Earlier I was describing to an unbeliever how Christians are accountable to each other within our community of faith--a community which has at it's head, God. This person wrote back to me, asking, if Christians were not equally accountable to non-believers as well. I'd like to take a moment and deliberate on this.
First of all, we need to distinguish between personal and public accountability.
A Christian is personally accountable to a body of believers for how he lives his life. If I fail to live a sacramental life, then it is the duty of my fellow followers in Christ to point this out to me and encourage me to do better and to pray for me. Furthermore, as a lay minister (non-vocational) in an Episcopal church, I am expected to live a life worthy of Christ, and I can be brought to account by my priest or the vestry of my church if I consistently fail to live a sacramental life, or if I dishonor my wife, or fail to provide for my family, etc.
Being a Christian means, by definition, to be accountable to others. In other words, once you choose to accept justification through faith in Jesus Christ, you don’t get to choose whether or not you will be accountable. Grace of God should encourage gratitude and love for God in our parts, and we should want to please Our Father just as he wishes to take care of us and reward us when we do well.
In contradistinction to the Christian life, 20th century pagans (I consider atheists to be irreligious, not nonreligious, since atheism is mere superstition explained in the vernacular of scientism or modern dogma, etc.) were accountable by choice, and they chose what they would be accountable for. In other words, a ‘classical atheist’ chooses (1) if he wants a life of accountability and (2) he chooses the conditions for which he will be accountable.
For example, the ‘old guard’ guys like Bertram Russell chose to hold themselves accountable for philanthropy to the poor, the spread of peace and wisdom, etc., but not so much to hold themselves accountable to their wives or their nations. Choosing the terms of accountability is probably an even more radical departure from our classical notions of morality and ethics than choosing whether to live a life of accountability or not.
None of this means that someone like Russell could not be, in many aspects of his life, a moral and decent man. However, most unbelievers seem to miss the point here: Russell’s goodness and his morality (when it was not skewed by his moral shortcomings) were not due to his personal traits or his biological makeup, but were the result of two things: (1) God’s grace and mercy and (2) dumb luck. The reason for this is that men and women cannot evolve into better beings without God because it takes justification through faith for men and women to evolve at all.
Moving on to the 21st century, we see a ‘new guard’ of pagans starting a new trend that would probably frighten Bertrand Russell into turning to Christianity: (1) this ‘new atheist’ chooses to deny any accountability for himself, but (2) he has no scruple about trying to force others to be accountable to them. This is why you have such odd scenes such as protestors defecating in public places and wiping their feces on police cars, but they demand that Wall Street bankers be held to account; or you have teenagers in London telling BBC reporters that they can destroy local shops and harass residents to show ‘rich people they can do anything they want’; this is why you see Occupiers ordering women victims at the Occupy Baltimore camp not to report that they have been raped or sexually assaulted to the police, but they demand that more affluent Americans pay whatever arbitrary sum of money that they the Occupiers decide is somehow a ‘fair share.’
I think the difference between someone like Bertrand Russell and the Occupiers is that Russell was an overall good man because he was still living in the shadows of a Christian society and he had been exposed to the teachings of Jesus, and he was still influenced by his Christian background. Many of the Occupiers are pure, mindless heathens because they have been generations removed from Christ…so it really isn’t completely their fault that they are so selfish and destructive because they’ve never been taught anything. So sad, really.
However, my point here is that Christians have a different form of personal accountability than nonbelievers do. It is a covenant with God and his Church (the body of Christ) made up of fellow believers...and we are all accountable to each other. While you can hear good advice from all manner of persons in life, and while I do not advocate dismissing their advice outright because they believe differently, I also think it is inappropriate for a nonbeliever, who has not committed himself to the same covenant as me, to lecture me about all of my failings...especially if he is simultaneously not bound to the same restrictions and tenets that I am trying to follow. After all, we are usually skeptical of anyone who offers his advice or opinion on a subject (lawyering, teaching, sportsmanship, etc.) in which he has no expertise or involvement. For example, if I have a hard day at work and am a little short with a troublesome coworker one day, I'll listen to what a non-believing observer has to say about my conduct: but should I take it to heart? Honestly, to me it is all a little too much like armchair quarterbacking. This is the job for the Body of Christ, my community of believers.
Public accountability for Christians is a different matter.
On the one hand, a Christian officeholder should uphold the oath he or she takes to the laws of the land (meaning the real laws such as the ones found in the enumerated powers of the U.S. Constitution…not make-believe laws that pagan persons think exist but really don’t, such as the assumption that faith and religious expression has no place in the American public sector or public policy, etc.)
If we abide by the laws of the land, then how do we fight injustice and ungodliness in our society?
Some Christians choose to use the legal system to fight unjust laws such as Roe v. Wade, and this is okay because they are simply using the legal means available to them to bring about social change. (God forbid that our system of government be open to and used by Christians equally as it is by pagan and heathen activists!)
Some Christians, like the Civil Rights activists of the 1950s and the antiwar protesters of the 1960s, resort to civil disobedience…or, breaking the law in a nonviolent way to make a political point. I’m of two-minds about this.
On the one hand, I prefer effective legal action or petitioning the legislative branch to pedestrian marches and demonstrations. However, as in the Roman days, when you feel the entire apparatus of public office is either ignoring your cause or even against it, sometimes you have to take to the streets. Obviously, with civil disobedience, the protesting offender takes the consequences of his or her legal transgression and accepts the consequences, whether that is 2 hours in flesh-cuffs…or being crucified upside down like Saint Peter.
But in short, the answer to the unbeliever's question is yes! Christians are accountable to nonbelievers, but not personally as they are to fellow believers. Instead, Christians are accountable to their public oaths and under the enumerated powers of our laws, and therefore we are accountable to unbelievers in so much as we are publicly accountable to Caesar or the US Constitution. Furthermore, our covenant with God demands that we treat unbelievers well, pray for them, and bear their burdens when they are in desperate need.
However, what unbelievers cannot do (and what they often seek to do) is to take advantage of our covenant oaths to weigh us down with human judgement and human guilt for our personal shortcomings while they themselves are unburdened and unbound. Therefore, they will put us (if we let them) on this obstacle course of their own making where we must always struggle not to be 'hypocritical', while they themselves are free to stretch their flippancy to all new hypocritical levels.
Do not let such wicked people torment you. God forgives you and He knows we are all trying to do better.
And the people He has sent into your life know this too.
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