It would be tedious to track it down again; but the gist of the post was that Evangelic Christianity is not authentic Christianity but is, in fact, toxic, and should be destroyed. But what I could not understand is that the author was not rejecting the idea of following Jesus but just the message of sinful mankind requiring a savior. I don't have a clue what the author thought of the Bible; I can't for the life of me imagine how anyone could make a consistent Biblical argument against what is basically the meta-narrative of the entire collection of 66 books.
But, Barna tells us that a shockingly small percentage of folks actually claim to believe the Bible is, in the words of the Statement of Faith that we repeated over and over again in Friends and Girls Only clubs, 'the inspired and only infallible and authoritative written word of God'.
This is where I get totally flummoxed. I can understand someone not agreeing with the doctrines of Christianity...that is, after all, the freedom of choice. But what I don't get is someone who wants to be a Christ-follower while rejecting the very documentation that provides the foundation for the faith. That simply does not make sense. If one rejects the authority of the Bible...what is left upon which to base one's faith?
Not much. Without the Bible, there really is no Christianity. So to reject the Bible, but yet claim to be Christian...doesn't make sense.
The Christian Message...that Adam and Eve chose disobedience and passed that inclination down to all their offspring, rendering human kind unable to enter the presence of God (an aside...can you take darkness into light? What happens to the darkness when the light comes on? Likewise a person cannot come into the presence of God with unrepented, unatoned sin..because sin cannot coexist with the holiness of God.) Because God loves the humans that He created, He himself became a human, to live the sinless life that we could not live and pay the wages sin demands so that people could receive His righteousness in place of sin and so be able to live in His presence. He works in those who do so to transform their thoughts, desires and behaviors so they conform to Him. In the end, the eternal spirit of each person will dwell with God if they have allowed him to remove their sin and follow Him as Lord ...or ...elsewhere...if they did not.
Of course, there's lots of details I've left out for the sake of brevity, and I'm not going into the weeds of one one denomination or another believes regarding those details, but in a nutshell...that's the Evangelic Christian message. I won't deny that there are many folks who have taken the message and twisted it and used it to advance their own agendas, or that those folks haven't managed to all but obliterate the purity of the Gospel at times. But the message of the Gospel...that God loves people and desires to walk in relationship with them...is one of love and hope.
The idea of destroying a message of hope and love...that, to me, sounds toxic.
Sigh. I don't feel like I've really expressed what I wanted to express. But maybe it's a start.
There is an interesting post written about how the Catholic church (my affiliation) is being whittled away by liberalism. I think the post could easily be written from your perspective. There is a slow agenda to rob the faith of its foundation, which as you say is Biblical. It is a way to meld it with the culture, which Jesus warned us cannot be done. The words of Christ cannot be argued away or altered so that they are more palatable.
ReplyDeletehttps://www.thecatholicthing.org/2017/10/06/how-to-destroy-catholicism-in-america/
Wow. 'This synthesis, partly Christian and partly anti-Christian, will, of course, be incoherent; but at the moment you’re creating it, it looks pretty good.'
DeleteYes, that's exactly what has taken place in the mainline Protestant denominations...thanks for sharing that, Julie.
I've heard this often. The first time was back in the mid-seventies when one of my aunt's stated that "Jesus was not the Son of God. He was a knowledgeable Rabbi, and a good man, but He was not the Son of God." Later, she gave a book (Who's Who in the New Testament) to my Grandmother to back her claims. As time has gone on, and more people are accepting the LGBTQ+ community as being 'good' and 'right' (after all, Jesus never mentioned Gays in any of His sermons), the thought that sin exists has become blurred, and 'hateful'. Therefore, anyone who speaks out against sin is wrong-headed, and 'dangerous'.
ReplyDeleteThe Bible tells us that this will come to pass, and it has. AND it's getting worse. I think that the wheat is being separated from the chaff, now.