Faith and Responsibility

When you reduce the message of Christian Reconstruction to its base ingredients, the essence is the obedience of faith (Rom. 16:26). Faith has a responsibility. Faith requires something of those who claim to hold it. That something is a responsibility to action in terms of that faith. To the Christian, responsibility is made manifest in faithful obedience to God’s law-word and its application to his family, calling, and labor.

If you believe something, then you bear the obligation to build in terms of it. The apostle Paul says, “we are debtors” (Rom. 8:12): we are under obligation to serve the Spirit of God (v. 14) by setting our minds (v. 5) on the spiritual law (7:14). This is not vain pietism. It is a mental dedication to the law of God given by the Holy Spirit that earmarked the spiritual disciplines of the righteous throughout redemptive history. After absorption the goal is always application.

In this issue of Faith for All of Life, we give attention to faith and responsibility as related to our present social dilemmas. We are living in a time when democracy is redefined into a humanistic tool of coercion, where the church is silent regarding the bloated welfare state, and an unholy syncretism of socialism and freedom is ushering in an era of total statism. Yet at the root it is the sin within the church that permits wicked ideologies to thrive, and this great ecclesiastical transgression is the divorcing of faith and responsibility.

As Dr. Gary North argues in “Death of Secular Humanism,” our “main problem is a culture-wide loss of faith: in the future, in personal responsibility, in the family.” We know that in order to retain something we must put it to use.

Hearing without doing, St. James says, leads to forgetfulness (James 1:24) and self-deceit (v. 22). We are ignorant of the devil’s devices (2 Cor. 2:11) because he is removing the power of faith while leaving a semblance of godliness that stands like an empty shell. Men believe but don’t act. They declare Christ is Lord but isolate His rule to their hearts. If faith is not joined with action, Christianity becomes a form of godliness that denies its own power (2 Tim. 3:5), and in history there is no greater tragedy.