Do Evangelicals Need a Better Gospel?

Josh, what do you understand the author to be saying by “the church is political”?

Unless I am misunderstanding him, he is saying that our call to love others should be worked out in our politics as we address “structural injustice.” I haven’t read either of the books that he linked to.

What he seems to mean is “social,” and he’s right that the faith has implications for how we live in society and what sort of society we strive for. It’s an application of the gospel, though, not the gospel itself and that distinction is important.

It seems to me that the problem in the Keller dustup isn’t letting theology shape politics. It is those who let politics shape their theology. That the statement that Jesus came primarily to die for sins is controversial shows just how unevangelical some evangelicals are. To put it bluntly, if that’s what Jesus came for, then he was indeed a miserable failure because he said the poor you will always have with you. He accepted gifts of extravagance. With people lined up waiting to be healed, he went elsewhere to preach the gospel. When people lined up for food, he rebuked them for their short-sightedness, and when they wanted to make him a political king to throw off the Roman bonds of injustice, he withdrew from them.

Some have decided what social justice looks like and are quite willing to shoehorn Jesus and his gospel into that shape. These are they who surely have never read thoughtfully the life of Jesus himself, or the life of his early followers who did not share this belief in social justice.

The theological vapidness of evangelicalism has perhaps never looked more ugly than it does now.

And it goes hand in hand with the celebration of the defeat of Moore and the almost visceral hatred of Trump. They have hitched their wagon to a horse that was never intended to pull it. They have put (almost) all their eggs in the basket of the here and now, of trying to overcome sin and brokenness with a gospel that is no gospel at all.

[Aaron Blumer]

What he seems to mean is “social,” and he’s right that the faith has implications for how we live in society and what sort of society we strive for. It’s an application of the gospel, though, not the gospel itself and that distinction is important.

Aaron,

The problem for me is the corporate language that he uses. It is the responsibility of the individual believer to meet others’ needs (family and then fellow Christian’s first) but I don’t see how we get from there to the church as an entity working to address “social injustices.” That is probably a good thing to do in many cases but I don’t see an express command to do so in scripture.

I may be overreacting but it seems to me that much of “Evangelicalism” has exchanged the spirituality of the church for a mess of political porridge.

I suppose this has a great deal to do with your view of Jesus’ Kingdom and, thus, our role in the here and now.

• Is the kingdom a present reality, or a future reign to be expected?
• Is Jesus, in some sense, enthroned now? If so, what does this mean for our mission, while we await His return?
• Does Scripture give us any expectation that “social justice” (in the true, Biblical sense) will ever be effected before Jesus reigns?

That brings us right back to where we started:

• What should we do with the passages (particularly in the OT prophets) which speak of Jesus establishing justice, peace and true righteousness on the earth?
• Is this the Gospel, or is it merely the fruit of the Gospel?
• Is it a fruit we ought to expect now, or a fruit we’ll only see when Jesus returns?

Exhibit one is this excerpt from the article, where Leeman imagines a typical response to the assertion that Jesus didn’t come to solve social problems:

The second crowd, again, felt like this was one more example of an individualistic gospel, a gospel that’s unconcerned with matters of justice and cosmic reconciliation. They asked: Tim, what about the fact that Jesus said he came to preach to the poor, proclaim liberty to captives, recover sight to the blind, and set at liberty those who are oppressed (Luke 4:18)?

Where do you suppose these allusions in Luke 4 come from? What is their context? What does this have to do with “kingdom?’ How does Jesus’ rejection and His coming second advent bear on these (and other) kingdom passages?

It’s almost as though your eschatology matters …