Years ago, while serving my first church, I took part in two “missionary” trips to the Dominican Republic. A local church there had embarked upon a highly ambitious plan to build a hospital for Haitian immigrants working as virtual slaves in the surrounding sugar cane fields. At that time at least, Dominican society discriminated against these workers (many of whom had been brought to the DR against their will) and wouldn’t treat them in their hospitals.
A week or two before the second trip a meeting was arranged for those scheduled to make the trip. It was led by a group of pastors who, being pastors, separated us into small groups to “share” our hopes and expectations for the trip.
At one point we were asked to discuss what we hoped to accomplish. The answers amazed me, though probably shouldn’t have. The sentiments expressed struck me as utterly grandiose, as if this small American church group alone was going to save the world.
When my turn came, I said simply that I was planning to go and sling cement, which I did. I would be a mule, which I was. After all, I argued, the job of savior has already been taken.
Then again, to be fair, I had the advantage of having been there the year before. Thus, I knew that what we Americans were bringing down there was labor, money, clothes, and medical supplies – admittedly important things. But I also knew that the Haitians had something we lacked – a vastly superior, lived Christianity. Their faith was astonishing to me. I had never seen anything like it before, nor have I since.
This admittedly innocent and well-meaning group discussion betrayed, albeit in minute fashion, a much larger overarching phenomenon found in virtually every mainline church today – the naïve, if paternalistic, belief that somehow we humans should be able to solve the world’s problems. (To be honest, the Christian witness by the Haitian church was, for me, far more world-changing than all our efforts combined.)
As referenced in my last post, Frozen in Amber, the roots of this mindset go back over a century when the mainline Protestant churches decided the real work of the gospel should no longer be confined to our churches but directed instead toward “fixing” the world beyond its four walls. It was almost as if the Protestant churches decided they had reached a state of perfection and were now in a position to apply their faultless wisdom and virtue in repairing our fallen world.
Though complete nonsense, this remains the singular focus of American Protestantism today. This despite the fact that the underlying philosophy of the “social gospel” assiduously ignores any number of basic Christian tenets.
For one, it denies the intractable power and seriousness of sin and evil. It pretends that with enough education, the latest social/scientific expertise, the purest intentions, and the utmost in refined and delicate feeling, evil will scatter like centipedes under a rock when exposed suddenly to the blinding brilliance of the noonday sun.
Another obvious basic error is rejecting traditional Christianity’s understanding that perfection in this world is beyond our reach, that human agency is existentially incapable of ushering forth God’s promised golden age. (News flash: that’s God’s job.)
Of course, these and other theological truths no longer much matter in today’s churches. The focus instead is almost entirely on feelings.
The astute reader will immediately recognize the social gospel to be an imitation of the secular Progressivism of the early 20th century. Swept up in the heady optimism of turn-of-the-century idealism, the Progressive movement believed, among other things, that society had grown too complex for the average person (who was too ignorant and too self-seeking).
Thus, modern science, including the newly minted social sciences, would bring forth a new cadre of managers who would provide both expertise and objectivity. These “experts” would lead us to the Promised Land, sweeping aside history’s heretofore failed and hackneyed labors, not least the church’s.
Part of this push for perfection was informed, wittingly or unwittingly, by Marxist ideology. As we know, Marx was heavily influenced by the 18th century French philosopher, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who famously said, “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.”
The implication, not lost on Marx, was that the human problem, the cause of all human injustice and suffering, was society, precisely the opposite of Christian doctrine which argues that society’s sins are but the sins of each individual sinner writ large (Original Sin).
To repeat, the Progressive idea, and thus that of the social gospel, is that society is the sole source of sin and evil. And because it is merely an arbitrary construct, with the right social engineering (by experts “in the know”), sin can be eliminated, and the natural wonderfulness of human beings unleashed.
Here human beings are assumed to be blank slates whose essential nature can be rejiggered and reprogramed at will by these enlightened, self-appointed doyens. Since soul and spirit don’t exist, they play no role.
Progressivism also ignores the dangers of placing power in the hands of the relative few (the experts and those in power). Lost is the obvious fact that, as history has shown, these elites are just as prone to self-interest, intolerance, corruption, and, yes, ignorance as those over whom they claim superiority.
Perhaps more to the point, no group of human beings will ever be capable of fully comprehending, much less fixing, the innumerable complexities, intricacies, and variabilities found within nature, much less the additional unpredictability and, yes, venality found within human nature and the society that forms around it. (Spoiler alert: only God possesses such omniscience.)
Which brings us back to the church. If the church, having joined forces with secular Progressivism, has proven incapable of saving the world, what then is its role?
Years ago, a woman, overhearing a conversation I was having, told me she’d always wondered what the word “pastor” meant.
In case you don’t know, it means, literally, “shepherd.” Simply put, the job of a pastor, as I see it, is to care for the sheep (the church), which includes protecting them from the sheep’s mortal enemy (the world).
In 1930, and again in 1939, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the famous German theologian and erstwhile pacifist, who later died in 1945 at Flossenbürg, the Nazi death camp, for his part in a failed conspiracy to assassinate Adolf Hitler, left Germany to study at New York’s Union Theological Seminary, one of the premier seminaries of his day.
What he found there appalled him. From the professors on down, the sole focus was on the social gospel. Christianity had been reduced to directing world affairs rather than attending to church matters, its natural home. For the Union crowd, the church and the culture had become one and the same.
This was especially troubling for Bonhoeffer given that by 1939 the Nazis had fully absorbed Germany’s churches. The church and culture had literally become one. Bonhoeffer was adamant in rejecting this abomination, holding firm to the Lutheran Church’s historic stance regarding Augustine’s two separate kingdoms – “the city of God” and “the city of man.” Seeing church and state merged in America was, to Bonhoeffer, a foolish and dangerous heresy.
As a result of this heresy, to cite just one of my many objections to it, church leaders routinely assume church ethics apply across the board, forgetting that the acculturation process (discipleship) within the church, the community of the Spirit, is different in kind. It’s unique, set apart.
In other words, the faithful are being shaped and molded into becoming a particular kind of people, a godly people. Just as someone reared outside a given family unit will invariably have a different set of values and norms, so the church, informed by the Holy Spirit, produces a different kind of person, one with a different perspective and, perhaps most significantly, a different kind of heart.
The promiscuous use of the word “diversity” provides a classic example of the failure to distinguish between the church and the world. Diversity in the church, comprised of male and female, Jew and Greek, properly assumes a unity of heart and mind aligned in common purpose – to love and serve God. “Diversity” outside the church means something completely different – a motley amalgamation of often competing and contradictory ideas, beliefs, and values. “Diversity,” in other words, as it’s commonly understood, is heresy.
One major manifestation of such epistemological confusion in our churches is the all-encompassing enthusiasm for “cosmic justice,” or “simple moralism,” as Reinhold Niebuhr put it, which holds that merely wishing for a particular outcome insures its success. Yet, alas, the world is far more complex, dark, and unmanageable than our moral naivete assumes.
Perhaps a kind of justice is still possible, on a smaller scale, within the community of the Spirit, designed as it is for such soul-work, and committed to the task of uniting hearts and minds with a common purpose and common task.
Put simply, the work of the church takes precedence over all other worldly concerns. Doing so is not to ignore the problems of the world, as many assume, but to approach these problems with an other-worldly spirit, one informed by godly purpose, a spirit premised by the conversion of heart and soul. For only by means of this humble, modest spirit can we hope to influence the world far more positively and realistically.