Group items tagged

The other is if your ideology promotes some utopia

radical religions, millennial religions, radical Islam, radical forms of Christianity, that say that there’s some irredeemably evil group standing between the world and perfection: the crusaders, the infidels, the Jews, the polytheists, the nonbelievers, and so on.

The age of ideology coined the term genocide. You’ve pointed out that just because we recently invented the term doesn’t mean it didn’t happen before.

What it means is we started caring about it.

What is the “rights revolution”?

The rights revolutions are the various social changes [that are] directed largely at violence on smaller scales.

against racial minorities

women’s rights

children’s rights

gay rights

That’s exactly the point, and here’s why it should matter to Christians.

They are horrifying because they represent what ought to repulse us: the rotting decay of death. But they still walk. And, beyond that, they still crave. In their search for human brains, they are driven along by their appetites, though always under the sway of a slavemaster’s will.

That’s our story

The biblical story of the Fall of humanity is one of a humanity that comes under the sway of death by obeying the appetite.

He sentences us to the curse of death so that, ultimately, we can be redeemed.

The Gospel tells us that, apart from Christ, we were walking in the flesh, that is slavishly obeying our biological impulses and appetites without the direction of the Spirit. As such, we were “dead in trespasses and sins” (Ephesians 2:1).

This walking death, the Apostle Paul writes, was driven along as we “carried out the desires of the body and the mind” (Ephesians 2:3).

Caribbean people could resonate with the horror of zombies because they knew what it was like to be enslaved by evil people, with no hope of escape.

The Gospel doesn’t just extend our lives forever into eternity. That’s what we, left to ourselves, think we want.

Jesus points out that he wants to eternalize his present state rather than to be hidden in the life of Jesus Himself. That’s a zombie walk, and Jesus loves us too much for that.

Jesus offers instead life, and that abundantly, as we eat of His flesh, drink of His blood, share in His triumph over the accusing slavemaster.