DJesus UnCrossed SNL Skit and the Violence of American Christianity

Warning, the following video has violent and bloody imagery. If this offends you, do not watch the SNL skit.

Many have written about this skit over the past couple of days. My view is that their reflections are suffient so I’m going to link to them.

Briefly, let me say that I believe that only in a culture dominated by the bad fruit of militant Christendom is such a skit even concievable. In many ways, this skit sadly portrays the perceptions of pop-culture about the nonchalant posture of many American Christians toward issues of violence. Christ have mercy…

David Flowers: “I believe that SNL’s portrayal of a “kick ass” Jesus is representative of the bad theology and sloppy biblical hermeneutics that’s so often prevalent among believers who have shaped for themselves an American gun-slinging Jesus—a Jesus that is unlike the Christ revealed in the Gospels.”

David Henson: “But satire reveals truths that are hard to hear. That triumphalist Savior many of us worship? He more resembles the sword and gun-toting DJesus who brings righteous vengeance than the prophetic vagabond foot-washer Jesus who preaches liberation and love of neighbor in the Gospels. The Savior we have created in our own violent images seems more like a character of a Tarantino film than the one at the heart of God’s story of eternal love.”

Heath Bradley: “The judgment that Christ brings is the penetrating message of sacrificial divine love that can leave the hardest of God’s enemies feeling “cut” to the heart. When read carefully, with attention to the details and to the central message of Rev­elation as the unveiling of the One on the throne as the Lamb that was slain (Rev 4–5), we are not forced to choose between competing concep­tions of Christ’s character. The apocalyptic Jesus is not the alter ego of the incarnational Jesus.”

WHAT OTHER RESPONSES TO “DJESUS UNCROSSED” HAVE YOU APPRECIATED? Link to them in the comments 🙂