Page History

The one temptation \[he says\] is to renounce all commerce

 with the wisdom of the world, with the various disciplines of

 culture, all of which contain the danger of deflecting us from the

 truth of the

 gospel. If we succumb to this temptation we will be like

 the man who hid his treasure in the ground. We will not learn to

 appreciate the truth of these disciplines which are valid on their

 own level, and we will not be able to validate the truth of the

 gospel on the level where its truth is apparent and the truth of the

 wisdom of the world turns into error. That is the level of the self's

freedom and responsibility, the self's sin and need of redemption:

 of God's freedom as creator and redeemer; of the self's encounter

 with God and of its redemption through divine grace and the self's

 response of repentance and trust....

The other temptation for us he says is to make too much of,
or to make too uncritical application of, the rediscovered biblical
fact that all men are sinners and that every historical struggle is
therefore a struggle between sinful men. The temptation is to
imagine that the cry of I a plague on both their houses' is a Christian
solution of every problem; that neutralism is an answer to every
political perplexity. This error consists in an effort to rise above the
responsibilities which we have as men for the order, the justice, and
the preservation of our civilizations and painfully nourished
systems of justice, seeking to play the part of God, in whose sight
no one indeed is justified. But we are men and not God; and we
must distinguish between the moral level of our decisions, where
we must carefully weigh whether the ostensible foe may not be a
friend with whom we must come to terms and whether the
ostensible friend and ally may not be a foe who must be resisted
resolutely if our prized liberties are to be preserved; and the
religious level, on which we have some knowledge of the fact that
both we and the most dangerous foe are equally sinners in God's
sight and are equally in need of his forgiveness (Essays in Applied
Christianity:
338, 340).