[On Jesus' rebuke of Peter] You can confess all the right words with a heart full of love for an alternative Christ, and be the mouthpiece of Satan. Seminary attempts to fill you with all the right words, and you are daily tempted to take them over, run them the way you figure they ought to be run. They aren't your words to run as you may wish to make them run. They are Christ's words, and He runs them as the Christ, the Son of the Living God, who goes to Calvary, identified as the Suffering Servant who makes Himself a sacrifice for sin. Yours, too - all of them. Even your satanic attempts to commandeer Him. That, too, and especially that, He would bring you to repentance of. -- Dr. Norman Nagel, Selected Sermons, p. 262.
Would you classify as mouthpieces for Satan those who defended the institution of slavery on the bases of Scripture and traditional Christian teaching? That includes Bishop John Henry Hopkins, who in 1864, one year after the Emancipation Proclamation, published a 300 page book doing just that. How about those true believers who opposed the granting of the vote to women in 1920 and continue to oppose the ordination of women on Biblical bases? Current discussions about what is or is not spoken of in the Bible, but not ever by Christ, could fall in the same category: the category of something that Christ would be in favor of, but we frail human beings have yet to learn. Ought to give pause to those whose condemnations are based so firmly on "traditional teaching passed down through the centuries." Doesn't, but ought to.
ReplyDeleteOh, I'm not so sure. Our Lord HAS spoken through His Apostle a very clear word regarding women and the ministry of teaching/preaching the Gospel. As to slavery, the cool thing is how Christianity destroys it from the inside out: "for the slave is our brother" as the carol has it.
ReplyDeleteP.S. The great thing in Nagel's sermon is how he shows that a Jesus who is other than the Jesus on the way to the Cross to suffer and die for the world's sins - that is the Jesus Satan would push.
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