The last several decades have formed the mind of popular culture to see religion and religious figures in a poor light. Priests and television preachers and Christians in general, are mocked, held in contempt and mistrusted.
How about this for a challenge? What could we do, as Orthodox Christians, to form the mind of popular culture to associate "Orthodoxy" with "love"?
Really, this is what God calls is to in Scripture, "they will know you by your love." (John 13:35)
Friday, June 19, 2015
A goal
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Hi Ross -
ReplyDeleteIt occurred to me that it's possible you may prefer that your musings stand alone, so if you would prefer an absence of commentary, I won't consider it an offense if you would rather delete comments.
On the original topic, unfortunately, popular culture has stretched the already flexible boundaries of equivocation and arbitrarily redefined love as unconditionally abandoning any moral standards held by Christianity, and hypocrisy as the failure to do so. In a world that seems this (literally) hell-bent on getting core principles precisely backwards, as well as having a deep-rooted psychological need to reduce an entire religion down to a warped caricature and bumper sticker sophistry, there seems to be two main but vastly differing ways to reach the world and show love: 1) capitulation to the ever-shifting and societally deleterious agenda of the progressives, or 2) steadfastly holding to our core principles in utter disregard of social justice shrieking, as we know what love REALLY means.
As you might have guessed, I lean towards the latter. The first option of spiritual compromise has a reliable tendency to cause churches progress from irreverence to irrelevance, and crash and burn. If a church is qualitatively no different than the world around it, it has nothing to offer. Contrarily, a church that maintains a strict adherence to Gods infallible Word will appeal to some and repel others, but there are also many whom would not have a heart for God no matter how the message was packaged. In summary, I suspect that society is too far gone to reverse the warped image it has obstinately crafted of Christianity, in which case it is left to the select few to carry the torch into the next generation.
In any case, I'd rather fit Gods definition of love than mans, and those who recognize it as such are my bothers for eternity. The opposite definition, favored by the world, is eventually consigned to the fire.
Okay I'm babbling now, better wrap it up. Thanks for listening, delete if you like.
- Carl
Carl,
ReplyDeleteI do appreciate your comments and input. You are very right, everything about us should be about love. Without love, we are nothing.