I received a Christmas email from an innovative ministry providing rugged, affordable transportation to impoverished people in the boonies of Africa and elsewhere.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n
I fully support the organization, but I cringed at their Christmas theology:<\/p>\n\n\n
Merry Christmas!\u00a0 Do you know the completion of the Christmas Story? It involves transportation.\u00a0<\/i><\/p>\n\n\n
Jesus is coming back. He will come on the clouds, a unique form of transport.\u00a0<\/i><\/p>\n\n\n
When I\u2019m asked \u201cWhat is the most affordable transportation in the universe?\u201d I say it’s the supernatural trip to heaven. If you believe Jesus died for your sins and that he is your Lord and Savior, you receive a spot on that heaven-bound, soul train.\u00a0<\/i><\/p>\n\n\n
This is an anemic understanding of the gospel.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n
Dictionary.com defines “anemic” as “lacking power, vigor, vitality, or colorfulness; listless; weak”.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n
In other words, it’s not as healthy as it needs to be.<\/p>\n\n\n
Here are the main problems:<\/p>\n\n\n
1) It implies that faith is primarily a matter of giving mental assent to propositional truths.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n
2) It’s very transactional: believe this and receive that.<\/p>\n\n\n
3) It makes Christianity out to be an escape from this world. (The book of Revelation makes it clear that we don’t get whisked off to heaven in the end. Heaven is brought down to a renewed earth. We stay put.)<\/p>\n\n\n
In other words, it is a pretty good summary of most Americans’ understanding of the gospel.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I received a Christmas email from an innovative ministry providing rugged, affordable transportation to impoverished people in the boonies of Africa and elsewhere.\u00a0 I fully support the organization, but I cringed at their Christmas theology: Merry Christmas!\u00a0 Do you know the completion of the Christmas Story? It involves transportation.\u00a0 Jesus is coming back. He will […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[92,95,23,150],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8124","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-anemic-faith","category-death","category-gospel","category-heaven"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8124","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8124"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8124\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8125,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8124\/revisions\/8125"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8124"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8124"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8124"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}