I like this quote: ‘I don’t preach a social gospel’

The late and truly wonderful Archbishop Desmond Tutu once remarked:

I don’t preach a social gospel;
I preach the Gospel, period.
The gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ is concerned for the whole person.
When people were hungry, Jesus didn’t say, “Now is that political, or social?”
He said: “I feed you.”
Because the good news to a hungry person is bread.

There are several things I really like in this quote. First, its directness. There is a no-nonsense dismissal of the suggestion that there is any difference between what people sometimes call ‘the pure gospel” and a social concern. Social justice is at the heart of Jesus’ mission and message, and those who pretend otherwise have missed the point. That obfuscation is so often motivated by a desire to avoid serious engagement with the needs of others—usually to protect our own wealth or comfort. Tutu calls that out, as he says ‘period’.

The next thing I like in this quote is his reference to the whole person. There are two important things here. First is that this is not something immaterial or ephemeral: the whole person includes every aspect of our lives. We are individual and social. We are physical and emotional and intellectual, and all of that makes up our ‘spiritual’ being. We have relationships and we have our own inner life. The whole person is all of this, past, present, and future.
Whatever we think we mean by ‘the Gospel’, the hope that God offers to us in and through this life, it relates to and enriches all of our lives, ‘the whole person’. But that leads me to say, secondly, Tutu shows that always this means something specific. Bread for the hungry is an example, and it is an imperative: at any given time there is something practical and immediate that this hope means. Something we can give, or something we can receive. (For some it is easier to think about giving than about receiving. For others, the opposite.)

So with Tutu I want to affirm a ‘social gospel’, because first of all we are all social beings. That includes our belonging to the one family of humankind, and our immediate families and local communities. But it also includes our belonging to the earth and our essential sociality, mutuality, in the whole life of the world. But I also affirm this social gospel because I believe that God is a social God. For me, the doctrine of God as ‘trinity’ is an affirmation of the life of God in community. There is a life which welcomes difference, expresses itself in creative love, giving and receiving, and this life inter-penetrates or indwells the whole creation. We live in this life: we come from and go to it. It is beyond us and yet in us. To learn to be ‘social’ in this way is to learn our place in the world: at once so small and insignificant, and yet also essential parts of the whole. This is the social gospel. To live is to belong, to give and receive.

Why, then, has this vision of life together, seen in Jesus, become so tied up in religious machinery and ideology that clouds or even denies it? More of that in some other posts to come. But in the meanwhile we need, together, to just hear this from Desmond Tutu: to live this social good news.