Today in class one of the guys who usually sits on the other side of the room from me commented about Zwingli and the Reformation in Switzerland. He noted that Zwingli’s stance (and that of his followers) started out peacefully, but later ended up tangled in violence (Zwingli himself was killed in battle). The seminary president, Jim Holm, mentioned that people tend to have a great deal of passion when it comes to spiritual matters. People will sometimes fight violently for something they are passionate about, even if that very thing is supposed to be peaceful and anti-war.
Anyway, after another student commented about her experience with liberation theology in Nicaragua, I started thinking about how this process moves along. How does a passionate belief in the Gospel end up furthering itself by clearly non-Gospel means?
When people encounter the good news - especially poor or oppressed people - it often generates a huge amount of hope and passion. Understandably, they want to spread this good news and effect the Gospel in their situation. This might mean liberation from a dictator, or another attempt at establishing Christendom… whatever people see as the way things should be in their situation if the Gospel is true. Fueled by passion, in an attempt to expand God’s kingdom people might try to put the Gospel into a larger vehicle that will take it further than it might go on its own. That vehicle might be Marxism, reformation of the church, Emergent, the Crusades, or who knows what. The danger is that these things, whether good or bad, are only ideologies at the end of the day. When the Gospel is embedded in an ideology, people easily make the mistake of committing to the cause rather than to Christ, the good news himself. Things are still done in the name of the Gospel, but really the allegiance is to an ideology that will eventually permit certain actions that the Gospel itself wants no part of.
That’s what I think, anyway.
