Social Gospel Quotes

Jesus the Socialist

Modern culture is a mighty force. It is either subservient to the gospel or else it is the deadliest enemy of the gospel

Holy solitaries' is a phrase no more consistent with the Gospel than holy adulterers. The Gospel of Christ knows no religion but social; no holiness, but social holiness.

Often the Jesus-focused churches are leaning towards a 'social gospel' interpretation of the kingdom, and the 'Paul' churches are talking about being saved from sin and going to heaven. But when we understand both Jesus and Paul in their historical contexts within the first-century Jewish world, the issues become both more complex and ultimately (I believe) more clear.

I don't preach a social gospel; I preach the Gospel, period. The gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ is concerned for the whole person.

If we look at it more from a philosophical standpoint, these foundations of atheism and secular humanism believe that you are your own God. That leads us to something that unfortunately has crept into many churches across America, and it is what I call the Social Gospel. The social gospel, that could creep into something that is called Liberation Theology, which is a mixture of leftist, pseudo-Christianity with Marxism.

An individual gospel without a social gospel is a soul without a body and a social gospel without an individual gospel is a body without a soul. One is a ghost, the other a corpse.

If the churches ever did reunite, it would have to be into something that was as sacramental and liturgical and authoritative as the Roman Catholic Church and as protesting against abuses and as much focused on the individual in his direct relationship with Christ as the Evangelicals, as charismatic as the Pentecostals, as missionary-minded as the old mainline denominations, as focused on holiness as the Methodists or the Quakers, as committed to the social aspects of the Gospel as the social activists, as Biblical as fundamentalists, and as mystical as the Eastern Orthodox.

I've been a social gospel-er and a person who sees politics as a central dynamic to the encoding of religious rhetoric.

I was a young woman who had grown up in the mountains of Montana as a Protestant Methodist in a pretty good social gospel tradition. I became fascinated with the religious lives of others who seemed also to be very religious, yet in ways that were quite different from my own. That fascination led to relationships, in India and elsewhere, with families of Hindus, of Muslims, of Sikhs, and a lot of study.

If they had a social gospel in the days of the prodigal son, somebody would have given him a bed and a sandwich and he never would have gone home.