Thursday, January 13, 2011

Christianity = Antithesis

The high humanism of contemporary theology and preaching ... reinforced the presumption that Christians could be Christians without enemies. Christianity, as the illumination of the human condition, is not a Christianity at war with the world. Liberal Christianity, of course, has enemies, but they are everyone's enemies-sexism, racism, homophobia... Psalms such as Psalm 109, which ask God to destroy our enemies and their children, can appear only as embarrassing holdovers of "primitive" religious beliefs. Equally problematic are apocalyptic texts that suggest Christians have been made part of a cosmic struggle.
"Cosmic struggle" sounds like a video game that middle-class children play. Most of us do not go to church because we are seeking a safe haven from our enemies; we go to church to be assured we have no enemies.
...The problem with most of the mainstream churches is that we do not even know how to join an argument-better, we think, to create a committee to "study the issue."...
Our difficulty is not that we have conflicts, but that as modern people we have not had the courage to force the conflicts we ought to have had. Instead, we have comforted ourselves with the ideology of pluralism...
One hopes that God is using this time to remind the Church that Christianity is unintelligible without enemies.

-Stanley Hauerwas, Preaching as though we have Enemies

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