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David Cassidy

20 Oct, 8 tweets, 2 min read

The LV Church clip was simply the charismatic version of the Christian Nationalism on display at Jeffress' Baptist church in Dallas. It is a deeply flawed religious impulse, making of the Church a political pawn & further contributing to the devolution of evangelical witness.

Christian Nationalism is a dangerous heresy to be avoided. Thriving on fundamentalist certainties and exclusiveness, it worships power, nation, ethnicity, and tribe. In every possible way, it makes otherwise faithful churches deny the very Gospel they claim to uphold & offer.

Christian Nationalism, especially in its White Supremacist mode, is often violent, always anti-christ, and cannot be regarded as authentically Christian in any way. It understandably provides fertile ground for those who seek to discredit the Faith. It must be resisted.

Not all Baptists or Charismatics embrace this kind of Nationalism - indeed some are rightly horrified by it. CN is contrary to much of their doctrinal heritage, arising from dominion theology. It makes Christians into culture warriors rather than lovers of neighbors & servants.

Faithful Christians should reject every last vestige of this odious view, and forever reject the seductive voice that would align the Church and the Gospel with a political party or candidate. The Kingdom of Jesus Christ is in this world, though not of it...

...and cannot operate on the same principles employed by the kingdoms of this age. This does not mean the Church withdraws from matters of justice for the oppressed. It does mean it does not identify itself with power, or limit itself to the boundaries of race, nation, or party.

Waving American flags as an act of worship embodies the idolatry of nationhood and is a rejection of not only the Faith we hold but the liberties at the core of our Constitutional Republic which make clear distinctions in this sphere to protect the conscience of all.

Pastors insisting that 'true' Christians can only possibly vote for one candidate or party is an act of colossal arrogance, profound misconduct, & abuse of power and trust. Basing Christian fellowship on politics is divisive and destructive. It has to stop.

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More from @dpcassidyC3

David Cassidy

@dpcassidyC3

20 Oct

The great Protestant teacher Reinhold Niebuhr devoted his life to warning against the dangerous sentimentality of a “Christian politics.” Love compels Christians to seek justice also through politics, Niebuhr insisted, but...

we must never equate our penultimate judgments about what might serve justice with the ultimate truth that impels us to seek and serve justice in the first place. In sum, we must never declare our politics to be “Christian politics,” thereby implicitly excommunicating...

those Christians who disagree with us.

Of course the more publicly potent religionizing of politics is today on the right of the ideological spectrum. Conservative leaders regularly say that they are only doing what the religious left did for decades...

Read 6 tweets

David Cassidy

@dpcassidyC3

18 Oct

“If I speak in the tongues of Reformers and of professional theologians, and I have not personal faith in Christ, my theology is nothing but the noisy beating of a snare drum.

And if I have analytic powers and the gift of creating coherent conceptual systems of theology, so as to remove liberal objections, and have not personal hope in God, I am nothing.

And if I give myself to resolving the debate between supra and infralapsarianism, and to defending inerrancy, and to learning the Westminster Catechism, yea, even the larger one, so as to recite it by heart backwards and forwards, and have not love, I have gained nothing.”

Read 4 tweets

David Cassidy

@dpcassidyC3

17 Oct

Today's Robert Frost - After Apple Picking

My long two-pointed ladder's sticking through a tree
Toward heaven still,
And there's a barrel that I didn't fill
Beside it, and there may be two or three
Apples I didn't pick upon some bough.
But I am done with apple-picking now.

Essence of winter sleep is on the night,
The scent of apples: I am drowsing off.
I cannot rub the strangeness from my sight
I got from looking through a pane of glass
I skimmed this morning from the drinking trough
And held against the world of hoary grass.

It melted, and I let it fall and break.
But I was well
Upon my way to sleep before it fell,
And I could tell
What form my dreaming was about to take.

Read 9 tweets

David Cassidy

@dpcassidyC3

13 Oct

One of my favorite Gospel moments concerns the paralytic carried to Jesus by four friends. THANK GOD FOR THOSE FRIENDS!

Gotta be honest - sometimes I can't lift my eyes to pray. I've got nothing but a paralyzed heart weighed down with every care. If someone said...

..."Run to Jesus", I'd just laugh at them and say, "Hey, I'm not running anywhere! I can't even kneel." Sometimes we're just empty - we can't get to where we need to go. Friends have to carry us. Sometimes its the faith of others that gets us through.

Sometimes our faith is useful to carry someone we love.
Some days we are carrying others and some days we're the ones being carried. On both days, we aren't alone.

So one of the biggest lies we hear is 'You're the only one.' Well, you're not. CS Lewis wrote that friendship...

Read 5 tweets

David Cassidy

@dpcassidyC3

24 Sep

Once to ev'ry man and nation
Comes the moment to decide,
In the strife of truth and falsehood,
For the good or evil side;
Some great cause, some great decision,
Off'ring each the bloom or blight,
And the choice goes by forever
'Twixt that darkness and that light.

Then to side with truth is noble,
When we share her wretched crust,
Ere her cause bring fame and profit,
And 'tis prosperous to be just;
Then it is the brave man chooses
While the coward stands aside,
Till the multitude make virtue
Of the faith they had denied.

By the light of burning martyrs,
Christ, Thy bleeding feet we track,
Toiling up new Calv'ries ever
With the cross that turns not back;
New occasions teach new duties,
Ancient values test our youth;
They must upward still and onward,
Who would keep abreast of truth.

Read 5 tweets

David Cassidy

@dpcassidyC3

23 Sep

I don’t think this is an inconsequential quibble. We don’t ‘build the Kingdom of God’. We do proclaim the Kingdom. The Kingdom of Jesus is not identified with a nation-state, military, political or economic system. We are citizens of a heavenly kingdom built by Christ not by us.

We recognize that Christ does in fact rule all things now. His “kingdom” is that rule made visible among people. It is not of this world, but is certainly for this world, though it won’t reach its fulness apart from the eschaton. Among other things, that means human attempts to-

secure here on earth a perfect expression of the eternal kingdom of God, whether in religious states or utopian communities, end in tyranny. They often resort to violence in order to impose or maintain their rule - whether psychologically in sects or politically in governments.

Read 13 tweets

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