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 scandal of the evangelical mind is that there is not much of an evangelical mind. 1 The following quote from The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind isn't meant to point a finger. I freely admit to being too terrified to read the front page of a newspaper after 9/11. I was also the kid who looked out the window to see if the moon had turned bright red, if my parents were late getting home, for fear that they had been raptured and I was left behind. Within weeks of the outbreak of this conflict [the 1991 Gulf War], evangelical publishers provided a spate of books featuring efforts to read this latest Middle East crisis as a direct fulfillment of biblical prophecy heralding the end of the world. The books came to various conclusions, but they all shared the disconcerting conviction that the best way of providing moral judgment about what was happening in the Middle East was not to study carefully what was going on in the Middle East. Rather, they featured a kind of Bible study...

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness… The opening lines from  A Tale of Two Cities  give an uncanny description of the headlines from the last few weeks. Natural disaster, turmoil, injustice, and the list goes on. If you take all of human history into account, maybe it's not  the  absolute worst of times, but the current picture isn't pretty. Of course, its grimness could be compounded by the speed with which news travels and the glut of information that inundates us whether we like it or not. But nevertheless, it's easy to get discouraged and fearful when I consider the state of the world. The problems begin to loom larger and larger, and if I'm honest, God begins to shrink bit by bit in my estimation. At this point, it's time to turn off the news, shut down the comp...