Advent 2015, December 4

The heading of this blog says these are my thoughts and not to reflect any institution with which I am affiliated.  I have free speech rights and I take responsibility for them.

Advent should cause us to reflect on the superiority of the Christian faith.  By that I don’t mean the Christian person.  To be a Christian is to recognize one’s fatal flaws, one’s rebellion and waywardness,  to see innate hypocrisy.  While the world tells us to trust ourselves, Scripture warns us about too much trust in our own “devices.” 

I speak of the core world view of Christianity in distinction from that of secular thought, which proclaims values it doesn’t really believe, and from other religions, which are as absolutist as any Christian system but which we have been told, in the name of multiculturalism, are more open and accepting. 

What I do mean is superiority psychologically, emotionally, historically, heuristically (what it provides a basis for in terms of future learning), spiritually, relationally, practically.

That is, I realize, a very big claim, especially since individual Christians often don't live out its superiority psychologically, emotionally, spiritually, relationally, practically.  Only when one studies the core of it is this superiority found.  Only when one delves deeply into the timeworn stories of a couple traveling across country to give birth out of their hometown due to the plans of a Roman emperor, who didn’t know he was only doing what God had prophesied 600 years before.  Of the outcasts of the society being the first to see the new King. Of a Savior who touched, acquired the smell of the sheep, gave his all, and lived again.  

If this angers you, well, I am not going to apologize.  A student showed an interesting video in a presentation about how women apologize for nothing and how to solve that.  I am not going to apologize for your reaction.  Would you apologize for yours?