In an industrial accident, a piece of flying metal severed a nerve in a young man’s shoulder. It left an otherwise perfect arm hanging worse than useless, in a disconnected course with the rest of the body. It became a burden to the rest of the body, severed from communication with the brain.
“Ye are the salt of the earth: but if the salt have lost his savour, wherewith shall it be salted? it is thenceforth good for nothing, but to be cast out, and to be trodden under foot of men” (Matthew 5:13).
I suggested in the last issue that in America, confusion and shame has come upon Christianity with a misguided notion of a special permanent relationship between God and America. Over the last thirty years, we have seen professed “evangelical Christian” presidents preside over ever lower legal and moral standards. It also appears that moral and ethical failure, sin, and deception appear to ensnare “Christian” politicians at about the same rate as their non-Christian counterparts. While we can be sure that God has not changed, we cannot claim the same for the so-called Christian west. In my growing-up years, a divorced/remarried man would have had little chance of winning the presidency. Yet by 1980, such a man was the favored candidate of the “moral” majority, swept into office by the “conservative right.” Many have already lost sight of the permanence of marriage as the foundation of the culture. When this is gone, every other value is negotiable.
“And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free” (John 8:32).
In a debate, an atheist appealed to a claimed impossibility of finding an unseen, spiritual God in a totally naturalistic world. In contrast, his Christian counterpart made repeated reference to his own rebirth as evidence for God and Christianity. Did either one get the point? I wonder.
These are days when exclusive Christian claims don’t go over well. First of all, religious experience is cheap because religious authority is an easy invention in the human mind. So why shouldn’t every individual have the right to his own religious ideas? Besides, who would you be to suggest your religion is better than mine? I encounter an ongoing flow of people with a mixed religious bag, assembled out of a personal wish list of what God should be like.(Reminds me of the charms that a witch doctor would assemble.)
But why not just come down to the obvious? If God is concocted in the minds and experiences of men and women, then God is not God at all. The god-maker is of necessity greater than his god. Such a god dies when his maker dies, since he never existed except in the mind of his maker. From such a beginning, is there any difference whether one puts his faith in a door knob, in the full moon, or in some vague “man upstairs”? Any “gods” in this range are simply bogus. There is no truth in them now, and they will not save in the end. A lot of thinking people intuitively know this, and quickly dismiss all religious experiences out of hand.
If Christianity is just one more of these invented “isms,” then the debater’s claimed spiritual rebirth is yet another disgusting tool to persuade people of that which is not. The question then is not whether the Christian debater is or was saved. It must rather be in definable, unchanging, historically grounded evidence that such a salvation is even possible.
In one single objective assessment lies the answer — who is Jesus Christ?
We address this article to a culture that is long on equality, personal rights, and democracy, and short on the wisdom of obedience and submission to authority. Far from being immune to the problem, Christianity in the West seems hopelessly mired in these same misguided ideals. We live in a culture where attempted answers merely multiply the problems.
Recently, I asked a few jail inmates for a one-word description of sin. Their answers: drugs, alcoholism, lust, sexual immorality. Not a bad description. I didn’t expect such a stark admission of sins that strike so close to home.
But there is a deeper reason for raising the issue. The Garden of Eden had every kind of good tree needed for food. Yet, through the tempter, Eve came up with three logical reasons to eat of the only forbidden tree in the whole place: Continue reading
Martin Luther regained the vision of justification by faith, a Biblically sound term. However, the late notable apologist, Francis Schaeffer, interpreted this as salvation being received by “faith plus nothing” or by “empty hands of faith.” The Bible also conveys the truth of imputed righteousness. A well-known evangelical leader mistakenly describes this imputed righteousness as the good works that Jesus did, being deposited to the account of the one who believes. (We will deal with imputed righteousness later.)
“Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools.” (Romans 1:22).
A morally confused age is producing a lot of people who do not know their own worth in relation to their pets and other living things. Are you one of them?
In the last issue we considered the “Gospel According to the Reader’s Digest,” based on the Unitarian definition of God, quoting the late Christopher Reeve. “The Unitarian,” he said, “believes that God is good, and believes that God believes that man is good. Inherently. The Unitarian God is not a God of vengeance. And that is something I can appreciate.”