Such an interpretation readily accounts for the fact that among Evangelicals, up until about twenty years ago, one could not teach kingdom principles for present living without being regarded as preaching a mere “social” gospel. Such a gospel sought to realize the kingdom of God by emphasizing legal and social reforms in line with Christian imperatives. And it was indeed, for all its good intent, a form of “works salvation”—one that now lives on in the fully secularized “social ethics” movement. Of course the only salvation in question for it was one from deprivation and suffering in this
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