It was the truncated gospel that evangelicals love so much that allowed Puritans to preach about the absolute sovereignty of God to slaves on slave ships from Africa to the Americas, while turning a blind eye to the injustice.
The "Truncated” Gospel
It was the truncated gospel, that allowed white evangelists to preach "the gospel" of repentance from sin to slaves on plantations while doing nothing to end their slavery.
It was the truncated gospel, that defended slavery against abolitionists on the basis of the authority and infallibility of the Bible.
It was the truncated gospel, that led to the formation of both the Southern Presbyterian Church [& Morton Smith's PCA a century later] and the Southern Baptist Convention in Augusta, Georgia.
It was the truncated gospel, that allowed the black church to be intentionally pushed to the margins of mainstream American traditional Christianity during the Southern white church resurgence during Reconstruction.
It was the truncated gospel, that allowed evangelicals to either passively support Jim Crow or work to maintain it in the midst of "liberal" attempts to dismantle it because such issues were not central to what God cares about for Christians.
It was the truncated gospel, that allowed fundamentalist evangelicals to bring in black musicians to sing [rap] at their theology & evangelistic conferences to then send them right back into segregated America without batting an eye.
It was the truncated gospel, that believed that dismantling Jim Crow was not the church's business among evangelical Baptists, Presbyterians, & Methodists in the South & it also physically blocked blacks from worshipping in white "gospel-centered" churches.
In the form of a traditional black church "sermon close," I'd like to give a short history of the consequences of today's truncated gospel that reduces redemption to saving souls, with no emphasis on redeeming the entire cosmos, to tie together previous Tweets. The Puritans👇🏾— Anthony Bradley (@drantbradley) August 31, 2018