Watered Down Christianity Only Gets it Half Right

jesus, sad, perplexed, betrayal, Christianity, Catholic

Somehow, for some reason, Christ’s teachings have been watered down over that last 50 or 60 years.

Today Christianity seems to be all about loving one another.  Isn’t this what Jesus told us?  Didn’t He say we should all love one another?  If only we could all learn to love one another, life would be great.

When I hear someone who professes to be a Christian or, worse still, a Catholic, saying something like this I wince a bit.  Who was responsible for this individual’s Faith formation, I wonder.  Whoever it was must have skipped right over the first and greatest commandment (Matthew 22:37-38):

“You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.  This is the greatest and the first commandment.”

How has the second greatest commandment “You shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Matthew 22:39) taken center stage?  Today, it seems that people are more important than God.

Of course those who hang all of Christ’s teachings on loving one another are not completely off base.  Our Lord does make it clear that we are to love one another.  Loving one another is, in fact, the second greatest commandment.

But there is more to being a good Christian than loving our neighbor.

Even more than we love ourselves, or our parents or our spouse or our children – or one another – we are to love God first and foremost, above everyone and everything else.

God Still Comes First

Loving our neighbor does not mean that we can ignore God or the rest of His truths.  And this just might be a problem for all those who preach ‘love is all you need.’  Those who say tolerance and acceptance and being nice to your neighbors is being a good Christian aren’t seeing things quite clearly.

Those who tend to selectively ignore – or reject – any of the Commandments of the Decalogue, or who reject any of the teachings given to us by Jesus Himself or the teachings handed down by the Apostles, may be in for quite a surprise when they die.

Yet many people today mistakenly believe that God loves us all so much that only really, really bad people will go to hell.  They think that as long as a person has led a relatively good life, God, in His mercy, will forgive the individual for any wrongdoings when the person dies.  They think that “good people” will be saved from hell.  As I pointed out recently, this is probably not the case.  Such thinking is not showing true wisdom.

False Compassion

Years ago author Erich Segal had Jennifer Cavilleri, the main female character in his novel “Love Story” say that “love means never having to say you’re sorry.”  Such a statement is as ridiculous as being told that love means complete acceptance and tolerance of immoral behavior.  This is not love.  It is false compassion.  And it is a lie.

As the CCC says:

“2484 The gravity of a lie is measured against the nature of the truth it deforms, the circumstances, the intentions of the one who lies, and the harm suffered by its victims. If a lie in itself only constitutes a venial sin, it becomes mortal when it does grave injury to the virtues of justice and charity.”

As I wrote in a CS article a few months ago, “Calling out sinful acts and actions is part and parcel of being a good Christian.”  It’s an act of charity.  Our first and overriding concern should be for the immortal souls of our fellow humans, not making it easier for them to lead sinful lives here on earth.

As we are told in the Great Commission: “Go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you” [Mathew 28:19-20] (Emphasis added).

Maybe we wouldn’t be immersed in the morally relativistic culture we see everywhere today if more Christians actually took this commission seriously.  When was the last time you witnessed your faith to someone else?”

Just Be Nice?

Many young Catholics these days (as well as many older ones and Protestants), have become practitioners of Moral Therapeutic Deism (MTD).  Christian Smith, who coined the term, summed it up in an article for the Catholic Education Resource Center:

  1. A God exists who created and orders the world and watches over human life on earth.
  2. God wants people to be good, nice, and fair to each other, as taught in the Bible and by most world religions.
  3. The central goal of life is to be happy and to feel good about oneself.
  4. God does not need to be particularly involved in one’s life except when he is needed to resolve a problem.
  5. Good people go to heaven when they die.

What a bunch of pablum.

If we don’t confess and repent of a sinful act, being nice to our neighbors, or performing a good act like giving money to a homeless person will not cancel out the sinful act.

Works of charity are important but they are not a substitute for repentance and confession.

The Catholic Church

Practitioners of MTD are often those who say “I’m spiritual but not religious.”   But as CS writer Mark Belanger pointed out recently, such an approach to life is foolhardy:

“[W]e cannot develop our spiritual selves in a vacuum. We need the structure, the guidance, and especially the institutional experience that religion provides.”

This is why Jesus Christ gave us the Catholic Church.  As St. Pope Paul VI wrote in Lumen Gentium,

“This is the one Church of Christ which in the Creed is professed as one, holy, catholic and apostolic, which our Saviour, after His Resurrection, commissioned Peter to shepherd, and him and the other apostles to extend and direct with authority, which He erected for all ages as “the pillar and mainstay of the truth” (#8, Paragraph 2).

Those who would criticize, ignore, or dissent from the teachings of the Catholic Church in favor of an MTD ideology, or any ideology or religion that preaches ‘love is all you need,’ may be putting their immortal souls in jeopardy.  They are allowing poorly formed consciences – swayed by the devil – to impede their judgement.

St. Paul predicted this would happen in his second letter to Timothy (2 Timothy 4:3-4):

“For the time will come when people will not tolerate sound doctrine but, following their own desires and insatiable curiosity, will accumulate teachers and will stop listening to the truth and will be diverted to myths.”

St. Pope Paul VI reaffirmed it in 1964:

“But often men, deceived by the Evil One, have become vain in their reasonings and have exchanged the truth of God for a lie, serving the creature rather than the Creator.” — Pope Paul VI Lumen Gentium, #16

A New Universalism

MTD is a kind of new Universalism – be good and nice and fair to each other and you’ll go to heaven when you die.  Clearly, however, this is not the case.  Jesus’ own words in Mathew 7:14 refute this idea.

In Matthew 6, Jesus tells us that we must radically transform the way we live our lives.  He says that we should “seek first the kingdom [of God] and His righteousness,” and, if we do, God will provide for us.  Given today’s ‘live life to the fullest,’ and ‘if it feels good do it,’ and ‘go for the gold,’ and even ‘greed is good’ mentality this is indeed radical and counter-cultural.

So while loving our neighbors is important, loving God is first and foremost.  Keeping God’s Commandments, living the Beatitudes, and transforming ourselves – putting our total and complete reliance in God – comes before loving our neighbor.  Loving God must come first.

As Jesus tells us in Matthew 7:21, “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father in heaven.”

Facebook
Twitter
LinkedIn
Pinterest

18 thoughts on “Watered Down Christianity Only Gets it Half Right”

  1. Pingback: Live Like Your Afterlife Depends on it + Genuflect

  2. I would find it impossible to truly love my neighbor without first having loved God and devoted myself to him. It is God that purifies the heart and motives and sustains love even when circumstances make it particularly difficult. Loving anyone under my own limited strength and power will only go so far. Loving by the grace and power of almighty God, allows me to truly love others even when I’d prefer to turn away from them. Of course it’s a lifetime journey.That’s perhaps why we make reference to “practicing our faith”. Day by day we get better. That is, if we devote ourselves daily to God.

  3. Pingback: SATVRDAY EDITION – Big Pulpit

  4. Thanks for your article, Gene! I think that the following quote from Dr. Tom Neal sums sheds some light on what you’re talking about:

    “Of course, for Aquinas to love means to consistently will and choose the good of the other. To love neighbor as self means seeing their sharing in the good as constitutive of your own sharing in the good. To love God, whose good we cannot will strictly speaking — as He is purely actualized good itself — is to love what God loves, which, of course, is the neighbor’s good. So we come full circle.”

    1. Thanks for reading the article, Dom, but I think Dr. Neal’s quote alone is lacking in some respects. An atheist can love his fellow man and all of creation for the beauty he sees in it, but if he denies God’s existence is he really loving God?

  5. Thank You for your article.
    Moral relativism and secular humanism have invaded our Christian mentality, especially through Religious Education in many parishes. We need to pray, make sacrifices, and pray again, because it seems that the narrow gate is closing: see Mt.7:13-14

  6. The question is how do you love God. And there are plenty of different ideas on that. You’re simplifying this way to much, and you’re painting the “opposition” with far too broad of a brush.

    Loving God is important, but I don’t “love God” by doing exactly whatever my favorite (or especially your favorite) churchman tells me to do. It turns out that the church’s actions are not always motivated by “love God” and/or “love others”.

    1. Loving God really is simple, Kyle, but since we have free will and the devil trying to keep us from loving God, it is hard. Love God as a loving son loves a loving Father. Keep His Commandments and live the Beatitudes. Try to “be perfect, just as your heavenly Father is perfect.”

  7. I can see three problems with the instruction, “Love God”.

    1. It’s an abstract saying which most people can’t understand. What is God? It’s more a concept than a “person”. What does it mean to “love God”? One can love one’s neighbor. One can love Thai food, or playing tennis, or the music of Beethoven. But “God” is too undefined to “love”.

    2. At various points scripture conflates loving God with loving your neighbor. “Is this not to know me?” Given something easy to understand, along with something hard to understand, people naturally grab on to the former, not the latter.

    3. “Love God” seems mercenary, and selfish. Getting on God’s good side is the way to save your butt in the afterlife. It has nothing to do with God being good. I’m reminded of the sermon in one of the Monty Python movies, “God, you are so big!! So super!!”

    1. Jesus is God and there is nothing abstract about Jesus. Look at a crucifix and you will see Him. You will also see how much He loves you.

    2. You can’t teach Calculus to someone who doesn’t know basic math. Jesus revealed the Trinitarian nature of God at the end of His public ministry.
      John 14:7 – “If you know me, then you will also know my Father.”
      John 14:9 – “Whoever has seen me has seen the Father.”
      John 14:10 – “Do you not believe that I am in the Father and the Father is in me?

    3. Your quotes are from John, which was written last (when matches it with Jewish sources) and has the “highest” Christology. I would like to get into a more detailed discussion of this with you.

      Jesus makes no claims for himself (he calls himself the “Son of Man”). He makes great claims for what God is doing uniquely through him, but always refers to God (or “my Father”) in the third person. He also actually denies being God. (Luke 18:19) It was easy for his followers to love him; loving “God” is a different question.

    4. You are trying to justify your original comment now by arguing that Jesus did not refer to Himself as God during His public ministry. But I have already refuted that argument. A discussion of John will have no bearing on the fact that Jesus is God or that the early Christians completely accepted Christ’s Divinity (see https://www.catholic.com/tract/the-divinity-of-christ). And, just to clarify, Jesus does not deny being God in Luke 18:19. You are misreading the verse. Jesus actually uses the man’s words to affirm that He is God. The man calls Jesus “good” and Jesus replies that only God is good. So He says He is God without actually saying He is God.

  8. an ordinary papist

    ” … ‘love is all you need’ maybe putting their immortal souls in jeopardy.

    The other side of this equation is ‘maybe not’

    1. As I have written before we can’t know how God will judge a person. But God gave us 10 Commandments not 6. I tend to think, a person who loves his neighbor as himself but couldn’t give a fig about Commandments 1,2,3, or 6 may be playing with fire.

    2. “I was growing up in the ’30s and ’40s. The Brown versus Board of Education was 1954 and it declared segregation to be immoral and inherently unequal, and it demanded that it be dismantled. And that meant that a whole way of life, which had been justified by the Christian church in my region, had to be dismantled. Now I had some interesting experiences earlier, where I had raised questions within myself, and I remember one that I tell about in the autobiography, when my father, who had taught me always to say, ‘Sir’ and ‘Ma’am’ to my elders whenever I responded to them, punished me for saying ‘Sir’ to an elderly black man. He said, We do not say ‘Sir’ to what he called Negroes. And I remember thinking that something’s really wrong about that, and I couldn’t have been more than three or four years old.”

Leave a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.