An couple of interesting articles cited by Rich on how some Christian evangelicals on both the Left and Right are beginning to reconsider whether extremism in support of their wing’s pet issues is, in fact, productive, let alone virtuous.
The National Association of Evangelicals, with 30 million members in 45,000 churches, opened a debate on Thursday on a document intended to expand the political platform of evangelicals beyond the fight against abortion and same-sex marriage. […]
The document urges evangelicals to address issues like racial injustice, religious freedom, poverty in the United States and abroad, human rights, environmentalism and advancing peace through nonviolent conflict resolution.
How … refreshing.
At the luncheon, several speakers said the document was necessary because evangelicals risked being seen as merely a Republican voting bloc. Several of those speakers identified themselves as Republicans.
Barbara Williams-Skinner, president of the Skinner Leadership Institute, a Christian training center in Tracy’s Landing, Md., criticized evangelicals who decide their votes using abortion and same-sex marriage as a litmus test.
“The litmus test is the Gospel, the whole of it,” said Ms. Williams-Skinner, an African-American who told the group that she is a Democrat who opposes abortion.
Ms. Williams-Skinner was the sole speaker to draw a standing ovation.
Granted, single-issue voting is a lot simpler to manage and follow. And the discussion was hardly without its proponents.
Critics indicated that the new smorgasbord approach could hit resistance.
Tom Minnery, vice president of Focus on the Family, an influential ministry based in Colorado Springs, stood up at the luncheon and warned the other leaders, “Do not make this about global warming.”
“The issues of marriage, the issues of pro-life are the issues that define us to this day,” he added.
Which is, of course, one of the problems. After all, one would think that it would be Jesus that would define them, right? And Jesus didn’t spend a lot of time talking about either marriage or pro-life matters.
Not to say those aren’t legitimate moral issues to debate. But to make them the defining issues is, it seems clear to me, missing the point.
Which isn’t missed, in fact, by some:
“We need a full-blown biblical theology that affirms both personal and social sin, both personal conversion and structural change, both evangelism and social action, both personal and social salvation, both Jesus as moral example and Jesus as vicarious substitute, both orthodox theology and ethical obedience,” Ron Sider, a professor of theology at Eastern Baptist Theological Seminary, wrote in “Good News and Good Works.”
Rich adds:
The evangelical movement first began to win a huge following in the 18th Century, led by men such as John Wesley and George Whitfield. In these politically and theologically divisive times it’s worth remembering why.
It was their conservative piety and their liberal humanity.
Indeed.
There’s a lot about the Jesus as Law Giver folks that bugs me. And a lot about the Jesus as Social Revolutionary folks that bugs me. The answer to me doesn’t seem to be to cubbyhole Jesus further around one or two “defining” issues, but to focus, paradoxically, on the breadth of the personal and social gospel he proclaimed.
Or something like that.
While the quote about Whitfield and Wesley perfectly echos my sentiments they are not my words. They are the words of David Waters.
In the late ’80s a pastor of mine was giving a sermon where the text was a listing of the disiciples. My reaction was how are you going to get a sermon out of this? The pastor noted that disciples including a person on the left (Simon the Zealot) and the right (Matthew). If Jesus could interact with the entire political spectrum, so could we.
The split between personal piety and social action dates from the early 20th Century. There the Modernist movement made the Evangelicals of the time suspicious of anything that smacked of the so-called Social Gospel. They abandoned the social action of 18th and 19th Century Evangelicals. What early 21st Century Evangelicals are (re)discovering is this is a false choice.
In an adult Bible study class in the Methodist church I was attending at the time we did a chapter on Jesus’ economic philosophy — how he told rich people they had to give everything away to follow him, how he urged his disciples to abandon their day jobs to follow him and serve those less fortunate, etc. When the class leader opened the floor for discussion, the first response was “this makes Jesus sound like a Communist!”
There’s a lot that secular left-wingers and pagans can agree with evangelical Christians on if the evangelicals bother to remember the other 99% of what Jesus said. There will always be serious disagreements, of course, but having Christians argue that the most Jesus-centered thing you can do for the poor is stop handing them loaves and fishes always struck me as a little odd.