Being Holy and the Social Gospel
I have always been fascinated with the Social Gospel. It seems so simple, so obvious, and yet so often overlooked.
Call it what you want; social gospel, social justice, missional, Christian, socialist… either way, the ideas expressed in the Social Gospel are not only accommodating with our Christian doctrine, but encouraging and challenging to our call as followers of Christ.
As a member of the Church of the Nazarene, we have a long history with the Social Gospel, even before there was such a determined thing. Think back to the Los Angeles Church of the Nazarene and their clear ideas of serving the poor incarnationaly and providing the destitute with food, shelter, clothes and the hope of the gospel.
Furthermore, there is a strong relationship between the Social Gospel and the Church of the Nazarene’s quest for Holiness.
I often think that in our desire for perfection, we easily become too consumed. Think back to the Church of the Nazarene from 1915-1945. Part of American Protestantism was focused on the modernism and the social gospel, while the other portion was fundamentalist and in strong rejection of it. While there is certainly a case to be made against socializing with “evil” people, this got an upper hand on the early COTN. What once was a denomination bent on helping the poor, was now a church that needed to distance themselves from the lower lives of society. It was necessary to abstain from vices so that we would not be associated with the corrupt people outside of the Church.
Even in 2010, we deal with this. What then is the connection between Holiness and the Social Gospel?
“The spiritual perfection of Jesus consists in the fact that he was so simply and completely filled with the love of God and man that he gave himself to the task of the Kingdom of God without any reservation or backsliding. This is the true standard of holiness. The fact that a man is too respectable to get drunk or to swear is no proof of his righteousness. His moral and religious quality must be measured by the intelligence and single-heartedness with which he merges his will and life in the divine purpose of the Kingdom of God. By contrast, a man’s sinfulness stands out in its true proportion, not when he is tripped up by ill-temper or side-steps into shame, but when he seeks to establish a private kingdom of self-service and is ready to thwart and defeat the progress of mankind toward peace, toward justice, or toward a fraternal organization of economic life, because that would diminish his political privileges, his unearned income, and his power over the working classes.”
-Walter Rauschenbush, “A Theology for the Social Gospel”, pg. 51
