We Aren’t the World
— Tuesday, March 2nd, 2010 —
I have a post up on The Resurgence site today on misguided Christian outrage. The post responds to folks who’ve been asking me if I’m offended that the new version of “We Are the World” leaves out Willie Nelson’s line about the Lord from the 1984 version. I think there’s a bigger story here, about when and how Christians ought to be outraged. You can read the article here.
Good word, Dr. Moore. I was sitting here scratching my head trying to figure out when God turned stones to bread until I read your next paragraph. : P
I see something similar in the BigGovernment / Journalism sites from Andrew Breitbart. As far as I can tell, he himself is not a believer, and I have no way of knowing the various contributors to the sites. However, God and the Bible get talked about and tossed around regularly in articles in ways that make my little toe wince. From what I understand, the Tea Party Convention was the same.
I’d much prefer they just leave shoddy exegesis and half-appeals to Scripture and the Lord’s blessing out of public discourse altogether. It seems like to give your “Amen” to such generic praise or Bible study is to allow your faith to be co-opted into a civic religion that at best acknowledges a God but hardly seems to include the gospel.
One of my Facebook friends posted this TED talk on nutrition: http://www.ted.com/talks/jamie_oliver.html
This was my response: The trouble is this parallels EXACTLY what is happening in the realm of spiritual food. We are killing our souls with cheap, easy fast food with lots of enjoyment and very little nutrition. When was the last time you had something at church that you had to cut with a knife and fork just to get it in your mouth and had to chew on it for a while … See Morebefore you could swallow it?
Pastors are to blame in part because they don’t want to spend the time in the kitchen. And there are plenty of folks in the pew who want the same Twinkies everybody else is eating in every other church instead of savoring a freshly baked home-made cake for dessert that you could never get out of a box or from a a wrapper.
Instead of breaking the Bread of Life, we buy it already sliced in a plastic wrapper.
@Rick Presley,
I absolutely wholeheartedly agree with you, and I think the comparison you made is just genius.
I wish more people (Christians) discussed this kind of stuff. But I praise God for opening our eyes, it really is the Spirit’s work.
I personally think that both the change to the song (and the idea in general of remaking it) is lame, but this sort of thing isn’t surprising at all. Someone did the same thing recently with U2’s “Sunday Bloody Sunday” and cropped out the last line about “the battles just begun…. to claim the victory Jesus won…” (I can’t remember who did this. I think it was the bald guy who won a season of American Idol). It was interesting because, while I was listening to the song for the first time I was thinking to myself, “you know, he’ll probably crop out that last line about Jesus’ victory…” and lo and behold he did.
Excellent points. I especially felt those words, “We’d rather have the affirmation than the revelation.” Wow. The problem is, people are much more interested in being right for their pride’s sake than in having a right relationship with God. Their belligerence gets evoked whenever anyone suggests they might be wrong, or their point of view might be less-than-admired. Love for self, not love for God, fuels their outrage.
May God deliver us all from such pride, and fill us with a genuine love for Him and for our neighbor!
Is the AFA’s response to the killer whale incident at Sea World yet another case of misplaced Christian outrage? Is it not also a case of bad hermeneutics? Using Exodus 21:28 (When an ox gores a man or woman to death, the ox shall be stoned, and its flesh shall not be eaten, but the owner shall not be liable) Brian Fischer calls for the euthanization of the animal. While I agree that it may be wise to take whatever means necessary to prevent the whale from ever killing another human, I leave the methods of such prevention up to the wisdom Sea World’s animal trainers.
I find it funny that Fischer even quotes the next verse regarding what to do if the animal kills a second time after the first incident hasn’t been dealt with: “the ox shall be stoned, and its owner also shall be put to death.” (Exodus 21:29), yet he obviously doesn’t call for the death of Sea World’s CEO.
Of course the blogs and news outlets are making fun of Fischer to no end, but could this be yet another case of Christians standing for (or against) the wrong things?