Church Happenings on Sunday May 20th

From the Anchor Baptist Church in Craig:

Beware of False Teachers:

So, I actually listened to this entire podcast and here are my thoughts:

This is a fantastic sermon that more pastors need to give! I've been on a tirade on this very topic. What you touched on is "Churchianity" vs "Christianity". Too many churches these days are no longer 'Christians' and instead "Churchian", instead of preaching the truth they virtue signal and make people feel good in fear of upsetting their congregation.

Problem is like you said, Christians know when they are being lied to and can sense false sermons. So genuinely well done! The best definition of "Churchianity" that I found:

"Many churches have reduced Christianity to the parable of the Good Samaritan, to such an extent that their religion could be more reasonably described as Good Samaritanism than Christianity. And while they subscribe chiefly to salvation through works and societally-approved attitudes rather than faith, they nevertheless possess complete and utter faith in the intrinsic goodness of foreigners.

Churchians (for it would not be strictly accurate to describe them as Christians) are liars and deceivers. They worship the god of Babel, not the Christian God. They serve the world, not Jesus Christ.

But where does this religious obsession with improving the world through works come from, when it has been absent from Christian theology for the greater part of two thousand years? Indeed, the entire conceptual core of Christianity is fundamentally based on the nature of the world not only being fallen and imperfect and ruled by an immortal spirit of evil, but remaining that way until the Son returns, the Prince of the World is cast down, and the Kingdom of Heaven is established.

Justice, in both Greek philosophy and proper Christian theology, is “rectitude of the will”, as can be seen in Aquinas’s Summa Theologica, specifically Secunda Secundæ Partis, Question 58, Article 1. And in the Christian sense, rectitude of the will is defined by conformity with God’s will, which can be debated, but being immutable, is assuredly not defined by the ever-mutating social justice narrative.

So social justice Christianity, or Good Samaritanism, or Churchianity, all amount to the same thing: a false form of Christianity that cloaks itself in Christian rhetoric while denying both the conceptual core of Christianity and the fundamental nature of the justice to which it nominally dedicates itself. And these false forms all flow from a concept that is considerably newer than Christianity, although it is related to an older religion.

The term tikkun olam is from the rabbinic literature known as the Mishnah, which dates back to 1492 and is believed to come from an oral tradition that may be as much as a thousand years older. It appears in the phrase mip’nei tikkun ha-olam “to indicate that a practice should be followed not because it is required by Biblical law, but because it helps avoid social disharmony.”

The phrase is often translated as “for the sake of the healing of the world”, which is why the expression appears in English as a directive to “heal the world” or “fix the world”, but a better translation is “for the sake of the perfection of the world”.

In other words, the conservatives and other Churchians have elevated a literally extra-Biblical post-Christian concept that flies directly in the face of genuine Christian theology to a super-Scriptural level, then used it as the basis to judge both members of the Church and the Bible itself!"

St. John By the Sea Will Have Mass Sunday May 20th at 10AM

We are so blessed this week that Fr. Peter Gorges is here and will celebrate our 10AM Mass on Sunday, May 20th. We will celebrate his GOLDEN JUBILEE after Mass with a potluck Brunch. Please join the Community of St. John by the Sea as we mark this rare occasion.

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