Monday, November 13, 2017

574 - Get Real

Spirituality Column #574
November 14, 2017
Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

Get Real
By Bob Walters

“Nobody in the West can be wholly non-Christian.  You may call yourself non-Christian, but the dreams you dream are still Christian dreams.” – Don Cupitt, Philosopher of Religion, Scholar of Christian Theology, Author, Atheist and Life Fellowship holder at Emanuel College, Cambridge University, England

Leave it to an atheist theologian – a formerly-ordained Anglican curate and career-long Christian “non-realist,” no less – to exist within this stated bundle of oxymoronic footings and perhaps unawares express a valuable truth of modern liberal politics and culture.  A more Christ-centered way to put this would be:

You can run but you can’t hide.”

As virtually all of the Western world’s public (and many non-public) colleges in the last century have replaced “Theology” departments with secularly correct departments of “Religious Studies” – thus absolving scholars of the too-often humiliating need to publicly profess Christian faith – since the 1960s Cambridge’s ancient school for priestly training is host to Cupitt, one of Britain’s most prolific and well-known non-God, non-Jesus, non-Holy Spirit purveyors and media darlings of Religion Without God.

Personally, I don’t blame Cupitt’s empty faith on Cambridge, because that school also produced and for many years was home to my fervently faithful and brilliant Christian brother and mentor Dr. George Bebawi, who was a divinity lecturer there.  When I asked George about Cupitt, whom he knew, George assured me that Cupitt was never considered a major intellectual player nor given a teaching job.  Family financial contributions to the school, he explained, account for Cupitt’s presence there.

Forty books and a broadcast career later, Cupitt is commercial evidence of the secular world’s spiritual thirst for “something greater” in this life without the intellectual entanglements and ultimate reality of Jesus Christ.  The notion of One True God is an absolute buzz-killer for today’s progressive liberals who seek spiritual meaning without accepting God’s objective truth. Hope for a Christian is the ultimate good and eternal home we have in Christ.   Secular “hope” – consider the energy expended on today’s non-Christian political agendas – is assigning one’s untethered cultural expectations to worldly political programs.  Its creed declares: “Mankind can fix its own problems.”

Good luck with that.  Secular religion offers no redemptive “endgame,” what Christian theologians call the eschaton, i.e., “How it all ends.”  As we read in Revelation, the Christian “end” proves Jesus is real, God wins, and through God’s grace and love humanity is rescued from its sin by faith in Jesus Christ.  Secular theology’s “end” offers nothing more real, true, permanent, or moral than the next election, debate, or protest.

The seeds of God’s truth are everywhere, and I believe John 3:16 is correct in saying Jesus came for all humanity, so let’s not leave anyone out.  Cupitt’s “Christian dreams” are God’s seedlings, and God’s harvest means eternal Jesus is looking for us.

The reality is: religion without God is as imaginary as love without relationship.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) offers evidence of “secular religion”: just look at the next “coexist” bumper sticker you see. God is whatever you want, or not.

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