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<\/a><\/p>\nIn recent months, maybe years, I\u2019ve noticed an upswell of blogs, blowhards, ministries, and demagogues dedicated to defending the faith, absolute truth, Christian values, even God.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve also noticed that the absolute truth being defended often looks conspicuously like a political party platform and the defended gospel, a lot like theological systems invented more than a millennium after Jesus walked the earth.<\/p>\n
Nevertheless, these campaigns are taken up with unbridled religious fervor as if the fate of all humanity rested on the rhetoric of the righteous.<\/p>\n
If you find yourself in the ideological trenches, spending all your time and energy fighting off the heretics and the godless, as if you and your fellow prophets are the last light of truth in a world of darkness, I urge you to recall the words of God spoken through Isaiah and know this.<\/p>\n
You\u2019re defending the wrong thing.<\/p>\n
When you come to appear before me,
\nwho asked this from your hand?<\/p>\nTrample my courts no more;
\nbringing offerings is futile;
\nincense is an abomination to me.<\/p>\nNew moon and sabbath and calling of convocation\u2014
\nI cannot endure solemn assemblies with iniquity.
\nYour new moons and your appointed festivals
\nmy soul hates;
\nthey have become a burden to me,
\nI am weary of bearing them.<\/p>\nWhen you stretch out your hands,
\nI will hide my eyes from you;
\neven though you make many prayers,
\nI will not listen;
\nyour hands are full of blood.<\/p>\nWash yourselves; make yourselves clean;
\nremove the evil of your doings
\nfrom before my eyes;
\ncease to do evil,
\nlearn to do good;
\nseek justice,
\nrescue the oppressed,
\ndefend the orphan,
\nplead for the widow.<\/p><\/blockquote>\nThis is what, or rather who, we should be defending.<\/p>\n
The orphan.<\/p>\n
The widow.<\/p>\n
The oppressed.<\/p>\n
The least of these right outside our door.<\/p>\n
But like the Israel of Isaiah\u2019s day, we suffer from an idolatry of faith that values theology and tradition more than people. We\u2019re plagued by an idolatrous obsession over ideas that\u2019s driven by a unquenchable need for control, a paranoid fear of the other, intense personal insecurity, and a pathological need to be right and have others recognize that we\u2019re right.<\/p>\n
But the gospel isn\u2019t about absolute truth.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s about absolute love.<\/p>\n
Yes, I know that 1 Peter 3 (and a handful of other New Testament passages) talks about defending the faith \u201cto anyone who asks for a reason for the hope that is in you,\u201d but we need to remember how Jesus went about doing the work of mounting a hopeful defense. It wasn\u2019t through long sustained debates with the Pharisees and Sadducees and Teachers of the Law every time they cornered him with questions. In fact, most of the time, he dodged their questions altogether.<\/p>\n
Jesus mounted a hopeful defense by incarnating the gospel.<\/p>\n
By standing between the persecutors and the persecuted, by fellowshipping with the ostracized, by embracing the outcast, and by defending the least of these.<\/p>\n
You see, if we could temper our religious fury for a moment, unclinch our fists, open our eyes, and look around we would see that we\u2019re just preaching to the choir. Those supportive comments and thousands of Facebook shares and roaring amens? They\u2019re not coming from the newly convinced or from those on the outside eager to hear more.<\/p>\n
They\u2019re coming from the people sitting in the pew next to us at church.<\/p>\n
It only seems like a loud chorus because we\u2019re preaching in an echo chamber.<\/p>\n
As passionate as we might be about defense of the faith and absolute truth, people aren\u2019t dropping their nets to follow our demagogy.<\/p>\n
They\u2019re not inspired by our denunciations of everyone but ourselves.<\/p>\n
Nor are they moved by our refusal to listen to others or ever admit we were wrong.<\/p>\n
In fact, these things are at the very heart of why the church is hemorrhaging people.<\/p>\n
We\u2019ve been asked for a reason for the hope that is in us, but instead of incarnating that hope through acts of love for those in need, we offer compassionless rhetoric and a sales pitch.<\/p>\n
And so people leave and search for hope elsewhere.<\/p>\n
There is a place for defending the faith with our words, but the best apologetics are lived, not ranted.<\/p>\n
Which is why we need to talk less and love more.<\/p>\n
Otherwise, the ones who need to gospel the most, won\u2019t be listening to what we have to say.<\/p>\n
And, according to Isaiah, neither will God.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
Grace and peace,<\/p>\n
Zack Hunt<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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