Why has the Church Caused so Much Harm?

This past week our life group started off with the question of why have so many atrocities been committed in the name of Christianity? This is a very valid question as we can all think of many evils perpetrated by the Church throughout history such as the inquisition, the crusades, and the witch trials. I'm sure that there are many others, too many to name here. This problem can be a tough stumbling block for many people to get past because the Church is supposed to represent God, right? Shouldn't Christians always act in a blameless manner if they claim to be God's people? Does the harm caused by the church invalidate the Christian faith? Or should we look at this a little closer...

Our first point that we made at our life group was that not everyone who calls them self a Christian is really a true follower of Jesus. We can call ourselves whatever we want to, but our true beliefs and motives can be seen by our actions. Even Jesus himself taught that your faith is shown by your actions (Matt 7:16-18). He also said that not everyone who calls Him their lord is a true believer in Matthew 7:21. Thus, we should be able to draw a distinction between those who use the name of Christ to advance their own selfish desires and those who truly are Christians by their actions. Augustine once said that you should not judge a worldview by its abuses. We should therefore, as Ravi Zacharias says, judge a worldview by the teachings and life of it's founder.

However, there probably have been some evils committed across history by "real" Christians. To this we responded that Christians are not perfect people and neither do we claim to be perfect. We still have to wrestle with temptations and sometimes we make the wrong choices. This is a clear teaching throughout the Bible, some examples being Romans 3:23 and 7:7-25. Therefore, on behalf of all Christians, may I ask for the forgiveness of the people who have been wronged by sins that we Christians have committed. We have sinned, we have been hypocritical and prideful and ungracious. I pray that we may change our ways and right the wrongs that we have committed.

Since we Christians are not perfect, we should be looking to Jesus instead. What did he teach? How did he live? Did he commit any evils? Is God really good and loving as he claims to be? God does not control his people, he has given us all free will, so we must all be held responsible for our own actions. We can't blame every sin committed by humanity on God and his sovereignty. To find out if he is worthy to be worshiped we must look to His character and His promises, and what Jesus did while he was on earth. (We will talk more about all this later).

In closing, let us look at how atheism as contributed to evils of history. Many atheistic dictators, such as Stalin, Hitler, and Mao have killed millions more than anyone operating under the banner of Christianity. The fundamental difference between these two cases however, is that when "Christians" commit evils in the name of their religion it is contrary to what their teacher actually taught. But when atheists kill in the name of evolution or ethnic cleansing, it is the logical outworking of their beliefs.

The Hard Questions Faced

My wife and I just started a new life group (aka small group, aka bible study) at our house and are very excited about the topic we will be discussing. We wanted a topic that would interest anybody that might come, whether a christian or not, so we decided to study the hard questions against the christian faith. We will be using Letters From a Skeptic by Gregory Boyd as a guide to our study and a help when we may become stumped. This book was read by my wife and I almost two years ago and we thoroughly enjoyed it. It is a collection of letters written back and forth between a father (the skeptic) and son (the apologist) about the father's objections against christianity.

I hope to be posting a summary of our discussions, or at least my opinions on the topics, and hope that you will enjoy following along. I welcome your comments and questions and will try to answer them as best I can. Here we go...

are we really free?

I just saw this movie last night on Google video. It is a pretty eye opening documentary on how the government is illegally taxing our income. It also reveals that all of the money they raise by taxing our income goes to pay interest on the federal debt. Did you know that the federal reserve is a privately owned bank? They are making money off of our country's debt and our income taxes are going straight into their pockets. They also have the rights to print our money! This is not right. This film is very interesting as well as disturbing. The entire thing is posted on Google video so that you can watch it for free (on a larger viewer than this too). The movie also talks about how we are headed toward a one world government. I believe that this is true because it was prophesied in the Bible in the book of Revelation. I'm not too worried though because I know that God is in control and that this is all part of his plan to redeem the world. He has already won the victory for me. Are you on His side? Jesus has already paid the price for you to be reconciled to God, all you have to do is believe. This film also talks about how there are plans in the works to implant everyone with an electronic transmitter under their skin that can be used to make purchases and identify you. Could this be the mark of the beast prophesied in Revelations 13:16,17? I know that God will give his people wisdom concerning this so that we can avoid the mark when the time comes. I am so thankful that he is sovereign and I don't need to worry or be fearful. You can visit http://www.freedomtofascism.com to find out more about the movie and it's mission.

Charity

There is a new book out that reports that conservatives give more of their money and time than do liberals. Interesting...

powered by performancing firefox

Seperation of Church and State

I just learned the other day from this article that the "doctrine" of seperation of church and state doesn't exist anywhere in our nation's founding documents. It's not in the Constitution, it's not in the Bill of Rights or even the Declaration of Independence.

"It's not in the Bill of Rights. It's not anywhere in a foundational document. The only place where the so-called "wall of separation" was mentioned was in a letter written by (Thomas) Jefferson to a friend. That's the only place. It has been picked up and made to be something it was never intended to be.

What it has become is that the government is protected from the church, instead of the other way around, which is that church was designed to be protected from the government."

And when Jefferson made this comment he wasn't using it to protect the government from the influence of the church, but was trying to keep the government out of the church's affairs.

"Jefferson politely declined in his letter to use his office for such influence," Hausknecht said, "explaining that the First Amendment prohibited him from doing so because it had created a 'wall of separation of church and state.' Although it's not completely clear among historians as to the complete scope of Jefferson's meaning,
because of the letter's specific historical context it's accurate to say, as Dr. Dobson did, that Jefferson felt the First Amendment protected the church from government interference -- not the opposite."

I thought this article was very interesting because I never knew where the idea of seperation of church and state actually came from and was the intended meaning.

powered by performancing firefox

Sharefest!

Two weekends ago (June 10th and 11th) my church participated in the annual "Sharefest" of Boulder County. This is an event where several churches in the area team up and help out the Boulder Valley School District by donating free work to their school such as painting, repairing, landscaping, cleaning, etc. This year 7 churches teamed up to work on 8 schools. My church was given Boulder High School to work on. We spent the majority of our efforts painting the cafeteria and hallways, doing some landscaping work and cleaning there really cool central atrium. It was a lot of fun and also hardwork. I was the team leader for my life group and we were in charge of painting a certain corner of the cafeteria. That was done pretty quickly and my team left for other jobs and I was left to work with only Kendra. We had a good time putting the finishing touches on our corner. We are both somewhat perfectionistic and so we can spend many hours just painting one corner. I think it looked great when we were done though. After the corner was finished we had the priviledge of painting a window sill and the wall around it. I think we did a great job on that as well. We spent the rest of our saturday cleaning paint drops off of the floor.

The next morning (sunday) we showed up and were assigned to help paint the doors that enter the cafeteria. Kendra and I assisted by removing the push plates on the doors so the painters could paint under them and not have to mask them. We also masked the edges of the doors. After that we were put in charge of cleaning paint drops off of chairs that should not have been used to stand on while painting. That was not a very fun job, but we got through it by focusing on how we are blessing the school and glorifying God with our service. At around 11:15 we finished up and headed to the mackey auditorium on CU campus for a huge worship service with all 7 churches that participated in sharefest. It was awesome worshiping with that many people (the auditorium was packed) and seeing a large portion of the church body in boulder coming together in one place. It was really cool when some of the school officials got on stage and expressed their thankfulness for what had been done and tried to estimate how much money had been saved for their schools.

It is awesome when the body gets together and stands along side with the community; loving them and serving them. That is how communities can really be reached for Christ. All glory and honor is HIS!