Addressing Illegal Immigration

This chapter introduces the varying evangelical responses to undocumented immigrants in the 1980s. Evangelicals’ views of the Reagan administration impacted their responses to the issue of undocumented immigration. Progressive evangelicals expressed their opposition to President Reagan’s Central America policies by supporting the movement to provide church sanctuary to people who fled the civil wars in Central America. In contrast, conservative evangelicals emphasized the need to act within the confines of the law. They became part of the legalization program provided by the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act, the Evangelical Task Force on Legalization, run by World Relief. At the same time, they closely followed the fate of Pentecostal Christians in the Soviet Union and sponsored Soviet refugees. Apart from legal concerns, what differentiated mainstream evangelicals’ and progressive evangelicals’ responses to undocumented immigrants in the 1980s was their willingness to take a public position against the Reagan administration’s foreign policy.

The Kingdom of God, Hope and Christian Ethics

This article interrogates the use of a Kingdom-of-God narrative frame, in the work both of progressive evangelicals Glen Stassen and David Gushee ( Kingdom Ethics) and in liberation theology, claiming that this narrative has often inspired hope and moral action but can be questioned on a variety of theological and methodological grounds. It considers startling recent claims by liberation ethicist Miguel De la Torre that all talk of a coming Kingdom of God is mythic, a middle-class illusion that undermines radical commitment to ethical praxis for justice. Engagement with two classic liberationist texts (by Gustavo Gutiérrez and James Cone) confirms both that liberation theology offers a somewhat radicalized Kingdom-of-God narrative and that De la Torre’s new claims represent a clear break with liberationism. The article concludes by briefly considering options in eschatology for those who have heretofore invested considerable hope in an immanentist, participative, certainly-coming Kingdom-of-God narrative to ground their Christian ethics.

Concerning the Ministry

The Ministry of the Church is a reprint of the reviews of the muchdiscussed volume, The Apostolic Ministry, which have appeared in The Record, to which has been added a preliminary chapter by Bishop Stephen Neill. For its scope and size it is about as good as anything could be; and it is highly satisfactory to find that progressive Evangelicals within the Church of England are rousing themselves to vigorous and effective warfare against a theory of the Church and ministry whose doctrinal implications strike at the very heart of their Evangelicalism. Something like a note of “righteous wrath” can be heard from time to time in these articles, and inasmuch as this note is sounded in the tones of first-rate scholarship, it is very welcome. The task of the writers was indeed a formidable one. They had to deal with a volume vast in bulk, heavily weighted with erudition, and abounding in historical constructions and generalisations of a very far-reaching kind. The number of effective criticisms which they have been able to make within so small a compass is really astonishing.In the main, they have concerned themselves with three lines of attack. They have set themselves to show first of all how slender are the assured historical data from which so vast a web of theory has been spun.