Evangelical Theology and Justice: Strange Bedfellows In the Kingdom of God — End of God

One big reason why Christianity has gotten a bad rap in post-world WWII Europe is that increasingly it began to be seen as hypocritical and disingenuous. Partly, as a result, the churches saw massive losses in the 60s and 70s. Statistics show that in my own country the Netherlands, for instance, the decline has still not come to a halt. I realize that a reduction to a single cause of any historical phenomenon is asking for trouble. But I’m not a historian and my purpose in this article is not to give an exhaustive overview of the decline of Christianity in Europe. Rather, I want to address a similar problem in evangelicalism where the accusation of hypocrisy points to a weird tension between evangelical theology and justice.

In the 20th century, one particularly pernicious problem regarding religions has come to light and is finally named: the checkered relationship between religion and justice. Christianity has not done well in the justice department. As the relationship between power and religion slowly became untethered in the 20th century, many people increasingly discerned a discrepancy between the teachings of Christianity and the standards of justice that had become generally normative in our culture–even when they are selectively and only imperfectly applied by everyone.