In Search of Kingdom Living

I’m starting my habit of book reviews again. Here we go. 

A Faulty Order: Retreating Battle Camps and Homogeneous Units

Here’s how chapter 1 begins for this book:

 What did the late Jerry Falwell and his liberal counterparts have in common? At least on the religious and cultural surface, the Bible-believing, soul-saving, old-world, moral-mandating Rev. Falwell and his liberal counterparts were worlds apart. However, both used power politics to build moral utopias. (p. 13)

In this chapter, the author (Metzger) traces “the historical development of the fundamentalist-evangelical movement in America and shed light on the movement’s current direction and focus, including a discussion of how evangelical social action fares today in the consumer age and what that entails negatively for race and class divisions” (p. 14).

Metzger asserts that fundamentalist Christianity began in the nineteenth century that included assorted issues such as theological modernism and Darwinian science. He believes the three themes in this fundamentalism that lead to evangelicalism’s loss of prominence in early/middle twentieth century is the following: privatization of spirituality, dissolution of public faith, loss of estensive social conscience.

The themes of Christian fundamentalism led to certain issues.

First, the seminary is seen as a cemetery, a place of anti-intellectualism. A place where ‘a love for Christ and a passion for the simple gospel message and ministry’. This mindset continues to prevail in some parts of Western Christianity today.

Second, consider the fundamentalism forefather, Dwight Moody. “Moody’s revivalist orientation also had an impact on the broader evangelical culture concerning issues of social justice. To Moody, social activism, like theological debate, threatened to distract from his primary concern for evangelism” (p. 19). Moody didn’t lack compassion, he just believed that evangelism was most effective way to address social concerns. Metzger refers to this attitude as ‘trickle-down social ethics’ – that by changing hearts, Christians will eventually be able to change the world ‘one life at a time’.

Third, there was a reaction against the social gospel movement and a growing dominance of dispensational premillennialism “that often promotes a pessimistic view of engaging culture because it anticipates a rapture of the church prior to the Great Tribulation destined to fall upon the earth” (p. 24).

Therefore, as important and as positive as Moody’s work was in the arena of evangelism and revival, those efforts did not go far enough, and they may even have inadvertently assisted in creating a vacuum within which a suspect form of the gospel could flourish. How? The rejection of the gospel as social is not just a repudiation of the social gospel; the rejection of the gospel’s implications for combating race and class divisions nurtures social niches and fosters a “social-club” gospel. (p. 25-26)

I resonated with this brief historical outline, and I found it fascinating how some of the issues that I struggle with in the consumer church can be easily deconstructed into its historical significance.

Along with my chapter-by-chapter review (this entry seemed more like a recap), here are two other people with their reviews.

Darryl Dash – Seeing the World as a Sinking Ship

Scot McKnight – Chapter 1 Review