Posted on 02/14/2008 4:28:15 PM PST by Terriergal
The Religious Left is successfully redefining what it means to be a conservative evangelical by misrepresenting what it means to be a conservative evangelical. In a recent conference call hosted by Faith in Public Life, one of the emerging voices of the Religious Left, Dr. Joel Hunter, said:
There’s also a change in the voices that are defining what is conservative now, and what is evangelical. In the past couple of decades you’ve had some very loud voices on both sides – hard right, hard left – and when those were the only choices, then of course many evangelicals are going to go with the hard right because, well, that’s kind of where we mostly are. Now there are many more voices that are expanding the agenda, and so those people that have always had kind of a holistic approach, rather than just a one or two issue approach, are now feeling permission and given permission to be more nuanced and more sophisticated in their approach, rather than just going in a very bifurcated system. And so, what you’re hearing now is that the old voices that appointed themselves as the definers of what was evangelical or what was conservative are not holding sway with the majority of evangelicals anymore.
By convincing America that conservative evangelicals are concerned only with two issues, stopping abortion and preserving traditional marriage, these new voices of evangelicalism are effectively making the case that conservative evangelicals ignore poverty, HIV/AIDS, and the environment. The history of evangelicalism tells a different story.
Evangelicals have set the standard throughout history for social action which continues into the present through numerous humanitarian relief organizations. The Association of Evangelical Relief and Development Organizations claim 64 such organizations as members, including World Vision, Compassion International, Samaritan’s Purse, and Mercy Ships.
One of the largest humanitarian relief organizations in the world is the Salvation Army. It defines its commitment to social services as “…an outward visible expression of the Army's strong religious principles.” Those social services include disaster relief, services for the aging, AIDS education, medical facilities, and shelters for battered women. The Salvation Army impacts 30 million people a year in the United States alone. The founder of the Salvation Army, William Booth, was a Methodist minister. On its website the Salvation Army defines itself as an “evangelical group.”
To these readily recognizable evangelical organizations add the innumerable evangelical churches across America that in very quiet and unrecognized ways minister to the needs of the poor and suffering every day. In my own community a local evangelical church runs the oldest and largest homeless shelter in our county. Grace Gospel Fellowship in Pontiac, Michigan serves 127,000 meals a year, provides rehabilitation services and housing for drug addicts and single mothers, and creates jobs. It accomplishes its mission without one dime of government funding, and is “dedicated to recovery through the Gospel of Jesus Christ.”
The Religious Left’s appeal for the Religious Right to “broaden its agenda” to include poverty, HIV/AIDS, and the environment ignores the fact that conservative evangelicals have always had a strong commitment to these issues. So if conservative evangelicals are already leading the efforts to relieve poverty and disease, what’s behind the call to “broaden the agenda”? Another agenda altogether.
What’s really happening here is an attempt by the Left to define evangelicalism down by moving it away from its emphasis on the power of the gospel to change lives. The church’s ability to affect social and cultural change, bringing relief to the poor and suffering, is rooted first and foremost in its commitment to the gospel of Jesus Christ, and what the gospel says about the condition of man in sin which results in the symptoms of poverty and disease.
The Religious Left invalidates the conservative evangelical commitment to humanitarian relief because we are achieving our ends in the name of Jesus Christ through the gospel, without the assistance of government funding. The fundamental tenant of modern liberalism is that a government program funded by redistributed wealth is the preferred method of humanitarian relief rather than what the church is accomplishing by faith through compassionate hearts.
The new voices of the Religious Left – Rick Warren, Joel Hunter, Tony Campolo, Jim Wallis, et al – are defining down what it means to be an evangelical by making the symptoms of man’s sin (poverty, disease, etc.) a priority rather than addressing the cause of those symptoms (sin) and the cure found in the gospel of Jesus Christ.
The argument for this reprioritizing is a convincing one, suggesting the new priorities for evangelicals ought to be determined by asking, “How would Jesus respond to (fill in your favorite social cause here)?” The implied answer is that Jesus would be more concerned about the treatment of the poor (especially illegal immigrants) and, at best, neutral on the questions of abortion and homosexual marriage because Jesus never spoke against abortion or homosexual marriage.
These new voices of evangelicalism wear the label “red letter Christians,” but they are in reality “white space Christians,” determining Jesus’ view of abortion and homosexual marriage by focusing on what he didn’t say rather than on what he did say. In Matthew 5 Jesus upholds the standard of the Mosaic Law, which is clear in its call for punishing anyone responsible for killing a child in the womb (Exodus 21:22-25). When Jesus wanted to illustrate true greatness, he set a child in the midst of the disciples and said, “Of such is the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 19:14). In Matthew 19 Jesus clearly affirmed that marriage is between one man and one woman by validating the story of Adam and Eve, holding it up as the standard for marriage. As for the question of how Jesus would respond to illegal immigrants, I’m pretty sure he would tell them to obey the law (cf. Matthew 22:21).
The new voices of evangelicalism sound eerily similar to the old voices of the social gospel movement who moved their churches away from the priority of the gospel in the early 20th Century, focusing instead on positive thinking and welfare as a solution to social ills. The result was empty pews and even emptier hearts. I’ll tip my hat to the new constitution, take a bow for the new revolution, then I’ll get down on my knees and pray we don’t get fooled again (with apologies to Pete Townshend).
Jesus spoke against Adultery and sexual immorality. And I kind of doubt they were doing millions of abortions back in 30 AD.
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First of all, the Didache, the oldest Christian document outside of the Bible, explicitly condemns abortion. Many believe the Didache may have been written in AD 70.
Secondly, Jesus *did* implicitly preach against homosexual marriage when he defined marriage as a man leaving his parents and becoming on flesh with his wife.
Good article. I'm seeing this as I trudge slowly through Bell's Velvet Elvis as well. To this point (and I'm just starting chapter -- or "movement" or "whim" or whatever he calls the divisions -- three), every mention or implied reference to the Gospel has been an experiential one: "living the way Jesus taught" kind of stuff. And that, at least to me, echoes a more social call. There certainly hasn't been much about sin and the need of a Savior.
Um... As I recall Deitrich BonHoeffer was Lutheran. You might consider more carefully when slinging terms like that about.
BTW Lutherans don’t hate Jews, and Paul himself wrote pretty harshly about them because of their legalism. They are as unsaved, according to the new testament, as any other unbeliever in Messiah.
True, but you’re arguing from the exception. The vast majority of Lutheran “leaders,” went right along with the S.S.
So what? That just means more likely that they weren’t real Christians in the first place. What does Lutheranism have to do with it? Hitler twisted Scripture all the time to convince ‘church going’ people that he was doing the “lord’s work” - doesn’t mean that Lutherans or catholics or anyone else — hate jews.
“Jew killing” was a symptom of teaching like John McCarthur’s mis-interpretation of Romans 13. You are fixating on the Jew-killing symptom but not the blind-obedience disease. When Christian pastors fail to see that Romans 13 is more of a warning for leaders who are not a “terror to evil,” they establish the framework for the kind of moral cowardice demonstrated by German Lutherans of the late 1930s.
What’s with the “moderator” CC?
By the way, I never said that Lutherans hate Jews—only that they were willing to say nothing as they were being slaughtered...
Nobody sends our guys out to die ~ your statement is an insult to everybody in the military, to the entire chain of command, to the President, to the people of the United States.
War, if anything, has as its purpose the bringing of peace.
But you don’t bring “peace,” Skippy, by establishing an Iraqi Constitution that establishes “Islam” as the source of all legislation. Islam is the problem, not the solution.
There are always a few Schindlers around, but not nearly enough.
It's like this, an airplane failed to take off properly. Instead it faltered, hit a bridge, bounced upside down and came down in the river. A few passengers in the tail managed to survive ~ one man still strapped to his seat was unable to get free.
While in the water thousands of others gathered on the riverbank and watched from a distance.
The fellow in the water helped his fellow passengers get out of the wreckage and onto the ice where they were safer (if not actually safe).
One man jumped into the water, and made his way through the ice to the plane. Then another man jumped in. Others on shore threw out ropes and tires.
Thousands of others continued to watch.
At least that's the charge the Sunni make, and there's a lot of validity to it.
In some parts of the world, and Iraq is in such a "part", people find it inconceivable that there should not be a state church, or that religion should be anything other than the guiding principle of society.
In America we generally believe a state religion is total nonsense and probably dangerous to your health. We also believe in free speech. We are in a tiny minority in this world.
Your describing human nature very well. On that we agree. I’m not sure you realize, however, the mitigating factor represented by good preaching. Good pastors put their flocks on a courageous footing; bad pastors put them to sleep.
And what do you think happens, when people start obeying God after receiving the Gospel, Terriergal?
Iraq also has snakehandlers.
Then, there are fellows with top level degrees from world famous universities who live in Baghdad and drink tea in the afternoon.
Since this is the place where civilization was invented, it's not exactly like it's a "foreign country".
I think that Huckabee supporters were the ones responsible for defining evangelicalism as being concerned only with abortion and homosexuality. They proved that they didn’t care about any other issues.
It's time to share.
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