The Good Work of Non-Christians, Empowerment, and the New Creation

The Efficacy of the Holy Spirit's Empowering for Ordinary Work

Weir

• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781498274296
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Have you ever considered the ultimate purposes and consequences of good work performed by non-Christians? Have you ever theologically considered the work of non-Christians at all? Is it possible that God would ever give credence to, let alone honor the work of, non-Christians in an ultimate sense? Are you frustrated by theologies of work that are entirely protological in orientation? How do we make sense of biblical excerpts that talk of work being judged towards a particular outcome?The Good Work of Non-Christians, Empowerment, and the New Creation attempts to answer these questions in a manner that also challenges evangelical assumptions about the ultimate outcomes of working life. Drawing strength from eschatologically minded theologies by Miroslav Volf and Darrell Cosden, Weir seeks to replace protology with eschatology in a theology of work about non-Christians. The British evangelical tradition is specifically taken up here so as to make critical assessments of certain airtight theologies regarding human action with reference to the new creation. This book attempts to create a heuristic against unhelpful hermeneutical tendencies that inform evangelical theologies. This is a work that is not only theological, it is biblically, historically, and ethically rigorous.

1

Francis Schaeffer (1912–84) and John Stott (1921–2011)

The Epistemological Problem of the Good Work of Non-Christians in Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century Evangelical Theology

I begin my investigation with the thoughts of Francis Schaeffer and John Stott, who between them made a seminal impact upon North American and British evangelical theology through their theological reflections on human work in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This first chapter will provide an initial foray into both the meaning of the work of non-Christians in evangelical thinking, and whether there is any correlation between work and the new creation.

I will evaluate Francis Schaeffer’s account of good work by non-Christians as there are some who believe he was the first to activate and politicize evangelicals in the twentieth century.1 Even if this claim is exaggerated, there is no debating the thoroughgoing nature of Schaeffer’s engagement with human civilization, and therefore with those who have shaped culture in opposition to the Christian God. Perhaps Karl Barth (1886–1968) is the only competing alternative, but Barth does not belong to the Westminster strand of evangelical theology that this thesis is operating within.

Because of the depth of theological analysis that Schaeffer has devoted towards the cultural tasks of non-Christians, he is the best possible interlocutor to evaluate within twentieth-century evangelical theology. Specifically, I will investigate Schaeffer’s doctrine of creation, his theological anthropology, man’s epistemological problem, and his understanding of important areas of culture as a consequence of this problem. My intention in doing so is to reveal how much esteem good work by non-Christians is granted by him.

I will then engage John Stott’s eschatological reflections on the parable of the sheep and the goats, providing a picture of an accepted interpretation of the work of non-Christians, and its relevance to the new creation in British evangelical theology. Stott is not only trusted in the British evangelical tradition, but in evangelical theology more broadly. He is considered an authority of evangelical dogma among British evangelicals, and is being introduced here because Schaeffer did not comment upon the sheep and the goats in his writings or sermons.

This will be a much shorter section than the space allocated to Schaeffer due to the relatively brief nature of Stott’s comments on the sheep and the goats. Nonetheless, his interpretation is significant for the purposes of showing the disconnect between the work of non-Christians and the eschaton. The brevity of these comments should not belittle the importance of Stott’s place in this chapter in any way.

Before Schaeffer, evangelicals had been at odds over issues of culture and work ever since they clashed with the social gospel movement in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In his assessment of the social gospel movement, a movement identified primarily with the figure of Walter Rauschenbusch (1861–1918), John Stott claims the true gospel had been betrayed.2 In fact, the social gospel has its original ground in the evangelical movement,3 but despite this, Stott claims that the betrayal of the true gospel is manifest in Rauschenbusch’s rationale: “We have a social gospel. We need a systematic theology large enough to match it and vital enough to back it.” Further, Rauschenbusch deemed it necessary to “furnish an adequate intellectual basis for the social gospel.”4

For Stott, the social gospel is essentially a philanthropic project that requires theological justification as an afterthought for credibility’s sake.5 Coupled with this was Rauschenbusch’s open rejection of a penal substitutionary understanding of the atonement, and his suspicion of biblical accounts of the miraculous. By contrast, penal substitutionary interpretations of the atonement had become quasi-orthodox in evangelical theology.6 Accordingly, the social gospel created evangelical anxiety over its perceived scriptural inaccuracy, and thus its Christian inauthenticity. Bebbington summarizes this well:

The liberals were rightly perceived at the time to be innovators. They wished to modify received theology and churchmanship in the light of current thought. Inevitably their ideas were swept along by the Romantic currents that had already been flowing powerfully in the later nineteenth century. Biblical inspiration, for example, was reinterpreted as of a piece with the uplifting power of the arts.7

Consequently, by association, the social gospel’s societal responsibility and focus on work suffered a deliberate neglect in evangelical circles from the late nineteenth century onwards.8 Decades later Schaeffer took up the necessary task of engaging culture in his theology, which included an analysis of the work of non-Christians through his doctrine of creation.

Francis Schaeffer

While visiting a bookshop at the age of seventeen, Schaeffer came across a book on Greek philosophy. As he read, he discovered that Greek philosophers were asking many questions about the human condition to which they had no answers. “In God’s providence,” his wife Edith remarks, “reading this book on Greek philosophy set his mind on fire.”9

At that time he was attending what he called a liberal church, and he listened to one final sermon there before never returning, realizing that this form of Christianity also did not offer answers to man’s basic problems. Schaeffer considered dispensing with the Bible before realizing that he had never actually read it. For whatever reason, he decided to read Ovid and the Bible simultaneously to see what he thought of both. Shortly aft...

Table of contents

• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Francis Schaeffer (1912–84) and John Stott (1921–2011)
• Chapter 2: Thomas Chalmers (1780–1847)
• Chapter 3: Richard Baxter (1615–91)
• Chapter 4: John Calvin (1509–64)
• Chapter 5: John Wesley (1703–91)
• Chapter 6: An Evangelical Re-reading of the Sheep and the Goats
• Bibliography