H. Richard Niebuhr once described late-19th-century liberalism in these remarkably succinct words: “A God without wrath brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Jesus without a cross.”* In recent decades, this distorted and emaciated gospel has also been seeping into the thinking and practice of popular Christendom. Terms like “wrath,” “sin,” “judgment,” and “cross” do not play well in a culture that has come to regard tolerance as more virtuous than truth. Through careful use of “text management,” we selectively focus on biblical images we want to hear and avoid the things in Scripture that seem harsh to our modern ears.
Notice how John the Baptist and our Lord in His early Galilean ministry both proclaimed the same disturbing message: “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand” (Matthew 3:2; 4:17). How well do you think these words would go over in the average church today? We would be wise to consider how tightly we have been gripped by the cultural agendas of our times and renew our minds by aligning our thinking with the whole counsel of Scripture.
*From Niebuhr’s book The Kingdom of God in America