Under the rubric of Calvin’s “twofold kingdom” Christians do have a place to “engage the culture” and to speak to broader issues but they must be willing to do so in their capacity as private persons, as members of society and not as representatives of the church. In other words, whatever social agenda a Christian pursues is one thing but leave the visible, institutional church out of it. The church, as a visible institution, as the embassy of the Kingdom of God and the Kingdom of Heaven, has no social agenda for the wider civil and cultural world.

Every culture and generation has been tempted to capture Jesus for their own agenda. The Gnostics portrayed Jesus as a second-century figure (a dead give away) who was a Gnostic opposed to the church and the Christian gospel of free salvation from the wrath to come through faith alone in Christ alone. The Constantinian (post-4th century) church often portrayed Jesus as such a fearsome king and judge that the church began to search for other saviors and mediators. In the Modern era, Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) re-made Jesus into his own rationalist image—he produced his own version of the New Testament stripped of supernaturalism. In the Carter 1970s and the Reagan 80s, as the baby-boomer-dominated culture turned inward, Jesus became a facilitator for our personal sense of well being.

Now, with the rise of the Millennial generation, the product of the war against terror and a Carter-esque economic malaise, the concern is ostensibly other-centered but once again the Christian faith has become yet another vehicle to carry social concerns. There is renewed talk among young evangelicals and others of the so-called “social gospel.”

By social I mean broader cultural and civil concerns that are not ecclesiastical. It may refer to current events (e.g., Ferguson, Missouri, ISIS) or to persistent social ills (e.g., poverty or racism). By gospel I mean the message of Christ’s incarnation, his substitutionary suffering active obedience for his people, his death, burial, resurrection, ascension, and return.  The expression “social gospel,” however refers to a distinctive movement and re-casting of the gospel message.

Before I describe this movement, however, briefly let me say that I understand how such a re-casting happens. When I became a believer in the mid-1970s I did the same thing. I did not know Jeremiah from Matthew. I remember being surprised that there were “minor prophets” in the Bible. I was utterly ignorant of the Christian faith but upon coming to faith in Jesus I immediately imputed my (then leftist) social views to Jesus and criticized the visible church for its indifference to suffering. After all, who is more concerned about the poor and the downtrodden than Jesus? I began to argue with my new friends that the church should support feminism, environmentalism etc. I was a typical child of the social progressive movement and I baptized all my prior social convictions as I came to faith.

It would take me a number of years to begin to be able to criticize my own social views, to learn that much of what I assumed to be biblical was not, that I had baptized covetousness and called it Christian. Only as I got to know Scripture more thoroughly, as I came to know a little bit more about the sources of the views I had inherited, as I came to learn the Christian faith on its own terms, was I able to see things a little more clearly.

One of the things I discovered, as I read the New Testament more closely, in its original language, against the background of its original context, is that there is no basis in it for the so-called “social gospel.” As a young, progressive evangelical I had been attracted to aspects of the message and ministry of Walter Rauschenbusch (1861–1918), pioneer of the so-called “social gospel.” Rauschenbusch was the son of Pietists, one of the formative movements behind modern evangelicalism. As a young evangelical I was drawn into Pietism, even though we did not call it that. The Pietists were formally doctrinally orthodox, i.e., they affirmed the doctrines of the ecumenical creeds (e.g., the Apostles’ Creed, the Nicene Creed) and the Lutheran confessions (from which tradition they emerged) but among the things that really animated them were two great principles: the personal encounter with the risen Christ and social justice. In our (late-modern) time the agenda of the Pietists is known as the “Emergent Church” or sometimes the “Emerging Church.” ¹

Rauschenbusch was a Northern Baptist born in Rochester, NY and educated in the USA and Germany.² He became a pastor in Hell’s Kitchen in New York City in the late 19th century. As the name implies, it was a greatly impoverished neighborhood. Like Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834) before him, Rauschenbusch’s Pietism had not equipped him to address the challenges before him. Like Schleiermacher, Rauschenbusch turned to the liberals for answers. He synthesized his Pietist theology with Albrecht Ritschl’s theology of the Kingdom of God. The Social Gospel movement wanted to bring about the Kingdom of God on earth. Their optimistic eschatology (doctrine of last things) told them that they could do it. They were inspired by the Modern idea of the universal brotherhood of humanity and the universal fatherhood of God. As many others before them had done the Social Gospel movement harassed the Christian faith to their social agenda.

Other Christians, however, saw in this movement a dangerous re-definition of the gospel and revision of the Christian faith. The Social Gospel movement came to be identified primarily with the liberal (mainline) churches. The message of those churches became, through the course of the 20th century, almost exclusively social and less and less about biblical and historic Christianity so that one could predict what the mainline churches will teach simply by reading the editorial page of the newspaper and then waiting a few moments. The mainline churches, under the influence of the “social gospel,” gave up the biblical and Christian doctrines of God, man, Christ, salvation, and the church.

Read More