Returning to the Gospel · Session 6
A Scripture-centered teaching study. Read it here, or download the full manuscript below.
When the church divides over its mission, the deepest question is not which strategy is wiser, but whether the proclamation of Christ crucified and risen remains the central work the church is given to do.
We have traced the Social Gospel in Sessions 3 through 5 and the liberal theology beneath it in Session 4. In the middle of the twentieth century, that same question, what is the central mission of the church, came to a head inside the Black church, in two Baptist leaders: Joseph H. Jackson and Martin Luther King Jr.
This session is not mainly about civil rights strategy. It is about the theological divide their conflict revealed. Is the church first sent to proclaim the Gospel that saves sinners, with justice and mercy as its fruit? Or is its central mission to transform the social and political order? We will describe both men fairly and then test that question by Scripture.
This also prepares us for Session 7. The Black Liberation Theology of James Cone grew directly out of this moment. Cone said that Martin King gave Black theology its Christian identity. To understand Cone, we must first understand the divide that produced him.
A clear word at the start. To examine the theology of the civil rights era is not to defend segregation. Segregation was a real sin against people made in the image of God. The question here is narrower and deeper: what is the church’s central mission, and where does it locate salvation?
Before leading this session, read and meditate on:
Pray for humility, fairness, and courage. We honor what was courageous and rebuke what was unjust, while testing every theology by the Word of God.
Keep Scripture central. The question is theological, not partisan.
Represent both men fairly and accurately. Neither was a caricature.
Distinguish two things clearly: the rightness of opposing real injustice, and the theology that frames the church’s mission.
Resist political tribalism in either direction. Test every position by the Word of God.
In Session 5 we set Biblical Christianity beside the Social Gospel and saw that the deepest difference is where each locates the church’s center: proclaiming Christ who saves sinners, or transforming society. We affirmed that justice and mercy are the real fruit of the Gospel, not the Gospel itself.
This session watches that same divide run straight through the Black church in the years around 1960.
Ask the group: Is the central mission of the church to save souls or to change society?
Then ask: Is that even the right way to frame the question, or does it set up a false choice? Why?
Some churches act as if the Gospel and justice are enemies.
Some churches act as if justice is the Gospel.
Scripture refuses both errors and orders them rightly.
King and Jackson gave two different answers to one question about the mission of the church. Scripture makes the proclamation of the Gospel central and makes justice and mercy its fruit. It refuses both the error that ignores injustice and the error that turns social transformation into the gospel.
For generations the church was the spiritual and social center of Black American life. Under slavery and then segregation, it carried both the worship of God and the survival of a people. The National Baptist Convention, USA was the largest Black denomination in the country. As the civil rights movement rose in the 1950s, the question of the church’s role in that movement became urgent, and it became divisive.
Joseph H. Jackson was pastor of Olivet Baptist Church in Chicago and president of the National Baptist Convention, USA from 1953 to 1982, the longest tenure in its history. He held what he called a law and order approach to civil rights: change should come lawfully, through the courts, the ballot, and economic self-help. He promoted a philosophy he summarized as from protest to production, and he founded the National Baptist Freedom Farm to provide land to Black farmers who had been displaced for trying to register to vote.
Jackson had supported the Montgomery bus boycott early on, but by 1960 he urged the convention not to commit itself to civil rights activism, and he opposed the civil disobedience of King’s movement. He defended his position in his book Unholy Shadows and Freedom’s Holy Light in 1967. Theologically, Jackson held that the church’s first mission is spiritual: to preach the Gospel and build people up in Christ, with social improvement pursued lawfully as a result.
Jackson’s strength was insisting that the church’s first work is the Gospel. His risk was that law-and-order gradualism could become a reason to stand back from real and urgent injustice.
Tradition: Stood in the conservative, traditional National Baptist stream, which confesses the historic doctrines of the faith.
Affirmed: The inspiration and authority of Scripture, the virgin birth, the full deity of Christ, His bodily resurrection, His personal second coming, and His atoning, substitutionary death.
A fair caveat: Jackson’s surviving record centers on the church’s mission and civil rights rather than systematic doctrine, so these reflect his traditional Baptist orthodoxy more than a series of individual published statements.
Martin Luther King Jr. was a Baptist pastor, the leader of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and the most visible figure of the civil rights movement. Trained at Crozer Seminary and Boston University, he embraced theological liberalism and personalism. He openly called himself an advocate of the Social Gospel and credited Walter Rauschenbusch with giving him a theological basis for social concern, writing that a religion concerned for the souls of men but unconcerned for the conditions that scar those souls is spiritually moribund.
King was not uncritical of the Social Gospel. He faulted Rauschenbusch for coming close to identifying the Kingdom of God with a particular social and economic system and for too optimistic a view of human nature, and he drew on Reinhold Niebuhr for a more realistic doctrine of sin. King combined his social concern with Gandhi’s nonviolence and his own vision of the beloved community, and he led through nonviolent direct action.
King’s strength was naming injustice as a real evil the church cannot ignore. His risk, rooted in the Social Gospel framework he embraced, was relocating the church’s center toward social and political transformation.
Source: Documented from his own seminary papers in the Stanford King Papers and from his sermons.
Authority of Scripture: Read through liberal, critical lenses and not treated as the final, inerrant authority.
Virgin birth: In a 1949 seminary paper he called it downright improbable and even impossible to the modern mind, an expression of the early church’s faith rather than a biological fact.
Deity of Christ: Understood as Jesus’ supreme God-consciousness and moral attainment, a difference of degree, rather than the confession that He is God the Son.
Bodily resurrection: Treated as symbolic of Christ’s victory over death; he wrote that the external proof was found wanting and preached that the form you believe in is not the important thing.
Atonement: Followed the liberal moral-influence stream rather than penal substitution.
A fair note: These are his documented stated positions. Some hoped he later embraced a more traditional faith, but the available evidence shows continuity. This describes his theology, not the state of his heart before God.
Beneath the question of the church’s mission lay a difference in theology. The table summarizes where each man stood on the historic doctrines of the faith.
| Doctrine | Joseph H. Jackson | Martin Luther King Jr. |
|---|---|---|
| Authority of Scripture | Affirmed as authoritative | Liberal, critical |
| Virgin birth | Affirmed | Denied as literal |
| Deity of Christ | Affirmed, God the Son | God-consciousness, a degree |
| Bodily resurrection | Affirmed, bodily | Symbolic, not literal |
| Second coming | Affirmed, personal | Not literal |
| Substitutionary atonement | Affirmed | Moral influence |
The disagreement became a denominational crisis. The conflict centered on two things: Jackson’s long tenure as president, and the civil rights activism of King and his allies.
It came to a head at the convention in Kansas City in September 1961. On a chaotic final night, Gardner Taylor led a large group of ministers in an attempt to take the platform and force a change in the voting procedure, and Jackson’s supporters met them. Dozens of fistfights broke out on the convention floor. In the middle of the melee, a respected pastor named A. G. Wright fell and fractured his skull. He died two days later.
The tragedy hardened the conflict. Jackson publicly accused King of masterminding the invasion of the floor that led to the death, and he repeated the charge in thinly veiled terms while delivering the eulogy at Wright’s funeral. King denied the accusation and demanded a retraction. Jackson refused, and when the convention reconvened he won re-election and removed King from his office as vice president of the National Sunday School and Baptist Training Union. More than thirty Baptist leaders sent Jackson a telegram condemning the accusation against King.
King then quietly withdrew from the National Baptist Convention. That November, thirty-three ministers formed the Progressive National Baptist Convention, which King, Ralph Abernathy, and Gardner Taylor joined, built around support for the civil rights movement. The largest Black denomination had split, and the line of the split was the question of the church’s mission.
Underneath the personalities and the strategy was a theological divide. Both men were Baptist preachers, but they answered differently the question this whole study has been tracing: what is the central mission of the church? Before we set their answers side by side, we test the question itself by four passages of Scripture.
Have someone read the passage aloud.
Jesus stood up in the synagogue at Nazareth and read from Isaiah: the Spirit of the Lord is upon me to preach the gospel to the poor, to heal the brokenhearted, to preach deliverance to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are bruised. Then He said, this day this Scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.
Social Gospel and liberation readings take this as a manifesto of social and political liberation. We must be honest and careful. The ministry of Jesus did include compassion for the poor and physical healing, and Scripture never treats the body as unimportant. But Jesus defined the heart of His mission elsewhere. He came to seek and to save that which was lost, and the freedom He most centrally gives is freedom from the bondage of sin. Read in the whole of Luke, the liberty of Luke 4 is fulfilled supremely at the cross and the empty tomb, not in a political program.
Jesus truly cares for the poor and the suffering. But the liberty He came most centrally to bring is freedom from sin, won at the cross. We neither ignore the body nor mistake social reform for the salvation Christ came to give.
Have someone read the passage aloud.
Through Amos, God rejects the worship of people who trample the poor: I hate, I despise your feast days. He calls instead for justice to run down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream. God is not indifferent to injustice. Worship that coexists comfortably with oppression is offensive to Him.
This is the truth that the critics of mere gradualism rightly pressed and that King rightly named. A church that preaches while ignoring real injustice has not understood the God it claims to worship. We cannot read this passage and treat indifference to oppression as a faithful option.
God genuinely hates injustice and rejects worship that ignores it. Any account of the church’s mission that uses the Gospel as an excuse for indifference to oppression stands under the rebuke of Amos.
Have someone read the passage aloud.
Paul is not ashamed of the Gospel, for it is the power of God unto salvation to everyone who believes. Here is the other half of the balance. The power that saves is the Gospel, received by faith.
Law, the ballot, economic development, and protest can all change conditions, and some of that is real good. But none of them can make a dead sinner alive or reconcile a rebel to God. When a church loses confidence that the Gospel is the power of God, it will start to look for its power somewhere else: in politics, in programs, in social movements.
The Gospel, not politics or programs, is the power of God for salvation. A church that forgets this will look for saving power in things that cannot save.
Have someone read the passage aloud.
The risen Christ sent the church to make disciples of all nations, baptizing them and teaching them to obey all that He commanded. This is the church’s defining commission.
Teaching disciples to obey all that Christ commanded will certainly produce love of neighbor, mercy, and a hatred of injustice. The Commission does not make the church indifferent to the world. But the mission is defined as making disciples, not as transforming the social order. When a church rewrites its commission as social transformation, it may accomplish real good and still drift from the one task Christ actually gave it.
Christ sent the church to make disciples. That mission produces justice and mercy as fruit, but it is not the same as social transformation, and it must not be replaced by it.
We can now set the two answers side by side. Both men were Baptist preachers. The table contrasts their emphases, including the characteristic risk of each.
| Question | Joseph H. Jackson | Martin Luther King Jr. |
|---|---|---|
| Primary mission of the church | Preach the Gospel and build believers in Christ. | Transform society toward the beloved community. |
| The deepest human problem | Sin, addressed first by the Gospel. | Injustice and the conditions that scar the soul. |
| Means of change | Law, the ballot, and economic self-help. | Nonviolent direct action and civil disobedience. |
| Theological framework | More traditional and Gospel-first. | Social Gospel and personalism, with Niebuhrian realism. |
| Gospel and justice | Justice pursued lawfully as a result of the Gospel. | Justice placed at the center of the church’s witness. |
| Characteristic risk | Using Gospel-first as a reason to stand back from real injustice. | Relocating the church’s center to social transformation. |
Scripture refuses to let us choose between these as if only one were true. It makes the proclamation of the Gospel the central mission of the church, and it makes justice and mercy the real and required fruit of that Gospel.
So we can say two things at once. Jackson was right that the church’s first work is the Gospel, and he was wrong wherever Gospel-first became a reason to look away from real injustice. King was right that God hates injustice and that the church cannot be indifferent to it, and his theology was wrong where it followed the Social Gospel in moving the church’s center from saving sinners to transforming society, and in adopting a weakened view of Scripture’s authority and of human sin.
The biblical path is not a midpoint between the two men. It is the Gospel held firmly at the center and justice pursued as its fruit, refusing both quietism and a social gospel.
Segregation was a real sin against people made in the image of God, and the church was right to oppose it.
God genuinely hates injustice. A faith that produces no concern for the oppressed is dead.
The first and central work of the church is to proclaim Christ crucified and risen.
Beware of any theology that makes social or political transformation the gospel itself.
Beware of judging either man by his political usefulness rather than by Scripture.
Before Session 7, read:
Write a short response to this question: How does the freedom that Christ gives differ from political or social liberation, and how are the two related?
Tonight we watched the divide of this whole study run through the church in the years around 1960.
Joseph H. Jackson insisted that the church’s first work is the Gospel and pursued justice through law, the ballot, and economic self-help. Martin Luther King Jr. named injustice as a real evil and placed the pursuit of justice at the center of the church’s witness, within a Social Gospel framework. Their conflict split the largest Black denomination and helped set the stage for the Black Liberation Theology we will examine next.
Scripture holds together what the two men tended to divide. The Gospel is the central mission and the power of God for salvation. Justice and mercy are its real fruit. The faithful church refuses both the quietism that ignores injustice and the social gospel that turns transformation into salvation, and it keeps Christ crucified and risen at the center.
This session touches race, politics, and a figure many people deeply revere. Lead with great care and honesty.
We are testing theology by Scripture. We are not relitigating whether segregation was wrong.
Keep the focus on the question that runs through the whole session: is the proclamation of Christ crucified and risen still the central work of the church, and is justice pursued as its fruit?
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