Marco Rubio has changed his religion three times

Baptized and raised Catholic in Florida.

Converted to Mormonism while in elementary school in Utah.

Went back to Florida and to Catholicism.

Now attends a Baptist church!

Detailed here.

John Shelby Spong's mother helps explain the obsessions of the man

From an interview here:

I happen to know the Bible pretty deeply and I didn’t reject the Bible when I rejected its literal frame of reference. I happen to be a believing, practicing Christian. I don’t go to church on Sunday mornings for show. I go because I want to be there and I need to worship. It’s not an option for me to sleep in on Sunday. My faith is deeper than that. I do not eat a meal that I don’t stop and say grace beforehand because that’s how I acknowledge the presence of God in my life at a regular time. I try to live a life of absolute commitment. I claim my Christian identity publicly.

This puts me at odds with my colleagues in the Jesus Seminar who are so scholarly but they are not devoted. They really think the church is a sick institution and they don’t want to be part of it. I think the church is the only place we’ve got, but we’ve got to transform and redeem it. If the church is not going to be the place where people encounter God and Christ I don’t see any other place in our society to do so. I work to transform the church. I don’t work to get rid of the church. I work to transform the meaning of what it means to be a Christian, not to get rid of that meaning. ...

I wrote a book once about reclaiming the Bible for a nonreligious world. I really want to take it back from those people who I think are ruining it. I don’t dislike those people. My mother was a fundamentalist. She had not finished the 9th grade. She knew no other way to approach the biblical story.

Spong was more inclined to wear membership in the Jesus Seminar as a badge of honor as recently as 2012, here:

In the 1990’s, Robert Funk invited me to become a Fellow of the Jesus Seminar. I was the first Fellow not to be a professional academic. ... While being a successful author and possessing a number of honorary doctorates, I did not have an earned PhD, which was normally regarded as a pre-requisite for becoming a Fellow of the Jesus Seminar. Nonetheless, the Seminar honored me by accepting me to its membership.  I have loved my association with them over the years.  I have participated in their debates and deliberations.  I have been invited to address some of their largest gatherings, including the 2004 event called “The Jesus Seminar at Times Square.”  The Seminar has adopted some of the perspectives that I have offered and they have under-girded my career with their incisive scholarship.  I have previously been recognized by them in several ways.  I was chosen for membership in the “David Friedrich Strauss Society of Biblical Scholars,” a society named for an early 19th century German New Testament scholar, who first brought the findings of the academy to the attention of the people of Europe.  Later I was given the “John A. T. Robinson Award” for “Courage and Integrity in Theology.”

I was deeply touched by each of these honors.  To close the gap between the academy and the people in the pews has been both the goal of the Seminar and the primary ambition of my career.  The Jesus Seminar has been a major force in enabling me to fulfill that vocation.  I have many friends today among the Fellows of the Seminar and I believe they have a new respect for the willingness of the clergy and lay people that I represent to be engaged in biblical scholarship. 

Scott Redd of Reformed Theological Seminary doesn't take Jesus' teaching about the cost of discipleship seriously

Here:

If, as the Apostle Paul says, we become new creations in Christ, then we should expect to find our wealth being directed toward ends that are more and more commensurate with our new creation. ... [W]ell-meaning believers often voice romanticized opinions about poverty and the impoverished, pointing out biblical passages that speak of the dangers of wealth while ignoring passages that speak of the wealth’s many blessings. ... Christians need to counsel, conspire, and collaborate with one another about how their mutual faith and love of God can find expression in the way they manage their wealth.

Yeah, it's right there in Luke 14:33, where it says "No one can be my disciple who doesn't manage all their wealth more and more commensurate with the new creation".

Pope Francis: Gay priests? Who am I to judge? Donald Trump? Not a Christian.

Kerry Dougherty, here:

"So it’s OK for the pope to judge an American politician but not gay priests?"

Ted Cruz' messiah complex is showing: Who does he think he is, Jesus Christ?

Jesus Christ the same yesterday, and to day, and for ever.

-- Hebrews 13:8

Pope Francis declares he's not a Christian: Vatican walls are not in the Gospel

Quoted here:

"A person who thinks only about building walls, wherever they may be, and not building bridges, is not Christian," Francis said. "This is not in the Gospel."

Rod Dreher: The bad news is Donald Trump is religious and social conservatives' only choice in this election

From Rod Dreher, here:

[Trump] has said publicly that he will make protecting religious liberty a priority. Does he mean it? I have no idea, and you don’t either. He is no religious conservative. But he is a populist who doesn’t care what the donor class thinks, because he is not indebted to them. It is reasonable to think that religious liberty stands a better chance with Trump in the White House than any other Republican. Mind you, that’s the soft bigotry of low expectations, but that just goes to show you how weak the position of us religious and social conservatives has become within the Republican Party. ...

For people in our socioeconomic demographic, greater immigration meant more and better restaurants, and better lawn and garden care.

Our kids weren’t having their schools overrun by children who couldn’t speak the language; they went to private school, or to public schools in parts of town immigrants couldn’t afford. 

We weren’t having the hospitals we used overrun by illegal immigrants needing care; we didn’t have to use the public hospital.

Our neighborhoods weren’t changing in front of our eyes. And so on.

The immigration issue was a chance for us to show our compassion — sometimes our explicitly Christian compassion — without it costing us anything tangible. The kind of white people my class looked down on and thought of as racist rabble were the kind of white people who had to bear a lot of the brunt of our politics and what we called compassion. ... [T]hey are not wrong to judge that many in our class looks [sic] down on them, and doesn’t [sic] share their interests. The kinds of social things they might like to conserve don’t really matter to people of my class. We can’t see it, we never could see it, and some of us are still bound and determined not to see it, until they make us see it.

A scholar of the prosperity gospel pinpoints the false message of libertarianism at the heart of it

Here:

The prosperity gospel has taken a religion based on the contemplation of a dying man and stripped it of its call to surrender all. Perhaps worse, it has replaced Christian faith with the most painful forms of certainty. The movement has perfected a rarefied form of America’s addiction to self-rule, which denies much of our humanity: our fragile bodies, our finitude, our need to stare down our deaths (at least once in a while) and be filled with dread and wonder. At some point, we must say to ourselves, I’m going to need to let go.

Perfect freedom eludes us

From Carol Zaleski on Samuel Johnson, here, who with fine turns of phrase has captured the humanity and wisdom of the man who navigated the divide between pre-modern and modern man more heroically than any English writer before or since:

'No writer has more convincingly described the failure to “scheme life,” the near futility of hygienic self-improvement. Not piety alone, but piety weathered by illness, disfigurement, financial worries, marital difficulties, overwork, and hereditary melancholy (to the point that he feared madness), as well as his bungled attempts at self-discipline, made Johnson skeptical of the Enlightenment ideal of autonomy. He was a kind and courageous man (notwithstanding his well-known combativeness in debate), full of charity, whose setbacks inoculated him against spiritual pride.'

Yeah, so how did Luke know what was said "between themselves"?

And when [Paul] had thus spoken, the king rose up, and the governor, and Bernice, and they that sat with them: And when they were gone aside, they talked between themselves, saying, This man doeth nothing worthy of death or of bonds. Then said Agrippa unto Festus, This man might have been set at liberty, if he had not appealed unto Caesar.

-- Acts 26:30ff.

Ash Wednesday, when the hypocrites disfigure their faces to be seen of men

Moreover when ye fast, be not, as the hypocrites, of a sad countenance: for they disfigure their faces, that they may appear unto men to fast. Verily I say unto you, They have their reward. But thou, when thou fastest, anoint thine head, and wash thy face; That thou appear not unto men to fast, but unto thy Father which is in secret: and thy Father, which seeth in secret, shall reward thee openly.

-- Matthew 6:16ff.

Calling J. Gresham Machen a forgotten libertarian is as unhelpful as calling Jesus a socialist

In a short essay entitled "Rendering Unto Caesar: Was Jesus a Socialist?" which the author rather embarrassingly calls "epic", Lawrence W. Reed never quite gets it that the idea of socialism is a phenomenon of the modern age which didn't present itself to the minds of pre-modern men and that those like Gorbachev who paste the term on figures of the past are doing more to obscure their thoughts than to elucidate them. Regrettably Reed goes on to commit the same error himself.

Socialism is an intellectual category which only lately in history arose in reaction to the appearance of industrial capitalism in the Enlightenment West. To paint Jesus with the hues of this corner of time completely ignores his own time and its conditions in which as a prophet he preached the imminent coming of the kingdom of God in unique historical circumstances. But it will hardly do to also make Jesus a defender of capitalism, which couldn't be more anachronistic. A good student of Jesus' teaching would not miss, as Reed does, that personal poverty and distribution of assets to the poor was a condition of discipleship according to the Synoptic tradition. Jesus believed this precisely because it represented repentance to him, without which one would not survive the end of the world and God's judgment which were fast and certainly approaching.

Of course this underscores a major difference with St. Paul, whose thought was a preoccupation of the New Testament scholar John Gresham Machen, the subject of the recent essay by Reed entitled "God’s Forgotten Libertarian". If repentance required various acts of renunciation of the world to Jesus, to Paul it above all required belief in the lordship of Christ, whom Paul believed was still soon to return in judgment.

The irony of Reed's title is that like socialism, libertarianism is also a late product of the modern age, precisely from the clutches of which Machen sought his whole life to rescue thinking about Paul, especially in The Origins of Paul's Religion (1921).

It's difficult to imagine a better way to misrepresent Machen.

And Paul.

Libertarian Christianity would have been an utter contradiction in terms to the apostle to the Gentiles for the simple reason that there could never be any notion of personal autonomy in Christianity, as if one could give oneself one's own law to live by apart from the law of Christ, or could live in blissful isolation without being a member of the body of Christ or without a duty to the rest of humankind, or could actually own oneself. These are all core notions of libertarian individualism which are at war with basic Pauline ideas:

What? know ye not that your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost which is in you, which ye have of God, and ye are not your own? For ye are bought with a price: therefore glorify God in your body, and in your spirit, which are God's.

 

-- 1 Corinthians 6:19f.

Likewise he who was free when called is a slave of Christ. You were bought with a price . . ..

 

-- 1 Corinthians 7:22f.

Let no man seek his own, but every man another's wealth.

 

-- 1 Corinthians 10:24

Even as I please all men in all things, not seeking mine own profit, but the profit of many, that they may be saved.

 

-- 1 Corinthians 10:33

[Charity] . . . seeketh not her own . . ..

 

--1 Corinthians 13:5

Examine yourselves, whether ye be in the faith; prove your own selves. Know ye not your own selves, how that Jesus Christ is in you, except ye be reprobates?

 

-- 2 Corinthians 13:5

I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me: and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself for me.

 

-- Galatians 2:20

Bear ye one another's burdens, and so fulfil the law of Christ.

 

-- Galatians 6:2

So we, being many, are one body in Christ, and every one members one of another.

 

-- Romans 12:5

Look not every man on his own things, but every man also on the things of others.

 

-- Philippians 2:4

Not that I speak in respect of want: for I have learned, in whatsoever state I am, therewith to be content. I know both how to be abased, and I know how to abound: every where and in all things I am instructed both to be full and to be hungry, both to abound and to suffer need.

 

-- Philippians 4:11f.

This know also, that in the last days perilous times shall come. For men shall be lovers of their own selves . . ..

 

-- 2 Timothy 3:1ff.


Christianity may have become many things, but what it most certainly is not in its origins is a materialist philosophy. Those who say otherwise like Reed unfortunately know not whereof they speak.