It Would Be Funny, If It Weren't So Pathetic

I made the usual mistake that I often make on weekday mornings; I turned on the Weather Channel hoping to see a weather forecast.  As usual, I got everything but.

Stephanie Abrams, the co-anchor de jour, who is most famous for talking about inane and meaningless trivia through the weekly planner segment, was moderating a panel of four or five 'experts', two of whom were religious figures, discussing the recent tornado outbreak.  She managed to look like a fool during this segment as well.

One of the 'experts' was Rabbi Shmuley Boteach.  His response to Stephanie's less-than-inspiring question, "Why do bad things happen to good people?" was that we should shake our fist in God's face and challenge him on why he is being so mean to people he's supposed to care about.  Another 'expert' was Rev. Dr. Serene Jones, the President of Union Theological Seminary.  She promptly replied that there is no answer to this question, and anyone who tries to answer it is only making things worse.

Makes one wonder if either of these folks has any familiarity at all with their respective corpus of religious writings.

I like this response from John Piper a lot better.  He does answer the question, and he doesn't make anything worse, unless (of course) you hold a worldview that places man above God in both value and authority.  But if you hold that worldview, I'm afraid the Rev. Dr. Jones is right, at least in your world.

If anyone needs empirical evidence that our culture needs the gospel, including some of our most well-know religious leaders, well, there you go.  As for having barely competent weather-babes moderating a panel of liberal theologians, it would be funny if it weren't so pathetic.  Real people are hurting in real ways, and all they have to offer are sound-bite-quality pablum.

Some Problems that Need Addressed

With apologies to Gary Gilley (because I heavily edited his list to make mine), here are some problems of the contemporary church that need serious attention these days-

• Emergent Christianity is a sentimental religion
• The view is that doctrines are unimportant and experience, not truth, is what matters
• Tolerance is more important than truth
• We should not seek to know God but to feel Him  
• Sin is not a great problem 
• The enjoyment of life is the primary purpose for Christianity
• The Bible is not what it claims; authority rests in the individual and in pragmatism 
• Jesus is simply an example for us, not a redeemer
• The resurrection was not a historical fact
• The Christian doctrine of salvation is to be criticized because it is narrow and exclusive
• The doctrine of salvation presents a cold, cruel and unloving view of God
• The betterment of the earth and the people and animals living in it is the church’s agenda

These are serious issues in need of a great thinker to evaluate them and give an answer from scripture, right?  Well, been-there-done-that, as they say.  All these issues come not first from the postmodern liberalism of the emergent church, but from classical liberalism of the 19th and early 20th centuries.  J. Gresham Machen addressed each of these (and more) in his classic book Christianity and Liberalism, written in 1923.

If you've never read that book, and the problems of contemporary church culture bother you, you need to read it.  If you don't know much about Machen, I can recommend a book that might be hard to find, but is worth the effort- Toward a Sure Faith: J. Gresham Machen and the Dilemma of Biblical Criticism, 1881-1915 by Terry Chrisope.  I used to work with Dr. Chrisope...he teaches history and religion at Missouri Baptist University in St. Louis.  The book came from his doctoral dissertation at Kansas State University.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.  And the more new problems we find, the more we realize there is really nothing new under the sun.  As Chesterton once said, "The wit of man is insufficient to invent a new heresy."

Sojourners a Leftist Fifth Column Organization

We already knew Sojourners leaned to the left, kinda like the Tower of Pisa viewed from the southeast.  But this puts the icing on the cake-

http://blog.christianitytoday.com/ctpolitics/2010/08/wallis_admits_t.html

I hope any of you with any ties to Sojourners immediately junk them.  Despicable.