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Jesus, Love, and Chick-fil-A: JP Moreland Responds to Matthew Paul Turner

So are Christians unloving if they supported Chick-fil-A day or stood up for free-speech and religious liberty? Did Christians fail miserably as Christ’s ambassadors earlier this week? Mathew Paul Turner seems to think so. But his well-intentioned post is misguided. Dr. J.P. Moreland provides clear thinking on these issues and responds to Turner’s post, point by point:

Point #1:

Yesterday’s campaign, while I don’t think it should be considered or called “hate,” neither can it be called love. Christians all over America ignored the second greatest commandment: to love our neighbors. Call yesterday what you want, freedom of speech, a rally behind “family values,” a sincere fascination with CFA’s brand of fried poultry…but it cannot be called love. It was not love.

RESPONSE

Here Matthew confuses standing against an issue with loving the people who engage in the issue.  We should stand against abortion, but still love people who get them.  We should stand against opponents of free speech and advocates of gay marriage, but also love individual homosexuals.  So he confuses a macro-issue (the issue of marriage and free speech) with a micro-issue.   Moreover, he also seems to think that love cannot be tough.  Sometimes the best thing you can do to love someone is to confront strongly their harmful, immoral behavior. So even in with regard to the micro-issue (involving a specific person) it is the right thing, given an adequate relational context, to say that their homosexual behavior is deeply immoral, their desire for marriage to be re-defined is contrary to Scripture and the natural law, and it will harm society significantly, and their desire to have political censorship brought against CFA is egregious.

POINT #2

People felt hate and we ignored that. At the end of the day, regardless of whether or not your Christian understanding of scripture harbors hate or not, a large group of people felt hated. Again, we can debate this point all day long, but that does not change the fact that people felt hatred because of what happened yesterday. Whether or not hate actually existed is not the point, people felt hated. And rather than acknowledging those feelings or trying to understand or engage them in any way, Christians everywhere marched off to their local CFA like it was a cross to bear, a necessity, a battle cry of some sort, the waffle fry’s last stand.

RESPONSE

Regarding his point about people feeling hate, this is the other side’s issue, not ours, and to be quite honest, they may need to search more deeply within themselves if they, in fact, felt hated.  Very few went to CFA with hate; they were angry about the other side’s hate, but they were not hateful.  Matthew confused hate with the hard virtues of confrontation of moral evil and standing for what is right, and he confuses real hate with the feeling of hate.  The feeling of hate was not the protester’s fault; it was a projection of the other side onto the protesters and probably reveals a need to be more discerning about those who disagree with you and not to react emotionally.  Such an emotional reaction is often narcissistic (I and my feelings of acceptance are all that matter; the issue, and people’s right to disagree with me are not the issue).

Point #3:

By rallying behind CFA, Christians put an issue above people. And it’s impossible to follow Jesus when issues trump people. Jesus never said “love God, love causes.” That is not the message that gets preached in churches all over America on Sunday mornings. I’ve heard a hundred different explanations from patrons of yesterday’s rally and nearly every one of them gives precedence to “the cause”. We can’t embrace love, mercy, hope, and peace when our causes (or a place of business) trumps people.

RESPONSE

Regarding the point of putting an issue above people, this is hopelessly misguided.  How can you even know, love and care for people without truth and knowing “issues (alleged truths) about people and how they think?  One of the most loving things one can do to someone is to stand up against their harmful behavior.
Also, how about loving the CFA people and all those on their side?  Don’t they need love, mercy and support?  Yes they do, and people chose to express that love and respect
Wednesday.  That was a very Christian thing to do.
You can read points 4 & 5 by visiting J.P. Moreland’s excellent site here.
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I, Smartphone and the Common Good (Video)

This is a creative way to communicate a very important truth if we care about serving and loving our neighbors (locally and globally).

“There are five primary lessons that we can learn from this video…

  • Markets bring people together without any one person in charge.
  • No one person has enough knowledge to create the things we use every day.
  • Markets allow people to use their gifts to serve others.
  • Each one of us has a role in serving the common good.
  • The innovations which markets bring can benefit all society.

We believe that how and why we work is directly connected to overall stewardship. God has gifted us with scarce resources in our mental capacities, our skills and talents, and our physical resources. Understanding how markets help us to best harness those scare resources for the common good is critical.

There are two other important implications from this video:

  1. Markets are the best form of global poverty alleviation known to date. Allowing markets to operate across the globe in the 20th and 21st centuries has lifted millions if not billions out of poverty. According to the World Bank, embracing market reforms has helped lift 400 million people out of abject poverty in China alone, because people were allowed to work. For most of us, our work takes place within the market setting, so markets are critical for allowing people to use their talents.
  2. Markets embrace the dignity inherent in our creation by allowing us to unleash our creativity. Markets allow us to be innovators, to take risks on ideas, to be entrepreneurial. Markets have made it possible for us to have electricity, air travel, indoor plumbing and even the smartphone. Those creative innovations, through the market, can make our lives easier, more efficient and less costly.”

For more see this excellent website. (IFWE)

To read my interview with Institute for Faith, Work & Economics fellow Dr. Jay Richards on economics and Christianity see my book Think Christianly: Looking at the Intersection of Faith and Culture.

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Only Science Can Save Us?

“Beloved for his Narnian tales for children and his books of Christian apologetics for adults, best-selling British writer C.S. Lewis also was a perceptive critic of the growing power of scientism in modern society, the misguided effort to apply science to areas outside its proper bounds.

In a new book, The Magician’s Twin: C.S. Lewis on Science, Scientism, and Society edited by CSC Senior Fellow John West, contemporary writers probe Lewis’s prophetic warnings about the dehumanizing impact of scientism. The CSC has also produced a short documentary film, The Magician’s Twin: C.S. Lewis and the Challenge of Scientism, which highlights some of the themes developed in the book.”

Coming this fall…

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C’mon…it’s just the internet right?

Information is not neutral and neither is the technology used to convey it. Please don’t be a passive consumer. (Romans 12:1-2)

“The brains of Internet addicts, it turns out, look like the brains of drug and alcohol addicts. In a study published in January, Chinese researchers found ‘abnormal white matter’—essentially extra nerve cells built for speed—in the areas charged with attention, control, and executive function. A parallel study found similar changes in the brains of videogame addicts. And both studies come on the heels of other Chinese results that link Internet addiction to ‘structural abnormalities in gray matter,’ namely shrinkage of 10 to 20 percent in the area of the brain responsible for processing of speech, memory, motor control, emotion, sensory, and other information. And worse, the shrinkage never stopped: the more time online, the more the brain showed signs of ‘atrophy.’ … And don’t kid yourself: the gap between an ‘Internet addict’ and John Q. Public is thin to nonexistent.” – Read the rest at Newsweek

H/T – Plugged in Online

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