12.12.05

The Gospel, Repugnant?

Posted in Faith and Practice, Culture and Ideas at 11:34 am by Jeff

The Guardian is an English newspaper that takes aim at The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe in a recent review entitled Narnia represents everything that is most hateful about religion

With a title like that, you’ve got to expect some caustic, anti-Christian propaganda. The article delivers, striking right at the heart of the Christian faith:

Of all the elements of Christianity, the most repugnant is the notion of the Christ who took our sins upon himself and sacrificed his body in agony to save our souls. Did we ask him to?

The Apostle Paul perfectly anticipated these types of reponses to the gospel.

For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. For it is written:
“I will destroy the wisdom of the wise;
the intelligence of the intelligent I will frustrate.”

Where is the wise man? Where is the scholar? Where is the philosopher of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since in the wisdom of God the world through its wisdom did not know him, God was pleased through the foolishness of what was preached to save those who believe. Jews demand miraculous signs and Greeks look for wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those whom God has called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For the foolishness of God is wiser than man’s wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than man’s strength.

-I Corinthians 1:18-25

One of the reasons I love the gospel is precisely its foolishness to the human mind. God is a master of irony.

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