A few minutes ago, I saw one that qualifies. It wasn't even from one of my friends. It was one of those "popular across Facebook" posts. Some lady interviewing an "ex-fundamentalist" minister who said something to the effect of "if we're more concerned with our souls getting to heaven than we are with the environment or racism, there's something faulty about our religion."
As we know, this kind of thinking, couched as it was because this guy wants to make the average person coming across his conversation say, "Hey, yeah, you know, this guy has a valid point," actually has a fairly long pedigree, going back at least to Walter Rauschenbusch and his social-gospel theology. And I daresay that the drastic decline in mainline Protestant denominations' memberships over the past 50 years and their concurrent preoccupation with "social justice" is not a coincidence. (My master's thesis was on this topic.)
It certainly showed up in a diatribe Chris Cuomo let loose with in the aftermath of the California country-bar shoot-up:
What this mindset does is render almighty God an abstraction, a concept rather than an immediate reality.Have you ever asked God to comfort the families of a victim? Then you downright mocked them. So says Chris Cuomo — the brother of Andrew, who claimed “[America] was never that great” (here) and insisted that pro-gun conservatives “have no place in the state of New York.”“’First, I would like to offer my thoughts and prayers.’ Because that’s what you do when you offer, thoughts and prayers. You mock those who lost loved ones, because if you gave it any thought at all, you would never walk away from any of these without figuring out a better way to deal with them. And prayer — you think leaving it to God is the answer? ‘We pray for strength; we pray for wisdom; for resolve.’ But we clearly don’t want to act on any of those here. So what are you praying for?”Yeah — what are you praying for, you jerks?“What would it take? How about a stadium full of children of the most influential people in our society all holding puppies? What if they were all shot and killed? Would we act? ‘Oh, don’t be ridiculous to suggest something like.’ Is it? is it ridiculous? More ridiculous than doing nothing, time after time? Listening to these people pouring out their pain, crying along with them, saying you care?”There ya go: if you pray, you don’t care.
And that is exactly why our society is so sick and rotten.
When our Lord says for us to come to him and he will make our burdens light, that he has overcome the world, that's not just some kind of "nice thought" that gives us a psychological lift when the going gets tough.
We are to turn over our entire beings to Him. He doesn't demand it, though. He invites us. He created us to be sovereign (as He is sovereign), but we should (that's should, not must) use our free will to lay our sovereignty at the foot of the cross and live our lives as acts of worship.
The mentality of the likes of the minister whose video I saw on Facebook, or of Chris Cuomo, is rooted in the most basic folly to which the human being succumbs: the idea that we can do this thing called human existence on our own.
Those of us who have given up this way of approaching life must go forth as agents of grace, witnesses to the immediacy and utter necessity of God. Embracing that is and always has been the only remedy for whatever ills beset any society that human beings organize. All other "solutions" merely heap on yet more folly, depriving us of the joy for which He created us.
Jesus is the answer, whatever the question.
Tell that to Netanyahu and crew too. Then when we rid the world of Islam whose adherents appear to be as devout as they come then perhaps we can have a strong semblance of the kingdom to come. It's actually been tried before and of course it involved war. There are no atheists in foxholes or hunkered down in the darkness withnsirens wailing, waiting for the explosive other shoe to drop. No atheists, only infidels and the saved by the blood if the lamb?
ReplyDeleteWe must pray that every soul in the human race says yes to Jesus.
ReplyDeleteThe left says the right ran them away from stern, unmerciful, unloving actions that their hearts, if not souls told them was wrong, not right, and they wanted no part of your God and his Jesus.
ReplyDeleteThat's really tragic. May they come to know God and see that he is infinitely good.
ReplyDeletePosted on facebook by a friend since the 60s, retired Methodist Minister:
ReplyDelete"Just ask around. People outside the Church will tell you: love is no longer our calling card. It is now condemnation, bigotry, judgment and hypocrisy. In fact, the Christianity prevalent in so much of America right now isn’t just failing to draw others to Christ, it is actively repelling them from him. By operating in a way that is in full opposition to the life and ministry of Jesus—it is understandably producing people fully opposed to the faith that bears his name.
In record numbers, the Conservative American Church is consistently and surely making Atheists—or at the very least it is making former Christians; people who no longer consider organized religion an option because the Jesus they recognize is absent. With its sky-is-falling hand-wringing, its political bed-making, and its constant venom toward diversity, it is giving people no alternative but to conclude, that based on the evidence of people professing to be Godly—that God is of little use. In fact, this God may be toxic."
https://johnpavlovitz.com/2017/06/04/the-christians-making-atheists/?fbclid=IwAR2gxqSVM3bmC_TJluy7ZTR3dA3nlViT_N06Yqw1l0j4Gs_Gmj3dZ61OIyU
You have to get a few paragraphs into it, but he quickly shows that he's a hard leftist, trying to frame the way Bible-believing Christians regard Muslims and homosexuals (or, as hard leftists like him put it, "the LGBT community") as "persecution," and bringing radical environmentalism into the discussion ("planet-wrecking"). What he's selling is about as far from Biblical Christianity as one can get.
ReplyDeleteGuys like his are exactly the problem, exactly what this post is about.
You can't cherry-pick scripture to come up with some kind of depiction of God as relativistic.
God is sovereign. We don't invent him, which is why I find his use of the phrase "this God," as well as your phrase "your God" in the previous comment noteworthy.
God does not exist to make us feel good about ourselves. That can only come from accepting His grace.
His "about" page depicts him as an "activist," "committed to equality, diversity and justice." He spells his leftism right out. He's proud of it.
ReplyDeleteJesus was a lefty
ReplyDeleteConservatives claim Christ as one of their own. But he was the unemployed son of two asylum-seekers with all the personal traits of a modern revolutionary.
"Love your enemies. Renounce your wealth. Pay your taxes. Help the poor. Cure the ill (for free). These are the hallmarks of a left-wing, socialist politics. What Jesus wouldn't do is allow the rich to get richer, give a free pass to the bonus-hungry bankers and invade one foreign country after another. "The politics of Jesus is a problem for the religious right."
https://www.newstatesman.com/religion/2010/12/jesus-god-tax-christ-health
You don't really believe that crap and you know it. That's Unitarian-bumper-sticker-level skewing of the Lord's ministry.
ReplyDeleteIt's yet more confusing the salvation offered by the Word Incarnate with worldly concerns. More of what C.S. Lewis called "Christianity and."
Back in the day the Pharasees and Saducees and the rich men were what the right wing among us is today. The poor, the tax collectors, prostitutes. The shepherds and the fishermen and "the other" were his special associates. Jesus is love and mercy.
ReplyDelete