{"id":107,"date":"2010-04-22T12:06:41","date_gmt":"2010-04-22T17:06:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.acu.edu\/acugst\/?p=107"},"modified":"2010-05-04T09:42:05","modified_gmt":"2010-05-04T14:42:05","slug":"does-the-gospel-sell-itself-part-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.acu.edu\/acugst\/does-the-gospel-sell-itself-part-3\/","title":{"rendered":"Does the Gospel Sell Itself? (part 3)"},"content":{"rendered":"<div id=\"attachment_57\" style=\"width: 160px\" class=\"wp-caption alignleft\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-57\" class=\"size-thumbnail wp-image-57\" src=\"http:\/\/farm5.static.flickr.com\/4016\/4460847438_d4c9bf1834_o.jpg\" alt=\"Mark Hamilton, PhD - Associate Dean, Associate Professor of Old Testament, ACU Graduate School of Theology\" width=\"150\" height=\"99\" \/><p id=\"caption-attachment-57\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Mark Hamilton, PhD - Associate Dean, Associate Professor of Old Testament, ACU Graduate School of Theology<\/p><\/div>\n<p>Ours is a time in which all the old truths have seemed questionable, all the old habits indefensible, and all the old passions unthinkable.\u00a0 Since Christianity is no longer a new religion and since Christians are often leaders in the power systems of the world and therefore often implicated in its evils, many men and women ask us whether Christianity, and thus the Gospel, makes any sense.\u00a0 They ask, to put things very bluntly, if Christianity is good for you.\u00a0 Does following the way of Jesus make you a better person?\u00a0 Does the church help people live in community in better ways?\u00a0 If there is a God, is this God good?\u00a0 Critics of Christianity such as Sam Harris or Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens tell us that God is not great, and that religion (at least they don&#8217;t just try to finger us!) is the source of all the evil in the world.<\/p>\n<p>Now a lot of their rhetoric is nonsense.\u00a0 Let&#8217;s be clear about that.\u00a0 Many of the critiques are ill informed about all sorts of things.\u00a0 They set up straw people to knock down.\u00a0 They pit the most ignorant Christians and against the best informed non-Christians.\u00a0 So there is much of the noise we can safely ignore as the last rantings of a publicity-seeking, sensationalistic media and public.<\/p>\n<p>But is that all there is to the brouhaha?\u00a0 Surely it is fair to say that many of us Christians (and other religious people) are confused about what our faith really teaches.\u00a0 We adjust to a series of compromises with worldly structures and react out of fear when we should act out of hope.\u00a0 The critics have a point there.\u00a0 To provide a real answer to the intellectual challenges facing us, then, Christians have to be clear about a few things that our faith actually teaches.\u00a0 Here are some:<\/p>\n<p>1. There really is only one God, and we are not it!\u00a0 The great Christian confessions such as the Nicene Creed or the Apostle&#8217;s Creed, to say nothing of the Bible, are organized around the confession of the supremacy, transcendent goodness, and honor of God.\u00a0 The center of the faith is not the faith itself, much less any laws, practices, ideas, doctrines, etc. deriving from the faith.\u00a0 God is God, and we are all seekers in need of redemption.<\/p>\n<p>2. The human approach to God comes through radical submission to the way of love.\u00a0 Christians vigorously pursue nonviolence in all we do.\u00a0 We join in the criticism of the relentless pursuit of money and power.\u00a0 We strongly question any human system that turns people into commodities.\u00a0 We disdain privilege in all its forms.\u00a0 We believe that God calls us to love all our neighbors as ourselves.<\/p>\n<p>3. We also believe that all human systems are flawed, some very deeply.\u00a0 Some Christians call this original sin, and of course we debate just how deeply flawed humans are.\u00a0 Surely the evidence is complex.\u00a0 But it is also incontrovertible.\u00a0 When St. Paul said that all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God, he was simply stating the obvious.\u00a0 It follows from this fact that no human system can command our final, unquestioning loyalty (not a nation, not an economic system, not even a way of doing family).<\/p>\n<p>4. We Christians think that vigorous pursuit of truth is a worthwhile goal, and that we have nothing to fear from honest inquiry.\u00a0 We think that our congregations should be places in which such inquiry occurs.<\/p>\n<p>5. Our faith is deeply intertwined with hope.\u00a0 Our critics misunderstand what we mean by hope, and frankly many Christians do too.\u00a0 We seem to see heaven as an escape from this world, as a kind of ace up God&#8217;s sleeve to make everything right.\u00a0 But that&#8217;s not what Scripture says.\u00a0 It talks instead about living lives that participate in God&#8217;s work of redeeming humanity.\u00a0 It talks about a God who can balance mercy and justice just right so as to bring about the final elimination of evil (something we can just barely conceive of).\u00a0 That&#8217;s a different view than the one attributed to us, and it&#8217;s different than the one we sometimes hear in church.<\/p>\n<p>This is a long blog post.\u00a0 Thanks for sticking with it.\u00a0 More next time!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Ours is a time in which all the old truths have seemed questionable, all the old habits indefensible, and all the old passions unthinkable.\u00a0 Since Christianity is no longer a new religion and since Christians are often leaders in the power systems of the world and therefore often implicated in its evils, many men and [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3538,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[64075,64080,609,1300,64076,64082,64081],"class_list":["post-107","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-bible","tag-church","tag-community","tag-mark-hamilton","tag-ministry","tag-mission","tag-theology"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v26.6 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Does the Gospel Sell Itself? 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