Rene Padilla on evangelism, ethics and the “teeth” of the gospel (The Lausanne Series, Part 1)
Last week I introduced this new series on the Lausanne Movement and its contributions to a better understanding of the intersections of faith, development, justice and peace. As I mentioned in that post, I’m going to begin with a presentation from René Padilla titled “Evangelism and the World.” Padilla is originally from Ecuador, and along with Samuel Escobar (who we’ll turn to next week) he was a pioneer of what became known in Latin America as “integral mission.” He was also a leader of the Latin American Theological Fellowship and has written a number of books including Mission Between the Times: Essays on the Kingdom.
Taking a look at the spectrum of Christian belief and practice at the time, Padilla saw two “extreme positions.” On the one hand, adherents of the social gospel in North America, and proponents of liberation theology throughout Latin America, understood salvation to be limited to the physical, political and social realm. Meanwhile, fundamentalists and evangelicals were reducing salvation to the future destiny of the soul. Both views of the gospel are incomplete, Padilla argued, saying that Christians must embrace “the whole Gospel for the whole man for the whole world.” He continued:
On the one hand, the Gospel cannot be reduced to social, economic and political categories, nor the church to an agency for human improvement... On the other hand, there is no biblical warrant to view the church as an other-worldly community dedicated to the salvation of souls, or to limit its mission to the preaching of man’s reconciliation to God through Jesus Christ.
In this presentation in 1974, I’m sure Padilla ruffled some feathers, though he believed that for the most part he had a sympathetic audience (he was, after all, speaking to a room full of people committed to the gospel and its global implications). Like Dietrich Bonhoeffer a generation or so before him, Padilla issued a devastating critique of superficial evangelism, what Bonhoeffer called “cheap grace.” Padilla argued that evangelism is about more than just getting people to believe a certain set of doctrines to ensure a future reward:
The aim of evangelization is... to lead man, not merely to a subjective experience of the future salvation of his soul, but to a radical reorientation of his life.
This radical reorientation of one’s life, he goes on to say, has unavoidable ethical and social implications. Padilla doesn’t deny the relationship between the gospel and personal holiness (and neither do I!), but knowing his audience, he was zeroing in on a huge blind spot. Evangelicals had all too often concentrated on “microethics” while tending to shy away from anything having to do with “macroethics.” People being shaped by the gospel ought to be concerned about both, he argued.
What’s more, he critiqued the pervasive problems of worldliness in the church, adapting the gospel to the “spirit of the times.” While evangelicals were quick to decry secularization, he said, they often failed to recognize the ways in which their understanding and practice of Christianity was shaped more by the prevailing culture than by the gospel. This isn’t a problem unique to North American Christians by any means, but given American Christianity’s influence around the world, confusing Jesus’s offer of abundant life with the American Dream presents a serious problem for Christians everywhere.
Recognizing our propensity to confuse the gospel with our culture’s understanding of “the good life” should lead us to a process of prayerful discernment, seeking to contextualize without becoming syncretistic, to use a couple of big missiological terms. When we fail to contextualize well, we either withdraw from the world we’re called to love, or we become no different from the world; both represent unfaithfulness to our Lord. In ethical and social terms,
When the church lets itself be squeezed into the mold of the world, it loses the capacity to see and, even more, to denounce, the social evils in its own situation... A Gospel that leaves untouched our life in the world -- in relationship to the world of men as well as in relationship to the world of creation -- is not the Christian Gospel, but culture Christianity, adjusted to the mood of the day. This kind of Gospel has no teeth.
By marching along in the world’s parade, favoring quantity to quality, and embracing technological efficiency in our churches and ministries without question, Padilla argued, we reduced the gospel to a “cheap product” and “turned the strategy for the evangelization of the world into a problem of technology.” Technology and efficiency have their place, he said, but "it is to this absolutization of efficiency, at the expense of the integrity of the Gospel, that I object.”
For those of us who would say we take the Bible seriously, we’d do well to examine our understanding of the gospel to see whether, in light of Scripture, these critiques have merit. What cultural values or norms have we absolutized at the expense of the integrity of the gospel? How have we adjusted the gospel to the mood of the day?
For those of us who are part of the church in the U.S., who can’t simply shake off our culture, we’d do well to ask how we can overcome the temptation to settle for cultural Christianity. At the same time, for those who are part of the church in Africa, Asia, Latin America, the Middle East and elsewhere, the challenge is to be proactive, to avoid creating your own culturally-modified, toothless Christianity.
The gospel is to be incarnated in culture wherever we are, affirming what is good, resisting what is evil, and discerning, through the guidance of the Holy Spirit, where that distinction lies. I’m grateful to René Padilla for helping us begin that process of discernment.
I shared this video last September, but here René Padilla and Samuel Escobar, as Latin American leaders, reflect on the Lausanne Movement's accomplishments and shortcomings. Next week I'll take a look at Escobar's presentation at Lausanne in 1974.
[Photo credit: Latin America Mission]
Al Wolters on worldview in everyday life
In recent weeks I’ve been doing some reading and blogging related to worldview and the role it plays in shaping how we live as Christians in light of what God has done, is doing and will do in history. Michael Goheen really piqued my interest in this when I heard him speak here in Phoenix in early March. He described his theological and spiritual journey, including what he describes as an important shift from a theological system to a theological worldview (my notes from the talk are here). In last Monday’s post, Bryant Myers suggested "we are to see the world as created, fallen, and being redeemed, all at the same time." And then on Thursday, Steven Garber in his book The Fabric of Faithfulness argued that if we are to weave together belief and behavior, it is essential to develop “a worldview sufficient for the challenges of the modern world.”
All these writers and thinkers have more or less the same thing in mind, I think, when they refer to worldview, but it’s also a term that carries all sorts of connotations for different people, so today I want to back up and take a look at what worldview means, drawing on the excellent little book Creation Regained: Biblical Basics for a Reformational Worldview (Eerdmans). It was originally written in 1985 by Al Wolters, and then re-released twenty years later, with an afterword by Michael Goheen himself (there’s a lot of overlap between that afterword and what he had to say in his talk).
Wolters defines worldview as “the comprehensive framework of one’s basic beliefs about things,” a definition he then breaks down bit by bit (I won't spell it out here, but each word is carefully chosen).
Like the others I referred to earlier, Wolters believes that a biblical worldview is best understood by the basic scriptural categories of creation, fall and redemption. He also contends that our worldview is to inform all of life; the Bible leaves no room for compartmentalizing certain parts of life into the mutually exclusive categories of sacred (church, spiritual practices, Bible study, etc) and secular (economics, politics, technology, etc). In other words,
The plea being made here for a biblical worldview is simply an appeal to the believer to take the Bible and its teaching seriously for the totality of our civilization right now and not to relegate it to some optional area called “religion.”
All of that is established in the first chapter, and then chapters two, three and four have to do with spelling out a fuller, deeper understanding of creation, fall and redemption, respectively. I hope you’ll read the book so you can see everything he has to say about the nuances of each of those three, but the biggest contribution Creation Regained makes is the chapter on discerning the difference between “structure” and “direction.” The terms may be confusing at first, but understood properly, the implications of that distinction are huge for our everyday lives.
I’ll try to sum it up in a paragraph. First, all things are created good (their “structure” is good), but all created things have been deformed by the Fall and sin (that is, they have been “misdirected”). As Christians, too often we recognize the directional distortion of something and discard it as sinful, but we fail to affirm its structural goodness, and miss the opportunity to see how, as a structurally good but misdirected part of creation, it can be redirected for purposes that please God and, in turn, serve the common good. With this distinction in mind, we can truly be “reformers” rather than either seeking to obliterate what’s tainted by sin on the one hand, or by fatalistically accepting the sin-tainted status quo on the other. In other words, distinguishing between structure and direction gives us an alternative to both “revolution” and “quietistic conservatism,” two approaches that leave much to be desired:
Our focus on structure rejects a sympathy for revolution, and our focus on direction condemns a quietistic conservatism... In sum we may say that whereas consecration leaves things internally untouched, and revolution annihilates things, reformation renews and sanctifies them. God calls us to cleanse and reform all the sectors of our lives.
That goes for our personal lives and our interpersonal relationships, but it also has huge implications for our life as citizens and as active participants in political, economic, and other systems. So, for an example applicable to the readers of this blog, when we’re faced with an ethical dilemma like alleged abuses of workers on the other side of the world tied to the practices of a corporation which we support through our purchases, we're presented with an alternative to the two predictable and insufficient responses. It doesn’t do to ignore the abuses as inevitable, “necessary evils” in our complicated, interconnected world. And it doesn’t do to decry the corporation for being a corporation and part of the free market system. Rather, we seek to discern structure and direction. What about the corporation is structurally a good part of creation? What about the corporation has been misdirected by sin? And what might we as “reformers” (or what Gabe Lyons calls “restorers”) do to redirect and reform that corporation so that what is good about it can continue, and so that it can contribute to the flourishing of all, including those on the other end of the market equation?
That’s a whole new way of seeing the world, it seems to me, and a whole new way of living. It’s not cynical and detached, but it’s not playing to either side of the culture wars, either. It is, however, rooted in the big narrative arc of Scripture -- creation, fall, redemption -- which is also the narrative arc of history. It’s brimming with promise, isn’t it? It’s realistic and it’s hopeful. It has both roots and wings.
As Wolters says clearly, developing this sort of a worldview -- learning to see the world and our lives through this kind of a biblical lens -- doesn’t answer every question and solve every problem we will encounter. In community with other believers and with the guidance of the Holy Spirit we’re given the task of discerning the implications of biblical teaching for all these areas of life. We won't do it perfectly all the time, but we can learn and grow. Most of all, developing a biblical worldview gives us a framework for understanding our lives in the world, and it gives us the right questions to ask:
To approach the phenomena of the world in terms of structure and direction is to look at reality through the corrective lens of Scripture, which everywhere speaks of a good creation and the drama of its reclamation by the Creator in Jesus Christ.
Do you find the themes of creation, fall and redemption -- as well as the distinction between structure and direction -- helpful for navigating the challenges of everyday life? Is there any part of this “worldview” you’d call into question?
Created, fallen, being redeemed
These days I'm re-reading Walking with the Poor: Principles and Practices of Transformational Development (Orbis) by Bryant Myers. I first read it a few years ago during grad school, and am now reading the new "revised and expanded edition" for an upcoming magazine review. It's basically the Bible for transformational development, not counting the actual Bible itself.
I'll have more to say about it soon, but for now I thought I'd share a particularly poignant paragraph from Walter Wink, who is quoted in the theology chapter, supporting Myers' conviction that "we are to see the world as created, fallen, and being redeemed, all at the same time." Here's Wink:
God at one and the same time upholds a political or economic system, since some such system is required to support human life; condemns that system insofar as it is destructive to full human actualization; and presses for its transformation into a more human order. Conservatives stress the first, revolutionaries the second, reformers the third. The Christian is expected to hold together all three.
That comes from Wink's Engaging the Powers: Discernment and Resistance in a World of Domination (I've yet to read that one, but I found his little book Jesus and Nonviolence: A Third Way insightful and helpful when I read it and blogged about it last summer).
Because the world is created by God, is broken because of the fall, and is being redeemed through Jesus Christ, it's important for development practitioners -- and for all of us -- to keep that three-fold creation-fall-redemption theme in mind as we do our work in the world.
It's easy to just be a conservative or a revolutionary or a reformer; it's tough to discern the proper place of each. But each impulse, each posture, has its place, and at times simultaneously. God help us to hold the three together.
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