Paul writes in Romans 1:16, “For I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ, for it is the power of God unto salvation for all who believe, to the Jew first, and also to the Greek.” No sooner does the apostle explain this, than he proceeds to paint a very painful picture of the human race. A race of people doomed to experience the wrath of God for their sins.
The point that Paul is making is that the gospel of God--the “good news” regarding Jesus, God’s only Son--can only be seen as good news as it is proclaimed against a backdrop of a fallen world. This is a world that is rendered fallen by a rebellious, treasonous, disobedient human family, of which each of us is a guilty member.
This bad news about people marks out the irreconcilable “no-man’s land” that separates so-called liberal Christianity from what may rightly be called evangelical Christianity. Full-orbed biblical faith in Jesus Christ is based on truth which insists on a radical antithesis.
When I use the label “liberal” here, I am referring to those who believe in unifying humanity under a banner of fallacious hopes and wishful thinking. These well-intentioned folks want to see peace and healing for a hurting and divided mankind...but they believe they can be attained by basically human, non-miraculous methods.
This became clearer to me recently as I pondered the apparent aims of some spiritually minded poets. These writers urge us to look within ourselves to discover the common ground and universal desires that can unite us all. They imply (or preach openly) that if flawed, mistaken, dissatisfied men and women would rally together under a banner of brotherhood, or a love of nature, or a desire for self-preservation, then...all would be well. After all, we are all “in the same boat together,” and together we are sufficiently equipped to get things right in the end.
Only a casual glance through the pages of Scripture will show that this view falls far short of the plight of mankind as the Bible describes it. Rather than facing a self-perfecting building project that merely requires a beefed-up quantity of concerted effort, humanity is, in reality, in the middle of a to-the-death cosmic combat of God-sized proportions! Our Creator is extremely mad...because people are extremely bad. And eternity in either a real Heaven, or a real Hell, hangs in the balance.
This biblical picture presents too sharp an antithesis to the liberal mind. In order to avoid such a God-vs-Man confrontation, one must do one’s best to equalize the two sides in the conflict. The liberal must either inflate man’s goodness and perfectibility, or deflate God’s nature as powerful and holy sovereign. Or both. Making man more god-like than the Bible paints him, or making God more man-like, is the key.
A favorite tool of such theological makeovers is modern textual criticism: taking the plain language of Scripture concerning God, His nature, His demands, His action, judgments and decrees, and re-interpreting it to render it more manageable on a purely human level. To a large degree, the biblical God has died the death of a thousand re-interpretations. Liberal theologians have taken God’s wrath, laws, miraculous powers and sovereign providence--even His plan to save sinners, and have reduced them to symbolic signposts that humans can use on their own journey toward self-perfection.
Those divine qualities, no longer seen as simple and factual, have been ripped from their spatial and historical context and boiled down into Aesop-like moralisms. In the modern theologian’s mind, there’s no genuine conflict--there’s only a moralistic stew where all of man’s good intentions (including his assumptions about God) are simmering together on the fire until we all wake up to the fact that we’re really all the same. All is One. There is no real antithesis to worry about.
When I, as a Christian poet, seek to reflect my faith in beautiful verses, the resultant lines cannot avoid the antithetical. To me, the truth of the biblical faith is just that: truth. And the truth forces one to make distinctions. The universe is not all “A”...it is also “non-A.” The reason that humanity is divided is that we’ve sinned against our Maker. The existence of evil in our world and in ourselves makes this perfectly plain, even if it wasn’t for the biblical testimony.
Furthermore, now that our Maker has provided a way to be saved from the punishment our sins have earned--Jesus--we turn our noses up at that gracious way, and go on devising our own ways--including the self-perfectionist path of the liberal.
The call of God from time immemorial has always been, “Repent”--to turn from non-A, and return back to A. This was the antithetical call of the judges and prophets of the Old Testament, the call of the Christ, as well as His forerunner and emissaries in the New Testament. To repent is to surrender before the challenge of God that stands against the proud, false hopes of those who imagine salvation is within their own grasp.
The Christian antithesis is that only the perfect work and atoning death of the divine, historical Jesus can provide a saving record of righteousness for sinners in the courtroom of a holy God. Every other path of salvation is “non-A.”
The liberal thinker may ask: “Are things really that desperate? Is the message of Jesus really so stark, judgmental and exclusive? Isn’t there room to flex, to leave our doors open a crack for sincere Buddhists or Jews or Hindus or Muslims? Can’t we all get along on a platform of good intentions?”
To those with such hopes I would simply point to the manger...the cross...the empty tomb...and ask the question: “Why?” If our good intentions were always good enough, who, then, really needs a Savior? Jesus said He came to earth “not to bring peace...but a sword.” He became the most challenging, antithetical figure who ever lived. But in love, He gave His life “as a ransom for many, to bring us to God.” And He claimed to be God’s only Way. His sole, unique Savior for the lost. That’s His challenge.
Only those who surrender before the challenge of Christ’s gospel, can truly be cheered by it.
Mark Aikins
April 12, 2015
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