Against the Lofty assumption that God has a "Preferential Option for the Poor"

This slogan, which seems to have first come from the lips of liberation theologian Gustavo Gutierrez, encapsulates a heretical dogma that has preferentially infected the recent church. The basic cluster of ideas:

1. God favors the poor over the rich or the suburban.

2. The poor are a modicum of God's saving revelation.

3. The poor are indeed the incarnation of God.

4. In order to be saved, you must help the poor.

5. In order to be saved, you must become poor.

And many more. It is quite obvious that where one of these tenets is present, the other do not naturally follow. I lump them together merely to show the basic conduits of what we are dealing with in the so-called theologies of the poor.

My solid conviction is that these concepts are not only utterly false and silly, they are poisonous to the gospel of God's grace. They have as little to do with scripture as arianism or pelagianism, although like arianism and pelagianism they claim scripture as their presupposition.

Hopefully my own interest in this stupidity will carry out long enough for me to post a series of arguments against God having a preferential option for the poor. If this happens, and if God grants me strength and wisdom, I should like to defend the scriptural truth that "there is no favoritism" with Christ (Col. 3:25). This is neither an isolated proposition nor a proof text, but the very life blood of God's dealings with mankind. I believe that its message can be found all across the pages of scripture.

The Word of God in Ecclesiastes, for the church?

"As a man comes, so he departs, and what does he gain, since he toils for the wind? All his days he eats in darkness, with great frustration, affliction and anger."  (Ecc.5:16)

There can be little doubt that Ecclesiastes is indeed the eternal Word of God. It comes from the mouth of God just as Deuteronomy comes from the mouth of God, just as Romans and John 3:16 and Galatians 3:28 comes from the mouth of God.

Therefore, we have here, in the solid declaration of the meaninglessness, worthlessness, absurdity, and vacuity of everything which makes up life not first the results of one ancient near eastern philosopher's study but The Revelation of God. That life is meaningless is not something we can subject to debate or denial, for we are immediately thrust in this matter towards confesson or denial of the Word of God. To say that life has meaning is to deny God.

Back to Blogging.

I've been away for awhile yada yada boom shalakalak. Gained new experience, new wisdom, and with it new pessimism. Nonetheless, charity would have me continue to blog to my audience in the heavenlies, because talking to oneself is only interesting part of the time.

A New prayer of consecration for this summer:

Dear Father,

When we said that we were rogues, we had no idea just how roguish we really were. Please continue to have mercy on us, and hear us for the sake of Jesus' worth. Amen.

Is the person of Christ a moral example to humanity?

Who knows....

First we would have to define morality. And then we would have to ask how far we have succeeded in evading the charge of imposing a secular definition of said concept onto the Divine perogative.

"Why do you ask me about what is good?" Jesus replied. (Matthew 19:17)

Such was the question that Jesus posed to a man who kept the law quite flawlessly from his childhood up. I believe that its appearance in the gospel signifies that we are to put the question to ourselves as well. Why do we ask Jesus about what is good? Do we have a clue what we mean by such a term? And if we did, would we not immediately ascribe glory to God alone, as Jesus did, rather than placing humans on the footing that was never claimed for them?

Faith in propositions.

It has often been said that Christians do not believe in any one proposition in order to be saved. They believe rather in a person (the heresy of so-called Christian monotheism suggests belief in God through Jesus). Some imply belief in a narrative; God's narrative of His saving deeds in Israel and Christ.

The sacred scripture of John speaks otherwise. It says: "But these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name" (20:31; cf. 1 Jn.5:1).

To believe that Jesus is the Christ is to believe in a proposition about said person. Propositions are declarative or textually stated facts about an entity. Actually, the saying "Jesus is the Christ" meets the criterion of any definition one may propose for the word proposition. And we are told by the scriptures to set our faith in this fact.

The problem with turning faith into a human achievement.

To even make faith a sort of disposition that is required (a feeling, a cognitive awareness, a self-understanding, a longing, a desire) is problematic in that, however minute and simple, however easy, the very fact that it is found in you makes it questionable. "Faith is uncertain," Luther once said, and his diatribes against the same have gone scarcely noticed by theologians today. The matter becomes wholly relative; a sort of gaseous pathogen that flits from one portion of the human construct to another, always escaping the gaze or, if caught, evaporating.

Barth once called faith a pure negation, a pure lack, a vacuum. He was right, and right also to immediately speak against turning this into a human thing. Faith is not a human thing. It is in us, but we cannot locate it or describe it. It is in us, but there is no part of it to which we are attached. We cannot say that we have it, yet a paradox forms in the epiphenomenon of assurance and joy. How can these things come if one does not know faith? Justifying faith! Yet as soon as we return to our self-reflection, the despair returns. Human achievements work despair alone.

What theological era are we in currently?

If I can compare it to anything, it would be that of the age of Medieval Scholasticism. Instead of reading and expositing the scriptures, theologians content themselves with the writings of Karl Barth or the modern church fathers (Bonhoeffer, Troeltsch, Yoder, Schleiermacher, Tillich etc...). Does anyone not see in this a stunning analogue to the days where the prime task of a theologian was to comment on Peter Lombard's Sentences?