To Do or Not to Do is Not the Question

We’ve all heard the venerable proverb “actions speak louder than words.” It’s often attributed to Abraham Lincoln who said those exact words in 1856.  But the general sense of this phrase has shown up in one form or another throughout history.

John Pym, the English parliamentarian said in 1628 “A word spoken in season is like an Apple of Gold set in Pictures of Silver,’ and actions are more precious than words.”  In 1698, Thomas Manton, in his Book of Sermons said “So they would give him Glory, praise him with their Lips, and honour him with their Lives. They would make that their Work and Scope, that this may be the real Language of their Hearts and Actions, which speak much louder than Words.”

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in his tale of Kavanagh, a story about romance set in the mid-1800s, added an interesting twist to this verity when he said “for we judge ourselves by what we feel capable of doing, while others judge us by what we have already done.” Longfellow’s observation about the human condition, now slightly changed, has endured through the ages.  We judge ourselves by our intentions, but we judge others by what they do.   

A Biblical Worldview Cares About Outcomes

Our speech discloses the state of our heart for “out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh.”

Our behavior and outward attitudes reveal the transforming work of the Spirit for we are judged by our fruit, not our intentions: “Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them.”

Our deeds display the reality of our faith for “faith without deeds is dead.”

Our actions announce the truthfulness of our love because “Suppose a brother or a sister is without clothes and daily food. If one of you says to them, “Go in peace; keep warm and well fed,” but does nothing about their physical needs, what good is it?”

Our “doings” show off the depth of our faith since “Anyone who listens to the word but does not do what it says is like someone who looks at his face in a mirror and, after looking at himself, goes away and immediately forgets what he looks like.”

Even Jesus’ two great apologetics were based upon actions, not the force of a logical argument. How were people to know the reality of His divinity?  By the outward witness of love and unity from His followers. 

A biblical worldview of racial injustice must care about outcomes

Four questions. First, given the biblical emphasis on outcomes, why is racial reconciliation so difficult?  First, and a big part of the answer – as I addressed in my last post – is the triumph of culture over faith. I wrote: “When people isolate within their tribes and are blind to their biases, uninterested in other people’s stories, preferring instead to sustain a historical and pernicious cultural narrative, they no longer “see” racial injustice.” And if you can’t “see” it, you don’t think any action is needed. 

Second, given the biblical emphasis on outcomes, shouldn’t our posture be precautionary towards love, where restorative action takes precedent over presuppositional beliefs? The Good Samaritan didn’t know the backstory to the injured man.  He could have assumed the man’s injury stemmed from poor choices and just walked away like the others.  But the Samaritan wasn’t interested in assessing blame, just achieving an outcome in accordance with his faith. 

Third, given the biblical emphasis on outcomes, how do we handle scripture’s call for justice to the “oppressed?”  When Isaiah says to “Seek justice. Defend the oppressed. Take up the cause of the fatherless; plead the case of the widow,” doesn’t that mean to tangibly take up the “cause,” plead the “case,” and defend the oppressor?

Fourth, given the history of the church as an enabler of racial injustice, mustn’t the outcome of true repentance include restitution to the injured party?  I’m reminded what Steve Pecota, my former pastor, once wrote “there can be no reconciliation without forgiveness and forgiveness requires repentance.”

Repentance starts with a reckoning, by acknowledging how we have “missed the mark.” It becomes outwardly manifested through a biblical principle of restitution, by making amends to the offended party. Attempts at racial reconciliation without the complete package of forgiveness, reckoning, and restitution will leave our nation’s sepsis of division unresolved – like sewing up a wound without first cleaning out the filth. 

Jesus taught reconciliation as conditional upon agreement, with the thumb on the scale given to the aggrieved party and the burden resting on the offender. White Christians who commend racial reconciliation while stridently opposing black perspectives aren’t seeking agreement in good faith.

Wouldn’t a biblical worldview suggest the very opposite?  Wouldn’t it start with a repentant spirit while leaning into the offended party?  Carefully listening in a spirit of humility ever ready to accommodate, where the coin flip under uncertainty goes towards the historically marginalized? And then ensuring that the fruits of the spirit characterize one’s speech, behavior, attitudes, deeds, actions, and doings in these interactions. 

Impediments to Biblical Worldview: A Magical Gospel

Many Christians believe that if we can just get folks saved, we’ve done our job.  People become good people through a miraculous transformation and then go to heaven. As the quartet song I sang in my youth goes “just a little talk with Jesus makes it right.”

Billy Graham rejected a magical gospel where problems are solved and troubles go away by people getting “saved.”  In his experience, converted hearts didn’t automatically yield converted actions.  He rejected the notion that if there was racial division, then get people just needed to get saved.  Or if there was marital strife and abuse, getting born again would fix it all.

Although many of Graham’s core beliefs remained unchanged over the course of his life, many others shifted as he grew in faith and understanding.  Our emphasis, he believed, should be on spiritual fruit: “the one badge of Christian discipleship is not orthodoxy but love.”  Rich Warren put it this way: “The point of life is learning to love – God and people: life minus love equals zero.”

“Learning to love” is a life-long commitment which scripture calls discipleship, my faith tradition calls sanctification, and theologians call spiritual formation. Such spiritual formation is the process of being conformed to the image of Jesus Christ for the glory of God and for the sake of others. It involves a daily transformation so that we, in the words of Wesley, are “habitually filled with the love of God and neighbor…having the mind of Christ and walking as he walked.”

Such spiritually formed people, a la Graham, are those who manifest Godly affections through both belief and action.  Truth is to be done as well as believed.  They see love as a verb, measured through actions assessed by the other.  Through that, they see racial reconciliation as a mandate of the gospel, measured by outcomes rather than intentions, and assessed by those historically disadvantaged rather than themselves.

Impediments to a Biblical Worldview: Faulty Theology and Church History

Here’s an excerpt from a recent Twitter thread from Dr. Anthony Bradley, a professor at Kings College, who provides an insightful response to a fellow pastor promoting a hyperbolic and nostalgic view of the gospel and church history:

“Evangelicals need to stop teaching their children bad history. Stop lying to them about the role of regenerated Christians in owning slaves, defending slavery, & defending and promoting Jim Crow…Tell them the truth: regeneration will not end racism in America. People not being racist ends racism whether they are Christians or not.

For all of US history, many white Christians have been regenerate and racist. Only unbiblical theology can’t concede that historical fact. This is the problem with the tautology that “the gospel will make everything alright” & that if people just “believed the gospel” issues like race would disappear. That’s not how the gospel works. Ex: Lots people who believe the gospel are terrible & abusive spouses and parents.

“The gospel” is not magic pixie dust that we can through on human action & make things go away. The noetic effects of sin don’t disappear b/c of the gospel. You can be regenerated & lead the KKK or run an apologetics ministry, owning massage parlors & sexually assaulting women…

The reason conservative evangelicals struggle so much with race & church history is that they’ve been fed bad systematic theology & church history.  Proof texting Bible verses doesn’t mean that you’re stringing those verses together properly…the sidelining of dogmatics, systematics, and biblical theology is sabotaging Christian ethics as the intersection of culture and public policy.”

Impediments to a Biblical Worldview: An Individualistic, Gospel

Dallas Willard, in his book, The Divine Conspiracy, laments how “the Christian message is thought to be essentially concerned only with how to deal with sin: with wrongdoing or wrong-being and its effects.  This reduces the Good News to a “gospel of sin management.” It places us at the center of gospel rather than God’s story, where “The aim of God in history is the creation of an all-inclusive community of loving persons, with Himself included in that community as its prime sustainer and most glorious inhabitant.”

Soong-Chan Rah explains how a truncated, sin management focused gospel stems from an alliance between faith and culture.  “The cultural captivity of the church has meant that the church is more likely to reflect the individualism of Western philosophy than the value of community found in Scripture. The individualistic philosophy that has shaped Western society, and consequently shaped the American church, reduces Christian faith to a personal, private and individual faith.”

This rejection of biblical community in favor of Western individualism helps erode the bonds between sisters and brothers in Christ. Pleas by Christians of color about the continuing legacy of racism fall on deaf ears because of this individualistic perspective: the only sins that matter are personal ones and those have been forgiven.  Hence they can neither “see” the reality of racism or accept evidentiary claims of systemic racial injustice because of presuppositional filters formed by culture.

The choice before the church in every age is always: will our identity be shaped by Scripture or by our culture.  By the biblical story or the cultural story? As Lesslie Newbigin, the famed missiologist, once said “the only hermeneutic of the gospel, is a congregation of men and women who believe it and live by it.”

Impediments to a Biblical Worldview: A Shallow Gospel

Promise Keepers swept through Christian spaces in the 1990s, calling men to honor Christ, build strong families, and live godly lives. McCartney included racial reconciliation as the sixth promise of a Promise Keeper: “committed to reach beyond any racial and denominational barriers to demonstrate the power of biblical unity.” McCartney believed “there is a spirit of white racial superiority that has oppressed, suffocated and strangled men and women of color.” His commitment to end racism stemmed from obedience as early on he felt God saying “you can fill that stadium, but if men of other races aren’t there, I won’t be there either.”

The Promise Keepers pathway to racial reconciliation relied upon a revival of individuals. Speakers denounced the sin of racism; white men were challenged to repent and then reach out cross racially and ask for forgiveness.  Racial reform would occur indirectly through redeemed men, not through directive action.  Human nature was the problem and repentance, personal responsibility, and friendship formed the solution. Walls must be broken though and cross-racial relationships established for things to change. 

In the three years of its heyday, men filled stadium after stadium from the west to east coasts with enthusiasm.  By 2000, however, 10 years after its start, its decline was in full swing.  McCarney saw the drop as a backlash for focusing on racial reconciliation rather than “the gospel.” The magnitude of the push back gave him a “first glimpse of the seething giant of racism lurking within the Christian church.” It grieved him that when speaking in a church, he typically encountered “wild enthusiasm while I was being introduced, followed by a morgue like chill as I stepped away from the microphone.”

C.S. Lewis once said “We make men without chests and expect from them virtue and enterprise.” Lewis wasn’t talking about any so-called “manly” attributes.   He was talking about the heart, warning about emotions which haven’t been anchored to immutable values through disciplined practice.

Lewis attributed this condition to modern society, but it could also be said of those who have embraced a shallow gospel consisting of saying the right words without the deep roots of discipleship. As Promise Keepers found, such a revival-centered, emotionally oriented, gospel without the much-needed anchoring of spiritual formation just wasn’t enough to defeat the power of culture and create men who embraced true racial harmony. 

Penultimate Thoughts

We revere Wilberforce for his dogged perseverance in seeking laws to abolish slavery.  We laud Martin Luther King today for his non-violent pursuit for rectifying a century of racial injustice in “the home of the free.”  Their sacrifice is now part of story about the culture changing force of the gospel. 

Yet most white evangelicals objected to King’s civil rights campaign on both political and theological grounds.  Their individualistic gospel hermeneutic saw his focus on justice as a denial of the sufficiency of the gospel. “The problem was not skin but sin,” they said.  America’s race problem was a grace problem and “Christ was the cure.”  Just preach the gospel and racial issues will vanish over time. 

Today it’s the same book with different bookmarks.  Racial inequities persist despite nearly 60 years of colorblind” laws.  Patterns of discrimination persist despite the appearance of race-blind policies.  These inequities and patterns are systematic, crossing multiple areas of life, 

Still much of the white evangelical church, like the past, refuse to “see” these inequities, entrapped in a culture that keeps them isolated, blind, and uninterested in knowing the truth.  Others “see” the differences but choose instead to “pass by,” constrained by gospel focused on sin and uninterested in outcomes. 

A Full Gospel

There’s an old saying that when all you have is a hammer, then everything becomes a nail.  A theology predominantly focused on individuals going to heaven yields a one-dimension view of Christianity that is overly privatized, horizontally limited, spiritually anemic, and operationally compartmentalized.  

But the plan of salvation and the gospel are not the same thing.  One gets you into heaven, the other joins God in the renewal of all things.  In NT Wright’s language, Jesus came to earth to bring something new, through the launch of a kingdom that was not of this world. As citizens of that kingdom, we are to be instruments of God’s new creation, planting signposts in hostile soil that show a different way to be human. 

This different way to be human invites us, in Jacobsen and Sawatshy’s words, to “mimic God’s own graciousness in our lives.  It calls us to become so enveloped in God’s graciousness that we become conduits of God’s grace and love for others. [This] goes to the very core of the gospel.  It is what makes the gospel good news.”

Theologian Alister McGrath once said, “a theology that touches the mind, leaving the heart unaffected, is no true Christian theology.” Stanley Grenz, drawing from the evangelical tradition, then added a third dimension saying “theology must then add the ‘hand.’ Thus, a truly generous orthodoxy arises when orthodox confession leads to a transformed heart to generosity in life.” 

So what should generous orthodoxy look like in the area of racial injustice?  Drawing upon writings from my last five posts, shouldn’t it be a gospel that:

• “Sees” others as created in the image of God, carrying the stamp of divine creation on them.
• Compels us to love through being quick to listen, slow to speak, and charitable in opinion, knowing that understanding conditions us for love.
• Reaches out to people different than us, willing to cross group lines and establish meaningful relationships, recognizing that where you stand depends upon where you sit.
• Sees “Learning to love” as a life-long commitment to be conformed to the image of Jesus Christ.  A daily transformation empowered by the Spirit so that we are “habitually filled with the love of God and neighbor…having the mind of Christ and walking as he walked.”
• Creates a “biblical worldview” defined by acts of compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, and generosity.
• Honors scripture through speaking up for the oppressed, the marginalized, faithful to Isaiah’s admonition to “Learn to do right; seek justice. Defend the oppressed. Take up the cause of the fatherless; plead the case of the widow.”
• Is “on guard” against the power of self to deceive through one’s innate biases, to adopt a tribal identity that changes our affections and actions, and to embrace cultural narratives that distort the gospel’s focus.
• Understands the need for humility and a commitment to diverse faith communities as it protects against theological error while creating an environment conducive to spiritual formation.
• Stops ignoring or downplaying racial disparities, recognizing all lives aren’t valued the same way.  Hence the church must address systematic racial, economic, health care and opportunity inequity, as well as recognize the systems that work against the fair treatment of all people.
• “Sees” the struggle of others clearly through a heart that cares, clothed with a compassion that causes one to stop, reset their priorities, and then undertakes concrete action which extend healing and restorative actions in support of the other.
• Refuses to hide behind a colorblind or individualist half-gospel, but sees racial reconciliation as a mandate of the gospel, measured by outcomes rather than intentions, and assessed by those historically disadvantaged rather than themselves.

Now that’s a full gospel, no?