Chaplain Wants Christ out of Air Force Academy
Here’s a story that will throw you for a loop: a "chaplain" at the U.S. Air Force Academy is complaining that the school’s administration has a "systemic and pervasive" problem of promoting religious values with a Christian bent.
The chaplain, Capt. Melinda Morton, a "Lutheran minister," spoke out publicly on Tuesday as an Air Force task force arrived at the academy to investigate charges that officers and staff members pushed their religious beliefs on cadets.
When you have good news, you want to tell people about it, right? And Jesus is the way, the truth and the life, right? I guess if you don't think Jesus is the only way, and that God is going to save everybody no matter what in the end, then you don't need to "push your beliefs on other people." What is the point of being a Christian minister if you don't believe everyone needs Jesus? Is the ELCA just a philosophical society?
---Katie
3 comments:
At issue here is the matter of power and evangelism. It's one thing to share faith as a friend. It's another to use your rank or position to pressure people into faith or silence the voices of alternative faiths. Jesus faced that temptation in the desert.
If one reads the entire article and then (because one has to) reads between the lines, one discovers that the issue is not "getting Christ out of the Academy," but rather getting religious power-brokering and religious intimidation out of a secular institution. I think your representing the issue of something else is disingenuous.
Hmm. OK. Perhaps I am disingenuous. Or perhaps I read it a little differently than you did.
I worry sometimes that ELCA Lutherans are so worried about being tolerant and not being exclusive that they forget that Jesus said, "I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me." (John 14:6) If we really believe that and if we really believe that salvation is only through Jesus Christ, then we should reflect that in our desire to share the good news. I am not saying we should try to force people to believe or punish those who don't go along, but we should not try to squelch evangelism. It is a matter of life and death.
Of course, if one believes that Christianity is only one of many paths to God, or that God has already saved everyone, as some in the ELCA would have us believe, then evangelism is offensive and a moot point.
When I read between the lines, what I often see is the secular world trying to squeeze Christianity, not religion in general, out of the public arena. I hate to see a representative of my church piling on. If that is disingenuous, so be it.
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