Live your theology.

Oh, that whole Glenn Beck not-a-political-rally-nor-a-doctrinal-rally rally over the weekend wherein he called people back to God and/or Jesus.

The satirical twitter account @XIANITY chimed “BREAKING NEWS: After months of resisting, lone hold-out American Evangelical receives Glenn Beck as his lord & savior.”

For a more substantial analysis let me refer you to Russell Moore’s post.  Mark from HereIblog.com does a nice job of detailing the differences of the Mormon Jesus and the actual Jesus over here.

My thoughts:

• The idea that we need to go back to God so that the USA will be wonderful again is rubbish.  If your reason for serving Him who is Holy, Holy, Holy is to achieve a better tax code, prayer in school, & Republicans in every office… there’s a good chance you are unaware of who God is.
• Speaking of not knowing who God is, this is pretty much a case study in what happens when we care more about an idea of God than God himself.  Not sure how else to explain the hip-hip-hooraying when someone throws Jesus’ name around when that name is blasphemed by a doctrine of Jesus that paints him as a created lesser God conceived through Spiritual procreation (along with the his brother Satan).
• This is why an American flags hoisted up near the pulpit has always made me uncomfortable.
• This sort of thing is the conservative equivalent of the social gospel.

Brief and undeveloped, to be sure.  What are your thoughts on the issue?  Are you as uncomfortable as I am?  Do you marvel at the number of people demanding a return to God who won’t take the time to actually look into what God has said about himself?  Has hyper-republicanism in the church set this in motion?

Read this quote from J. Gresham Machen (emphasis mine) & then watch the opening ceremony of the PCUSA’s 219th General Assembly. Then let me know what you think.

It is true that the decisive thing is the regenerative power of God. That can overcome all lack of preparation, and the absence of that makes even the best preparation useless. but as a matter of fact God usually exerts that power in connection with certain prior conditions of the human mind, and it should be ours to create, so far as we can, with the help of God, those favorable conditions for the reception of the gospel. False ideas are the greatest obstacles to the reception of the gospel. We may preach with all the fervor of a reformer and yet succeed only in winning a straggler here and there, if we permit the whole collective thought of the nation or of the world to be controlled by ideas which, by the resistless force of logic, prevent Christianity from being regarded as anything more than a harmless delusion. Under such circumstances, what God desires us to do is to destroy the obstacle at its root. . . . What is today a matter of academic speculation begins tomorrow to move armies and pull down empires. In that second stage, it has gone too far to be combated; the time to stop it was when it was still a matter of impassioned debate. So as Christians we should try to mold the thought of the world in such a way as to make the acceptance of Christianity something more than a logical absurdity. . . . What more pressing duty than for those who have received the mighty experience of regeneration, who, therefore, do not, like the world, neglect that whole series of vitally relevant facts which is embraced in Christian experience – what more pressing duty than for these men to make themselves masters of the thought of the world in order to make it an instrument of truth instead of error? — J. Gresham Machen, Christianity & Culture