CommonChristianity: secularism

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Monday, September 3, 2018

616 - A Common Problem

5:00 PM | Posted by Common Christianity | | Edit Post

Spirituality Column #616

September 4, 2018

Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

A Common Problem

By Bob Walters

“The first effect of not believing in God, is that you lose your common sense.” – G.K. Chesterton

Surveying the current-day Christian church landscape one might well argue that common sense appears to be equally optional for believers and non-believers alike.

Like Peter who lost his nerve but not his faith, Christians to this day can be fearfully reluctant to engage the secular onslaught that confronts our relationship with Jesus Christ. Christians see the surrounding world going mad; the surrounding world madly criticizes Christianity. It’s a seeming standoff of irreconcilable hypocrisies.

Except … the lone hypocrisy inherent in the global church is not Christ or Christianity; it’s us, the Christians. We’re the ones who make a mess of things. Jesus Christ is just fine and Christianity is the single most enduring truth mankind will ever encounter. The Bible is true. God and the Holy Spirit know exactly what they are doing. They have made eternity on the truth and authority of Jesus Christ in all things.

All we have to do is trust it: the reliable truth “that the world is real; that our actions have consequences; that truth itself is something solid and absolute; that we didn’t just make it up. This common sense perishes except where there is Christianity to preserve it.” But Satan the Lord of Lies is the secular team captain and a master of manipulating our many human weaknesses: we doubt what is real, lurk in our greed, treat morality as situational, and make up our own rules. Satan and secularism always seem to be on offense, while Christians always seem be on defense.

The “world is real” quote in the previous paragraph is an apt Chesterton paraphrase written by world-renowned Chesterton scholar Dale Ahlquist in his 2006 book, Common Sense 101: Lessons from G.K. Chesterton. Chesterton’s 1908 classic Orthodoxy, an intellectual precursor to C.S. Lewis’s later work, is a book I read every couple of years to help me stay sane in my faith amid a world of secular insanity.

With Jesus as my divine guiding light, I believe life’s common-sense basics include men, women, marriage, children (boys and girls), education, morals, industry, community, helping one another, that gender isn’t fluid, that unborn babies are in fact humans created in God’s image, and, you know, being honest. Oh … and in faith telling others about Jesus with love and compassion. Plus, I like and appreciate America.

At this time in history, that makes me a bigoted, binary, judgmental homophobe and worse, a Christian. I’m perceived not as a defender of proven organizing traditions of viable society, but an enemy of the socialist, globalist, and LGBTQ cultural zeitgeist which in ridding itself entirely of God has rid itself entirely of common sense.

That’s why so many things seem to be so backwards … because they are.

As I survey the church landscape – an evangelical scandal here, Catholics in glaring crises there, secularists chortling ”hypocrites!” and “haters!” everywhere – I know that Jesus Christ, Almighty God, and the Holy Spirit are right where they always are: blocking Satan’s goal line and encouraging me to love my enemies.

It doesn’t seem to make much sense, but it sure enough is the common truth.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) encourages you to look up Chesterton and Ahlquist, especially this excerpt from Common Sense 101: The Lost Art of Common Sense

Labels: C.S. Lewis, church scandals, Common Sense 101, Dale Ahlquist, G.K. Chesterton, hypocrisy, LGBTQ, Lord of Lies, Satan, secularism, Truth | 0 comments

Monday, March 20, 2017

540 - Swinging for the Fences

4:36 PM | Posted by Bob Walters | | Edit Post

Spirituality Column No. 540
March 21, 2017
Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

Swinging for the Fences

By Bob Walters

Public opinion polls these days fairly pulsate with bad news for the Christian faith.

Endless journalists and authors predict looming cultural destruction. Political and media savants pontificate daily that civilization’s sky is falling because of the godless “other side” (liberal vs. conservative, etc.). Theological sages insist the church must expand; the church must contract; the church must withdraw; the church is irrelevant.

Woe is us! God is losing! “Nones” are ascendant! America’s moral compass is lost. Millennials don’t do church. Boomers spoiled their children. Academia has gone secular. “Love God and others” is now “If it feels good do it (with whomever you want).”

Hysteria reigns, possibly because personal “opinion” is now culturally sovereign having conversationally replaced divine “truth” almost everywhere. That doesn’t truly mean God is behind, Jesus is losing or the Holy Spirit is taking a few days off. It means we are living in a time when culture’s most aggressive, pervasive and powerful communicators do not intimately know God, Christ, the Bible, Church or religion. They’ve heard of it but don’t know it. They certainly don’t trust it; it’s just an opinion.

Thus has arisen today’s quasi-god culture that freely invokes divine-sounding expressions – “You are a blessing to me,” “May god bless you,” “I pray to god,” “God help us,” “Jesus Christ!” (the expletive) and many others – without a second thought as to their true divine meaning, the divine realness of who and what they are talking about, and the eternal efficacy of figuring out divine truth in the context of their words.

Truly knowing God, you see, is a good thing.

Instead people emptily, mindlessly, chat up “faith” or “belief” without offering the bedrock context of something really big out there worth faithfully believing in: a true, righteous, relational and loving all-powerful God. Secular folks intone small godly bon mots with sincerity of their own earnest but shallow purpose, or to encourage others as an expression of compassion. They offer nice words that have no cosmic juice.

And it is shake-that-person-by-the-shoulders maddening to see how little they understand about and expect from God. God is relationship, Jesus Christ is explanation and the Holy Spirit is wisdom. This God is the biggest thing going. Faith and belief are only a small start, maybe a sacrifice bunt, toward learning what God means in our life now and forever. It is trust and relationship that awaken the true “swinging for the fences” powerhouse of intimately knowing God with our heart, mind, soul and strength.

There is no opinion poll that can track that. Paying lip service to some god as we express a sincere personal intention about some worldly concern is a stillborn exercise of vanity; a baseless hope. A seeking human heart’s love and thirst for Jesus, on the other hand, is the thundering long-ball of infinite, eternal trust and relationship.

That is the faith and belief – God’s Grand Slam – that will get you home.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) notes baseball starts soon. Polls suggest the Cubs are 4-1 favorites to repeat as World Series champions. Anybody got an Amen?

Labels: Faith and belief, God's Grand Slam, home run, media, opinion polls, relationship, secularism, theology, trust | 0 comments

Monday, January 9, 2017

530 - God is Still Here

4:41 PM | Posted by Bob Walters | | Edit Post

Spirituality Column No. 530
January 10, 2017
Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

God is Still Here
By Bob Walters

Perhaps the greatest arrogance of this or any age is the assumption that God’s existence is somehow dependent on the majority opinion of mankind.

Let’s remember that God is still here no matter what educators teach, the media reports, pollsters predict, commentators opine or celebrities spasmodically declare. Neither does a sincere preacher’s sermon nor a humble Christian’s service alter the unalterable divinity of God. The thing that can be made different is not God, but man’s faithful relationship and love with God and others. Beware; we live in an age – an arc or history, really – out of alignment with the pedestrian but supernatural truth of Christ.

This “arc” is the modernist march of philosophical humanity that for the last 300 years or so has walked Western man’s popular intellect further and further away from the foundational, always relevant reality of God. While I’m quite convinced man’s modernist inclinations have no impact whatsoever on the three-in-one person of God, Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit, or on the eternal kingdom, divine glory and ultimate victory for God’s plan of salvation and love, we are wise to take heed that when we confuse our temporal intellectual fashions – modernism – with the unceasing reality of God, we are compromising our own eternal being.

We are electing eternal sides – Heaven or Hell – not fleeting flirtations.

“Modernism” doesn’t mean smart phones and driverless cars. Tracing its roots back to Thomas Aquinas and 13^th century naturalism, modernism is the seriously earnest academic trajectory of man taking over the definition and description of God. Humanity beheld the Age of Enlightenment – great philosophers, brilliant politicians, and revolutions both shedding kings (America) and killing them (France, Russia) – and this modernist Enlightenment “light” man has been trying to steal is the spotlight that shines properly, only, entirely and eternally on Jesus Christ, not human systems.

But human systems are what popular culture’s “best and brightest” human minds have been assembling and assimilating ever since in an attempt to replace the simple and traditional truth of God’s ultimate mastery over all Creation. God gave mankind freedom to concoct all manner of foolish ways to replace God – from the fall in Garden of Eden up through evolutionary theory, social science, reproductive rights, identity politics and on and on. Bounteous modern day ammo exists to locate, learn about and love God – Church, the Bible, communications’ tools – as does the ever-present, ineffable, stubborn sense human’s possess that “there must be something more.”

Yes, there is “something more” no matter the modern or ancient world’s fancy or arrogant arguments against it (Romans 16:18, 1 Corinthians 2:4, Colossians 2:4)

God is still here and our faith still counts.

He always is and it always does.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) notes that secularism suggests we don’t need to trust Jesus, glorify God or seek the Holy Spirit. Those are three pieces of very bad advice.

Labels: 1 Corinthians 2:4, academics, Aquinas, Colossians 2:4, Enlightenment, faith, modernism, Romans 16:18, secularism | 0 comments

Monday, February 23, 2015

432 - Perfectly Understandable

6:02 PM | Posted by Bob Walters | | Edit Post

Spirituality Column #432
February 24, 2015
Current in Carmel-Westfield-Noblesville-Fishers-Zionsville

Perfectly Understandable

By Bob Walters

Most of the time in this space I prefer to write about Christ rather than Christians because Christ is perfect. Christians are not.

While Christian flaws are rampant, it’s hard to find anyone possessing even the most elemental familiarity with Jesus along with an ember’s worth of faith and understanding who would say, “Y’know, that Jesus fellow was really a bad guy with a lot of bad ideas.”

The recent historical mega exceptions are folks like Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot, Mao, etc. Their rabid followers saw in these secular leaders a mistaken truth and supposed salvation that in reality only resides with God the Father, Son and Spirit. Even then, the problem wasn’t that these guys made specific war on Jesus Christ – although an argument can be made that they did – but that each of these 20^th century Hall of Fame mass murderers thought their political and power ambitions were superior to any other social construct, including the freedom provided in Jesus Christ.

Like the Roman magistrates who were led by the Jewish leaders to see Jesus as a threat to 1^st century Roman sovereignty, these 20^th century killers were not solely focused on eradicating Jesus; they simply didn’t want the competition – Christian freedom, for instance – suborning their earthly, dictatorial authority.

Certainly, we don’t have to commit genocide to give great aid and comfort to mayhem’s great champion, Satan. Rather, just replace the truth and wisdom of Christ with one’s own fleshly and hence intellectually limited cocktail of morality, relativity, appetites and “being a good person.” Voila, one’s place is secured among Satan’s pantheon of fallen humanity perceiving truth existing not in the Bible, not in the Church, not in the love of Jesus Christ and certainly not in the ultimate judgment and justice of God, but in perdition’s darkened mirror.

With a society-wide, burgeoning majority of secular, liberal, “my religion is no religion” academic pontificators, judicial reconstructionists, social justice devotees and self-help evangelists, modern America bears an alarming though perfectly understandable, societal, macro-miscomprehension of divine values.

We worry about radical Islam, which has a religious position of “Jihad” somewhat akin to the aforementioned “Hall of Fame” – “Jihad” seeks to eradicate anyone who is not them. Radical Islam gives us great discomfort but, so far anyway, hasn’t produced nearly the body count of the past century’s largest secular killers.

Whoever may want to remind us Christians of our historical imperfections, I get it. But the great present-day threat to American freedom is neither medieval Christianity nor modern Islam; it is secularism’s stupid indifference to Christ.

Gaining Christ – humbly, intellectually and reverently – alone secures human freedom.

That’s the lesson of history.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) is an expert on Christians not being perfect.

Labels: bad guys, Christians not perfect, Hitler, Islam, Jihad, killers, Satan, secularism | 0 comments

616 - A Common Problem

540 - Swinging for the Fences

530 - God is Still Here

432 - Perfectly Understandable

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