Sin's Scope

Moore:

 

Jesus hadn’t come to enter their lives. He came to wreck their lives, and invite them into his life.

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There is the first mistake of those who talk as though personal evangelism and public justice are contradictory concerns, or at least that one is part of the mission of the church and the other is a sideline matter. If we are centered on the gospel, then that means that our mission is to expose sin with the light of Christ. Sin is not neatly marked out in silos marked “personal” and “social.” The Bible shows us from the beginning that the scope of the curse is holistic in its destruction—personal, cosmic, social, vocational (Gen. 3–11), and the Bible shows us in the end that the gospel is holistic in its restoration—personal, cosmic, social, vocational (Rev. 21–22).

My denomination was founded back in the nineteenth century by those who advocated for human slavery, and who sought to keep their consciences and their ballots and their wallets away from a transcendent word that would speak against the sinful injustice of a regime of kidnapping, rape, and human beings wickedly deigning to buy and sell other human beings created in the image of God. Slavery, they argued (to their shame), was a “political” issue that ought not distract the church from its mission: evangelism and discipleship. What such a move empowered was not just social injustice (which would have been bad enough), but also personal sin. When so-called “simple gospel preaching” churches in 1856 Alabama or 1925 Mississippi calls sinners to repentance for fornicating and gambling but not for slaveholding or lynching, those churches may be many things but they are hardly non-political. By not addressing these issues, they are addressing them, by implicitly stating that they are not worthy of the moral scrutiny of the church, that they will not be items of report at the Judgment Seat of Christ. These churches, thus, bless the status quo, with all the fealty of a court chaplain. The same is true of a church in twenty-first-century America that doesn’t speak to the pressing issues of justice and righteousness around us, such as the horror of abortion and the persisting sins of racial injustice.