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© 2024 — John Chaffee MDiv/ThM

Don’t Be Surprised…

If “Christianity” is just about life after death but never asking the difficult question of the possibility of life BEFORE death then you can count whole scores of people out.

More than that,

If it is about denying the hard and soft sciences rather than celebrating them,
If it ravages the earth rather than caring for it,
If it values strong leaders to the point it silences the abused,
If it scapegoats the whistleblower rather than protecting them,
If it allows excluding foreigners rather than welcoming them as God in disguise,
If it enables sexism, classism or racism rather than confronting them,
If it is about sanitizing art and music rather than humanity of it,
If it diminishes rather than consecrates the material world,
If it ignores or minimizes oppression rather than liberating from it,
If it shows favoritism rather than equality,
If it spends more money on the building than on people,
If it treats all people outside of it only as members to be “won over”,
If it lets people off the hook from confronting their own ego, narcissism, or delusions of grandeur,
If it concretizes the status quo rather than shattering it,
If it keeps looking backward with nostalgia rather than forward with hopeful imagination,
Then you can also count them out.

If it does any of these things, you can count many people out.  Go ask the next generation, how YOU can be more like Christ.  Let THEM fan your flame of faith. It is possible that they have the unique responsibility of reflecting back to us how Christlike we are, and that we ought to listen to them if we are not living up to the virtues and the values that we once emphasized to them.

To live in this way is not to be something other than Christian, it is being eschatological in the present. It is living the end of cosmic history in the now.  The Christian faith inspires because it emphasizes our place in lowering heaven by razing the hells on earth.

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