Thursday, September 2, 2010

“To be this gullible, American Christians have had to endure years of vacuous talk"

Prominent Souther Baptists criticize Glen "Elmer Gantry" Beck: [“What concerns me here is not what this says about Beck or the ‘Tea Party’ or any other entertainment or political figure. What concerns me is about what this says about the Christian churches in the United States,” said {Russell} Moore, dean of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, in an Aug. 29 post on his blog, "Moore to the Point."


“It’s taken us a long time to get here, in this plummet from Francis Schaeffer to Glenn Beck,” Moore continued, referring to the late evangelical theologian many consider the intellectual father of the Religious Right. “In order to be this gullible, American Christians have had to endure years of vacuous talk about undefined ‘revival’ and ‘turning America back to God’ that was less about anything uniquely Christian than about, at best, a generically theistic civil religion and, at worst, some partisan political movement.”

Meanwhile, {Robert} Parham, in a commentary for the Newsweek/Washington Post “On Faith” website, said Beck had used the rally to fabricate “a pottage of civil religion that says America has a divine destiny and claiming that a national revival is beginning."

He observed that Beck referred to American founding documents such as the Constitution and the Gettysburg Address as if they were as divinely inspired as Scripture itself.

“What is important to Beck is belief in God -- God generically -- not a specific understanding of God revealed in the biblical witness, but God who appears in nature and from which one draws universal truths,” Parham said. “Not surprisingly, Beck only uses the Bible to point toward the idea of a God-generic. He does not listen to the God of the Bible who calls for the practice of social justice, the pursuit of peacemaking, the protection of the poor in the formation of community. Beck has little room for God's warning about national idolatry and rejection of fabricated religion.”] (emphasis added)

Nuff said.

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