http://counterpunch.org/jensen03072006.html
Thought this was really odd. Made me feel sad and angry at first then just interested in what could happen next to this person.
What strikes me most, is that I believe the persons goals cannot be accomplished without the aid of Jesus Chist and a belief in his divinity is essential to recieving that aid. What I think people don’t get about Christianity when they approach it from a secular framework is that the transformative power of Gods justification and following sanctification in our lives so radically shift our perspective so that if we were to honestly welcome someone into christian brotherhood who is not actually a christian (by christian believes Jesus is the risen son of God, and decided to live life for God’s glory and not their own) they would not fit in, they wouldn’t understand what made them different, and would ultimately have a hard time doing the good works (or as the author of the article puts it, “to struggle to make religion a force that can help usher into existence a world in which we can imagine living in peace with each other and in sustainable relation to the non-human world”) because their lives are not changed or different than they were before coming to church.
The Church as an agent for social change without primarily striving for the glorification of God is at best the ‘christian right’ and at worst the crusades. Those end caps and everything in between is only self-centered a bandaid for the world. The difference is that having a focus on Christ causes us to loose much of our self-centered ideals about being heros and saving the world, and enable true Christians to truely love without borders. I’m not saying true Christians do not do dumb things, or sometimes forget about the putting God’s glory before their own, I’m just saying on the whole a God-centered focus causes more social change by tranforming within, than people who step out with a focus on doing something good only for the sake of doing something good.
I understand the appeal of wanting to change the world. I do, and I would love to go down in the history books for doing something great that really made a differnce in the world. But if I did that for me, and not for Gods glory, in the end I would still be dead, and gained no benefits from my hard work other that slightly elongating my memory in the minds of those living on this tiny rock, for a small fraction of this universes existance.