If Jesus is God incarnate, the second person of the Trinity, the only way to the Father, the propitiation for our sins, God’s only Son, the Logos who is eternally pre-existent, begotten not made – if he is who he claims to be – then all religions other than Christianity fall disastrously short of being true.
The Anglican Church of Canada, an organisation that has been uncomfortable with undiluted truth for decades, is offering $10,000 grants to anyone willing to water down the Gospel with just about anything so long as it bears no resemblance to Christianity.
From here:
Echoing principles laid out in the Marks of Mission, the Anglican Foundation of Canada (AFC) is offering five one-time grants of $10,000 each for new community service or outreach projects that involve interfaith collaboration. Requests for proposals are due Sept. 1, 2015.
The grants are part of a new tradition for the Foundation, which beginning in 2014 pledged to set aside $50,000 each year to encourage and fund innovative ministry-related projects through a request-for-proposals process.
This year’s interfaith focus is designed to meet human need through loving service. Projects eligible for the grant will be new initiatives undertaken in 2016 that involve collaboration between Anglicans and individuals or groups from at least one religion other than Christianity.
Religion other than Christianity. Does liberal Anglicanism count?
The Anglican Church in Canada and the TEC have long since abandoned any real belief in Christianity and have managed to persuade members to accept their watered down self-made beliefs through their apostate primate and his followers. As the old saying goes, “If you spread it thick enough, someone will believe you.”
Do you honestly believe that cultural environment had nothing to do with you becoming a Christian, David?
I went from atheism to Christianity, through a fairly volcanic conversion experience, but I would find it difficult to argue that my becoming specifically Christian was completely divorced from my cultural tradition and environment.
If I’d been born to a secular Jewish family and had gone through a similar experience, there’s a goodish chance I’d have embraced Judaism, seems to me.
There’s a reason the vast majority of religious people the world over share their parents’ religion.
The cultural environment in the 60s, when I began to consider these matters, would have coaxed me into Eastern mysticism if anything.
Christianity would have been the last thing I would have been tempted to believe: it was the religion of my grandparents – outdated, irrelevant and respectable.
Also, of course, a person’s being led to Christianity through cultural influences has no bearing on whether it is true or not. And if it is true, other religions are not.
Bit facile. Christianity is indeed the religion of your parents and your grandparents, and regardless of the superficial rebelliousness of youth, the overwhelming majority of religious people across the globe follows the religion of their parents. This is hardly a contentious claim.
You can choose to believe that this is not significant, of course. That’s fine.
Well my cultural environment was the 60s as well and the religion I was considering was not that of my parents, who disliked the church and made that quite clear. My older brother was a Communist and told me repeatedly that religion was ‘the opiate of the masses’ (among other epithets). I don’t doubt that the cultural milieu can have an influence, but if this world means anything, it’s an exercise in free will: People choose what they want to believe.
With our Crucified and Risen LORD’s Promised (v. + John) Pentecost, recorded in + Acts 2, the “culture” of the Kingdom of GOD dispels the cultures of the kingdom of Babel (vv. 9-11), in whatever forms they take.
Pentecost alone invariably provokes the most radical of all existential questions,
“What shall we do?”
Pentecost’s life transforming answer:
“Repent, and be Baptized every one of you in The Name of Jesus Christ for the remission of sins, and ye shall receive the gift of The Holy Ghost…whosoever shall call on The Name of The LORD shall be Saved +.”
Good. This is what we used to call “p*ssing away your money”. Until they run out of other people’s money there is no hope for them.