Finding a biblical framework for Christian social engagement

|PIC1|Especially since the 1960s, there has been a new and urgent search to find a biblical framework for Christian social engagement. In South America and South Africa, the major focus has been 'liberation for the poor' and the Exodus theme has provided an important source of inspiration.

More recently, Ronald Sider and others in the US have been writing about the ways evangelicals can engage with public policy. Across much of continental Europe, the Christian Democratic parties, built on a philosophy with Christian roots called 'Personalism', continue to exercise a significant and sometimes dominant political influence. The problem is that each of these approaches is producing very different policy agendas. Which should we follow?

The biblical foundation for action

There are two issues to consider. The first is the biblical foundation to be used. Those who follow Kingdom ethics find their authority and content in the teaching about the Kingdom of God in the New Testament.

In contrast, those who follow 'Creation ethics' base their ethics on the norms explicit and implicit in the early chapters of Genesis. The difficulty is that neither provides very much guidance about the agenda for political and social transformation. So is there anywhere else we can look?

The Jubilee Centre has argued that biblical law, rightly interpreted, provides both a framework and an agenda for social reform. Since God is a trinity of persons perfectly joined together in love, he is a God concerned above all else with the way we relate to him and to one another. This God took a nation, Israel, who had hard hearts (Matthew 19:8) and revealed to them in a particular historical and geographical context how they should order their political, social and economic lives.

Then, later, he sent his own Son to provide the possibility of forgiveness to heal broken relationships and to show what a perfect relational life would look like. This story of revelation, with all of its ups and downs on the way in Israel's history, provides the raw material for us as Christians today to work out a response to the political, economic and social issues which press upon us. It provides the basis for a political agenda.

From principle to policy

There is, then, the second difficulty to overcome. If Christians wade into the ocean of politics with their 'Christian solutions', when even the best policy prescriptions take us two steps forward and one step back, how will the public distinguish between the good news of the gospel and flawed political answers?

The art of politics is compromise, but there is no element of compromise in the gospel of Jesus. On the other hand, if we distance political activity from our faith, how do our lives give glory to God? How can we then demonstrate to the world that we live under the Lordship of Christ?

The Jubilee Centre's answer to this dilemma has been to seek Christian ethical principles from biblical research, but let other Christian-based campaigning organisations argue for the policy outworking of these principles in the political arena.

By appealing to the relational perspective on issues, and with insight provided from biblical reflection, groups such as the Relationships Foundation in the UK are able to bring Christian values into public policy debate, without associating policy prescriptions involving complex compromises directly with the message of the church.

This approach also allows Christians more easily to involve non-Christians in their search for change in society and has wider application in the workplace - whether business, schools, hospitals or the courts.

The Jubilee Centre's model has already resonated with Christians in other countries. In Kenya, a group of Christians under Professor Peter Kimuyu's leadership has recently come together to establish a body similar to the Jubilee Centre. They have called their organisation the 'Sychar Centre' because they want to reach out to society at large, just as Jesus reached out to the woman from Sychar in Samaria (John 4).

After a 15-month wait, the Centre was given clearance by the Office of the Registrar General in 2007. The first issue they are taking up is ownership and distribution of land, as this was one of the main causes of the riots in January following the national elections.

They hope to run a series of consultations with our sister organisation Concordis International to allow the different ethnic groups to explore together a new and equitable basis for land ownership to be reflected in the constitution.

So where does an international association of Jubilee type organisations fit in? Our plan is to build an international network of Christians who are seeking to bring about social transformation on the basis of biblical teaching, whether at a political or organisational level, and who share our approach.

In addition to the Kenyans, there are Christians who are already actively pursuing this agenda in Australia, Singapore, the United States and South Africa. As an ambassador for the Jubilee Centre, I will be seeking to encourage and empower them as Christian social and political activists.

Michael Schluter, founder of the Cambridge-based Jubilee Centre. This article was written originally for the Jubilee Centre and is printed in Christian Today with permission. For more on the work of the Jubilee Centre, visit www.jubilee-centre.org