From A. W. Tozer: "Many tender-minded Christians fear to sin against love by daring to inquire into anything that comes wearing the cloak of Christianity and breathing the name of Jesus. They dare not examine the credentials of the latest prophet to hit their town lest they be guilty of rejecting something which may be of God. They timidly remember how the Pharisees refused to accept Christ when He came, and they do not want to be caught in the same snare, so they either reserve judgment or shut their eyes and accept everything without question. This is supposed to indicate a high degree of spirituality. But in sober fact it indicates no such thing. It may indeed be evidence of the absence of the Holy Spirit.
"Gullibility is not synonymous with spirituality. Faith is not a mental habit leading its possessor to open his mouth and swallow everything that has about it the color of the supernatural. Faith keeps its heart open to whatever is of God, and rejects everything that is not of God, however wonderful it may be. Try the spirits is a command of the Holy Spirit to the Church. We may sin as certainly by approving the spurious as by rejecting the genuine. And the current habit of refusing to take sides is not the way to avoid the question. To appraise things with a heart of love and then to act on the results is an obligation resting upon every Christian in the world. And the more as we see the day approaching."
Well, I certainly agree, I am not sure why someone would get nasty over this post!! Sheesh,
Peace,
Meg
From Thomas a Kempis’ “The Imitation of Christ”:
…for not all that is high is holy, nor is all that is sweet good, nor every desire pure, nor all that is dear to us pleasing to God.
Amen. It seems the problem is not a recent one, eh? 🙂
The right-wing’s multi-front war on American democracy now aims at our core belief in separation of church and state. It includes an attempt to say the founding fathers endorsed the idea that this is a “Christian nation,” with an official religion.
But the founders—and a vast majority of Americans—repeatedly, vehemently and with stunning clarity denounced, rejected and despised such beliefs.
Nowhere in the Constitution they wrote does the word “Christian” or the name of Christ appear. The very first phrase of the First Amendment demands that “Congress shall make no law concerning an establishment of religion.”
One major reason Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Tom Paine, Ethan Allen and the vast majority of early Americans rejected the merger of church and state was the lingering stench of Puritan intolerance. The infamous theocratic murders of the Salem witch trials sickened the American soul, just as today’s power grab by Karl Rove’s new corporate fundamentalists creates an atmosphere of intolerance and fear, defined by the world’s largest prison gulag.
With characteristic duplicity, the radical right is attempting to re-write another of this nation’s most cherished beliefs. Consider a widely circulated screed by the University of Dayton’s Larry Schweikart. With astonishing inaccuracy, Schweikart asserts that Jefferson’s famous demand for a “wall of separation between church and state” doesn’t really mean what it says. Jefferson’s observation that the founding fathers were not particularly devout is also dismissed, as if Schweikart knew them all and Jefferson didn’t.
Twisting metaphors, changing meanings and ignoring Jefferson’s Unitarianism, Schweikart conjures a completely fictitious endorsement for a Christian state.
Then comes the astonishing assertion that the incomparably urbane, tolerant and ever-eclectic Benjamin Franklin was somehow a Christian soldier. Never mind that in his Autobiography the Puritan-born Franklin, with his usual wry wit, laments having been dragged by a friend to church, from which he fled back to his books and experiments.
Never mind also that the legendary atheism of the wildly popular Tom Paine and Ethan Allen was embraced throughout a new nation that loved rational reason.
Instead, the Rovewellian claim that the US belongs to Puritan fundamentalists and their corporate sponsors is fed with random shreds deliberately misused as if by divine right.
The Deistic God of Franklin, Jefferson, and their Enlightened cohorts was in fact a humanistic divinity, rooted in the possibilities of the mind and spirit. America’s true founding faith drew strength from diverse sources, including native America, pacifist Quakerism and the actual teachings of Jesus from the Sermon on the Mount: broad, peace-loving, tolerant, egalitarian, pluralistic, loving.
In other words, the precise opposite of G. W. Bush’s totalitarian jihad. Today’s theocratic crusaders promote the mean spirit of Puritan fanatics who ruled Boston from 1630 with an iron fist and a hangman’s noose. To claim that this infamously repressive (and repressed!) state church was somehow supported by its most focused opponents is to defame America’s founders and Truth itself.
It is not the Judeo-Christian Ten Commandments that form the bedrock of American values. It is the first Ten Amendments to the Constitution. If anything should be chiseled in stone on our public buildings, it’s the Bill of Rights.
Which is precisely what this attack on our history means to burn at the stake. Awakened America rose up in revolt against King, corporation and clergy. Its rejection of a state-sponsored church, Christian or otherwise, was fiercely explicit and decidedly mainstream.
Today’s corporate-funded fundamentalist jihad is at war with America’s uniquely diverse revolutionary soul. Spitting in the face of our historic core, the Big Lie of a “Christian nation” is vintage Rove at his most Orwellian.
America’s founding genius lit up the world with secular pluralism. Those who attack our uniquely open spirit with phony scholarship are those whom George W. Bush might most accurately describe as “people who hate America.”
My post was very much in context:
“Gullibility is not synonymous with spirituality.”
Yet gullibility is the hallmark of the so called “christian right”.
“Snobbery is the child of pride. Pride at first may be eager and ambitious as it tries to make a place for itself or to prove that it has already attained that place. Later it loses its eager quality and becomes defensive. Finally it ceases to struggle or defend and accepts its own image of itself as something too well established for discussion and too beautiful to improve. When it reaches that stage it has produced a snob, and no snob is ever aware that he is one.” A. W. Tozer
Jesus in Luke 6:36 Be ye therefore merciful, as your Father also is merciful.
Jesus in Luke 6:37 Judge not, and you shall not be judged. Condemn not, and you shall not be condemned. Forgive, and you shall be forgiven.
I’m not sure how A.W. Tozer would fit in with todays constellation of Republican apostates; or Jesus for that matter.
Hey Ghost Danzing,
Just curious: what was it in Tracey’s quoting of Tozer that elicited this response?
GD:
Why-oh-why did you think this was the place to copy-paste your liberal talking points? *sigh* That’s rude. And off topic.
Well done, T. Reminds me of personal experiences I’ve had with followers of the Word of Faith movement, et al. Also, Frank Perreti hit this one on the head (if not in an inelegant way) in “The Visitation”. Good stuff.
WG
Sheesh. I go away for a bit and come back to this? Interesting sense of context you have, GD. I hope you don’t mind if I take the liberty of copying and pasting this onto *your* blog — where it belongs.
Don’t try to comment here again. You won’t be able to because I simply can’t abide such rudeness.
Everyone else — Thanks for circling the wagons!
Ghost Dansing — I’m sorry that you are unable to understand the quote. You haven’t understood its context or the way in which I’ve used it.
Obviously, you’ve got a couple different IP addresses since I banned your other one. And now this one.
I don’t want to play this game with you. You seem to prefer grandstanding to discussion. My blog is not the place for you to do that; YOUR blog is. To cover all my bases, I’ll now try as much politeness as I can muster:
This is my party. I’m the hostess. Please leave.
I have asked you nicely. Please respect my wishes.
Tracey,
I appreciated your Tozer quote, he is one of my favorites! Do not be dismayed by the slow-minded, easily deceived malecontents, who have failed to perceive the Truth. Such dishonest reference to our founders only reveals the desperate nature of the Left, and the fact that they are losing the war of ideas and values.
Back to A.W. Tozer, I recently read a compilation of his teachings and sermons in which he stated that any Church leader who lets the nose of the camel into his tent in the morning, will find the whole beast there before nightfall (paraphrase). His point was that one of the highest responsibilities of Church Leadership is to protect the flock from error and deception. As usual, Tozer’s warnings are even more applicable today than when he wrote them.
Hey, Zain, thank you for your comment. I so agree with you on the whole deception problem. Now more than ever — Time to get serious about Truth. Absolutely.