 | This articleneeds additional citations forverification. Please helpimprove this article byadding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Find sources: "Ron Sider" – news ·newspapers ·books ·scholar ·JSTOR(July 2022) (Learn how and when to remove this message) |
Ron Sider | |
|---|---|
| Born | (1939-09-17)September 17, 1939 Stevensville, Ontario, Canada |
| Died | July 27, 2022(2022-07-27) (aged 82) |
| Education | |
| Occupation(s) | Theologian, activist |
Ronald James Sider (September 17, 1939 – July 27, 2022)[1][2] was a Canadian-born Americantheologian and social activist. He was the founder of Evangelicals for Social Action, anevangelical leftthink tank.
Sider was a founding board member of the National Religious Partnership for the Environment. He was the Distinguished Professor of Theology, Holistic Ministry and Public Policy atPalmer Theological Seminary inSt. Davids, Pennsylvania.
Sider was born on 17 September 1939 inStevensville,Ontario, to Ida Cline and James Cider, a farmer andBrethren in Christ pastor.[3][4] His experience at church initiated his interest in social activism.[3] Sider graduated from secondary school at Niagara Christian College (NowNiagara Christian Collegiate) inFort Erie, Ontario, in 1953 and became the first in his family to go to college. Sider attended theWaterloo Lutheran University, inWaterloo,Ontario, and received aBA in European history in 1962.[3] While at Waterloo, he joinedInterVarsity Christian Fellowship and set his sights on a career in academia.
Upon graduating fromYale University with an M.A. (history, 1963), B.D. (divinity, 1967), andPhD (history, 1969),[5] he expected to teach early modernEuropean history on secular university campuses, and continue hisChristian apologetic work for IVCF. In 1968, Sider accepted an invitation fromMessiah College to teach at its newly openedPhiladelphia Campus inNorth Philadelphia.
Theracism,poverty, and evangelical indifference he observed at close hand made a deep impression that led him to write the book,Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger.
What Sider saw as the injustice ofpoor,majority-minority urban neighborhoods motivated him to work toward developing abiblical response tosocial injustice. He brought together a network of similarly concernedevangelicals, which in 1973 became the Thanksgiving Workshop on Evangelical Social Concern. It was this conference that issuedThe Chicago Declaration of Evangelical Social Concern.[6] Twenty years later, a similar gathering of evangelical leaders resulted in the Chicago Declaration II: A Call for Evangelical Renewal. In 2004 he was a signatory of the "Confessing Christ in a World of Violence" document.
By 1984 he had become a member of Oxford Circle Mennonite Church, Philadelphia, and spoke at the World Mennonite Conference on peacekeeping where he advocated a Christian pacifist perspective.[7][8]
Sider added his signature to a full-page advertisement in the December 5, 2008, edition ofThe New York Times, which condemned violence and intimidation against religious institutions and their followers following the passage ofProposition 8. The ad emphasized that "violence and intimidation are always wrong, whether the victims are believers, gay people, or anyone else." Alongside him, twelve other religious and human rights activists from various faiths also signed the ad, acknowledging their differences on key moral and legal issues, including Proposition 8.[9]
Sider published over 30 books and wrote over 100 articles in both religious and secular magazines on a variety of topics including the importance of caring for creation as part of biblical discipleship.
In 1977, Sider'sRich Christians in an Age of Hunger, was published. Hailed byChristianity Today as one of the one hundred most influential books in religion in the 20th century, it went on to sell over 400,000 copies in many languages. He later authoredGood News Good Works (published byBaker Book House), a call to the church to embrace evangelical left beliefs. Its companion book tells stories about ministries that brought both evangelism and social transformation together.
Completely Pro-Life, published in the mid-1980s, calls on Christians to take aconsistent life ethic opposingabortion,capital punishment,nuclear weapons,hunger, and other conditions that Sider sees as anti-life.Cup of Water, Bread of Life was published in 1994.Living Like Jesus (1999) has been called Sider'sMere Christianity.Just Generosity: A New Vision for Overcoming Poverty in America (1999, 2007) offered a vision for reducingpoverty in the United States.Churches That Make a Difference (2002) with Phil Olson and Heidi Rolland Unruh provided concrete help to local congregations seeking to combine evangelism and social ministry. Sider’s later publications includedFixing the Moral Deficit: A Balanced Way to Balance the Budget (2012);Just Politics: A Guide for Christian Engagement (2012);The Early Church on Killing: A Comprehensive Sourcebook on War, Abortion, and Capital Punishment (2012);The Spiritual Danger ofDonald Trump: 30 Evangelical Christians on Justice, Truth, and Moral Integrity (2020).
In August 2009, Sider signed a public statement encouraging all Christians to read, wrestle with, and respond toCaritas in Veritate, the social encyclical by PopeBenedict XVI. Later that year, he also gave his approval to theManhattan Declaration, calling on Christians not to comply with rules and laws permitting abortion, same-sex marriage and other matters that go against their religious consciences.[10][11]
Sider's opponents typically criticize his ideas as consisting of bad theology and bad economics. The most thorough critiques come from the AmericanChristian right, specifically fromChristian Reconstructionists.David Chilton's book,Productive Christians in an Age of Guilt Manipulators (1986), with a foreword byGary North, argues that Sider's book takes a position contrary to the biblical teachings on economics, poverty, and giving, and that the economic model it provides is untenable.[12]
Sider significantly revised the book for the twentieth anniversary edition, and, in an interview withChristianity Today magazine said, "I admit, though, that I didn't know a great deal of economics when I wrote the first edition ofRich Christians. In the meantime, I've learned considerably more, and I've changed some things as a result of that. For example, in the new, twentieth-anniversary edition, I say more explicitly that when the choice is democratic capitalism or communism, I favor the democratic political order and market economies."[13]
Sider was the child of a CanadianBrethren in Christ pastor. He attended Oxford CircleMennonite Church, was the father of three and lived in Lansdale, Pennsylvania, with his wife Arbutus, a retired family counselor. They celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary in 2011, and they had six granddaughters. Sider's sonTheodore is a tenured professor of philosophy atRutgers who has published over 50 scholarly articles and three books withOxford University Press.
