When Churches Go Astray

Mark D. Tooley has an informative expose on the ultra-liberal National Council of Churches (NCC) proposed “Social Creed for the 21st Century.” The new creed, an updated of their 1908 one, is intended to infuse new life in an organization which is withering under the weight of its own liberalism and counter-Biblical positions.

While it is accurate to say that modern liberalism is in almost every way counter to Biblical counsel, Tooley goes on to explain why this is so, and why the vision of liberalism--and the NCC--is so flawed:

Accurately, the NCC’s new president, Archbishop Vicken Aykazian told the NCC’s General Assembly in November, “We Christians, we thought the 20th century was going to be a century of peace and prosperity, and we were wrong! … [The 20th century was] a century of bloodshed.” But the left-leaning mainline Protestants who dominate the NCC are loath to recognize the persistence of human sinfulness. Instead, they assume an array of government or multilateral initiatives, backed by the right motivations and sufficient funding, will extinguish poverty and war forever.

Now, as in 1908, the church council focuses nearly exclusively on the power of the state to impose its secularized vision of God’s Kingdom. Universal health care, more public education, more social security, redistributive tax policies, and restricted global trade. The only wars that seem to concern the NCC’s Creed writers are those waged by the U.S. That U.S. power, and not the United Nations, deters countless other wars goes unacknowledged. The role of church, family, cultural traditions, and other mediating institutions in creating a more just society are likewise and revealingly unmentioned.

This failure to recognize and acknowledge the sinful nature of man is what puts liberalism at odds with everything the Bible teaches--and at odds with how America was designed to function, since the Founders recognized man's fallen nature and worked to block it at every turn in our government.

The Bible teaches that, since the Garden of Eden and the fateful choice made by Adam and Eve to do it their way instead of God's way, humanity has been born with a sinful nature. This sinful nature means that humans are born with a predisposition to do the wrong thing, to put radical self-interest above conformity to God's character.

The only way to overcome this sinful nature is to become "born again," as Jesus put it in John chapter 3. Even then, the Christian's new born-again nature wrestles with the old sinful nature we're born with...and sin can be so attractive that we don't always allow our new nature to win.

But the failure to acknowledge this is why liberalism is an unworkable, dead-end philosophy. It assumes that if you can just remove all the negative environmental influences in the world (poverty, injustice, disease, etc.) that humans will naturally make the right choices.

The Bible says exactly the opposite, and the last century--filled with more innovation, disease-control and wealth than ever before--has proven it by being the most bloody century in human history.

The Founders of America recognized this fallen nature of man. It's why they created a Constitution to define in law our ideals and governmental parameters, set up the three-part government (executive, legislative, judicial), why they built-in checks and balances throughout our government, why they instituted federalism to share power between the central government and the states, and it's why they encouraged an informed and free citizenry. These all work together to diffuse that sinful human nature that, if concentrated in a central government, tends toward oppression.

It's why empowering government beyond its constitutional limits and making free people more dependent on government are so dangerous. This is why liberal efforts to undermine the Constitutional rule of law, the proper checks on government, and federalism all so disturb me. When we undermine these things, we undermine what makes our country work. When we undermine these things, we undermine the security of our own freedom.

And I am particularly disappointed that groups like the NCC fail to realize all this. Being Christian, having the same Bible that the rest of us have, they of all people should know this. The church is the conscience of our society; it should know better than this.

But then again, as I said before, that old fallen nature can still kick in, even among people who have a Bible. That fallen nature is what leads us away from the Bible and God's counsel, and toward the same mistake that Adam made in the Garden: I'll do it my way.

It's why, as Tooley said of the NCC, "For them, political creeds are the desired alternative."