The Social Creed of 1932, Federal
Council of Churches: “We may legitimately expect that the
collective mind of the nation will be equal to the intellectual
and administrative tasks involved, especially under the stress of
critical social conditions, if the moral qualities required are in
sufficient power. What our people lack is neither material resources nor
technical skills – these we have in abundance – but a dedication to
the common good, a courage and an unselfishness greater than
are now manifest in American life. The tasks are beyond us and their
accomplishment will be indefinitely delayed or frustrated, unless there
be a nationwide
spiritual awakening which has social
gains.
"Our supreme social need is spiritual awakening. In our extremity
arising out of harrowing social conditions throughout the world,
we therefore turn anew to Christ; for the faith of great endeavour, for
an overwhelming disclosure of God in the life of humanity, for the
dedication of innumerable individuals
to the creation of a more Christian social order, and for the
assurance that what needs to be done, with God’s help can be done.”
[Federal Council Bulletin
16, No. 1 (January 1933), New York, 9. Emphases added. Cited in
Building the Kingdom of God on Earth, Martin Erdmann (Wipf & Stock,
2005), p. 182]
E. Stanley Jones, Federal Council of Churches:
“We believe that we see the goal and we believe that men can get hold of
that power to move on to that goal. That
goal is the Kingdom of God on earth. The Kingdom of God is a new
order standing at the door of the lower order. The higher order, founded
on love, justice, goodwill, brotherhood and redemption, stands
confronting this lower order founded on selfishness, exploitation,
unbrotherliness, with its resultant clash and conclusions… it [the
higher order] will finally replace this lower order, for it is God’s
order. We shall present Christ as the open door to that era. We shall
unfold the possibilities of that era both within the individual and the
collective will."
[Federal Council Bulletin 19, No. 8 (October 1936), New York, 5.
Emphases added. Cited in Erdmann, ibid, p. 183)
The leaders of the original Social Gospel movement realized that several
things were important to pull off the “building the kingdom of God on earth”
scam. They recognized that they needed to create a sense of corporate guilt
– a collective sense of responsibility for the ills of mankind. This often
had a strong emotive component designed to tug at heart strings. They also
borrowed from the politico-socio-psycho techniques of collectivism,
substituting a group conscience for individual conviction. As much as it was
important to turn on the heart, it was also equally necessary to turn off
the brain. Serious thinking was substituted by slogans, formulas and social
action. Raising penetrating questions about the nature of this collective
guilt and/or the proposed solutions was viewed with suspicion – it was seen
as a hallmark of selfishness and separateness. Redemption was accomplished
by fixing the sins of Society.
Writing about
Walter Rauschenbusch, considered by many to be the father of
the Social Gospel movement, one historian remarked:
“In writing his last book [A Theology for The Social Gospel in 1917, ed.]
Professor Rauschenbusch made a final effort to commit Christians to the
social gospel.… Yet the
social gospel… was not…secure…. Rauschenbusch,
however, was no more of an optimist than he was a millenarian; nor was
he even remotely a pessimist. Rather he was a man of sufficient faith to
have hope – faith in the religious power of man, hope for his social redemption. What was needed, he declared, was a
theology
which would advance beyond the old doctrine of the sin of Adam’s
fall and of individual men to encourage a recognition of and repentance for the sins of society.”
[emphasis added]
CFR leader John Foster Dulles argued in his book
War, Peace and Change
(1939) that there was a need to overcome man’s basic human selfishness. His
proposed solution was sociological, not theological. He suggested an ethical
transformation that could take place on the
small-group level that would
emphasize interrelatedness and interdependence. He believed this process
would eventually destroy isolationism and extreme nationalism and create an
international mindset. According to historian and theologian Dr. Erdmann,
who chronicled the role of the
Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) in setting
up the original Social Gospel movement,
John Foster Dulles had observed how
easily humans could be psychologically manipulated by groups into
receptivity to new ethical solutions:
“In only a small segment of our lives are our acts dictated by
reason. In
the main we act unthinkingly under the impulses of emotional and physical
desires or in accordance with tradition or the customs of the social group
of which we happen to form a part.” (War, Peace and Change, p. 52, cited in
Erdmann, Building the Kingdom of God on Earth, p. 202
[emphasis added]
How to Enhance Collective Blame
The current AIDS push by Rick Warren, through the vehicle of his Global P.E.A.C.E. Plan is an example of the New Social Gospel. It includes the same
ingredients as the original Social Gospel movement – corporate blame,
collective guilt, communal responsibility and redemption via social action.
And it is built upon an updated, more sophisticated edifice of small group
dynamics. What follows are some key examples of how this process works:
1. TAKE THE TEST: To break down natural barriers of inhibitions, everyone is
being asked to take an HIV/AIDS test. In fact, it may be a “rite of passage”
– a requirement before any volunteer work can begin. This is a cognitive
dissonance-producing, “guilty until proven innocent” exercise which may
trouble faithful and pure Christians. But one of its purposes is so that
everyone can personally experience the collective shame and guilt.
“Rick Warren welcomes Obama, Brownback to Saddleback’s AIDS summit" By Kelli
Cottrell, 12/4/06
“Kay Warren explained the steps that churches and other organizations can
take to crawl, walk and run in their ministry to HIV victims.
“A crawl step would be to send cards to HIV patients, she explained. A
walk
step would be to start an HIV/AIDS support group and a run step would be to
have testing on your campus or go as a group together and take the test.
“’When the church is involved, we have hope,’ Kay Warren said. ‘We grieve
for those who have died, but we have hope.’”
[emphasis added]
2. EMPHASIZE COMPASSION: A kinder-gentler aura is produced by propping up
sweet-sounding women like Kay Warren, or in the case of the recent White
House Summit On Malaria, Laura Bush. Emphasizing compassion also acts as a
decoy, helping to ensure that nobody asks the hard questions about money
streams, power structures, partnerships, hidden agendas, etc. An interview
with the Rick and Kay Warren from Family Life Today exemplifies this tactic:
“Seeing the AIDS Crisis Through God's Eyes,”
12/07/06
“Kay: Oh, at the International AIDS Conference in Toronto this year, the
closing session had a very dynamic speaker who went through and listed all
the different takeaways of this five-day conference, and as he was listing
them, people were standing up and cheering and shouting as their different
ones that they really related to, and it was interesting to me – it caught
my attention really early on, is he had these 15 things he was listing. So I
started keeping score, if you will, on my piece of paper, an applause meter.
I wanted to see what people were reacting to the most enthusiastically.
“And so issues about women and gender violence and how that was affecting
the AIDS pandemic – people were standing up and cheering, and women having
rights over their bodies, people standing up and cheering, and then the next
one of the points was, "and children with HIV," and the applause kind of got
to a medium level, and he talked about orphans that were left abandoned and
alone, and there was silence in the room – silence.
“Rick: Nobody clapped.
“Kay: Nobody clapped. And then he moved on to other things, and the applause
built again to this thunderous applause at the end where he again spoke
about women.
“And my friend and I who were there, looked at each other. She broke into
tears, and I sat there with my mouth open, stunned, and we just looked at
each other and said, ‘They don't care. They don't care. How can they not
care?’
“It's shocking, it's stunning, when children and orphans are on your radar
screen. They truly are the most vulnerable – the most vulnerable person on
the planet – it is a girl child. Children, as a class, are the most
vulnerable, and then you move it to girl children – they are the most
vulnerable to abuse, to exploitation, and to HIV.
“Dennis: And
the thing that excites me about what you two are doing is – and we're
doing the same thing – is you're calling the church to step up and do
something that is so clear biblically.”
[emphasis added]
3. CREATE A FALSE DICHOTOMY: In the quote below one can read that
“mission-minded disciples” are becoming “world-class Christians.” Any
opposition to this is portrayed as “selfishness.” This approach is virtually
a re-hash of the Social Gospel tactics described in the quotes at the
beginning of today’s post.
"Purpose Driven in Rwanda: Rick Warren’s sweeping plan to defeat poverty” by
Timothy C. Morgan in Kigali, Rwanda 09/23/05
“Warren hopes to enlist 1 billion individuals through their congregations
and small groups for mission projects. This mobilization of church and
small-group members will walk them through three steps: personal PEACE,
local PEACE, and global PEACE.…
“Once an individual church adopts the Purpose Driven model, there are many
more moves to make. They describe those steps as moving around a baseball
diamond. The goal is mission-minded disciples. Warren says, ‘You can't get
the church to jump from total selfishness, where they want all the sermons
about 'How do I avoid stress,' to caring about Angola.’
“’How do you
get them to become a world-class Christian?’”
[emphasis added]
4. EMPHASIZE THE COLLECTIVE: Peter Drucker, Rick Warren’s business-guru
mentor, discussed his 3-legged stool concept of Society at a Peter F.
Drucker Foundation for Non-Profit Management conference held in 2000. In
Drucker’s model, “separateness” is the sin which must be repented of for the
sake of community and partnerships.
“WISDOM FROM PETER DRUCKER...his four greatest lessons and going beyond the
walls,” EXPLORER...field notes for the emerging church,
Leadership Network,
No. 23, 11/6/06
"Another thing I heard is a way to talk to
church people. They still see themselves as a separate island, and so do the universities. Only now are
they beginning to say, 'We are a part of the
community.' We are all elements
of society beyond the walls. We are doing the social job and everyone has a
stake...the government and the individual. We need
partnerships and they are
a two way street.’
"The last thing was nothing new but also overwhelming. Despite the diversity
of values and purpose, we have something in common. The nonprofit is not
what we have in common, but that we lead with community and that is
foundational to society. This is different from ten years ago and accepted
not only on the nonprofit side but the profit side as well."
[emphasis added]
5. RESTRUCTURE THE CHURCH: The early Social Gospel proponents had strong
ties with Communism and Socialism and they emphasized restructuring Society
into a collective model (see previous post). The New Social Gospel
proponents also borrow from the communist cell model, revamping it into
modern small groups. But the purposes remain the same. The following article
is very illuminating on this topic.
“The Cellular Church: Letter From Saddleback: How Rick Warren built his
ministry,” by Malcolm Gladwell, New Yorker,
9/12/05
“Churches, like any large voluntary organization, have at their core a
contradiction. In order to attract newcomers, they must have low barriers to
entry. They must be unintimidating, friendly, and compatible with the
culture they are a part of. In order to retain their membership, however,
they need to have an identity distinct from that culture. They need to give
their followers a sense of community—and community, exclusivity, a distinct
identity are all, inevitably, casualties of growth.
"As an economist would
say, the bigger an organization becomes, the greater a free-rider problem it
has. If I go to a church with five hundred members, in a magnificent
cathedral, with spectacular services and music, why should I volunteer or
donate any substantial share of my money? What kind of peer pressure is
there in a congregation that large? If the barriers to entry become too
low—and the ties among members become increasingly tenuous—then a church as
it grows bigger becomes weaker.
“One solution to the problem is simply not to grow, and, historically,
churches have sacrificed size for community. But there is another approach:
to create a church out of a network of lots of little church
cells—exclusive, tightly knit groups of six or seven who meet in one
another's homes during the week to worship and pray. The small group as an
instrument of community is initially how Communism spread, and in the
postwar years Alcoholics Anonymous and its twelve-step progeny perfected the
small-group technique. The small group did not have a designated leader who
stood at the front of the room. Members sat in a circle. The focus was on
discussion and interaction—not one person teaching and the others
listening—and the remarkable thing about these groups was their power. An
alcoholic could lose his job and his family, he could be hospitalized, he
could be warned by half a dozen doctors—and go on drinking. But put him in a
room of his peers once a week—make him share the burdens of others and have
his burdens shared by others—and he could do something that once seemed
impossible.
“When churches—in particular, the megachurches that became the engine of the
evangelical movement, in the nineteen-seventies and eighties—began to adopt
the cellular model, they found out the same thing. The small group was an
extraordinary vehicle of commitment. It was personal and flexible. It cost
nothing. It was convenient, and every worshipper was able to find a small
group that precisely matched his or her interests. Today, at least forty
million Americans are in a religiously based small group, and the growing
ranks of small-group membership have caused a profound shift in the nature
of the American religious experience.…
“In the past twenty years, as the enthusiasm for publicly supported welfare
has waned, churches have quietly and steadily stepped in to fill the gaps.
And who are the churchgoers donating all that time and money? People in
small groups. Membership in a small group is a better predictor of whether
people volunteer or give money than how often they attend church, whether
they pray, whether they've had a deep religious experience, or whether they
were raised in a Christian home. Social action is not a consequence of
belief, in other words. I don't give because I believe in religious charity.
I give because I belong to a social structure that enforces an ethic of
giving.
"‘Small groups are networks,’ the Princeton sociologist Robert Wuthnow, who has studied the phenomenon closely, says. ‘They create bonds
among people. Expose people to needs, provide opportunities for
volunteering, and put people in harm's way of being asked to volunteer.
That's not to say that being there for worship is not important. But, even
in earlier research, I was finding that if people say all the right things
about being a believer but aren't involved in some kind of physical social
setting that generates interaction, they are just not as likely to
volunteer.’ [emphasis added]
The Truth:
The Social Gospel always seeks to
replace the biblical Gospel message. It de-emphasizes God’s Word. And,
as has been shown in the past three posts, the Social Gospel has an
insidious agenda that runs contrary to biblical Christianity.
When you oppose the Social Gospel you will be attacked with the “false
dichotomy” tactic for supposedly lacking compassion or charity. You will
be told that you are selfish.
But true Christian acts of charity and compassion are always accompanied
by the saving Gospel message. And the Gospel message is a proclamation
of liberty from sin and guilt. It gives light to those in spiritual
darkness.
“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to
preach the gospel to the poor; he hath sent me to heal the
brokenhearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of
sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised.” (Luke
4:18)
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