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Undeniably, one major task of theology today is to define what it means to be a Christian in a secular society. For millions, of course, there is no real problem. Baptism and church membership are the external criteria of faith, and a true follower of Jesus is one who keeps his beliefs free from heresy and tries to live a decent, upright, moral life. Yet to the most thoughtful spokesmen of modern Christianity, these criteria are not only minimal, they are secondary and even somewhat irrelevant. Instead, they argue that faith is not an intellectual assent to a series of dogmatic propositions but a commitment of one's entire being; ethical concern is directed not primarily toward one's own life but toward one's neighbor and the world. The mortal sins, in this new morality, are not those of the flesh but those of society; more important than the evil man does to himself is the evil he does to his fellow man. "The Christian's role is to bear witness to God in man," says Jesuit Clinical Psychologist Carlo Weber. "Jesus Christ is the wedding of the divine and the human. Being a Christian for me means bearing witness to the wedding of divinity and humanity, to love God and man—to be involved, therefore, in human affairs."
Although the churches have always taught that Christ was both God and man, Christians have hardly ever seemed to accept his humanity. Historically, preaching has emphasized the Risen Christ, who sits at the right hand of God, and will come in glory to the Last Judgment. This is a basic premise of faith, but it is equally true that Jesus was emphatically a man—a lowly carpenter who walked the earth of Palestine at a specific moment in human history, and whose death fulfilled Isaiah's prophesy of the Suffering Servant. Jesus, as Bonhoeffer memorably put it, was "the man for others."
Summing up his message to man, Jesus asked his followers to love God, and "thy neighbor as thyself." For centuries, Christians have seemed to emphasize the first of those commands—and all too frequently, when there was a conflict between the two, it was love of man that went by the boards. But Biblical scholars point out that the New Testament is a very secular book, and there is an unmistakable social concern in Jesus' moral teachings. In Matthew 23, for example, Jesus condemns as hypocrites the scribes and Pharisees who ostentatiously tithe their possessions but neglect "the weightier matters of the law, justice and mercy and faith."
Christian & Atheist
There is nothing fundamentally new about the insight that Christian ethics are corporate rather than individualistic. The medieval monasteries, for example, were dedicated to serving their communities as well as to praising God in communal prayer; the Mennonites and Quakers have always emphasized brotherly love and peace rather than dogma. The difference is that theologians now take it for granted that Christian love is something that cannot be confined to the church but is directed toward all the world. The commitment of a man who follows Jesus is not to an institution, but to life itself.