How they know us
I’m a big fan of Fred Clark’s Slacktivist, a blog about Christianity and politics by a newspaperman near where I live. His posts consistently give me good food for thought and offer counterexamples to what people think of as “Christian.”
In a recent post, Fred notes that Christians are supposed to be known by our love, yet we have come to be known by some Christians’ lack of love for gay folks. Fred offers some guesses as to how that may have come about. The key take-away here, though, should be that scripture and Christian theology simply don’t support intolerance. In the New Testament in particular, we have pages upon pages of teachers and thinkers and Jesus Christ Himself telling us not to play nice and help each other out, and only a minority instances that — when taken out of historical, literary, and other critical context — seem to suggest otherwise.
This brings me back to the sermon mentioned in my pervious post: The reverend said outright that most people don’t read the Bible, including those who quote it to justify their moral agenda. They’re just quoting the few verses they think they know. (I like a preacher who doesn’t sugarcoat things.)
Did you ever notice how the people Jesus gets most annoyed with in the Gospels aren’t the hookers, adulterers, and thieves, but the hypocrites who claim to be righteous? Funny thing, that. How did these folks come to be what the rest of us are known for?
