Why have evangelicals neglected social responsibility?
Members of the evangelically oriented American Scientific Affiliation gave over virtually the whole program of their twenty-fourth annual convention to discussion of current social issues.
The most penetrating analysis was delivered by the keynoter of the four-day convention, Professor John Warwick Montgomery of Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. About 125 ASA members were on hand to hear him.
Montgomery asserted that it is not even necessary to prove that Christian believers should have social concern. “Such an effort,” he said, “would be tantamount to a statistical survey demonstrating that all husbands are married, or a search purporting to discover who is buried … in Martin Luther King’s tomb.” Montgomery quoted a distinguished New Testament lexicographer to show that the very word “salvation” has social implications.
“If you know what Christianity is,” Montgomery said, “you know immediately and by definition that it demands of its adherents active opposition to social evil and positive efforts to ameliorate human woe.”
Montgomery characterized evangelical indifferences toward social responsibility as a “blind spot.” He pointed out that Christian orthodoxy has had blind spots before, and the failures “of the alternatives to the revelationally grounded evangelical position should have provided every incentive to biblical Christians to enter the social area with all the resources at their disposal. For, in fact, only evangelicals have resources of infinite worth to bring to bear on the miseries of the human condition.”
Evangelical failings in the social realm can be seen as “the product of confusing the Zeitgeist with the Word of God,” Montgomery said. He noted “how terribly easy it is for Christians, while holding in theory to the full truth and entire relevance of Holy Writ, to operate in utter disregard of major aspects of its teaching.” Some evangelicals, he suggested, have made social action suspect simply because modernists have advocated it.
Montgomery’s speech to the ASA. which met on the campus of Gordon College, included a parenthetical warning: “Woe to the contemporary evangelical who thinks that he will become more ‘relevant’ by moving away from an inerrant Word (he will simply become more erroneously irrelevant).”
He also chided evangelicals for downgrading Scripture by neglect: “The liberals use the visible scissors and paste of destructive biblical criticism, while we employ the invisible scissors and paste of selective hermeneutics: we preach only those texts that do not make us socially uncomfortable.”
The ASA is a fellowship of evangelicals from an assortment of scientific disciplines. This was their first convention in several years that has avoided discussion of evolutionary theory. The issue had become a sore point, so much so that a conservative group broke away and formed another fellowship, known as the Creation Research Society.
