0502 Evangelical Answers
Not much has changed in Marxist Socialism and Liberation Theology. It is amazing that more “dominate”, “oppressive”, “luxurious[ly]” privileged, scientifically inept, biblically misguided, divisive behaving, evangelical malcontents haven’t already been vanquished from the illegal alien-flooded American land of promise that we and our principles helped in large part to build. If liberals had their way, insensitive white conservatives would just get out of the way and become hyphenated “euro-Americans”. Instead of celebrating the heritage, freedoms and community of American citizenship, misguided hyphenation bigotry helps other bigots better identify their targets. Waving the flags hyphenations and demeaning the “melting pot” in the name of multicultural egotism will never magically cause unified equality.
The illusion is that those in the “underbelly” will show the ruling classes the way to utopia. Carried along by the “marginalized”, conservative non-hyphenates will leave cushy struggle-free, hardship-immune, sorrow-less, disengaged ivory towers. When everyone reaches those utopian shores, liberals and non-Christians will expect to watch as evangelicals and fundamentalists suddenly understand how exclusivist and mean-spirited it was to attempt sharing a race-less paradise, an earthly peace of mind and soul, and a personal experiential relationship with the eternal God of all. Jesus will realize His blunders – mistakes like assuming the literalness of the Old Testament (including Genesis 1 and 2), expecting sexuality to conform to the created design, claiming fulfillment of the Old Testament law by the law of love, preaching Himself as the physically incarnate God of the universe, and daring to demonstrate ultimate love by exercising the authority to rescue sinful men and women through His own blood. He will be expected to recant of having left behind written biblical standards of holiness and, most especially, of promising God’s own Spirit to those who dare take Him as their Master.
As a discussion with a local Hispanic pastor highlighted to me recently, few of his constituents or acquaintances share the philosophy or theology demonstrated in the monologue above. They are persons who, when it comes to God and questions of faith, care about the same things that other human beings care about. He reminds the few that cling to racism and classism, that such sin is no respecter of social standing, racial heritage, or circumstance of birth. It exists in every kind of human as a matter of the heart. And, except for the hyper-vigilant, someone with personal issues, there is no reason for any of us to scapegoat someone else for our woes.
The idea by some, however, seems to be that if one guts Genesis of its historic truths by dismissing the literal creation account as poetic license and transforms both marriage and the fall of man into a parable, one will be able to bring persons to personhood through a poetic image of God. To deal with their misery, one would reveal to them their falleness and redemptive value as mere parable. The catch is that Genesis 1 is Hebraic poetic prose, not simply poetry. Even if it was pure poetry it could, just as in any language, express literal facts. In addition, there is no contextual reason to call the Eden episode a parable. There is no second creation story.
The Jesus of the Gospels is also the God of the Old Testament. If He can’t be trusted to give facts in Genesis, He is not worthy of trust in the Gospels either. In a quest for meaning, liberal Christian & non-Christian belittling of the plain Biblical text only accomplishes making Christianity look like just another religion to be “interpreted” for whatever social tunnel vision the handler might want to justify.
By resting His teachings on the historicity of Genesis and the rest of the Old Testament, Jesus proclaimed revolutionary good news. God came to men, not to clarify religion psychologically, but to provide rescue from sin through human-Divine relationships. Jesus brought the ultimate hope & comfort – the ability to experience incredible love & security in daily life with a God who isn’t surprised by our pain (omniscience), who literally lives with his followers (omnipresence), and who has the ability to take us through anything (omnipotence). There is no greater identity, value, or comfort than walking through this world hand-in-hand with the One who literally walked with man in the cool of the literal Garden of Eden.