Creation and the rightness of social involvement
Ours is a society with Christian roots, yet the contemporary church is now almost entirely irrelevant, both intellectually and practically. This is a very great irony! How has it come about? One of the main factors for us, as evangelicals, is what is called pietism.
Pietism was a movement that started at the end of the 17th Century in Germany with the writings of a man called Jacob Spener. He was a lovely person and struggling for true piety. The church had become dead: orthodox in theology, it was always fighting over minutiae. Spener and others were so dissatisfied that they turned to what came to be called pietism. They emphasised the Scriptures; they studied them together; they asked for preaching that was relevant; they changed their lives; they practised good works, and they began the modern missionary movement. John Wesley was deeply influenced by these people. Largely through the influence of Wesley and his Methodists and the migration of evangelical Germans, this theology spread to Britain and to America. Finally, through the missionary venture, it went round the world.
However, pietists opposed an emphasis upon the mind and reason in favour of emotion; hence the phrase `a felt religion'. Of course, we must have both. But in their reaction, they lost the one to gain the other. Furthermore, it was a movement away from public to private involvement. There was still social involvement, such as care for orphans and widows, but at the expense of involvement in society-at-large. And as you go down the 20th Century, so you see the evangelicals, who take the Bible as their base, moving further and further from the public to the private arena.
What can we learn from this great irony of an evangelical church which is largely irrelevant to society? We must once and for all repudiate this pietistic background. It is no good just saying: `We don't like it'. We have to reject it, theologically. That is, we have to go to the Scriptures and show that the pietistic view is false. The idea that spirituality is private and not public, and that spirituality is emotions and faith, independent of mind and intellectual convictions, must all be repudiated.
The answer, in a nutshell, is to look back to Creation for our final rationale of the rightness of social involvement. Why? Because the Scriptures are woven from the material used at the very beginning. We are given a definition of what man is: made in the image of God. He has all those characteristics (not, of course, to the same degree but at a finite level) of the Creator; hence the phrase: `Let us make man in our image, in our likeness'. Creativity, morality, love, language, beauty - isn't that what makes man? And overarching all this, is what? Society. Man was not made to be just an individual, an Adam or an Eve. They were made for a relationship and there was to be an increase, to fill the Earth. So clearly God had in mind, society.
Now this warp and woof principle means that we do not need to find within the Bible, for instance, that beauty is important to God or that it is legitimate for me to make a nice garden with lovely flowers. What use is such a garden? It does not preach the gospel; you cannot eat the flowers. Ah, but beauty is important to God, and therefore to us, because we were made to be like Him and He created a beautiful universe. And so with all aspects of culture.
People sometimes say: `Where in the whole Bible do you find a text that tells you that abortion is wrong? ' Is there anything? Of course there is. You do not need a proof-text to tell you that the individual has supreme, infinite value because it is obvious from the early chapters of Genesis, and because of the utmost seriousness with which God treats murder. Similarly, you do not need proof-texts about hospitals and schools. It flows from the whole warp and woof of Scripture. So we should be seeking to make society something beneficial to man and glorifying to God. Our Reformation forefathers knew that. I would say that there is still far, far too much of the pietist mentality in our churches today.
Ranald Macaulay.
(Further material is available on this and related subjects from: L'Abri Fellowship, The Manor House, Greatham, Liss, Hants, GU33 6HF. This article is an edited excerpt taken from the November 1991 Newsletter of Evangelicals for Life, and used by permission).
