Posted on 03/15/2010 6:29:32 AM PDT by SLB
Fox News broadcaster Glenn Beck is famous for launching verbal grenades, and he did so again in recent days, calling upon church members to flee congregations that promote social justice. His comments incited an immediate controversy, where far more heat than light has yet been evident. As expected, there is more to this story than meets the eye -- or may reach the ear via the public conversation.
During his March 2, 2010 radio broadcast, Beck said this:
I beg you, look for the words "social justice" or "economic justice" on your church Web site. If you find it, run as fast as you can. Social justice and economic justice, they are code words. Now, am I advising people to leave their church? Yes! If I'm going to Jeremiah's Wright's church? Yes! Leave your church. Social justice and economic justice. They are code words. If you have a priest that is pushing social justice, go find another parish. Go alert your bishop and tell them, "Excuse me are you down with this whole social justice thing?" I don't care what the church is. If it's my church, I'm alerting the church authorities: "Excuse me, what's this social justice thing?" And if they say, "Yeah, we're all in that social justice thing," I'm in the wrong place.
Almost immediately, reaction statements emerged with furor, found in press releases and public statements made by figures like Sojourner's editor Jim Wallis and various social justice advocacy groups. Like Captain Renault in Casablanca, various media outlets rounded up the "usual suspects." The resultant public conversation has not been very substantial, but it has offered media magnetism.
Some of those outraged by Beck's statements immediately insisted that social justice is the very heart of the Gospel, while others insisted with equal force that Beck had offered a courageous call for Christians to flee liberal churches that had abandoned the Gospel.
As anyone familiar with incendiary public debates should have expected, though the truth is a bit harder to determine, the issue is indeed worth whatever hard thinking a clarification of the issue requires.
Is Glenn Beck right? That is the question most in the media were asking, along with a good number of Christians who were aware of the debate. With just a few words, Beck, a convert to Mormonism, set the world of American religion into a frenzy of discourse.
At first glance, Beck's statements are hard to defend. How can justice, social or private, be anything other than a biblical mandate? A quick look at the Bible will reveal that justice is, above all, an attribute of God himself. God is perfectly just, and the Bible is filled with God's condemnation of injustice in any form. The prophets thundered God's denunciation of social injustice and the call for God's people to live justly, to uphold justice, and to refrain from any perversion of justice.
The one who pleases the Lord is he who will "keep the way of the Lord by doing righteousness and justice" (Gen. 18:19). Israel is told to "do no injustice in court. You shall not be partial to the poor or defer to the great, but in righteousness you shall judge your neighbor" (Lev. 19:15). God "has established his throne for justice" (Psalm 9:7) and "loves righteousness and justice" (Psalm 33:5). Princes are to "rule in justice" (Is. 32:1) even as the Lord "will fill Zion with justice and righteousness" (Is. 33:5). In the face of injustice, the prophet Amos thundered: "But let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream" (Amos 5:18). In a classic statement, Micah reminded Israel: "He has told you, O man, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?" (Micah 6:8).
To assert that a call for social justice is reason for faithful Christians to flee their churches is nonsense, given the Bible's overwhelming affirmation that justice is one of God's own foremost concerns.
But, there is more going on here. Glenn Beck's statements lacked nuance, fair consideration, and context. It was reckless to use a national media platform to rail against social justice in such a manner, leaving Beck with little defense against a tidal wave of biblical mandates.
A closer look at his statements reveals a political context. He made a specific reference to Rev. Jeremiah Wright and to other priests or preachers who would use "social justice" and "economic justice" as "code words." Is there anything to this?
Of course there is. Regrettably, there is no shortage of preachers who have traded the Gospel for a platform of political and economic change, most often packaged as a call for social justice.
The immediate roots of this phenomenon go back to the mid-nineteenth century, when figures like Washington Gladden, a Columbus, Ohio pastor, promoted what they called a new "social gospel." Gladden was morally offended by the idea of a God who would offer his own Son as a substitutionary sacrifice for sinful humanity and, as one of the founders of liberal theology in America, offered the social gospel as an alternative message, complete with a political agenda. It was not social reform that made the social gospel liberal, it was, its theological message. As Gary Dorrien, the preeminent historian of liberal theology, asserts, the distinctive mark of the social gospel was "its theology of social salvation."
Even more famously, the social gospel would be identified with Walter Rauschenbusch, a liberal figure of the early twentieth century. Rauschenbusch made his arguments most classically in his books, Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907) and Theology for the Social Gospel (1917). In a 1904 essay, "The New Evangelism," Rauschenbusch called for a departure from "the old evangelism" which was all about salvation from sin through faith in Christ, and for the embrace of a "new evangelism" which was about salvation from social ills and injustice in order to realize, at least partially, the Kingdom of God on earth. He called for Christian missions to be redirected in order to "Christianize international politics."
The last century has seen many churches and denominations embrace the social gospel in some form, trading the Gospel of Christ for a liberal vision of social change, revolution, economic liberation, and, yes, social justice. Liberal Protestantism has largely embraced this agenda as its central message.
The urgency for any faithful Christian is this -- flee any church that for any reason or in any form has abandoned the Gospel of Christ for any other gospel.
As I read the statements of Glenn Beck, it seems that his primary concern is political. Speaking to a national audience, he warned of "code words" that betray a leftist political agenda of big government, liberal social action, economic redistribution, and the confiscation of wealth. In that context, his loyal audience almost surely understood his point.
My concern is very different. As an evangelical Christian, my concern is the primacy of the Gospel of Christ -- the Gospel that reveals the power of God in the salvation of sinners through the death and resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ. The church's main message must be that Gospel. The New Testament is stunningly silent on any plan for governmental or social action. The apostles launched no social reform movement. Instead, they preached the Gospel of Christ and planted Gospel churches. Our task is to follow Christ's command and the example of the apostles.
There is more to that story, however. The church is not to adopt a social reform platform as its message, but the faithful church, wherever it is found, is itself a social reform movement precisely because it is populated by redeemed sinners who are called to faithfulness in following Christ. The Gospel is not a message of social salvation, but it does have social implications.
Faithful Christians can debate the proper and most effective means of organizing the political structure and the economic markets. Bringing all these things into submission to Christ is no easy task, and Gospel must not be tied to any political system, regime, or platform. Justice is our concern because it is God's concern, but it is no easy task to know how best to seek justice in this fallen world.
And that brings us to the fact that the Bible is absolutely clear that injustice will not exist forever. There is a perfect social order coming, but it is not of this world. The coming of the Kingdom of Christ in its fullness spells the end of injustice and every cause and consequence of human sin. We have much work to do in this world, but true justice will be achieved only by the consummation of God's purposes and the perfection of God's own judgment.
Until then, the church must preach the Gospel, and Christians must live out its implications. We must resist and reject every false gospel and tell sinners of salvation in Christ. And, knowing that God's judgment is coming, we must strive to be on the right side of justice.
Glenn Beck's statements about social justice demonstrate the limits of our public discourse. The issues raised by his comments and the resultant controversy are worthy of our most careful thinking and most earnest struggle. Yet, the media, including Mr. Beck, will have moved on to any number of other flash points before the ink has dried on this kerfuffle. Serious-minded Christians cannot move on from this issue so quickly.
The gospel of social justice as a means of setting up God’s kingdom here on earth is no gospel (good news), but rather a perversion of the truth. We aren’t called to make the world a nicer place to go to hell from, we are called to rescue people out from a world slated for deception and destruction. The appropriate scripture passage is Gal 1:6-8, “I marvel that ye are so soon removed from him that called you into the grace of Christ unto another gospel: Which is not another; but there be some that trouble you, and would pervert the gospel of Christ. But though we, or an angel from heaven, preach any other gospel unto you than that which we have preached unto you, let him be accursed.”
The irony is that the one trumpeting this message is Glenn Beck, who is the follower of a man (Joseph Smith) who received another gospel from the hands of a supposed angel of light (Moroni). If there was ever a group specifically targeted by Galatians 1:8 it is the Mormon church.
To complete the thought (sorry, cold medicine kicking in): Religions should not try to use the government (force) to achieve charitable goals.
I wonder what Mormon policies were in their earlier history. They’re pretty infamous for revelation revision. They may not always have favored the tax funded charity model.
Charity from the heart is true altruism.
Government forced charity is slavery.
Should Christians embrace socialism? See our website www.faithfacts.org.
See “Christianity and the Culture” for the article.
1. They have recognized that the philosophy of Christ invites and inspires faith, hope, and personal charity and benevolence.
2. They also have recognized thaat it does not command coercive "taking" of the fruits of one's neighbors' labors by use of a collective mechanism called government, however.
3. The 1st is compatible with liberty. The 2nd, if followed to its logical conclusion, leads to tyranny.
The Far Left's teachings have permeated the seminaries and public discourse, and through the clever use of semantics, many have been misled.
Beck simply stated what hundreds of thousands of church members already have concluded. They have embraced the philosophy of Jesus, but they have not embraced so-called "liberation theology" or the other forms of Far Left ideology which have been mixed with the Gospel message by the hierarchies of mainline churches.
The Far Left loves to misuse Jefferson's "separation of church and State" phrase, but they overlook his recognition of the philosophy of Jesus. That might be interesting to review here:
Jefferson stated that Jesus "preached philanthropy and universal charity and benevolence," that "a system of morals is presented to us [by Jesus], which, if filled up in the style and spirit of the rich fragments he left us, would be the most perfect and sublime that has ever been taught by man."
He wrote, "His moral doctrines...were more pure and perfect than those of the most correct of the philosophers...and they went far beyond both in inculcating universal philanthropy, not only to kindred and friends, to neighbors and countrymen, but to all mankind, gathering all into one family, under the bonds of love, charity, peace, common wants, and common aids," which, Jefferson said, "will evince the peculiar superiority of the system of Jesus over all others."
Comparing the Hebrew code which, according to Jefferson, "laid hold of actions only," "He [Jesus] pushed his scrutinies into the heart of man; erected his tribunal in the region of his thoughts, and purified the waters at the fountain head."
That Jefferson cut out the statements which he believed to be directly attributable to Jesus, pasted them into a little book which he kept by his bed and, by his own words, read from them daily, might lead one to conclude that his political philosphy of liberty probably was influenced by what he considered to be the superiority of the "philosophy" of Jesus.
It is unlikely that any person alive today has read the writings of as many of the great philosophers as Jefferson. His talents and abilities were legend. His devotion to liberty and to the ideas essential to liberty were based on simple principles, some of which, undoubtedly, came from his understanding of the basic law underlying all valid human law: "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you."
He understood: that the philosophy capsulated in that idea has the power to make people in a society more benevolent, more loving, more caring, and more willing to take care of each other--voluntarily.
There is a sharp contrast between a philosophy of love and the politics of hate which motivate the radical Islamic terrorists, as well as the radical Left which now spouts its personal hatred in our partisan politics. Thomas Jefferson summarized an idea that tyrants of all political persuasions deny: "The God who gave us life gave us liberty at the same time: the hand of force may destroy, but cannot disjoin them."
I just ran across this and it’s pretty interesting:
And THAT is the essence of what Glenn is saying ... government directed ‘social justice’ must not be allowed to infiltrate the Christian perspective charity. While the scum-sucking commie leftist of America demand separation of church and state out of one side of their filth-ridden mouths, they are demanding ‘the church’ align itself with their brand of forced social justice.
This is simply not the case. I watched the program and it was about communism / progressive-ism and their infiltration and perversion of the of the Christian faith. It was not reckless it was simply truthful. Communists will use any means, including the Church of Christ itself to inflict its Godless evil upon the world. And Social Justice is one of their buzz words. Essentially Glenn's advice was to leave any church that espouses communism as they cannot be about God. He was spot on as the author grudgingly concludes.
OK, then... don't call yourself a "Christian" then.
I find this ironic because I have just recently done the same thing. I presented myself to a new church across the street because it was of my denomination.
The church services then began which consisted of a church member standing up and reading a couple of verses from the Bible. Then the pastor stood up and said a few word, which included WE MUST BE MORE PROGRESSIVE AND CONTEMPORARY IN TEACHING GOD’S WORDS TO OUR YOUTH! Then began a series of music, mostly good old time gospels, but with new lyrics which were mostly liberal jibberish supposedly written by the band leading Baptist preacher. This was followed by 30 minutes of witness and testimony from the congregation whose mind is being filled with this KRAP!
My question was, OK, WHO is doing the teaching? WHO and WHAT are they teaching their youth? And when did the teaching of God’s Word become progressive or contemporary.
My third thought was, I am definitely in the wrong place!
To be morally offended by the Gospel is to be literally and blatantly anti-Christ.
Glenn Beck is not a Christian...
He is a member of another religion...
A rteligion with “social justice” practices of their own...
What’s he preaching policy to Christians for ???
Depends on what “social justice” means to your church and your congregation.
If it means equal opportunity, its okay. If it means equality of outcome, Beck’s right. Once upon time, equality of opportunity was all “social justice” meant and it might be leftover in your church’s beliefs from that time.
I can’t really trust Beck on anything religious. He has obviously not investigated his own faith as much as he has investigated other things or he wouldn’t be Mormon.
That said, I see a clear division in the Church. The Libs who are WCC and place social problems ahead of the Gospel, and the Conservative churches, many of whom see that the cure for social ills is the same cure as spiritual ills, Jesus Christ.
If he’s truly worried about Beck’s salvation....PRAY for him
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I am and I do.
I wonder what Mormon policies were in their earlier history.
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They were theocratic communists. It is called the “United Order”. Most polygamous LDS groups still practice it.
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