Via Institute on Religion & Democracy (IRD) – Chasing the Religious Left’s “Wild Goose”.
A recent festival convened by Religious and Evangelical Left leaders served as a mixing pot of liberal political advocacy and emergent church theology. Over the weekend of June 25, over 1,000 self-identified “progressive” Christians flocked to the Wild Goose Festival situated in the rolling hills of North Carolina. This mix of old time hippies and young idealists enjoyed an eclectic blend of art, music, talks, and general dissatisfaction directed at traditional evangelicals.
“Paul, in the Bible, tells my wife to be silent in church, screw St. Paul, screw him!” shouted a visibly angry Frankie Schaeffer during one session of the festival. Schaeffer, son of deceased author and evangelical leader Francis Schaeffer, lamented his family’s role in building the “religious right”, and the gathered audience of disaffected former evangelicals and other religious left groups affirmed his message. Schaeffer’s presentation seemed intentionally designed to offend traditionalists, leading to gleeful claps of approval from the audience.
They clapped for him? Let’s be clear: The Bible is the inspired word of God, with the original writings turning out exactly as God and the writers wanted them to be. Therefore, when Schaeffer says, “Paul, in the Bible, tells my wife to be silent in church, screw St. Paul, screw him!, he is really saying, “Screw God, screw him!” Note to Frankie, the organizers, the other speakers and the audience members who agreed with Schaeffer: Christianity may not be your forte’.
While festival organizers proclaimed a “big tent” of inclusion, speakers repeatedly criticized a wide field of supposed adversaries ranging from political conservatives, evangelical Christian leaders, the United States government and even contemporary praise band leaders. Especially singled out for disdain were Southern Baptists, who were openly ridiculed by almost all of the major speakers.
Ah, you can really feel the love and tolerance! Makes me want to be a Southern Baptist.
. . . Hoping to attract young evangelicals drawn to biblical teachings to care for the widow, the orphan, and the broken, festival speakers repackaged socialism and called it Regenerate Economies, while daydreaming about ending the nation-state through global environmental governance.
Yep, just your usual socialist / communist politics disguised as religion. We get the parts about caring for widows and orphans, and do it with our own money. We also get the parts about not shedding innocent blood, what marriage really is, etc.
Happy for the government to push the Church away from her responsibility to the poor, Sojourners chief Jim Wallis was on hand to offered a healthy dose of fear-mongering. As I sat in the searing heat of the morning sun, I listened to his lecture, entitled “The Sky is Falling on the Poor.” Wallis showed that he is well versed in the intricacies of the evil Republican budget but ignorant as to how the debt was created in the first place. Wallis boldly stated to the applause of the audience that “the debt arrived through two wars and tax breaks for the rich.” In classic Wallis style, class warfare is good, but actual warfare, even against terror, is always of the devil.
That’s what you get from false teachers include people like Jim “the Gospel is all about wealth redistribution“ Wallis.
Emergent Church purveyor Brian McLaren picked up where Wallis left off. Standing in the middle of a geodesic dome made of branches and twine, he lamented the lack of global environmental regulation and argued that “we must talk about the joy in paying taxes.”
Go ahead, champ! Pay all the extra taxes you like. Just don’t covetously ask Caesar to raise them on others and call it giving on your part.
He raged about the “myth” that the church could take over the care of the poor from the government, calling those who believe such so “stupid and idiots…and that’s being nice.” Over 40 years of failures in the federal government’s “War on Poverty” should convince religious statists least to question whether government is always the solution. But few such doubts arose at The Wild Goose.
Yep, just like Jesus taught: Ask Caesar to solve all your problems.
As usual, while usually misinterpreting the verses on giving (they seem to ignore the part about giving “what you have decided in your own heart to give, not reluctantly or under compulsion”), they ignore calls to sexual purity. And these “social justice” types are uniformly pro-legalized abortion, the ultimate injustice.
. . . Using a combination of emotionalism and revisionist hermeneutics Peggy Campolo concluded unscientifically “gay people don’t have a choice.”
That’s a fact-free statement on her part. She is ignorant of ministries like Gay Christian Movement Watch that have helped countless people.
Going to criticize those “hateful arguments that people have change, they actually haven’t. Those people are confused about their sexuality and are probably bisexual.” Not to be outdone by his wife, Tony Campolo stated plainly that since the Church has “become welcoming and accepting” of divorced people and not restrictive to ordination, eventually homosexuality will be accepted as well. Ironically, Peggy and Tony were rebuked by a young gay activist for not affirming those who chose to be LBGTQ.
Run, don’t walk, from the religious Left.
What a joke! This conference was nothing more than a farce, ecumenical attempt to further push the emergent churches erroneous views on the biblically ignorant….
The real sad thing about this is how the Apostle Paul is ridiculed for writing down exactly what God inspired him to and the crowd goes wild in contradiction to it…..
Also both sermons were man centered and not Christ centered which is usual when the those who speak don’t believe the bible to be the inspired word of God….
I guess when you get a bunch of unbelievers and heretics all together in one place, this is what you can expect.
I’m told by one lefty “Christian” that God doesn’t care about sexual purity anymore. The ONLY thing that makes us a Christian is some ambiguous “love they neighbor” thingy that apparently doesn’t include standing for truth and facts. Another speaks of “do no harm”, as if harm itself is a sign of evil. For this person, “the truth hurts” must be eradicated for the truth about proper behavior is indeed a burden, even for those committed to the narrow path.
I had asked of these people a question, “How far astray from Biblical teaching can one be without worshiping a false god?” and have yet gotten nothing resembling an answer. Indeed, I believe they’ve totally ignored the question. But the folks speaking at the event featured in this post are definitely pushing the envelope in that regard.
They do know that “love your neighbor” first appeared in Leviticus, right? You know, that book that God didn’t inspire and that doesn’t contain any universal moral laws.
Sent from my iPhone
It’s always interesting to see how easy it is to make quotes about “love thy neighbor” while hating on someone who one thinks does not do that right! Sometimes I can even fall into that if I’m not careful; if I don’t stay in the Word and in prayer. I want to be one of those people who lives in truth (as defined in scripture), speaks when God leads me to speak out, and sincerely demonstrates love toward everyone God brings into my life(even leftists who I find annoying). I consistently find that this is so much easier said than done.
I am a Southern Baptist. So was my brother, who, interestingly enough, now teaches at the same university as Tony Campolo. My brother is a Democrat, but I don’t know how Liberal he is. But his son, my nephew, is very much a Liberal. He also teaches at the same University. I also suspect my nephew is a homosexual. Seems Campolo’s heretical message has been spread around. My brother got his Master’s at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, in Fort Worth, Texas, which, at the time he went there, had moved far to the left, before the Conservative reformation of the Southern baptist convention.
I wonder if these people realize that they are heading in a direction talked about in Revelation, and they are not on the winning team.
Apparently not.
Not to worry, SST, they don’t believe in those concepts, so obviously they don’t exist.
Mark mentions the “conservative reformation” of the Southern Baptist Convention. Southern Baptists aren’t always as wise as serpents or as innocent as doves, but I believe we draw such venomous hatred from the Left because we successfully resisted being subverted by the stealth radicals who have taken over so many mainline denominations.
We stand as a rebuke to the idea that theirs is the only way and the inevitable destination of History: like the Boy Scouts, Southern Baptists must be assimilated or destroyed.
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More to the point of this post, I’m reminded of something C.S. Lewis wrote in an essay, “Modern Translations of the Bible,” collected in God in the Dock and posted online on a small website, here:
http://biblearchive.com/blog/2007/study/cslewis-modern-translations-of-the-bible/
“In the earlier history of every rebellion there is a stage of which you do no yet attack the King in person. You say, ‘The King is all right. It is his Ministers who are wrong. They misrepresent him and corrupt all his plans—which, I’m sure, are good plans if only the Ministers would let them take effect.’ And the first victory consists in beheading a few Ministers: only at a later stage do you go on and behead the King himself. In the same way, the nineteenth-century attack on St. Paul was really a stage in the revolt against Christ. Men were not ready in large numbers to attack Christ Himself. They made the normal first move—that of attacking on of His principal ministers. Everything they disliked in Christianity was therefore attributed to St Paul. It as unfortunate that their case could not impress anyone who had really read the Gospels and the Epistle with attention: but apparently few people had, and so the first victory was won. St Paul as impeached and banished and the world went on to the next step—the attack on the King Himself.“
Thanks for the quote, Bubba. As usual, Lewis was profoundly on target. I’ve noticed that with all sorts of liberals, including my aging parents. The “I like Jesus but not Paul” false dichotomy works well for Satan.
The Lewis quote does make such a profound, and true, point.
I’ve even heard some go so far as to claim that Paul was some kind of misogynist…and that modern Christians would be well-served to avoid the Epistles and focus only on the Gospels. After all, they said, Jesus didn’t put-down women the way Paul does…..
NEWS FLASH….it’s *all* “God inspired, God breathed, and useful for teaching and correcting in righteousness.” (Too lazy to look it up right now, but you know the verse I mean.)
And while we’re on the subject, Paul wasn’t sexist. For one thing, he praised on the contributions of the women in the church, and where he does seem to assign them a subservient role compared to men, it is a reflection of the time and place in which he lived.
Women in first century Judea and in most of the Roman world…were even more poorly educated than the men (usually illiterate). And their job description at that time consisted of preparing meals, keeping house, and raising children while their husbands worked somewhere else during the day…pretty much what most women did throughout Western Civ all the way up to World War II, when they were put to work in factories. It was silly to think a woman of the day would have the grounding to be imparting knowledge to other believers.
The women who weren’t allowed to speak in church – same deal. They sat on one side of the room, the men on the other. Continually they were leaning across the aisle to ask their husbands what such-and-such meant when spoken by the preacher. This was disruptive to everyone’s learning; Paul simply admonished them to knock it off and save it for a private conversation at home.
The whole issue of gender relations as related to the Scriptures, is nothing but a battering ram…one wielded by postmodern “feminists” with an axe to grind. Any excuse to reject its teaching will do in their minds…any at all.
Exactly. If people can’t get on board with that then Christianity may not be their forte’.
A woman in a Bible study once said, “I don’t like Paul; he was anti-women.” I kept thinking that not only was she wrong, but how she really wasn’t going to like how much of the New Testament he authored!