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Moreover, because of its primary concern with the needs and interests
which its citizens share in common, the state is by its very nature in
adequate to express the deepest and richest levels of human commu
nity which stem out of men’s freely chosen interests and loyalties and
out of a recognition of the uniqueness of each person’s endowments.
In view of the nature of the state as an instrument of the com
munity for the protection of its members and for the harmonizing of
their activities, the state may be said to have two main purposes:
the provision of
order
and the provision of
justice.
Of these the first
is clearly the more fundamental; for order, or peace, is prerequisite
to the achievement of justice. But the ultimate end of the state as
a sovereign power is not the achievement of order but the establish
ment of justice. God does not will that man as a free moral being
should live under an order that is based upon coercion alone, for
such an order would ignore man’s true humanity. Order is in
dispensable to prevent human life from becoming a “war of every
man against every man,” but justice is equally essential if the state
is to be a true instrument of the community for the promotion of
the common welfare. Not only is the state necessary to defend the lives
and liberties of its citizens by the order which it provides, but it is also
needed positively to further the common good by the encouragement
which it gives to the pursuit of an increasingly fuller measure of
justice in the social order in view of the general reluctance to pursue
the good of the people as a whole when the latter conflicts with one’s
own narrower interests.
CHRISTIANITY AND DEMOCRACY
In seeking to understand the relationship of Christianity to democ
racy, we need to be on our guard against two common misconceptions.
In the first place, there is a frequent tendency to equate Christianity
with democracy as if the latter were the only form of government
which could possibly be considered Christian. But, as James Hastings
Nichols points out, for over fifteen hundred years Christians never
suspected that political democracy was the natural or even a possible
implication of their faith and ethic.6 And even within the relatively
recent period since the rise of Western democratic ideals and insti
tutions only a minority of Christians have been genuine advocates of
6 James Hastings Nichols,
Democracy and the Churches*
Philadelphia,
The
Westminster Press, 1951, p. 17.
318
Biblical Faith and Social Ethics