A month or so ago I had a comment on Helm’s Deep, on KLICE and its Director's advocacy of ‘social transformation’. The Director
of KLICE responds here. I am happy to have been put right by Jonathan regarding
the institutional position of KLICE. I don’t think I said or implied that KLICE
speaks for the TF, which is purely a research fellowship in which various views
jostle side by side. But KLICE is, I now understand, free-standing within the UCCF and with overlapping interests with one research
group of the Tyndale Fellowship, and otherwise devoted to its own research and
advocacy. I am sorry to have got things not quite right.
Jonathan says KLICE also has an opinion page or pages,
which do not speak for KLICE, though obviously a piece by the Director of KLICE
carries more than ordinary gravitas,
and later on in his reply, he makes no bones about this. This was my original
concern. KLICE does not only foster
research, but takes a strong line on Christian ‘social transformation,’ the very
area in which they research.
Otherwise, the
remarks in Helm’s Deep were not far
off the mark. The Director of KLICE tells us that he is an impatient advocate
of ‘the good news that God is, in Jesus, in the business
of reclaiming the whole of his rebellious and broken creation as his own and
that this in-breaking, transforming Kingdom is already present now, in Christ
himself and in his Body’. Such a man is not going to have much time for diverging views, whatever he may say.
Nevertheless it is important to note
that there is another position, (as he acknowledges). another view of the
church and of the scope of Christian ethics, nearer, I say, to both the spirit and letter of the New Testament. The
church is an exclusively spiritual body, spiritual both in her concern for the spirits of
men and women, and as a chief locus of the regenerating and sanctifying work of
God the Holy Spirit. She is formed of those who, relying on divine promises,
are in this life pilgrims and strangers, who look for a city which has foundations,
whose maker and builder is God. Through the churchly means of grace they are
being helped to put on the whole armour of God in their daily fight against the
principalities and powers.
Do such people have obligations to
others? Most certainly they do. They are
‘to do good to all men, especially those who are of the household of faith’, to
their fellow Christians and to the wider community. Their influence should be
manifest in the family, at work and at play and through the part they take, or
may take, in voluntary societies, and so on. But how they meet such obligations, in their
competition with other obligations they have, is largely up to them. The idea
that the church might have social programmes for 'transformation' of society
is not part of this outlook, for their clamour can easily drown out the good
news of salvation through the cross of Christ, in rather the way the Judaizers
compromised the gospel in apostolic times. One thing is needful.
As far as I can see no Christian
group in history has thought that what they were about was fostering the ‘in-breaking,
transforming Kingdom’ in the sense that Jonathan has in mind. Not the medieval
Papacy, not the Anabaptists at Munster, not Wittenburg or Geneva or Canterbury,
not English Dissent. Not until the advent of the social gospel did churches
acquire the ambition of establishing the kingdom of God on earth. So a good
question is: Where did the idea of the Christian Church being engaged in
societal and cultural transformation as an essential outworking of the Great Commission
come from? Perhaps the Director of KLICE would consider the idea of supporting
a PhD student or two to look into things?
