We are experiencing an unparalleled assault on our civilization that will be experienced first by societies non compliant, Christians included, because the first move by any totalitarian dictatorship, is to get rid of houses of worship, for if I bow down to God, I’ll not bow down to them. The mechanism they are using is fear, and if you’ve studied psychological warfare, you’ll know that anxiety, fear, and human isolation, will cause people to de-compensate psychologically and become very vulnerable, gullible and easy to manipulate. Look at yourself and those around you now since covid. How else can you explain this passive emotional fragility?
Seriously church, we are now in a war unlike any prior. How and when it escalates, only God knows. This war may not be typically combatant with guns, tanks, & bombs. Our conflicts are now largely psychological, and I fear we’re not prepared at all to go up against its games, whether we choose compliance, apathy, a Goliath, a fiery furnace, even a lion’s den, or a guillotine or any of the other weapons recorded in Martyrs Mirror. How does one prepare for such? I’ve been so sheltered.
None of the above was in the works when I typed up what follows. The last two days have been an unsolicited and unexpected journey for me. Understand I’ve been under conviction for months that at some point I would need to speak more candidly about what little I have been privileged to learn about our world and its subsequent implications for the anabaptist community.
I was told year’s ago by a friend to read Brad Jersak’s book “A More Christlike God, A More Beautiful Gospel, which I finally did, and now it’s buried amongst many boxes, awaiting its release. Therefore, I am sharing this formerly prepared document with you from pages 10-13.
“I’ve been pleasantly surprised how this proposition – the message that Jesus shows us what God is like – is often well received by those who don’t profess Christian faith. If I say, “God is love and Jesus was love incarnate,” no problem! Jesus is seldom the issue, even for a rabid, self-avowed ‘non-Christian’ such as Saturday Night Live satirist Bill Maher. His primary attacks are not against Jesus at all, but against Christians whose religion does violence in the name of the Prince of Peace. He castigates:
“If you’re a Christian that supports killing your enemy and torture, you have to come up with a new name for yourself. . . . ‘Capping thy enemy’ is not exactly what Jesus would do. For almost two thousand years, Christians have been lawyering the Bible to try to figure out how ‘Love thy neighbor’ can mean ‘Hate thy neighbor’. . . .
Martin Luther King Jr. gets to call himself a Christian, because he actually practiced loving his enemies. And Gandhi was so Christian, he was Hindu. But if you’re endorsing revenge, torture, or war, … you cannot say of the guy who explicitly said, ‘Love your enemy’ and ‘do good to those who hate you.’ …
And not to put too fine a point on it, but nonviolence was kind of Jesus’ trademark – kind of his big thing. To not follow that part is like joining Greenpeace and hating whales. There’s interpreting, and then there’s just plain ignoring. It’s just ignoring if you’re for torture – as are more Evangelical Christians than any other religion. You’re supposed to look at that figure on the Cross and think, “how could a man suffer like that and forgive?” …
I’m a non-Christian. Just like most Christians.
If you ignore every single thing Jesus commanded you to do, you’re not a Christian – you’re just auditing. You’re not Christ’s followers, you’re just fans. And if you believe the Earth was given you to kick ass on while gloating, you’re not really a Christian – you’re just a Texan.”
Brad Jersak now:
Ok, Maher’s unbelief is actually biting hatred directed against un-Christlike perversions of God, the projections of religious fundamentalists. Audiences find this commentary comedic because the irony is tragically accurate and laughably contradictory. Instead of reacting defensively or hanging our heads in silent shame, why not hear his indictment as a clarion call back to explicit Christlikeness.
At other times, atheism is self-created through some offense. We despair of faith when a tragedy or disappointment makes nonsense of the God we inherited or imagined. Touched deeply by loss, our misperceptions of who God is, should have been or failed to be for us, can lead us from mere doubt to an active rejection of faith.
Charles Darwin exemplifies this experience. His discoveries about natural selection and the evolutionary process certainly undermined his faith in ‘special creation,’ but they did not ‘kill God’ for him altogether. In fact, Darwin’s theories were not generally regarded as problematic by key Christians of his day. That great battle comes later in America. Toward the end of his life, he wrote, It seems to me absurd to doubt that a man may be an ardent theist and an evolutionist.”
When his precious ten-year-old daughter died in 1851, it broke his heart and crushed his faith. Darwin could hold the good purposes of God and the suffering in natural processes in healthy tension until he had to endure the terrible suffering of his little girl. It was too much. Whatever Darwin had believed, about God, that belief could not survive his grief.
I wonder. In the case of the sardonic Bill Maher or the brokenhearted Charles Darwin, the real culprit may actually be a non Christlike image of God. Which is to say, no God at all. If so, I’m inclined to agree with Walter Wink, who affirmed such atheism as a first step toward true worship, because it represents the rejection of an idol. That is, people like Maher and Darwin might be turning from – i.e., repenting. The next step, which I don’t pretend they have taken, is a turning toward – i.e., faith. I say a Christlike God is worth turning to.
Continuing, when I personally turned my gaze to the God who is completely Christlike, I was confronted with how non Christlike the ‘church-God’ or even the ‘Bible-God’ can be. Setting Jesus as the standard for perfect theology, many of our current Christian beliefs and practices would obviously face indictment. Even significant swaths of biblical literature don’t line up well with the Christ of the Gospels. Claiming that God is revealed perfectly in Jesus triggers tough questions about the God I once conceived and preached. Jesus’ life and character challenges my religious cliches and standby slogans – especially the rhetoric of supreme power and irresistible force. Christ never reveals God that way in his teachings and especially not in his Passion ( that is, Jesus’ arrest, trial, torture, and death).
Yes, he proves victorious, especially in his resurrection, but remember that Paul resolved to preach ‘Christ and him crucified’ (I Cor 2:2). You could resist him, you could mock him and beat him up. You could kill him. And we did. Our God is the cruciform Christ, the ‘weakness of God’ I Cor 1:25) who is stronger than men. Why? Because he operates by overcoming love, not by overwhelming force.
Take heart. Assuredly, we will encounter whatever comes, transformed by His love, and empowered by His Spirit, as we turn from, by repenting; and toward, in faith. … GO FORTH IN HIS CONFIDENCE>>>> mle
Next Up: Eugene Peterson literally stole the non-believer’s catchphrase “A Long Obedience in the Same Direction” and made it the name of his best book released in 1980, as well as commandeered a key word phrase associated with atheist philosopher Frederic Nietzche “that the only way to live life is to find a standard and stick to it.” Unfortunately for Frederic and the world ever since, he rejected his childhood standard, Jesus Christ, and instead became the pawn of the Imposter, the Devil himself. I’ve summarized Peterson’s Ch 13 titled Obedience. Two of his quotes are “a Christian who stays put is no better than a statue waiting to be pulled down when the tide changes” and “you ever notice for all its interest in history the Bible never refers to the past as “the good old days.” The past is not, for the person of faith, a restored historical site that we tour when we are on vacation; rather it is a field we plow, disc, harrow and plant, fertilize, and lovingly work to insure a bountiful harvest.”