Quote of the Day

Have we - I speak to those of us who are committed Christians - have we forgotten that God's power is more clearly seen in the message of the Cross than in any political or social plan we might devise?  Might not our search for some antidote to our grevious ills be symptomatic of our lost confidence in the power of the gospel to change people from the inside out?  Do we cling to the cross with the deep conviction that it is not simply a part of our message to the world, but rightly understood it is the whole of it?.....In an effort to be "relevant" we now face the temptation of being diverted from our mission and becoming involved doing what is good while bypassing what is best….

Our Two Dangers

In our desperate moment in history we face two dangers.  The first is to say that we must retreat from our cultural and political battles to be true to the supremacy of the cross.  This view point is right in emphasizing that our primary mission is to preach the gospel, but it fails because we end up preaching to ourselves…Those older fundamentalists were right in holding to the centrality of the Christian message but wrong in teaching that he Christian faith could be lived in isolation from the culture and its institutions.  Thus the cross, though exalted among the faithful, was hidden from the world.

The second danger is that we become so overburdened with social/political agendas that our message is lost amid these cultural skirmishes.  The church has always faced the temptation to modify the gospel or make it secondary to a given political, philosophical, or cultural agenda.  When this happens, Christians have exposure to the culture, but the cross does not.  Again hidden.

Jacques Ellul, in The Subversion of Christianity, wrote, "Each generation thinks it has finally discovered the truth…Christianity becomes an empty bottle that successive cultures fill with all kinds of things."  Regrettably, the Christian bottle has been filled with many different agendas.  Early in the history of the church, the Cross was obscured by sacramentalism, the idea that salvation was a grace given through the rituals of the church.  Salvation was not longer a personal relationship with God, but was reduced to partnership with the ecclesiastical structure.  The bottle w was emptied and filled with liturgy that could never bring a soul to God.  The Cross became an ornament hung around the neck, not an instrument that changed the heart.

Rationalism and humanism arose in the eighteenth century, the fruits of the Enlightenment.  Religion, it insisted, must conform to our understanding.  Whatever seemed contrary to our sensibilities was eliminated.  Miracles, for example, were discounted as being out of sync with the enlightened cultural mind - set.  The Unitarians argued that God was too good to send man to hell, and the Universalists believed man was too good to be sent there.  The Cross became a symbol of sentimental love, not the means by which Christ shed His blood to reconcile men to God.

Today the bottle of Christianity is often filled with physiology.  Since Freud, the need for a religious conversion has been eliminated.  Secular psychology denies that man fell from some previous state of holiness.  Since he has not fallen, he has no need to be picked up, at least not by God.  Salvation is simply a matter of having a healthy self-image.  The cross of Christ is a symbol of man's alienation from himself; a reminder that man must be reconciled to who he already is.

The New Age movement, in combining Christianity with any number of Eastern/occultic ideas ignores the Cross altogether.  At best it is a symbol of self-awareness, a reminder of our need to get in touch with the world beyond us.  According to this movement the Cross does not humiliate us; it exalts us.

Some political activists have filled the Christian bottle with a strategy for political reform.  Salvation, it appears, is electing conservatives to national and local office.  Important though this might be, we must always remember that God is neither Republican nor Democrat.  When the Cross is wrapped in the flag of a political party, it is always distorted or diminished.  Even for some who have experienced its power, the Cross has become an addendum to what is thought to be more pressing agendas.

……Ultimately the ballot box cannot save us; only God can.  And the Cross is the centerpiece of His agenda.  Only when the Cross stands alone, unencumbered with other religions, philosophies, or political ideologies, does it retain its power.

Erwin Lutzer