Beyond Pleated Pants and Skinny Jeans: Bonhoeffer to the Rescue
Scot McKnight, in his recent book Kingdom Conspiracy , rehearses the maddeningly familiar dichotomy between evangelism and social justice cleverly naming the former as those who wear Pleated Pants and the latter as the Skinny Jeans set. I’ve struggled with the dichotomy or tension from the earliest days of my entry into theological study and pastoral work (the early ‘70’s). I guess I received good teaching and had good mentors for I never felt in myself this tension that was writ large over the evangelicalism from which I came. In my day they might have been called the Straight Leggers and the Bell Bottoms or something like that. Somewhere along the way (late ‘80’s – ‘90’s) the idea that God called his people to care for the needy and feed the hungry and protect the widows and orphans seeped into the evangelical awareness. “Justice” was all the rage for a while – from the conservative to the less conservative end of that spectrum. Yet here in...