Is it time to put Christ back into Christianity? Not according to Jan Markell at Worlview Times, who rails against "red-letter Christians"* who pay more attention to the words of Jesus than to the more hateful - and apparently, more important - passages in the Bible.
They feel it is convenient to blot out the words of Paul on homosexuality and focus in on the good deeds Jesus talks about. Most are pacifists who reject an "eye for an eye" (Leviticus 24:19-20). They focus on Jesus' words about helping the poor, ministering to "the least of these" (Matthew 25:40), loving our enemies, etc. That justifies abandoning hundreds, even thousands of condemning verses in the Bible they choose to wish away. That makes homosexuality OK and war wrong!
Of course, Jesus himself rejects "an eye for an eye" in Matthew 5:38. He goes on to say things like "Give to him that asketh thee, and from him that would borrow of thee turn not thou away," and, in the parallel passage in Luke 6, "Judge not, and ye shall not be judged: condemn not, and ye shall not be condemned."
Jan Markell hates these verses and the people who quote them:
It is also tragic that these folks are frequently called "the evangelical Left." They don't have even 1% of evangelical theology in a single bone in their body. They cherry- pick the verses they like, almost exclusively the red letters of Jesus.I expect she wishes those verses weren't in the Bible at all, since Jesus can't possibly have meant them. When Matthew 5:39 reports him saying, "resist not evil," that can't be an endorsement of pacifism, surely? That would contradict the entire Religious Right worldview (a favorite word of theirs), which is based on judging and condemning, warring against one's enemies, and despising all acts of mercy. If you listen to Jesus, "that makes ... war wrong!" Inconceivable!
Conservative Christians have traditionally couched their lack of mercy in more careful words, such as "love the sinner, hate the sin"(which sounds good, but in practice there doesn't seem to be much difference). But the mask is slipping. The hateful style of religion is growing so intense that its practitioners can barely disguise themselves any more. Jan Markell doesn't want you emphasizing the words of Jesus, because they don't say what she wants to hear, and she's no longer even embarrassed to say so.
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* Since, in many traditional Bibles, all the words of Jesus are printed in red.
1 comment:
I remember a religious comic book we received for Christmas once, about the end days and the rapture. Scary shit for a kid. And I explicitly remember it saying that in the end times, preachers stopped preaching the gospel.
The clear implication was that it was those damn liberal preachers, of course. But I've yet to hear of a liberal preacher who explicitly refused to preach the red letter verses.
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