You might be think­ing, on the basis of the title, that I’m going to talk about pol­i­tics. If you want to know what I think is cur­rently wrong with the Lib­eral Party read here.

Today’s rant is about “lib­eral” Christians.

I don’t think there has been any­thing more harm­ful to evan­ge­lism than the water­ing down of the gospel. There are plenty of things athe­ists could say about what the Bible actu­ally says that would be grounds for choos­ing to reject God. But noth­ing annoys me more in the dia­logue than those weak kneed Chris­tians who try to apol­o­gise for God’s behav­iour. Espe­cially when it comes to that archaic ban on gay­ness (which is a genetic trait so can’t be wrong) or those cul­tural ideas of mar­riage and fam­ily. Read any forum where gay rights are being dis­cussed (and I’m not actu­ally opposed to gay mar­riage nec­es­sar­ily) and you’ll see the type of peo­ple I’m talk­ing about.

It is impor­tant to place the Bible in his­tor­i­cal con­text and to under­stand what the text meant to the orig­i­nal read­ers. But these lib­er­als need to go back to read­ing their Bibles. They’re kind of miss­ing the point. Right from the nation of Israel to instruc­tions for Chris­tians the idea is that at some point God has to be counter cul­tural — or there’s no point? How are the peo­ple of God to be dif­fer­ent if every­thing that’s nat­ural is fair game? It just doesn’t make sense.

Lib­eral Chris­tian­ity is less log­i­cal than athe­ism. Athe­ism func­tions on a type of ratio­nal and log­i­cal frame­work. Lib­er­al­ism takes a bizarre mix of the super­nat­ural ele­ment of Chris­tian­ity and the emo­tional any­thing goes moral­ity of Athe­ism and tries to blend them. It stinks.

We should expect sin to be nat­ural. In fact, I’d go as far as to say we should have an inher­ent dis­trust for any­thing that seems nat­ural to us, as humans, because human nature is sinful.

I can see where they come from, some­times, we are called to love peo­ple. Lov­ing the sin­ner but hat­ing the sin can be pretty con­fus­ing. But to sug­gest that cer­tain behav­iour is ok for Chris­tians just because it’s instinc­tive isn’t just a slip­pery slope. It’s a fireman’s pole. Straight down.

The fun­da­men­tal assump­tion of Lib­eral belief — from what I can gather — is that some­how we, in the 21st cen­tury, are bet­ter qual­i­fied to under­stand the mind of God than those prim­i­tive dis­ci­ples and their apos­tolic procla­ma­tions — and heaven help any­one who tries to base a world­view on the Old Testament.

Sci­ence, cul­ture and psy­chol­ogy have helped us under­stand our sin­ful­ness bet­ter — they do noth­ing to turn that which God calls sin­ful into some­thing pure.

That is all.

Author: Nathan Campbell

Nathan runs St Eutychus. He is currently a student at the Queensland Theological College. In a previous professional life he worked in public relations for an economic development and tourism marketing organisation. He is married to Robyn. He likes coffee and the internet.

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