Evangelism, evangelisation, capitalism, imperialism and can we avoid 'isms'?
Gamma Gamaliel
Shipmate
in Purgatory
This thread is a spin-off from the 'Hidden God revealed through the Cross' thread.
The issue of evangelism came up there and, I think, with broad agreement on how not to engage in it.
My thoughts on this one is how we can avoid 'the spirit of the age' as it were when it comes to evangelism, proclamation and indeed the broader evangelisation or Christianisation of society. We all, rightly, jump up and down at capitalist-style marketing models of evangelism and at top-down imperialist or colonial impositions - as per the British Empire, Tsarist Russia and so on.
As creaturely creatures embedded and embodied in our respective cultures and societies, I'm wondering to what extent we can be 'counter-cultural' in our approach to these things?
I've mentioned before that St Aidan and St Cuthbert couldn't have 'Christianised' Northumbria if they hadn't had the backing of the King and his thegns.
Likewise, Protestant missionaries in the South Pacific couldn't have functioned without the backing of tribal leaders.
We Orthodox can wax lyrical about how the Russian monks took up the cause of the Aleuts against the rapacity of the Russian fur traders, but I'm sure it wasn't all as laudable as that.
Life's messy. Societies are messy.
This is something that affects all of us. Christianity is a missionary faith, irrespective of what form of Christianity we inhabit or espouse.
We all operate in a late-capitalist, largely post-Christendom context. How do we engage and evangelise without adopting a sales-driven model or a top-down 'imperialist' one?
The issue of evangelism came up there and, I think, with broad agreement on how not to engage in it.
My thoughts on this one is how we can avoid 'the spirit of the age' as it were when it comes to evangelism, proclamation and indeed the broader evangelisation or Christianisation of society. We all, rightly, jump up and down at capitalist-style marketing models of evangelism and at top-down imperialist or colonial impositions - as per the British Empire, Tsarist Russia and so on.
As creaturely creatures embedded and embodied in our respective cultures and societies, I'm wondering to what extent we can be 'counter-cultural' in our approach to these things?
I've mentioned before that St Aidan and St Cuthbert couldn't have 'Christianised' Northumbria if they hadn't had the backing of the King and his thegns.
Likewise, Protestant missionaries in the South Pacific couldn't have functioned without the backing of tribal leaders.
We Orthodox can wax lyrical about how the Russian monks took up the cause of the Aleuts against the rapacity of the Russian fur traders, but I'm sure it wasn't all as laudable as that.
Life's messy. Societies are messy.
This is something that affects all of us. Christianity is a missionary faith, irrespective of what form of Christianity we inhabit or espouse.
We all operate in a late-capitalist, largely post-Christendom context. How do we engage and evangelise without adopting a sales-driven model or a top-down 'imperialist' one?
Comments
Easier said that done though.
As Gandhi is reputed to have said, 'If it weren't for Christians, I'd be a Christian.'
Which of us is equal to these things?
Racism is not simply irrational hatred of people who look a bit different but the whole institutional structures which promote the ideas.
I posted that movie line as a joke. Apologies.
I'll get me coat.
I added the 'ism' at the end as I'd noticed that evangelism, capitalism and imperialism all share that suffix.
I'm wondering how we can 'do' evangelism without it becoming systemised in a kind of 'packaged' way as it were.
Perhaps we can't.
You mean Thatcher's policies annoy you, or the idea that her policies can be classified as an ideology annoys you?
Start acting like Christians?
Do you actually 'do' evangelism? Because how much stake do you really have in the answer?
Yes.
And can we have a clear gospel message that can manage without Old Testament ideas such as 'The Fall' and God being angry and needing sin to be paid for in some way?
I was thinking of 'we' in general as in Christians of whatever persuasion rather than me as an individual.
But no, I don’t go around door-knocking or giving out tracts or trying to preach or rant in the open-air which is something I used to do back in my full-on charismatic evangelical days.
That doesn't mean I don't think evangelism isn't important nor that I don't have any stake in the issue.
We all do.
Well, Christ himself is the 'Gospel message'.
He is the Gospel.
The Fall is mentioned a fair bit in the NT. It's not only mentioned in Genesis. 'As in Adam all die, so in Christ shall all be made alive.'
1 Corinthians 15 is a good place to start.
I think it's possible to have a 'fear of God' without getting tied up in overly juridical models of the atonement. I've read some Orthodox material today that was pretty scary. We don't go in for the juridical models, and we aren't alone in that either, but that doesn't mean we aren't 'tough on sin, tough on the causes of sin' to borrow and adapt a Blairite phrase (with apologies for doing so).
@Lamb Chopped has reminded us in a recent post that God is pretty scary and she's right to do so.
We must 'work out our salvation with fear and trembling.'
That doesn't mean hell-fire preaching and trying to frighten people into the Kingdom but if we fear God we should treat everyone with respect and love.
'Lord save us and help us and keep us by your grace!'
On this thread?
If it's the post in thinking of elsewhere, the emphasis of that wasn't on the scary stuff either.
As for sin needing to be paid for, I don't think that's in either the Old or the New Testament. The New Testament is about the forgiveness of sins through grace, the defeat of death, and the triumph of love.
Indeed.
Apologies if I've misquoted or misunderstood you. I seem to remember seeing a post of yours about reverence and awe before a holy God.
I wasn't saying you were focusing on hell-fire and damnation.
I must be more diligent to check and cross-reference here, and elsewhere. More haste less speed and so on.
Anyhow... I've woken up in the wee small hours and need to get back to sleep.
'In fear of God and faith and love draw near.'
Your last sentence is a good summary of the gospel.
But as far as 'sin needing to be paid for ' not being in the Bible I must have been subject to some heretical teaching!
And I'm really interested to explore why that might be.
It's an interpretation that became the dominant one in certain evangelical circles and can be traced back through Anselm to some emphases from St Augustine of Hippo - not that either of them would have understood these things in a contemporary evangelical sense.
We've had threads on penal substitutionary atonement several times over the years and atonement models more generally. I won't rehearse any of that here suffice to say that the 'court-room' analogy and the idea of 'satisfaction for sin' became so embedded in certain evangelical circles that it became the dominant model almost to the exclusion of other ways of looking at these things.
I know. I was there.
There are more nuanced iterations. I would argue that John Stott's The Cross of Christ which defends the penal substitutionary model takes a wider and more balanced view than what we might get from some evangelists and pulpiteers.
In my long and drawn out transition to Orthodoxy it took me a good while to slough off this particular 'skin'. I saw it as a betrayal of the Gospel to see the atonement in anything other than penal substitutionary and propitiatory terms - and yes, the term 'propitiation' does appear in the scriptures. We could argue whether 'expiation' or 'propitiation' is the correct way to interpret these things ... but that would take things into a deeper tangent.
From a purely pragmatic point of view that standard hot-gospelling presentation does 'make sense' insofar as it offers a neat sound-bite form of sales-pitch - if I can put it that way without giving offence to those who sincerely adopt and proclaim this model.
That's also its weakness as it can become glib and formulaic.
I wouldn't go so far as to use the 'h' word for this kind of presentation, but I would say it's problematic. I would certainly have no hesitation in applying the term 'heresy' to some of the views on the atonement promulgated by certain extreme health-wealth, prosperity gospel practitioners.
But that's another story.
Upvote for Dolly Parton.
One of the worst things the conservative evangelicals did for me is not only imply they're the only real Christians, but to avoid mention of alternative views even existing. They were masters of "The Bible says [Evangelical interpretation of a bunch of verses]"
I've heard similar remarks about philosophers, and I agree. It's better to claim your baggage than to carry it around unconsciously.
[That said, it's also important to know that the fact that your thinking is influenced by this or that philosophy doesn't mean you've turned that philosophy into the gospel. Kinda like Dolly, I agree that it's important to be open minded and respectful to actual people over ideas, which might be a core idea itself. It's just that we all got ideas.]
Which views and people are you thinking of specifically ? Because I don't think this is actually all that true, unless you are comparing the scholarly exposition of one to the popular in the pews expression of the other.
I'm not saying I agree with Stott necessarily but that he makes a better case than the popular 'in the pews' version.
I'm not sure it any helps any discussion when a view is portrayed via its worst parody.
Whether we agree with him or not I don't think he descends to the rather grotesque way PSA is presented by some of its worst exponents.
I think we are talking past each other to a certain extent.
I was fairly clearly not referring to Stott.
I’m reminded of a line from Steve Taylor’s song “I Want To Be A Clone”:
(The attribution to St. Francis may derive from a line in his Rule of 1221: “No brother may preach contrary to the forms and institutions of the holy church and unless it has been conceded to him by his minister. The minister must beware not to grant this concession to anyone indiscriminately. All the brothers, however, should preach by their actions.”)
Which is more powerful, telling others that God loves them, or simply demonstrating by what I do that I love them, that I love God, and that my love for them flows from my love of God?
Not that I come anywhere close to doing a particularly good job of it.
I once heard a preacher say that there's no point in lending your neighbour your lawn-mower unless you tell them why you are doing so.
'I'm lending you my lawnmower as an expression of my Christian faith ...'
Well, why not simply lend them your lawnmower? You don't need to be a Christian, Jew, Muslim, Hindu, atheist or worshipper of the Flying Jelly Monster to do that.
Indeed, I'd suggest that if there was some kind of agenda behind loaning your neighbour your lawnmower it rather undermines the point.
There may well be an occasion when we can share our faith with our neighbour but setting out to do so 'artificially' or with strings attached isn't the way to go.
I'm not sure that preacher would say the same now, 25 years on.
Cross-posted.
Yes. This.
Some forms of evangelism are rather wordier than others.
Or if you want to consider the gospel in terms of a message, there are many ways to communicate a message that don't involve words. (And that's before you get to Marshall McLuhan's “the medium is the message”.)
I mean, sometimes you've got to use words.
As in 1 John 3:18.