about more on that later...

"Once again there are two extremes toward which Christian People Tend to slide. To begin with, there are those who declare that if Jesus is the true revolutionary then the single main Christian task is to build the kingdom here on earth through social, political, and cultural revolution. Alas, this social gospel (as it used to be called) has singularly failed to deliver the goods in the century or so since it was advocated in this modern form. An enormous amount of good has been done: social conditions have been improved vastly, though how much of that has been due to Christian work and how much to other influences it's hard to say. But we are still a fragmented, frightened and battered world. Even in the affluent West there are many places where Dickensian conditions or worse, still obtain, all the more appalling for being mostly out of sight and mind as far as the glossy media is concerned.
At the other end of the scale there are those who declare that nothing can be done until the Lord returns and everything is put to rights. The forces of evil are too entrenched, and nothing save a great apocalyptic movement of divine power can address them or change the deep structures of the way things are. This kind of dualism breeds very effective within societies where, though injustice can be seen and named, it is politically inconvenient to do anything about it. We will get on, such a view says, with the real business of the gospel, which is that of saving souls for the future world. We will even do mopping-up operations, Band Aid activities, to look after the people at the bottom of the pile. But we won't do anything about the structures that put them there and keep them there. This kind of dualism banishes the continuing healing activity of the Father from the world he made, of the Son from the world of which he is already the Lord, and the Spirit from the world within which he (she?) groans in travail.

Neither of these views begins to do justice in any sense to Paul's injunction to be steadfast and immovable in doing the work of the Lord because in the Lord our labor is not in vain. ...And if we believe it and pray, as he taught us, for God's kingdom to come on earth as in heaven, there is no way we can rest content with major injustice in the world."

Tom Wright, Surprised by Hope