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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