Heresy

A Look Back at “Judgmental Christians…”

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My final post of 2004 was “‘Judgmental Christians’ and The Way of Christ for 2005,” wherein I wondered if we Christians were more defined by our judging the lost than by our service of others in the name of the Lord. While I believe it is one thing to cling to Truth, it is quite another to cling to Truth AND serve others in love. A helping handWhen we only do the first part well, being labeled “judgmental” is rightly applied; we function as the holder of the lifebuoy, but refuse to throw it to the unworthy.

As they say at other blogs, read the whole thing.

I believe that 2005 saw no improvement to what I blogged about in the post above. We are still highly judgmental. We continue to judge the lost, people who lack the moral compass Christ provides. Frankly, that’s a waste. It’s like working at an orange grove in Florida and wondering why the trees there don’t yield cherries.

Because of this, I believe that the Godblogosphere recognized that judging the lost was a waste of online time. I don’t know if we bloggers took our judging the lost completely offline or not, but I noticed that online the rants diminished. I still see plenty of non-blogged Christian handwringing over what the heathens are doing. Lots of press releases from Christian organizations talking about the next new perversity to rise in the ranks of the perverted, but still no real service in love to those same people—at least none of the kind that Jesus exhibited in His earthly ministry to prostitutes, cheats, liars, crooks, and sinners of all flavors. We talk about Jesus Our Model, but we still don’t really serve or love like He did.

What happened in the Godblogosphere this year, however, was a reconcentrating of our judgmental ire on each other, not only on other Christians in general, but other Christian bloggers specifically. While I’m amused at the timing of many of the wars that broke out after I stepped out of my blogging shoes for a few days (only to return to chaos in the Godblogosphere), I was consistently disheartened by the level of attacks and the sheer unwillingness of opponents to listen and seriously ponder what each side was saying. Sometimes, we don’t even hear the acid in our own words even as we’re running a litmus test on what the other side just uttered.

More than anything else, it seems that 2005 was characterized by witch hunts and finger pointing. I can’t believe how many times I blogged on this issue, but a few posts come to mind:

I hate to sound like a Christian version of Rodney King, but “can’t we all just get along?” And if the rift is so wide that getting along isn’t possible, can’t we at least treat each other humanely? Let the secular bloggers resort to vitriol. Our default mode is supposed to be love, not acid-throwing. It is possible to disagree without beating each other over the heads with a baseball bat. The teams in an NHL battle may check someone into the boards with enough fury to crack Plexiglases, but the two teams still shake hands at the end.

For 2006, it is my wish that all of us Godbloggers consent to the following when dealing with those whose views differ from ours: Love, lisitle=

Hidden Messages of American Christianity: Correctness Before Love

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This is the third in a series of posts covering the hidden messages that sneak into American churches' proclamation of the Gospel. For more background, please refer to this post.

And behold, a lawyer stood up to put him to the test, saying, "Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?" He said to him, "What is written in the Law? How do you read it?" And he answered, "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself." And he said to him, "You have answered correctly; do this, and you will live." But he, desiring to justify himself, said to Jesus, "And who is my neighbor?" —Luke 10:25-29 ESV

We all know about love. Those of us who came of age in the Seventies heard "God is Love" so many times it must have been drilled into us via some clever ad campaign. Remember, the crying Indian? Somebody must've had a "God is Love" public service ad just as catchy.

For all the talk of love, you would think our churches would have that message down pat by now. And even if we don't love perfectly, we should at least understand the priority the Lord gave to love. No need to pull out 1st Corinthians 13 and 2nd Peter 1: 5-8, right? The love message percolates in everything we do.

Well, supposedly.

Somehow, we Christians in the West have this affinity for misprioritizing love below faith, hope, and everything else. Nobody expects the Spanish InquisitionThe very people of a God who is characterized by His Fatherly Love talk a good game about love, but the message we send out rarely starts with love. And when we end with it, that love's usually in the form of "Sorry about ripping your still-beating heart from your chest, but I did it in love."

Listen, our interaction with the brethren and with the lost shouldn't always take on the form of an intervention. It doesn't have to be a bare lightbulb, a hard wooden chair, and a cult deprogrammer we hired out of the Yellow Pages.

Too often our attitude is that of the lawyer who confronted Jesus. A master of splitting hairs, he swiftly noted how well he'd followed the love rules of the Law, but showed his true colors by adding his final element of personal correctness: "And who is my neighbor?" You can almost see the smirk.

Having been on a blogout last week, I evidently missed an enormous brouhaha that erupted over something Michael Spencer said over at BHT. At this point, I don't even want to know the specifics. All I know is that a lot of normally sane people forgot that love comes before correctness. The idea of leading with love first before tactfully addressing a fault got buried in a rush to judgment.

Can we see why the lost have no deep desire to join our little temples of pettiness? "Oh, shocking statement, Dan! 'Temples of pettiness'? Isn't that being a tad harsh?" All I can say is that our message of the love of Christ is being trumped by our desire to be correct. Love must come before correction. Love must come before EVERYTHING, folks. The mature Christian leads with love first and follows with everything else.

And yes, I know that love must be tough sometimes. My argument here is that it doesn't have to be tough all the time, nor does it have to be tactless. Our sense of proportion is out of whack when a few comments on a blog cause the strongest voices in the Godblogosphere to turn shrill and unloving.

Here's a little "Count to 10" anger management idea when we stumble across some inflated comment: Let's ask ourselves, How can I be a true example of love to my brother before I confront him?

I know a couple who were driven out of their church by folks who were more concerned about being correct than being loving. That couple's crime? They thought it was okay to read the Harry Potter books. When this opinion was expressed in a group of believers who did not share that belief, things turned ugly. To make matters worse, the couple was fairly young in the Lord and were new to that church. Now those final two elements aren't generally in themselves a reason to let things slide, but love should still have come first, then the acknowledgment that perhaps it is best to remark and let the Lord work it out in the lives of this couple. The result, however, was a bludgeoning, tears, anger, despair, and two fine people leaving the church.

It breaks my heart that we are too often concerned with being correct than being loving. And for all those who would accuse me of being soft on doctrinal stances for thinking that way, I would ask if the spirit in which anyone corrects another truly flows out of love and not self-justification. I would also ask that any of us who correct consider our own faults first, then consider if we are functioning more like the lawyer in the passage above than in the Spirit of Christ. Even in those passages where Jesus corrects sinners, he starts off by letting them know they are loved before He adds, "Now go and sin no more."

Which message do we lead with when we encounter others? Correctness or love? Only one is the way of Christ.

That Other Standoff

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Is it almost Thanksgiving? You’d never know it from the various wars erupting all over the Christian blogosphere as one faction yells to the other faction,Standoff “Oh yeah, well what about this!”

Yes, I’ve participated, but I’ve tried to be as civil as possible. I’m not trying to establish a beachhead. I just desire that other people understand the faction I’m tenuously a part of, especially since mine seems to be on the small side as factions go.

The cessationist/charismatic debate on the surface has tended to be civil. I think that the default faction leaders, David and Adrian, have done well. There have been a few gashes, but I’m not seeing any severed limbs lying around.

But there’s another war out there and this one has turned grisly: Emerging Church vs. Traditional Church. The rhetoric on both sides is so dense that it’s approaching depleted uranium stage. This week brought out the mustard gas and biowarfare as Emerging Church proponent Justin Baeder attempted a domain rustling by securing “emergentno.com” in an effort to put the spoofing screws to Traditional Church proponent Carla Rolfe of Emergent No at “emergentno.blogspot.com.”

Two words: Truly Lame.

While the cessationists and charismatics appear to at least be listening to each other so far, the Emerging Church (EC) vs. Traditional Church (TC) battle has degenerated into a hatefest. I’m halfway tempted to pronounce a pox on both their houses. (I’ve previously blogged about this issue here, here, and here.) The sad part is that there are people on both sides of this EC/TC war whom I appreciate, and the truly thoughtful folks on both sides are not as heinous as they are portraying the other side to be. In many ways, both sides there are attacking the same fringe elements that are under assault in the charismatic/cessationist debate.

But assaulting the weirdos is easy. I’m a charismatic and I’m fed up with the fringe within the charismatic movement. (I’m even more fed up that the fringe may be taking over!) When examining the war going on between the EC and TC camps, each side has every right to be hacked at the lack of Christlikeness in the other side, but then we all know what Jesus said to the group ready to stone the woman caught in the midst of adultery.

I’ve got zero diplomatic skills, so if I tick someone off here in either the EC or the TC camps, I apologize in advance.

This is what the Bible says:

And one of the scribes came up and heard them disputing with one another, and seeing that he answered them well, asked him, “Which commandment is the most important of all?” Jesus answered, “The most important is, ‘Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ The second is this: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these.”
—Mark 12:28-31 ESV

Earlier this week, Ingrid Schlueter of Slice of Laodicea, one of the TC blogs that is most fiercely battling the EC, had this to say about Traditional Churches:

There is, without doubt, a shortage of biblical love and concern on the part of church members in Bible preaching churches today. There is a reason that emergent churches and mega churches with small groups are attractive. There is no more empty feeling in all the world than having attended a church service as a visitor and leaving without a kind word being spoken. In my husband’s and my search for a church for our family in an area where good churches were in short supply, we found this again and again. At one point, after attending a church for almost a year, I said, “Tom, we could be in an advanced stage of rigor mortis in the back pew and I doubt seriously that anyone would notice.” … After moving to a new state, we visited one church where we needed directions. I went to the church office and said, “Excuse me, we’re just visiting and we need to find out where to put our children for Sunday School.” The woman looked me up and down rather cooly, and gestured vaguely down the hall. “Someone will help you down there.” She said. This, folks, was a small church. But I was new and uninteresting looking and that was that.

I don’t think I can add anything to her disappointment. Far too many Traditional Churches, filled with people who adore God and love the Scriptures, are getting the first part of Jesus’ two greatest commandments right, but are missing the second. Doctrine has no strength unless it’s put into practice. It’s not enough to be able to cut down every heretical anti-lapidarydipsydoodlearian out there with the Truth of the Scriptures. Yes, that has extreme value and must be guarded, but if we do not love the very people that the Lord Jesus died for, all the doctrine in the world will sit idle in our hearts, gone begging for someone, anyone to put it into practice for the disenfranchised of the world.

Ingrid’s lament is even more tragic, since it should be second nature for us to at least love the rest of the Body of Christ, even if we have difficulties with extending the love of Christ to the lost. Yet how can we do the latter, as the Lord Himself showed us, if we can’t even love our brothers and sisters in Christ?

Does the EC do this better than the TC? Probably. That need to be part of a loving community greater than oneself is one of the reasons that the EC is gaining adherents. The people who don’t normally get called to the wedding party are being handed an invitation. The Traditional Church needs to understand this and repent.

Now as open as Ingrid was about failures of the TC, I’ve searched high and low to find someone within EC ranks who was willing to take on the fact that the EC plays fast and loose with a lot of Scripture, muddying just about every doctrine it touches. With Open Theism increasingly discussed within the EC (but not in those exact terms, since the EC doesn’t desire to have exact terms about anything), one wonders if they’re doing the second commandment right, but are unraveling the tapestry that spells out that the first commandment clearly. What the TC does well—speaking to sin, holding up the cross, affirming the inerrancy of Scripture and its authority—the EC outright mangles, with many of the leading lights in the EC giving depositions on doctrine in the same manner that Clinton asked us to rethink what the definition of “is” is.

For this, the TC has every right to hold the EC’s feet to the fire, but the EC won’t stand for it. I won’t go into all the sites posting doctrinal fallacies attributed to the EC (and they are legion), but suffice it to say, it’s hard to think of the EC in any way other than a reactionary movement that can’t form a coherently Biblical reason for everything it supposedly believes. What other outcome, other than rank heresy, can be expected from the EC if it continues to deconstruct the Scriptural base on which it’s supposedly founded. The oldest lie in the Book is, “Did God really say…?” The Emerging Church needs to understand this and repent.

All this makes me tired.

Why is it incongruous to think that we can have solid doctrine that holds up the full revelation and personhood of the Triune God while ministering Christ to His Chosen and the lost around us? When those two are melded in purpose, isn’t that The True Church? Emphasizing any part of the whole revelation of the Gospel over any other part is a recipe for disaster, yet somehow Traditional Churches and Emerging Churches are doing their best to cook up such a mess.

And we wonder why the Church in the West is failing.