Wednesday, May 4, 2016

Willard Wednesdays

The Divine Conspiracy: Chapter 2 Gospels of Sin Management (pp.50-54)


The Gospel on the Left

"By the late 1950's and early 1960's, the older liberal theology, with its 'social gospel', had pretty well proven itself unable to accomplish the transformation of human existence that it had envisioned and promised.  Bludgeoned to its knees by world events, its intellectual capital exhausted , and incapable of providing concepts that could clarify exactly what was happening in Western life and society at the time, it awakened to find itself, as a social and institutional reality, on the side of the oppressor when the civil rights movement began to dawn."

"Quickly, liberal leadership moved into an activist posture.  By 1963 the National Council of Churches leadership had for some time been preoccupied with the question of the church's nature and mission, hence with the basic nature of the Christian gospel.."

"To be committed to the oppressed, to liberation, or just to 'community' became for many the whole of what is essential to Christian commitment.  The gospel, or 'good news', on this view, was that God himself stood behind liberation, equality, and community; that Jesus died to promote them, or at least for lack of them; and that he 'lives on' in all efforts and tendencies favoring them.  For the theological left, simply this became the message of Christ."  

"This is the gospel of the current Christian left:  Love comes out on top. "

"But just as there was a serious question as to what constitutes saving faith, so there is a problem with the precise nature of redemptive love.  In this world, there are many things called love.  Which love is it that is God?  And who is the God that is called love?"  

"Robbed of its reference to a transcendent spiritual being or substance that nonetheless engages with humanity while holding them responsible to its specific directives on how to live, this 'love' ('God') has no recourse but to become whatever the current ideology says it is...this 'gospel' turns out in practice to be little more than another version of the world-famous American dream.  Words associated with it are 'egalitarianism,' 'happiness', and 'freedom'.  As a professor of education at Bradley University recently stated, 'the American dream is that people can do or be what they want if they just go ahead and do it.'  Desire becomes sacred, and whatever thwarts desire is evil or sin.  We have from the Christian left, after all, just another gospel of sin management, but one whose substance is provided by Western (American) social and political ideals of human existence in a secular world."  

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