This post was written by Randy Newman on October 21, 2008
In my last blog entry, I asked, “Is there an integrating force that joins evangelism and cultural influence?” I started to build my case for an answer in the affirmative. I’ll try to add to that here.
I’ll begin with an illustrative event. In the 1960’s Columbia Bible College in South Carolina faced a difficult tension. Their school had long been segregated, in part because the state of South Carolina required it to do so. While the consciences of some (but not all!) of their administration opposed racism and segregation, the legal issues were complex and difficult to overcome.
Their rationale is instructive. In addition to arguments about submission to authority, a larger explanation came from their views about the role of the church in society. Should Christians engage in politics or merely “preach the gospel?” CBC’s main calling, they maintained, was to prepare missionaries to bring the gospel to all the nations.
But what about black applicants who wanted to spread the gospel? What if they wanted the training CBC could provide? An insightful article that examines the historical and theological considerations of CBC’s administration can be found in Robert Priest’s chapter, “Sharing the Gospel in a Racially Segregated South” in his book, This Side of Heaven (2006, Oxford University Press).
Amidst cultural changes in the wider society and from some pressure from alumni, CBC did make radical changes to integrate. It is unclear to me whether they addressed the philosophical/theological issues behind the legal, social, and practical ones. Should Christians engage in political or social issues or just “preach the gospel?”
Again, I point the question toward the world of academia. Should Christian professors get involved in social issues on campus or just pursue excellence in teaching and evangelize when the opportunities arise?
One example may help focus my question. Recently a traveling “art show” came to a number of university campuses in the state of Virginia. It was
sponsored by a coalition of “sex workers.” These included strippers, prostitutes, and pornographers. The show claimed to have as its goal to raise awareness of and lift up the public opinion of a legitimate art form.
One university’s alumni called for, and ultimately received, the resignation of its president, due in part to his decision to allow the show on campus. Several other universities hosted the event with little or no objection from anyone (Christians, feminists, or law students. Prostitution is still illegal in the state of Virginia).
There are many other examples. In fact, I believe the cultural atmosphere on most campuses may be more influential in forming of students’ lifelong worldviews than the courses taught in classrooms.
Should Christians have worked against segregation at Columbia Bible College? I believe the answer is yes. Should Christians have objected to sex workers performing on state university campuses? I believe the answer is yes. Should Christians engage in efforts to promote social justice? I believe the answer is yes.
And I believe the answer flows from the same integrating principle. We are called to love our neighbors as ourselves. That love surely includes sharing the gospel. In fact, to do many other things to help our neighbors but to not share the gospel with them may be the most unloving thing possible.
But to not address issues of injustice, abuse, hatred, immorality, and other forces that surely will do harm to people, is also unloving. Christians must find their voices. Someday students of history will look at our day and age and marvel at our silence just as we marvel at the silence about segregation in the 1960s.
Part 1
This post was written by Mark Hansard on October 15, 2008
In “Down on the Transplantations,” Anita Kuhn, an editor for Touchstone Magazine, reviews a recent article from the New England Journal of Medicine about the definition of patient death and when it is ethical to remove a patient’s organs for transplant. According to Kuhn, the NEJM authors admit that the definition of patient death has been changed to allow more favorable conditions for organ transplants. The old dead donor rule (”cold, blue and stiff”) is no longer in use because in the 1960’s it was changed to “devastating neurologic injury.” This definition, commonly referred to as “brain death,” allowed the organs to be removed from a body when they were still in use. Often, organs die when the patient dies, and so are not useful for transplant. But brain-dead patients still have functioning organs, and their bodies appear alive–they metabolize, excrete waste, and even mature sexually. This, of course, has raised ethical questions in the minds of some ethicists and medical practitioners about removing the organs from such a patient.
Therefore, some experts have proposed a definition of “cardiac death,” in which the patient’s heart is not operative for three to five minutes. But this also has ethical difficulties, as it is possible to revive a patient’s heart even after five minutes of ceased activity. Kuhn writes that this often leads to an ethically inconsistent position in which “irreversible cessation of cardiac function,” comes to mean “we won’t try to resuscitate.”
Interestingly, Kuhn goes on to note that the NEJM authors, instead of retreating to the old dead donor rule because of ethical problems with the new rules, instead say that the problem has been the dead donor rule itself. What is needed, they say, is informed consent ahead of time, either from the patient or the patient’s family, that the organs can be removed even from “irreversible neurologic injuries that do not meet the technical requirements of brain death.” Kuhn gives an interesting analysis and critique of this view, which definitely worth reading here.
This post was written by Randy Newman on October 2, 2008
Is there an integrating force that joins evangelism and cultural influence? In other words, are Christians supposed to engage in works to change society or just in one, which is to change hearts? To add a specific point to it, should Christians called to the university try to influence the academic and social climate of their campus or just teach their specific classes and occasionally share the gospel with colleagues and students?
To be sure, the teaching and evangelizing are non-negotiables. But is there also a call to promote well being for students in other aspects besides academics or spirituality?
A little historical perspective may help. For much of church history, almost 1900 years of it, the church saw social responsibility and evangelism as two sides of the same Christ-centered, gospel-infused coin. The twentieth century is an anomaly. A split, which began long before the 1900s, became a great schism during the so-called Fundamentalist-Modernist controversy. The liberal wing abandoned beliefs in doctrines which are central to the Christian faith: the deity of Christ, the authority of scripture, the lostness of people without Christ, etc. They replaced evangelism (since people really didn’t need salvation) with social action.
This prompted two responses. One voiced by J. Gresham Machen and echoed by many conservatives, was that Christianity and Liberalism are really two different religions. H. Richard Niebuhr described liberalism as, “A God without wrath brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross.”
The second response was to separate evangelism from “the social gospel.” “Evangelism is what ‘Christians’ do and ’social action’ is what
liberals do.” After a while, there arose almost a knee-jerk reaction to any kind of social action done by Christians. The conservatives objected to any such involvement with warnings of “where that kind of thing ends up.”
But the same J. Gresham Machen (a theologian who helped form Westminster Theological Seminary) who saw liberalism as a completely different belief system than the gospel was not ready to neglect the need for social change. In fact, he saw social action as pre-evangelistic.
I actually have these words of his framed and hanging in my office: “False ideas are the greatest obstacles to the reception of the Gospel. We may preach with all the fervor of a reformer and yet succeed only in winning a straggler here and there, if we permit the whole collective thought of the nation or of the world to be controlled by ideas, which, by the resistless force of logic, prevent Christianity from being regarded as anything more than a harmless delusion.”
He called the church to change the environment in which people heard the gospel so they would be more receptive to it. Influencing education, promoting justice, caring for people’s physical needs, and displaying love to those least deserving of it were all part of the pre-evangelism he encouraged.
There’s much more to this argument. Please stay with me. I’ll share more of my thinking about this in a future Antecedents entry.
Part 2
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