(Part Nine)

(Adapted from chapter one of ‘Recent Trends Among Evangelicals’ by Rowland C.Croucher, John Mark Ministries 1986/1995.

2. Social ethics

We have already touched on the issue of evangelicals and social concern. Here we must add just a couple of further points.

Evangelicals are becoming increasingly restive with our propensity to concentrate on private vices to the exclusion of a concern about ‘macro-ethical’ issues. Certainly, we must lobby to have some of the vicious crimes associated with prostitution, pornography and gambling dealt with in law. But, until recently, evangelicals have been strangely silent on such global concerns as race, war, poverty and injustice. Back in 1969, Leighton Ford told the US Congress on Evangelism in Minneapolis (the one where a couple of hippies were thrown out and Billy Graham later personally apologised to them):

When people of privilege abuse their power and refuse justice, sooner or later violent upheaval is bound to come. If we do not seek to heal the rubbed-raw wounds of racial strife, then we shall deserve ‘the fire next time’. It is to the shame of the Christian church that we have been so slow to face the demands of the gospel in the racial revolution… Christians have a stake in preserving historic truth, but since sin infects every person and institution, we need a holy discontent with the status quo. The gospel calls for constant change. We cannot identify our gospel with the past.

Such an evangelical conscientisation probably began with Carl Henry’s ‘The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism’ (1947)

and was reinforced in the 1960s by authors like David Moberg, then in the 1970s with several evangelical declarations (e.g. that from Chicago, 1974).

Another concern is between our relationship to sins and to sinners. Homosexuals, for example, have got the idea that Christians are against them, as well as being against their lifestyle. Perhaps we’ve been more against the sin than for the sinner in some cases. With Jesus, as distinct from the Pharisees, it was the other way around.

3. Social and behavioural sciences: the question of integration

This area provides one of the clearest watersheds between fundamentalism and progressive evangelicals. Fundamentalists still tend to be wary of ‘secular scholarship’ and are ‘against culture’. Evangelicals, with John Calvin, would argue that: ‘Whenever we come upon these matters in secular writers, let that admirable light of truth shining in them teach us that the mind of man, though fallen and perverted from its wholeness, is nevertheless clothed and ornamented with God’s excellent gifts.’

Evangelicals are reading authors like Robert McAfee Brown who, in his book ‘The Pseudonyms of God’ (i.e. those ways God is speaking to us through the disguise of human culture and natural event), argues that ‘traffic between the gospel and the world travels on a two-way street’.

Brown is not arguing for a natural theology – one that moves from us to God – but for human life and culture to provide a third God-given source for theological creativity in addition to Scripture and tradition. perhaps sometimes we begin with human beings, their ‘sitz im leben’ and their perceptions of reality. This need not conflict with our adherence to a more ultimate theological authority. Surely the ‘hermeneutical suspensions’ required in this rigorous acitivity (i.e. a temporary questioning of one’s previous understandings of scripture) are part of the risk we take in making timeless truths relevant to particular cultures.

The concept of the integration of the social sciences with Christianity is somewhat new and yet the basic idea is an old one. Augustine, for example in his ‘The City of God’, worked out an integrative schema of Christianity and Platonic thought. Thomas Aquinas, in the 13th century, attempted an even more complete integration of Christianity and Aristotelian thought.

Modern integrative studies attempt to discover common ideas and conceptual structures behind both the social sciences and Christianity. They encourage thinking psychologically/ sociologically about Christianity and thinking Christianly about the social sciences. Certainly integration does not mean a fusing of either with the other: the social scientific method and the Christian faith begin with different assumptions.

For example, Christians have been anxious about the social sciences providing naturalistic explanations of supernatural phenomena; of psychological determinism leading persons not to be responsible for their actions; or of the humanistic assumptions of some social scientists. Some of these fears are well-grounded. Freud, for example, viewed much, if not all religion as a function of our neurotic tendencies. J.B. Watson thought the concepts of the mind, soul and spirit as unscientific.

These days, however, evangelical scholars are confronting such issues head-on, combining the special revelation of God in scripture with knowledge gained from the theory and data of the social sciences. After all, they are saying, the social scientists are simply discovering how God has made his creatures. Such data can be of immense help in such fields as ‘Christian psychotherapy’, church growth and so on.

For example, many missionary societies which experience a high drop-out rate over the first two terms of service are asking psychologists to devise more effective screening processes through objective research. Once upon a time we might have thought that our reliance on the Holy Spirit through prayer was the only way to ascertain God’s truth. It’s interesting that in the area of physical healing, Christians have generally been as inclined to submit to the findings of the scientists as to rely on prayer for healing. Perhaps in both the physical and the social sciences it’s a matter of ‘both-and’ rather than ‘either-or’.

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