Glenn Beck Urges Listeners to Leave Churches That Preach Social Justice -- Politics Daily
Is this guy for real? What a blow-hard. Giving people your opinion on what church to go to? This guy has no boundaries.
While Jesus is primarily brings a personal, individual slant on Christianity (abba, father) to say that group/social justice is not a part of New Testament theology is ridiculous.
James's lessons about widows and orphans speak volumes about this. Beck must be a convoluted hermeneutic to not see that these are responses in and to communities, not just individuals. Perhaps they are not the state, but they absolutely are not limited to individual responsibilities. We are called a Body, a Temple, a Vineyard, deeply connected to the Triune Love of Father, Son and Holy Spirit. One may not love in isolation.
He seems to be fixated on personal salvation,and while I can agree that we are to be judged (and saved) individually, there is much more to the work of God in the world than individual salvation.
Of course Beck is not the first (or last) to accuse those of us interested in the church’s mission of social justice of “temporal messianism,” but that is just not the case. I suffer no illusions of bringing to the Earth a messianic perfection to replace Heaven, but let us not forget that Christ taught us to pray that God’s will might be done ON EARTH as it is in Heaven. We are fallen and will not be perfect before we are in His presence, yet he has given to us the ministry of reconciliation, to reconcile the entire earth to Him, as His ambassadors. Christ adopted Isaiah’s prophetic purpose in Luke 4, and Paul and James reflected it.
This is the great idea of “already, but not yet,” living in the knowledge of Christ’s ultimate victory over death and sin but not yet experiencing it. Christ has done the work, the eschaton work, the salvific work for the world, yet we remain in a fallen world, fallen ourselves and awaiting the ultimate redemption. In this moment, He calls us His own ambassadors to reconcile the world to God. We live in a great tension of knowing of the perfection that will come, having faith in its imminence, by God, yet bearing the impossibility of its present moment while being called to participate with God in bringing it to bear.
We are not merely called to a spiritual hoping or spiritual transcendence. To do so leads either to a Gnostic nihilism or to a great rejection of GodÂ’s very creation, His incarnation. Jesus came in the flesh, calls us to participate with bread and wine and water, to live right now, right here, as His kingdom. We are called to a spiritual hope AND a physical manifestation of what He has prepared for us to do now. These are not works for our salvation, but works for His glory.
