The awareness of sin used to be our shadow. Christians hated sin, feared it, fled from it, grieved over it. Some of our grandparents agonized over their sins. A man who lost his temper might wonder whether he could still go to Holy Communion. A woman who for years envied her more attractive and intelligent sister might worry that this sin threatened her very salvation.
[Today] preachers mumble about sin. the other custodians of moral awareness often ignore, trivialize, or evade it.
–Cornelius Plantinga, Not the Way It’s Supposed to Be (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995), pp. ix-x
Saint Paul warned us to work out our salvation with fear and trembling.
There is precious little fear and trembling in today’s congregations.
Don
The cheap grace theology of the reappraisers has pretty much done away with sin, repentance, and absolution.
Not exactly, Billy. It’s just that we’ve chosen to ignore different “sins.” The reasserters ignore greed, gluttony and pride; the reappraisers ignore, perhaps, lust, sloth and maybe envy (although I think we all have to work on that one.)
But as long as we judge others, we miss the mark. Perhaps we’d all get a lot farther if we critiqued the sins of thinking we have the power of judging like Gods and cleaned up our own lives rather than always critiquing the lives of others.
Or, as H. Richard Niebuhr put it so well:
“A God without wrath brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross.”
And John, I think that both sides are guilty of often ignoring Pride. It shows no favoritism, and was the damning sin of the First Reappraiser, after all ;^).
4. Are you saying that Jesus sinned?
#4, how do you read that, Gawain?
#4 BTW, it was Bennison or someone similar who made that claim. Standard unitarian reappraiser stuff.
#3, John, while I do applaud your recognition of reappraisers ignoring sins, the one difference between the two camps is that reasserters still acknowledge that some of the things they ignore are sins. The reappraisers redefine sin so that they don’t just ignore it, they say it no more is a sin, and they now celebrate it. And I don’t disagree that we all need not to be blind to the logs in our own eyes, but we reasserters cannot ignore the radical change in the theology of our church by reappraisers – call it critiquing if you like – to do so could be to ignore both great commandments, as well as the third great commandment levied on Ascension Day (or thereabout).
“The reasserters ignore greed, gluttony and pride.”
Too bad John that you did not hear +Lawrence preach last week, he touched on pride (the great story of George Way Harley). But then I doubt you have ever darkened the doorway of a reasserter church, so how would you know?