He said he'd wished I'd preached on Judges.
I was the guest preacher that day and this was one of
those sluggish congregations where you feel as though
you're looking into the eyes of department store mannequins.
I'd just finished preaching a gospel sermon on the new
birth from the third chapter of John. And the man approached
me to say he'd love to hear me preach on Judges, because "that's
what we really need."
I said I'd wished I'd known that. The Book of Judges
is one of my favorites, and I'd have been glad to preach
the gospel of Christ from the account of the days when "there
was no king in Israel and every man did what was right
in his own eyes." The Book of Judges defines the
scope of human rebellion, and the longing for a kingdom
that can only come in Jesus.
So I said, "I'll tell you what: anytime you want,
I'll come back and preach on Judges."
He was excited, for the first time that morning it seemed. "Great," he
said.
"We need it. I'll tell you…what the Democrats
are doing—filibustering President Bush's judges…it's
just not right."
It took a second or so for me to get what he was saying.
He was worried about judicial filibusters, not about
the canonical Book of Judges. He wanted a sermon that
was relevant to the problems of the world, and he thought
the new birth was less relevant than congressional roadblocks
to appointments to the federal judiciary.
In one sense, I suppose, that's normal. After all, people
tend to categorize what's important by what the people
around them are talking about. And no one on Fox News
had been discussing what to do with unregenerate humanity
that morning. They'd been talking about judicial nominations.
This seemed "real"
to him, and he wanted a word from God.
THE SOCIAL GOSPEL: A MORE "REAL" CHRISTIANITY?
This man's experience is almost exactly what the pioneers
of the "social gospel"
were trying to get at: a Christianity that moves to something
more "real" than church doctrines and religious
experience. The social gospel movement of the early twentieth
century picked up on this human impulse and designed
a theology and a mission around it. And it seems that,
in some ways, the old social gospel is back.
The pioneer of the social gospel movement was Walter
Rauschenbusch, a Baptist who was alarmed by the plight
of the poor in places ranging from Hell's Kitchen in
New York to the working class neighborhoods of Louisville,
Kentucky. Rauschenbusch and other social gospel advocates
wanted to make Christianity relevant to the social crisis
in areas ranging from liquor traffic to housing conditions
to labor negotiations to global peacemaking. But the
social gospel advocates weren't simply "applying" historic
orthodox Christianity to these problems. The seeming
impotence of traditional Christianity to address these
issues was, for the social gospel pioneers, evidence
that something was wrong with Christianity as it was
then being articulated.
The social gospel believed Christianity's problem was
that it was too individual—focused as it was on
personal regeneration and a gospel of salvation from
judgment. The social gospel sought to redirect Christians
away from "pie in the sky by and by" (that
is, eternal life) and toward peace and justice in the
present. Regeneration came to be articulated mostly in
terms of social justice rather than peace with God and
neighbor. And the kingdom of God came to be articulated
in terms of the evolutionary progress of history rather
than a cataclysmic invasion of history culminating in
resurrection from the dead.
At the same time, the social gospel sought to deemphasize
the centrality of the church as a local congregation
(or even as the universal Body of Christ).
"The Church is one social institution alongside
of the family, the industrial organization of society,
and the State," Rauschenbusch wrote. "The kingdom
of God is in all these, and realizes itself through them
all."
For the social gospel, then, Christianity is defined
by Christian social action in the name of Jesus, not
by doctrines about Jesus or experiences with Jesus. The
social gospel stood then with the "modernists" against
the so-called "fundamentalists"
in the doctrinal controversies of the early twentieth
century because for them Christianity wasn't about whether
one affirmed the virgin birth or the second coming or
the authority of Scripture or even the bodily resurrection.
Christianity was defined by following Jesus, which meant "walking
in his steps" in terms of advocacy for social justice
and global change.
The social gospel did indeed advocate evangelism, but
the evangelism was often a means to an end—to the "Christianization" of
a locality or of the world—so that social change
might result. Because progressives of this time often
believed monotheistic Christianity was the evolutionary
pinnacle of human religion, they believed a modern Christian
identity could democratize, and thus "civilize",
the "heathen" social barbarisms around the
world. Christian missions then would mean increased living
conditions, more just industrial policies, better living
conditions for women and children, and so forth. In this
sense, the social gospel has a lot in common with, for
instance, conservative commentator Ann Coulter's insistence
that the Islamic world be "evangelized" to
Christianity—as part of the defeat of jihadist
extremism in the "war on terror."
IS THE EMERGING CHURCH A RENEWED SOCIAL GOSPEL?
When people ask me if I think the "emerging church" is
a renewed social gospel, I normally have to hesitate.
Without wanting to sound like former President Clinton
before the special prosecutors, I have to say that it
depends on what you mean by "social gospel," and
what you mean by "emerging church."
As others have noted, the "emerging church" is
a designation that means very little, and means less
and less every day. Any designation that can be used
by some to describe orthodox, evangelistic pastors such
as Mark Driscoll and Dan Kimball in the same category
as teachers such as Brian McLaren and Rob Bell is a close
to meaningless term. This confuses the issue.
At the same time, the issue is confused when some evangelicals
are quick to label as "social gospel" any social
action or concern done by the body of Christ. Evangelicals
can disagree about whether the church's outward mission
is primarily evangelistic, or whether it's actually multi-focused. This
debate, among conservative gospel-believing followers
of Christ, though, is not a debate between the social
gospel and the gospel. This doesn't mean the debate is
not important; just that it's a different debate. Some
evangelicals might wrongly suspect concern for poverty,
for example, or orphan care or spousal abuse as a kind
of "social gospel."
The social gospel isn't in the ministries of those who—transformed
by Jesus—share with him his burden for the "least
of these, my brothers." It is seen, instead, in
the teachings of those who seek to replace a gospel of
justification with a program of justice, those who seek
to de-emphasize the new birth in favor of social action.
That is definitely resurgent.
Brian McLaren, for instance, caricatures the "legal
view" of personal forgiveness of sin through the
atonement of Christ as part of what must change about
Christianity. Doug Pagitt calls on contemporary Christianity
to abandon a "sin-centric" gospel which has
turned the faith into, in his words, "a pessimistic,
evil-obsessed religion of sin management." And Rob
Bell tells us that Jesus' gospel never made "claims
about one religion being better than all other religions." Instead,
Bell writes, following Jesus is "the best possible
way to live."
Some on the left wing of the "emerging church" spend
an awful lot of time telling us that Christianity is
about more than a collection of doctrines, and I agree.
Some of them insist, loudly, that the gospel is about
more than
"going to heaven when you die" and that the
kingdom of God addresses the whole of life, and again,
I agree. The problem is that these teachers often seem
to be doing more than speaking about the "more" of
the gospel of the kingdom that some evangelicals miss;
that is, they downplay the historic core of the good
news of the kingdom—an announcement about Jesus
that is a historical reality of incarnation, atonement,
and triumph and an announcement about us that says,
"Unless a man is born again, he cannot see the kingdom
of God" (Jn. 3:3).
Too often, the doctrinal left wing of the "emerging" movement
isn't clarifying the doctrinal content of Christianity,
but using, it seems, cunning words to downplay this doctrinal
content in order to substitute a social program there
instead. This can—and has—happened on the
political right as well as on the political left, and
with the same kind of wreckage left in its wake.
Ultimately, the social gospel of the early twentieth
century was self-defeating, and I predict the same for
any reincarnation of it. Without that which makes Christianity
unique—the scandal of the cross—people will
keep the social program but substitute a religion, whether
secular or pagan, that better allows them to "continue
in sin that grace may abound." This is why those
groups that embraced the social gospel last century are
now burned-over shells of previously Christian conviction.
The social gospels of yesterday and today are correct
that an isolationist, separatist Christianity fails to
see the wholeness of kingdom salvation. They are right
that "apolitical" churches or Christian movements
are typically the most political of all—in supporting
the status quo (think, for instance, of those "simple
gospel preaching" churches of the Jim Crow South).
They are wrong, though, in seeing the jettisoning of
personal sin, personal redemption, and personal reconciliation
as the way to redeem a kingdom identity.
THE HISTORIC GOSPEL: COSMIC AND PERSONAL
The gospel of historic Christianity is cosmic. In Jesus,
God reconciles "to himself all things, whether on
earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his
cross" (Col. 1:20). That means we must be concerned,
as Jesus is, with the whole of human experience, recognizing
the curse of sin in human suffering as well as in human
guilt.
But the gospel of historic Christianity is also personal.
We love our fellow humans and serve them in their suffering
precisely because we believe that God loves not just "humanity" but
individual humans, that Jesus died for persons, that
God's wrath is propitiated against persons, and that
persons will be raised, individually and collectively,
in the flesh on the last day.
Any "gospel" that evacuates the cross of judgment
against sin, that alienates the gospel from personal
reconciliation with God and with others, is something
other than the gospel of Jesus Christ. And any Christianity
that turns us away from the truths handed down about
Jesus—his deity, his humanity, virgin birth, his
suffering at Golgotha, his bodily resurrection, his future
return, his authority in Scripture, his building of the
church—is pointing us to some different Messiah.
Let's remember that the gospel is social but the social
gospel isn't good news. And a church that embraces it, "emerging" or
otherwise, will not long be a church.
So let's speak truth to power, even as John the Baptist
did to King Herod (and sometimes with the same results).
Let's feed the poor, house the homeless, adopt the orphan,
shelter the widow, advocate for the unborn, and respect
the environment. But, most importantly, let's preach
peace and justice, for the individual and for the whole
world, found in the bloody cross and empty tomb of Jesus.
Russell D. Moore is Senior Vice President for Academic
Administration and Dean of the School of Theology at
The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville,
Kentucky. He also serves as preaching pastor at the
Fegenbush Lane campus of Highview Baptist Church where
he ministers weekly. Moore is the author of most recently Adopted
for Life: The Priority of Adoption for Christian Families
and Churches (Crossway).
January/February 2010
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