Persnickety

God is in control. So say the evangelicals after the Trump election. So says Michael Gerson albeit in a more honest and intellectual way (I have pasted his column to the end of this blog). And so say I, though with a different inflection, a different meaning entirely, from the Christian Right. Today I saw that, while traveling in a plane to the finals in Colombia, the Brazilian soccer team,  Chapacoense , crashed and all but three team members and some from the crew perished. God is in control. God is good, all the time. So says the evangelical Right. Aleppo battle continues. 16,000 civilians flee. God is in control. God is good. All the time. Think of the God of the Now. Think of His presence throughout all the created universe, His influence, His power, His essence. Where is this God, this He? Nowhere. Not in heaven, which is not a place any telescope can point out; not on Mars or any star; He is not in the Kuiper Belt or in the sun or on the dark side of ...

Is Evangelical Christianity the worst evil ever manifested by humanity, as averred by a recent online article ? No, I do not believe that. I put that in there to manifest not its inherent evil but to 1) prod the reader; and 2) to bring up the underlying premise of that article: what is required of a Christian? The blog's author, CK Ratzer, basically states that nothing is required. Christ has given his Grace once and for all and the Law is without effect (this is the antinomian view, from anti= against; nomos= law). That is the Good News. He then postulates that Evangelical Christianity preaches a "mixed" gospel, one of repentance and grace, then one of required action, action that never accumulates into goodness, but is a cause of guilt and shame and never-ending judgmentalism. Anyway, I didn't want to argue what he has already argued. Read the article and see for yourself. As to what is required... We know that "repent" is a mis-translation. It m...