ELM
Education for Life and Ministry
MAY MACLEOD LECTURE
2001
REV. TIM COSTELLO
Love and
Justice
I want to explore integral
mission to the poor and evangelical conviction on behalf of
the poor. It is an issue that resonates with my own
experience when I moved from being the local Baptist
Minister to the elected Mayor of the St. Kilda Council. St.
Kilda is a suburb of Melbourne, known for its drugs; street
prostitution and an entrenched divide between the wealthy
and the poor. I stood on the platform of public housing for
the poor and was proud to lead the first council in
Australia to put local ratepayers' dollars into
homelessness. Prior to this, housing had been a Federal and
State Government responsibility with shameful buck passing
between these tiers of government that left the poor
suffering and vulnerable. Now many other councils
throughout Australia have followed this lead but I
discovered that the committed support for my policies did
not come from my evangelical or church comrades, but from
secular groups. It caused me surprise and disappointment
and demonstrated a clear lack of integration. Since then it
has been both a personal and theological question to ask
why was this so?
I would like to consider this topic by reflecting on
probably the most famous story Jesus told, found in Luke
Chapter 10, and colloquially called The Good Samaritan.
This story was precipitated by two questions that highlight
the gap between engagement with the poor and my evangelical
upbringing. At first sight, the two questions seem so
different and almost unrelated that one wonders if the Good
Samaritan story is indeed a response to both. The first
question is: what must I do to inherit eternal life? It is
individualistic, self-referencing and acquisitive. However,
it is also an intensely spiritual question and was the
dominant question of my evangelical tradition. Indeed, this
question organised the priorities of my church and its
passion.
The question you determine as fundamental reveals your
fundamentals. The question you name as prior determines
your priorities. Most Baptist churches, as I have
experienced them, focus their spiritual energy into
financial giving for evangelistic crusades, youth outreach,
lay witness and church planting. To ask where this focussed
energy emanated from is to discover the fascination with
this first question. Eternal life and the believer's
assurance with heavenly security is what ultimately matter.
Indeed, as a young evangelical, I was taught that there is
no more awesome question that can be posed to our children,
our loved ones, our neighbours and our world.
We carried that heavy responsibility for the eternal
salvation or damnation of other people into every aspect of
our lives. Practically this meant I often felt unable to
take a holiday, focus on professional study or career or
even relax and enjoy transient joys as it absorbed precious
time and distracted from this most urgent eternal
responsibility. I did not feel any comparable burden for
the fate of those living in absolute and hopeless poverty.
Theologically the paramount importance of this question
relativised other parts of Scripture such as the Hebrew
prophets, Matthew 25 and James' reflection on how faith
without works was a sham salvation. They were somehow
regarded as second-order teaching to inheriting eternal
life.
Consequently, it seemed always disappointing to me, as an
evangelical, that Jesus refused to answer the question
posed by the religious lawyer. Of course, Luke tells us
that the question was a test and I have come to realise
that it is still a test for evangelicals. There has been
many a time I have preached on this text and wished that
Jesus gave a clear, simple, first-century Palestinian
version of the four spiritual laws. What an opportunity he
seemed to miss when today we can pray a lifetime for a
non-Christian friend to ask us that precise question, and
most evangelicals can die without anyone ever actually
bothering.
Jesus throws the question back with a question: What does
the Bible teach? This religious lawyer gives a magnificent
summary of the Hebrew law and prophets: love God intensely;
love your neighbour as intensely as you love yourself.
Jesus congratulates him, promises that he shall indeed live
and turns to go. This is practically the point at which my
evangelical tradition finished its theological enquiry. We
read the second question but failed to notice its
relationship to this first question. Simply put, it was
relegated in priority to merely an expression of
soteriology. Saved people were good people like the Good
Samaritan but they had to be saved first. The story became
a quaint illustration of the dangers of travel on the
Jerusalem-Jericho road only intensifying my despair when I
recognised my tradition's lack of integration of gospel and
passion for the poor. In short, I received a worldview that
left a chasm between the spiritual and material; between
justice and justification; worship and politics; jubilee
teaching and economics; forgiveness of sins and forgiveness
of debts and between evangelism and social action.
The second question is who is my neighbour? It is communal,
outward directed, self-surrendering and highly social. It
is the organising question of social justice and social
compassion. When this question is prior and fundamental,
budgets, programmes and services reflect this priority. Of
course, within the Christian church, Christian Aid, World
Vision, TEAR fund and many other organizations have arisen
from this question.
It was this second unrehearsed and genuine question that
drew the immediate response of the story of the Good
Samaritan. However it probably caused this religious lawyer
to wish he had never asked. By the end of the story, his
ethnic and religious categories were exploded. The very
group he loathed and despised was now the central frame of
his spiritual vision. He was dragged out of his comfort
zones and forced to confront his deepest prejudices and
religious coldness if he was to inherit eternal life.
These two questions still typify a yawning gap in the
secular mind today. In Australia, if you asked people to
define a Christian or a religious person, they would most
probably say someone who loves God, who lives in this world
but reflects more on the next, and whose worship and piety
is to ready themselves for heaven. Such a person talks of
being saved because their real energies are directed to
their eternal fate.
Similarly, if you asked someone who a social reformer is,
they are more likely to say, that it is someone who has a
love for their neighbour and who works hard, even
slavishly, to transform and change the world now. They want
to see salvation here and now so their preoccupation is
political and social transformation on this earth. A
well-known secular saint who has captured the imagination
of Australians in recent years has been Dr Fred Hollows, a
professed atheist, albeit raised in a Church of Christ
family who rejected its otherworldly theology, and went on
to work as an eye surgeon with Third World and Aboriginal
peoples who suffer from cataracts and blindness. With his
premature death just a few years ago, there was an enormous
out-pouring of grief and the appending of the word 'saint'
to this secularised doctor's life and mission. I am sure
every country represented here has its equivalents.
But I wish to contend that Jesus' response showed no gap
between these questions. The story of the Good Samaritan
is, indeed, a response to both queries. Future salvation
and a salvation now expressed in a love of neighbour and
world, belong together. I would argue that theologically,
the separation of these questions is one of the deepest
failures of evangelicism as a theological tradition. I
contend that Jesus saw these two questions as indivisible,
and two sides of the one coin. That to divide them was to
render the Gospel powerless and neutral. It was to do the
opposite of splitting the atom that released power, it was
to neutralise its power and allow wealthy churches and
Christians to feel at ease in this world and blissfully
certain of the next.
I say this after having been a participant, particularly in
my youth, at numerous evangelical conferences, which have
engaged in endless and fruitless debate about the
priorities of the spiritual against the social, or the
primacy of evangelism against justice and action.
I should indicate that evangelicals aren't alone here. John
Cornwell's book, Hitler's Pope, about Pius the 12th, is
very revealing of what may occur when these questions are
separated. In that book, he documents how Pius the 12th,
whose real name was Pacelli, was the Vatican Diplomat who
left defenceless Germany's 23 million Catholics in 1933. In
that year, he signed a Concordat with Hitler that agreed on
disbanding the only Democratic Party left in Germany able
to challenge Nazism, the Catholic Centre Party. He also
agreed to withdraw Catholics from all social and political
action. Their newspapers, their extensive associations with
a political edge, such as Catholic Action, were all
willingly surrendered. Why? In return for this withdrawal,
the Catholic Church was granted full religious freedom and
given funding for all their teachers in Catholic schools.
Pacelli, who had been seeking this Concordat with the
Weimer Republic even before Hitler took power, believed
that the church's religious vocation was primary and its
political and social action was expendable.
After signing this Concordant, Hitler wrote, 'It seems to
me to give sufficient guarantee that the Reich members of
the Roman Catholic confession will from now on put
themselves without reservation at the service of the new
National Socialist State.' Before we feel too
self-righteous we need to remember that Protestants soon
followed with their own Concordat, based on similar
principles.
The day after signing this 1933 Concordat on 1 April, the
Nazis began their boycott against Jewish businesses. This
was the first major test on a national scale, of the
attitude of the Christian church, toward the situation of
the Jews under the new government of Hitler. Not a single
word of protest as a result of this first systematic,
nation-wide persecution was heard from the churches.
Cardinal Faulbacher of Munich, said: 'The Jews can help
themselves'. In terms of the Good Samaritan, Catholics and
Protestants under Hitler, proved to be the priest and the
Levite who saw this battered Jew lying vulnerable and
defenceless on the central European roadside.
But were the priest and Levite in Jesus' story just
hard-hearted and uncaring? I doubt it. They simply had a
focus on their spiritual and religious duties. If they bent
down and helped this bruised and bleeding victim, they
would be rendered ceremoniously unclean and would fail
their duties in the temple, the synagogue and to the
faithful. The clash of priorities between religious and
social responsibilities outweighed the personal and humane
responsibilities of citizens to a fellow Jew not to mention
common neighbourliness. Their immediate deference to the
religious priority impeded them crossing the cultic
boundaries of clean and unclean that were the touchstone of
Jewish holiness. Just as in the 1930s, Catholic priests and
the Protestant leaders passed on by, the theological
articulation of religious priorities and spiritual
attentiveness produced unjust and incomprehensive results.
A passion for souls must proceed from a passion for the
poor and, therefore, spiritual and social context is an
expression of the same Gospel. Indeed, the passion for
evangelism must be seen as stemming from the same holy
motivation as to love our neighbours as ourselves.
Evangelism without neighbourly love that sees brokenness
and injustice is a spiritualised form of a privatised
Gospel. It is caricatured by those who hear our preaching
as Evangelicals as akin to selling tickets to the great U2
concert in the sky where those who respond can have the
assurance that their seat is secure, their entrance
guaranteed. But equally social action and justice without
evangelism is a recipe for burnout, dryness and
disillusionment. To change ourselves and be saved, is only
in order to change our world. Loving our neighbour and
loving God belong together if we are to know eternal life.
I must confess that I think substitutionary atonement,
which had totemic importance in my evangelicalism, must be
re-examined. The death of Jesus for my sins to propitiate
and angry God has consumed evangelicals in a cosmic drama
that leaves them enervated and inattentive to these worldly
injustices. Apart from it failing to provide any basis for
respect for human rights it suppresses more empowering
atonement models such as the cross unmasking all the powers
that cripple life. In the first chapters of Romans there
are at least ten pictures that describe how God has done
something for our salvation that we could not do for
ourselves. To absolutise one at the expense of others is to
force a separation in the fundamental two questions under
consideration.
Integrity is the noun that expresses the notion of
integration. The evangelical church, with its highly
developed marketing techniques of mass evangelism,
tele-evangelists and implicit sub-text of blessing and
prosperity now, is in desperate need of an integrity
injection. The export of Hillsong music out of a Sydney
mega church has made accessible melodic praise and renewal
songs throughout the world. Its amazing financial success
is backed by a crude prosperity theology. Head pastor and
monetary beneficiary of this success is Brian Houston whose
latest book is called You need more money. God's Amazing
Financial for your Life. He tells the faithful to go to the
best suburb and to the best street and stand in front of
the best house and imagine themselves living there. Most
evangelical Australian churches sing their songs and imbibe
their theology.
Only from overcoming the gap between these two questions
and seeing them fused as one will we ensure an evangelical
integration of good news for the poor. The more the
questions are separated for theological reasons or strategy
reasons, the greater the corresponding loss of integration
and integrity. This is why evangelists with lasting impact
understood this integration. Charles Finney, the great
Presbyterian evangelist in the mid-1800s in the US, was
said to have the greatest retention rate from those who
were converted through his preaching. Yet it was Finney who
refused to offer the sacraments to slave owners, even
though they boasted impeccable born-again credentials. It
was Finney who, at Oberlin College trained the first blacks
and women for the ministry that scandalised the civil
society of mid-19th century America.
Many of the other evangelical heroes have the same
integration in the outworking of their faith. A familiar
name herein England is that of William Wilberforce, who at
26 thought he would leave Parliament and become a clergyman
in order to have a truly spiritual ministry. Thankfully the
Rev John Newton wrote to him, urging him to stay in
politics and saying his calling was in the secular field.
Wilberforce renounced the illusion that only the first
question could leave to a truly spiritual vocation and
spent the next 51 years of his life fighting slavery. John
Wesley preached 'social holiness' that integrated atonement
and social transformation and General William Booth shocked
the church apathy and blindness of his day with In Darkest
England and the Way Out.
I expect these evangelical leaders would challenge the
church today to commit to social action and evangelism, lay
witness and advocacy, prayer and Jubilee economics, worship
and politics as expressions of the Gospel. Then along with
our trademark evangelistic programs we might be equally
known for leading the May first and Seattle-type
demonstrations instead of leaving it to anarchists and
radicals. Yes we would practise non-violence in these
demonstrations but like the Good Samaritan, would refuse to
ignore the smashed up neighbourhoods of our world because
the IMF/World Bank assure us that they are doing all that
is possible to help the poor. These demonstrations have
exposed that the daily violence of 40,000 children dying
daily from preventable diseases represents a total failure
of their policies. It also unmasks the western, liberal
media's shocked outrage that a Nike or McDonalds was
defaced to make this systemic evil visible. Moreover these
demonstrations have shocked the elites and reminded them
that the failure of their political and spiritual
imagination is noticed. Curiously it has recently helped
the IMF/World Bank suddenly remember that they actually
exist to solve these problems. That is their calling.
At the heart of the Gospel is the fact that God loves us
and sent his Son to die for us. We, therefore, affirm that
we only learn to love through the love of others. One of
the quickest ways to make prisoners and asylum seekers
morally invisible to their guards, is to deny them visits
from their loved ones, thereby ensuring that the guards
never see them through the eyes of those who love them.
The power of the story of the Good Samaritan is that
eternal life is linked to One who refuses to avert the eyes
to look away and thus not have to love. Even a defence of
important spiritual priorities is demolished, as
neighbourly love is, prima facie, the evidence of eternal
life. This is a God big enough for the pain of this world
and a Gospel integral to the poor. This Gospel remains a
challenge theologically and practically for the evangelical
church.
Rev Tim Costello
President, Baptist Union of Australia
This transcript is also
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