“Most churches are a one-sided disaster,” says Ronald Sider, president of Evangelicals for Social Action, in his book Good News and Good Works: A Theology of the Whole Gospel. I laughed out loud as I read the statement, amused that Sider has the guts to summarize the situation so bluntly. He is a qualified writer who has made it his life goal to see more Christians live with an equal zeal for evangelism and social action.
I’ve never thought of the suburban church I grew up in as a one-sided disaster, but Sider has a point. Politics and denominational distinctions have polarized Christians when it comes to serving the poor. To over-simplify the situation, liberals focus on social action while negating evangelism, and conservatives do the opposite. In the following paragraphs I speak to fellow conservatives, arguing that we must learn to see past mutually exclusive, man-made structures in order to rightly understand Scripture and live out Christ’s call.
The Social Gospel is a good starting point. This movement at the beginning of the twentieth century was a response to the massive poverty that accompanied industrialization. According to John Atherton, Canon Theologian of Manchester Cathedral, the orthodox theology of traditional American Protestantism did not provide answers to problems like the exploitation of factory workers. Those who were sensitive to this reality, such as William Gladden and Walter Rauschenbusch, reached into emerging liberal theology to fuel the movement of the Social Gospel.
Unfortunately, in doing so, they wed the biblical mandate of solidarity with the oppressed to heretical theology that frowned upon doctrines like substitutionary atonement. They claimed such doctrines only internalize faith and render it useless for a society.
In 1910 the Presbyterian General Assembly reacted by establishing five fundamentals of Christianity. According to Kenneth Collins in his book The Evangelical Movement, this statement was re-enforced by a twelve-volume series called The Fundamentals, written by leading conservative scholars of the day. Christians needed this reaction in order to guard orthodox teachings such as the virgin birth and Christ’s bodily resurrection; however, the Fundamentalist movement fostered a school of thought that downplays social action because of its association with liberal theology.
To this day, people at places like Moody Bible Institute (where I attended undergrad) look suspiciously at social action because they automatically label it as liberal.
For example, during Moody’s 2008 mission conference, I attend Bread for the World’s workshop. The representative, a woman who looked to be in her late 20s, spoke briefly about her background as a social researcher in Africa. Then she presented loads of information about poverty and hunger in Africa and how we could help solve it by promoting legislation to ease world hunger. At the end she passed out forms to send to our congressmen in order to encourage the government to take action.
One student raised his hand and said, “This is a cool idea and everything, but I’m not sure if I can participate because I’m conservative and this seems kind of liberal.” Everyone chuckled at the student’s apprehension, but it is living evidence of a serious and deeply rooted problem with the way many people think within mainstream Christianity.
I am not saying that Christians need to abandon theological concerns in order to devote all their energy to making the world a better place by serving the disadvantaged. The desire for greater unity among confessing Christians has its place, but because we swim in the water of pluralism and tolerance it can also be dangerous. Kevin DeYoung, co-author of Why We’re Not Emergent, gave a powerful reminder in a recent message I heard. He said that we abandon the cross if we make the ethical teachings of Jesus the supreme call of Christianity.
Along with DeYoung and the long-deceased writers of The Fundamentals, I agree that followers of Jesus must never loose sight of the gospel as a message of historical assertions calling for belief that leads to transformed lives. In maintaining that belief however, conservatives must admit their tendency to label some things liberal that are actually biblical, especially when it comes to serving the poor.
What we are left to ask ourselves, then, is not which political camp we belong to or what movement we identify ourselves with. We are left to look at the Scriptures and our lives before God and ask; “Am I modeling God’s concern for the poor and bearing verbal witness to the death and resurrection of his Son?”
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