One would be the spiritualized interpretation that would go like this: In the exodus, God rescued his people from oppression in Egypt and conversely in the cross God has rescued his people from the oppression of sin.
The other ditch would be the politicized interpretation that basically says that we can see God passionately moved to justice on behalf of his people and thus we should be concerned about social justice as well.
Dr. Wright affirms that both of these views are important and clearly found in the exodus narrative, but most people tend to emphasize one over the other. In speaking to the first interpretation, I appreciate what he writes here:
This spiritualizing way of interpreting the Bible, and the missionogical implications that go with it, requires us to imagine that for generation after generation, century after century, the God of the Bible was passionately concerned about social issues - political arrogance and abuse, economic exploitation, judicial corruption, the suffering of the poor and oppressed, the evils of brutality and bloodshed. So passionate, indeed, that the laws he gave and the prophets he sent give more space to these matter than any other issue except idolatry, while the psalmists cry out in protest to the God they know cares deeply about such things. -Dr. Christopher Wright, The Mission of God, p. 280,281
Somewhere, however, between Malachi and Matthew, all that changed. Such matters no longer claim God's attention or spark his anger. Or if they do, it is no longer our business. The root cause of all such things is spiritual sin, and that is now all that God is interested in, and that is all that the cross dealt with. A subtle form of Marcionism underlies this approach. The alleged God of the New Testament is almost unrecognizable as the Lord God, the Holy One of Israel. This alleged God has shed all the passionate priorities of the Mosaic law and has jettisoned all the burdens for justice that he laid on his prophets at such cost to them. The implications for mission are equally dramatic. For if the pressing problems of human society are no longer of concern to God, they have no place in Christian mission - or at most a decidedly secondary one. God's mission is getting souls to heaven, not addressing society on earth. Ours should follow suit. There may be an element of caricature in the way I have sketched this view, but it is not unrepresentative of a certain brand of popular mission rhetoric.
It will be clear that I find such a view of God and of mission to be unbiblical and frankly unbelievable, if one takes the whole Bible as the trustworthy revelation of the identity, character and mission of the living God. But to repeat, I do not reject or reduce the terribly serious spiritual realities of sin and evil that the New Testament exposes, or the glories of the spiritual dimension of God's redemptive accomplishment in the cross and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. I simply deny that these truths of the New Testament nullify all that the Old Testament has already revealed about God's comprehensive commitment to every dimension of human life, about his relentless opposition to all that oppresses, spoils, and diminishes human well-being, and about his ultimate mission of blessing the nations and redeeming his whole creation. Deriving our own missional mandate from this deep source precludes the kind of spiritualized reductionism that can read the exodus narrative, discern one vial dimension of its truth and yet bypass the message that cries out from its pages as loudly as the Israelites cried out in their bondage.
2 comments:
I agree with almost all of what Wright is saying here. The God of the OT and the God of the NT is obviously the same God. If he shows a great concern for social justice in the OT (and He does), then we can know that the same is true in the NT and on into the present day. God does not change. If He cares about social justice, then we, as His people, should want to have similar hearts. If we don't, then we are being disobedient to Him and careless about part of His call to His people.
It's when we start to emphasize this social justice aspect of our mission *over* the proclamation of the Gospel and the importance of personal salvation that things become unbalanced. In the overall scheme of the Bible, social justice is a clearly resounding theme. Compared to the message of salvation from God's wrath and reconciliation with Him though, social justice *is* a decidedly secondary matter. That is *not* to say that we in the church shouldn't pursue it as an important part of our mission in this world.
The problem is, too often, within the walls of the church and outside of them, we *assume* the Gospel then just want to "move on" to things like social justice. Christians should be involved in social justice, but we never move on from the Gospel. How do we know that the people in our churches understand the Gospel well? (We can almost know for certain that people outside the church don't understand it well!)
Any assumption that I might have had about people in evangelical churches knowing the Gospel well has been shattered. Several months ago, I spoke to a woman at DSC about the membership class. She told me that the most illuminating part of the class for her was the teaching on justification-- because she had never previously heard of the concept! This woman was a professing Christian. I have heard many other professing Christians who are similarly unaware about the Biblical truth of the justification of sinners before a holy God.
Social justice is a clear *implication* of the Gospel, but it is not the Gospel itself. We should teach social justice and practice it, but we dare not confuse it with, or emphasize it over, justification and reconciliation with God. Too many people in evangelical churches don't even understand the latter, and without that, they can't see the Biblical context for, and importance of, the former.
To clarify-- I appreciate and agree with Wright's heart on this issue, and I think he is indeed addressing an imbalance in many evangelical (and Reformed) churches. The only place here where I disagree with him is that I do think that compared the Gospel itself, any *implication* of the Gospel is secondary. Important, yes, sinful to ignore, yes, but decidedly secondary. The only other alternative is to make implications of the Gospel as important as the Gospel itself-- and that is unBiblical, just as is *ignoring* implications of the Gospel.
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