Here’s a nice little quote I keep going back to from a book I bought a number of years ago from a Christian book store in the Detroit area. The book is called, “Nine Great American Myths: Ways We Confuse The American Dream With The Christian Faith” by Pat Apel. The quote:
“The problem arises, as Calvin pointed out, when we assign to Jesus a character different from that which He received from God. In the derision of Jesus during the passion, the Roman soldiers dressed Him in purple as King of the Jews. They were using Jesus to mock the Jewish insurrectionists of the day. Halford Luccock writes that ‘this indignity has been afflicted upon him again and again. More than once has he been…clad in costumes that do not fit his personality, with the result that the man who walks before us has been so completely disguised as to be unrecognizable.’
When we place Jesus in the garb of the American mythology, we are repeating the mockery inflicted upon Him during the Passion week. That is the problem with American religion–it renders the Christian faith unrecognizable.”
I think a lot of times the Christian Church has blind-spots in which that “draping of Christ” with some cultural aspect or another goes on for quite some time. And thus, she is not going to be spotless. In some instances though, it may be so imbedded into her theology that it’s hard to separate the two if even it should be separated (and there may be reasons for this ie., the possible perception of the undermining of authority).
In other words, it’s hard to imagine ANY form of Christianity that is not historically and culturally located and thus, those “barnacles that attach themselves” to the “purity” of the word of God as expressions of that word.
The Atom Panopticon 