It is okay to just talk about our past. Our nation's founders were not divinely endowed with special grace to avoid sin in their choices. They were for the most part ordinary Europeans bringing with them their European worldviews to colonize another land.
We can look at their choices, compare them to the values they asserted, see where th…
It is okay to just talk about our past. Our nation's founders were not divinely endowed with special grace to avoid sin in their choices. They were for the most part ordinary Europeans bringing with them their European worldviews to colonize another land.
We can look at their choices, compare them to the values they asserted, see where they instantiated those values and where they deliberately and openly flouted them, and speak about them as if they were real people making real choices.
There is no need for anyone to look at our past and demand that it not exist. There is, I think, a special reason for followers of Jesus to look at our past with the gimlet eye of a truth-lover: we are said to be those who follow the Way (our earliest appellation of our beliefs and behaviors) and those who love the one who is the Way, the Truth, and the Life.
My understanding of the gospel is that it *frees* us. Frees us from our own sins, frees us from our brokenness, and frees us from shame and guilt. We can look at our collective past, see the good and the bad, be grateful for the good, mourn the bad, and work, right now, to make a better country because we, as followers of Jesus, are here on earth to be the hands, arms, legs, feet, and body of Christ.
It's puzzling that a "Christian" college would shrink from truth. Is not truth so powerful and so valuable that we'd do everything we can to understand it and embrace it?
It is okay to just talk about our past. Our nation's founders were not divinely endowed with special grace to avoid sin in their choices. They were for the most part ordinary Europeans bringing with them their European worldviews to colonize another land.
We can look at their choices, compare them to the values they asserted, see where they instantiated those values and where they deliberately and openly flouted them, and speak about them as if they were real people making real choices.
There is no need for anyone to look at our past and demand that it not exist. There is, I think, a special reason for followers of Jesus to look at our past with the gimlet eye of a truth-lover: we are said to be those who follow the Way (our earliest appellation of our beliefs and behaviors) and those who love the one who is the Way, the Truth, and the Life.
My understanding of the gospel is that it *frees* us. Frees us from our own sins, frees us from our brokenness, and frees us from shame and guilt. We can look at our collective past, see the good and the bad, be grateful for the good, mourn the bad, and work, right now, to make a better country because we, as followers of Jesus, are here on earth to be the hands, arms, legs, feet, and body of Christ.
It's puzzling that a "Christian" college would shrink from truth. Is not truth so powerful and so valuable that we'd do everything we can to understand it and embrace it?