Sunday, December 11, 2005

A Different Kind of Evangelical?

In a blog entry entitled, A Different Kind of Evangelical, Steve Bush paints a vision of a version of evangelicalism that is refreshingly free of indifference to ills like imperalism, war, and slums. This articulation however makes an error of unnecessarily surrendering the flag of traditional Christian doctrine to its "conservative" friends:


"Conservative evangelicals tend to see salvation as an individualistic affair, postconservatives emphasize the communal dimension. Conservatives tend to see hell as a place of eternal, conscious torment after death; postconservatives are concerned about this-worldly hells of genocides, slums, and diseases."


This doesn't sound "evangelical" in the sense of being true to old-time doctrines, having a common confession-- a definition IIRC Ron Sider has used, but I could look it up.

The vision I have is one where social sins-- such as wishing torture on an Al Qaeda accountant (or worse, blindly agreeing with our system, which in reality is torture of adbucted Muslims who have nothing to do with carrying out acts of terror) -- is sin. Sin in the sense of a "personal" sin that one must either pay for in something called "hell" if one rejects Christ's payment on the cross for it.

To capitulate the old-time doctrines is major uncool.

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