Tuesday, March 11, 2014

The American Religion of Pontius Pilate.

John 14:6 identifies Christ as "The Way, The Truth, and The Life.". An early catechism, the Didache, puts it even more strongly "There are two ways, the Way of Life and the Way of Death". When faced with a man who is "The Truth" himself, in John chapter 38, Pilate's retort is "What is Truth?" and the musician Andrew Lloyd Weber expanded upon that in Jesus Christ Superstar with "Are Mine the same as Yours?

Recently, in an online discussion, I ran into the odd comment "Christianity is my truth I choose but it's not everyone's truth".

That's quite the American Pluralistic sentiment there- what I call the Individualist Christ- Jesus is for me, but he's not necessarily for you.

One of the things that separates out American Protestantism from Catholicism is exactly that individualistic attitude, that Christ isn't the Universal Truth he claimed to be, that in fact, other people choose other truths.

Want to know why traditionalists and conservatives lost the sexual revolution and the culture war? You need look no further than the Americanist Religion of Pontius Pilate- that there is no universal truth, no right and wrong on which we can base our lives. Pluralism is, in and of itself, the problem, not the solution.

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Oustside The Asylum by Ted Seeber is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at http://outsidetheaustisticasylum.blogspot.com.