After dealing with them lo these many years, I have come to the conclusion that it is not about God for them. It is entirely, wholly and completely about them. Look at their words. God is a magic talisman, to be invoked in public. But everything is about them. My salvation, me my mine.
There are few differences between Evangelicals and secularists when it comes to their worldview. Evangelicals just have Christian sprinkles on theirs.
Engaging these Fundamentalists here on FR has shown me they have the same sort of “you can’t tell me what to do” attitude as the secularists.
Liberalism and Evangelicalism are first cousins.
“Look at their words. God is a magic talisman, to be invoked in public. But everything is about them. My salvation, me my mine. “
That’s so true. Like rzman21, I was Lutheran and only a couple of years ago recognized the fact that I couldn’t deny the work of Christ throughout history the way Protestant and Protestant derived groups have to. A good many of the Protestant derived groups are actually teaching that “Thy Will” and “My Intellect” are the same things just like Luther substituted personal self-confidence for faith. Luther threw out the definition of Faith as the Scriptures and Church has always taught it and along with the redefinition threw out anything that was an outward sign of faith like sacraments or works. Luther discarded everything to do with faith as either useless or a sin and instead, he claimed that it was personal self-confidence that redeemed men, not Faith as described in Scriptures. Those anti-Catholics and others who declare that they can infallibly interpret Scripture to suit their own prejudices and predispositions could only do such things things if they were one with Christ and the Father, not redeemed individuals living by Faith. They enthrone their own intellect as a part of the Trinity and relegate the Holy Spirit to the role of a reference or footnote.
They have to deny the power of the Holy Spirit in order to personally claim that all the others throughout all of history back to Christ were wrong and not led by the Holy Spirit. Who could dismiss as, “opinions of men”, everything written by all the great figures in Church history except someone who denies the power of the Holy Spirit and the promise of Christ to protect His Church? Who could know the hearts of those who defended and even died for the Scriptures other than someone who believes they are superior to the Holy Spirit? The Holy Spirit does not sew the sorts of divisions that have grown out of the heresy Luther preached. If the heresies originating with Luther aren’t enough, many of those who slander the Church Christ founded eschew Luther as well and instead claim that the first time the whole truth was revealed to anyone was when someone in the US during the mid-1800s began making false prophecies. How people can even think that Christ as described in the Scriptures would sacrifice Himself for us and then abandon the vast majority of mankind until the sixteenth century or even until the mid-nineteenth century is beyond me. Christ left His Church specifically to teach us and to ordain shepherds for the sheep, sheep who are prone to wondering around aimlessly and falling into error and heresy when they have no shepherd to watch over them. And Christ did not ordain everyone who can open a Bible to be a shepherd, either. The sheep may like pretending they’re the shepherds, but by your fruits you will know them. The sheep outside of His Church are running in every direction ordaining queers, accepting child sacrifice, laughing at the command to be fruitful and multiply, and based on their own understanding, eschewing good works and sinning boldly exactly the way Luther, not Christ, commanded.
Regards