Tried With Fire

In the light of President Trump's recent dinner with "evangelical" leaders , this quote from How the Nations Rage is remarkably prescient: "The [religious right] movement stood up for good things, but its language tended to be apocalyptic. It gave earthly political outcomes - a vote on a law, an election, or a Supreme Court case - an outsized importance. Too many exclamation points and all cap sentences tell our non-Christian fellow citizens that our policy agenda is more important than the gospel itself. It says THIS ELECTION IS THE MOST IMPORTANT THING IN THE WORLD! It communicates that we're really just a branch of this or that party. It says that God is not so big after all. That is why we have to scream." 1 And to quote another book, "Fear is the political language conservative evangelicals know best." 2 In contrast: Jesus responded to them, “Do you now believe? Indeed, an hour is coming, and has come, when each of you will be scatter...

The following is a quote from How the Nations Rage: Rethinking Faith and Politics in a Divided Age by Jonathan Leeman (pg. 133-135). "Here's the larger point: Christians should listen to what Republicans and Democrats have to say on welfare policy, tax policy, racial reconciliation, the refugee crisis, and growing suicide rates. But our thinking shouldn't start or stop there. Our thinking should be more expansive, more complicated, more personal, more human. Our political instincts should develop by living inside the loving and difficult relationships that comprise a church. You might even say our political thinking should be pastoral..." "Inside the local church is where a Christian politics becomes complicated, authentic, credible, not ideologically enslaved, real. It's in these real-life situations where you're forced to think about what righteousness truly is, what justice truly requires, what obligations you possess toward your fellow God-imag...

We know that God knows more than we do, and that he's morally superior - "better".  But we still assume that God, broadly speaking, shares our sense of justice and morality, our view on love and sex, our politics and passions, our idea of an evening well spent and a life worth living.  He's basically like us ... like me. It is this assumption that's at the heart of what the Bible calls our sin. The Serpent promised that we could be "like God," which is really just another way of saying, "God is like you, so do as you please."  And we have believed this lie ever since. Over and over the Bible has to say he's not like us because we repeatedly try to make him like us.  We squeeze God into our own mental universes.  We domesticate him and fashion hm after our image, but what foolishness!  This is the God who created the universe with words.  This is the God who destroyed the world with a flood.  This is the God who sruck down two priests fo...