Josh Benner

Tag: liberal

  • Kanye West gives political commentary at end of SNL

     

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    Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons @David Sankbone
    Popular rapper Kanye West was the musical guest last night on the season premier of Saturday Night Live. At the end of the show, he invited the cast back up on stage.
    West was wearing the Donald Trump red and white “Make America Great Again” hat. As the show was ending, West gave a political commentary. It’s been removed on Hulu and was cut off on the live broadcast (to be fair, it was the closing credits of the show).
    West has publicly supported Trump on multiple occasions. He met with Trump to discuss issues including the murder rate in West’s hometown, Chicago. He has said he loves Trump.
    That doesn’t mean he has to love everything Trump does but he is an interesting voice in the political arena. It seems that part of his support from Trump is also disapproval of democrats. West talks about how the show producers bullied him about his MAGA hat.
    He turns and thanks the cast (some of whom look very uncomfortable) for giving him this platform.
    West talks of how there should be a natural balance to things, yet he suggests 90% of news is liberal, 90% of television is liberal. He talks of how major entertainment hubs like Los Angeles and New York are overwhelmingly liberal, as well as in the music industry. “It’s easy to make it seem like it’s so so so one-sided,” West says. He’s exactly right on that front. So much of what we are experienced to in the media is liberal. In these large media formats, it can be hard to get other voices into the conversation and that isn’t productive.
    I’m sure people will mock West, people will (and have) said it’s for publicity. But for almost two years, West has been supportive of Trump. West has caught a lot of flack. The media and entertainment industries he is criticizing will dismiss what he’s saying (while at the same time, proving his point).

    Thanks for reading! I’d love to hear what you think, and don’t forget to subscribe! 

    Josh Benner is the associate pastor at Cornerstone Evangelical Free Church in Fergus Falls, Minnesota and has a Master of Divinity from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. He enjoys writing about faith and culture. He lives with his wife Kari in Minnesota.

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  • What’s the greatest danger to the church?

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    There are 300,000 churches in America.
    There are many wonderful churches that boldly proclaim the gospel and faithfully teach the Bible every week. There is no perfect church in the world, because every church is full of members who are imperfect people.
    I think that the biggest issue the American church faces today is related to truth and love.
    Love that undermines truth and truth that doesn’t practice love. I’ll briefly explain what that means.
    Love that undermines truth 
    Love is important. The greatest command in scripture is to love God and to love people. God is love.
    But some churches can emphasize love to the point where it undermines truth.
    For instance, there is a temptation in some Christian circles to consider the love of God and reason that: “since God is love, his love extends to all people, whether or not they believe in God and whether or not they want or accept his love.”
    God is love. But that is just taking a slice of the character of God and acting as if that’s the whole pie. God is love. But he is also just, and righteous, and holy. He judges, he has wrath towards sin. God has all of those qualities at all times.
    God is love. But the idea of love is not only exclusive to what our culture defines love as.
    We tend to value acceptance and tolerance as what it is to love. And it’s true that God meets us where we are, but Jesus doesn’t save us to keep us the same. God is a perfecting God. We sin. We sin so much that we needed a savior, and the gospel is not a message that teaches us that we’re ok and we should just keep doing what we’re doing. We need to live for God and pursue him.
    Making love purely about acceptance and tolerance is not the full Biblical scope of what love is. And so it undermines the truth of scripture. And it runs the danger of undermining the inerrancy of scripture (taking the Bible as practical wisdom rather than the infallible word of God). And this view runs the risk of undermining the gospel itself.
    Assuming that love and  demand for justice are mutually exclusive.

    I observe this being the great risk in more liberal denominations.

    Truth that doesn’t practice love

    I think this is more of a danger in conservative and evangelical circles. We place a high value on the scripture and theology. And well we should because both of those are hugely important.

    But we can get so preoccupied with having the right answer that we lose sight of actually living out what we know. This is very similar to the failure of the Pharisees in the gospels. They were very well studied and trained in theology, but they missed the heart of the message.

    It can be easy to know the right answer but it’s difficult to live it out in practice.

    Truth and love. It comes down to belief and practice. We need both.

    Josh Benner is the associate pastor at Cornerstone Evangelical Free Church in Fergus Falls, Minnesota and has a Master of Divinity from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. He enjoys writing about faith and culture. He lives with his wife Kari in Minnesota.

  • The biggest mistake liberal Christians make

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    A few weeks ago, the Episcopal diocese in America voted to remove gender pronouns for God in updated versions of their Book of Common Prayer.

    I think many in our world believe in a gospel of “you’re ok.”

    I’ve been thinking a lot lately about liberal Christianity.

    They place a strong emphasis on love. And love is obviously important. The greatest commandment that Jesus gives is to love God and to love our neighbor. Not just to love our neighbor, but to love our neighbors as we love ourselves.

    But here’s where liberal Christians get it wrong.

    They emphasize love to the exclusion of other aspects of God.

    God is love. But he is not only love. God is also holy. God is also wise. God is also just and a judge.

    And when we hold up love as the only aspect of God that matters, it will ultimately lead to affirming that which is blasphemous.

    The gospel is not there to tell us that we’re all ok. Actually, it’s the opposite of that message. We are not called to love sin. Nowhere in the Bible is sin seen as a good thing. The Bible teaches that all of humanity is sinful. In fact, we are so sinful that the only way that we could be reconciled to God was for God to bear the cost of our sin. Jesus did that on the cross.

    God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us (Romans 5:8).

    Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends (John 15:13).

    Absolutely, we see the love of God in the gospel. But we also see his justice. Sin has an eternal penalty apart from Christ. And while he went to the cross to show his love, it also shows the cost of sin. Let us not take sin lightly.

    When we try to decide what is good apart from God’s moral law, it ends up becoming merely the opinions of men. As the common refrain in the Bible’s book of judges goes: “In those days there was no king in Israel. Everyone did what was right in his own eyes (Judges 21:25).”

    God is love but he is also wise. And just as we can’t pick and choose who to love (we are called to love everyone, to want what’s best for everyone, to have concern for people) we also cannot pick and choose which aspects of God’s wisdom and morality we want to like. It’s all true.

    In the Beatitudes, Jesus teaches: blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied.

    Blessedness is not in pursing worldly goals, it’s not in “following your truth,” it’s not in doing what makes you happy. It’s having a desire for the righteousness of the righteous and holy God who created the universe.

    And because God loves us, he doesn’t desire for us to be kept the same when we come to him. It’s not a difference of opinion between us and God in regards to sin. It’s truth and falsity.

    jrb