Stackhouse on What Evangelicals Need

Gideon Strauss quotes John Stackhouse on what evangelicals need:

American evangelicals need to escape the narrow (and heretical) idea that God’s Plan of Salvation is to rescue souls from a worn-out planet and whisk them off to a spiritual heaven. Their teachers and preachers need to expand the horizons of salvation to include the physical body, the church, and the whole of creation.

This divine endorsement of the whole world needs to be rooted in a strong doctrine of creation, furthermore, not just of salvation. Thus American evangelicals need to understand and embrace the so-called creation mandate, the command of God to rule over the creation, to cultivate it, to “be as God” to it as the image of God. Thus everything about the “everyday” matters to God. And in this context, politics now becomes godly work – not just for politicians, but for all citizens and all neighbors – because politics is simply the conversation and negotiation about how we’re all going to get along with each other as well as we can.