Public Righteousness
By Foy Valentine

Facing the institutionalized unrighteousness of Adolph Hitler’s Nazi evil, Karl Barth in 1938 voiced this prophetic challenge:

... Let the Church ... look and see whether she is not now ... compromising herself with the Devil, to whom no ally is dearer than a Church, so absorbed in caring for her good reputation and clean garments, that she keeps eternal silence, is eternally meditating, eternally discussing, eternally neutral, a Church so troubled about the transcendence of the Kingdom of God—a thing which isn’t really so easy to menace!—that she has become a dumb dog. This is just the thing which must not take place ... today.

There is no issue to which the people of God may not speak; and public righteousness is one issue to which we have a divine mandate to speak.

No convincing case can be made for the neutrality of the people of God in the face of the immoralities that everlastingly dog our feet. It simply cannot be insisted that the Old Testament had nothing to say against sleaze, lust, oppression, violence, injustice, fraud, greed, dishonesty, and public unrighteousness in ancient Israel or that the New Testament had nothing to say against all these things in the Roman Empire. Moses confronted Pharaoh. Israel conquered the unrighteous enemies of the Lord God. “The stars in their courses,” sang Deborah and Barak, “fought against Sisera” (Judges 5:20). Daniel broke the Chaldean king’s unjust law (Daniel 6:10). Amos scathingly denounced the corrupt political personalities and powers of his day. John the Baptist warned the Establishment to flee from the wrath to come (Matthew 3:7). Jesus called King Herod “that fox” (Luke 13:32) and generally showed a fine and faultless flair for controversy with the public enemies of righteousness. (He could, indeed, be found in the middle of nearly everything but the road.) James castigated the rich oppressors who dragged the poor before their corrupt judgment seats (James 2:6). John the Apostle fearlessly proclaimed judgment upon Imperial Rome herself calling her “the great whore that sitteth on many waters” (Revelation 17:1). God’s moral giants have never been timid fencestraddlers. So, John Milton rightly said that the neutralists are despised by both heaven and hell, remaining ever outside the gates.

The Need for Public Righteousness

On the windward side of Molokai, I have squinted through a high-powered microscope to focus my eye in awe on the living organism that causes leprosy. Near the Sabine River bottoms of Van Zandt County in East Texas, I have looked down in elemental terror at the crawling copperhead snake that had just plunged the deadly poison of its loathsome fangs into my veins. Over the jungles of Paraguay, I have looked out of the airplane window in wordless dismay to see what happens when an engine swallows a piston. On the high walls of Buenos Aires and again under the beautiful bridges of Venice, I have viewed with fearful fascination Communism’s hammer and sickle painted red and garishly so that even those who speed may read. In Panama’s primitive interior where the heat is stifling and the humidity overwhelmingly oppressive, and again in India’s pre-monsoon dust and poverty and oven-like heat, I have winced at the sickening, sudden onslaught of a fearful food poisoning which has wracked my frame with rigors of appallingly severe proportions. In Gaza I have driven with fear and trembling directly under the manned machine guns where the very air reeks with the ancient hostility of Jacob and Esau, compounded with usurious interest for millennia. On the Pacific island of Raiatea, I have stood quietly and alone in wordless horror on the altar stone where the ancient Polynesians sacrificed a human being on the occasion of every new moon. Across the face of the earth in my lifetime I have been an anguished witness, however, to something far more pervasive, more lethal, more awesome, and more sinister than any of these, the incredible proliferation of an all-pervading nerve gas of immorality.

Today’s world in which Christians are called to proclaim good news is a fallen, sinful, disfigured, hurting, immoral world. It is perishing, as Augustine said of Rome, for want of order in the soul.

By an incredible distortion of logic, it views immorality as a harmless exercise of the times, violence as a proper way of life, racism as a divine right, and materialism as its just dessert. It firmly believes that a person’s life consists in the abundance of the things which he possesses. Its master is its credit card; and it owes its soul to Visa and Master Charge.

Yesterday it stood at the edge of a precipice, and today it has taken a step forward.

It is a world shot through with moral Novocain.

Its conscience is no bigger than a bar of soap after a hard day’s washing.

It arrives late, leaves early, and does not want to get involved. It has too few arrows in its quiver. It feels no compunction to keep its word. It does not believe “you have to dance with who you brung.” It is pathetically wall-eyed with one eye on the paycheck and the other on the rear view mirror. It has made quantity king and quality a pauper.

It seems hell-bent on cutting the jugular vein of decency. Its crime in the streets is bad; but its crime in the suites is worse. It is not its luck but its moral judgment that has petered out. Its derelict empires are characterized by impotent armies, doubtful dollars, and a malignant anarchism that is now headed willy-nilly straight for totalitarianism.

If there is a figure in its tapestry, incoherence is its name. Dancing on the edge of the bottomless pit, it has lost faith in God, hope for mankind, and love for either God or mankind. It is mired in a permanent identity crisis.

It is morbidly preoccupied with trying to find new nerve endings to stimulate. Instead of making a joyful noise to the Lord, it makes a doleful noise to itself.

Though it has worked for generations to build a Wholly Human Empire, its present prospect is fire in the sky, blood on the moon, and the elements melting with a fervent heat.

Nurturing a cornucopian faith in its own omnicompetence, it has erected a thousand monuments to folly, nearly all of them fantastically expensive in terms of human resources.

Our world dies the death of a thousand qualifications. It seems incapable of letting its yea be yea and its nay, nay. Its convictions are never quite sure of themselves. It cannot determine whether this is the year of the Dove, the Hawk, the Vulture, or the Lemming.

It underproduces wisdom and overprocesses knowledge. Because it does not understand the past, it can neither redeem the present nor prepare adequately for the future. To satisfy its appetite of the moment, it will burn down a cathedral to fry an egg.

For all its education and affluence and leisure and technology, it remains bound in shallows and miseries, stumbling along with one foot in a bucket.

It is afflicted with congenital myopia, blurred vision, a grievous nerve failure syndrome, and a terrible case of hardening of its ought-eries.

It is as far from real repentance as Oral Roberts ever was from the Mayo Clinic.

It knows as little about integrity as a downtown tomcat knows about home life.

More specifically, its family life is on the rocks. Its racism is unresolved. Its citizenship is characterized by corruption and cowardice, in about equal parts.

Its economics is an incredible ripoff of the have nots by the haves who manipulate the system to sock it to the poor and provide welfare for the rich who maximize their capital and privatize their profits while they minimize their risks and socialize their losses.

And it lives and moves and has its being in an open Pandora’s box of adultery, addiction, conspicuous consumption, pornography, population crisis, hunger, male chauvinism, violence, unbridled irresponsibility in television programming, wars, and rumors of wars.

As our grandpas used to say of a dog eating grass, “There’s somethin’ it ain’t gettin’.”

Today we are in the midst of a moral earthquake that is registering ten on God’s Richter scale.

Public unrighteousness now threatens to pull down the pillars of the nation itself. It has left us rocking like a rowboat in the wake of a speeding battleship. It has become a way of life.

Unrighteousness is a noisome pestilence, a poison fog, a Beast out of the Pit, a tight harness that is rubbing us raw. It manipulates its unclean snout over our most precious things— justice, mercy, love, and peace—leaving them defiled, unclean.

One expression of our unrighteousness is an anti-social and irresponsible withdrawal into cocoons of privatized hedonism. Such excessively rugged individualism sees all discipline as dangerous and all customs as inherently evil. Scoffing at righteousness and snickering at values, this radical individualism metastasizes into an uncivilizing compulsion that rips the threat of moral influence out of the fabric of society. Unrighteousness is moral mark-missing which produces buckets of moral filth that slop the sins of arrogance and greed and lust and pride while the inner spirit starves. This unrighteousness steals the clapper from our liberty bell. It gets its values secondhand and reads its truth off cue cards. It glories in fathomless imbecilities ranging from the new math to the new morality.

Righteousness has become an object to poke, probe, and dissect before it is then ignored and at last abandoned altogether.

Mass media bent on producing ever more exciting circuses for today’s new Romans give us the biodegradable politician and a bipartisan avoidance of most of the important moral issues of our time. Fearing religion as an opiate, our age has eaten the locoweed of racism, sexism, materialism, militarism, and scientism. Its latter state is worse than its first.

Like Jack who gloried in his beanstalk only to find at the top an angry giant, we have planted the malignant bean of immorality only to find the monster of unrighteousness ready to do us in when we have climbed to the top of the crop.

The situation of public unrighteousness need not be further belabored lest we demonstrate an answer to Macbeth’s question, “What! Will the line stretch out to the crack of doom?”

Unrighteousness is not just a strange god; it is an evil and hostile god who wills for us not life but death.

Public righteousness is not something we have to cultivate in order to ward off secularism, atheism, socialism, or humanism. It is not merely a part of our arsenal of weapons for national survival, or for discreet national aggression.

For national or institutional or personal survival, nevertheless, righteousness is fundamental not ornamental. Any nation or institution or individual who eats the apple of unrighteousness will surely die. Public righteousness has often seemed in recent times to be ready for the garage sale of history. It must be recovered if America and Americans, or for that matter, if the human race and the world, are to have a future.

We seek to recover righteousness for we know that when righteousness breaks down, trouble breaks out; we know that when morality breaks down, chaos breaks out; we know that when moral values break down, cynicism breaks out. I say “recover” in spite of the fact that George Cruikshank said that this Nation was founded at a time when statesmen were without ideals, the Church was without vision, the Crown was without honor, and the common people were without hope. I say “recover” because our forebears, while far from moral perfection, were basically committed to integrity. Growing up in East Texas where we like our chili hot, our heroes human, and the truth with the bark on it, I used to hear my Daddy sing a gloriously provincial and littleknown folk song:

Come, all you Mississippi girls
And listen to my noise.
You’d better not marry those Texas boys
For if you do, your portion will be
Johnny cake and venison—that’s all you’ll see;
Johnny cake and venison—that’s all you’ll see.

It was true. The portion, the lot, of our forebears was johnny cake and venison, poke sallet and cornmeal mush, hoecake and sorghum syrup. But their portion, partly given by God and partly claimed like Jacob wrestling with the Lord at Jabbok’s ford, was something else, too. It was courage; it was discipline, fortitude, risk, nerve, vigor, work, blood, sweat, and tears in pursuit of great ideas, noble aspirations, enduring values. “Poor folks have poor ways,” they said; and yet, they dreamed the infectious, impossible dream. They shucked off the old-world husks of monarchy, a ruling class, and a state church. They pushed back the wilderness and broke new ground. They built little cabins in the clearings and little one-room meeting houses for their churches. They settled down and read their Bibles, and they developed character and carefully cultivated the righteousness without which no nation can become strong or long endure, without which no individual can become strong or no institution long endure.

The Nature of Public Righteousness

Righteousness is defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as “justice, uprightness, rectitude, conformity of life to the requirements of the divine or moral law; virtue, integrity.” Its original spelling was “rightwiseness”; and, as we sometimes still say a thing is sidewise, meaning sideways, so this original spelling, right-wise-ness, signified right-way-ness. That is what righteousness is, right-way-ness. It assumes a standard. It starts with moral judgment. It distinguishes between right and wrong. It tells the difference between good and bad.

Furthermore, the concept of righteousness is one of the biggest, profoundest, most pervasive concepts in the Bible. The word itself is found some 205 times in the Old Testament and some 96 times in the New Testament.

Exactly what is the righteousness which the people of God want to manifest and see manifested in society? Righteousness is discerning the difference between right and wrong and then choosing right while rejecting wrong. Righteousness is the will to be right and to do right. Righteousness is doing the truth, doing justice, doing love. Righteousness is adherence to principles as the best safeguards for the rights of persons. Righteousness is freedom with responsibility. Righteousness is liberty under law. Righteousness is justice. Righteousness is equality of opportunity. Righteousness is honesty—honesty in public life as well as honesty in private life. Righteousness is speaking the truth. Righteousness is respect for others and honoring their rights. Righteousness is peace—personal peace, family peace, racial peace, peace between generations, class peace, economic peace, and international peace. Righteousness is personal integrity and it is institutionalized integrity— integrity in our homes, integrity in our schools, integrity in our governmental entities, and integrity in our churches. Righteousness is security with the clear understanding that although for the Church the umbilical cord to this world has been cut, there is another valid perspective which sees Christianity, as William Temple insisted, as the most worldly of all the great world religions for even Christians still need food, clothing, and shelter as well as such other necessities as health care, individual freedom, and personal privacy. Righteousness is responsibility. And righteousness is discipline—discipline as opposed to the lawlessness and disorder in which each does that which is right in his own eyes without regard to authority, human or divine.

Public righteousness has precious little to do with civic ritual that woodenly genuflects in the direction of the powers that be and mindlessly salutes every passing Caesar who is chauffeured by. It is not to be confused with the fuss and feathers of political rhetoric that every leap year wells up and floats off into clouds of incomprehensibility. It has no discernible relationship to plastic lapel flags. Public righteousness moves in the direction of right civic relationships, right social conduct, right public behavior. Public righteousness is related to justice, values, standards, morals, oughtness. It does not gag at calling good, good and evil, evil.

Eric Sevareid was overly optimistic when he said in one of his concluding broadcasts that the central core of this country is moral and believing but he was essentially right in seeming to indicate that we can never be at home with unrighteousness. Any assumption that we can is nonsense for it would be a denial that humanity is created in the image and after the likeness of a moral God.

All righteousness, including public righteousness, is rooted and grounded in the righteousness of God.

The Jews understood at a very early time that God was passionately devoted to the right, that, as we are told in Genesis 18:25, he would not “slay the righteous with the wicked,” and that the “Judge of all the earth” will “do right” (Genesis 18:25).

Because the Lord God is morally superior, he is always acting in morally superior ways. Because he is righteous, he is always doing righteousness. God is morally positionized, morally involved, morally active. God’s purposes are always moral, never malignant, always redemptive, never destructive, always orderly, never chaotic. As his moral wrath is against all personal, social, and public unrighteousness, all moral aberrations and moral abominations, so his moral favor is upon those who do righteousness, establish justice, work for good, and do the things that make for peace.

Jesus Christ so clarified and communicated the righteousness of God that the world even today cannot escape His righteous impact. Paul made righteousness his great theme in his most significant writing, the Epistle to the Romans. New Testament Christianity further focused and clarified the obligation to do right. The early Church was so beautifully baptized in the righteousness of God, that one unknown historian wrote (in The Epistle to Diognetus), probably between 130 and 200 A.D.

: ...Christians are not distinguished from the rest of mankind either in locality or in speech or in customs. For they dwell not somewhere in cities of their own, neither do they use some different language....But while they dwell in cities of Greeks and barbarians as the lot of each is cast, and follow the native customs in dress and food and the other arrangements of life, yet the Constitution of their own citizenship, which they set forth, is marvelous, and confessedly contradicts expectation. They dwell in their own countries, but only as sojourners; they bear their share in all things as citizens, and they endure all hardships as strangers. Every foreign country is a fatherland to them, and every fatherland is foreign. They marry like all other men and they beget children; but they do not cast away their offspring. They have their meals in common, but not their wives. They find themselves in the flesh, and yet they live not after the flesh. Their existence is on earth, but their citizenship is in heaven. They obey the established laws, and they surpass the laws in their own lives. [Henry Melville Gwatkin, Selections from Early Christian Writers (Westwood, J.J.: Fleming H. Revell Co., n.d.) pp. 13-14.]

Because God is righteous, he does not and therefore humanity should not treat righteousness and unrighteousness as if they were alike.

As personal righteousness is rooted and grounded in the righteousness of God, so public righteousness is rooted and grounded in personal righteousness. Public righteousness is related to personal righteousness as fruits are related to roots. In public righteousness, the body politic chooses morality over mammon, leans toward justice instead of exploitation, elects freedom rather than tyranny, and opts for order in preference to anarchy.

What is the relationship of right to public righteousness? Some things seem to be instinctively known to be right such as the dispensing of justice without favoritism and rejection of the wanton destruction of life. Other things come to be understood to be right, such as the rejection of human slavery and the separation of church and state as the surest guarantee of religious liberty, when they come to be understood as best for society. Still other things are only very gradually perceived to be right such as the control of pollution and the reining in of a rampant militarism which hardens its heart against Arnold Toynbee’s insight that militarism has been the chief cause for the disintegration of civilizations during the last four thousand years.

What can we do to lay hold of public righteousness and turn away from the demonic unrighteousness which so aggressively besets us? The situation, as Dr. Johnson said of a man about to be hanged, should wonderfully concentrate the mind. We do not have the leisure of eternity in which to repent of our sin, turn to righteousness, and prepare to meet God.

The Church and Public Righteousness

The Church, although it is the Body and Bride of our Lord Jesus Christ, originates no righteousness. It reflects the righteousness of Jesus Christ, our Prophet, Priest, and King, who is the consummate word of God’s righteousness.

The Church, at once called out and sent forth, gathered and scattered, redeemed and redemptive, lighted and lighting, is the incarnated righteousness of God. Though living in the midst of the hypocrites and the carnal, the lukewarm and the indifferent, the faithless and the unbelieving, the mammon-grubbers and the pleasureseekers, the misleaders and the misled, the Church is the storehouse and distribution center for true righteousness. Therefore the Church must be everlastingly vigilant not to fetch her fire of righteousness from the strange altars of civil religion, atheistic humanism, or mechanistic behaviorism; and we must be equally vigilant not to misplace our fire of righteousness on the strange altars of mysticism, unbridled emotionalism, pseudopietism, or escapist dispensationalism of the kind tragically displayed by the Branch Davidians who got their dispensationalist premillenialism from the same bitter well that a lot of Baptists and Methodists and Presbyterians have done for the last 50 to 75 years.

When the church is true to its high calling in Christ Jesus, it is everlastingly involved in the process of moral leavening, consistently speaking for God to the nation, and to the nations, about what is right as it brings the word of the Lord to bear on the great moral issues that affect humanity made in his image.

The Church, of course, can never be crucified on all the crosses. We cannot all be involved in all the burning issues all the time. But we can and we must bear witness, by our nature as the people of our righteous God and by the inner compulsion of God’s Holy Spirit, to public righteousness in general and to such specific moral issues as keep arising in this kind of world. Let the Church, then, be God’s salt, God’s light, God’s leaven.

It is the Church’s business to “follow righteousness” (2 Timothy 2:22), “to do justly” (Micah 6:8), and to “let justice flow down as the waters and righteousness as a mighty stream” (Amos 5:24), as we play the moral music which the world will instinctively stand up to. Let the Church do the truth.

It is the Church’s business to live out the moral validity of our baptism. In that baptism, having been buried to the old ways of unrighteousness, we are raised by God’s grace “to walk in newness of life” (Romans 6:4). Let the Church demonstrate the Gospel.

It is the Church’s business to cultivate a valid inner life that normally, naturally, inevitably issues in a valid outer life. Having received righteousness, the Church is obligated and empowered to transmit righteousness to the world in which it travails while Jesus tarries. Appropriating the righteousness of God, through personal repentance and personal faith in Jesus Christ as Lord, the Church is responsible for faithfully and consistently sharing integrity through all that it is, all that it says, and all that it does. Let the Church communicate righteousness.

It is the Church’s business to find those times and places, those ways and means to bear an unambiguous moral witness in an age paralyzed by ambiguities. Let the Church’s Yes be Yes and its No be No.

It is the Church’s business to pray for righteousness—personal righteousness in our own lives, civic righteousness in our communities, national righteousness, and international righteousness reaching beyond our borders to the uttermost part of the earth. Not only may the Church so pray: if it is faithful to God, it must so pray. Let the Church look up.

It is the Church’s business to sound a certain note in calling the country to embrace the righteousness which alone can exalt a nation. Let the Church speak out.

It is the Church’s business to preach repentance for unrighteousness and faith toward God issuing in changed lives, changed institutions, and a changed society. Those who hold four aces don’t ask for a new deal—so I am told; and neither should the Church preach some other Gospel than the Gospel of God in Christ which leads changed people to change the world. Let the Church preach on— proclaiming the whole gospel of God in Christ.

Let the Church be seized by the Spirit, driven to the desert, and conscripted in the service of authentic righteousness. Let the Church hold fast to its vision of God, issuing in justice, integrity, morality, and righteousness, for where there is no such vision any people will surely perish.

Let the Church not shrink from the Golgotha of sacrificial involvement on behalf of public righteousness.

And let the Church, flying alone like an eagle and not in flocks like blackbirds, so follow righteousness and do righteousness as to guarantee that those who come after us can have the opportunity to experience a future that is better than our past.

“Righteousness exalts a nation, but sin is a reproach to any people” (Proverbs 14:34).

Reprinted from Christian Ethics Today. Subscriptions to Christian Ethics Today are provided without charge to anyone. They are totally supported by the voluntary contributions of their readers. Your gifts will be deeply appreciated and should be made out to the Christian Ethics Today Foundation and mailed to Dr. Joe E. Trull, editor, 101 Mount View Rd., Wimberley, TX 78676-5850.

June 2002