Interview: Eric Mason on the Dangers of a 'Narrow Gospel'

Editor's Note: Read part one of this interview. Dr. Eric Mason is the founder and pastor of Epiphany Fellowship. He is the recipient of multiple earned degrees, including a B.S. in Psychology from Bowie State University, a Master of Theology from Dallas Theological Seminary, and a Ph.D. from Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary. He is the founder and president of Thriving, an urban resource organization committed to developing leaders for ministry in the urban context. He is the author of four books, the most recent of which is Woke Church : An Urgent Call for Christians in America to Confront Racism and Injustice . This is part two of Faithfully Magazine's interview with Mason, conducted by phone. It has been edited and condensed for clarity. In your book, Woke Church , you talk about how the gospel and justice are deeply intertwined. You seem to be responding to a movement or tendency in White Evangelical circles to narrowly define the gospel to the exclusion of justice, reconciliation, etc. Can you speak on why you believe the gospel has been so narrowly defined in these circles? When I talk about the narrow definition of the gospel, I’m saying that the gospel is taught in America individualistically. We think almost exclusively about individual salvation. But, the Bible even talks about the salvation of households and even of people groups. However, we’ve reduced salvation to justification. But, when you read Colossians chapter 1, [you] read that Jesus has come to redeem all things. That’s what it says in verse 23. Throughout the book of Titus, Paul does something different. He basically reverses his formula for orthodoxy and orthopraxy. He reverses it and he starts with orthopraxy, orthodoxy, orthopraxy. So, in chapter 3, he talks about serving your civic authorities in verse 1. Then it goes from [there] to don’t forget that you were lost yourself. Then it goes into one of the strongest passages on the theology of being regenerated by faith by the renewing power of God. Then it calls God a philanthropist. Then he says as an outflow of this, let our people learn to meet pressing needs in order that we may not be found unfruitful. So, what does that mean? As an outgrowth of God being a philanthropist to save us in our fallen estate, we as Christians do proclaim the gospel, but we also do good works that are a reflection of our regeneration in how we relate to the brokenness that is in the world as an implication of the gospel. "We believe in word and deed. We proclaim the clarity of the death, burial, and resurrection of Christ, and we also believe that we are supposed to meet pressing needs in order that we may not be found unfruitful. We’re not saying that our good works are the gospel. We’re saying that they’re an outflow of the gospel." So examples of a narrow definition of the gospel. When most guys are planting their churches in the inner city like me, I can’t just go there and say, “Yeah man, we’re going to get a good worship band and a nice space and we’re going to go ahead and do small groups,” and that’s really the extent of the church. “We’re going to maybe support some churches for missions.” For me and many guys like me that come into an inner city, I have to come in thinking about not just building a place where people can have community building a deep gospel base, but also about how 90 percent of my community is single parent homes. The average household income is $15,000 per household, which is well below the poverty line. So, when I’m coming into my community, I can’t just come in with a cookie cutter suburban model of church. I have to come in thinking about, “How does the gospel speak into the economics of this community?” When you come into this community, and you see that $400 million was removed from the city’s educational budget and they’re closing schools and shoving 35 to 40 young African-American kids in the elementary classrooms and then they take another $800 million three months later and invest that in the prisons. And so you got to ask yourself, “Am I just going to sing songs on Sunday and believe in the regulative principle?” We believe in Word and deed. We proclaim the clarity of the death, burial, and resurrection of Christ, and we also believe that we are supposed to meet pressing needs in order that we may not be found unfruitful. We’re not saying that our good works are the gospel. We’re saying that they’re an outflow of the gospel. I remember one guy who was saying, “You have got to make sure that you don’t have youth ministry. You can’t have youth ministry and children’s ministry because we need to minister to the family and the whole family needs to be in church.” Well, I’m like, you say not to have youth ministry, but where I am, that will kill our entire ministry, because there are parents that have to work two jobs to make ends meet. So, when you’re telling them Deuteronomy 6, before they can get home to do Deuteronomy 6, they have to bring some money home to do some Deuteronomy 6. So, what are they doing with their kids? They need supplemental ministry to help them contextually with their families, and a lot of times in inner cities, ministering to children and youth is a gateway to ministering to their entire family. Listen, if we experience and knew each other’s contextual and gospel stories, we wouldn’t make weird assumptions about others as it pertains to the need to talk about the implications of the gospel in these particular ways. https://twitter.com/pastoremase/status/1047065538722189312 In your book, you also pointedly use the analogy of family history to talk about how we, as American Christians, need to be honest about our Christian family history and how we are impacted and affected by those who went before us. Why is knowing and acknowledging this family history important for the church today? How do you recommend an ordinary parishioner to begin doing this? I would start with the reality that America has trained us to patriotically and triumphantly think about our history. This is really important. Because we aren’t told the broader narrative of American history, what that does is it creates in people a resistance to when others bring up present problems in the country. We’re not taught and we’re not teaching people in school and in the church that this country is deeply woven and built on and embedded with racism. Racism is in every fabric of our culture. If you don’t begin with dealing with the reality of that, it’s very difficult for you to learn, if you make assumptions that it’s not. And the question is how do you do that? I think even watching a documentary on Netflix like 13 th , and that’s just one area. That’s just the prison pipeline. When you look [at] a documentary like 13 th , you’re like, “I didn’t know this at all! I wouldn’t have known this!” I think that for anybody who is a believer who believes in original sin knows that if there’s an original sin that impacts us through just us being humans, then we should know that that original sin still affects how justice is being done. Then, what I think our brothers and sisters need to do is really begin to take down our gods. That’s why one of the sections in my book is “Be aware,” because we don’t even know our lineage and how we got to where we are as the church. So, one of the things I would read is Carter G. Woodson’s History of the Negro Church . I would read Richard Allen’s memoir . It’s a very small memoir on how he bought his own freedom and what he went through to become a bishop and begin to start a whole denomination. A bigger work for those who are more ambitious is C. Eric Lincoln’s The Black Church in the African American Experience . It’s a very, very good book. One of my favorite books is by Carl Ellis: Free at Last? The Gospel in the African-American Experience. Now, if you’re a person that is used to more deep intellectual jargon, you can read Doctrine and Race by Mary Beth Swetnam Mathews. You’re going to have to put it down because it’s so dense in its depth. So, those are some types of resources. I tell people to go on a journey, a sanctifying journey of learning the challenges of race in our country. Just google it: “Racism in America.” I mean, again, real simple. And if you have any connections, any relationships with people of other ethnicities, not using them as a project but asking them, “Is it okay if I could have you over sometime or take you out and ask you how you feel about the state of race in this country and why you feel that way? And give me your story, I’d love to know your story, to know when you first knew that you were Black.” You know? Someone asked me that question and I don’t even know how to answer it. Some people are like, “I knew I was Black on this day.” And usually when you first know you’re Black, it’s not in a positive light. It’s usually in a negative experience. People say, “Why do you have to wear shirts that say ‘Black this’ and say ‘Black that.’ It’s because whiteness is presented as the universal standard of our country. Nobody has to say “white power.” Everything tells you that white has power. When I turn on the TV and my kids watch super heroes, when they watch Bible programming, they are subliminally engaged by art that says that Blacks have contributed nothing, when we know that’s not true. But Whites are naturally nurtured in our country in very, very overt and covert ways to value themselves and see themselves as better than others. And we’re not saying you’re racist. We’re just saying you’re trained to view yourself in a particular way that says you’re valuable, whereas most ethnicities—in particular, African Americans—because of the legacy of slavery, Black codes, Jim Crow, and systematic racism in this country, are always reminded of our inequality in this country. This is a difficult question. The Bible speaks pretty clearly that unrepentant, habitual sin that shows no signs of inner struggle and spiritual warfare may be a sign that saving faith is not present. At the same time, Christians should be extremely careful of making declarative statements about who is or is not saved. With that in mind, how should Christians think about the fact that many Christian pastors, leaders, theologians were active proponents of slavery, racialized theology, segregation, and other forms of racial injustice? More pointedly, is racism heresy, or is it heterodoxy, and does that impact the way the church today should treat this sin? I think it’s a third-class condition. Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe saved. Maybe not. I think it’s all of the above. I’m not going to say the person’s not saved because they are racist. I wouldn’t just rote say that. I would reverse the question. People would say that James Cone is not saved, but my question to them is, have you read any of James Cone’s works? This is the thing. I think that there is a possibility that a person who is walking in the unrepentant sin of racism could have a problem with their soteriology. What I mean by that is, the question is, are we all equally fallen or are Blacks more fallen than others in your theology? "Racism is heresy. Why is it heresy? Racism is heresy because it’s partiality doctrine... As a matter of fact, most of Acts is about proving the Jews that Gentiles were savable, and that’s why the Jerusalem council happened in order to not say, 'You need more than we need in order to be saved' or, 'You need what we need to be saved versus Christ.' Christ plus anything is heresy. It’s not merely a variant doctrine, but it is an unorthodox, unbiblical sub-doctrine." I have so many resources. I know about a lawyer that wrote a book in the early 1900s on basically the dehumanization of Blacks as not imago dei . He basically trained Whites how to view Blacks. In the Museum of the Bible, they have a Bible there where they took out all of the passages on freedom and justice and the Exodus to keep slaves from knowing that the implications of the gospel mean manumission. So, when you start changing the Bible and you want to limit the Bible that you give to a person, I really, really struggle with that. I have to go to First John and talk about sins versus sin. Racism is heresy. Why is it heresy? Racism is heresy because it’s partiality doctrine, which the Bible teaches all the way through it—Proverbs, Galatians, Acts are deep on partiality. As a matter of fact, most of Acts is about proving [to] the Jews that Gentiles were savable, and that’s why the Jerusalem council happened in order to not say, “You need more than we need in order to be saved” or, “You need what we need to be saved versus Christ.” Christ plus anything is heresy. It’s not merely a variant doctrine, but it is an unorthodox, unbiblical sub-doctrine. So, I think that there are many deep ways that we can nuance and think through this, but it’s embedded into our sociological DNA. My kids already know that they’re Black and there’s a difference, and I’m trying to train them not to choose whiteness when they choose a toy because of self-hatred. So, even going beyond whether or not they’re saved and all of those kinds of differences, I do think that if a person is racist they should be put under church discipline because church discipline is a mechanism that is utilized to tell whether or not someone is saved. That’s what church discipline is for. That’s the purpose of it. My question—have we ever in American history ever seen a White church discipline a White person because of racism? Have you ever heard of anyone excommunicated because of their racism? Even if you look at, and I hate to bring this up, even if you look at the [Presbyterian Church in America] and you see guys who wrote documents with racist ideas and nobody put those guys under church discipline, it’s one thing to say we denounce his teachings. The question is, are you calling him to repentance by excommunication until he’s brought into restoration? If not, you are a co-conspirator of continuing to be partial in how you deal with sin. We’re just talking about basic Christianity. I mean, if Paul gets in the face of Peter and talks to him and challenges him just about not eating with the Gentiles… I mean, Peter didn’t write a treatise on the Gentiles! He just stopped eating with them and Barnabas was carried away by his hypocrisy, the “son of encouragement.” Paul rebukes him publicly and said he wasn’t walking in step with the gospel! To me, those are strong statements, brother. That’s what church discipline is for. That’s the purpose of it. My question—have we ever in American history ever seen a White church discipline a White person because of racism? Have you ever heard of anyone excommunicated because of their racism? Even if you look at, and I hate to bring this up, even if you look at the [Presbyterian Church in America] and you see guys who wrote documents with racist ideas and nobody put those guys under church discipline, it’s one thing to say we denounce his teachings. The question is, are you calling him to repentance by excommunication until he’s brought into restoration? If not, you are a co-conspirator of continuing to be partial in how you deal with sin. We’re just talking about basic Christianity. I mean, if Paul gets in the face of Peter and talks to him and challenges him just about not eating with the Gentiles… I mean, Peter didn’t write a treatise on the Gentiles! He just stopped eating with them and Barnabas was carried away by his hypocrisy, the “son of encouragement.” Paul rebukes him publicly and said he wasn’t walking in step with the gospel! To me, those are strong statements, brother. [caption id="attachment_60704" align="aligncenter" width="400"] Eric Mason (Photo: Twitter/Eric Mason)[/caption] You mentioned that church discipline is an essential, that you can’t have a church without church discipline. How do we deal with that fact, that our American churches didn’t perform church discipline with clear racists? In a sense, would we have to say that our churches were not really true churches for all this time? I would say that some of the churches were apostate. Because we’re not talking about we didn’t give him food. There were churches that changed the theology of baptism so that slaves who were baptized would remain as slaves. We’re talking about baptism. This is a core, 2000-year-old Christian essential. And you put him in the water and then say that his or her baptism doesn’t count because they’re not fully human? Where in God’s economy did He create a person that looks human but wasn’t human and they had a partial soul? That’s heterodoxy in and of itself, that a sentient human being is only 2/3 of a living soul. But, let’s just say that they are 2/3 of a soul. If they are, then why would you baptize them and say that their baptism doesn’t count because they’re not a human? Why baptize them? You’re not baptizing horses! You know? It’s how deeply the root of sin, the deceitfulness of sin based on Hebrews 3:13-14 that causes the heart to be hard. I think that there are churches that have let that sin become a part of the acceptable culture of their church. This is a central gospel sin. When you don’t affirm a person’s humanity, that’s what James chapter 1 and 2 is about—you don’t affirm a person’s humanity because of their social status. It’s unbelievable. And James was questioning your salvation based on that. So, the goal is to save the soul of the Western church. I like the modern English translation of Revelation 2 when it says “the love you had at first.” When it says “the love you had at first,” it’s the intensity of the authenticity of Christian love for God and people fulfilling the law. And so, if you notice the things that the Ephesian church did well is it loved defending the faith and it suffered well. But it had nothing to do with loving people. So, losing your first love is not loving God and having that flow into how you love other human beings and other Christians. The church of America doesn’t realize that it’s lost its first love. When we look at that as a reality, I think that we better be careful because God is going to remove lampstands. That can exegetically mean either of two [things]. It could either mean moving you out of existence as an ecclesiastical entity that represents Jesus’ name on earth. Or, it can mean that the mantle of movement influence that the church theologically had would be removed. So, if we’re saying that the latter is true, then for the American Western church, which has written more theological works and has had more global theological missiological influence than probably any nation of Christians in the world… Could God be saying, “I’m going to give your theological movement influence to South America, Africa, and Asia?” I don’t know which interpretation is right, but I know that we’re in a lot of trouble as it pertains to our commitment to the Lord Jesus Christ and how people view us. I think we need to really work in our commitment to be a faithful church community. And I’m hopeful particularly with the younger generation of White Christians and African-American Christians who are not only understanding each other and wanting to move forward with understanding each other, but then are also trying to change the tide of the generations that come afterward. So, I’m encouraged by that. Lastly, what are the specific changes that you hope and pray to see in the church in America in your lifetime? Within my lifetime, I would like for us to equally agree that racial injustice is a problem. Equally. Like, not having to nuance, not having to prove we believe in justification by faith in order to affirm the spiritual reality and spiritual warfare that’s involved with the nature of how this whole thing is going about. And then, us being able to be a unified community where there’s a lot of repentance. I would like to see Christianity functionally divorcing itself, respectfully divorcing itself from Western politics and becoming a prophetic voice to it rather than a partner with it. That’s what I would love to see. I’m hopeful, yet grieved. That’s the nature of being a Christian. You come into the Areopagus and your spirit is vexed within you because you see God’s standard and you see the gap where the culture is pertaining to that, and the gospel is the bridge between the two. My prayer is that we would stop arguing about these things and begin working towards maximizing God’s glory and how we deal with these matters as a community of faith.

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