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As for power and politics,
one of my favorite lines from Jesus
is when he was doing a meandering teaching – healing tour on the way to Jerusalem for the last time. Religious authorities, harassing him, suggested he go into hiding because “Herod is looking for you”. (Herod the non-Roman ruler under the Roman thumb, was not known for excercising democratic or humanitarian procedures very regularly.) Jesus says, in effect, “Go tell that skulking predator where I am, and what my agenda and schedule are. Don’t forget to mention that I’ll be in Jerusalem in three days”.
That’s not the response of a man cowed by authority religious or political.
But “the common people heard him gladly,”
and he saw and heard them gladly, and loved them deeply, and served them any way he could. Is that liberal? Probably. He was very liberal in his remarks about wealth and power (critical of the misevaluation and misuse of those gifts), and very conservative in refusing to advocate any kind of overt rebellion.
He was very conservative in his love for God, Temple, and the Scriptures, and very liberal in his willingness to critique the use of those things, and to be misinterpreted as disrespecting those things — and in his readiness to get kicked out of synagogue for speaking what he saw in the Scriptures and in the world around him, no matter the situation or the “gravity” of those present.
So Liberal and Conservative are probably the wrong parameters.
But it’s a very valuable and stimulating question.
Is Jesus a Republican? Would he be a Democrat OR Republican today? Well, it’s VERY hard for me to imagine him being associated with today’s machiavellian Republican party, and not easy to imagine him being officially associated with the [greedy, manipulative – 2017] Democrats. In his day he would not even take a political stance against Herod, Pilate, or Ceasar. But he undermined all of them AND the religious establishment by his clearly emphasized moral priorities.
Jesus rebuked the hyppcriates and the leaders, he sat with the murederor and the harlot and the thief. The ones he condemnd are the self-righteous, and those people of the church that spread hate. God Said for us to show liberality to all. The pharisees are the republcians of this day and age. God loves homosexuals, as much as he loves any other sinner. He says that not one of us our worthy, Keep casting the first stones, We will see who Christ sides with. Jesus was a liberal, and he taught love. But you are the ones who re-wrote the bible, to say God so loved the straights, that he gave his only son. Remove the mote from your own eyes you blind leaders of the blind!
The reality is that Liberals are not hypocrits about supporting Abortion, Homosexuality …while Republicans are …Republicans leaders also support abortion and homosexuality…they are just hypocrits about it .
Jesus was against hypocresy. They claim only to be against those issues in order to gain votes of Christians, but actually when their turn in gov they have not done anything about it.
Take the dont tell rule in the Army …is just about not telling who you really are, and not about getting rid of homosexuals.
Also Homosexuality is the same kind SIN that any other sexual inmorality.like Adultery, Fornication or any Sexual aberration …many of which are abudant in all Parties.
can you really hate the sin and not the sinner?
This is a great post. The comments must also be found thought provoking by most who read and consider them. On the Real Liberal Christian Church website (realliberalchristianchurch.org), you will find that I’ve written extensively about self-styled conservative-Republican Christians and others who mistakenly believe themselves to be followers of Jesus. You will find that I refer to Jesus as a small-c communist — not to be confused with the one-party dictatorship under Marxism-Leninism. The difference lies in Jesus’s anti-coercion and spirituality. Marx and Lenin were, of course, highly coercive (violent, even deadly). In addition, they were what is termed materialists — disbelievers in spirit in the sense in which Jesus means the term “spirit.�
You will find that I’ve explained and documented the textual foundation for this position. Even the very name of our Church is intentionally designed to cause one to remember the proper meaning of the words. You will see that our header contains the verse, “The vile person shall be no more called liberal, nor the churl said to be bountiful.� — Isaiah 32:5. That verse is interpreted on the site. Its prophetic importance is also explained.
Please come visit and feel free to leave your comments. This subject matter, covered here and on the Real Liberal Christian Church site, is of critical importance and needs to become common knowledge. It needs to come to be on the minds and in the hearts of every soul on Earth. Then God will amaze the whole of humanity.
God bless everyone.
Tom Usher
Actually, I am IN FAVOR of ordering monogamous, persistent homosexual relations by way of some legal device of “civil union�. But I am also in favor of preserving the centuries-old tradition of the (formerly) Christian nations to differentiate this from “matrimony�. And I am finally believing in the right of anyone who sees it this way (esp. the churches) to profess that this way of living is an “abnormity�, is against God’s will or even (if they please to call it that way) is a “perversity�, a sin provoking God’s general vindication.
I plead for upholding these rights – apart from being just quaint enough to take free speech seriously – from a conservative streak of caution, because it appears to me that those progressives who counsel ‘take it easy’ against the shift in the moral fabric of society which they are busy exerting by their advocated course of annihilating the legal/societal acknowledgment of the (somewhat, profoundly) different typology of male vs. female personality and behavior (and let’s say it plain, the whole issue of homosexual rights is but one of the many faces of this secular-emancipative hobby horse, which is a great error, and very anti-human), – I am not so sure at all that these progressives do not make us empty promises. They cannot guarantee that treating as the same what is very different, here the germ of a family, there an (intrinsically more promiscuity-prone, …) homosexual association, will have no negative consequences, e.g., for children adopted.
That being said, of course, it were utterly beside the point to suspect God to “dismiss a love between two people merely because they happened to be of the same sex�. What makes you suspect us doing so?
It just happens to be that the (responsible) heterosexual relationship (i.e., a marriage), naturally, intuitively (and, esp., NOT just owing to the ingrown prejudices of society) holds out more suggestion to the insight (lost upon some, certainly not all, homosexual ones!) that love is more than sex.
Are you genuinely not seeing this difference? To me (heterosexual, but sole), even in anticipation, it is very present in my mind that the kind of intimate relation I would care for would have to be a thing very much different from a standing appointment to mutual masturbation.
(And to put this out of doubt, let me add that I am very positive about sex, including some “unconventional formsâ€?. Nobody will see me squinting into bedrooms. They can even make their appointments in public toilets, – if they like to degrade themselves sufficiently. I never felt the slightest streak of grudge against other people’s orgasm; it is by wishing they/we enjoy it, truly and fully enjoyed it, that I say we should accept the natural framework, as viewed by Christian faith. These bounds of faith and nature are not where Puritan utilitarianism fantasized them to be. Yet no less confused are today’s ‘gender mainstream’ers.)