Christianity Without Christ?

There's a very insightful article by Joseph Loconte at Virtue Online, "The Voice for Global Orthodox Anglicanism." The title is, interestingly and aptly, something which plagues our modern world: "Christianity Without Salvation."

The piece examines how some in Christendom were and are misled by the rise of the "Social Gospel."

Richard Niebuhr called this "cultural Christianity," i.e., re-imagining the gospel according to secular nostrums about the march of human progress.

As such, Rauschenbusch's gospel had little need of a Savior. It merely displaced the problem of evil--the supreme tragedy of the human soul in rebellion against God--with the challenge of social iniquities. The Kingdom of Heaven would come soon enough, if only we put our hands to the plow.

Perhaps this earth-bound emphasis explains the social gospel's naïve embrace of morally dubious causes, including eugenics and abortion. We underwrite modern social programs with similar illusions about human nature. Thus drug "maintenance" programs, to take but one example, leave the scourge of addiction largely untouched because they do not address its moral and spiritual causes.

This sheds some insight on why Leftist don't see killing an unborn child as "evil," yet become morally indignant at the perception that homosexuals are being denied a "right" to sodomize one another and have the rest of society smile upon that behavior.

In the theology of Social Gospel disciples, what God says is right or wrong is less important than pursuing a transient concept of "social justice" that, like Marxism, moves and changes based on the perceived needs of those with the most power.

He also gets to the crux of why the pablum of Leftist so-called "Christians" is so bad:

It is hard to see, though, how Rauschenbusch's theology could be called Christian in any meaningful sense of the term. It required no repentance or atonement and carried no fear of judgment or bracing hope of eternal life.

Something which calls itself Christianity but is more concerned with Marxist causes than with obeying and fulfilling the commandments of God is not only a deceptive distraction, but ends up leading its disciples and many others down the same dead-end street that secular Marxists travel.

Christianity that does not hold central the redemptive power of unconditional repentance for sin, and the saving grace of Jesus Christ's "new birth" is not Christianity at all.