Evangelism and Justice

From False Dichotomies to Gospel Faithfulness

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Toward the end of the 1980s, the new, reunited Pres­by­ter­ian Church (U.S.A.) car­ried out a national dis­cus­sion of its goals and pri­or­i­ties. The out­come of the process was the iden­ti­fi­ca­tion of two pri­or­i­ties for the denom­i­na­tion: evan­ge­lism and social jus­tice. Since the theme “evan­ge­lism” had received lit­tle atten­tion at the national level of the church in pre­ced­ing decades, I was grate­ful that it re-appeared in our offi­cial lan­guage. But I had to won­der what was going on when these two themes were placed next to each other as sep­a­rate priorities.

What kind of evan­ge­lism is referred to if it can be dis­tin­guished from social jus­tice? What is the char­ac­ter of the social jus­tice that can be sep­a­rated con­cep­tu­ally from evan­ge­lism? Since I was about to take a fac­ulty appoint­ment in mis­sion and evan­ge­lism, I was obvi­ously inter­ested in the think­ing that was behind these choices. I soon dis­cov­ered when I came to Louisville Pres­by­ter­ian The­o­log­i­cal Sem­i­nary in 1991, that the sep­a­ra­tion of the two themes was not merely aca­d­e­mic or def­i­n­i­tional. It became clear in many con­ver­sa­tions that our denom­i­na­tion was often per­ceived as made up of two major fac­tions, one that grouped itself around “evan­ge­lism,” and another around “social jus­tice.” The oper­a­tive assump­tion appeared to be (and still is for many, I fear) that those who are deeply com­mit­ted to the church’s evan­ge­lis­tic mis­sion have lit­tle inter­est or com­mit­ment to social jus­tice, and those who take social jus­tice con­cerns seri­ously are not very ener­gized by the themes or prac­tices of evangelism.

More than Per­sonal Sal­va­tion
These two pri­or­i­ties, set in this pat­tern of par­al­lel com­mit­ments with lit­tle inter­ac­tion between them, rep­re­sent a pro­foundly dis­turb­ing dis­tor­tion of the very nature and mis­sion of the church of Jesus Christ. This dis­tor­tion I call the “mission–benefits” dichotomy. It reduces the broad sweep of the Gospel mes­sage to the nar­row con­cern for a person’s indi­vid­ual salvation—a rela­tion­ship with God now and the assur­ance of sal­va­tion here­after. The indi­vid­ual focuses on receiv­ing the ben­e­fits of sal­va­tion while ignor­ing or dilut­ing the mis­sional voca­tion that always accom­pa­nies the call to fol­low Christ. The pri­mary focus is on the ver­ti­cal, with lit­tle regard for the hor­i­zon­tal dimen­sions of the Gospel. Sal­va­tion is under­stood as a sta­tus rather than a process. The church is under­stood as the com­mu­nity that offers and then admin­is­ters indi­vid­ual salvation.

Miss­ing from this reduc­tion­ist under­stand­ing of the Gospel are the real­ity and claims of the King­dom of God as a rad­i­cally dif­fer­ent order­ing of life in obe­di­ence to Jesus Christ as Lord. Evan­ge­lism becomes pri­mar­ily the recruit­ment of mem­bers of the church, and the church itself becomes the col­lec­tion of peo­ple for whom the insti­tu­tion is to pro­vide the ser­vices that con­tinue to guar­an­tee their sal­va­tion. Lost is the bib­li­cal empha­sis on the mis­sion­ary voca­tion of the church and the wit­ness char­ac­ter of each Christian’s calling.

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It is far eas­ier to focus on the ques­tion of who is saved and who is not than to con­front the chal­lenge of Christ’s claims to be Lord over every area of our lives, per­son­ally and cor­po­rately.
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The church does not exist for the sake of its mem­bers’ sal­va­tion. Its evan­ge­lism is not pri­mar­ily a pro­gram to guar­an­tee its con­tin­u­ing exis­tence as an orga­ni­za­tion. The church is mis­sion­ary by its very nature, and each Chris­t­ian is marked by Christ’s sweep­ing promise, “You shall be my witnesses.”

The ben­e­fits of know­ing God’s love in Christ can­not be sep­a­rated from the voca­tion to become wit­nesses to that heal­ing love in the world into which Christ sends his church. The mis­sion of God in Christ has the whole world in view. Evan­ge­lism is com­mu­ni­ca­tion of good news, meant to be com­mu­ni­cated to every­one every­where, like the sower of the Gospel para­ble spread­ing his seed on every kind of soil as he crosses the field. The over-arching Bib­li­cal descrip­tion of the church’s pur­pose is “wit­ness,” which is pub­lic demon­stra­tion of what God has done and is doing in Christ so oth­ers may make deci­sions about the claims of this mes­sage. It is far eas­ier to focus on the ques­tion of who is saved and who is not than to con­front the chal­lenge of Christ’s claims to be Lord over every area of our lives, per­son­ally and corporately.

The Prob­lem with Social Jus­tice
Our cur­rent con­cern with social jus­tice could and should be the cor­rec­tive to such reduc­tion­ist under­stand­ings of evan­ge­lism. It should be the way in which we are reminded of the cos­mic scope of the Gospel, the claims of Jesus that his com­ing means rad­i­cal trans­for­ma­tion of every level of soci­ety, start­ing with the weak, the blind, the lame, the impris­oned, and the mar­ginal. The pri­or­ity of evan­ge­lism must be per­va­sively shaped by the King­dom claims of the Gospel that are at the heart of what Chris­tians mean by jus­tice. But it is dif­fi­cult to see that hap­pen­ing if our under­stand­ing of social jus­tice is defined with­out its essen­tial ref­er­ence to our evan­ge­lis­tic mandate.

Sep­a­rat­ing social jus­tice from the Evan­gel per­pet­u­ates a pro­found reduc­tion­ism of what we mean by such jus­tice. How is social jus­tice to be a wit­ness to the rad­i­cal good news of God’s love in Christ? What is the rela­tion­ship between what we mean by jus­tice and the right­eous­ness of God? If the rad­i­cal claims of the Lord­ship of Christ tend to be diluted in evan­ge­lism reduc­tion­ism, is not some­thing sim­i­lar also hap­pen­ing on the social jus­tice side of the debate? My hunch is that this reduc­tion­ism has to do with the West­ern tra­di­tions that have shaped us.

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For a very long time, we earnestly believed that our Chris­t­ian social orders actu­ally rep­re­sented the King­dom of God on earth.
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We, as Chris­tians in North Amer­ica, can­not help the fact that we func­tion as heirs of a long and com­plex his­tory that we define as “Chris­ten­dom.” We have had a dis­tinc­tive place and priv­i­lege in our social and polit­i­cal orders for a very long time, from the fourth cen­tury until well into the twen­ti­eth cen­tury. We became used to the idea that, as Chris­tians and as the church, we were enti­tled to deter­mine the shape of our soci­eties. The church crowned kings as Chris­t­ian mon­archs, jus­ti­fied wars as holy, devel­oped sys­tems of social wel­fare as expres­sions of Chris­t­ian char­ity, and received the state’s sup­port to pro­tect its insti­tu­tions, its prac­tices, and its con­vic­tions (up to and includ­ing the legal exe­cu­tion of heretics). Our holy days shaped the cal­en­dar, and we mea­sured time in terms of the Lord­ship of Christ, anno Domini. For a very long time, we earnestly believed that our Chris­t­ian social orders within this sys­tem of Chris­ten­dom actu­ally rep­re­sented the King­dom of God on earth.

There can be no ques­tion­ing of the enor­mous ben­e­fits to West­ern civ­i­liza­tion that resulted from the cen­turies of Chris­ten­dom. Even a diluted and reduc­tion­ist ver­sion of the Judeo-Christian legacy has had ben­e­fi­cial effects upon our soci­eties at every level. The case can be made that this per­va­sive Chris­t­ian wit­ness through the cen­turies has per­ma­nently shaped the con­science of West­ern soci­eties. The ancient bib­li­cal per­sua­sion that every human life has an “alien dig­nity,” based on the fact that God cre­ated it and Christ died for it, con­tin­ues to influ­ence how we func­tion. Still pow­er­ful in our soci­eties are con­vic­tions that are basi­cally Gospel-shaped: power should be lim­ited and shared, the weak should be pro­tected, wealth should be shared, fam­ily rela­tion­ships should be hon­ored, and indi­vid­ual poten­tial should be encour­aged and fos­tered. That the theme “social jus­tice” is such a major pre-occupation of West­ern soci­eties is attrib­ut­able, at least in part, to the Chris­ten­dom legacy.

A Mat­ter of Con­trol
Another side of that legacy, how­ever, is the idea that we as heirs of Chris­ten­dom are still capa­ble of design­ing and build­ing the king­dom of God, as we assumed we were doing dur­ing the cen­turies of an overtly Chris­t­ian social structure.

It is fas­ci­nat­ing to observe the lan­guage in the church today. We con­stantly read about the King­dom of God and our role in it. But we find verbs being used that betray more of our Chris­ten­dom self-confidence than a bib­li­cal sense of God’s rule. We are enjoined “to build” the king­dom, to “con­tribute to” the king­dom, to “extend” the king­dom, to “strate­gize” for the king­dom. It is a ques­tion of who is the sub­ject of that action? Who is doing the exhibit­ing? In the New Tes­ta­ment, the reign of God is clearly God’s work: it is given to us, we are invited into it, we enter it as chil­dren, we receive it, and we are sur­prised by it. But we don’t have it under our control.

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While our nar­row evan­ge­lism must reclaim the bold real­ity of the promised reign of God already tak­ing shape in our midst, our overly opti­mistic approach to doing jus­tice must be reshaped by the evan­gel­i­cal process of repen­tance, rejec­tion of con­for­mity, and trans­for­ma­tion by the renewal of our minds.
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If the pri­or­ity of evan­ge­lism is still marked by a reduc­tion­ist drive for con­trol, the case can be made that our com­mit­ment to social jus­tice has a sim­i­lar prob­lem. We are a soci­ety shaped by the con­vic­tion that we can man­age progress toward desired ends. We can explore and use the cause and effect nexus to man­age out­comes. We can iden­tify prob­lems and solve them by dint of our human ratio­nal­ity and tech­no­log­i­cal achieve­ments. Where we see social prob­lems to be solved, we can design the edu­ca­tional sys­tems to pro­duce peo­ple of virtue who will then solve the prob­lems. We can even fig­ure out what God’s rule is sup­posed to look like, draw up the blue­prints and start imple­ment­ing it.

When we, as West­ern­ers and as West­ern Chris­tians, engage the non-Western world, espe­cially in areas of social need and cri­sis, we often betray our lin­ger­ing sense of cul­tural supe­ri­or­ity as we gen­er­ously and self-confidently share the solu­tions we already have for any­one else’s prob­lems. We still assume that our way of defin­ing jus­tice should be nor­ma­tive for every­one. We are still per­suaded that God has given us the tool­box and the plans, and we should fin­ish the work of build­ing the Kingdom.

The Chal­lenge of the Cross
The sep­a­ra­tion of these two pri­or­i­ties, evan­ge­lism and social jus­tice, may also mean that we do our social strate­giz­ing while ignor­ing the Gospel’s uncov­er­ing of our sin­ful­ness. The cross itself chal­lenges the self-confidence of our inher­ited Chris­ten­dom atti­tudes. Human designs for a just soci­ety are as fal­li­ble and sin­ful as the humans who design them. While our nar­row evan­ge­lism must reclaim the bold real­ity of the promised reign of God already tak­ing shape in our midst, our overly opti­mistic approach to doing jus­tice must be reshaped by the evan­gel­i­cal process of repen­tance, rejec­tion of con­for­mity, and trans­for­ma­tion by the renewal of our minds. Par­tic­u­larly as heirs of the West­ern Chris­ten­dom tra­di­tion, we must be sen­si­tive to our own reduc­tion­ism pre­cisely in our def­i­n­i­tions of justice.

After the twen­ti­eth cen­tury dis­as­ters cen­tered in the West, the Chris­ten­dom legacy has become and will remain a prob­lem­atic basis for any claims we might make to moral and eth­i­cal supe­ri­or­ity. After two World Wars, the Holo­caust, the envi­ron­men­tal cri­sis, and the emer­gence of glob­al­iza­tion as imposed by post-Christendom cul­tures on the rest of the world, we West­ern­ers have a cred­i­bil­ity prob­lem when we pos­tu­late our abil­ity to define what social jus­tice is and ought to be. The Evangel’s way of empow­er­ing hon­est con­tri­tion and open­ness to regen­er­a­tion must pre­cede our attempts to “let jus­tice roll down like waters and right­eous­ness like an ever­flow­ing stream” (Amos 5:24).

Merg­ing Evan­ge­lism and Social Jus­tice
How, then, can we over­come this false dichotomy? What would it take to merge the pri­or­i­ties of evan­ge­lism and social jus­tice into one mis­sional con­vic­tion that embod­ied them both and much more? This is the chal­lenge that con­fronts us as a church tra­di­tion that inher­its the legacy of Chris­ten­dom but finds itself now in a strange new land—a post-Christian, post-Christendom mis­sion field. The divi­sion into two pri­or­i­ties doc­u­ments how lit­tle we have under­stood the dra­matic changes in our con­text and what they mean for our voca­tion as a mis­sion­ary church.

To over­come the dichotomy, we will need to fol­low the argu­ment of Romans 12:2:

• rec­og­nize our con­for­mi­ties, our cap­tiv­i­ties to the mind­sets and assump­tions of Chris­ten­dom still at work in us;
• expe­ri­ence the trans­for­ma­tion by the renew­ing of our minds that will hap­pen as we encounter in Scrip­ture the full­ness of the Gospel, which is Jesus Christ, who is the mes­sage, the mes­sen­ger, and the embod­i­ment of the reign of God;
• dis­cover anew what is the good and per­fect and accept­able will of God, with­out assum­ing that we already know the answers because of our Chris­ten­dom legacy.

The prob­lem of the false dichotomy between evan­ge­lism and social jus­tice is also an oppor­tu­nity for our con­tin­u­ing con­ver­sion, a con­ver­sion from reduc­tion­ist under­stand­ings of both evan­ge­lism and jus­tice toward a fuller vision of the Gospel. It will cen­ter on the per­son and work of Jesus, the con­crete for­ma­tion of his peo­ple for his ser­vice, and the real­i­ties of heal­ing and hope that are the evi­dence now of God’s reign break­ing in. It will work out of our com­mon desire to learn together how to lead our life as a com­mu­nity, wor­thy of the call­ing to which we have been called—and to receive the Spirit’s power to do it.

Ban­ner photo by Dipu Das.

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