Truth or Popularity

What's the price of popularity?

That can vary, of course, according to how popular something is.  But even if something is extremely popular, that doesn't always mean the popularity is justified, does it?

After all, my blog is proof that popularity is not the ultimate arbiter of truth!

Not that I'm never inaccurate or that my opinions are always sound.  One time on FaceBook, I was participating in a lively exchange on some topic (which was so important I can't remember it now) and the FB friend whose post started it all commented on my "opinion."  I immediately shot back that my contribution to the debate wasn't an "opinion." 

But nobody else found that very humorous.

Christ:  Just the Facts

The only person who ever walked the Earth who never had an opinion was Jesus Christ.  Everything He thought and spoke was - and is - ultimate truth.  Unadulterated, uncompromised, unchangeable truth.  In fact, since He created all truth, He couldn't have an opinion, because since He knew everything, nothing was open to interpretation.

Even though He had no opinions, Christ wasn't very popular, was He?  Even though He spoke utter truth, that's not what most people wanted to hear.  Even Pilate, who asked Christ rhetorically what truth is, didn't really want to know Christ's answer.  Which provides us a reliable metric regarding truth and what's popular:  they're not necessarily the same thing.

Democracy, for example, is a virtue many Americans vehemently endorse.  Some evangelicals even go so far as to say that democracy is the political system God most strongly advocates, since political freedom seems so similar to spiritual freedom.  The problem with assuming such a correlation, however, comes when you confuse the mortal fallibilities of human decision-making with God's divine right to save His people from their sin.

Throughout history, most of Christ's followers have not benefited from our American version of democracy, yet the Gospel is still with us today because it is true.  It has not been eradicated, despite plenty of sociopolitical attempts to do so.  Isn't that amazing?  Obviously, democracy is preferable to atheistic totalitarianism, but it's not necessary for the truth of the Gospel to prevail.

Democracy Doesn't Always Support Truth

That fact should give us hope, but it doesn't, does it?  I suspect that's because we still want our faith and all of the great stuff we enjoy as Americans.  But ironically, just as we benefit from democracy, which is based entirely on popularity, the very foundations of that democracy may be falling apart as Americans vote on popular issues without considering the ultimate truth behind them.

Democracy could end up killing itself.

Unfortunately, democracy isn't so much the ability of a majority of people to make good decisions as it is simply preferable to risking leaving all the decisions up to one person or a small group of unaccountable people.  This means that even though more people support a specific political agenda than those who oppose it, that agenda may not be what's best for the population.

Truth matters, even if it's not popular truth.

If we evangelicals dwelled less on partisan bickering and championed truths we can't deny - whether we think they help or hurt our standard of living - then at least we'll know that if popularity drags America off of a cliff, Christ's truth will still be here for us.

Christ's truth:  our salvation - as if we thought there was any other.
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Making the Bible Convenient?

If you saw this advertisement on ChristianityToday.com, what would be your first impression?

  - "Cool!  Something to help me cram in a little Gospel while I'm busy with real life."
  - "'Friendly?'  Yes, I've always found the Bible too intimidating."
  - "Here we go again - yet another book that trivializes the importance of God's holy Word."

You can probably imagine what my first reaction was when I saw this ad today.  Instantly, I reacted with indignation.  Even our evangelical society refuses to acknowledge the fallacy in the notion that God's Word should "fit" into life.  Shouldn't it saturate life instead?  The Bible isn't a how-to guide for making life tick as much as it is a source of life from the Creator of it.

Yes, that's probably too severe a knee-jerk reaction to a book that, upon review on its publisher's website, seems geared more to the unsaved than the saved anyway.  People who likely have yet to become convinced through the power of the Holy Spirit of the Bible's primacy and authority.  Here is Bethany House's summary of this book by Dr. Daryl Aaron, entitled Understsanding Your Bible in 15 Minutes a Day:

  The Bible can feel overwhelming at times. What parts should you read first? How can you understand it? What does it mean for your life? Meanwhile, most books about the Bible are time- consuming, leaving you without much time to read the Bible itself.  In Understanding Your Bible in 15 Minutes a Day, Bible professor and former pastor Daryl Aaron answers your most important questions about the bestselling book in history. Broken into topical readings, you can read systematically from the beginning, or pick and choose topics of interest. Each reading is brief, engaging, and easy to understand.

So, OK:  it's not heresy.  In fact, it's not even a bad idea to provide people unfamiliar with the Bible a primer of sorts for how it was put together, why the prose can seem a bit stilted, how it's all inter-related, and other basics.  After all, we're entering a new age in America where more people are unchurched than churched.  The things that generations of kids learned in Sunday Schools across the country are now going unlearned by most kids, since they don't go to church.  They're growing up and entering college without even a fundamental understanding of what the Bible truly is.

If this book can help counter that trend, then great!

However, although this book may serve a useful purpose, Bethany House's advertising for it betrays a marketing ploy that's all too often assumed with our faith walks:  that a token amount of time a day is sufficient for life proficiency.

From pastors who plead with their congregations to spend just 10 to 15 minutes a day in personal devotions or quiet time, to churchgoers who fastidiously watch the clock during services to make sure they get out on time, the urge to compartmentalize and streamline the Gospel permeates modern evangelicalism.

Which can make for some jaded Christians when things don't seem to be going their way, even with their "God box" checked off every day.  Perhaps taking 15-minute chunks for learning factoids about the Bible is a good thing, but who among us can really count on such budgeting to be sufficient?  It's not even the question of 15 minutes, or five, or half an hour.  It's the very idea that God's Gospel is packageable that bothers me.  That it can be parsed out like, well, an instruction manual.  Check off these lists as you complete your read-through.

Rare is the evangelical who will admit that this is how they view the Bible.  But how many of us practice it all the same by the way we live our lives?  Getting done what we want to get done, or what we think needs to get done, and checking in with God's Word every now and then for a shot of faith like we do power drinks.

If God's Word is the essence of life, then will five minutes a day be enough to absorb it for the benefit of our soul?

Hey - it's not like I'm any example of spending hours in the Word either.  I'm preaching as much to myself as anybody here.  Most weekdays, I probably spend ten to 15 minutes in my devotions, so I'm no saint when it comes to "living" in the scriptures.  I'm doing better at reminding myself at different times during the day of Bible passages I've memorized over the years.  But I'm purposefully trying to spend more time with God in His Word because, frankly, I'm realizing how much I need to.  That's why, when I see advertisements like this one that suggest God wants to fit into our schedules, I blow a fuse.

God doesn't want to fit into our schedules.  He wants us to fit into HIS schedule.  In fact, He wants to BE our schedule.

I have a hard enough time applying this truth to my own life without being encouraged to slack up on it by a Christian publisher.

As long as the focus remains on us, genuinely understanding your Bible in 15 minutes a day will never happen.
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Co-Belligerence: the Lesser Evil?

Although it's 75 here in north Texas this afternoon, it's beginning to look a lot like Romney.

For the Republican presidential nominee, anyway.

Even with his painful blunder yesterday when, talking with CNN, he actually verbalized "I don't care about the very poor," and even though he received the endorsement today of buffoonish Donald Trump - in Las Vegas, no less - Mitt Romney doesn't appear to have much left standing in his way on his march towards the nomination.

Of course, the presidency is another story entirely!  But in terms of the nomination, it seems to be all over except for some final hissy-fits from the serial-adultery has-been, Newt Gingrich.

With a Mormon in serious presidential contention for the first time in America's existence, our country's fading evangelical voting block may need to swallow hard and learn a new word.

At least if those of us evangelicals who are Republican will still vote for the party, if not the candidate.

After all, let's not forget that some evangelicals, after seeing a Mormon headlining the ticket, might feel fewer qualms about voting for Barak Obama.  At least he doesn't proudly align himself with a false religion.

Yet the fact that Mormonism is indeed a false religion, combined with nagging worries over the Obama administration's disdain for Christianity (as seen in its intransigence over conscience objections) will likely force many evangelicals to adopt the practice of co-belligerence.

Co-belligerence?

Generally speaking, co-belligerence is when disparate groups join forces to fight a common enemy, even though they have little else in common with each other.  Originally part of military parlance, Francis Schaeffer is credited with introducing the term to conventional Christianity, reasoning that "a co-belligerent is a person with whom I do not agree on all sorts of vital issues, but who, for whatever reasons of their own, is on the same side in a fight for some specific issue of public justice."

In other words, co-belligerence is a compromise between groups who would otherwise be opposing each other, but consider the negatives that might result from their refusal to cooperate on a particular issue to be worse than the negatives that might result if they choose to work together to resolve or conquer that issue.

Or even as Timothy George, a prominent advocate for cross-ministry efforts between Catholics and evangelicals, puts it, co-belligerence is an "ecumenism of the trenches."

In co-belligerence, each entity of the unified front agree to put aside the bickering amongst themselves they would normally do so that they can concentrate on achieving their shared objective.  In this case, it would mean evangelicals would keep our mouths shut about Mormonism being a cult long enough for Romney to not only secure the Republican nomination without too much more intra-party acrimony, but also the presidency.

Of course, the big gap in this relationship is what Mormons bring to the table.  In actually, it appears as though evangelicals will be doing most of the shutting-of-mouths and turning-of-cheeks, since Mormons already consider themselves Christians.  And some hard-nosed evangelicals may consider that too high a price to pay simply to avoid having a Democrat in the White House.

Frankly, I see both sides of the argument.  I understand the dangers of letting as apparently anti-religion an administration as Obama's stay in office for another four years, and I understand that the Republican Party has utterly failed to field a compelling slate of candidates from which to choose Obama's replacement.  So conservatives are going to have to suffer through the discomfort of a painful decision:  let Obama stay, or put a cultist in the Oval Office?

Personally, I think the threats that can be logically assumed from Obama's record thus far justify the co-belligerence necessary for a Romney vote.  But I can also understand how evangelicals, who either simply can't bring themselves to vote for a Mormon, or who remain optimistic - however irrationally - about Obama's ability to minimize his administration's destruction of religious freedom, might see co-belligerence as too much doctrinal fudging or even theological complacency.

In times like these, I'm particularly grateful that God looks at our heart, even as he's with us in the voting booth!
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