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Within the churches, there is considerably less agreement on how this commitment should be exercised. Christian radicals—such as the young firebrands who dominated the National Council of Churches' Conference on Church and Society in Detroit last fall—argue that the true follower of Jesus is the revolutionary, siding with forces and events that seek to overthrow established disorder. On the other hand, Protestant Theologian Hans-Joachim Margull of Hamburg University points out that it is not always so easy to identify the secular causes that Christians have a clear moral duty to support.
It is easy enough to argue that Christians have a God-given duty to work for racial equality, or for the eradication of hunger and disease in the world. The strategies to be followed in achieving these goals do not so easily acquire universal assent. For that reason, Dean Jerald Brauer of the University of Chicago Divinity School argues that churches should not necessarily be engaged in trying to hand down specific solutions to social and political problems from the pulpit. Christian creativity in trying to solve these questions, he says, "won't be a case of the churches poking their noses into areas where they have no right to be. Churches may have no special answers, although they certainly have a responsibility to sensitize their people to the questions. But the answers will have to be worked out by the body politic."
What this means, in essence, is that a commitment to love in worldly life cannot be separated from faith in Christ, who demanded that commitment. One argument against trying to build Christianity on moral action alone is that Jesus' teachings, unlike those of, say, Confucius, make sense only when understood as counsels of perfection in obedience to God rather than as workable guidelines of behavior. The Rev. David H. C. Read, pastor of Manhattan's Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church, points out that in facing many problems of life the behavior of the Christian and the humanist might well be identical. Bertrand Russell and the Archbishop of Canterbury, for example, could equably serve on the same committee to improve housing. "The distinction is not in their action," Read argues. "It is in their motivation and ultimate conviction on the meaning of life." This suggests that the committed Christian who is immersed in the secular world will also be to some extent an anonymous Christian; his light will still shine before the world, but it will not be so easily identified.
Since faith is the reason for commitment, most churchmen regard the idea of a "Christian atheist" or a "Christian agnostic" as something of a contradiction in terms. "I can't see how it is possible to be a Christian atheist," says Episcopal Bishop James A. Pike, who has been accused of being just that by some of his fellow clerics. "You cannot attack the idea of an ultimate and at the same time accept Jesus as an ultimate." Swiss Catholic Theologian Hans Kiing points out that "Jesus had no sense of himself without God. He made it clear that his radical commitment to men presupposed a radical commitment to God."