Social Gospel, Version 2.0 - Social Justice

Scott Allen, president of Disciple Nations Alliance, compares the current social justice movement within Protestant churches today with the Social Gospel movement in the early 20th century.  According to Allen, "advocates of the Social Gospel believed the church should be engaged in the culture, fighting against injustice and working to uplift the impoverished and downtrodden—all admirable goals. The problem was they unwittingly allowed secular assumptions to inform their theology of cultural engagement."

Fundamentalists reacted to the Social Gospel movement by emphasizing the preaching of the Gospel and individual soul salvation largely to the exclusion of involvement in social issues.  Consequently, the evangelical church was caught unprepared to deal with emerging social issues of the latter half of the 20th century with a biblical worldview--issues like racial injustice and sexual morality.

Allen applauds evangelical social justice champions for caring about social issues like poverty, racism, and the refugee crisis.  Because of this commitment, he believes the evangelical church can avoid the unfortunate sacred-secular dichotomy that resulted from its reaction to the Social Gospel movement.  

But Allen is deeply concerned about the evangelical church because it has uncritically "absorbed many of the assumptions and much of the language of the social justice movement—assumptions that veer sharply from a Biblical worldview.  As a result, they find themselves unwittingly syncretized to a false religion, one that works against the very thing they purport to champion—genuine justice."

I would encourage you to read Scott Allen's complete article, “History Repeats Itself.”  Then, please respond with your thoughts and insights in "Comments" below.