{"id":324,"date":"2006-09-01T07:24:00","date_gmt":"2006-09-01T07:24:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/oxgoad.ca\/2006\/09\/01\/the-social-responsibility-of-christians\/"},"modified":"2006-09-01T07:24:00","modified_gmt":"2006-09-01T07:24:00","slug":"the-social-responsibility-of-christians","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/oxgoad.ca\/2006\/09\/01\/the-social-responsibility-of-christians\/","title":{"rendered":"The Social Responsibility of Christians"},"content":{"rendered":"
We fundies in our insular little blog world have had a bit of discussion regarding social responsibility recently. You can catch some of the discussion at My Two Cents<\/a>, and additional posts on Pensees<\/a> and Paleoevangelical<\/a>.<\/p>\n I think that perhaps the argument we are having among ourselves is somewhat affected by not carefully defining terms. When I say “social action”, does it mean the same thing as Bob Bixby means? I am not altogether sure that it does.<\/p>\n In thinking about this, I did a little skimming in The Fundamentals<\/span> this evening. There might be some oblique references to a social agenda of some kind in the chapters on missions, though they were not explicit enough to warrant a quote. Other than those chapters, I cannot find much reference to the issue in that source. I think I’ll have to do some digging amongst the older fundies writings to see if they address such issues at all.<\/p>\n The next thing I did was to look up the Wikipedia entry<\/a> on the Social Gospel. Here is their definition:<\/p>\n The Social Gospel<\/b> movement is a Protestant Christian<\/a> intellectual movement that was most prominent in the late 19th century<\/a> and early 20th century<\/a>. Social Gospel principles continue to inspire newer movements such as Christians Against Poverty<\/a>. The movement applies Christian<\/a> principles to social problems<\/a>, especially poverty, liquor, drugs, crime, racial tensions, slums, bad hygiene, poor schools, and the danger of war. Theologically, the Social Gospel leaders were overwhelmingly post-millennialist. That is they believed the Second Coming<\/a> could not happen until humankind rid itself of social evils by human effort. For the most part, they rejected pre-millennialist theology (which was predominant in the Southern United States), according to which the Second Coming of Christ was imminent, and Christians should devote their energies to preparing for it rather than addressing the issue of social evils. Their millennial views are very similar to those shared by Christian Reconstructionists, except that Social Gospel leaders are predominently liberal politically and religiously (in contrast to the Reconstructionists, who tend to hold politically liberatarian and religiously fundamentalist views).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n The Canadian Encyclopedia (an effort by a noted Canadian socialist) has this entry<\/a>:<\/p>\n