{"id":1165,"date":"2013-10-09T20:42:00","date_gmt":"2013-10-09T20:42:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/rhetoricraceandreligion\/2013\/10\/the-god-of-no-compromise-and-the-government-shutdown.html"},"modified":"2013-10-09T20:42:00","modified_gmt":"2013-10-09T20:42:00","slug":"the-god-of-no-compromise-and-the-government-shutdown","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/rhetoricraceandreligion\/2013\/10\/the-god-of-no-compromise-and-the-government-shutdown.html","title":{"rendered":"The God of No Compromise and the Government Shutdown"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>
For many of us who grew up evangelical, the word \u201ccompromise\u201d has always been a bad word. It means to allow non-Christian values and influences to corrupt your devotion to Biblical truth. Frank Schaeffer, the son of the evangelical leader who started the modern Religious Right,\u00a0claims<\/a>\u00a0that our government shutdown and its Tea Party architects cannot be understood apart from this fundamental characteristic of the evangelical ethos. Insofar as the Tea Party is an evangelical phenomenon, I think he may be right. Evangelicals are raised to be a people of no compromise. And it all starts with\u00a0an understanding of Jesus\u2019 cross that makes God into Darth Vader<\/a>\u00a0and turns us into cookie-cutter stormtroopers devoted to His imperial cause.<\/span><\/div>\n
Why did Jesus have to die for our sins on the cross? For most conservative evangelicals, that question has a very simple, straightforward answer:\u00a0because God has zero tolerance for sin.<\/em>\u00a0God is holy, and\u00a0what holiness means<\/a>\u00a0is God\u2019s\u00a0refusal to compromise<\/em>\u00a0His expectations for perfect adherence to the laws He lays out in the Bible. Since no human being other than Jesus has ever been perfectly obedient, God had to create a means by which His expectations for perfection would not be compromised by showing mercy to an imperfect people. So instead of torturing every human being forever because of their imperfection, God pours out His wrath on His own Son to show the world that He is a God of no compromise who will pour out the same wrath eternally on people who won\u2019t accept Jesus as their Lord and savior.<\/span><\/div>\n
One of my favorite movies,\u00a0The Usual Suspects<\/em>,\u00a0<\/em>is premised on a similar gesture of no compromise. The main character,\u00a0Keyser Soze<\/a>, is a Turkish gangster whose rivals kidnap his children and hold guns to their heads, demanding that he give their business to them. To show that he is a man of no compromise, Keyser Soze shoots and kills his own children rather than capitulate to their demands. Similarly, Darth Vader\u2019s uncompromising obedience to the Emperor is measured by his willingness to kill his own son Luke Skywalker. Vader\u2019s ethical system measures \u201cgood\u201d as uncompromising obedience to his master\u2019s will; it is irrelevant whether this \u201cgood\u201d harms or benefits other people.<\/span><\/div>\n
A cross whose purpose is to uphold God\u2019s uncompromising intolerance for imperfection creates a God in the image of Keyser Soze or Darth Vader, because it defines God\u2019s goodness not according to any sort of benevolence towards humanity, but as His demand for nothing less than perfect conformity to His will. In such a view, goodness is whatever God wills, as opposed to God\u2019s will being expected to reflect a goodness that could be considered independent of its association with God.<\/span><\/div>\n
Read the rest here<\/a><\/span><\/div>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For many of us who grew up evangelical, the word \u201ccompromise\u201d has always been a bad word. It means to allow non-Christian values and influences to corrupt your devotion to Biblical truth. Frank Schaeffer, the son of the evangelical leader who started the modern Religious Right,\u00a0claims\u00a0that our government shutdown and its Tea Party architects cannot […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1165","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nThe God of No Compromise and the Government Shutdown<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"For many of us who grew up evangelical, the word "compromise" has always been a bad word. 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