The Christian Left
I reviewed Opie's post from earlier today and surfed the Christians for Progress website. All I can see in the website is that Christ was a socialist revolutionary, but I never saw that anywhere in Scripture. This is just another political movement using Christ as a disguise, just as some unfortunate parts of the Christian Right do. Pure nonsense, and blasphemous too, really.
As I understand it, the whole point was that He was a major disappointment as a political Messiah. Many of His followers who threw palm leaves on the path to Jerusalem hoped he was coming to remove the imperial Romans. But He was a Messiah of the spirit, humbly inviting us to enter the true eternal kingdom, not the kingdom of man but the Kingdom of God, which transcends earthly concerns. Did He not invite us to abandon worldly concerns - including our families and farms and fishing boats and possessions - and to worry about our souls and to put our faith in God - not man - and to follow Him towards a life abundant in spirit, and eternal? And does that not require a scary leap of faith, to trust something other than ourselves? Or did I miss something in Sunday School? I am not a man of deep faith, and I am overly consumed by earthly and vain pleasures, but I do have a brain, of sorts.
Comment from The Dylanologist:
Additionally, for anyone to call any part of Christ's ministry "social criticism" is historically inaccurate, as the very conception of a "social order" did not really exist in the common consciousness until the French Revolution or even later (I would argue anyways). Of course, different social classes did exist at the time and certainly people were aware of their station in life, but the idea that "all men are created equal" would have been unthinkable and indeed incomprehensible to anyone alive in 30 AD. In any case, Christ was not arguing for the the human or civil rights of each individual (and probably wouldn't have greatly cared about such things anyways), but rather for the equal potential of each human being to attain salvation through faith in Him. The point being that once one has accepted Christ into his heart, class, income, race, sex etc. become mere incidental factors, irrelevant to one's ultimate fate. To argue that Christ ever intended his teachings to be a form of social rebellion thus misses the point of his entire ministry.
