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
