Why care? The theological foundation of social action

A friend of mine who has worked in development work in TSA for a number of years said to me a few months ago that he felt he didn't really have a theological basis for what he was doing. My impression is that he has dipped a little into various theologies, principally of the more Progress or Liberation type, but he has never felt that he has a coherent and comprehensive understanding from which to work. Specifically, I think he has never been strongly exposed to the broader evangelical history of social action nor its theological base. I believe that the SA, with its glorious history of social action, needs to rediscover its own theological roots in just this area, and so to place evangelism and social action in close coordination within the Army's holistic mission. 

You don't need a Liberation Theology to have a holistic vision for social action. The Christian social reformers of the 19th Century would not have agreed with an LT reading of, say, Exodus, and yet their call to social action WAS grounded in their classic, evangelical theology. What are the distinct elements of such a theology as it touches on social, compassionate and developmental issues? In one sense a "holistic" vision is one where all thought-streams are interconnected, so that every aspect of theology has a social outworking, but I think it is possible to identify three key theological taproots of evangelical social concern.

1) The Image of God: Common humanity flowing from common humanness. 

We recognise and honour the image of God in every human being. This image is present and underwrites the value of human life after the Fall - it is present in all, regardless of gender, age, colour, class, age or ability. Admittedly, among the various lines of discussion regarding the nature of the image of God, it has been an evangelical stream - the Lutheran - that has tended to say that the image was lost completely in the Fall, but Reformed theology, with a few exceptions, has argued for a damaged and yet still present image, which is still the basic measure of human value. This position has dominated British evangelical theology.

The logic of this, once seen, or allowed, is inescapable. If the measure of human worth resides outside of ourselves, in God himself, then a respect and honour is due to one another which precludes all racism, sexism, classism and ageism.  And how can I allow my fellow image-bearer to starve, be mistreated, abused, trafficked or killed? 

In honouring all human beings as being made in the image of God, I honour the One who is THE image of the invisible God - the Man for whom and by whom all things were first made. This leads to the second point...

2) God's kindness and compassion in Jesus Christ

In a broken world under judgement, social concern is motivated by - we might say made possible at all by - the grace of God in Christ. The human race has fallen - we are corrupt. At one level we don't deserve any good. Hunger and pain, struggle and failure, chaos and unfairness, are all woven into our lives. But what God has done in Christ means that we cannot adopt a "grin and bear it" approach. He has shown kindness and mercy and condescension when we were dead in our sins. He has stooped to help us. We live in a helped world. 

This help has come to us holistically. Though the centre and goal of Jesus whole ministry was to PREACH the gospel of forgiveness of sins and then to BE that gospel through his dying and rising, nevertheless, along the way of the Word and the Cross, he did good at the most practical level. Maintaining the spiritual message of the Cross at centre is totally consistent with vigorous attempts to ease the physical burden of our fellow human beings because that is exactly how Jesus demonstrated his love as he travelled along the same road. If sin is the cancer and suffering and injustice are the symptoms, I will not take my eyes off the need for a cure from sin, but I will want to help with the symptoms. I will recognise that to preach the message of forgiveness to a man with an empty stomach is to deny the love at the very heart of the message I preach.

It is striking how the NT letters, as they come to practical application, repeatedly bring us back to the cross of Jesus as our motive.  Love your wife, give to the poor, be kind and tolerant towards each other in the church, submit to your boss - all these and more are to be driven, for the Christian, by a constant awareness of God's love in Jesus.  Amongst all the rediscoveries of which the church is in need, the rediscovery of the link between Cross and lifestyle is amongst the most important. 

3) The coming age of Christ 

The gospel of Christ is more than simply a spiritual message of forgiveness in itself, of course. In justification we hear the verdict of the future judgement day brought into the present; that great "Not Guilty" is the opening fanfare of our entrance into eternal life, and eternal life is enjoyed now and forever, in a new world which the scripture presents consistently as physical and solid. 

The future world will be a place of justice and peace, of integrity and prosperity. All that is corrupt and unjust in the present system will be swept away into the rubbish bin of eternity. Some Christians, including some evangelicals, have tended to say, "Well - that's for the age to come - no need for us to do anything now." I think the opposite - we are to live as citizens of the coming kingdom. This world may be passing, it may be destined for judgement, and yet it is groaning for its future redemption and we cannot live as if it had no value at all. The powers of the age to come have already laid hold of us, and we have to demonstrate the values of that age in the here and now by pursuing the same goals. We are to show the characteristics of the future reign of our dear King, Jesus, in this age. Indeed, it is precisely the certainty of his coming justice, of judgement in the light of the transcendent moral values of this King, that makes the pursuit of justice in the present evil age so utterly imperative. 

One of my favourite characters from British church history is James Montgomery the hymn writer, who gave us the carol "Angels from the realms of glory".  He was imprisoned on more than one occasion for his radical, socialist-leaning views. He cared passionately about the plight of the poor, and helped in the fight against the slave trade. All of that was rooted in his Moravian spirituality - the same source that John and Charles Wesley had drunk from so deeply. My favourite hymn of his is the well-known paraphrase of Psalm 72...

1. Hail to the Lord's Anointed,

great David's greater Son!

Hail in the time appointed,

his reign on earth begun!

He comes to break oppression,

to set the captive free;

to take away transgression,

and rule in equity.

2. He comes with succour speedy

to those who suffer wrong;

to help the poor and needy,

and bid the weak be strong;

to give them songs for sighing,

their darkness turn to light,

whose souls, condemned and dying,

are precious in his sight.

3. He shall come down like showers

upon the fruitful earth;

love, joy, and hope, like flowers,

spring in his path to birth.

Before him on the mountains,

shall peace, the herald, go,

and righteousness, in fountains,

from hill to valley flow.

4. To him shall prayer unceasing

and daily vows ascend;

his kingdom still increasing,

a kingdom without end.

The tide of time shall never

his covenant remove;

his name shall stand forever;

that name to us is love.

That is eschatological hope, clearly breaking out into present social concern. 

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I am not rejecting every insight that has come through Liberation Theology. I am saying that a broad-based commitment to social action was built into the Christian movement way before LT. In the Salvation Army there are many who have a genuinely deep love for Christ, and a deep love and concern for people, which have been come into being through a traditionally evangelical but theologically impoverished preaching. As those who are involved in social action look for a deeper foundation, they seem to be offered mainly non-Evangelical models. We need to go back to our roots, with greater confidence that we have what we need in classic Evangelical thought.



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For a helpful and thorough historical and theological survey of the relationship between Evangelism and Social action in the SA, please see here. I think it ends up a tad too positive about the impact of post-modernity, but I think the authors may not have been aware of (or imagined) the way that post-modern thought would invade evangelical theology over the last decade.

 

Threads

In a recent post, I referred to the two threads of judgement and salvation that come together in the gospel accounts of Jesus' baptism by John. It strikes me that the "threads" concept is such a powerful tool for understanding the Bible, and yet one which is not always appreciated.

To use that particular example, and explore it a little more deeply: the synoptic gospels refer to Malachi 3 and Isaiah 40 as they describe John's ministry. In Mark 1 the two passages are actually glued together, and introduced as if both by Isaiah, but on looking closely they are two quotes. The NIV does the work for us with carefully separating punctuation:

Mark 1:2-3 ... as it is written in Isaiah the prophet:“I will send my messenger ahead of you,who will prepare your way”— “a voice of one calling in the wilderness,‘Prepare the way for the Lord,make straight paths for him.’” 

What is striking is that the two verses quoted are the sections of the two passages which are most alike, and Mark weaves them into a virtually seamless whole.  But when we look at the context of the two verses, the contrast is stark: 

Malachi 3:1-5 “I will send my messenger, who will prepare the way before me. Then suddenly the Lord you are seeking will come to his temple; the messenger of the covenant, whom you desire, will come,” says the Lord Almighty. 
But who can endure the day of his coming? Who can stand when he appears? For he will be like a refiner’s fire or a launderer’s soap. He will sit as a refiner and purifier of silver; he will purify the Levites and refine them like gold and silver. 
Then the Lord will have men who will bring offerings in righteousness, and the offerings of Judah and Jerusalem will be acceptable to the Lord, as in days gone by, as in former years. 
“So I will come to put you on trial. 
I will be quick to testify against sorcerers, adulterers and perjurers,
against those who defraud laborers of their wages, 
who oppress the widows and the fatherless, 
and deprive the foreigners among you of justice, 
but do not fear me,” says the Lord Almighty. 

Isaiah 40:1-5 Comfort, comfort my people,
says your God. 
Speak tenderly to Jerusalem, 
and proclaim to her that her hard service has been completed,
that her sin has been paid for,
that she has received from the Lord’s hand double for all her sins. 
A voice of one calling:
“In the wilderness prepare the way for the Lord;
make straight in the desert a highway for our God. 
Every valley shall be raised up, 
every mountain and hill made low;
the rough ground shall become level,
the rugged places a plain. 
And the glory of the Lord will be revealed,
and all people will see it together.
For the mouth of the Lord has spoken.” 

Both prophets speak of a voice or messenger, preparing the way for the Lord's coming. But that is their only point of similarity: Malachi's coming is terrifying, full of burning judgement against immorality and hypocrisy; Isaiah's is full of comfort and the assurance that punishment is done with. 

I don't know, and I don't know if anyone knows, whether any thinker or movement had put those two texts together before Mark did, but what is clear is that in drawing them together and making quite obvious that he sees them as referring to John and (more importantly) to Jesus, Mark is "doing theology" on a grand scale. He is joining threads, linking themes from past revelation and affirming that they both come to fulfilment in Jesus.

Those two threads, Judgement and Salvation, go way back, of course. At the very beginning of the Bible we see them under different names - they are Cursing and Blessing, which seem to alternate as themes in early Genesis. It is only as the universal nature of the curse of judgement is revealed in practice that blessing becomes inextricably linked with salvation - blessing can only be experienced when the curse is lifted, when sin is paid for, when judgement is removed. This is why Isaiah 40's promise of comfort is because sin is paid for - in the context a reference to exile, but illustrating a broader principle. 

Ultimately we may say that God has only two ways of dealing with the world: salvation and judgement. Extend those into eternity and you get the names Heaven and Hell.  The gospels draw those themes together and say that Jesus is God's agent in bringing both; he is Lord of both. 

The point is that there are many such threads, of greater and lesser prominence. Others could include the Presence/tabernacling of God with his people, or sacrifice, or the Son of Man, or the Shepherd, or the Servant, or the Messiah, or the Rock, or the Word, or Wisdom. It is the gathering of these threads into an interwoven whole in the coming of Jesus that constitutes a specifically Christian reading of the Old Testament. We could go so far as to say that whoever brought together the Suffering Servant of Isaiah 53 and the Terrifying Messiah of Psalm 2 invented Christianity. And the evidence is that this was Jesus himself.  

Contemporary criticism has often dismissed the idea of any unity of thought in the Bible. We are told that the book is a collection of incompatible theologies, and that any idea of an overarching theme or truth is an unworkable construct. Such an approach, it seems to me, rides roughshod over the Bible's own awareness of its internal diversity and yet its affirmation of unity. The New Testament's testimony to Jesus is precisely that he is the One in whom all those diverse and apparently opposing threads come together.  

The God of Christians and the God of Islam

I was challenged by a friend regarding the slightly muddled way in which I stated my trinitarian faith in the blog post on the Charlie Hebdo massacre. In conversation it struck home that it is precisely our trinitarianism which makes the distinction between the God of Islam and the God of Christians so vast. And it is a common lack of appreciation of the Trinity in our daily Christian lives that makes it possible to see God in such a way as verges on the Islamic.

The God who reveals himself in scripture is never a lonely Monad. Even in the Old Testament we may be mentally teased by the mystery of the plural in the word Elohim, the revelation of self consciousness and internal communication in Gen 1, or the strange multi-person and yet single person theophany of Gen 18. These and many more prepare the way for the dazzling New Testament light on the nature of God as Three-and-One. The OT doesn't teach the Trinity per se, but some things sure make sense once we have the NT revelation!

From all eternity, Father, Son and Spirit have existed in perfect, loving relationship. The Creation did not occur because God was lonely; our creation as relational beings is rather the echo of an eternal relationship. Our own experience of relationship, starting in the family, is to be understood as an analogue for our approach to God as we are invited to call him Father. Obviously, all earthly fathers fall short of ideal, some very grievously so, but even in saying that, we reveal a common consciousness of what fathers ought to be like. With all compassion for those whose fathers were appalling, by calling God "Father" and inviting us to do the same, the Bible appeals to that common consciousness. And what a father should be, God is. Perfectly. 

The world was made by and for the Son; from the start the plan of God was that a divine Man would rule over his creation, and so it has been. If Adam, the first man, brought failure and shame into our story, the second and last Man was and is and will be all that Adam should have been and more. 

In the Incarnation, the eternal Son, without ceasing to be what he eternally was, became what he eternally was not. In his death on the cross the price for the redemption of rebel human beings was, at its heart, the hellish abandonment of the Divine Man by his Father; our sin so serious that it took a breach in the Eternal Fellowship to right it. In his resurrection, Jesus, the Man, is proclaimed to be both Eternal Son and the true Man, worthy and qualified to judge all human beings at the last day as Creator of and representative-yet-perfect member of the human race. In his glorification the dust of the earth - a living Man - is now sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high. 

Through that victorious, Spirit-led progress of the Son through incarnation, ministry, arrest, torture, assassination, resurrection and glorification, the right has been won for all who are "in him" to have fellowship with God by the Holy Spirit. The initial joy of knowing God as one who is "close by" - the joy that Adam knew at the start - has been restored. Even though our own state of sinlessness is still future, God is with us in the present by his Spirit. His Spirit shows us Jesus at the start of our Christian life, the Spirit makes us aware of our own sinfulness, the Spirit draws us to faith, the Spirit helps in prayer, the Spirit prompts us to be more like Jesus, the Spirit works through us in the lives of others, the Spirit makes us useful with his gifts, the Spirit guarantees a future where we will be face to face with God the Father and our Lord Jesus Christ. We would be nowhere without the Holy Spirit. 

That is just a brief outline of some of the elements of Trinitarian faith. The Trinity - the fact that God is One, in Three persons - is not describable using human analogies, still less explicable using human logic. But the truth of the Trinity does pervade everything in the Christian life. That which is not Trinitarian is not Christian. And the concept of God within Islam is a very long way away. 

That is not to say that in conversation with Muslims it is necessarily unhelpful to say, "Let's talk about God" without pressing the distinction right at the start. But the distinction is there - as soon as we start to think seriously about Christian doctrine there is a chasm. We worship different Gods. 

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As a relative newcomer to the Salvation Army, my views are very much first impressions. But it seems to me that the Doctrines of the SA in general, and the Trinitarian one in particular, need to be remeembraced at a fresh level. At present there seems to be an almost self-conscious distance between personal belief and commitment to the doctrines. The Doctrine of the Trinity is affirmed at a formal level, but it doesn't dominate in general discourse, in our meetings for adoration or in what comes across of personal faith. It is only possible to even begin to swallow the "we follow the same God" line because in practice we are more Unitarian than Trinitarian. Some of what I have written above regarding the Trinity may even sound very odd, and yet it is pretty standard Christianity, if couched in provocative language! 

Our Doctrine is not to be a theoretical statement which we affirm on becoming soldiers or officers but which makes no practical difference. It is our faith - it is a brief description of actual truth about our actual God, and is to inform our gospel, our worship, our joy and our hope.

The day after the terror before...

Today the globe has been a mad village. With #killallmuslims trending on Twitter (both in favour of and against the hashtag, to be fair), everyone seems to be jumping onto the #jesuischarlie bandwagon in support of the murdered cartoonists, and simultaneously following the standard line that the few violent extremists are utterly unrepresentative of Islam as a whole.  

Here are a few thoughts:

Yesterday's killings were an outrage, a wicked, murderous evil which had no justification whatsoever. My thoughts and prayers throughout the day have been with the family and friends of those killed yesterday, with the injured, and with France as a nation. 

I believe in freedom of speech. I don't want to see magazines like Charlie Hebdo closed down by law or by the pressure of public opinion. 

I don't like some of the content of magazines like Charlie Hebdo. Satire is an important means of critique in our society, but offence for offence' sake (which I think is what some of their output actually was) is not desirable and is not the same as satire. I do not like gratuitous offensiveness towards Muslims any more than I like such offensiveness towards Christians; nevertheless, I defend the right to publish. 

I believe that Islam is a false religion, that Mohammed was a false prophet and that Allah is a false god. I worship the God of the Old and New Testaments, the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, giver of the Holy Spirit. The distinction between our faiths is stark; to say they are both the same is ludicrous and disrespectful to both.  The distinction is too important for me to enjoy satirical, scurrilous or scatological cartoons at the Prophet's expense - I think it is more respectful to simply disagree and then be open to debate and discussion when we have the chance. 

I recognise that the vast majority of Muslims deplore what took place in Paris yesterday, and that there is no warrant whatsoever for a general backlash against people of that faith. Nevertheless, I believe that Islam does demonstrably hold within it an emphasis on revenge and on this-worldly punishments to fall on those who insult Allah or his Prophet. It is in marked distinction from Christianity, for which being mocked and insulted is to be a fundamental part of following our mocked and insulted  Saviour. For more on this, see John Piper's excellent article from 2006 http://www.desiringgod.org/articles/being-mocked-the-essence-of-christs-work-not-muhammads

I believe that the particular cul-de-sac that the West has driven itself into with its pluralism and multi-culturalism is utterly unsustainable and will, tragically, produce many more outrages of this type. We are in a process of painful change, and where that process will end, culturally and politically, is anybody's guess. Certainly the absolute inability of western governments to be able to comprehend revealed religion of any type does not bode well.  Things are going to be tough - for people of any serious faith, and Christians may well find themselves hurting alongside Moslems in the future.  

I believe that the fatal flaw in Islam (as in other world religions, and in much folk Christianity) is the inability to understand let alone preach grace. Religion always says, "Do!" In Jesus Christ God says, "Done!"  The Prophet never died for his people's sins - but that is what we all need. The finished work of Jesus is the basis for assurance (not vague, trembling hope) of heaven, it is the basis for a transformed life of love, it is the basis for being able to handle mockery, persecution, violence and death and still pray for those who are hurting you. I suspect that we may be heading into just such a time of fear and terror; may God give his people grace to live out the grace in difficult times.