Archive for the ‘Social "gospels"’ Category

The dead before the wounded, part 2: True hope for Haiti

Saturday, February 20th, 2010

Listening to “emergent” Christians talk about their ideas on the internet is not very easy.

For me, that has proven especially true in the past couple of weeks, for at least three reasons.

The first is that they keep saying things about God that are not too Biblical, or imbalanced, even if they aren’t strictly heretical (i.e., something that keeps you from being a real Christian).

The second is that they keep assuming other Christians, such as myself, mainly believe as they do for certain reasons — they want to preserve power, they want to shoot homosexuals in the streets for sport, they’re all legalists, fundies, etc. They don’t give much leeway to those who believe “traditional” Christianity, and live their faith in love, because they really believe the Bible teaches this and God wants it.

The third reason is because these are not just philosophical issues that can be talked about over (insert trendy drink of your choice) while tapping out notes on your (insert i-Something of your choice).1 I keep getting that impression from a lot of “emergent” advocates — and to be fair, from some “traditional” Christians too — that all this is just a bookish discussion.

Instead, this stuff is vital. It affects people’s lives. Believing wrongly about spiritual realities ruins marriages, families, churches. False doctrine (no matter which doctrines you believe are false) corrupts how one views God, morality, salvation, how to interact with the world.

And what if it’s true that Christians who still hold to the Biblical framework of man’s personal sin against God2), and eternal consequences for failure to repent and believe Christ? If so, those who claim or act otherwise are in a lot of trouble. Why? Because in their efforts to help the world, heal its hurts, etc., they’re stepping right over dead bodies — ignoring man’s true problem, deadness in trespasses and sins (Ephesians 1-2), in order to treat flesh wounds.

One month ago I addressed this issue in Part 1. It started with a fantasy-world analogy3 and actually dared to finish with a surface evaluation of the civil rights era. Now I’ll finally finish up, with some thoughts on Christians and others who could seem to prefer moral zeal but without Biblical knowledge, following a certain earthquake.

Do your paperwork

More than a month has passed since the earthquake that tore through the half-island nation of Haiti. Already afflicted with disease, death and poverty, the island is still suffering the aftermath of that near-apocalypse. The blighted country’s existing population of orphans undoubtedly swelled, and charity workers, Christian or not, are trying to figure out what to do.

They want to help the suffering people, they really do. They have great hearts, those charity workers. But what they also need to make sure they have is, um, the right paperwork.

This also goes for a certain group of Baptists.4 In early February, ten members of an Idaho church were trying to get into the Dominican Republic, crossing the border with multiple Haitian orphans in tow. Instead they were arrested and charged with child kidnapping.

More recently, eight of the Baptists were freed and returned to the U.S. in time for some to get on the Oprah show.5 But two of their leaders, Laura Silsby and Charisa Coulter, are still jailed in Port-au-Prince. They hadn’t had the right documents, Haiti authorities said, and oh, by the way: some of the children weren’t really orphans. A World magazine story (on Feb. 4) further describes:

[Silsby] told reporters last week: “Our hearts were in the right place.”

[. . .]

The Americans, members of a group called New Life Children’s Refuge, said they planned to establish an orphanage for children in the Dominican Republic. CNN reported that the group has no experience running an orphanage, and that the group’s headquarters are listed as Silsby’s now-foreclosed home.

What I hope is that the missionaries (or missionary wannabes?) are not now thinking this is simple anti-Christian persecution. I hope they aren’t claiming “this was God’s will” for something that just wasn’t very good sense. I hope good intentions aren’t being held up over God-glorifying wisdom.

I also hope other Christians won’t pick on them too much. Rather, we should seek to encourage good-hearted Christians who could use some, well, wisdom too.

In Romans 10:2, Paul refers to non-Christian Jews who have “zeal for God, but not according to knowledge.” They don’t “submit to God’s righteousness,” the apostle says. In their case, having a “heart in the right place” was not enough.

The same is true of not only the Baptists in Haiti, or the social-gospel “emergent” folks, but any Christian. We should also be Biblical. We need to do the right paperwork. Otherwise, we risk making Jesus look bad, or else, have all these great intentions to help people but instead miss the real problems. 6

Rejecting society-prosperity “gospels”

Not having an actual orphanage to take the “orphans” to is a bad enough problem. Far worse is the issue described in Part 1: if you had a God-given “power” to give resurrection from death to some victims (though you don’t know who), why would you ignore it in favor of only treating not-quite-dead-yet people for surface wounds?

Yet many Christians, “emergent” or not, do this all the time.7

We get wrapped up in things like Natural Disaster Recovery, and Man’s Inhumanity to Man, and Addressing Injustice, and tend to neglect the far worse problems in man: the natural disaster of the Fall, man’s inhumanity to God, and the worse injustice of not constantly giving Him glory.

Many know the health-wealth-and-prosperity “gospel” teachers are an easy and rightful target for Christians who point out their heresies and/or greed.

But how is a society-prosperity “gospel” much different? It turns the Christian religion, or missionary work, primarily into trying to heal a society’s wounds, without the “secret power” of the Gospel that God uses to raise someone from spiritual death!

Though it sounds cliché, John 3 remains clear: Jesus told Nicodemus that unless anyone is personally, supernaturally, “born again,” he cannot even “see” the Kingdom of God. The Gospel, personal and life-transforming, powered by Christ’s divinity, sacrificial death and resurrection, is what raises people to life. It’s the secret power. It’s the only ultimate hope for humanity.

No one is saying all Christians should end their Haiti relief work, or any civil-rights work, so we can all only yell John 3:16 all over the place. Rather, Scripture is clear that helping the poor, feeding the hungry, addressing injustice, defending life, etc., are part of Christians’ Gospel-powered presence in the world. However, in combating civil-rights evils, or caring for the poor or orphans after the Haiti earthquake, shouldn’t Christians at least also spread the Gospel that Christ died to save sinners from their own spiritual deadness?

The choice is not “either we preach the Gospel, or we help the poor or fight injustice.” Christians throughout history haven’t seen this as a dichotomy (though a lot of people nowadays seem to force it into a black-and-white issue). Neither does the Bible.

By rooting everything we do not in our own society-prosperity work, but in that secret power of God to replace hearts of stone with living hearts of flesh (Ezekiel 36:26), we stay truly humble. We work out of gratitude to God, not confidence in our own morality or intentions. We still have zeal, but with Biblical knowledge. We do our paperwork — and hopefully have a little more common sense and hearts in the right place. Best of all, God, and not us, will get the glory.

  1. Insider meme traders’ note: i-Stuff and all the cultic crazes about it is going to sound as bizarre in 20 years as headbands, “boom boxes” and “Walkmans” do to us now. Tell your children. ↩
  2. That’s as opposed to focusing on man’s sin against man, the kind of sin that Christians of all stripes or permutations emphasize. ↩
  3. I think I should use those more often. ↩
  4. And you thought I was going to pick on “emergent” advocates again, didn’t you? ↩
  5. “Americans describe jail, worry over Haiti,” Idaho Press-Tribune, Feb. 20, 2010. ↩
  6. I am resisting temptation to write further about this issue here based on the doctrine of Christian vocation — that is, doing all one’s work with excellence. That’s because another article I found did some muckraking about one of the women arrested, including a quote from a former employer who said the woman was not very disciplined. But I’ll avoid it for now, first, because it could be based on nothing but gossip, and secondly, the topic deserves a completely separate column. ↩
  7. Yes, I can’t help but pick on the “emergents” a little more. That’s because they’re the ones who, like their intellectual ancestors the mainline denomination leaders, keep codifying the “heal people’s wounds” approach at the expense of “preach the Gospel that can raise the dead” approach. But it seems evangelicals drift into this thinking by naïveté and ignorance, and contrary to what they claim to believe. ↩

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Fiction, delays and doctrine ‘emergent-cy’

Thursday, January 28th, 2010

Today I finally finished (first draft) a novel whose story and images were born Sept. 22 (a date significant for other reasons too), 2007. Pre-revisions, it’s 42 chapters. It wasn’t intentional; I wanted 40.

So, that is one reason why I didn’t post a new column for yesterday.

Meanwhile, I’ve also been learning a lot about the “emergent” movement, and particularly its emphasis on saying the Christ-died-in-place-of-sinners idea is not right (calling it “barbaric,” or in the infamous words of Steve Chalke quoted by Brian McLaren, “cosmic1 child abuse.” A writer acquaintance of mine, Rebecca Miller, has been writing a lot about these “emergent-cy” doctrines. Her Jan. 25 installment, The Emerging Heresy, caused much “conversation” and I found myself writing a lot of comments and rebuttals in response.

A few of those comments are excerpted below, but I encourage readers to have a look at the full back-and-forth thus far. It’s well worth a deep read, for a helpful cross-section about what many “emergent” activists are teaching, possible reasons why, and the need to address them with as much truth and grace as we can, and maybe even a little sarcasm.

From what I can tell of “emergent” Christians, they may mean well in their re-imaginings and all that sort of thing. I fear that what they are doing is taking one hammer in hand, namely, that of avoiding What the Church has Done Wrong in the Past — either actual wrongs, or perceptions thereof. Many such people seem to have backgrounds in legalistic churches, and/or megachurches that cared more for programs (ostensibly doctrine) than they did for people, the issues of the world, etc.

With that hammer in hand, every problem begins to look like a nail. And the result is that too many “re-imagining” folks swerve to opposite extremes. With the chief end of man reset from “glorify God and enjoy Him forever” to “we must fix the problems in the church, and then the world,” legalism roars back into force, more hip and socially aware and creative than before.

The three issues at the heart of this debate: God’s nature, the seriousness of man’s sin, and Christ’s Atonement for sins.

[. . .]

McLaren and others have referred to the idea of God’s plan to crucify His Son to satisfy His wrath as “divine child abuse.” For all that exploration and conversation and open-mindedness, they make an exclusive claim about what Christ’s death was *not* about. Scriptures clearly saying the contrary are thrown aside for the sake of the System. The System takes this as axiomatic: God needing to punish His Son on behalf of those who would believe is a “barbaric” concept.

[. . .]

Again I cite: a plain reading of Romans, a plain reading of Hebrews, plain reading of the entire Old Testament, plain reading of the whole Bible — respecting the (divinely inspired) authors’ intent from the beginning, ignoring (as much as possible) our own 21st-century, philosophical, “enlightened,” chronologically-snobbish cultural constraints.

Cheez, it hurts to see my Savior’s sacrifice so denigrated. By believing this, one says three things about the God one claims to value more highly than such a “barbaric” God.

1. “My sin isn’t so bad.”

God could not be so offended by humanity’s rebellion, or my own personal desire to use Him and his gifts as a means to my own idols, as to require a punishment. I’m either a basically-good person, or I’m a victim of sin, and instead of being only angry at me, God should only feel sorry for me. (What a narrow and false dilemma! Yet Scripture dares to show that God is both/and, quite above reductionistic divisions of His character.)

2. “God isn’t so good.”

Along with elevating man’s nature far above the level permitted by clear Scriptures about his natural and willful wickedness, such a claim is an insult to God’s holiness. He’ll overlook sin; regardless of how He punished it in the Old Testament, He’s learned better now, and pretty much everyone is okay by Him because He’s figured out how to rise above it all.

Justice is cheap. Grace is no longer valuable and undeserved — it’s expected! God just indulges the little hellions. Universalism is constantly hinted at, and now (as many expected) directly taught by many “emergent” leaders. Reacting to the wrong “get a contract with God and you’re saved forever” notions, they have overreacted and said *no* conscious new birth (repentance and conversion) is necessary to be in God’s favor.

3. “God is about me, not about Himself.”

Contrasted with the clear truths that God wants to give of Himself to the world, to those who repent and believe in Him, because He is the most glorious “thing” He could offer — is the idea that His all-defining, all-central characteristic is “love.”

In this view, God’s “love,” undiscerning, always tolerant, never condemning a person for his free-will choices to reject Him as the ultimate good, is now His defining virtue. He does everything for the sake of just love, love, love — as certain people wish to define it, that is. Even the “Harry Potter” series, with all its “love, love” basis, was deeper than that.

  1. Or “divine” ↩

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The dead before the wounded, part 1: King’s gospel

Wednesday, January 20th, 2010

Imagine a world where war and other horrors have been raging for centuries across the land.

Already nearly everyone has been afflicted with suffering and disease. And even for those few who are untouched by the battles between the land’s rich ruling despots and poverty-stricken peasants, envy, violence and racism dominate.

In the Killing Fields outside the main city of the rich rulers, death is the only reigning king. Bodies are littered in all the crags and holes torn in the earth by near-magical battle forces. Others lay dying, begging for food, water and shelter, and protection from further attacks.

You and others know of a Secret Power that is their greatest hope.

The mightiest Wizard in all the land has promised to work through you. Why? He is appalled at men’s inner wickedness that has given rise to these horrors. That is why this most powerful of all wizards has gifted you and others with this task: go to the Killing Fields, and to the cities, find the hurting and the dead, and heal them.

This power is of a different and mystical kind. It will work most effectively on not the wounded, but the dead. If applied to the dead bodies, whom some strange twist of “destiny” has favored, it will awaken them. They will come back to life. They may love, laugh and live again. They will be eternally grateful to the Wizard whose gift has brought them to life and saved them from death. Ultimately they will live forever, free of the consequences of evil and suffering.

So you stride onto the Killing Fields. But rather than coming first to the dead bodies, you kneel beside those who are wounded and begging for help. Why? Despite the secret power to raise the dead, the wounded are crying louder. Their needs seem worse. And after all, the secret power will only work on some of the dead bodies anyway; you don’t know which ones.

With elixirs, food, water and blankets, you do your best to make the wounded comfortable. Though many of them die despite your efforts, those who do get better go on to be grateful for your help, and maybe even help others. But someday they will die anyway and never have a chance at new life. Meanwhile in the Killing Fields, the slaughtered dead stay dead forever. You never even tried to let the Wizard’s secret power of regeneration work through your deeds.

And with that, this fantasy metaphor is complete, and perhaps by now, thoroughly transparent.

Wounded flesh, hearts of stone

This past Monday, people across America gathered in streets, churches and more to pay tribute to the late civil rights and religious leader, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. As a local journalist, I cover these events every year, and am re-led to consider King’s influence on people’s beliefs.

On that morning, a speaker at one such regional event commented on what he said was King’s commitment to preach the Gospel above all else. “Before I was a civil-rights leader, I was a preacher of the Gospel,” King said later in his life, according to the speaker. “This was my first calling, and it remains my greatest commitment.”

That profession was also evident in an earlier letter King wrote to the girl he liked, Coretta Scott (whom he later married). He told her he had finished reading the 1888 American “utopia” novel by Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward: 2000-1887, which apparently Scott told him about.

“I welcomed the book because much of its content is in line with my basic ideas,” King wrote.1 He went on to describe his own opposition to overt Marxism and Communism, yet saw benefits in socialism — he believed capitalism began with noble intentions, but had “outlived its usefulness.” King praised many of Bellamy’s points, with caveats — including what he saw as Bellamy’s failure to temper his idealism with realism, in this case, a Biblical truth:

Bellamy with his over optimism fails to see that man is a sinner, and that he is give [sic] better and economic social conditions he will still be a sinner until he submits his life to the Grace of God. Ultimately our problem is [a?] 2 theological one. Man has revolted against God, and through his humanistic endeavors he has sought to solve his problem by himself only to find that he ha3 has ended up in disillusionment.

Yes, “doctrine-cop” types such as me can complain about some of this, such as that King didn’t mention that God’s grace is not just something you submit to, but receive through faith, all as gifts from God Himself because of the sacrifice of His Son for His people. But altogether, praise the Lord, King got it right!

Still I wonder why, a few paragraphs later, he proceeded to write:

Let us continue to hope, work and pray that in the future we will live to see a warless world, a better distribution of wealth, and a brotherhood that transcends race or color. This is the gospel that I will preach to the world.

Thus I ask: did King, whatever he may have said about the Secret Power, end up incidentally bypassing it in favor of treating the wounded before the dead?

Regardless of how he started out, was his message drawn away from the Gospel of Grace to a “gospel” of societal prosperity, racial brotherhood and “better distribution of wealth” — hoping to heal sins’ wounds, but in effect ignoring the deadness of humans’ hearts?

And, though King may have believed in Christ’s true Gospel, the “power of God for salvation to everyone who believes” (Romans 1:16), what is the legacy of most civil-rights successors?

Today, are civil-rights activists, more socially “liberal” Christians, poverty workers, politicians, stepping over the dead bodies, and urging Christians to be just as “progressive” as they are by downplaying humans’ spiritual death and instead focusing on the surface wounds of sin?

No one would ever deny the need to promote understanding between people groups, and combat segregation laws and other evils resulting from dead human hearts. Yet for Christians, we have enough workers to treat the suffering and the dead. It’s said that former generations have too often stepped over the wounded. Let us not now overcorrect and ignore the dead.

(Next week in part 2: true help for Haiti, and the need to reject society-prosperity “gospels.”)

  1. The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., Volume VI: Advocate of the Social Gospel, edited by Claybourne Carson (University of California Press, 2007), pages 123-126. I looked this up myself to confirm the original speaker’s quote; these pages of the book can be viewed online. ↩
  2. These brackets are in the original. ↩
  3. Also printed in the original. ↩

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Camels and needles, the Kingdom and peoples, part 1

Wednesday, November 11th, 2009

Was there ever a “needle’s eye gate” in first-century Jerusalem?

Every once in a while you hear this anecdote tossed about in reference to Jesus’ famous metaphor in Matthew 191. It goes like this: in Jerusalem of Jesus’ day, there was a very small, very tight passage through which it was really hard to get a camel. So that is what Jesus was talking about.

camel-needleThe better commentaries and study-Bible notes2 bust that myth: there was no such gate. The only sources for that idea are commentaries long after the first century. To say Jesus meant it was only pretty hard for the rich to get into the Kingdom, not impossible, rejects the true meaning.

But there is an even greater error Christians believe based on that verse.

Have you heard of it? Nowadays, with all the “social gospel,” Christianity-is-about-helping-your-neighbor-and-feeding-the-poor notions around, it’s even more prevalent.

Ye have heard that it was said …

The Bible says rich people’s money may keep them from the Kingdom.

AKA: Jesus opposes wealth.

Figure A:

Many fundamentalists seek to explain away the obvious hostility to wealth in the saying attributed to Jesus [. . .] Unfortunately for the fundamentalists, the concensus [sic] of New Testament scholars is that Matthew’s passage barring rich people from heaven means exactly what it says. It remains to be seen how many of them are willing to give up all their wealth in accordance with the ideals they claim to profess.3

(more…)

  1. Also in Mark 10, specifically verse 25, and Luke 18, also verse 25. ↩
  2. For example, see The NIV Archaeology Study Bible (Zondervan, 2006), page 1,594. ↩
  3. “The Camel and the Needle’s Eye,” Robert Sheaffer, date unknown. That looks like another one of those “smart skeptic bests stupid Christians” blogs, yet in this case he’s quite right about the “needle’s eye” error. But too bad he didn’t debunk two Biblical errors for the price of one! ↩

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