A God without wrath brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross.
H. Richard Niebuhr in 1937 commenting on the Social Gospel.
The thing to do is to get a man at first to value social justice as a thing which the Enemy demands, and then work him on to the stage at which he values Christianity because it may produce social justice. For the Enemy will not be used as a convenience. Men or nations who think they can revive the Faith in order to make a good society might just as well think they can use the stairs of Heaven as a short cut to the nearest chemist’s shop. Fortunately it is quite easy to coax humans round this little corner. Only today I have found a passage in a Christian writer where he recommends his own version of Christianity on the ground that “only such a faith can outlast the death of old cultures and the birth of new civilisations”. You see the little rift? “Believe this, not because it is true, but for some other reason.” That’s the game.
CS Lewis, The Screwtape Letters
Liberal Christianity is where Christianity goes to die. More on this tomorrow in the next installment of PopeWatch.
Who was it said that the preaching of the Harvard Divinity School was limited to the fatherhood of God, the brotherhood of man and the neighbourhood of Boston?
🙂
“A God without wrath…”
Thank you. Yes, I’m Crawling out from under a rock. H. Richard Neibuhr hits a world class homerun. Thanks agian for this introduction.
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Folks at my old parish were well into the stage of valuing their faith “because it may produce social justice.” Or, immanence. The certainty that when you die you are no more. You only transcend while you live and work for “social justice” as a member of the Body of Christ.
I keep hoping Pope Francis will come out in favor of Heaven.
Every person has a vocation, a call from God, to be who he must be. Every man who is called to be a priest by God ought to respond by becoming a priest. No woman has come forth claiming a vocation, a call from God, to the priesthood. Therefore, the demands of the LCWR for a vocation, a call from God, to the priesthood is not being obeyed by the bishops. Sadly, only belief in the Immaculate Conception of Our Lady, the Blessed Virgin Mary, will bring understanding of our own conception as innocent sovereign persons in the womb of our mothers. If these women weren’t so mean, I would be embarrassed for them. The fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse, unbridled ignorance, rides again.
I wonder if they have read, or believe, the messages from La Salette, Fatima, Garabandal, and Akita?
My guess is that they would say they’re from the devil – if they believe in him.
Mgr Ronald Knox has a rather good description of the kind of religion Niebuhr pilloried and which he was expected to teach, as an Anglican schoolmaster.
“I think, then, it should be said at the outset that public [i.e. English private boarding-schools] schools are trying to teach the sons of gentlemen a religion in which their mothers believe, and their fathers would like to: a religion without ” enthusiasm ” in the old sense, reserved in its self-expression, calculated to reinforce morality, chivalry, and the sense of truth, providing comfort in times of distress and a glow of contentment in declining years; supernatural in its nominal doctrines, yet, on the whole, rationalistic in its mode of approaching God: tolerant of other people’s tenets, yet sincere about its own, regular in church-going, generous to charities, ready to put up with the defects of the local clergyman.”
Archbishop Fulton Sheen; “If God wanted women in His priesthood then He would of made Mary the Blessed Virgin to have been the first.”
“If God wanted a person to become a priest, God would have created that person a man” Mother Angelica
If Man wanted to become God, he (man) would call himself liberal.