Why is it that every few years an ecumenical spirit rages like a wildfire in the realms of Christendom? The latest fad, which has almost 50,000 friends on facebook, is: The Manhattan Declaration: A Call of Christian Conscience. See what it's about for yourself at http://www.manhattandeclaration.org/
I am not one of the nearly 50,000. The reason for this is that I still remember the Reformation. I take the Bible seriously, and I believe the only mandate the church has from Christ is to Preach the Word. The church is misguided when it joins in alliances with pseudo-Christians, heretics, and especially non-believers to rally about saving a culture that will ever be anti-Christ.
Instead of listening to a modern Roman Catholic, I prefer to heed the advice of a former Roman Catholic from another era, whose counsel we all should heed. He said, "My conscience is Captive to the Word of God." When Martin Luther uttered those words at the imperial diet of Worms in 1521, he was not speaking about the issue of marriage or homosexuality. His main concern, as it should be ours, was the very Gospel itself. May christendom get its conscience's priorities right. Maybe this will happen when evangelicals stop worrying about the church's position in the world and start recognizing the worldly spirit in the church.
Only around the gospel should we unite. Till Orthodox and Roman Catholics, not to mention heretics and non-believers, unite in submission to Christ alone through the gospel alone, all our ravings about a culture going from bad to worse will mislead us with a sense of unified accomplishment by simply striving together. Our joining hands and gaining friends in cyberspace, however, will be a hollow victory. We may as well close our churches and back the right candidate if our conscience is captive to the Manhatten declaration. Despite its caveat that this is no political or partisan issue, the truth is that only in the realm of political activism will the dreams of the Manhattaners be accomplished. Christ never called us to this.
For all the Manhattan Declaration's moral overtones, we forget that merely moral people will still wind up in hell without Christ. When the perspective of God and eternity truly shapes our vision and His gospel sets us free, then we join brother Martin in not only uniting for a cause, but we recognize that the only cause worth living and dying for is the proclamation of the gospel. Anything less or anything else is just not worth the commotion and rage. Rather than unite around the Manhattan Declaration, we should join with Luther in the Unforgettable Stand: My Conscience is Captive to the Word of God.
Too much is being made of the Manhattan Declaration, and not enough of our Lord's declaration: "It is Finished."
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12/14/09 2:11 PM
