iMonk has reviewed and recommended a movie called ‘Lord, Save us from your followers.‘
The link to the preview of the movie is here
I haven’t seen the movie, only the ten minute preview, but I’m looking forward to seeing it when I have the money to buy it.
It seems to be mainly abot the culture wars in the US, which I don’t see as such a great problem in UK, but it does seem to fit in some way into my own view of how to conduct a ‘culture war’ as a Christian.
While I’m not the biggest fan of Bono, but his comment in the preview is something I can agree with. He says that he was cynical, not about God, but abaout God’s politics (3:00 in the preview). I’d say that it is the politics of the church that is at fault, not God himself, but the thought is still a good one.
When God created, he created everything necessary for life. As part of that, he created the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, then told Adam and Eve not to eat of it. What has facinated me for a long while now is that God, omniscient being that he is, knew the potential for Adam and Eve to eat that fruit. He knew it would happen, and still He left the tree there.
He didn’t rip the tree up. He didn’t put it in an unaccessable place. In His infinite wisdom, he didn’t remove the thing that was going to drive a wedge between Him and his creation. There’s no sarcasm in that statement. God, who is all-knowing, all-wise, DID NOT make it impossible or even make it hard for the peak of his creation to sin.
Why then is it that we, of limited knowledge and questionable wisdom, see fit to attempt to censor others through legislation, seeking to impose our wisdom of what is wrong and dangerous on others? How do we come to the conclusion that we should make laws that force others to conform to a Christian lifestyle?
Sure, God has used laws in the past (see Exodus, Leviticus and Deusteronomy in the bible), but even then it was in the contxt of his own people. He didn’t extend those laws to the nations that were not in conscious relationship with Him. He didn’t command, implore or otherwise encourage the Israelites to get those laws accepted by the nations they came in contact with.
In the time after Jesus’ physical time on Earth, Paul writes:
What business is it of mine to judge those outside the church? (1 Cor 5:12)
What business is it of our’s, as the church today, to impose our way of life on others? For instance, people in the US recently waged a campaign against homosexual marriage. I suspect church people involved are the same people who would wage a campaign against a secular government’s attempts to force churches to marry homosexuals or even employ them in a church. It’s ok to force others to live our way of life, to impose our morality on them, but if they try to modify ours…
Our ‘business’ is to share what we know, and to make disciples. Not to conscript disciples and force others to live as we think they should. That would be my confession (like the confessional in the movie 6:20). That I, and the people I identify myself with, have overstepped the bounds of our authority, replaced our wisdom for the wisdom the god we are supposed to be serving. That we have replace the rule of God with the rule of Law and tried to impose regulation rather than treating others as God treated Adam and Eve by leaving them to make thier own choices in the light of what they know and believe.
Ad Sensus 