This January 18 opens the Octave of Christian Unity, “octave” for “eight days”. It begins with the confession or testimony of faith of Peter for openers and closes with the conversion of Paul. I have had occasion to comment on the breakdown of the relationship between the two men, in the context of Christian unity. It just goes to show that being one in Christ cannot and should not mean that we are all nice to each other.
Kenda Dean wrote a provocative book some years ago, Almost Christian, describing the faith of American teens and young people, a faith which they imbibe from their parents that she (and others) calls “Moralistic Therapeutic Deism”. This term, borrowed from sociology, describes a religious attitude that cherishes “niceness” as a basic value, emphasizes religion as the means to heaven for “good” people, and whose deity is a pop psychologist, interfering little and demanding almost nothing.
MTD has been around a long time. It used to be called Liberal Protestantism, which H. Richard Niebuhr famously described as “A God without wrath [who] brought men without sin into a Kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a Cross.” He blamed a church that is captive of the age:
The captive church is the church which has become entangled with this system or these systems of worldliness. It is a church which…
