Learning from the Global Church: Part 3
Overcoming Compartmentalization
In my ongoing series regarding what Americans need to learn from our brothers and sisters in other countries, I’m ready to take on what may be the most glaring aspect of American Christianity: compartmentalizing our lives and reducing the scope of the gospel to addressing part of life instead of the whole.
Compartmentalization is a serious problem in the U.S., but much less so in the church of the majority world. We are far more prone in the West, and particularly in the USA, to break our lives into separate compartments which are hermetically sealed from each other. Then we only allow our faith to exercise full authority over certain aspects of our life.
For example, we tend to think Christianity is primarily about going to heaven after we die. Only to the degree that something is a “salvation” issue is it truly important. Of course, we all know God cares about ethics, morality, justice, peace, compassion, human dignity, and other issues. However, we tend to relegate these to secondary matters which we hope to be enhanced by our faith, but which are not “salvation issues.” Since we cannot earn our salvation, which is by God’s grace, we treat Christian virtues and values as optional signs of Christian maturity--nice features we hope naturally develop among us, but not essential.
Let me illustrate one devastating way this has played out in American history. Christ came into a world where slavery was the norm in every society. There was no option to eliminate slavery in the early church since Christians did not have the political/social power to do so. They could only regulate and mitigate the impact of an evil system. Therefore, slavery was greatly regulated in the church from the beginning. Believers were taught to view all people of all social classes as God’s image bearers who should be treated with dignity and welcomed into the loving Kingdom as equal brothers and sisters.
As corrupt as European Christendom was for many centuries, it was not legal for a Christian to enslave a fellow Christian. However, when the Atlantic slave trade started to become common, Christians in the American colonies were caught in a bind. Should they evangelize their slaves? If these slaves converted, they would have to be emancipated. But how can you justify not sharing the gospel with people God loves and wants to save from every tribe and tongue when we are commissioned to make disciples of all ethnic groups?
The solution the 17th century American church developed was compartmentalizing life. In a series of slave codes in Virginia starting in the late 1600s and culminating in 1705, it was determined that converting to Christianity only changed a slave’s eternal situation, not their earthly situation. Salvation was for the soul in the afterlife, not the body in this life. Such a move was a massive and novel compartmentalization of Christian faith that was a predictor of what was to come. Anything that conflicted with Christian faith in the “real world” of daily experience could potentially be moved to the compartment of optional instead of a “salvation issue.” These issues could then be labeled a false “social gospel.”
When we compartmentalize our lives like this, we slice people up into pieces instead of seeing them as whole. We think we can love someone’s soul while caring little about their body, family, community, and lived earthly experience. We can give mere lip service to, or even downright ignore, issues of justice and peace. To the degree that we care about righteousness, American Christians tend to reduce it to personal morality and the nuclear family and ignore larger social expressions of setting things right. We reduce the gospel to souls and overlook the importance of bodies and social realties.
In fact, the Greek word sozo (σωζω) which occurs over 100 times in the NT means both "to save" and "to heal." As a novice student of NT Greek, I found it hard to know which way to translate this word because both meanings made sense most of the time. The problem was with the false dichotomy I brought to the text. In the scriptures the two meaning are intertwined. If we asked Jesus, "are you here to save souls or heal bodies?" I think he would say... "Yes." God has always cared about all of us - bodies and souls.
This kind of thinking is rare in the majority world and global church. They better understand that you can’t love part of a person. Majority world Christians are more likely to point out that you can’t care about a person’s eternal destiny while ignoring their earthly reality. You can’t separate people’s spirits from their bodies. Jesus is Lord of all, or he is not Lord at all. While there is a clear distinction between the kingdom of God and the nations of this world, citizens of God’s kingdom are commissioned to extend God’s reign (Jesus’ authority) over every aspect of life. We cannot ignore oppression, exploitation, objectification, dehumanization, and call ourselves the children of Jesus’ Father. People need saving in every aspect of life and calling Jesus “Lord” is comprehensive.
If this is true, then there is no clear separation between preaching the Good News and being agents of Good News who work for justice, righteousness, and peace through compassion, service, and truth telling in a world of propaganda. We cannot announce liberation of souls while ignoring the bondage of bodies or dehumanization of certain populations. And it would be anemic if we tried to treat bodies without tending to the spiritual realities at play. Jesus calls us to a holistic approach – saving/healing people body/soul. We need to reject “monocular” visions of God’s mission and embrace Christ's binocular way of seeing the world. Human beings are full of dualities – two eyes, ears, arms, legs, etc. Cutting out one eye would “simplify” our vision, but abandoning a binocular vision wouldn’t make it better! It would mess up our depth perception!
I find it interesting that Matthew Parris who is an atheist, claims that the best development work in Africa is done by Christians because they offer a path that fits holistically with human needs. We need to sit at the feet of our global family and learn from them what it means to love all aspect of people, even of our enemies, and make Jesus Lord of all.