I remember my parents looking down on my grandmother for religiously watching Robert Schuller because he preached a “prosperity gospel” and a “social gospel”. A kind of truth diluted if you will, till there is no vestige of the original truth left to see. I knew that Schuller had associations with Norman Vincent Peale's writings and that was part of what upset my parents so badly. What I couldn't understand was why, If God loved us SO much, it was bad to teach that He wants those who follow Him to be successful in all their endeavors.
As I got older, and started reading the Bible for myself, passages like the Sermon On the Mount where Jesus spoke of God's love for us by comparing how beautifully He clothed the flowers... the ideals that I was being taught made even less sense.
I also began to understand the concept of the “social gospel” as I grew older. Great contempt was shown in my household for those who would reach the masses using the things the masses understood (unless those masses were primitive people being reached on a foreign pioneering mission field). Concerts were out, as were movies or events featuring food, sporting events or even river rafting trips...these mundane, and enjoyable activities were not to be used as a primary method of spreading God's Love because they were gimmicky. My parents believed that if you used these methods as your primary outreach tool, when those things went away so would your “converts”. But their disdain didn't make sense to me as I read the Scriptures that they so prided themselves in following. Jesus himself spent his time among the rabble... the outcasts of society. It seemed to me that Jesus was in the habit of meeting people where they lived. He wasn't afraid to cut someone down a notch who interacted with the world from a self-inflated viewpoint while at the same time expressing genuine compassion for someone in the depths of dispair. He used the metaphors people understood... to the fishermen he said he would make them fishers of men, but he knew that concept would be lost on the tax collector, who he instead told to render unto Caesar that which was Caesars and unto God that which was God's...To the lawyers of the day (Pharisees and Sadducees) he pointed out the fine points of the laws that they themselves were breaking because they were always arguing amongst themselves about what the law “really” meant, but to the woman accused of adultery he simply said “go and sin no more” after first having chased away her accusers.
And so, I read and I studied these things and it made even less sense to me to revile those preaching a “social gospel” because it seemed that a social gospel was in fact what Jesus himself preached.
