jeffreymark

DEATH OF THE MONOLITHS

The old mainline church denominations that once towered over this nation like a monolith are rapidly declining. Here's a glimpse as to why:

Conservatives from the world’s largest Anglican provinces who are angered by liberal thinking in churches [particularly in relation to the ordination of practicing homosexuals] in North America and elsewhere plan to create a global fellowship that challenges worldwide Anglican unity but stops short of a formal split.

And another example.

The Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), bitterly divided over sexuality and the Bible, set up another confrontation Friday over its ban on ordaining non-celibate gays and lesbians.

The denomination’s General Assembly, meeting in San Jose, Calif., voted 54 percent to 46 percent Friday to drop the requirement that would-be ministers, deacons and elders live in “fidelity within the covenant of marriage between and a man and a woman, or chastity in singleness.”

You who seek to usurp tradition and the historical interpretations of the Bible, you can run even if it means running into religion, but you will never eradicate the remanent who oppose your ill chosen path. Their words, true to the Bible, ring forth with the same resounding cry as the prophets of old. And, like the prophets, some may try to destroy the messagenger, but they will never destroy the message because of its eternal nature.

Go here to read more.

HE SOUNDS SO EVANGELICAL

I keep pressing the issue of Obama's apparent evangelical magnetism. He sounds so convincing, so idealistic, so youthful but, when assessing his religion remember these salient points expressed in the Associated Press:

Comments critical of America by Obama's longtime pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, caused a firestorm during the primaries and brought Obama's brand of faith under scrutiny because of Wright's adherence to black liberation theology. Obama also has battled false but persistent rumors that he is a Muslim; they have been kept alive on the Internet despite his repeated talk about his longtime devotion to Christianity. Conservative Christians make up about a quarter of the electorate, and they helped put Bush in office twice. Many still are likely to oppose the Democratic nominee because of his support for abortion rights, gay rights and other issues. An AP-Yahoo News poll in June found that people who attend church at least once a week support Republican McCain over Obama, 49 percent to 37 percent. Those who attend church less often tend to favor Obama. White evangelical Christians who attend church weekly favor McCain by huge margins.

While Obama would expand Bush's efforts to give religious charities more equal footing when getting federal funding, he also would tweak what he would call the President's Council for Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships in ways that divert from Bush's approach.
He would increase spending on social services, starting with a $500 million-a-year program to keep 1 million poor children up to speed on their studies over the summers. He would increase training for charities applying for funding and make it a grass-roots effort. He would elevate the program to be "a critical part of my administration," a reference to criticism that Bush paid barely more than lip service to his effort.

It adds up to, now are you listening my friends? Come a little closer. It adds up to raising taxes. And how does
one such as Obama do that? The same way New Dealers have always done it-by promoting class envy.

THE STATE OF RELIGION IN AMERICA

Those outside the church often misinterpret motives and actions of both evangelicals and others particularly Christian groups. To say that all Christians especially evangelicals reflect John Hagee is analogous with placing all Democrats on the same bridge with Ted Kennedy. The latest Pew Research Center's Forum on Religion & Public Life survey concurs. In relation to interpersonal dynamics between different faiths the Pew Center discovered a broad scope of acceptance:

A majority of those who are affiliated with a religion, for instance, do not believe their religion is the only way to salvation. And almost the same number believes that there is more than one true way to interpret the teachings of their religion. This openness to a range of religious viewpoints is in line with the great diversity of religious affiliation, belief and practice that exists in the United States, as documented in a survey of more than 35,000 Americans that comprehensively examines the country’s religious landscape.

Religious views indeed provide the impetus behind a person's lifestyle including their political preferences. And why shouldn't it. If we believe faith surrenders to a god then that god ceases to be god when one disobeys. The Christian traditionally believes their God reveals himself through the Bible and the Church. So, for example, when the Apostle Paul in Romans 1:24-27 identifies homosexuality as a one of the many judgements against those choosing to reject God, Christians embrace this statement as authoritative. Suggesting they see this through contemporary cultural eyes asks them to surrender what they believe to be traditionally and historically a final authority on all matters of living and faith. Religion is a potent thing. Asking one to give it up along with all its practices does nothing more than to reinforce and bolster that faith.

An area of concern, in my opinion, particular to the Christian faith lies in the contemporary smorgasbord mentality of many Americans. The "me" generation has now come full circle. Boomers and their offspring look for the tailor made church complete with feel good music and awe inspiring Bible studies. But, getting fed presents only a small portion of faith's pie. To those who continually seek a good old fashioned Bible feeding I would ask, "When are you going to take off the bib and put on an apron?" The abundance of bibs in proportion to aprons reveals a dark shadow looming over the American church.

Read more Pew findings here.

OBAMA'S SORT OF COMPELLING SERMON

I never really believed the rumors that Obama is a Muslim. I think pundits and he himself disproved that notion long ago. In reference to his faith he displays all the characteristics of an evangelical social liberal fitting into an Anthony Campolo orJim Wallis mold. Yesterday at the Apostolic Church of God in Chicago Obama delivered a compelling, evangelical laced message in which he exhorted young black fathers move their responsibilities with their families to a higher plane. Toward the end of the message, however, he lowered himself to political animal and once again, in true Jimmy Carter fashion appealed to class warfare, imaginary inequities, American imperialism, and global warming. Too bad a good sermon got trumped by sold out liberal politics.

When I was a young man, I thought life was all about me — how do I make my way in the world, and how do I become successful and how do I get the things that I want.

But now, my life revolves around my two little girls. And what I think about is what kind of world I’m leaving them. Are they living in a country where there’s a huge gap between a few who are wealthy and a whole bunch of people who are struggling every day? Are they living in a country that is still divided by race? A country where, because they’re girls, they don’t have as much opportunity as boys do? Are they living in a country where we are hated around the world because we don’t cooperate effectively with other nations? Are they living a world that is in grave danger because of what we’ve done to its climate?

I once heard a preacher friend of mine state during the Carter years, "Just because a guy is born again doesn't necessarily make him a good president." Evangelicals take heed. Read the entire text of Obama's sermon here.

FORGET REVEREND WRIGHT ALREADY

Pundits have almost reached the point of beating a dead horse. Having said that however, it might behoove a person to take a look at Reverend Wright's congregational letters over at Hugh Hewitt's place. Some of those letters look a bit radical while others are simply normal church business. If indeed Obama read these letters he cannot claim ignorance in his quest to distance himself from the reverend.

MORE OBAMA AND LIBERATION THEOLOGY

The black liberation theology of Reverend Wright and presumptively of Barack Obama flows from several streams which originated with the confluence of Marxism and Christian idealism in 1955 South America. The degree of Marxist influence on LT appears debatable. Liberation theology, however, leaves no doubt as to its collectivist underpinnings. Latinos who desperately struggled to overcome poverty found comfort in Jesus' call to the rich for equity, sacrifice, and liberation. Marxist influenced socialism implicitly presented itself as the ideal medium through which Jesus' truth could be actualized. Pope Benedict XVI provides a compelling critique of this multi-layered theology. He suggests that Marxist liberation theology is predicated upon German theologian Rudolph Bultmann's permutation of Christian authority:

But Bultmann's "historical Jesus" is separated from the Christ of faith by a great gulf (Bultmann himself speaks of a 'chasm'). In Bultmann, while Jesus is part of the presuppositions of the New Testament, he himself is enclosed in the world of Judaism.

Now the crucial result of this exegesis was to shatter the historical credibility of the Gospels: the Christ of the Church's tradition and the Jesus of history put forward by science evidently belong to two different worlds. Science, regarded as the final arbiter, had torn the figure of Jesus from its anchorage in tradition; on the one hand, consequently, tradition hangs in a vacuum, deprived of reality, while on the other hand, a new interpretation and significance must be sought for the figure of Jesus. [emphasis mine]

Bultmann's importance, therefore, was less because of his positive discoveries than because of the negative result of his criticism: the core of faith, christology, was open to new interpretations because its previous affirmations had perished as being historically no longer tenable. It also meant that the Church's teaching Office was discredited, since she had evidently clung to a scientifically untenable theory, and thus ceased to be regarded as an authority where knowledge of Jesus was concerned. In the future her statements could only be seen as futile attempts to defend a position which was scientifically obsolete.

Bultmann's new mythological Jesus now stood at the mercy of any idealistic movement whose leaders desired to arbitrarily fit Jesus into their plan thus, baptizing it with righteous motives. A revolution, in the name of Jesus, possesses the noblest of intentions because it offers his hope, his freedom, and his promises of equity.

No doubt, black liberation theology lies covered with the same multi-layered idealistic sheet as does 1950's Latin American liberation theology. A few social liberal evangelicals such as Tony Compolo tend to sympathize with current BLT:

Certainly, Jeremiah Wright is advocating neither Marxism nor violent revolution. What Rev. Wright does say is that, as the African-American community endeavors to establish itself as a people who are both equal with whites and deserving of the dignity that God wills for all human beings, they have God on their side.

Rev. Wright’s words may seem harsh and his style may be strident, but that just may be the way that those of us in the white establishment react. For his African-American brothers and sisters, there may be a different reaction. Many of them will hear him as an angry prophet in the tradition of ancient Israel.

To we white folks, Jeremiah Wright sounds threatening. But we might ask ourselves if we deserve to be threatened.

Marxist or no Marxist, Wright's BLT raises red flags based not on motives or principle, but on perceptions and atmosphere. Frankly, his calls for liberation bait black hostilities and target them toward a devil-the oppressive whitey, who keeps gifted men like Obama from rising to the top. Now that this dark horse (no pun intended) broke loose from the crowd he incarnates BLT, and like Jesus, holds the keys to the Kingdom. John Perazzo of Front Page Magazine articulates our grave concern:

When we read the writings, public statements, and sermons of Rev. Wright, we quickly notice his unmistakable conviction that America is a nation infested with racism, prejudice, and injustices that make life very difficult for black people. As he declared in one of his sermons: "Racism is how this country was founded and how this country is still run!... We [Americans] believe in white supremacy and black inferiority and believe it more than we believe in God."

In a similar spirit, Wright laments "the social order under which we [blacks] live, under which we suffer, under which we are killed."[1] Depicting blacks as a politically powerless demographic, he complains that "African Americans don't run anything in the Capital except elevators."[2] On its website, Wright's church portrays black people as victims who are still burdened by the legacy of their "pilgrimage through the days of slavery, the days of segregation, and the long night of racism," and who must pray for "the strength and courage to continuously address injustice as a people."

Wright detects what he views as racism in virtually every facet of American life. In the business world, for instance, he attributes the high unemployment rate of African Americans to "the fact that they are black."

Barack Obama admittedly sat under this aberrant, heretical teaching for years, only to distance himself from the messenger, not the message, after much criticism. Furthermore, the tone by which Obama addressed his grandmother, a typical white person, seems harmless enough except when taken in its personal context. Now that Obama stands as the Dem's candidate it might behoove pundits to work him over with a fine tooth comb. Better to elect a great orator of illustrious character than one who like Hitler left people exclaiming, "I'm not sure what he said, but whatever he said, he said it well!"

OBAMA'S LIBERATION THEOLOGY ROOTS

Barack Obama's preacher problems may reveal his theological roots. Those roots appear nefarious and reflect a 70s radical theology prevalent among many liberal mainline Churches during that time. Several pundits have already called attention to Obama's liberation connection. The theology is dead among most contemporary theologians. Go here, and here to read more about the Obama/Liberation Theology connection.

MCCAIN'S REVEREND PROBLEM

John McCain, who derided Obama for his choice of spiritual guides, fell into a similar reverend trap.

Images of one of the nation's rising stars of television evangelism are widely available on DVDs and Web sites, with sermons that are almost certain to inflame some segment of the voting public. But in its quest to secure support from evangelical Christians, the campaign of presumptive Republican presidential nominee John McCain did not note a long record of inflammatory statements by Parsley and the Rev. John Hagee of Texas, another TV evangelist, until long after McCain had accepted their endorsements.

The move backfired last week when clips of the ministers' sermons gained national attention, prompting McCain to reject their support. The candidate's abrupt turnabout brought criticism not only from secular viewers, who questioned why he had aligned himself with controversial religious voices, but also from evangelicals, who said he may have alienated a powerful bloc of potential Republican voters.

I do not agree with the Washington Post article when it declares McCain's move may have backfired. Both Hagee and Parsley command a large audience, yet reach only the fringes. The evangelical core remains balanced, often canceling each other's votes. McCain's reverend problem is one of integrity, not populism. His acceptance/rejection of the reverends brings to light personally his poor judgement and politically his willingness to pander. So, while he backed off Parsley and Hagee, he demonstrated a dispositional affinity with Obama. Indeed McCain disturbs me, but Obama disturbs me even more.

Furthermore, evangelical spokesman Ralph Reed offered McCain a little wisdom via Bloomberg.com:

John McCain should stop seeking endorsements from evangelical pastors and instead appeal directly to their church members, said Ralph Reed, the former Christian Coalition executive director.

``John McCain doesn't need to be standing at a bank of microphones next to a particular leader,'' Reed said in an interview on Bloomberg Television's ``Political Capital With Al Hunt,'' to be broadcast today. ``My advice would be stay away from endorsements and stick to the issues.''

OBAMA QUITS CHURCH II

As an evangelical minister and Republican (I have yet to vote for a Democrat in my 35 years of voting) I feel some sympathy for Barack Obama and John McCain in their quest to discover a spiritual guru. Their errors may be indicative of shallow faith or unreasonable discernment. Even intelligent men fall victim to compartmentalization when referencing their faith. For most principled and truly faithful individuals, religion gets into the emotions. Something so sacred and penetrating often bypasses reason and stirs what Methodist John Wesley called enthusiasm, which according to him, leads individuals and masses into all sorts of predicaments, a phenomenon to guard against. Wesley described the nature of enthusiasm thusly:

As to the nature of enthusiasm, it is, undoubtedly a disorder of the mind; and such a disorder as greatly hinders the exercise of reason. Nay, sometimes it wholly sets it aside: it not only dims but shuts the eyes of the understanding. It may, therefore, well be accounted a species of madness; of madness rather than of folly: seeing a fool is properly one who draws wrong conclusions from right premisses; whereas a madman draws right conclusions, but from wrong premisses. And so does an enthusiast suppose his premisses true, and his conclusions would necessarily follow. But here lies his mistake: his premisses are false. He imagines himself to be what he is not: and therefore, setting out wrong, the farther he goes, the more he wanders out of the way.

Every enthusiast, then, is properly a madman. Yet his is not an ordinary, but a religious, madness. By "religious," I do not mean, that it is any part of religion: quite the reverse. Religion is the spirit of a sound mind; and, consequently, stands in direct opposition to madness of every kind. But I mean, it has religion for its object; it is conversant about religion. And so the enthusiast is generally talking of religion, of God, or of the things of God, but talking in such a manner that every reasonable Christian may discern the disorder of his mind. Enthusiasm in general may then be described in some such manner as this: a religious madness arising from some falsely imagined influence or inspiration of God; at least, from imputing something to God which ought not to be imputed to Him, or expecting something from God which ought not to be expected from Him.

Both Obama and McCain may know no other religion than the sort that emanates from their extreme, yet opposing mentors, Wright, Hagee, and Parsley. And the problem holds implications for the Church as well. Theologians who ardently and vociferously endorse a particular politician must realize their gospel stands the chance of rising or falling with individual's character. Interestingly Obama claims he will make a decision about his place of worship after January. So, he may be more in touch with his reason than we think. Only time will tell.

FIFTEEN MINUTES OF FAME NOT GOOD FOR MEN OF THE CLOTH

Preachers habitually sport big egos. Placing them in the spotlight often exploits their big heads and their littleness. Again, another little man who belongs in the righteous pulpit, not the bully pulpit, made a fool of himself and the politician (Barack Obama) he enthusiastically endorses:

Another Chicago minister is causing headaches for Barack Obama after he gave a sermon Sunday at Obama’s church in which he said Hillary Clinton felt entitled to the presidency because she’s white.

Catholic pastor Michael Pfleger, who is white, issued a formal apology for his sermon Thursday after Obama put out a statement saying he was “deeply disappointed” by Pfleger’s remarks at Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago.

“I regret the words I chose on Sunday. These words are inconsistent with Senator Obama’s life and message, and I am deeply sorry if they offended Senator Clinton or anyone else who saw them,” Pfleger said.

That was after a video of his sermon was posted on YouTube.

In it, Pfleger mocked Clinton for getting choked up on camera before the New Hampshire primary in January.

“When Hillary was crying … I really don’t believe it was put on. I really believe that she just always thought ‘This is mine. I’m Bill’s wife. I’m white. And this is mine’,” he said, shouting at times. “Then out of nowhere came, ‘Hey I’m Barack Obama’. And she said, ‘Oh damn! Where did you come from? I’m white! I’m entitled! There’s a black man stealing my show’!”

Obama's ministerial affiliations present a different twist to the same problem discovered in McCain's infamous endorsements from Rod Parsley and John Hagee. Obama hangs with liberals while McCain shmoozes with faux evangelicals. I say faux, because these two McCain supporters fail to represent mainstream evangelicals. They preach to the fringes. Yet, McCain in particular looks like an unspiritual man searching for an evangelical-political voice. Because of his spiritual deficit or perhaps immaturity he lacks the discernment to choose wise ministers. I must admit, liberal theologians, much like their political twins tend to be activists and spout the political speak of the day, while reasoned evangelicals seek to transform the pop culture into a more Christ like image. I fear, however, any politician who seriously listens to the current pop culture driven apocalyptic philosophy such as Parsley and Hagee promote. And, yes indeed they view the Roman Catholic church as the great whore referred to in the Book of Revelation. But, that's a matter for a whole different blog post.