Race, Culture and Evangelicalism

Now before I begin this post I was say that I one consider myself an Evangelical and so I consider myself a member of this group that I will discuss. However, a good chunk of my beliefs about race and culture were cultivated before I really knew what evangelicalism was--though I shared many of the beliefs of an evangelical at that time. The Professor that highlighted the theological and cultural characteristics of evangelicals (specifically during the 19th Century) also considers himself as leaning mainly toward evangelicalism.

I am not going to highlight all of the characteristics of Evangelicalism, but I will focus mainly on the ones that I think affect our view of race and culture.

1) Because Scripture is seen as authoritative and that God's Word can speak to people of all generations, Evangelicals have a tendency to see "history as transparent." At least in the time of the Great Awakening and 19th Century, Evangelical Christians have seen their identity through the lens of 1st Century Israel. They project the world of 1st Century Israel on the rest of the world across time.

2)Evangelicals often find themselves in an adversarial relationship with their surrounding culture. And often this adversarial relationship is often provoked by Christians. They always feel besieged. It is almost a sense of percieved victimization (real or not). Which is so interesting in light of the Cross--that part of our identiy is that of the victim. St. Wacker says that this point is particularly interesting if you image how the U.S. South is today: What happens when Evangelicals or just Southern Baptists in a community IS the majority?

In light of these two ideas, St. Wacker says that evangelicals have "no understanding of the power of culture," particularly in response to the first point. If history is transparent, it is often made obsolete and not important. If Evangelicals always seem to find themselves at odds with the world, then it will impact their modes of crossing cultures and evangelism.

After hearing this lecture, I feel that I completely understand why I faced so much opposition on entering evangelicalism when I spoke about the importance of culture, especially black culture. It makes sense now that others thought that my assertions of agreeing that for many people Christianity felt like "White Man's Religion" and that Christians needed to understand the implications of racism and history before evangelizing and crossing cultures even in the U.S. made me a liberal, a communist, or even some may have thought--an apostate.

What are the implications of this?

1) Evangelicals need to understand God's mandate of culture.

2) Once there is understanding that God loves culture, we need to move toward understanding where we've messed up in the past and confessing our sins to our brothers and sisters and lean on Jesus for our forgiveness. We may not be forgiven by those we have hurt, we can understand their pain at staying in unforgiveness while recieved forgiveness from Jesus and letting him free us from the pain when others want to make us pay for the sin that we cannot pay for.

3) We must continue to learn about History, Culture, Race and about the things that God loves that we try to push out of our theology for various reasons.

4) Embodying these practices of Reconciliation will make our Gospel more credible, especially to those who have been hurt by us.