Second Thought

Looking again at news and commentary

by Andrew Phillips,—February 25, 1988

The Listener

"Twenty years ago, Britain's newspapers made only modest reference to money matters. Today, their business sections are almost as long as the news pages, and a myriad of papers and magazines are devoted to nothing else. Money, after sex, dominates most of the tabloids.

"The price is moral schizophrenia—Monday to Friday money man, Saturday-Sunday social man. Sensing all this, thinking people, Christian and non-Christian, are re-examining Christ's repeated warnings about money, wealth and power and what they are apt to do to those who scramble for them or cling to them.

"The tendencies are not all one-way. The charity Business in the Community, formed by private sector lenders only a few years ago, has grown rapidly in support and activity, particularly where the problems are more intractable—among minorities in the run-down city areas. What is more, business ethics are forcing themselves on to the agenda in business, schools and larger companies. The Institute of Business Ethics was formed a year ago.

"One wonders where the New Testament is supposed to hold sway. I suspect [the marketplace] answer would be 'in church'.

"One should have no illusions about the strain that good people are put under by these moral dilemmas, quite apart from the purely competitive pressures.

"The baffling thing is that when Christ exhorted the well-off and ambitious of his day ... to consider the lilies of the field and mark how free of care they were, he saw straight to the heart of our own affluent preoccupations.

"Montesquieu wrote, 250 years ago, that Britain 'had progressed of all people in three important things—piety, commerce and freedom'. That balance has been all but crushed by a rabid materialism. To restore it will require more than moral utopianism which glosses over unaccommodating reality, and much more than piety which evades the difficult but enriching insights about wealth and power of the New Testament."

Reprinted courtesy of The Listener, London, England.

Editors' comment: As the writer says, the tendencies are not all one-way. For one thing, more and more articles like the above are showing up in newspapers and magazines. A surprising number of them take note of the moral and spiritual vacuum left in the wake of materialistic trends. And writers are finding in the New Testament something more than antiquated idealism.

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