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To: PetroniusMaximus
Sounds like you’ve chosen to take your seat with the Christians-Socialists of last century’s Europe.

The socialists of last-century Europe thought that the State was "God marching through history." Frieiderich Ernst Daniel Schleiermacher, "the father of modern protestant theology," started the trend of redefining the faith, and God, in terms of some other something. For Schleiermacher God was "a feeling of unconditioned dependence," a subset of Man's evolving experience. Thomas B. Altice asserted that Christianity was really just Heidegger's existentialism in drag. Liberation theologians asserted that Christianity was really just Marxism in drag. As post-mil scholar J. Gresham Machen pointed out 80 years ago, liberalism and Christianity may use the same vocabulary, but they are actually two different religions. We use our words to mean what we have always meant for them to mean. Liberals eviscerate the Gospel words of their messy entrails of factuality, and pack them with some preferred payload. Like the lady who used a baby's hollowed-out corpse to smuggle cocaine ...

I enjoy sitting with Augustine and Athanasius and Calvin and Luther, all of whom, with varying degrees of faithfulness, believed in and proclaimed the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ. Unlike you, when I call Jesus "Lord," I do not cross my fingers behind my back and mutter, "Well, by 'Lord' what I really mean is 'Guru,' a domesticated, neutered, ineffectual personal spiritual adviser." The Jesus adored by sane Christians in all ages is the Eternal Second Person of the Blessed Trinity, the One who has overcome death, hell, and Satan, the one in whom we are more than conquerors, the One who makes us competent agents of His will, agents of His Kingdom.

Now, if you view Christianity as a form of emotional masturbation, have at it, whack away at your precious subjective feelings. If, however, the King is at work today, and has something to say about every aspect of life, then come on in, the water's fine, and there's plenty for everyone to do.

Unlike the prognosticators, sane (ortho-dox, right-thinking) Christians have better things to do with their time than creating imaginary maps of futures that never happen.

37 posted on 05/23/2011 2:51:46 PM PDT by it_ürür (the caravan moves along)
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To: it_ürür

“Unlike you, when I call Jesus “Lord,” I do not cross my fingers behind my back and mutter, “Well, by ‘Lord’ what I really mean is ‘Guru,’ a domesticated, neutered, ineffectual personal spiritual adviser.” “

1. You don’t know me.

2. Strawman argument.

3. What is it in the “reformationist’s” water that gives them such misplaced intellectual haughtiness?


51 posted on 05/24/2011 10:15:57 AM PDT by PetroniusMaximus
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