Why Jesus was NOT a Liberal (or a conservative)!

Saturday Jacinda and I both went to get a haircut at a local mall. After we walked around some of the shops, including a Barnes and Noble. I always tend to gravitate towards two sections: Christian Books and sports. Go figure. The one thing that continues to amaze me whenever I go near the Christian book section is how many useless books there are on Christianity. I remember hearing once that Christian books (outside of the Bible) were fairly rare, or at least the bad ones were filtered out and never really saw the light of day. In the last fifty years or so, though, Christian books is a massive money making industry and people who should not be writing, let alone about Christianity, pump out books it seems either to boost their egos or make money.

What I am trying to get at more specifically was that while browsing through Barnes and Noble I spotted a book called "Jesus Was a Liberal."

I know what is going on right away, but let me explain. Many Christians who find themselves politically liberal feel that their voice has been taken away by the "Silent Majority" or the Christian Right that really took off back during the Reagan years. Now they are trying to distance themselves from the Christian Right and maintain their Christian identity. I do not judge them for this, neither do I think they are wrong in doing this. The problem lies in the way they go about this.

I want to be clear that I am specifically at odds with the author of the book I mentioned above. I have two immediate reasons for this. First, the book makes a theological claim about Jesus right in the title, "Jesus WAS a Liberal." I am assuming that the author did not even realize this or if he did he did not mean it this way, but it still says that Jesus WAS. The Christian understanding of Jesus Christ, however, says that Jesus IS. Jesus IS still alive and he rose from the dead to establish His kingdom forever. I am not trying to overplay this in case it was mere oversight, but this is a fundamental teaching of the Christian church.

The second problem lies in the word "liberal." I do not care if many of Jesus teaching fit into a modern liberal worldview, the real issue is that the term liberal, especially the way we use it today, is loaded with political and social implications of our current period in history. Nowhere in the Bible is the term Liberal used and this must be acknowledged. This is the problem of reading into the text our own culture and worldview, instead of actually reading what it says. In truth, most of what Jesus said in the Bible is far from any political position i have seen held by anyone in public office. Not only does Jesus reach out to the poor and condemn the unjust and prideful, but he speaks of hell and judgment frequently. Not too many liberal churches that I know of preach on hell that often, let alone of it being a real place. Though I only read the front and back cover, the intent of the book seems to argue for a Christian POLITICAL shift back to the left, instead of back to the actual Bible.

If you read the Gospels and try hard not to bring to the text your personal assumptions, which is impossible, but if you try you will see that Jesus has no time for politics. He has no time for government officials and their agendas. Jesus would not be anywhere near the White House dinner, whether with Obama or Bush in the Oval Office. When Jesus is tempted by the Devil while fasting in the wilderness He rejects the Satan's offer of political power for the agenda of His Father. When the religious leaders try to get Him in trouble with the Roman Government by using the issue of taxes, Jesus seems to affirm the political reality of the day. "Give to Caesar what is Caesar's." But what is more important is that in comparing the image of Caesar on a coin and the image of God that is imprinted upon humanity, Jesus is saying, "Give Caesar his worthless pieces of metal and give to God your whole life."

If you want to break the Bible free from the confines of the political Right in America, fine by me. Just make sure that what you are preaching is the Gospel and not your politics. I think this is just as big a problem, if not more so, for the Right, since it takes the political reality for granted. This is not easy and anyone who knows me knows that I am politically conservative. Does this make what I have to say loaded? Probably yes. But I think that we on the right should hold ourselves to just as high of a standard when it comes to seeing with a Biblical worldview and not seeing the Bible with a worldly, politicized world view.

Skepticism

Is skepticism good? I think so, to a degree. I think the problem is that it is acceptable and even applauded to be skeptical of faith and spirituality, especially in America today, but if anybody is skeptical about science, "Whoa, c'mon. Science is truth."

I think it is funny how so many skeptics of religion point to the example of how Galileo was condemned by the Catholic Church for saying the earth revolved around the sun. This is not to me an example of the church trying to bury science. It is an example of the belief of the day driving social and political policies. Is not this exactly what the global warming scientists are trying to do. They condemn anyone with a different scientific opinion and their position is the norm that is driving the social and political movements of our day. The massive amounts of email from the leading scientists in the Global Warming field is one thing, but recently India has been releasing news that the head of their climate research team has been using weak, at best, data from an interview, not an actual experiment, to drive their political agendas.

So what am I trying to get at? Well, basically science is the observations of men, human beings. Humans can be wrong and this needs to be a starting point for all scientific research. It is called humility. Science is observation and observations can be tainted by so many different factors. This does not mean that science is wrong. Far from it. It just means that if you put your faith in science, and it is a faith, then you are putting your beliefs in the hands of men who screw things up. Men who have political agendas. Men who will condemn others who disagree with them.

I think we do ourselves a disservice by quickly putting people into certain analogous relationships and do not put everything in the proper context. I am not defending those in the church who condemned Galileo, but they were speaking for God. They were speaking from the place of political dominance. The Bible does not speak of whether or not the earth is the center of the universe, or if the sun is the center of the universe, or if there are other planets with life in the universe for one simple reason: it is not important to the message. The message is about how much God loves us, not about how God made us the center of the universe and told us that we are the only thing that matters or that the Pope should be the governor of the World.

So who has the social and political dominance now? Well, that can be a hard thing to tie down, but in the area of climate science it is the Global Warming crowd who say they have a consensus. Why wouldn't they want a Galileo to set them free to the realities of science if theirs was wrong. Maybe they just don't have the correct tools like scientists before Galileo, or maybe they want to maintain their dominance like the Heliocentrists in the 17th century.

Either way, if you are going to be skeptical of religion then you should be equally skeptical of science. Not because of science itself, for it is just an idea, but of the men who use, and abuse, it.

Rejoicing over his bride...

I was in chapel the other day and one of the readings was Isaiah 62: 1-5. The passage specifically speaks about the coming salvation of Israel, but what really caught my attention was verse 5. It reads, "For as a young man marries a young woman, so shall your sons marry you, and as the bridegroom rejoices over the bride, so shall your God rejoice over you." Again, this passage is specifically talking about God saving His bride, but the phrase "and as the bridegroom rejoices over the bride" made me pause because in this statement is not a description of what is going to happen, but an assumption of something that already happens.

I think this is important for me as a husband because I lose track many times of the incredible joy that I have in my life because of my wife and I should never forget to rejoice over my bride. It is easy to get distracted by life and frustrated with all the responsibilities that come (though I know I have relatively few), but like Proverb 5 says "Let your fountain be blessed, and rejoice in the wife of your youth... be intoxicated always in her love."

I am still young and our marriage is still young, but I hope that the rejoicing and joy in our marriage only grows greater with time.

By the way I am going to make a shameless plug for my wife. If you have not checked it out Jacinda has a website with her photography on it. She also just opened an Etsy page at http://www.etsy.com/shop/jacindashields. She is a wonderful artist, so please check them out.