I’ve been spending a bit of my free time bumming around the ‘net. I haven’t had much free time – I’ve got too much Hebrew homework to do. But I seem to keep running into atheist, agnostic, and anti-Christian/religious blogs. I’ve been noticing a few things that seems to be consistent: a grievous misunderstanding of what Christianity is all about.
I was looking at one blog this morning that concluded that all religion – especially Christianity – is based on fear. I appreciated that he, unlike many of his “friends,” acknowledged the great variety within the Christian faith (we’re not all bleeding conservative Republic fundamentalists). But he still made many of the same mistakes.
Some within the Body of Christ do in fact preach and live out a faith motivated by fear. Although I would still consider those members brothers and sisters in Christ, I think they have a “weird” understanding of the Word. There is not one single benefit – socially, culturally, psychologically, or behaviorally – that comes from that sort of rhetoric. True change does not occur by fear; true change is that result of a realization of a higher/deeper truth. In the case of Christianity, that truth is the imperfection of humanity and the perfect found in God, bestowed upon purely by grace through the death and resurrection of his Son, Jesus Christ.
Salvation (i.e. entrance into the eternal bliss of heaven) is in no way contingent on works. I say this as a criticism to folks on both sides: the non-Christians who think we’re all “doing good;” and the extremely vocal Church leaders to emphasize national morality while their chosen party continues to falter and preach a message that can basically be summed up as “morality (i.e. works) are more important than faith/grace – if only everyone will do what God demands, then the USA will be blessed and prosper.”
What is often misunderstood is that good works are the result of true faith – not the end goal. It’s sort of like saying “thank-you” to your best friend when they do something really, really nice for you. But in our case, it’s Jesus/God who did something really nice for us; we accept that gift and then do everything we can to say thank-you. That means doing good; that means loving people – even the people we don’t like very much.
It’s that Gospel that we sign on to when we profess our personal faith in Jesus Christ. And it’s that Gospel that we should be living out everyday in every situation – not because we want to make sure that everyone around us knows we’re Christian, but because it’s what we’re supposed to do as our wy of saying “thank-you.”
Filed under: Apologetics, Christianity, Random, Theology
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