Complicit Christianity. . .

Looking in the rear view mirror and trying to figure out how the pandemic was able to galvanize our population with fear and trembling might be just an interesting pursuit of the obscure -- except that no one believes that this was an isolated incident.  In trying to figure out how this threat was different from serious influenza threats in the more recent past as well as the Spanish Flu, one is struck by some obvious distinctions.

First of all, past threats were not aided and abetted by a 24/7 media that kept the focus on the pandemic and only on the pandemic.  Waking every morning in the past 15 months to the steady drumbeat of threat, fear, and panic from the talking heads we call the news had a profound effect that the more pedestrian media of the past could never duplicate.  Remember that it took weeks before the nations found out that a world war had begun a little more than a hundred years ago.  Not today.  The media always has breaking news and the breaking news is always bad and for more than a year the breaking news was that Armageddon was at hand in the form of an unseen virus that might be man-made or nature rebelling against mankind.

Second was the presence of the social media and its ability to produce news that might be real but no one could know for sure (at least until the anonymous fact checkers put their step of approval on it).  The social media fostered lies, half-truths, and fears in the form of headlines that appealed largely to the fringes of America.  People could post conspiracy theories along with threats to the soul of democracy while others could taut the unanimity of science that never quite existed.  It is no wonder that COVID would become a stick of dynamite in the sea of fear the other media had fueled.

I could go on with other things but I think that we must also admit that Christianity was also complicit in this.  Not the orthodox Christianity of creed and confession and an infallible Scripture but the Christianity which had long ago ceased to speak of sin, the cross, a life of suffering and cross bearing, and the greater value of eternal life than this temporary mortal existence.  While I do not like to paint with a broad brush, a Christianity in which God's primary focus was on our happiness and the Gospel was defined as a principle of love, acceptance, and tolerance left us with an Achilles' heel into which Christians fled with abandon.  What kind of God would sit idly by while my personal life was threatened, while my hopes and dreams were held hostage by fear, and while my world came crumbling down upon me?  Perhaps, the God who promised that the future for those who followed Jesus should not be seen with rose colored glasses.  

Even among Christians, the God of the Scriptures has been obscured by the God of convenience sf preference, the God whose primary work is to serve our interests as we define them for the primary focus of mortal life.  Even at the Christian funeral this Christianity seems unable to even whisper the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting.  Instead this faith finds comfort in memories shared, in the judgment of a life well lived on their own terms, and of a better place which is left unnamed.  While we can see how a world which idealizes technology and science might be found unprepared for a pandemic, this shallow Christianity without doctrine or ground in Scripture hangs in the wind of change, preference, and the elusive happiness that has substituted for eternal salvation has left many Christians to the prison of their fears.  Now a new god has been born of this pandemic.  It was always there but sort of a hidden spirit summoned from the fringes by fear -- the god of personal safety.  The high priests of this god order distancing and masks and produce vaccines.  It will not be long before this Christianity will look exactly like the spirit of the age and nothing like the Christ.

It is incumbent, then, for orthodox Christianity not only to warn the faithful of this temptation and heresy but also to call us all to repentance.  As Jesus warned when pulling a story from the news about the tragedy of death when the Tower of Siloam fell, so it will be for you unless you repent.  Sin is not some little pest but the corrupted humanity which sees self and want and desire and, yes, fear, more clearly than God, the cross, and hope formed in the resurrection of the body, the life everlasting, and the eternal dwelling place of God with men and men with God.  Surely the saints are praying for us and Christ interceding on behalf of those for whom He shed His blood but we must take urgently the call to preach repentance and a life of cross-bearing to a people who have come to think that God not only loves them as they are but leaves them as He found them.  Now is the time to walk worthy of and speak boldly this eternal Gospel not only for the sake of our own salvation but for witness to the world and to a shallow vapid Christianity that has forgotten what it means to have real hope.