Blogotional

In the Boar's Head Tavern on Thursday, proprietor Michael Spencer posted a bit of a letter he received at his personal blog, Internet Monk. Michael is the leading Joel Osteen smasher in the blogosphere -- and there aren't many better targets in Christendom, so he files the letter under "pro-Osteen." I'm going to go a bit farther. Here's the quote:

People are tired of the same old hum drum. They want to know how to live now. Heaven is there and all whom God allows will enter. I guess slavery will always be around. Jesus came to set the captives free, but religious people are determined to keep them bound. The message of God is love. As Malcolm X stated, " By any means necessary." We should preach and teach love at all cost. Those who don't love are not interested in hearing or teaching others about it. They lead people astray, "In the name of Jesus." "Jesus Christ, the savior of sinners? The Gospel of salvation? The cross of Jesus Christ? Salvation by grace, through faith by Christ"

No one should be teaching about the cross. We have made that a Graven Image. That was the means by which Jesus was crucified, but so were many others. We have put crosses all over the place. We have dignified the cross as if that is what God wants. There is no Gospel of salvation....

I'm going to file it under heresy.Without getting into it too heavily, three comments on my part

• People are tired of the same old hum drum. I see, it's not about what God tells us, it's about what we want to hear. How silly of me, all this time I thought the being that created the universe, gave me life, died for my salvation, and keeps things running in some sort of decent order might be just a little more important than I am -- obviously I was wrong.
• The message of God is love. John 15:13 - "Greater love has no one than this, that one lay down his life for his friends." I kind of like that, let's roll with it for a minute
• No one should be teaching about the cross. But I thought it was all about love, and I thought the cross was the greatest possible expression of love? Now I'm really confused.

Look, in America, people are free to think and worship as they see fit, but those of us in Christianity are similarly free to define what Christianity is -- and whatever this person is serving, it ain't Christianity. Spencer can be a little too strong and a little too impolitic for my taste from time-to-time, and there have always been people in the fold that bought into nonsense, but if there are people actively arguing for this kind of malarky, it's time for us to get serious about saying what is and is not Christianity. Given the self-contradictory nature of this person's rant, it's kind of easy - but in other cases it is not.

My questionis this -- what are you doing in your congregation to make sure people that think this way are on the margins where they belong? What can we do? We sure cannot let it continue.

UPDATE: In rereading this post I had one thought that I think is really worth throwing out there. For churches that allow it, like my Prebyterian church, we really need to restore the role of "teaching" elder. Right now, the role of elder has been reduced to an almost purely administrative one. This reduction in importance of the role does too things. First of all, it makes most of the job immensely tedious which automatically eliminates a lot of people that ought to have it. Secondly, it attracts people who have agendas, but are not necessarily well schooled all things Christian.

Perhaps by reintroducing a doctrinal component to the job, things could improve? The modern church needs too many people involved to exclude the agenda types from the day-to-day work, but perhaps if there was a formal doctrinal class.... Just an idea that needs tossing around.