Tuesday, April 15, 2008

Is Cross Currents Genuinely Jewish?

Are the evangelical Christians who pay blind fidelity to George Bush and the Republican party true Christians? The current TNR argues no, and frames the controversy in a way that makes me wonder if the RWRabbis who are forever equivocating and disassembling in the service of the conservative agenda are representing a theology that is genuinely Jewish.

Here's the money quote about contemporary Christians that planted this particular seed in my brain.
Marsh believes that the politicization of Christianity in recent years--using the good name and moral commandments of the church to "serve national ambitions, strengthen middle-class values, and justify war"--has been spiritually disastrous for evangelicalism in the United States. Conservative American Christians, he claims, have forgotten the difference between "discipleship and partisanship." They have "seized the language of the faith and made it captive to our partisan agendas--and done so with contempt for Scripture, tradition, and the global, ecumenical church." The result has been a collapse into spiritual nseriousness, as Christians have "recast" their faith "according to our cultural preferences and baptized our prejudices, along with our will to power, in the shallow waters of civic piety.".... Out of a combination of cultural parochialism and theological illiteracy, American evangelicals have come to believe that their Christian faith is perfectly compatible with unwavering faith in the Bush administration--in fact, many of them have come to believe that the two faiths are, at bottom, identical.
Lapins, Menckens and the masses of Jews who think as they do are guilty of the same crime, aren't they? More in a bit.

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