What do you think of when you hear the words social issue?
Many of us think of those topics of conversation that we hope won't come up at family gatherings. Many of us think of those agendas that divide political parties and religious denominations.
But let's think of those issues which affect everyone on this planet with appalling violence and need. Let's think about the ways that indigenous people have suffered under colonial expansion; let's think about slavery - transAtlantic and modern-day; let's think about dictatorships and oppressive regimes. How can we allow division over so-called social issues distract us from being present and powerful in the fight against these and other injustices.
Dr. King says it well: all too many... have remained silent behind the anesthetizing security of stained-glass windows.
Part of the problem is that we have spiritualized - no, overspiritualized... maybe hyperspiritualized - the message of the gospel. We have, as Stearn provocatively puts it, allowed faith to kill works because of an allergic reaction to what some might call the social gospel. We have so feared slipping into a merit-based system reminscent of medeival, imperial Catholicism that we have diminished, even destroyed, the role of our doing the gospel. This aversion to works, as it were, has found us AWOL, absent without leave, for the great crisis that is global poverty and its hitmen.
The social gospel and the spiritual gospel.
What about the whole gospel?
Please join this Advent book club by reading The Hole in our Gospel
and this blog every day until Christmas.
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