"The gospel has been humiliated"

via lucious_purple in the lj-comm religous_left, I've just finished reading an op-ed piece from Professor of Religion Charles Marsh of UVA in the Boston Globe. It's a very compelling article dealing with the role of evangelical Christians in the run-up to war in Iraq:

Why did American evangelicals not pause for a moment in the rush to war to consider the near-unanimous disapproval of the global Christian community? The worldwide Christian opposition seems to me the most neglected story related to the religious debate about Iraq: Despite approval for the president's decision to go to war by 87 percent of white evangelicals in April 2003, according to a Pew Charitable Trusts poll, almost every Christian leader in the world (and almost every nonevangelical leader in the United States) voiced opposition to the war.

Marsh invokes the words and memory of Dietrich Boenhoeffer, Lutheran pastor and martyr to his cause in Hitler's Germany. I am usually one of those who invokes Godwin's Law when someone plays the "nazi" card with respect to the piece of shit who lives in the White House, but this is one time where the parallel to what happened during World War II is valid:

Bonhoeffer, who had actively opposed the Nazis since the passage of the Aryan Laws of 1933 and was executed in April 1945, believed that the church had so compromised its witness to Jesus Christ that it was now incapable of "taking the word of reconciliation and redemption to mankind and the world." The misuse of the language of faith had humiliated the Word; any hope for renewal would need to begin with the humble recognition that God was most certainly tired of all our talk.

I encourage everyone, Christian or no, to read this article and give it some consideration.

You can ping this entry by using http://www.nola-blogs.com/cgi-bin/mt/ruebourbon.cgi/788 .