Ron Sider and "The Evangelical Scandal" (from ChristianityToday):
I find it incredibly ironic that in the last few months, the importance of political life nurturing moral values and wholesome families and so on is center stage. And then you have this astonishing data that evangelicals live just like the world in terms of divorce. And it's incredibly ironic that one of the issues—and one I agree vigorously with—is concerned with how public life affects marriage. I'm in favor of the marriage amendment. But at precisely a point in time when our political rhetoric as evangelicals has focused on that, we have to face the fact that we're not any different from the world. And that's just incredible hypocrisy and it undercuts our message to the larger society in a terrible way.
And...
I would think that evangelicals would want to get biblical and define the gospel the way Jesus did—which is that it's the Good News of the kingdom. Then we see that it means that the way to get into this kingdom is through unconditional grace because Jesus died for us. But it also means there's now a new kingdom community of Jesus' disciples, and that embracing Jesus means not just getting fire insurance so that one doesn't go to hell, but it means embracing Jesus as Lord as well as Savior. And it means beginning to live as a part of his new community where everything is being transformed.
One of my favorite examples is the story of Zacchaeus. He is involved in social sin as a wicked tax collector. When he comes to Jesus, he gives away half his goods and pays back everything that he's taken wrongly. Jesus says at the end of the story, "Today salvation has come to this house." There's not a word in the text about forgiveness of sins. Now, I'm sure Jesus forgave the rascal's sins; he clearly needed it. But what the text talks about is the new transformed economic relationships that happen when Zacchaeus comes to Jesus.
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