Wednesday, November 16, 2016

"Prophets of Doom" and a Faith That Operates Through Love

I spent a few days glued to "The Prophets of Doom" episode of Dan Carlin's Hardcore History podcast. Carlin opens the podcast by apologizing to everyone that he is going to offend in his attempt to tell the story of the Münster Rebellion of 1534-1535. That list included both  the religious and atheists. It's that powerful of a story.

I highly recommend the podcast to anyone who can stand a little gore and isn't afraid to plumb the depths of religious violence and Christianity. The story begins relatively quietly as a militant strand of the persecuted Anabaptist Christian religious minority takes over the town from the Catholic Prince Bishop and and the Lutheran City Council that had been in charge.

The roots of this Anabaptist movement include powerful concepts that have reverberated through history like the equality between human beings, a more modern view of marital relations, adult baptism, and the communal ownership of property. The rebellion eventually devolved into delusional religious fervor, murder, polygamy, starvation, and cannibalism. Every side committed violence that we would now consider war crimes. If you're not into podcasts, you can read a full description of the siege on the All Empires website.

I don't know what the next version of the "Doomsday Prophets" will be, but their arrival is as inevitable as winter snow on the Rockies. However, the spectrum of this issue doesn't just include "Doomsday Prophets." How many churches are classified as hate groups? How many churches are more easily identified by the people they don't like rather than the people they love?

While Münster's "Prophets of Doom" bring up a lot of interesting psychological and sociological questions, the one that I think is most important to the modern day religious reader is how to we ensure that we do not inadvertently travel down the same twisting but well-worn path that turns a good religious faith into something evil.

I think that the answer is that your faith must operate through love. Charitable love must be your faith's connection to other human beings. For Christians, any other connection between your faith and others risks defying Jesus's clear mandate, “Do not judge, or you too will be judged. For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you." Matthew 7:1-2.

Beyond the danger of losing salvation through judging others harshly, the Christian theological basis for having your faith operate through love is summed up in Matthew 22:34-40. In that passage, a Pharisee lawyer asked Jesus, "Teacher, what is the greatest commandment under the law."

Jesus replied: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”

As Christians, we must constantly evaluate our faith and our actions against those two commandments. That is as close as we can come to inoculating our faith against becoming exactly the opposite of what it should be.j

p.s. Here is another "Running with the Current" video.





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