Christian believers, grounded in their local Christian communities and working together through the institutional churches and para-church agencies at regional and national level, can co-operate – with discretion – with those of other religious beliefs or none, in pursuit of specific shared goals. Such collaboration is appropriate and justified because the Bible and the Christian tradition teach that all human beings can know the basic moral requirements of the good and virtuous life that make for the common good. These requirements include ‘the knowledge of good and evil’ and the ‘Golden Rule’ that we should treat others as we would wish them to treat us.
Christians hold, of course, that the ultimate good is revealed in Scripture. It is to be found in God, as he is known by faith in Jesus Christ through the life-giving power of the Holy Spirit. It is experienced in the community of the Church through all the means of grace that God has provided. Christians therefore work with selfless devotion to make that truth known through mission and evangelism. But Christians also typically work with divinely inspired energy for social goods which contribute to the well-being of the wider community, precisely because these reflect the ultimate source of all good in God and in fact approximate to it to various degrees.
The ultimate goal of human life, the theological good, is to know, love and serve God, or as the Westminster Shorter Catechism famously expresses it, “to glorify God and to enjoy him for ever”. The social good, the proximate goal of human life, is to live in harmonious fellowship, in love and charity, first with our neighbours, then with our nation, and ultimately with global humankind. Christians are committed to pursue the social good because their faith teaches them that all their fellow human beings are created in the image of God (imago dei), are loved by God and are the subjects of the working of the Holy Spirit, in every human heart and life, that calls them to repentance and faith and to live henceforth in tune with God’s will for human well-being. Human fellowship and communion (koinonia), in friendship, marriage, the family, the neighbourhood and beyond – for all its shortcomings, fragility and imperfections – upholds God’s creation mandate while reflecting and anticipating that communion (koinonia) with God and the saints which is the fruit of redemption.
