I am currently aware of two “American Centric” evangelical calls to strengthen our spiritual spine, own the truth of the gospel (seen as a personal transactional commitment to God) and battle for the heart and soul of our national well being by protecting traditional values. The saddest thing to me is that while I share many of the same concerns for my country and moral perspectives it is the last thing the Church should take on, as framed. Why? Because it is not the gospel of our Lord. It is actually closer to the religious based intolerance he himself confronted. Here’s how.
A recent Naz pastoral stream I enjoy was an example of this very thing. (This site is perhaps the last place where truly cross cultural and cross generational conversation, sometimes heated, are respectfully engaged). The question framed was innocent enough: “Where has all the communal and passionate prayer meetings gone?”
Here was the substance of my response and further reflections:
There is an interesting tension in this stream that Ive been thinking about and living with for sometime.
Reference was made by several to an American past as spiritually ideal, but no longer true; to both very good effect and to loss as well.
Even as the culture has improved significantly in racial and minority practices (ending segregation and the legally supported inequality before the law for persons of color, women, sexual orientation, those physically challenged and finally ending in the 1970’s the forced segregation of native children from their familial and tribal communities to government run boarding schools) and having at last come to a consensus that equality of opportunity is an American ideal; it is also demonstrable that there is a decline in individual ethics around fidelity in marriage, business, academia and in the practice of communal and individual spiritual formation, in attachment to institutional non-profits (church being only one example) that form, maintain and nurture communities and countries. It was suggested that preaching a love centric gospel without “hell” or personal consequence is a primary reason for these losses in our cultural life. It may be.
I would suggest that the opposite is also true. Much of the progress in legal access to voting for African Americans or the dismantling of separate and unequal lies at the feet of the Black Church led by Dr King and the current decline in personal and social faith is because the white evangelical and conserving churches were at another lunch counter basking in a gospel of consumption focused on securing our places in yet another privileged environment, heaven. That unimaginative and overly personal gospel may be as much a cause of the decline in faith as life changing as any negative consequences.
A God who serves as both good cop and bad cop, of both generosity and yet knows how to crack a few heads around helps to keep order. It’s just so terribly boring, not to mention un-Jesus.
What’s more, that’s not the gospel we received from our Wesleyan roots. We as Wesleyan’s inherit a scriptural/theological tradition that emphasizes salvation as “restorative, healing, cleansing” believing that “hell avoidance” salvational models miss the whole point—indeed actually produces the very kind of Jesus follower that individually exercises integrity largely unaware or unconcerned about the “us/them” quality of a faith rooted in law. “Thank God I am not as they are” is one outcome. Beyond that, such legal atonement theories like God’s wrath being somehow satisfied in Jesus death places God at odds not only with us but within the Trinity itself. We simply do not believe the Trinity of God acts schizophrenically but in unity. Nor as a bad cop, good cop or a penal warden at all.
For loves sake God will, we understand ultimately remove evil from the cosmos and bring to account those finally unrepentant. We further know that to live against the very Love upon which all reality is founded leads to horrific ends. Yet, to the extent God acts in power to limit evil, God has failed in God’s real purpose; “when the times reach their fulfillment—to bring unity to all things in heaven and on earth under Christ“ (Ephesians 1:10 NIV). It is reconciliation between ourselves and our neighbors, especially those we classified as “the other” that seems to give away God’s real agenda as the Father of all has “predestined us for adoption to sonship through Jesus Christ, in accordance with his pleasure and will— to the praise of his glorious grace, which he has freely given us in the One he loves” (Ephesians 1:5-6 NIV). So there is little room for a gospel that relies on fear as it’s instrument.
If fear of God is removed and I believe, as typically practiced, should have been, then a primary historic motivator for personal ethics is removed. That is one of the reasons for social chaos and will be until such a time as an ethic of positive good, of love has direct impact on dealing with the sinfulness, the negative energy previously restrained by threat of punishment.
The solution? The perfecting of love—in both our personal and social striving and in the confessed awakening to the personal, historic, social demons that threaten us with both social and inter-personal and interior chaos.
Clarity about the need to be entirely given over to loving God and loving our neighbor—to the sanctifying Presence of the Spiri—is sorely needed; this time motivated by the same spirit that allowed Dr Martin Luther King to love sacrificially, by a love that overcomes.
It may take shared suffering to create new wine skins for the kind of holiness as love instead of holiness as integrity. What that will look like. who knows? But it can only begin when we are done saving the America of our memory and instead give ourselves away to the salvation of all our neighbors, close and far.
Blessing! Terry :)
For more on a gospel of social/political engagement purchase my book at Amazon:
https://www.amazon.com/Holiness-21st-Century-Political-Engaging/dp/1980391092/ref=sr_1_3?keywords=Te
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