religious." He still distinguished between "Christian" and "secular" spheres, but held that in the person of the Christian they have been conjoined. Moreover, in this world there are many offices or "callings," of which he saw three main groupings:

Three kinds of callings are ordained by God; in them one can live with God and a clear conscience. The first is the family, the second political and secular authority, and the third the church or the ministry.⁷

We could best describe these as society, state, and church. Every Christian exists in all three at once; that is, with certain duties falling to his lot from day to day because of his relationship to other people within each sphere. It is to the Reformers that we in fact owe the crucial distinctions between church, state, and society.

Writing of this Lutheran doctrine of the "calling," Emil Brunner well says in The Divine Imperative:

Nowadays the word "calling" means little more than the share of duty which falls to the lot of the individual in the whole economy of labour, in the business of earning one's living. It has become an economic conception. But even in the theological ethic it has seldom been understood in the deeper sense. How could it be otherwise when the truth of justification by faith was no longer understood? It was realized, of course, that Luther had achieved something decisive by his renewal of this conception; but men thought that the decisive element lay in the fact that through this new meaning of vocation the secular, civil, and economic forms of labour, in contrast to the ascetic monastic conception, had become hallowed once more. In so doing the very centre of Luther's ideas has been misunderstood. Certainly this new respect for the economic, civil, and secular sphere is one of the logical results of his work. But that is only the by-product of a greater transformation.

Through the idea of the "Calling" existence in the world is revealed in its sinfulness, and at the same time it is "covered" by forgiveness, while the believer regains a good conscience with which he can take part in the action and life of the world, without feeling guilty of "compromise." To express this in a brief formula: the point is here that world pessimism is overcome, while at the same time the radical corruption of the world and the absolute character of the divine law are recognized. All that Luther cared about was to secure the possession of a good conscience in one's Calling, and to do away with the unsatisfactory alternatives; renunciation of the world or compromise. Therefore this idea of the Calling is full of eschatological tension and a daring which conquers the world; indeed, we might almost call it a "divine audacity"; and the reason is this: God takes over all responsibility for our action in the world which in itself is sinful, if we, on our part, will only do here and now that which the present situation demands from one who loves God and his neighbor.⁸

In this excellent statement of Brunner's we are reminded that the Bible tells us not only of God's law but also of God's grace. The glorious gospel of God in fact shows how through Jesus Christ God's law for work may be fulfilled. It is of fundamental significance that our Lord was a carpenter. In His life God's intention for man in the creation was completely fulfilled. Christians down the ages have rightly loved to dwell upon the picture of Christ as the Master-Workman of whom it was said, "He hath done all things well" (Mark 7:37). The Lord who spoke of His "yoke" as easy was also the good carpenter who knew the difference between a well-made and a badly made yoke which the oxen at the plow would have to wear. It is of the deepest significance for the biblical doctrine of work that God, when for the sake of our salvation He chose to be made man, was incarnate in a village craftsman and not in a king or statesman or general or philosopher. This was the only fitting image for the God whom the Scriptures had all along represented as himself the great and only worker in the creation. "In six days the Lord God made heaven and earth … and on the seventh day rested from his work" (Exod. 20: 11). In this biblical doctrine of God himself the Master-Workman of the creation, we have the answer to the blasphemous Greek view that work is degrading and fit only for slaves, as well as the biblical vindication of the Christian view that work is an honorable and necessary activity of the good life. It is thus wholly appropriate that the God of our salvation, when he became man, should have been born into a working-class family (John 5:17). The Almighty Lord of Heaven and earth could have been adequately revealed only by "taking the form of a servant" (Phil. 2:6). The tragedy of our age is that the working classes of the world should have turned their eyes away from the workman of Nazareth and followed the false teaching of Karl Marx.

To the world outside the Church, therefore, it is vital that Christians proclaim work as a law of God for human life, a law from which there can be no escape. At the same time, for those who have been born again from above by God's sovereign grace in Christ, work ceases to belong to the sphere of law and becomes what God intended it to be from the beginning of the world. When in Christ we are re-created and regenerated in His new creation, we are enabled to fulfil the divine intention for work, which in our own strength we could never do.

Becoming a Christian means nothing less than a complete change in the direction of one's living. It means becoming an entirely new sort of person. God's Word speaks of this as a rebirth, of "a being begotten anew," followed by a complete change in one's consciousness and subconsciousness which changes a man in the depths of his being, in what the Bible calls his heart. Only God's Spirit and sovereign grace can bring about such a fundamental change in life orientation. Once a person becomes a Christian he thinks, feels, and behaves differently from the non-Christian or unbeliever. No one saw this more clearly than Abraham Kuyper. In his Principles of Sacred Theology he writes:

We speak none to emphatically, therefore, when we speak of two kinds of people. Both are human, but one is inwardly different from the other, and consequently feels a different content rising from his consciousness; thus they face the cosmos from different points of view, and are impelled by different motives. And the fact that there are now two kinds of people, occasions of necessity the fact of two kinds of human life and consciousness of life, and of two kinds of science.⁹

To which we must surely add two kinds of art, two kinds of politics, two kinds of marriage, two kinds of jurisprudence, two kinds of education, and above all, two kinds of work. For the non-Christian, work continues to remain under God's curse laid upon Adam and all his descendants: "Cursed is the ground for thy sake; and in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life, thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee … In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it was thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return" (Gen. 3:17-19). Thanks to the work of the second Adam, for the Christian work once more becomes his glad and free service. But while the Lord's curse has been alleviated by the coming of Christ, the land will always give up weeds as well as plants. Man will always have to labor to survive, although that labor will reveal itself as less of a curse as men become progressively sanctified. As the image of God becomes restored in our hearts by the indwelling spirit and presence of God's Son, so we gradually recover our God-given creativity and find joy in our daily work and find it to be good (Gen. 1:31).

But the basic truth remains: until paradise is regained and Christ returns to bring in a new heaven and a new earth, as promised in God's Word, there will always remain scarcity. This basic truth of economics is recognized by the so-called classical economists such as John Marshall, Ludwig von Mises, Roepke, Wicksteed, Robbins, Hayek, and even by such neo-classical economists as Paul A. Samuelson in his well-known textbook, Economics, where he writes in answer to J. K. Galbraith's thesis in The Affluent Society as follows:

In The Affluent Society, Harvard's Galbraith has eloquently pointed out that Americans today have for the most part gone beyond the level of physiological necessity … Without challenging Galbraith's thesis that the time has come to spend more on public needs and less on private needs, one may properly point out that our total product would have to become many times higher than its present level if everyone were to become able to live at the level of a moderately well-off doctor, lawyer, professor, or advertising man – to say nothing of the really well-to-do. … Even if the national income were divided up equally between every man, woman and child – and it clearly cannot be – there would be only about $60 per week to go round. Therefore, while it recognizes the important germ of truth in the notion that America has become an affluent society, economics must still contend with scarcity as a basic fact of life…

"Economic Scarcity" refers to the basic fact of life that there exists only a finite amount of human and nonhuman resources, which the best technical knowledge is capable of using to produce only a limited maximum amount of each and every good … And thus far, nowhere on the globe is the supply of goods so plentiful or the tastes of the populace so limited that every person can have more than enough of everything he might fancy.¹⁰

Likewise G. L. Bach recognizes in his textbook, Economics, that scarcity is still the basic economic problem. He writes:

Human wants are vast, perhaps infinite. Resources to fulfill these wants are limited. They are scarce. For most of the world's population – perhaps two billion people – live in abject poverty. We in the United States are rich compared to most of the world. But even we are far from rich enough to escape the ever-present need for economizing – that is, for choosing between alternatives when we would like to have both. At the individual level, few of us have all the money we want.¹¹

Unfortunately this great law of scarcity in economics is not recognized by the new radical economists such as Robert Theobald in his recent work The Guaranteed Income and by Messers. J. N. Morgan, M. H. David, W. J. Cohen, and H. E. Brazer, who claim in Income and Welfare in the United States:

The U.S. has arrived at the point where poverty could be abolished easily and simply by a stroke of the pen. To raise every individual and family in the nation now below a subsistence in­come to the subsistence level would cost about $10 billion a year. This is less than 2 per cent of the gross national product.¹²

Regardless of the attempt of such apostate economists to climb out from under the great law of scarcity laid upon mankind as part of God's curse upon man's disobedience, it still holds good. Just as the second law of thermodynamics holds good in the world of physics and biology, so the law of scarcity holds good in the world of economics and business. It shows up constantly in the principle of diminishing returns, marginal product and utility, interest and bank rate. Like the second law of thermodynamics the law of scarcity will be suspended only when Christ shall have subdued all things unto himself, and God shall be all in all (1 Cor. 15:28).

3.  Obeying the Lord's Ordinances for Work←⤒🔗

What are these holy ordinances arising out of the biblical understanding of work as man's proper office and service of God?

1. The first principle is that all workers are persons created in God's holy image and, therefore, they should be treated as persons and never as functions of the economic system. Only when the workers stop feeling that they are being reduced to slaves and functions of the machines they operate may we expect to restore meaning to work.

It should by now be apparent that the principle of technical and economic rationality and present methods of so-called scientific management of men, when put into practice regardless of all other considerations, come into conflict with the real world of men and women and with their manifold and incalculable desires and purposes. The subordination of modern industry to such technical rationality and to such methods of scientific management is not a necessary and inevitable consequence of the coming of the machine. It is an act of human choice. It is within the power of men and nations to choose whether production exists for the sake of man or man exists for the sake of production. As far as God's Word is concerned, the primary purpose of industry and commerce must be to serve the community by producing goods and providing services as efficiently and profitably as possible, and no doubt technical rationality and scientific management of men may be necessary means to efficient production. But the problem which confronts industry today throughout the world is how to fulfil its primary and proper purpose without sacrificing the true ends of social living and without devaluating human labor. The workers must be given back the sense that they belong within the scheme of modern industry which their forebears previously felt in medieval and domestic industry. They must be given a share of responsibility, however humble, in that scheme. Sir George Schuster, the noted British industrialist, has expressed the conviction that "the greatest need of our modern industrial society is to make industrial employment something which is, and is seen, as an essential part of a satisfactory human life."¹³ In a similar vein the late Samuel Courtauld has well and beautifully said that "the quality of the workers who leave the factory doors every evening is a more important thing than the quality of the products its delivers to the customers."¹⁴

Human labor must never be severed from the person of the worker. Manpower is not a mere means of production only to be considered from the point of view of greater production or profits, such as a machine, a factory building, or a patent. Labor is indissolubly connected with man, who is created in God's image and therefore called to serve and glorify his Creator in his labor. According to God's Word, man is called to have dominion over creation. The image of God is a task; man has been called upon to have dominion, and that includes both the workers and the managers.

2. Side by side with this recognition of the human dignity of the worker as created in God's image is the principle of cooperation rather than conflict in industrial life. The commandment to love one's neighbor has also its consequences for man's social and indus­trial life. The man who is directed by the Word of God "to love the Lord" and "his neighbor as himself" can make no compromise with the humanist doctrine of the class struggle. He must oppose those apostate socialists who would make the class struggle normative for industrial relations. Employer and worker are each other's neighbors, because they are called upon to do the same work in the same business, factory, plant, or trade. Each must have his own responsi­bilities. This will not be possible by way of conflict but by way of cooperation. H. Van Riessen suggests in the last chapter of The Society of the Future that such cooperation can take place when the industrialist keeps his workmen informed as much as possible about the running of the plant, future economic plans, and various other internal problems of organization and production.¹⁵ Such industrial works councils have been operating successfully in the Netherlands since the end of the last war, and they go far to explain why Dutch industry has not suffered from the wastage caused by strikes. In his article in Delta W. F. de Gaay Fortman on "Industrial Relations in the Netherlands" points out that:

Any enquiry into the organizational relations between labor and management in the Netherlands will at once turn up one characteristic fact – the low number of strikes … Since the liberation of the country in 1945, strikes organized by the trade unions have been infrequent. To be sure, there have been wildcat strikes spontaneous and unofficial, but even these have been less frequent than elsewhere. The Dutch worker … can feel at ease with the leadership given by the three large trade-union federations, which have the aim of negotiation with employers as long as possible to reach agreement. This is not to say that there is no conflict in industrial relations in the Netherlands. The struggle, however does not take place in the factories or on the docks but around what R. F. Hoxie, in his book Trade Unionism in the United States has termed "the mahogany table." It is carried on with the weapons of persuasion, scientific calculations, and piercing argument.¹⁶

What is the explanation of this happy situation existing in industrial relations in the Netherlands? The answer will surprise most Anglo-Saxon Christians who have so successfully managed to keep Jesus Christ locked up behind the doors of their churches and chapels, instead of letting Him reign in their factories and offices. Fortman answers that it is Christianity which is responsible:

Attention must be drawn to the close links between religion and political life, religion and social life, and religion and cultural life that many in the Netherlands advocate. In virtually no other country in the world do religious and ideological movements find their expression to such a degree in corresponding organizations of employers and employees.

The idea that lies at the base of the relationship is as follows: every employer's 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 labor, 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 the Netherlands to the founding of Catholic and Protestant employers' organizations 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. In the case of the employers' organizations it is liberalism; with the trade unions, socialism or communism.

The existence of organizations split along ideological lines has come to be accepted in the Netherlands as an essential part of Dutch national life … One result is that the closed shop is unknown. In labor management deliberations, the central Catholic and Protestant organizations are always drawn into the discussion along with the "general" organizations, while associations of employers or workers not federated with the central organizations also often find themselves allocated a place at the conference table. This open method has the great advantage over the closed shop system that minorities are not suppressed and that as many groups of employers and workers as possible are drawn into the consultations. If, as a consequence, negotiation sometimes becomes more difficult, from the point of view of democracy in industrial life the system has undeniable advantages.¹⁷

By contrast, the history of Joint Consultation given by Rodger Charles in his book on British industry, Man, Industry and Society, makes sorrowful reading and should cause every British Christian employer and worker in the land to bow his head in sorrowful repentance before the Lord Jesus Christ. After describing the origin and development and eventual breakdown of the Whitley Com­mittee's Industrial Councils set up after the Great War, Charles asks why they failed. He answers:

The reasons for the failure of Whitleyism surely lie, not in any intrinsic impossibility the scheme contained, but in the unfavourable circumstances in which it was tried. Industrial relations are not something apart from, but very much a part of, our whole social and political life. To put forward proposals such as the Whitley Report embodied, at the time when macroeconomic theory was so ill-developed and when the central government had so little of that care for the common good that is the essence of its true task, was asking too much … As long as it was permissible for the powers-that-be to doubt the legitimate place of the unions and their collective bargaining practices in the scheme of things and to consider labor simply as an economic factor almost devoid of human needs and wants, it was not possible to reorganize industry along Whitley lines.¹⁸

As a Roman Catholic Christian, Rodger Charles, no doubt, is too polite to state the real reason; namely, the fact of the apostasy of the majority of Protestant Christians in Britain who have preferred to be guided in their political and economic life by humanistic categories of thinking derived from apostate laissez faire and Marxist economics rather than by the Word of God as the ordering principle of their economic and business life. Let there be no doubt of it. The deplorable situation which has prevailed and continues to prevail in British industrial relations is the direct and inevitable outcome of Protestant pietism and the abdication of all responsibility for the nation's industrial and economic affairs. Without the spirit of the Lord Jesus Christ in control of men's hearts, Anglo-American-Canadian industry is doomed to frustration, conflict, and eventual death. No wonder West Germany and Holland, which allow for Christian employer and trade unions, are today running rings around British, American, and Canadian industry with its pagan restrictive industrial practices on the part of both labor and management, with its demarcation disputes, its working to the book and go-slow policies of our so-called "neutral" trade unions, and with the price fixing and retail price maintenance of the employers' organizations.

Realizing that industrial relations are not something apart from, but very much a part of, a society's whole social and political life, the Christian worker movements upon the European Continent have been forced to widen their objectives. Along with the material improvement of the worker's position, they have also tried to bring about far-reaching changes in the social structure as a whole. Speak­ing of this wider objective before the Fourth Congress of the International Federation of Evangelical Workers' Associations at Copenhagen in May, 1950, W. F. de Gaay Fortman, a leading Protestant Christian trade unionist, said:

It must be understood that the struggle for new forms of society could not be vigorously carried out until now. But today the sorest material needs of the laborer, at least in Western Europe, have been met. That is why it is possible now, more than ever before, to draw the attention of Christians to the great evil of capitalistic development: the fact that the worker no longer bears any responsibility of his own in the process of labor, and consequently has been alienated from his labor and from the community in which he performs his labor. This state of affairs now con­stitutes the heart of the social problem.¹⁹

After suggesting, as we have already suggested, that this depersonalization of the worker in modern industry is due to a number of factors, including modern techniques with their tendency towards specialization of functions and their mechanization of production, Fortman then adds:

Besides, there Besides, 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 upon the working classes. Countless workers have learned the doctrine of unrestricted self-interest from their employers and how they did learn it! Then there was, in addition, the fact that society was not prepared to help the working man to utilize his leisure properly when shorter working hours were realized. This will suffice to outline the causes of the spiritual proletarisation of the working-classes.

It is especially to fight this spiritual proletarisation that the Christian social movements propagate industrial democracy both in industry and factory undertaking, in the social and economic fields. The Christian social movement has adopted as its principle harmonious cooperation of capital and labor. One of these two factors should not overrule the other; together they hear the process of production and that is why they should also bear the responsibility for its progress together.

The idea of cooperation on the basis of equality inevitably leads to the idea of industrial democracy. A worker is no part of a machine, but a man created by God and placed in this world with his own responsibility towards God, his family and the several communities in which he has his task. In the social order he should find no hindrance to the acceptance of this responsibility.

A worker in these days is exposed to the temptations of a system which promises him an almost unlimited improvement of his material position but which at the same time tends to make him a slave of the totalitarian state. Resistance to this demonic system is, in my view, only possible, if the Christian social movement right now vigorously sponsors such structural changes in the social system that the worker regains his dignity as a man, bears for his part responsibility in the regulation of economic life and in so doing realizes again the significance and purpose of his labor. In opposition to the brutal destruction with which com­munism threatens the world, all those who recognize Jesus Christ as Lord of their life and of the world have the duty to show that the criticism of the Gospel on our social order is far more radical than the communistic criticism and that a real recovery and a real renovation of the violated social relations is not to be attained in any other way than by obedience to the Lord's commandment.

Therefore, industrial democracy is necessary in the national economic policy, in the economic relations in industry, and especially in individual plants and undertakings, for a worker carries out his work there; he spends the greater part of his life within its boundaries; and it largely defines his circumstances in life.²⁰

3. A third and vital ordinance of God regarding work is that work is not primarily a thing one does to live, but the thing one lives to do. Work is, or it should be, the full expression of the worker's faculties, the thing in which he finds spiritual, mental, and bodily satisfaction, and the means by which he offers himself in service to God and to his fellow men.

Now the implications of this are not merely that work should be performed under decent sanitary and living conditions, reason­able hours of work, and so on. That is a point even we in the English-speaking world have begun to appreciate, thanks to the efforts of a former generation of great evangelical churchmen such as Lord Shaftesbury, Oastler and Bull of Bicrlcy, and it is all to the good.²¹ But we have tended to concentrate upon such matters to the exclusion of all else.

There is, for example, the question of profits and remuneration. Apostate post-Christians have got it fixed firmly in their heads that the proper end of work is to be paid for it in terms of hard cash. As one wit has put it, we "price everything and value nothing." But, if our Christian principle is at all true, this does not follow. So long as society provides the worker with a sufficient return in real wages to enable him to carry on his work properly, then he has his reward. For his work is the measure of his life, and his satisfaction is found in the fulfilment of his own nature as a worker, and in the contemplation of the perfection of his labors. That in practice there is this satisfaction is shown by the mere fact that a man will put loving labor into some hobby which can never bring him any financial return. His satisfaction comes from looking upon what he has made and finding it very good. He is no longer bargaining with his work, but serving it. It is only when work has to be looked upon as a means to financial gain that it becomes hateful; for then instead of a friend it becomes an enemy from which tolls have to be extracted. What most workers today demand from society is that they should always get out of their work a little more than the value of the labor they give to society. By this process they persuade themselves that society is always in their debt – a Marxist conviction that piles up costs and leaves many workers with a grudge against society. Such a view of work is no doubt derived from Marx's so-called labor theory of wages.

A second consequence is that if we really believed that work is not primarily a thing one does to live but the thing one lives to do and arranged our work and our standard of values accordingly, we should stop thinking of work as something that we hasten to hurry through in order to enjoy our time off. We should look on our leisure as the period in which we are refreshed and recreated for the purpose of getting on with our work. With such a Christian attitude we would no longer tolerate conditions or regulations of any sort that prevented us from working as long and as well as our enjoyment of work demanded. We should resent any restrictions imposed by management or labor union as a gross infringement upon the liberty of the Christian worker. Such a biblical attitude would upset all our present pagan notions about hours of work, rates of work, unfair competition, seniority, and so on. We should fight as artists fight for precious time in which to get on with the job – instead of fighting for shorter time in which to fritter away precious hours. Instead of work being a drudgery it would become a delight as we sought by means of it to praise God and glorify Him in our labor. George Herbert rightly sensed this praising of Jehovah God in his wonderful hymn:

Teach me, my God and King
In all things thee to see
And what I do in anything
To do it as for thee!

All may of thee partake
Nothing can be so mean
Which with this tincture, "for thy sake,"
Will not grow bright and clean.

A servant with this clause
Makes drudgery divine
Who sweeps a room, as for thy laws
Makes that and the action fine.

This is the famous stone
That turneth all to gold
For that which God doth touch and own
Cannot for less be told.²²

Our Heavenly Father stands ever ready to gather up our daily offerings of sweat and tears and to change them into "sacrifices of praise and thanksgiving"; His grace makes believing human work thanksgiving (eucharistia). As Calvin Seerveld well says:

God's call to worship ranges the breadth of his creation; nothing is too mean for Him to stoop and save. Every Christian worker may hold on to that Biblical truth that Jehovah God works in us both the will and the deed to act out our salvation with fear and trembling and joy to his good pleasure; in whatever calling, and with however so many talents His Grace finds us … My father is a seller of fish … My father is in full-time service for the Lord, prophet, priest and king in the fish business. And customers who come into the store sense it. Not that we always have the cheapest fish in town … not that there is no sin; But this; that little Great South Bay Fish Market … is not only a clean, honest place where you can buy quality fish at a reasonable price with a smile, but there is a spirit in the store, a spirit of laughter, of fun, joy, inside the buying and selling that strikes an observer…

When I watch my Dad's hands, big beefy hands with broad stubby fingers … they could never play a piano; when I watch those hands delicately split the back of a mackerel or with a swift, true stroke fillet a flounder close to the bone, leaving all the meat together; when I know those hands dressed and peddled fish from the handlebars of a bicycle in the grim 1930's, cut and sold fish year after year with never a vacation through fire and sickness, thieves and disaster, weariness, winter cold and hot muggy summers, twinkling at work without complaint … struggling day in day out to fix a just price, in weakness often but always in faith consecratedly cutting up fish before the face of the Lord; when I see that, I know that God's Grace can come down to a man's hand and the flash of a scabby fish knife.²³

It was with such a spirit that our Puritan ancestors carved America out of the bushland and scrub of the Atlantic seaboard and that Dutch Calvinists pushed back the frontiers of the sea to build up their polders. It is only such a spirit which makes work worthwhile. May the Lord give us back such a spirit.

A third consequence of such a Christian principle is that we should fight tooth and nail, not for mere employment, but for the quality of the work that we do. We should clamor to be engaged in work that is worth doing, and in which we could take a pride because it would be work for the glory of the Lord and the service of our fellow man. Workers guided by such a biblical principle would demand that the stuff and the goods they turned out of the factories would be good stuff – they would no longer be content to grab their pay packets and let the credit for their workmanship go by the board. Like the shareholders in the brewery, they would feel a sense of personal responsibility for what they produced, and clamor to know and to control what went into the beer brewed. There would be protests and strikes – not only about unjust conditions of pay and of work, but about the quality of the work demanded by the bosses, and the honesty, beauty, and usefulness of the goods produced. The greatest insult which our apostate capitalist age has offered to the workers is the end product of their labors and to force them to dedicate their lives to shoddily making things that are NOT worth making.

Of the terrible temptation to split up into sacred and secular what God has made one, Calvin Seerveld has said:

Comes then the subtle darts of the Evil One, whether in the mouth of angel, man or snake: "Has God said that all life is to be conformed to Jesus Christ? Is there not anything indifferent to Christian conviction? Surely what God wishes is your heart, your personal commitment to Jesus Christ as your individual Saviour; this confession is what God wants. But really, sweeping the streets with a broom is sweeping the streets with a broom, whether the handle is held by a believer or unbeliever. Qua broom sweeping there is no difference. Of course, a man's behaviour and attitude and motive can be Christian or not, but not broom sweeping per se."

This line of thought may be unpremeditated but it is murder. It kills the Christian worker and leaves behind a Christian that works. Work is then no longer my work, a man is not in his working or in his work product any more, but work is turned into a kind of abstracted qua se mechanical function to which I seem to be locally attached as it were. Such a rootless, purely theoretical conception of the nature of work conflicts radically with the Biblical view of work and undoes the whole drive for Reformational Christian living because it separates a man's faith from his livelihood, that is makes faith something mental, "spiritual," extrinsic to his actual bodily activity. Such subtle reasoning about work per se, work-in-general, secularizes the Christian's daily walk with God as devastatingly as talk about God-in general ruins a Christian theology. Sweeping the streets is no longer God's service or worship but simply something you do to earn a living; cutting up fish is no longer God's service, but a common naturally human business. It cuts the heart, the life blood out of Christian work! Christian labor, strictly speaking, is nonsense. Bodily labor is a neutral necessity, that's all.

There is no lack of Christian proponents for this evil idea. Strange bedfellows accept this barren conception of work divested of its hallelujah character. Roman catholic theory, Barth's theology, do-gooding liberals, and a wide run of Fundamentalists all agree, in varying ways for different reasons, that there is a zone of reality not intrinsically touched, dominated, to be changed by God's saving Grace, that there is an area of the world which simply is there. These groupings sharply debate among themselves the exact dogmatic content of Christian belief and also argue sharply among themselves just how important and what constitutes this "other realm," and how it is to be related to matters of salvation, but they all hold basically that certain created states of affairs, like work, for example, are essentially mundane.²⁴

4. The fourth ordinance of the Lord God for human work is that the so-called "secular" vocation is just as sacred as the ecclesiastical. In fact there is no secular aspect of life in which we may safely ignore the Lord's claims upon our lives. Christians must get it firmly into their heads that when a man or woman is called to a particular job of "secular work," that job is as true a vocation as though he or she had been called to the sacred ministry of Christ's holy and catholic and apostolic Church.

Perhaps the Church should conduct a special commissioning service at which Christian workers could be empowered by God the Holy Ghost in their chosen vocations as carpenter, electrician, truck driver, factory worker, school teacher, nurse, etc. For the true Christian, whether "layman" or "clergyman," everything he or she does is an offering to God, for our Jehovah God is a jealous God who demands the whole of our lives to be dedicated in his service. Our God is not a mere "god" reserved for the chapel or church, but He is. the Lord of the tentmakers, the tax collectors, the fisher­men, the miners, and the carpenters. All of the Christian's life is precious to the Savior and therefore whatsoever ye do it as unto the Lord, whether you eat, drink, work, sleep, or play (Col. 3:23-24).

Those who laid the foundations of Western civilization had a doctrine of work which they formulated in the Latin phrase laborare est orare (to work is to pray). Can that still be the foundation and heart of a Christian doctrine of work in modern society? asks the Christian industrialist, Mr. Heron, in the book, Prospect for Christendom:

Can a financier or a machine tender really pray at his work today? Can he practice the presence of God as he plans his next deal or struggles against the monotony of his nut-tightening? Can he see in the thing that he is making or causing to be made something which is being made for Christ's sake? Let us admit without reservation that unless in each case the Christian can answer these questions with a simple affirmative he must, if he is logical, give up his Christianity or his activity in relation to money or to the machine.²⁵

In actual factthere can take place in many forms of work – notably in the concentration of the artist upon his task, and in the process of scientific discovery, but also in craftsmanship of various kinds – an experience that is analogous to the act of prayer. As Heron does well to point out:

It is a matter of common experience that the labourer sometimes loses himself in his work and that when he does so his load is eased. There is a strong resemblance between this condition of the body absorbed in what we call work and its state in silence in what we call prayer; and the reason for the resemblance is that in both cases man is giving himself to God – in the one instance to God at work in the natural creation, in the other to God at rest in the spirit.²⁶

From this it willbe evident what far-reaching changes will have to be brought about in industry today before the assertion "to work is to pray" can be for many of those engaged in it anything more than a mockery. In nothing has the Church so lost her hold on reality as in her dismal failure to understand and respect the "secular" vocation. Working for God has come to be equated almost entirely with personal evangelism and witnessing for Christ. As a tragic and direct result, work and religion have become separated into two departments of life, and the "secular" every-day work of the world has become turned to purely selfish and destructive ends, while the great majority of American, British, and Canadian workers have today become completely irreligious and live as if God is dead. And then churchmen dare to express astonishment! But is such a result so really astonishing? How could any sane workman remain interested in a religion which thus appears to have no concern with nine tenths of his life. The churches' official approach to an intelligent carpenter is usually confined to exhorting him not to be drunk and disorderly in his leisure hours and to come to church on Sundays. What the churches should be telling him is that the very first demand that Jehovah God makes upon him is that he should make good tables. Let him go to church on the Lord's Day, by all means, and let him remain temperate by all means; but what use is all that if in the very center of his life and occupation he is insulting the Lord God with bad carpentry? We may rest assured that no crooked table legs or ill-fitting drawers or sloppy workmanship ever came out of the carpenter's shop at Nazareth. Nor if they did, could we really believe that they were made by the same hand that made the heavens and the earth (Gen. 1:31; Psalm 104; John 1:3).

For the same reason we must object to the usual doctrine which would confine so-called church work amongst women to organizing fetes and bazaars. The churches' official approach to wives and mothers is usually confined to exhorting them to be chaste, sober, and monogamous during the week and to attend church on Sundays, thereby implying that religion is something that goes on only in a building set aside for that purpose. What the churches should be telling wives and mothers is that the very first demand Almighty God makes upon ALL married women is that they should become good wives and better mothers. Go to church, by all means, but never forget that as a married woman she is serving God best of all when she fulfills the "office" of wife and mother to the very best of her ability.

This is not to deny the vital importance of worship. Having given to God his worth-ship and acknowledged His claim upon our lives in His house, we should then go out into His world to do His will on earth even as it is now done in Heaven. When asked by his mother, "Why has thou thus dealt with us," upon finding Jesus in the Temple, He replied, "I must be about my Father's business" (Luke 2:49). It is significant that no sooner had the boy Jesus declared that He must be in the things of His Heavenly Father, that He returned to Nazareth and was subject to His earthly parents. In His mother's cottage as much as when He was learning of the things of God in the Temple, He was in the things of His Father. The next eighteen years, when the Son of God was a village carpenter, are all the proof we could ask that the everyday workaday routine of every one of us can be one long, unbroken act of worship of our Heavenly Father. The Christ-centered life of being in the things of our Father is indeed like a compass with its two legs. If we will strike the one leg of worship deep into our central loyalty to Christ, then the other leg of obedience can take as wide a sweep as it likes in the things of the world; for thereby it makes them our Father's business and the dominion of the Kingdom of Heaven. Thus, to Brother Lawrence of Lorraine, the monastery cook, a kitchen and an altar were as one; and to pick up a straw from the ground or to dust the cobwebs off the ceiling could be an act of adoring worship. "The time of business," he tells us, "does not with me differ from the time of prayer, and in the noise and clatter of the kitchen, when several persons are at the same time calling for different things, I possess God in as great tranquility as if I was upon my knees at the Blessed Sacrament." We may then be in the things of our Heavenly Father by making our business His business, just as much as when we are worshiping Him in His own house. As a devout Christian housewife has written:

Lord of all pots and pans and things, since I've not time to be a saint by doing lovely things, or watching late with Thee or dreaming in the dawn light or storming Heaven's gates. Make me a saint by getting meals, and washing up the plates. Although I must have Martha's hands, I may have Mary's mind and when I black the boots and shoes, thy sandals Lord I find I think of how they trod the earth, what time I scrub the floor. Accept this meditation, Lord, I haven't time for more. Warm all the kitchen with Thy Love, and light it with Thy peace.

Forgive me all my worrying, and make all grumbling cease Thou who didst love to give men food in room or by the sea Accept this service that I do – I do it unto Thee.²⁷

4.  The Christian Answer to Automation←⤒🔗

         1.  Automation←↰⤒🔗

If Christians rightly claim to have an answer to all man's problems, they must deal with the serious problem facing Western people today; namely, the silent revolution now taking place in Western Europe and North America caused by the application of scientific method and technical "know-how" to industry and commerce. Automation represents a whole new concept of manufacturing. It is taking over not only many of man's physical functions but also many of his mental functions. In his Reith Lectures Sir Leon Bagrit defined automation as follows, carefully distinguishing it from mechanization:

Automation is that part of what I have called the "extension of man" which integrates all the sensing, thinking, and decision-making elements…

"Automation" has been, and still is, a greatly misused word, but its proper meaning, and therefore its implications, is gradually becoming better understood. Perhaps I could attempt an ex­planation, if not a definition, by saying that it is a concept through which a machine-system is caused to operate with maximum efficiency by means of adequate measurement, observation, and control of its behaviour. It involves a detailed and continuous knowledge of the functioning of the system, so that the best corrective actions can be applied immediately they become necessary. Automation in this true sense is brought to full fruition only through a thorough exploitation of its three major elements, communication, computation and control – the three "Cs."²⁸

Bagrit then pointed out that many people today fear automation because they suppose it is going to turn them into sub-human types, into something close to robots. This is because they confuse automation with mechanization. While mechanization has indeed given millions of people sub-human work to do, automation does the exact opposite. Bagrit points out:

A mass-production line is essentially a timing machine, which moves goods from place to place in a given time. In that given time a man has to be available to perform a given task. He is in fact in many ways a slave of the machine. It fixes his time and fixes his movements, and he has to produce a series of semi-intelligent mechanical motions to keep the machine fed and moving. This is what I mean by saying that mechanization is his master.

Automation, on the contrary, by being a self-adapting and changing piece of mechanism, enables a man to work at whatever pace he wants to work, because the machine will react to him. Except in the simpler processes he is the master of the machine. The machine that forms part of an automated system is not predetermined; this kind of machine gives information and suggests a course of action, but it does not necessarily say "I won't wait." The computer produces a vast amount of information … Automation is the exact opposite of mechanization. The man in charge extends his faculties but remains himself. He does not become a slave. He stays in the centre and becomes the real master.²⁹

Bagrit illustrates the difference between automation and mechanization by means of an analogy. If we wanted to drink a cup of tea, following the principle of mechanization, the direction in which our hand would move and the speed at which it would do so would be completely predetermined. It would move automatically and the handle would have to be in a particular position for it to be picked up by our hand, because in mechanization there is no way of correcting any error. The cup would then move towards the place where it supposed the mouth to be. If our mouth was not there, because of some error in the operation, the machine might well pour the tea down our neck. It would not know it was doing anything wrong. This is, of course, what happened to Charlie Chaplin in the great comedy film, Modern Times. The machine fed him blindly because it was following a motion that was rigidly predetermined.

Automation, on the other hand, Bagrit suggests, is a system based upon what is called "feed-back." It uses sensing devices, communication mechanisms, computing or deciding elements, and control mechanisms. In the example of the teacup, if the same operation were done by automation, the eye, which is a sensing element, would communicate with the computing or brain mechanism, telling it exactly where the cup was, where the hand was, and where the mouth was. It would then continuously signal the position of the hand all the time it was moving towards the handle. The computer would calculate the necessary corrections and instruct the control mechanisms to make sure that the hand moved accurately towards the handle. In its turn, the brain would signal to the control mechanism the adjustments necessary to obtain the optimum result. At the same time another sensing device, the finger, would determine the temperature of the tea, allowing for the difference in temperature between the cup and its contents. The computing mechanism, the brain, would compare this new information with what was already stored in its memory, and then might signal back that the tea was still too hot, or it might compute the necessary delay before the tea was ready to drink. Furthermore, the eye might register that the cup was too full and that if it moved at too great a speed it would spill. The hand would then be instructed by the computer to move the cup at a pace so designed that it would arrive at its destination at the right temperature and without spilling. This is what we must understand by "automation," a process of control by communication de­vices which tends to produce the "optimum" result. Bagrit would prefer to have it known by the term cybernation, since it deals with the theory of communications and control, which is what genuine automation really is.

The aims of automation include the best possible use of available resources, the production of vast quantities of manufactured material and the doing of office work as quickly and as cheaply as possible. It has been found that it can be introduced successfully only if certain conditions exist. An enormous capital investment is necessary and the return on this investment is adequate only if production is for a mass market. The system can vary with the nature of the product, but wide variations involve radical alterations in the plant and an uneconomic delay in production. It is therefore necessary to organize flow production, that is, material at all stages passing uniformly through the production process at a steady and a rapid rate. The system cannot be introduced without the right equipment and technical expertise.

Automation is not a single, simple piece of equipment or industrial process, but rather a combination of a number of factors involving many pieces of mechanical and electronic equipment. At the present time it is being introduced into industry in special places, dealing with steps of special importance in the productive process which lend themselves to this technique. It is becoming possible to combine automated systems to produce even greater savings and efficiency of production, and eventually whole series of systems may be integrated to form fully automated factories. Such factories would employ practically no men in the ordinary way other than as managers and technicians.

Thanks to the application of this cybernation or "automation," we are now undergoing a second and even greater "industrial revolution" than the first one based upon coal and electricity. Describing what is now happening, Norbert Wiener writes in The Human Use of Human Beings:

There has long been a tendency to render factories and machines automatic. Except for some special purpose, one would no longer think of producing screws by the use of the ordinary lathe, in which the mechanic must watch the progress of his cutter and regulate it by hand. The production of screws in quantity without serious human intervention is now the normal task of the ordinary screw machine. Although this does not make any special use of the process of feedback nor of the vacuum tube, it accomplishes a somewhat similar end. What the feedback and the vacuum tube have made possible is not the sporadic design of individual automatic mechanisms, but a general policy for the construction of automatic mechanisms of the most varied type. In this they have been reinforced by our new theoretical treatment of communication, which takes full cognizance of the possibilities of communication between machine and machine. It is this conjunction of circumstances which now renders possible the new automatic age.

The existing state of industrial techniques includes the whole of the results of the first industrial revolution, together with many inventions which we now see to be precursors of the second industrial revolution. What the precise boundary between these two revolutions maybe it is still too early to say. In its potential significance, the vacuum tube certainly belongs to an industrial revolution different from that of the age of power; and yet it is only at present that the true significance of the invention of the vacuum tube has been sufficiently realized to allow us to attribute the present age to a new and second industrial revolution.³⁰

Thanks to this new industrial revolution, the British and North American economies are expanding at a rate unheard of in human history. More goods and services are now being produced than ever before. Science and technology are making it possible for us to have a plentiful supply of food, clothing, and other consumer goods produced by only a fraction of the labor force that was required even a few decades before. In the United States, for instance, one man on the land now produces more than enough to feed fifteen men in the cities.

2.  The Social Consequences of Automation←↰⤒🔗

While admitting the economic benefits brought about by automation, many people today are concerned about its social conse­quences, especially redundancy and unemployment. Thus the vice president of U. S. Industries, Inc., writing in Time and Motion Study on the "Human Side of Automation," pointed out that:

Employment as a percentage of our labor force has dropped from 98% to about 90% or to state it another way unemployment has gone up from 2% of our labor force to almost 10%. In Britain there has been a similar economic growth yet unemployment is increasing from 1.4% to 4%. The most important factor causing this substantial reduction in both of our work forces in relation to our increased production has been automation.³¹

John Billera then went on to point out that what he called many misleading and widely broadcast myths about the effects of automation on our workers were in vogue. The first of these myths is the belief that for a number of reasons automation is not going to eliminate jobs. Yet the price of automation, he says, is written in cold and bold figures for all to read. "In the U. S. in just three years from 1955 to 1958 while productivity climbed, the number of production workers declined from 13.5 million workers to 11.9 million workers or a loss of 12%. The National Planning Association of the U. S. has made a study showing that the numbers of chronically unemployed rose from about half a million in 1953 to about two million in 1960."

In a similar vein, Pope Pius XII expressed the view:

There is no doubt that the period of transition may result in an increase of unemployment among the older workers, who are less adapted to new training, but younger labourers as well are faced with the same danger whenever a nation is forced to hasten its steps towards automation because of its competition with other countries (March 7, 1957).³²

Later in 1957 the Pope noted the danger of confusing technical productivity with economic productivity. Automation leads to a fantastic growth in productive capacities. But, he asked, "Will it lead to a lasting and sure attainment of conditions which will make possible the material and human well-being of every member of the population, and in which all those who contribute immediately – with their labour, their property, their capital – to the national economy will receive a return corresponding to their investment" (June 7, 1957)?³³

The Pope was aware of the arguments that in the long run employment will rise as a result of automation. But even if this were true, he pointed out, "the fact remains that an increase in technological unemployment even for a brief period would represent in some countries a loss that could not be lightly incurred. In this area it is not at all legitimate to adopt the false principle which in the past impelled certain statesmen to sacrifice an entire generation in view of the great advantages that would accrue to succeeding ones" (June 7, 1957).³⁴

The Roman Catholic priest, John F. Cronin, points out in Labour and the Church:

As a social phenomenon, automation must be considered as one of the major developments of recent decades. At first there was a tendency to underestimate its impact and to consider it on a par with the technological changes of earlier years. More recently the pendulum of thought has swung to the opposite extreme and some persons despair of ever finding jobs for the workers who will ultimately be displaced by the new processes. Whether or not this despairing attitude is justified, it is clear that the false assumptions of a few years back lack validity. Automation is not like the introduction of the automobile, which displaced the horse and carriage … only to create millions of new jobs directly or indirectly related to motor transport. In some fields at least automation is moving decisively in the direction of displacing far more workers than can be absorbed either by expanded production in the automated industry or by occupations incidental to the process of automation. Nor is it clear that displaced workers can readily be retrained so as to find jobs in other occupations or even other areas of the nation. Some workers are too old to profit by retraining. Others may lack the talents for occupations which still need workers.³⁵

Fortunately there is a great deal of evidence to suggest that this alarmist view has substantially distorted both the character and the potential impact of automation.

First and in general, it is held by many economists that automation is basically a continuation of, rather than a radical departure from, the ongoing trend of technological advance as Bagrit supposes. Automation from this point of view is now considered as a gradual development in the historical course of technological progress. While productivity has been rising, it has been accelerating at a modest rate. Dramatic breakthroughs in the rate of productivity increase and peopleless plants are more fantasy than fact. It is pointed out that productivity in manufacturing – where the alarmists have predicted the more serious inroads on employment – has grown more slowly in recent years than the average rate for the entire economy.

Secondly, it is pointed out that the impact of automation upon employment has been grossly misunderstood and overstated. This misunderstanding arose because of the historical coincidence in the late 1950's of rising unemployment, on the one hand, and the de­velopment and expanding use of computers, on the other. While these two developments were occurring more or less at the same time, their causes were in fact substantially independent. The rising unemployment rates of the late 1950's were caused primarily by a deficiency of aggregate consumer demand, aggravated by a quite rapid increase in the size of the labor force. If the predictions of the alarmists are correct and automation is spreading rapidly through the American economy, the critics point out that a growing body of dis­placed and unemployed workers should be evident. But this just has not happened. On the contrary, unemployment rates, which rose to about 7 percent in the late 1950's, have fallen significantly in the 1960's. In 1966 and 1967 the unemployment rate was below 4 percent, partially because of the stimulus to aggregate consumer demand which the 1964 tax cut provided. In short, gloomy predictions of mass technological unemployment have simply not borne fruit.

The impact of automation upon employment has been exaggerated for other reasons. In the Myths of Automaton,³⁶ Charles Silberman even argues that there is actually very little automation in existence. "No fully automated process exists for any major product in any industry in the United States. Nor is any in prospect in the immediate future."

The main reason for the modest inroads of automation is that most manipulative operations (for example, the guiding of a tool in an appropriate way by an automobile assembly-line worker) are in fact extremely difficult to automate. In addition, such important industries as agriculture, construction, and transportation are highly resistant to automation because of the large number of small, geographically dispersed firms and operations involved. This dispersion and the small size of individual operations also tend to make many service industries (merchandising, repair shops, professional services, etc.) immune to automation. And in fact, most manufacturing operations are organized on a customized "job shop" basis – the antithesis of the completely standardized, long run, production process which is conducive to automation. The inclination of the alarmists to impute the anticipated consequences of a few impressive cases of automation to the economy as a whole – to generalize upon the basis of a very small number of special cases – say the critics, has led the alarmists to give us a highly exaggerated impression of the unemployment effects of the "new technology."

Furthermore, the critics among economists argue, there is an unfortunate tendency to confuse what is technically or scientifically possible with that which is economically feasible. Many of the tech­nologically possible uses of automation entail the substitution of very complex and expensive machines for relatively cheap labor. Unless the resulting increases in output are profitable, the substitution of expensive capital for cheap labor may simply not be worth it.

Again, it must be pointed out that there is not any theoretical reason why there should be mass unemployment on a free market. In fact, the wealthier the economy – and production is what increases real wealth – the easier it should be to employ men. This is because new opportunities become available for human labor which were not economically and socially possible in the earlier less prosperous and less productive era, e.g., the rise of the electronics, telephonic, and motor industries. Automation, if it is to be profitable for the entrepreneur, must be productive since the fantastic costs of automating an industry must be balanced by vastly increased production if the company is going to make a profit and thus stay in business.

No manufacturer would dare embark upon the costly business of automating his factory unless he can expect to increase productivity and profits by at least twenty-five percent in the first year, rising to say, forty percent after three years. At this rate he reckons he can recover the cost of the machine in a short time, say five to seven years. In these calculations the saving on wages of the operatives that the machine will replace is an essential factor. Humanitarian motives may not be entirely absent from his mind, but he will argue that it is better for a small percentage of employees to become unnecessary than for his whole business to go bankrupt. In order to survive in today's competitive world markets the manufacturer must modernize and automate his factory; redundancy is part of the price.

At the same time, it must be remembered that modern industry depends for its very existence upon an affluent customer society at home, so that production may be on a large enough scale for a mass market. An immediate program of total modernization, if such a thing were possible, might well reduce the labor force to a fraction of its present level, but if this meant that sixty or seventy percent of industrial workers had to subsist at the present level of unemployment benefits then the bottom would fall out of the market in consumer durables and the automated industries would go bankrupt. Too rapid modernization can prove just as fatal as too slow a movement.

Far from reducing living standards, automation should bring about a general fall in the prices of the goods produced in this way, since competition makes it essential that most of the savings be passed on to the consumer, unless, of course, the company is protected by state-enforced tariffs, state-enforced "fair trade" laws, or state-financed subsidies. This fall in prices is what the whole Western world experienced during the first industrial revolution, and there is no reason why it should not happen again if a halt is called to the present inflationary policies of all Western states.³⁷

Few economists today seem to realize that inflation can exist where there is a stable price level. In fact, in a producing economy prices should normally be falling, thus permitting a wider distribution of consumer goods. If the supply of money in circulation remains constant and the supply of goods increases, the price level should drop. The most productive era of American economy was from 1870 to 1910, covering the years of America's industrial "take-off," yet the price level in these years fell by 40%. The output of goods, on the other hand, rose by 50%. Falling prices are thus not in any sense inconsistent with prosperity. The only question that concerns the economist should be the volume of production and not the price level. It is only in post-Keynesian times that economists have taken up the Social Credit cry of "stable prices and full employment through inflation." The result of this disastrous policy is exactly what we are witnessing today in Britain and the United States: inflation, outflow of gold, budget deficits, and austerity programs to fight the government-created inflation and unemployment.³⁸

If automation must not be held responsible for increasing the level of unemployment, neither should it be blamed for the large number of unskilled workers in society who are being displaced by it. As automation increases, we must expect the proportion of manual, unskilled jobs to fall and the proportion of jobs requiring technical knowledge to increase. Laborers who are displaced by automation are unable to find jobs today because they have not been adequately educated for life in modern society. In his fundamental work, The New Improved American, Bernard Asbell has proved that the new machines have exposed the real causes of unemployment to lie in ignorance and the stupefying, dehumanizing effects of pre-automation and four hundred years of racial cruelty. Now that we have invented machines to do routine mechanical work, we must set men free from the subhuman tasks they have always performed, and train them for more demanding, more enjoyable, more human labors. Asbell claims that literacy will be forced upon us by the robots when they relieve human beings of wretched mechanical chores.³⁹

In any case, Billera's argument that automation will bring about mass unemployment is just not true. In actual fact, what is occurring is a far more gradual adjustment. Most of the difficulties in the present situation are precisely about the rate of modernization in industry. As one set of jobs is becoming redundant and men are losing their employment, so at the same time another set of different kinds of jobs is being created. Improvements in working conditions with fewer hours of work means that more men will be required in some industries, while in other industries there will be vacancies for new kinds of jobs. For these and other reasons many industrialists and economists argue that automation and modernization will cause a shortage of jobs in the short term, but a shortage of employees in the long term.⁴⁰

Again, it needs to be pointed out that workers who are displaced by automation are unable to find employment today because minimum wage laws have dried up the market's jobs for the less productive, less skilled worker. The unskilled laborer should not expect to receive high wages since he is unproductive. But that does not mean, as Billera and others have suggested, that he is useless to society. For those who, for various reasons, cannot be retrained for more highly skilled jobs, there are still jobs available to those who are less skilled precisely because the low productivity job cannot be economically done by an expensive and highly specialized machine. In a rapidly expanding economy, the list of services that the consumer demands gets longer and longer; as leisure time expands so the call for workers in the entertainment industries will increase. There are numerous examples of this kind of service job open to the less skilled: taxi driving, telegraph deliverers, the whole florist industry, newspapers, sales jobs of products which were before too expensive to distribute on a mass scale, e.g., swimming pools in California, golf ranges, holiday camps, motels, etc.

With the additional profitability of mass production, many firms are rapidly establishing training centers to provide opportunities for retraining of less skilled men who can service these new machines.

Action now being taken by the American and British Governments is also of great significance in this respect. The establishment of Government Training Centers and the Industrial Training Act is gradually changing the outlook of men to the question of stability of employment. A worker who had become redundant and who has made a successful adjustment in middle age to a totally new kind of job had this to say:

In my last job I lived for five years in daily dread of becoming redundant, but when I did lose my job and got some training for a new kind of work I found it interesting and a challenge. When eventually I got a new job I realized that it was one of the best things that had happened to me and I wonder why I ever let myself get so worried.⁴¹

If more American and British workers would adopt this attitude towards automation then they would have far less reason to fear the future.

3.  A Christian Solution to the Social Problems of Automation←↰⤒🔗

What emerges from this discussion is the necessity for training, retraining, and mobility. Both government and industry must work together to provide facilities for retraining. As Leon Bagrit well puts it:

Large numbers of those who become redundant as a result of automation lack skills to fit them for new jobs, and so we find ourselves faced with the paradox that, on the one hand there are numerous empty jobs, and on the other there are numerous people who remain unemployed because there is not enough retraining available. Training should be provided for every young entrant into the labour force … It has been estimated that to be able to earn a living continuously, the young people now coming into the labour market may need as many as three different kinds of jobs during their lifetime. This requires not merely training in specific skills but considerable mental flexibility, so that workers are prepared and able to learn and relearn throughout the whole of their lives. We may have to provide in this country up to twelve months' training for some categories of displaced workers. This will be a costly operation, and, whether it is in the United States or here, it will have to be paid for by the nation if undue hardship is to be avoided, either to industries, or to individuals or to local authorities.⁴²

It may be argued by non-Christian capitalists and economists of the old laissez faire school of economics that society has no such responsibility towards workers displaced by automation, and that it must not therefore be expected to spend large sums on retraining programs. ⁴³

In reply it must be pointed out that such a view implies an acute isolation of the economic aspect of human life from the public-legal aspect. Modern neo-Liberalism especially seems to be char­acterized by this exaggerated isolation. The great economists Roepke, Hayek, and Von Mises have raised economic marketing re­lations into a world by itself, which as such has nothing to do with immediate ethical or social issues and norms. Behind this abhorrence of all governmental intervention in the business world one can detect even today a devotion to the closed view of the economic world held by the classical economists. According to Adam Smith the interplay of the purely private economic interests of the market would guarantee in an automatic manner the best possible solution for society as a whole. As Kouwenhoven says in his great Reformed thesis on Liberty and Equality:

Economic thought starting from a sociological individualism was based on man as a separate and independent individual. Completely ignoring the sociological structures from which the economic agent acts, it is assumed that economic life went on in an amorphous society into which the economic aspect was inserted as a purely functional matter. It first disregarded the structures of individuality within which economic action takes place; it then constructed, apart from these structures, economic agents acting self-sufficiently as equal individuals, and finally – on the basis of the free association of these independent type-figures – built up an order in economic life, working by virtue of the impersonal mechanism of the market.⁴⁴

Over against such an autonomous economic sphere Christians must stress that economic life in its "market-acts" and "market situations" reveals an individuality structure which means that it is subject not merely to economic norms but also to social and ethical norms. The economic sphere is not only mutually irreducible to any other sphere but it is indissolubly inter-related with all the other spheres. This means that the government has a God-ordained right to restore the balance in social life when this has become disrupted by automation.

The question inevitably arises, to whom does the knowledge and the skill which make the abundance of modern production belong? Does it belong only to the shareholders and to managers or to the workers. The answer to this question is fundamental, for the scientific knowledge and technical skill now being applied in industry is the most important factor in our economy today; more even than capital and investment and more important even than labor itself. For example, when a new machine is introduced to replace ten men, to whom does the product of the machine belong? Have the ten men who have become unemployed no right to share in the goods and wealth being produced with increased efficiency in the economy as a result of the new machine? Let me repeat the question: to whom does the knowledge and the skill which make the abundance of modern methods of production belong? The new managerial classes or the government or the people?

The answer is that in the first place it belongs to God. The Word of God teaches us that the earth is the Lord's and the fulness thereof and that it is from God that men derive their power to unlock the secrets of His universe. Man is called to be a just and faithful steward of the gifts entrusted to him, and that must include the scientific knowledge which has resulted in the tremendous technological advances of our age. Man is also called to live his life in community with his neighbor and to love his neighbor as he loves himself. This means that the benefits of automation must in love be shared by all members of society and not just by the favored few. As a Christian, this writer is convinced that the knowledge and the skill which make automation and its consequent increase in productivity possible is a part of our common national cultural and scientific heritage. This knowledge and skill belong to our entire national families, and, in equity, every citizen is entitled to share in this common national cultural heritage in terms of increasing economic security, increasing economic independence, and increasing leisure as machines and automation displace the need for human labor.

Big business and big government in America, Britain, and Canada have no more right to deny the American, British, and Canadian people of the economic benefits of this common national cultural heritage in the fields of industry, agriculture, and commerce than they have any right to deny the common people the use of the highways, the courts of justice, and protection by the police against murderers and gangsters.

It should be self-evident that as automation results in increasing production with diminishing labor, the cost per unit of production should also fall and be reflected in decreasing prices and increasing real incomes. The present system of governmental restrictions on the market's pricing mechanism, including state-enforced inflation as well as the bankers' monopoly of credit with its governmentally protected fractional reserve system of issuing loans, produces the reverse results – namely, rising prices, as can be witnessed by the steadily rising price index, increasing taxation of personal and corporation incomes, and little real leisure.

Genuine democracy cannot exist unless it embraces both political and economic democracy, not in the socialist or collectivist sense, but in the sense that the people as a whole can decide what shall be produced, the conditions under which it shall be produced, and how it shall be distributed. The elaborate voting system which this requires already exists in our present economic system – the market economy of capitalism. Under this system the peoples' incomes provide their voting power. By their purchases they decide what they want produced. As Ludwig Von Mises points out:

The customer is sovereign … Businessmen are under the necessity of turning out what the consumers ask for and they must sell their wares at prices which the consumers can afford and are prepared to pay. A business operation is a manifest failure if the proceeds from the sales do not reimburse the businessman for all he has expended in producing the product. Thus the consumers in buying at a definite price determine also the height of the wages that are paid to all those engaged in the industries. It follows that an employer cannot pay more to an employee than the equivalent of the value the latter's work, according to the judgment of the buying public, adds to the merchandise. This is the reason why the movie star gets much more than the charwoman. If he were to pay more, he would not recover his outlays from the purchasers; he would suffer losses and would finally go bankrupt. In paying wages the employer acts as a mandatory of the consumers as it were. It is upon the consumers that the inci­dence of the wage payments falls. As the immense majority of the goods produced are bought and consumed by people who are themselves receiving wages and salaries, it is obvious that in spending their earnings the wage earners and employees themselves are foremost in determining the height of the compensation they will get.

The buyers do not pay for the toil and trouble the worker took nor for the length of time he spent in working. They pay for the products. The better the tools are which the worker uses in his job, the more he can perform in an hour, the higher is consequently his remuneration. What makes wages rise and renders the material conditions of the wage earners more satisfactory is improvement in the technological equipment.

American wages are higher than wages in other countries because the capital invested per head of the worker is greater and the plants are thereby in the position to use the most efficient tools and machines. What is called the American way of life is the result of the fact that the United States has put fewer obstacles in the way of saving and capital accumulation than other countries.⁴⁵

For this reason we should welcome automation as the best method of increasing productivity and thereby raising the peoples' living standards. It is not automation which is to blame for unemployment but the present financial policy of so-called easy money and credit expansion. This policy not only creates unemployment but robs the people of their hard-earned savings by inflation and lowers the pur­chasing power of the dollar.⁴⁶

As regards workers who have become technologically redundant, society obviously has a responsibility to see that they are helped back into gainful employment. For this reason we suggest the following program.

The school age should be raised and further education provided for all children now at school so that they can be educated for the new patterns of work which are required today because of automation. These include card punchers, computer operators, system analysts, computer programmers, and electronic engineers.

Special retraining centers should be established for adult workers who have become redundant through automation.

Financial inducements should be offered to encourage men to move with their families to those parts of the country where their newly acquired skills can best be used.

Redundant workers should be enabled by law to draw unemployment benefits in proportion to their weekly wage, which would help to mitigate the worst features of unemployment. This would have the indirect effect of maintaining the consumer market in areas where there is a sudden rise in unemployment because of high redundancy in an industry for some special reason.⁴⁷

The adoption of such a program would persuade workers to accept automation because they would see it as conducive to a higher material standard of life. It would show them that society cares for people even when they have become technologically redundant through no fault of their own. Then they would realize that no one is personally responsible and morally culpable just because he hap­pens to have become unemployed through lack of the requisite skills.

5.  The Christian Understanding of Leisure←⤒🔗

In the Christian view work is not only an obligation laid on man by his Creator; it also has its divinely appointed limits. Work in the Christian view may never he considered an end in itself nor the sole fulfilment of the moral being of man. As Emil Brunner says:

There are persons on whom it is not necessary to impress the command to work; in their case it is necessary to lay emphasis upon the fact that there is also a commandment about keeping the Sabbath, as a sign that work is not an end in itself, that labour must serve man and human life, but that it must not dominate it…

Only in repose does the human quality in a human being become evident, just as inhuman qualities are revealed in those who cannot rest. In the ability to rest we see whether man is still in control of his work, or whether he is possessed by it.⁴⁸

No age has ever been in greater need of the reminder of the place of rest and worship in man's life than our own. Work, for millions, has become an end in itself, taking possession of all their faculties. We must remind our apostate age that the observance of the Lord's Day not only provides men with a necessary safety valve but puts their daily work in the perspective of eternity and this reduces it to its true proportions. As Brunner well writes:

Play is a safety-valve, by means of which the superfluous steam of self-importance, self-conscious dignity, solemnity, and over-seriousness can be let off.⁴⁹

The psalmist has told us, "Be still and know that I am God." To receive God's best gifts we need to be at rest. In his beautiful book, Leisure the Basis of Culture, Joseph Pieper suggests that it is not only a discarded notion of the nature of knowledge that we must recover if we are to become whole men and women again; it is also a discarded notion of the nature of leisure. In Pieper's indictment of the contemporary world, no charge is meant to be more grave than that it is a world in bondage, a world that has succumbed to the idolatry of work, of activity for its own sake. He says:

Work is the process of satisfying the "common need" – an expression that is by no means synonymous with the notion of the "common good." The "common need" is an essential part of the "common good"; but the notion of the "common good" is far more comprehensive … More and more, at the present time, "common good" and "common need" are identified; and (what comes to the same thing) the world of work is becoming our entire world; it threatens to engulf us completely, and the demands of the world of work become greater and greater, till at last they make a "total claim" upon the whole of human nature.⁵⁰

The charge can hardly be denied, and its accuracy is reflected in the degradation of the notion of leisure. For leisure is now treated as being for the sake of work, as required simply in order to fit the worker to resume his task; and in addition, so great apparently is the fear that leisure may turn into idleness and sloth, leisure itself is now organized, every moment of it filled with activity, no matter how trivial. In the Christian past, on the contrary, the notions of idleness and sloth were closely associated with the inability to put oneself at leisure or at rest in contemplation and prayer and adoration of Almighty God, Father, Son, and Spirit.

How necessary it is to be still, especially in times of high tension. Not to know the stillness of the soul in prayer before God is comparable to being condemned to be chained, year in and year out, to the constantly grinding wheel of one's work in some great murky city, without ever getting the opportunity to

Go down to the sea again
To the lovely sea and sky.

Stillness induces relaxation as we all know deep down. Doctors appeal to their patients to relax, until it has become almost a modern incantation. Health cults have even been devised with nothing more by which to commend themselves than the art of relaxation. The British Medical Journal made a claim some time ago that something like 40% of the beds in the hospitals of Britain are taken up by patients suffering from various nervous disorders. And many of these are the victims of noise and the constant buzzing confusion of modern life. Is there any wonder that the human body is breaking down under the constant hammering it receives from the high tension existence of our age? Men and women are today driving themselves so that they can only come to a stop with a jerk, and that is when the damage is done.

A car mechanic was asked what was the greatest fault among modern motorists. He replied, "Driving on their brakes." What he meant by this was that drivers got the maximum speed out of their cars under all and varying circumstances and they rely on their brakes to slow down, always, they hope, just in time. But such driving always involves a jolt, and each jolt loosens some small bit or other of the car, either in the engine or the body work. Soon it begins to rattle and squeak. Is it not the same with our human bodies? Men drive themselves so hard today at their work that eventually they develop rattles and squeaks called frustration, bad tempers, jitteryness, and so on. If only modern man would realize the tremendous therapeutic as well as spiritual value of worship. God is a Spirit and we must worship Him in spirit and in truth. Man can only nourish his spirit when he worships God. He then has to relax, and such worship of God has in itself more healing power for his frayed nerves than anything else in the world.

Again, stillness encourages reflection. How little time modern people devote to reflection. They never seem to be able to stay still a while and let their minds wander over what they are experiencing or reading. The old tramp was right after all:

A poor life this if full of care
We have no time to stand and stare.

"Be still and reflect upon me," saith the Lord, and then you will be restored in your inward parts and refreshed for your daily duties. As the prophet Isaiah teaches, "They that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; they shall walk and not faint" (Isa. 40:31).

Let Christians today recover the art and the discipline of worship and we shall see such spiritual resources released in the world as will make the release of nuclear energy look like a firecracker. The worship of God in prayer and sacrament is the very heart of the Christian's life and the secret of any successes he may win in his great mission to the world. The worship of the One True God is not a means to a better social order; it is an end in itself. Man's chief end is in fact to glorify God and to enjoy Him forever. In seeming to do nothing for a sin-sick world, the Church of Christ by her worship of God day by day, week by week, does all for the world, or at least does that without which no human effort can ever be made perfect. All the other ministries of the Christian, when compared with this great ministry, are marginal and derivative. This liturgy or service of God in worship and prayer is central. So long as the Church calls men to worship God and provides a simple and proper vehicle for worship, it need not question its place, mission, and influence in the modern world. If the Church loses its faith in rendering God the most worthy praise that is His due and forgets to "do this in remembrance of me" on the Lord's Day; if the Church becomes thoughtless in the ordering of worship and careless in the conduct of worship, it need not look to its avocations to save it from God's judgment. It will already be dead at its heart. In the Lord's Prayer we pray first, "Our Father, who art in Heaven, Hallowed be thy name"; and then "Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven." Before we can do any worthwhile work for God's Kingdom we must first hallow His Name.⁵¹

In dealing with the problems caused by automation, we must be able to distinguish between work as man's vocation to serve God and work as a mere function of the economic system. Vocation is essentially a religious term signifying the call of man by God to His service in this world. Function is a sociological term defining an individual's service to society.

The primary meaning of vocation is the call of God to the new life in Christ and to the service of His Kingdom. It is in this sense that the word is used in the New Testament. In a pre-eminent sense, vocation is a call to the Christian ministry in the service of the Word of God and the holy sacraments. But for the "lay" Christian also, God's call is first and foremost a call to serve Him in the order of redemption, but it is also a call to recapture his environment for Christ.

In view of this primary meaning of the term vocation, it might seem the better course to use it only in this sense and to speak of functions which men perform in society simply as their occupations. But this would be to deny to "secular" activities the possibility of being the fulfilment of a vocation or calling, and this would be en­tirely contrary to what we have said about the "world" being the place in which God is to be served. Yet it is obvious that many jobs in modern society cannot be included within a Christian definition of vocation, e.g., certain industries which are directed not to meeting men's fundamental needs but to providing them with luxuries of doubtful value or goods that are only minor embellishments of life; and such occupations as book-making, prostitution, and the like.

Perhaps the criterion by which we can determine whether the work we are doing is a Christian vocation is that suggested by Mr. Heron – whether we can see in the thing we are making or doing something which is being made or done for Christ's sake.⁵² In other words, all jobs which are meeting the real needs of human society may be considered as real "vocations" in so far as they afford an op­portunity for the service of God and man. What the Christian must demand in regard to every form of work is that it should minister directly or indirectly to the satisfaction of genuine human needs, and that it should not deny or frustrate the realization of a man or woman's true manhood and womanhood as a person created in God's image and therefore responsible to God and living in love and charity with his fellows. Such a conception of work as a Christian vocation, if followed by all Christians in the English-speaking world, would result in far-reaching changes in the existing forms and structures of work in Atlantic society.

In so far as automation reduces work as a mere function it can be welcomed if it opens up new opportunities for work as vocation. Automation releases people from drudgery and boredom and thereby opens up new avenues of cultural activity for millions of people. God has entrusted to mankind the glorious task of developing not only the resources of the economic world to His honor and glory, but also of developing all the other aspects of His creation. The fulfillment of this "cultural" mandate implies that there must be opportunities available for participation in this divinely given task. It is precisely here that automation opens up a tremendous new field for human endeavor. There are numerous areas of culture and aspects of God's creation which have not even yet been touched, in any real sense, by the reformational influences of the Word of God. We have only to think of the fields of art, music, literature, and scientific research. So much has yet to be done to bring all these aspects of life into subjection to Christ's rule. Automation may well provide the necessary goods and time and leisure for such cultural activity, provided it is not regarded simply as a means of making greater profits but instead is viewed as a gift of God to be used wisely in the fulfillment of the cultural mandate. Work as vocation means that Christians, at any rate, will use the new opportunities of more leisure to engage in cultural pursuits for which previously they had little time to enjoy and develop. In this way there may well arise a whole generation devoted to glorifying God in their music, in their poetry, in their gardening, in their literature.

Already we can see that automation has freed both women and societies from the need for routine drudgery in factories and offices and given many more women than ever before not only greater domestic happiness but the opportunity to engage in voluntary social work for which they now have the time and energy. Of this development Bagrit says:

Look at America where, through gadgetry, there has been an enormous decrease in the time most women have to devote to their domestic chores. I doubt very much if you would find many of them looking for work in the kitchen as a way of filling in time. They discover what they consider to be more rewarding and interesting activities … We find women busily buying every conceivable gadget to avoid having to do monotonous repetitive work. And as a result they have more time to devote to their children, their husbands and their homes, more time in mak­ing themselves look pretty and attractive, and more time to raising the general cultural level of their lives … One valuable consequence of automation is going to be the ability to opt out of the industrial machine, and I personally believe … that in the long run this is likely to lead to an increase in domestic contentment. It would be a long step backwards even to attempt to "put woman back into the home," but to give her the option of going back if she prefers it seems to me to be quite different and socially valuable.⁵³

Bagrit does not believe that women enjoy having to go out to work to help the husband make the budget balance at the end of the week. He says:

I doubt if, under present conditions, women really enjoy getting up at six, preparing the family breakfast, rushing the kids off to school, and catching the bus in time to arrive for the eight o'clock shift; and, after a day's work, rushing home, cooking a dinner, and cleaning the house, while trying to maintain a decent domestic life. Then why do so many do it? Simply because they must, if they and their families are to live at an acceptable standard. If, as a nation, we become productive enough and consequently rich enough to make the man's wage packet sufficient for the family needs, many women would prefer to go to the hairdresser rather than to the factory.⁵⁴

This writer could not agree with Bagrit more. It is a positive disgrace that in England thousands of women have to go out to work to help their families make ends meet. In many such cases the working wives and mothers even have to work on the night shift, thereby undermining their marriages. If automation releases women and wives from having to go out to work, then we may expect to see the next generation of children being brought up instead of dragged up as they have been in England ever since their mothers went to work in the factories during the last war. The sooner women return to their peculiar office of raising and bringing up their own children, the healthier will be our society.

If used rightly then, automation may well provide the workers with new opportunities for social and cultural enrichment. Whether in fact it does so will depend on whether men use their new-found leisure to glorify God or to satisfy their own carnal lusts. However, leadership can be given in folk schools where people can be taught to recover the handicraft skills formerly enjoyed by their forebears.

Training must be provided on an ever-increasing scale; more national parks, camping facilities, reasonable family hotels, community centers should be developed.

In the first Industrial Revolution most Christians stood idly by until it was too late to heal the scars which had been made upon large sections of the population, too late to expiate the sins of omission. The Church is still paying for that sin. God is now giving Christians a second chance to redeem the time, to make the days good instead of evil, to be in the vanguard rather than in the rearguard of the new cultural formation and economic organization of modern society; to be true to Christ the Redeemer of both ancient and modern civilization and to join the human race rather than to abdicate from all responsibilities for it.

In the first industrial revolution, it was only a few Protestant Christians who had any glimmering of the problem, men such as Groen van Prinsterer and Abraham Kuyper. These men realized that moralizing was not the answer. The social question arising out of the first industrial revolution required nothing less than a structural reformation of society as a whole, not a tinkering with the warped structures and institutions that had developed as a result of apostate economic individualism and collectivism. As Kuyper said:

Only this one thing is necessary if a social question is to exist for you; that you realize the untenability of the present situation; and that you realize this untenability to be one not of incidental causes, but one involving the very basis of social association. For one who does not acknowledge this, and who thinks that the evil can be exorcised through an increase in piety, through friendlier treatment or kindlier charity, there exists possibly a religious question. This does not exist until you exercise an architectonic critique of human society itself and hence desire and think possible a different arrangement of the social structure.⁵⁵

As we have seen, the Reformed philosophy of labor, industry, and society has provided modern man with the basic postulates of such a Christian structural ordering of human society in terms of the doctrine of sphere sovereignty and of the balance of authority and freedom.

Are we going to allow the second industrial revolution to be as disruptive of human society as the first proved itself to be, and are Christians going to stand by and watch the inevitable hatred grow between the new class divisions of society, or are they going to make it a new age of reconciling men and classes by reconstructing society upon God's creation norms and standards? Van Riessen warns us that a merely formal application of such biblical principles for the reconstruction and reformation of the basic structures of modern society will be useless unless such principles can be infused into the souls of men who understand them in the light of their origin and as the only means of fulfilling their divine vocation. Such creation ordinances are a mandate of creation; they come to man through the redemption of Christ. And their function is to emancipate life in keeping with the purpose of such redemption. Such principles are links in the chain of redemption, and they will function properly only if the man whom they motivate is filled with the mind and spirit of Christ. They can then become manifestations of love in compliance with the great commandment.

According to Van Riessen such creation norms become:

…manifestations of reverence, not so much for man but for the calling of man, and consequently for the freedom man needs to follow his calling and to answer for his life and work to God. Such manifestations spring from a respect for life as religion.

The distress and cultural crisis of our society can be overcome only if life is liberated. A sharp distinction must be made. Freedom is not only to be free from. Such freedom moves in a vacuum. The liberation from galling social restraints must have meaning, it must be freedom to unfold cosmic reality significantly.

This brings us to the very heart of our subject. The urge toward a collectivistic social structure flows from a need for securities, for which men are willing to surrender their freedom from the restraints necessary to obtain these securities. But much more essential is the fact that men are unequal to the responsibility of this freedom of restraints, for they no longer know why they should be free. Through the Renaissance and humanism, life has lost its religious purpose; it is without perspectives…

The most profound thinker of secular positive science can delude us no longer. He leaves the question of the "why" alone, because he no longer knows a meaningful, convincing and vital answer. Modern man has lost the awareness of being called to a task by an authority beyond the cosmic horizon; he no longer knows what happens to his answer, or what his work means. As a result the anxiety of loneliness steals upon him. And man, who desires to be free "from," flees before the torturing question "why," into the shackles of collectivity.⁵⁶

The one hope of the liberation of society from its present collectivist structures by which personal freedom has become shackled is therefore a victory over the spiritual crisis of our time. Without such a victory, which presupposes the reversal of the present trend towards complete secularization, no recovery of social life will be possible. Fundamentally this means that people recover their faith in Jesus Christ as Redeemer of the world and live out of the grace He provides. Van Riessen points out:

The absence of the fulfilment of this condition should not prevent anybody from devoting all his energies to the recovery of society and from checking its dangerous course of development. For such recovery of society is in itself already a considerable part of the re-Christianization of social life.⁵⁷