A New Social Gospel?

I remember thinking as far back as early in college that I didn’t fit in the categories that were out there.  It seemed like (now remember this IS 1980’s Texas I’m remembering); it seemed like people were either conservative Christians or liberal democrats/ atheists.  I didn’t mind a lot of the ethical positions of conservative Christians, but my atheistic/ democratic friends (that was a sort of redundancy back then and there, I must admit.)  cared more about the things that Jesus seemed to care about than my conservative Christian friends.  It seemed like people were either on this ‘side’ or that ‘side’ and I didn’t fit either one.  I appreciated some of moral positions of one group and some of the economic/ social positions of the other group. 

 

I remember even asking in seminary, in an ethics class, who’s doing this right?  Who is really embracing the “Politics of Jesus”—to borrow from John Howard Yoder’s wonderful and challenging book--?  The response was “The Catholics”.  Well, ok.  Maybe.  But, nothing against Catholics at all, but that didn’t seem like a likely path for me. 

 

What I have since come to discover is that there were then and are now a LOT of people feeling like I was and do.  People feeling like our faith and our faith commitments had been hijacked by political parties who use religious leaders to drive the masses to their political brethren.  I’m not really a ‘masses’ kind of person.  I bet you aren’t either.  It doesn’t seem so revolutionary to say it, but it seems like it is to practice it: Jesus is bigger than any one political party.

 

I’ve come to appreciate the folks who identify themselves as ‘emergent’.  They are seeking and finding a new paradigm for what it means to live out our faith in all areas of life: social issues, economic issues, political, religious—without being herded as, you know, ‘the masses”.  It just seems like with the emergent folks, the fences are lying in scrap pieces all over the landscape.  It’s messier than having the fences in place, predictably dividing us.  But Jesus was pretty messy too.  It just seems to me that our nation needs a little less vitriolic religiocentic partisanship and a lot more thoughtful, prayerful, engaging, loving, truth-telling Jesus following on whatever the issue may be and whatever the cost to us.

 

Here’s an interesting article from Newsweek about what’s happening among New Evangelicals trying to transform the world:

 

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15566389/site/newsweek/