The Light of Christian Love in a Dark and Loveless Culture

For quite some time now, Christians have been on the receiving end of accusations by the world and by a large population of false Christians that we fail to demonstrate the kind of love Jesus and His apostles demonstrated. The examples cited by our accusers center on issues like abortion, homosexuality, and a dogmatic approach to Christianity in general. By dogmatic, I mean that Christians insist on the absolute truths of Scripture and seem unwilling to even consider alternative approaches to said Scripture, at least the kind of approaches that modern people in our modern culture consider less offensive, more open, more reasonable, intellectually respectable, and more inclusive.

It is absolutely the case that Christians are to demonstrate the love of Christ in whatever culture they find themselves. That fact is uncontroversial. But that statement is more complicated that it appears at first glance. When Christians use the term love, one has to ask if we mean the same thing the culture means when they use the same term. It depends on how one understands the meaning of the term love. You see, just as the modern expression study has a common meaning in our culture, we recognize that it had a different common meaning when the King James Bible was produced. What that culture meant when they used the term study was different from what our culture means when we use it. The content of the word “love” has to be supplied by the ancient writers of Scripture if we are to understand how Jesus and His disciples demonstrated love to others living in the dark culture of their own time.

Matthew and Mark both tell us that Jesus began his peaching ministry with a sermon on repentance. His message was simple: repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near. Accompanying His message of repentance, Jesus performed many signs and wonders along the way. It is the illegitimate separation of Jesus’ miracles from Jesus’ message that creates much modern confusion about the Jesus of the New Testament. Modern pictures of Jesus focus almost exclusively on Jesus’ acts of compassion toward those He healed much to the neglect of the fundamental principles of His message, which was first and foremost a message of repentance. Rather than shedding our modern philosophical and political leanings, and allowing our understanding of Jesus to be informed by 1) the ancient middle-eastern men that wrote about Him, and 2) the Holy Spirit who is essential in understanding the Jesus of the NT, modern culture imposes a modern paradigm on Christ and recasts the Jesus of the NT into a Jesus that looks remarkably similar to their personal idea of what someone of Christ’s stature must be like. In other words, the modern idea of Jesus is nothing more than the recasting of Jesus into the socio-cultural-politico idea of modern unbelievers desiring to exchange the image of the Christ of Scripture for an image they can live with.

The Christian must respond in love to this culture. For some of us that is more difficult than for others. Many of us want to take a torch to what is left of this culture and be done with it. That is a self-righteous attitude indeed. But for grace, there go I. While there is a place for righteous indignation, we must make sure we constantly examine our hearts. Paul was rightly vexed at the rampant idolatry he witnessed in Athens. Such a response is perfectly natural. But it is easy for those feelings to morph into a spiritually unhealthy and self-righteous attitude. What we have to do is acknowledge that our message is one of love, grace, and hope. It really is. And if that is true, then the antithesis of our message, which we believe the culture, is declaring, is not a message of love, grace, and hope. What I am suggesting is that we change our approach.

The culture says it is unloving, controlling, and degrading to women for us to tell a woman what she is to do with her own body. It has been messaged as a woman’s health issue. Abortion is not a woman’s health issue. It is an ethical issue. It is a sin issue. True Christian love, Christian grace, and Christian hope will speak to the truth about abortion in love, but it will do so directly. Just speak the truth! We should not feel bad about speaking what is true. And we should not worry that some people are going to hate what we say. If we love women the way Christ loves them, we will tell them the truth about abortion. Abortion is murder and those who have abortions and who perform abortions commit murder. Love urges women to avoid the sin of murder. Love, grace, and hope do not allow women to live in their own self-deception, thinking that abortion is merely a woman’s health issue. Murder is a sin that will clearly come under divine wrath. Love makes sure it communicates honestly and clearly the sobering truth about the consequences of such behavior.

The culture says it is unloving, bigoted, and hateful to discriminate against homosexuals in any way whatever. They ought to be allowed to marry, and even to be members of churches, to enter the clergy, seminary, work on faculty at religious institutions the same as anyone else. True Christian love, grace, and hope speaks the truth about the issue of homosexuality.

True love, true grace, and true hope do not leave people entangled in their sin. True love reaches out with a message of hope. What hope is there without change, without a difference, without new life? There can be no hope without change, or without new life. Moreover, only God can bring about the kind of change and life that true hope offers. We say we are loving the homosexual when we allow him or her to marry, to join the church, to have equality in all things. We say that we are loving the homosexual only when we celebrate their homosexuality with them. Christians say that we are not loving anyone when we lead that person to believe that they can continue sinning and experience the life offered by God in Christ. How could it ever be loving to allow someone to think they are not under the judgment of God when we know they are? The answer is simple: it cannot.

The Christian does not fight homosexuality and abortion or any other sin because they are pet peeves. We proclaim God’s truth about homosexuality and abortion and every other sin precisely because we do love people. Lets take a look at something John says about how we love fellow believers and see if we can glean some principles from his instructions.

John said basically that no one could love their fellow believer if they see them with a genuine need and the means to meet that need but choose not to do so. Additionally, John said that if you do not love your fellow Christians, you could not possibly love God. Essentially, John is saying that claims to love God are false under such circumstances. Now, if this is true regarding material needs, temporal needs, how much more is it true regarding spiritual needs? If you see someone caught up in sin, committing sinful acts that are destructive of their own life, how could you claim to love them if you did nothing to help them recognize their sin so that they might perhaps repent of it should God provide such intervention?

It is not unloving, ungracious, or hopeless to speak the truth in love about these cultural sins and abuses we see around us. Quite the opposite is true. It is unloving, ungracious, and pernicious not to confront a society when it is open rebellion against God. We see the sermons of Christ, Peter, Stephen, and Paul and how they each confronted their culture. We see that in some cases God poured out His grace and men were converted. But we see that in most cases, men responded with bitterness, hatred, and even violence toward those that carried the message. They crucified Christ and Peter, stoned Stephan, and beheaded Paul. If we were to speak the way some of the false Christians of our modern culture think we should, it is hard to understand how anyone would ever be slandered for a message like that. But this fact seems lost in the minds that make up most of that crowd for some strange reason.

Unpopular Christianity

Jesus said to the crowd at the “Sermon on the Mount” that the gate that leads to eternal life is narrow. He said that there would be few people who find that gate and subsequently, find eternal life. (Matt. 5:13-14) Greek and Roman writers fairly often employed the image of the two paths in life.^[1] Such thinking receives its fair amount of scorn in modern, western cultures. What is more, much of that scorn comes from the religious community. Such thinking is continually viewed as legalistic, hypocritical, and often associated with the sect of religious leaders known as the Pharisees. But these are the words of Jesus Christ Himself. In addition, Jesus was speaking to a crowd of people who were primarily religious. Yet, according to Jesus, most of this crowd was lost. Most Jewish people in Jesus’ day were religious; respecting God and keeping his commandments were important parts of their culture.^[2] We can relate to this sort of culture in America. Our country is filled with churches like this and our churches are filled with people like this. They do not drink beer, fornicate, commit adultery, lie (at least not really big lies), or commit a variety of other sins they think are the worse kind of sins. They have never been born again. They think they are morally good and therefore that makes them a Christian.

There is another component now filling our churches. This element thinks that Scripture is simply a good guide in that it points in a certain moral direction but that it should not be taken overly-literally, even in its prohibitions. These are the people who divorce their husbands and wives at will when they feel they have the ground to do so. They are the churches filling their pulpits with female pastors who denounce and deny God’s ordained role for women. These are the people who think there is nothing necessarily wrong with abortion and who suggest one can be gay and Christian. Essentially, they destroy the Christian standard revealed in Scripture and replace it with one that meets with their preferences. They deny the exclusive claims of Christ, believing that eternal judgment is an outdated doctrine. In their mind, Jesus was not talking about eternal judgment but rather, temporal happiness. For them, it is merely an attitudinal issue that Jesus was concerned about. Christianity is about loving your neighbor in precisely the terms they would define them. Christianity is about social causes, racial issues, gay marriage, income equality, gun control, utopia in the here and the now. Christianity is more of a socio-political movement than it is a supernatural religion making outrageous claims about morality and eternal judgment. After all, that is the stuff that bigots are made of.

Second, this unpopular Christianity, as opposed to pop-Christianity, is something the world actually hates. Jesus did not say that if Christians would be just the right kind of Christians that the world would come flocking to Christ. I realize that men in the emergent church and in Rick Warren’s seeker-sensitive model and Andy Stanley’s psychological version think that Christ is just about relationships and that if we just show people we care, they will want Christ and all that He offers. Where that nonsense comes from I am not sure. I am sure however, that it does not come from biblical exegesis. That much is not difficult to ascertain. Jesus said to His disciples that all men because of the name of Jesus would hate them. (Matt. 10:22) Now, if we listen to men like Perry Noble, Rick Warren, Andy Stanley, and Joel Osteen, we are led to believe that if we are doing it the way Jesus told us to do it, then the world would flock to our churches in groves, literally tens of thousands of people would pound the doors down wanting this Jesus we have to offer. Moreover, we are told that if the world hates you and rejects your message; that the reason is in how we deliver that message. You’ve heard it: man, you just turn people off with that repentance stuff. That kind of preaching just doesn’t work. You need to get with the times if you want your message and your church to be relevant. Yet, in stark contrast to this, Jesus told His disciples not to stop doing what they are doing when men hate them, despise them, and say evil things against them falsely, but rather, to rejoice that they are considered worthy to suffer for His name’s sake. Biblical Christianity is despised by the world while pop-Christianity is embraced by the world and despised by Christ.

Finally, unpopular Christianity brings division and controversy. Jesus said that He did not come to bring peace on the earth. Rather, Jesus came to bring division. (Lu. 12:51) Those who think that Jesus came in order to make it so that we could all stand around, holding hands, and singing “We are the world” while ignoring our serious theological differences (such as exclusion, homosexuality, illicit divorce, Christology, the Nature of Scripture, et al) exhibit a profound ignorance of the very words spoken by Jesus Himself. Biblical Christianity is a profoundly unpopular, and from a worldly standpoint, an intensely disturbing religion. Biblical Christianity leaves no stone unturned. It leaves no behavior to human autonomy. It demands that everything that we are and do be subject to the Creator of all that is. Nothing is left to itself. There is no independence. The idea of individual “rights” simply does not exist in such a system. The demands of the Christ of Scripture are higher than any demands any man could place on himself. The Christian dictum that one must die to oneself if one is to find life is at the heartbeat of Biblical Christianity. It is any wonder why such a system would be so unpopular among the world? It is for this very reason that only those that are the objects of the regenerating work of the Holy Spirit do actually come to embrace this profoundly unpopular religion. Who, in their right mind, would ever want to die their own self?

Popular Christianity in the west and especially in the Americas has become a religion that is, in a strict sense, unknown to Scripture and Scripture unknown to it. For decades this religion has denied the authority of Scripture, changed the image of God, perverted the teachings of Christ, and removed every offense from Scripture it could find. Popular Christianity is little more than a psychological subscription to moralistic principles derived from the image of God within man, modified of course, by each individual’s preferences. For some, it is little more than having a clubhouse of friends to chat with on Sundays. For others, it is a means to positive thinking, to better parenting, to career enhancement, and to a better over all self-esteem, albeit entrenched in a subtle self-righteousness that resides hidden deep within, but, nevertheless is at the core of it’s philosophy.

Jesus said he who loves his life will lose it and he who hates his life will find it. (Jn. 12:25) Jesus said if you were of the world, the world would love you. But because I have chosen you out of the world, the world hates you! (Jn. 15:19) So, Christian, if the world hates you, then rejoice! But if the world loves you, you must be the world too.

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^[1] Craig S. Keener, The Gospel of Matthew: A Socio-Rhetorical Commentary (Grand Rapids, MI;  Cambridge, U.K.: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2009), 250.

^[2] Ibid., 251.

The Scandal of the Christian Faith

According to the source of the Christian Faith, the Bible, Christianity is a scandalous proposition. According to the apostle Paul, Christianity’s most notorious figure in the first-century church, scandal is at the heart of the Christian message. Writing to the churches at Galatia regarding this odd idea of justification by faith alone, Paul argues that any attempt to add law to the Christian message removes the scandalous element of the gospel and hence makes the gospel no gospel at all. The Greek word skandalon, according to Louw-Nida means that which causes offense and thus arouses opposition. The idea that one who was hanged on a cross would actually be the Savior and Redeemer of the nation was nothing short of scandalous. Additionally, where the Gentile was concerned, that one who could not save Himself from such a humiliating death could actually be trusted to save others was simply foolish. In fact, from a natural standpoint, the whole idea of redemption in Christ by way of the cross is simply inexplicable in natural, rationalistic terms.

Paul expressed this view also to the church at Corinth when he said that the preaching of the cross is considered moronic to the unbeliever (1 Cor. 1:18). Moreover, once again, a few verses later he says to the Jew, the gospel is a scandal and to the Greek, the gospel is moronic (1 Cor. 1:23). In other words, the gospel and the natural mind are, from the start, antagonistic one toward the other.

The Christian message is scandalous because it rejects the notion of autonomous human reason from the start. Men do not weigh the evidence and the arguments coupled with the consequences and then decide that Christian theism is the best decision given all the facts. Christian theism is resistant to the proclivity of the natural mind which insists that all claims, to include God’s claims be placed in the dock and judged by the standards of rebellious and ungodly men. Instead, Christian theism demands that men take God at His word and do as Christ commanded without hesitation: repent.

The Christian message is scandalous because it is intolerant and narrow. Christianity claims to be the only true religion, the only way to God, and that all those rejecting it’s claims are doomed to the worse kind of eternal judgment imaginable.

The Christian message is scandalous because it claims that only it’s ethic and values are the ethic and values by which every human should honor, embrace, and adopt in every aspect of their lives. Moreover, rejection of the Christian ethic is considered a rejection of the Christian message. And rejection of the Christian message is considered an overt rejection of God Himself. Nothing is more scandalous than the judgments about human behavior made by the Christian message.

The Christian message is scandalous because it insists on a very narrow view of Scripture, that Scripture is inerrant, fully inspired and must be acknowledged and recognized as such by all subscribers.

The Christian message is particularly scandalous to modern culture because it rejects such popular movements as homosexuality, gay marriage, co-habitation, abortion, and a variety of other cultural values, not the least of which is that the human mind is capable of serving as the final reference point for how and what we know as well as how we ought to live. Christianity resists modern expressions designed primarily to subvert it into a system solely for the enjoyment and pleasure of self-righteous moralistic deists.

Yet, for some reason, modern, and especially, modern American Christians with their version of pop-Christianity think they are actually accomplishing something if they can get modern Americans to attend their churches, Sunday schools, prayer meetings, and receive the sacraments. It is a psychological gospel geared toward those who want more control over their lives. What do we think it is when people claim to want to be better in their career, more successful, better parents, better spouses, and so on and so forth. The “better” is actually a man-centered standard that is informed by Hollywood values to mainstream cultural values. The “better” usually has no relationship to the divine standard laid down in sacred Scripture.

Christian theism is a scandal and the only people who subscribe, it turns out, are those who have lost their minds and as a result have found redemption in Christ.

The Philosophy of Christianity

According to Christianity, the state of affairs that has obtained is what the Bible declares it to be. And what is that, exactly? God created the heaven and the earth from nothing over the course of six days in history past, approximately 6,000 years or go, give or take a few years. All things that have come to be owe their existence to creative act of God who is Himself sovereign Lord and ruler of all things.

According to Christianity, all human knowledge is the product of divine revelation. Human beings know things only because God chose to reveal them to us. God accomplished this through natural and special revelation. The fear of the Lord is the beginning, not the end point of all human knowledge. According to Scripture, all the treasures of knowledge are deposited in the person of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, who is Himself the second person of the Triune God.

According to Christianity, human morality is derivative of the divine law, which is itself derived from the divine lawgiver. What God deems holy and righteous is holy and righteous because it is a reflection of His perfect moral character. The divine law, which is the basis of all human morality, is the reflection of God’s divine character.

According to Christianity, the ultimate authority for human knowledge is the Bible. The Bible is the self-attesting divine standard by which we know anything at all and by which we ought to order our lives. The Word of God, as it is called in Christianity, needs nothing to justify belief in it. It is, by nature, self-justifying. Should Scripture require justification for belief that rests outside of itself, this would nullify its self-attesting and authoritative nature. Christianity boldly, radically, and without apology teaches that the Bible is the inspired and inerrant Word from God in written form as it came to us in the original autographs and that the copy we have today is an accurate copy of that Word given to us from God.

According to Christianity, human beings were created by God for a purpose. Hence, the inevitable and relentless search for meaning and significance in life is the fruitless endeavor of a creature determined to find that meaning apart from its purpose. Without God as His creator, man is a meaningless, purposeless accident produced by random chance without significance or value.

According to Christianity, humanity turned its back on its Creator not long after creation. Ever since that time, man has rebelled against God, choosing rather to walk in autonomous rebellion at various levels. Man continually breaks every one of God’s commands repeatedly, continuously disregarding his Creator.

Christianity teaches that humanity is in desperate need of radical and miraculous redemption. Without this redemption, humanity is doomed to self-destruction. Humanity is without the necessary tools to redeem and rescue itself. This is the teaching of Christianity.

Christianity unflinchingly asserts that Jesus Christ is the only hope for humanity. Redemption can be found only in the blood sacrifice that Jesus Christ made at Calvary. Christianity contends that faith in Christ alone and only faith in Christ alone can save humanity from eternal wrath. Only those who have trusted Christ as their Lord and Savior will avoid eternal judgment and experience the loving embrace of God as their Father.

Christian teaches that only the hearing of the gospel of Jesus Christ can generate faith in the human heart. Without this gospel, faith in Christ is impossible. Without faith, salvation is impossible. Without a preacher, hearing the gospel is impossible. Hence, all those who have never heard the gospel of Jesus Christ, along with those who have heard and have not repented, are doomed to eternal damnation.

The hope of all humanity is found only in the person and work of Jesus Christ. Only in Christ do we experience the redemption of our souls. Without revelation of God in nature and in Scripture, humanity is doomed to an existence of ignorance and irrationalism. This explains why intelligent people can justify the murder of unborn babies and call it a woman’s health issue or a woman’s rights issue. This explains why two men can kiss one another, have sex with one another, and do who knows whatever else to one another and intelligent people can call it love. This explains why public school systems have lost all their abilities to exercise common sense and basic decent judgment. This explains why we can no longer distinguish between art and the ridiculous nude events week at Brown, an Ivy League school no less. Redemption is to be found only in Christ. Humanity continues its downward spiral into immorality, ignorance, and irrationalism and no one in the world seems to notice. As for the Church, let’s make sure we keep the light on for them.