At ethicsdaily.com, more response to the SBC’s move to sever ties with the Baptist World Alliance.
from the above link: Robert Parham: The decision represents more evidence that Baptist fundamentalists are retreating to a 19th century castle of racial and cultural homogeneity
And this is a Baptist group. Never you mind. It’s a “liberal” (and therefore evil and un-Biblical) group, and so this trumps the much clearer message of Jesus’ ministry of constantylyreaching out to the “outcast” and the constantly making reference to how “pagans” express the values of the Kingdom than do the “religious” (the Jewish leaders of the day). The SBC Leaders look more and more pharasaical every year.
The complaint that the SBC leaders have about the Baptist World Allinance being “anti-American”, and the further fact thatthey list this first among grievances gives us a clue about where their true loyalties lie. They criticize a worldwide Baptist body for being “Anti-American”, which basically means that there has been criticism of American policy. Well, hell yeah, that’s in the Bible, right there in ,……uh…….well, it’s in there somewhere. Thou shalt not criticize a president and an administration that has been “blessed” by the Religious Right. If you do, you must be anti-Christian too.
NO, my friends. It’s simply that therer are perspectives and theologies that place allegianace to THE GOSPEL rather than politics. To support a war, and continue to justify in spite of a glaring lack of evidence for the initial justifications for it (which have ebcome increasingly linked to outright deceit and “exaggerations” designed to convince an unwitting public that it was justifiable. Never mind thatthe concept of “Just war” has been hijacked by a militarymind set that sees force as the ultimate solution. This is NOT CHRISTIAN, and millions of Christians have been led astray by a cultural captivity to the myth that violence solves things. The belief that all of this leading to the capture of Saddam will “show those bastards” that they can’t push us around. This is SO absurd. Just what do we think is going to DECREASE the conditions that spawn terrorists? To give them increasingly more reasons to hate us? The world was aginst this, but the World was wrong. They don’t know what they’re talking about. Gimme a break. It’s like an international version of the SBC leadership. The Baptist World Allinace is a bunchof foreigners with no respect for our superior culture and stainless Christian morality. (Yeah, tell that to families who lost loved ones in Iraq. If this “war” was required to be fought on US soil, all for the “higher value” of freedom and democracy, how many Americans would buy it? If ours were the people to have to face the “precison bombing” of the US military, how many of us would rest easy that “innocent lives” would not be lost? Yet, when this campaign is taking place “over there”, far away, and affecting “MUslim people” instead of “people like us”, we can preach to them about “braving the battle” for the sake of a better tomorrow.
To me, this lacks a basic and logical sense of compassion, and betrays an extremely dangerous “justification” of what has been preached to us as “Christian morals”. Whenever I hear the Christmas hymns that refer to peace on earth, I shudder at how many have been so duped by a glorification of forms of violence wrapped in the flag, and this somehow makes it past what I would think would be a stronger “Christian filter” that enables us to separate the wheat from the chaff; the gospel from a false gospel.