The Big Four

One danger of the evangelical church is that it can get to where it only thinks of its role in the world in terms of personal faith. At its worst, churches can exclusively become retreat centers for those who are already saved. We hardly interact with the world at all. We worship on Sunday and work the rest of the week. The two aspects of our lives never meet.

At other times, the church might only engage the world in order to get people saved. This task is, of course, the most important one the church should do in the world. It should be the top priority. However, the Bible suggests that God desires his people to do more in the world when they can. Certainly, this has been the belief of the Wesleyan evangelical tradition from its very beginnings. 

It is common for evangelicals to decry the “social gospel” movement of the early twentieth century. This movement to a large extent consisted of individuals who had lost their faith in Jesus. Many of them no longer believed Jesus was the Son of God or held to other orthodox beliefs like the virgin birth and miracles. All they had left of the gospel was social concern, the drive to help the poor and others in need.

However, it is important to recognize that their social concern was not the enemy of the gospel. It was indeed part of the biblical gospel. The problem with the social gospel movement was not its social concern but its loss of orthodoxy. It only had half of the gospel left. It is ironic that, partially in response, many orthodox Christians threw away the social half of the gospel!

At one point in our conversation with Dr. Lyon, she mentions the “big four” social concerns of the Old Testament. Zechariah 7:10 gives us one example of this list:

Concern for these four types of individuals pervades the Old Testament: 1) the widow, 2) the orphan, 3) the alien or stranger in the land, and 4) the poor who had been knocked off track in life. There was no social safety net in ancient Israel, just as there wasn’t in the United States until the mid-twentieth century. In ancient Israel, a person without family might find themselves begging – a widow or an orphan. At the beginning of the twentieth century in the United States, a person without a job and without a source of income or support was also left to waste away. 

These four types of individuals were thus on the edges of society, on the margins. They were the people you didn’t notice. They were the people you could easily ignore because it was none of your concern. But the Old Testament indicates that they were of concern to God. Similarly, the Parable of the Good Samaritan is just one passage in the New Testament showing that God remains concerned about those in concrete need (Luke 10:25-37).

Of special note here is the stranger, the foreigner. It was normal in the ancient world to bully and harass such people. Part of the dynamic of the Sodom and Gomorrah story in Genesis 19, as well as the story of the Levite in Judges 19, is the harassment of strangers. Because Israel itself had once been a group of foreigners living in Egypt, oppressed by the dominant culture, God would never let Israel treat any strangers in their midst the same way (e.g., Exod. 22:21, 23:9; Lev. 19:33-34; Deut. 10:18-19, 24:17-18).

Today, we can debate policies and laws about immigrants. The playing out of principles can get genuinely complicated in reality. Yet, like Dr. Lyon at the beginning of her pilgrimage, it is also easy to rationalize away our blind spots. It can be difficult for us to distinguish between kingdom principles and our political leanings. As we look back in history, we see dynamics similar to ancient times as waves of new peoples arrived in America – the Irish, the Italians, the Polish. Remember Polack jokes? In the end, as it has been said, “Immigration is an issue, but immigrants are people.”

Concern for these four groups did not go away in the New Testament. In Luke 4, when Jesus is giving a kind of “inaugural address” in his home synagogue in Nazareth, he does not talk about getting people’s souls saved. Instead, he quotes Isaiah 61. Here is what he says:

Yes, seeing people come to Christ is the most important task the church can endeavor to see accomplished in the world. But if we are to obey the Scriptures, it is not the only task. In the Parable of the Sheep and the Goats in Matthew 25:31-46, at the final judgment, Jesus does not judge the world in relation to what words of faith they might say. He judges the world on the basis of what they concretely did for others.