Interview: Carl Henry on Evangelical Identity

Dr. Henry is internationally recognized as one of the principal leaders of the evangelical movement. He was the founding editor of Christianity Today, has been a professor of theology at Northern Baptist and Fuller Theological Seminaries, and is the author of countless books and articles. At the time of the article, he was writing a monthly series in Christianity Today entitled “Evangelicals in Search of Identity.”

Jim: What are some of the key issues involved in an evangelical identity now, in terms of direction, and especially in relationship to the young evangelical phenomenon?

Dr. Henry: We’re at a time when loose coalitions of special evangelical emphases have been emerging. I think the young evangelicals especially represent that sort of loose coalition of particular concerns. While it’s good that we begin to understand each other, I don’t think that one will ever get from this sort of cross-pollination what the evangelical movement ideally ought to be.

What is missing is, first of all, a vision for the comprehensive truth of God. You get the left shooting at the right, the right shooting at the left; the four spiritual laws emphasis and the social gospel emphasis lining up against each other; and the inerrancy group lining up against those who compromise inerrancy. So the potential for division seems to overhang the modern situation as fully as the encouraging signs of conversation and liaison.

Secondly, there is the lack of a sense of body in the evangelical community. It is fragmented. Some people call it American Independence, which permeates the evangelical community. But it’s more than that. There’s an excessive spirit of independence that characterizes evangelicals almost world wide.

Wes: What would a comprehensive view of God’s revelation begin to look like?

Dr. Henry: It would involve, certainly, the priority of the truth God declares. If revelation isn’t intelligible, we’re at a loss to say anything about God and his purposes for man. Secondly, it must include the righteousness that God demands, both public and private righteousness, personal holiness, and social justice. Thirdly, the grace God offers, the evangel, would be included.

Wes: Do you feel that this comprehensive view, to give identity and unity to evangelicals, would only be around the understanding of scriptural inerrancy which is laid out by the Evangelical Theological Society?

Dr. Henry: I would say that the biblical emphasis falls first and foremost on the authority of scripture. After that, the emphasis falls, it seems to me, on the inspiration of God’s word. It is what God has spoken; that’s why it is authoritative. The notion of an authoritative word that isn’t God’s word, or that isn’t inspired, is out of view. Inerrancy seems to me to be an inference from the inspiration that the Bible teaches. If one denies inerrancy, and affirms errancy, he raises all sorts of questions about inspiration. The affirmation of the errancy of scripture introduces a principle of instability into the authority of scripture that leads to a lack of agreement as to what parts of scripture are to be considered authoritative and what parts are not.

Wes: In seeking to clarify the meaning of evangelicalism, are you defining evangelicals on the basis of a particular view of inerrancy?

Dr. Henry: Evangelicals are to be known in the world as the bearers of good news in message and life -- the good news that God offers new life on the grounds of Christ’s death and resurrection in the context of a biblically-controlled message. That’s the emphasis that is characteristically apostolic. Now, the apostles did not go out into the world preaching first and foremost scriptural inerrancy, or a pre-millennial kingdom, or some of the other things that are made the forefront issues today. These issues are of concern to the Christian community, but they are hardly the umbrella under which one goes out into the world.

Jim: It seems that a biblical peoplehood is coming together from a number of traditions and places, one of them being evangelical, but not the only one. And it’s a faith that is defined more by a life that is rooted in the word and is growing out of scripture than around a precise formulation of a doctrine of scripture. That’s not to say that questions about the nature of scripture and how we understand it are no longer important. However, perhaps the greatest test of one’s biblical fidelity is whether one’s life is rooted in the word, rather than the preciseness of one’s doctrinal formulations. Often those that talk about inerrancy are never doing the word. They are describing the word, analyzing it, but somehow not doing the word. And this goes back to the whole Hebrew notion of what truth is. Can truth be something that we describe and converse about apart from it becoming a part of our lives?

Dr. Henry: Lifestyle is now a growing concern everywhere. In the Bible it has always been a concern. The truth is something that is to be done, not something that is merely to be known. And Christianity rejoices in the one life on earth in which a perfect lifestyle was achieved.

On the other hand, one cannot derive the content of Christian truth from an examination of lifestyle. One could hardly derive even the so-called apostolic kerygma from apostolic life in the world, staggeringly different as Christian life was. How could you ever discern from the apostolic lifestyle the incarnation or the resurrection of the crucified Lord?

Jim: I sometimes wonder if we can even hope for a unified understanding of righteousness in the personal and public sense you mentioned. Some basic differences within evangelicalism have been rather pronounced for a number of years. It has been argued, by Dayton and others, that there is a discontinuity between the evangelicalism of the nineteenth century and the dominant evangelicalism of the twentieth century. The divisions in the present situation go right back to those old days in the last century where the Princeton school of theology took clear stands against the abolitionist activities of the revivalist evangelicals. On questions of race, women, and economics, the Princeton school was on the side of the status quo, so much so that Hodge’s writings were used by pro-slavery apologists in the South to support slavery. Evangelicalism, as Dayton points out, is now dominated by those who root themselves in the line that runs through the Princeton school. Some of us find ourselves increasingly going in different directions and find more resonance with the evangelicalism of the nineteenth century. I wonder if what we mean by public righteousness or the proper relationship of the church to society and state is something that there is going to be real agreement about, given this historical perspective.

Dr. Henry: Let me spell out a position. The Old Testament prophets proclaim universal justice and peace as a prospect assured by the coming Messiah. Christ applies to himself the Old Testament promises and in him the kingdom of God dawns. In the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus the victory is already won over all the forces of evil and oppression in the world.

Secondly, Jesus extends that victory in the world in and through the church, the new society of regenerate men and women over which he reigns as head. He extends it by the conquest of Satan and sin in the lives of believers and by the mission that is given to the church in relationship to the world. He extends his victory as well through civil government as a divinely established institution for the promotion of justice which God defines as the restraint of disorder. Part of the obedience which is expected of Christians is their function in relationship to civil government.

The Christian community, in its task of light and salt in the world, is to illumine and salt the world. It has a preservative function, and it fulfills this function in several ways. First, the evangelistic mission which involves a distinctive lifestyle; secondly, the use of one’s gifts in the vocational arena to the glory of God and service of his fellow man; and thirdly, the fulfillment of responsibilities in the public arena to civil government. That’s the framework within which I work for the extension of the righteousness of Christ in society.

Wes: Let me ask two things about that. First, if the church is to be the new society over which Jesus reigns as head, how can those within that new society live their lives in contradiction to Christ’s own teaching about the questions of violence and wealth, for instance?

Jim: The issue is how we view Christ: whether Jesus Christ is axiomatic for us on a personal, political, and economic level. My basic discomfort with the social ethics of mainline Christendom, be they evangelical or liberal (which to me are usually much closer than most realize) is the failure to come to terms with the incarnation of God in Christ. Jesus Christ, as I understand the New Testament, is not only the means of my atonement, but the pattern for my life. Is Jesus Christ politically axiomatic for the believing community? And if not, then in what sense is the new society a new society?

Dr. Henry: The new society is a society that is transracial, transcultural, transnational, and in which love ideally reigns in all interpersonal relationships. It is a society that is ruled by love. It exists at the same time in relationship to the larger world.

While I agree with you wholly that Jesus is the example of incarnate sonship, I don’t think you can infer merely from the lifestyle of Jesus all the criteria that should govern Christian living in the world. Jesus himself gave a teaching role to his disciples and apostles. He wrote nothing and entrusted to the disciples and apostles the role of writing what the spirit would bring to their remembrance in interpreting his mission. In point of fact, most of the epistles are older than the gospels, and Romans 13 is older than most of the gospels. And while Jesus is in his earthly life the pattern for the believer in the unqualified obedience which he demonstrates to his Father’s will and in the fullness of the Holy Spirit in his life, that does not in itself answer the question whether there are aspects to the humiliation of Jesus that attached only to his life in view of his specific redemptive mission -- for example, the giving of his life as an atonement without any resistance or countermove toward the powers that crucified him. We stand in an interim period between Jesus' submission to the injustice of Pilate and his return as King of Kings and Lord of Lords when every knee and all the rulers will bow -- an interim period in which the New Testament ethic evolves with its legitimate role for the state as an instrument for active promotion of justice and restraint of injustice by the use of force.

Wes, I read your question in the last editorial, “Is it conceivable that a faithful follower of Jesus would push the nuclear button if he were in the White House?” My question is, is it conceivable that Jesus should be walking along the street when some violent aggressor should attack an elderly widow and rape her and not use what force he had to interrupt that, and that he should simply stand by and encourage them to be at peace? Is it conceivable that any act by any person could have such elements of violence and destruction, including Hitler’s destruction of six million Jews, that God’s response to it would be one other than love?

Wes: You say that there are aspects of Christ’s humiliation that may be tied to his specifically redemptive mission, and that we then have to look to the corpus of other New Testament teachings. Yet you look to the corpus of New Testament teaching and find continual admonitions to live as Christ lived, to live in Christ, to follow his own pattern, and specific teachings on the very question we have been discussing, never to return evil with evil, to love one’s enemies, never to pay back an evil turn with a like gesture, to leave vengeance to God, which is in fact the context of the teaching of Romans 13.

Jim: I get uncomfortable when I hear a theologian like yourself, who is continually centering in what God has said, to begin to base an ethic on what one should do when an elderly woman is attacked, or what one does because of who Hitler is. I agree that an ethic needs to be applied to those situations, but it seems dangerous to me to formulate an ethic out of examples or out of the cases and circumstances, rather than beginning with the revelation of God in Jesus Christ. Also, you are dealing in both cases with things that are very emotionally charged.

In a discussion of those issues I would always like to keep coming back to the question of who Jesus Christ is and what that means for us. Then our ethic grows out of the incarnation and of scripture to the specific instances and the cases in which it must be applied. To say that any reasonable man would have to respond to Hitler in this way is much like the feminist argument you dislike -- any reasonable person would have to feel this way, so Paul must be mistaken.

Dr. Henry: The examples that I have are not radically extreme cases. One is an actual turning point in western history and the other is one you can find in The Washington Post or Star every week. To come back to the example of Jesus, one would need to settle the question of war through an experience in which he or his disciples were involved and in which he gave explicit teaching on the subject. As I see it, no passage drawn from the Sermon on the Mount explicitly deals with the subject of war. And apart from that, any effort to settle the question of involvement in war is highly inferential. More than inference is involved in the Romans 13 passage.

Jim: The legitimacy of civil government is not denied, nor that civil government is used in the providence of God, nor that God’s action in history is not limited to the church. God’s hand can be in revolution and in war, using that cycle of violence against itself. The question here, though, is the relationship of the Christian to civil government and what part the church of Jesus Christ plays in God’s action in history.

Dr. Henry: Very true. But there is a fundamental danger in looking at civil government somewhat deistically, or almost dualistically, as in some of the recent writings in which it is viewed only in the context of demonic powers, rather than as a divinely purposed order of preservation that is as firmly rooted in the will of God, and hence in the intention of Christ, as is the church, at this particular point in history. Civil government has in the purpose of God for history, this side of the end time, a purpose as a divinely structured order of preservation in fallen society as undeniable as his purpose for the church.

Wes: Do you think that God’s action in bringing about the continuing dawn of the kingdom first demonstrated in the life of his son is achieved as much through the state as through the church?

Dr. Henry: No.

Wes: Do you draw a distinction between the role of the government in restraining disorder and the role of the government in instituting the new society?

Dr. Henry: Only what is regenerate belongs to the kingdom of God. And the state doesn’t regenerate -- it preserves ideally in God’s name the structures and content of justice.

Wes: But in that preservative function, do you feel the Christian has a loyalty to that function on the same level as his loyalty to the church?

Dr. Henry: Whatever loyalties he has, whether to the church or civil government, are loyalties unto God through Christ. Paul doesn’t depart from the apostolic principle that where the state demands what God disapproves, the Christian is to obey God rather than man, and that where the state disallows what God requires the Christian ought to disobey the state.

Wes: Yes, but I infer that you said the purposes of God’s will are just as much for the state, for divinely structured order, as they are for the church.

Dr. Henry: For the state as an instrumentality for certain purposes in a fallen society, yes.

Jim: Here I think we are touching one of the issues that is at stake in different strands of evangelicals and where we are going. The kind of reformed theological thinking on these matters, at least for me, gives much too positive a role to the state. It doesn’t take seriously enough the fallenness of the state or the state’s identity as one of the principalities that the New Testament says are in open rebellion against the purposes of God. Though I would see a providential care of God through the state, the state is never intended to be an instrumentality for bringing in the new order.

Dr. Henry: I agree that the definition of justice and spiritual regeneration are not the government’s business.

Jim: What concerns me is how this has worked out historically. What has happened in the doing of mainstream social ethics is that the ethics no longer derive from God in Christ but derive from the state or from notions of civil government. Reinhold Niebuhr, for instance, says that the nonresistant, nonviolent Jesus, while most faithful to the historical Christ, is just not adequate for determining public ethics and that we need to derive those ethics for our action in the public, political, and social area from other norms. I can understand how Reinhold Niebuhr does that because of his weak Christology, but I’m alarmed when his is the major text at evangelical colleges teaching political science. A discussion about the New Testament role of the state is in order. But the norms that we take as axiomatic to that discussion must derive from God in Christ and not from the state. Is Jesus the norm for us, or isn’t he?

Dr. Henry: There are biblical principles but no comprehensive political philosophy in the New Testament. We have a great deal more about the church as the new society and the way the church is to live her life and govern herself than we do about the church in relationship to the world. We have to remember that the political arena is a vastly changing one, in different places and times.

The church needs to channel informed Christians into the realm of vocation, in law, jurisprudence, political service. And yet the WCC Geneva Conference on World and Society wholly bypassed Secretary of State Rusk, an active churchman. No effort was made to involve him. Why wasn’t he there along with those who opposed Vietnam? I’m not saying this on behalf of Vietnam now, because I myself at Christianity Today assumed the trustworthiness and the non-deceptiveness of some of the statements we were getting from our leaders about Vietnam. Today we have gone to the opposite extreme in not trusting anything they say. We’re on the other binge. But at least it’s been a very sobering experience, and we no longer take their statements at face value. But it’s very difficult to superimpose the post-Watergate, the post-Vietnam situation back upon the years that we were going through then. I myself said in those years, even while I was still editor, that if we did not intend to do what was necessary to bring that war to a conclusion we ought not to be in there at all.

Jim: The strategy of infiltrating the systems of the world by Christians through vocation doesn’t strike me as a new strategy but as the one being practiced right now. There are Christians in every single vocational area. It seems, though, that those institutions are changing and shaping the Christians in them more than the Christians are changing the institutions.

Dr. Henry: The church has not itself taught effectively scriptural principles to her own sons, who have gone on into these various spheres of vocations. This is the great tragedy. When I was a young fellow your age, many of the Christians in the agencies in Washington were the sons of social gospel ministers, those sons who had become disenchanted with the concept of ministry and went in with a social gospel philosophy. The church needs to become a center in which the biblical social ethic is learned no less than the personal ethic.

Wes: My experience is that when you get involved in the political order, you then are asked continually to compromise, relegate, reinterpret, or dismiss central New Testament teachings in order to preserve your own place within the order, or to preserve the government itself on the terms which it defines. To gain power within the system, I have to play according to its rules which are part of a fallen order, directly in contradiction to the kingdom that I have given my life to.

Dr. Henry: There is nothing about the order itself as God ordains it that requires it per se to box you in. It is the misuse of what the order is intended to be by compromised people and groups. Involvement in it, in the context which you suggest, gives a Christian a perfect platform out of which to interpret what the order is doing, how it is cutting across Christian concerns, and to speak a Christian witness to it precisely in that situation.

Without minimizing all that you have said, even in these circumstances it seems to me that we must not totally withdraw. We must rather use the situation as fully as possible. Little as has been achieved, it is nevertheless worthwhile. The Christian can count upon the providence of God to take our meager efforts even in a compromised situation, and even if we ourselves don’t act infallibly in this arena, the providence of God can preserve and multiply our efforts in the political sphere.

I think Joseph in Egypt had his role, and he still has his role in modern times. At the right moment the right opportunity comes, when people either turn to the Christian out of frustration, or when he finds an appropriate opportunity to exercise his influence, whether he does it through re-election or whether he does it like Brooks Hays, who if he had waited four years and compromised on the race issue would have been elected, but who in good conscience refused to compromise and lost.

Wes: Even Joseph’s position came by way of prison.

Dr. Henry: Yes.

Jim: But that’s a crucial point. There’s a difference in one’s being used of God in God’s timing, out of a believing community of people where one’s identity and one’s norms for life and action derive. Then God can use the community or the person in the secular order. What’s important to me is our own faithfulness, and if God in the course of history chooses to use that for a larger purpose, well, praise God. And if not, still praise God. I don’t see anywhere in scripture the instruction to gain power for influencing institutions in the world that social action people talk so much about.

The crucial question here for me is not participation in or outside of the system, but on what terms are we active and involved? Most of the thinking and activity that has gone on under the banner of Christian political and social involvement, both ecumenical and evangelical, is much more on the world’s terms than on the terms of the kingdom. To act on the terms of the kingdom is not the same as withdrawal. Christians now and down through history, out of an allegiance to Christ’s kingdom, have been decisively involved in ways that are peripheral to the established ways of involvement yet historically wind up being those most decisive in terms of the shape of history.

Dr. Henry: A great deal that passes for Christian social ethics today overlooks the primary responsibility for Christians to care for those within the body, simply because we have little sense of body within Christian circles any longer.

I see a regrouping of evangelical forces for power and an alignment. And it’s not only on the right wing; it’s also on the left. What we need is a deep realization of our emptiness, even if we should succeed in our smaller visions of what is needed. The world is in such tragic shambles today. It’s a pit of anguish.

Yet when you look at the evangelical community, what do you hear them say? In one whole wing, four spiritual laws. In another whole wing, radical social activism. Where is the sense of the new community? I’m convinced that it isn’t going to come by an organizational evangelical ecumenicity emerging into some giant framework of the existing evangelical agencies. They can find ways of understanding and cooperating, but that isn’t the way the new family is going to come into being. Do we have to wait for the dropping of an atom bomb or for some national calamity?

It can come only through repentance and prayer and reawakening. It will have to come out of a great sense of emptiness and longing, a transcendent initiative that crowns a sense of emptiness and hunger on the part of God’s people. I don’t sense a depth of hunger and yearning that really seems to answer to the anguish of the world in our time.

Jim: The rebuilding of the church is to me the most important thing that we need to be about. That sense comes out of a number of things. One is a very radical understanding of the kingdom as a new order. Secondly, the common life of that new community is the key to understanding God’s action in history. Community is not a substitution for involvement, but the means of our engagement with the world. Out of that, there needs to be a daily involvement with the poor, understanding that the Christian community is to look at the systems of the world through the eyes of the victims of those systems and to make community with the poor, which is different from being an ecclesiastical lobby on behalf of the poor from a position of comfort and power. Out of that base there needs to be visible protest and confrontation with the forces of death and the pursuing of alternatives. On those four counts I am increasingly depressed about the evangelical establishment.

Dr. Henry: Let me ask about this, because World Vision has a deep commitment to the poor, as you know. Don’t you feel that, number one, if we don’t lick the problem of inflation the whole world may be in trouble in another generation. Number two, don’t you think that the problem of providing jobs is one critically important facet of attack on the poverty problem?

Wes: But don’t you think that then inevitably raises the questions of what are the systemic causes of that unemployment and of that poverty?

Dr. Henry: Yes, the raising of this issue inevitably raises the question of structural changes. The Christian community can’t avoid the obligation to raise questions of unjust structures. On the one hand, I don’t share the view that demeans what the Christian does into simply a Band-Aid or aspirin dispenser operation because I am grateful for the type of humanitarianism that Christianity released in its history. But I wholly agree that it’s not the place to stop, and the question of just structures is one that must be raised in the economic as well as in other arenas.

I think there are strengths to capitalism. But our failure to criticize capitalism in its operation -- the shoddy record of production for obsolescence, the reckless depletion of natural resources, the prizing of profit over sensitivity to workers’ needs, the bribery by multinational corporations, the big stake in smoking and cigarette production despite the fact that we know it to be harmful, the alcohol traffic -- gave a one-way street to the Marxists to criticize capitalism, in such a way that our younger generation became enchanted with Marxism as an alternative.

Jim: In terms of questions related to the structures of power, why is it that almost across the board, the structures of evangelicalism are time after time -- by association, by relationship, or by outright conviction -- on the side of the rich, not the poor, the white, not the non-white, of the powerful and not the powerless?

Is the kind of mainline evangelicalism that goes through the Princeton school right back to the Reformation, is that theology inherently supportive of the status quo or at best a mild sort of reformism? Is there something inherent in that theology that is socially and politically resistant to change?

Dr. Henry: What happened in part was this. People came into the evangelical churches who had little and became successful because of the new virtues, the new drives, and the new integrity. All of this contributed to their success, and these resources grew up within the churches and became available to support enterprises. It’s impossible to launch a movement without financial support.

When we launched Christianity Today a lot of people thought that J. Howard Pew was the benefactor. Pew was a large donor, but we could have never survived with simply the gifts that Pew gave us. We had Northern Republicans. We had Southern Democrats. I didn’t know what some of their politics were. So Christianity Today in its support had a considerable diversity.

Now, in regard to becoming poor, the Christian is called in the New Testament to show compassion for those in need and to use what he has as a divine stewardship. I don’t see any necessity in the New Testament for any personal redistribution of all one’s properties as long as he has a lifestyle that honors God and uses what he has as a stewardship.

A community of goods was practiced voluntarily by the Jerusalem church, but there is no necessity for this to be universally imposed upon believers. I think we need to rethink the matter of lifestyle, however. I don’t think the Christian community can bear the massive burden of poverty in the world.

Wes: The conclusion seems to be coming from economic studies that western civilization cannot continue to live in the way in which we now do if there is to be a true sense of compassion for all humanity.

Dr. Henry: Unless one could come up with data, argued data, to show that sheer redistribution would not within a remarkably short time simply deteriorate again into a repetition of the same circumstances, I think that Christians are far better off to avoid legalistic solutions and to probe possibilities that are job producing -- to try to set up industries and this sort of thing. That represents a far sounder use of funds than simply an automatic leveling.

What needs to be shown, and I doubt that it can be, is that if I eat less hamburger or that if I eat less beef, it will provide more grain or more food for the person out in Africa.

Wes: It won’t necessarily. But what is true is that if everyone continues to eat the same amount of grain through beef consumption, for instance, the resource base of protein grain for all humanity will continue to be monopolized. I think it does raise the question of how much our lives as Christians are tied into the present economic order and how much is that present economic order sustained ultimately at the expense of the world’s poor.

Dr. Henry: Yes, and the correlation of what is done in the West with nations that do the most that they can to solve their own problems, in contrast with nations that through lack of population control simply extend the problem.

Jim: I would like to get back to the third thing you mentioned earlier -- the gospel that God offers. Are there inherent things in particular formulations of evangelical theology that are resistant to fundamental change in the social order?

For example, what the gospel means is itself still a very controversial question. What is the evangel?

The traditional view would say that the heart of the gospel is justification by faith, the atonement, getting one’s heart right with God. Then there are social implications and political responsibilities that derive from that. Others would say that the meaning of Jesus is the inauguration of a new order of things. Whenever you delete the coming and the meaning of the kingdom from the proclamation of the gospel, the inseparable unity between justification by faith and participation in the kingdom of God is broken. Reconciliation is required because to participate in that new order requires a change so fundamental that the apostle calls it a new birth.

In the nineteenth century evangelism resulted in so much social initiative, the meaning of the kingdom was kept in a central place. Now the kingdom imperative is on the periphery and neglected or removed altogether so that what you have is a gospel defined by the four spiritual laws. That theology seems to me to be inherently susceptible to being used to sanction the social order the way it is.

Dr. Henry: The twentieth century evangelical movement found itself in a religious context that was not characteristic of the nineteenth century movements. It was the context of an ecclesiastical power which spoke for Christianity in the larger world community, deleted the importance of personal regeneration, and conceived the evangel essentially in terms of social change. Hence the evangelical movement promoted its evangel in a reactionary way, centering the evangel in personal regeneration and deploring socio-political activity as a mere extra-curricular activity.

In the two definitions of the evangel that you give, I think the second is the authentic one. Though the evangel is the proclamation of the coming of the new order, it must be no less central than the first. The substitutionary death and resurrection of Christ as the ground of God’s gift of the forgiveness of sins and new life in Christ reaches far beyond inner-personal concerns to the whole of interhuman relationships. The good news is that the righteous God of history has won victory over the forces of evil and the powers that would do us to death. On the ground of Jesus' death and resurrection we are offered the forgiveness of sins, new life, and a place in God’s kingdom. We belong to the new society, which Christ rules as risen head, that will pass over into eternity. This society is indignant of unrighteousness wherever it exists in personal and social relationships. It shares with Christ the longing for the coming in its fullness of the new heavens and earth where righteousness prevails through out of the whole of it. And no one can really stand on New Testament terrain unless he tries to be as explicit about the justice God demands as about the justification that God offers. That’s the big task for us in this turning time in human civilization.

Wes Michaelson was on the editorial staff at Sojourners when this article appeared. Jim Wallis is the editor-in-chief of Sojourners.