Time to Dump Counterfeit Christians

You may have heard the phrase “The Emerging Church” tossed around. It’s the latest thing, the new buzz, though its roots likely go back to Christian writers of the mid-20th century like Paul Tillich. It is a way of being Christian that is at the same time more spiritual and more thoughtful than what passes as Christianity in America today.
Marcus Borg, a professor at Oregon State University and a leader in the emerging church movement, likes to talk in terms of paradigms. A paradigm is simply a basic way of seeing things, a matrix from which understanding comes. For example, in the world of astronomy before Copernicus and Galileo, a paradigm prevailed that said the earth was at the center of the universe with the sun and stars revolving around. It was completely wrong but it worked. Sailors studied the “movement” of the sun and stars, charted the patterns and sailed their ships by what they saw. Even though the original assumption was incorrect, ships got where they were going.
The church and Christianity over the centuries have created their own paradigms. In the first, what started out as a counter-culture movement was sucked into complicity with secular society. A good example would be the Holy Roman Empire. Another would be the way in recent years that the conservative church has intertwined its interests with those of America’s conservative leaders.
As an adjunct to this, the church, and I include mainline Protestants in this, has exchanged Jesus’ dynamic spiritualism and radical politics for a system of beliefs that converts Christianity from a heart faith to a head faith. The head is happy with knowledge while the heart wants wisdom. Better to keep the heart out of it and stick to simple formulas the head can handle. So, what makes one a Christian? Well, do you believe that Jesus is the only son of God, died for our sins, rose from the dead, ascended into heaven and will come again? If so, eternity is yours. Believing is more important than being. Faith means accepting these facts rather than living as if we believe in our hearts that God intended us for a life of compassion, justice and mercy. Entering the “kingdom of God” is put off until after we die.
If we Christians had not lived with this counterfeit paradigm for the past 2,000 years the world might be a very different place. But it was never likely to happen. Few have the stomach for what Jesus asks of us. For those who do, the kingdom can be now.