The Hartmann Report - Are “Christians” trying to remove Jesus because he was too liberal? Russell Moore, the editor of Christianity Today, has authored an editorial in which he worries out loud about evangelicals who are openly rejecting the teachings of Jesus as being “too liberal.” Moore told an interviewer: “It was the result of having multiple pastors tell me, essentially, the same story about quoting the Sermon on the Mount, parenthetically, in their preaching — ‘turn the other cheek’ — to have someone come up after to say, ‘Where did you get those liberal talking points?’ And what was alarming to me is that in most of these scenarios, when the pastor would say, ‘I’m literally quoting Jesus Christ,’ the response would not be, ‘I apologize.’ The response would be, ‘Yes, but that doesn’t work anymore. That’s weak.’ And when we get to the point where the teachings of Jesus himself are seen as subversive to us, then we’re in a crisis.”
3 comments:
I wonder what they expected. They made Paul and his extremely unhealthy opinions, not Jesus, the real framework of the religion. Now their choices are coming back to bite them and they're surprised?
The fascist mask seems to be coming off. I swore off religion at the age of 5 when I chose between god made the world in 7 days and the Earth is 5 Billion years old. I chose the 5 billion and science. But part of my intellectual journey is looking at the role of religion in the war machine.
The Christians saying that Jesus is too liberal have forgotten who he was (if he was) and jumped full belly in to religion as the basis for warfare. Democracy is in peril, racism rules the day.
I know the sane Christians are fighting back. Friends in the peace movement regaled me with discussions among the Baptists as to whether they were a peace church any longer. The coming generations have no conception of a peace church, so they just stop going.
The same people who want to kill also are all in for fossil fuels. Let us hope civilization survives the ills the right wing are attempting to visit uon us.
This is where ministry is going — back to the days of parsonages. My bride is a UU minister, and it’s only because she was second career and I’m an attorney in private practice that we could afford to live in the community she was called to serve, a second tier West Coast city but fully feeling the housing boom caused by the first-tier cities. Her pastor’s salary is pretty close to the median in the area, which doesn’t enable one to buy or even rent comfortably in our community. Church salaries haven’t kept pace at all with real estate and health care costs, to say nothing of the relatively recent phenomenon of ministers carrying big student loan debt. (We just paid off my wife’s $60k debt with the proceeds of a case I worked on for years). And those same pressures limit giving by the parishioners, which is necessary to increase the minister’s salary.
It bodes ill for the future — Unless they come from a monied family, I don’t see how any young minister will be able to follow my bride into this pulpit when she is ready to hang it up. So only more senior ministers who have ridden the real estate cycle a few times will be able to even consider serving the communities who can pay moderately well. The newer ministers who will most need decent pay and benefits won’t be able to afford the ante of living in the community they want to serve.
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