Fundamental to our understanding of God is that he is a loving Father to all people with a special and purposeful relationship with those that follow his Son, Jesus Christ. This is that heart of evangelistic faith: that God loves all people as his children, seeks to save all, and in Christ has died for all.
Yet, often the universal parenthood of God is dismissed as a liberal idea in, especially, Reformed-Baptist circles. As I have investigated this interpretation, I have found that it was largely due to the battles between liberal and conservative Baptists in North America. The argument is older than that, but here it took on a particular intensity. Social Gospel Baptists emphasized our common humanity to support a political ethic of rights and responsibilities. We see good examples of this in Walter Rauschenbusch’s classic, The Social Principles of Jesus. While their hearts were in the right place, like many progressives, their hearts exceeded what their exegesis could demonstrate. Moreover, while there are many beautiful elements of the Social Gospel, it too often over-emphasized the political dimensions of sin and salvation and undermined the personal. When they did demonstrate their doctrines with exegesis, they used strongly historical critical methods of interpretation, unafraid to point out inaccuracies in traditional views on certain passages, which offended the conservatives.
In response, the conservatives in turn offered polemics against liberalism, who conservatives worried dissolved the particularity of the church. J. Gresham Machen, for example, dismissed the doctrine of God’s universal fatherhood in his Christianity and Liberalism. However, while the Reformed-Baptists appealed to adoption texts in Paul and John, which does apply childhood relationship only to Christians, this essentially neglected a large sum of Biblical material that did speak of all people as God’s children, glossing the Bible with their own Calvinism. In doing so, the dangerous implication could be that God does not love all people, or if he does, it is certainly in an arbitrary, uneven, and preferential way, saving the elect while damning everyone else.
Thanks for clearing up my confusion and error! I love the Prodigal Son Parable...Lots of good stuff there in!
Posted by: René Lafaut | February 08, 2016 at 08:51 PM