{"id":253,"date":"2007-12-04T11:40:39","date_gmt":"2007-12-04T15:40:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/godandculture.wordpress.com\/2007\/12\/04\/hillarys-home-run-for-the-purpose-driven-left\/"},"modified":"2007-12-04T11:40:39","modified_gmt":"2007-12-04T15:40:39","slug":"hillarys-home-run-for-the-purpose-driven-left","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.godandculture.com\/blog\/hillarys-home-run-for-the-purpose-driven-left","title":{"rendered":"Hillary’s ‘Home Run’ for The Purpose Driven Left"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"clinton_warren.jpg\"<\/a>The problem is not that Rick and Kay Warren invited Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton to keynote their third annual Global Summit on AIDS and the Church at Saddleback Church. Giving Senator Clinton a platform in one of the largest evangelical churches in America exposes her agenda, allowing us to engage her in the arena of ideas on the social issues on which we fundamentally disagree, something conservative evangelicals should welcome. The problem is that Rick Warren never engaged the Senator on the points on which evangelicals fundamentally disagree with her agenda.<\/p>\n

Senator Clinton was welcomed by the ostensibly evangelical crowd with a standing ovation. She spoke for just under thirty minutes, taking as her text James 2:26, \u201cFaith without works is dead,\u201d removing it from its context and turning it in to a pretext by saying,<\/p>\n

\u201cOne of my favorite passages in Scripture is that famous line from James that \u2018faith without works is dead.\u2019 But I have concluded that works without faith is just too hard. It cannot be sustained over one\u2019s life or over the generations. And it\u2019s important for us to recognize how, here in what you\u2019re doing, faith and works come together.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

There\u2019s just one problem: faith and works don\u2019t \u201ccome together.\u201d Our works are never independent of our faith. We don\u2019t add our faith to our works. Our works flow from and validate our faith.<\/p>\n

The point of the James passage is not to suggest that we add faith to our works in order to make our work easier and more fulfilling. Rather our works flow from our faith in Jesus Christ to give evidence of our salvation from sin in Jesus Christ, and this faith is \u201cnot of ourselves\u201d but is itself \u201cthe gift of God\u201d (Ephesians 2:8,9). The point of the James passage is not to say that what we do can somehow be made easier by our belief in what we are doing, but rather to say that we can do nothing at all unless it flows from our faith in Jesus Christ. Senator Clinton has redefined faith to mean faith in our works rather than faith in Jesus producing our works.<\/p>\n

Throughout her speech the senator similarly mishandled the word of God, at one point paraphrasing 1 Corinthians 12:12 saying, \u201cCorinthians tells us that \u2018the body is made up of many parts, and though all its parts are many, they form one body.\u2019\u201d She then went on to interpret the \u201cthe parts of the body\u201d as the combining of government resources (tax revenue) with the resources the church can provide (comfort care) when the text clearly indicates that the body is Christ\u2019s Church and believers are the individual members of his body, the Church.<\/p>\n

But the most egregious misapplication of Scripture came when the Senator from New York said,<\/p>\n

\u201cWe are taught to heal the sick, to love them as our own, but 25 years ago too many died alone ashamed to tell their families what had made them ill. In the Gospels we learn that one-third of Christ\u2019s ministry was healing the sick. And if you read those moments when Jesus is presented with someone who is ill, it becomes abundantly clear that Christ had a choice. He could have been too busy. He could have thought, you know, this is not the message of the day. \u201cI don\u2019t need to do this, I\u2019ve already done it in Capernaum, so I don\u2019t need to do it again.\u201d But he made THE choice. He never asked why someone was sick. He just healed and ministered to those in need.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In that quote Hillary Clinton humanizes Jesus, bringing him down to a level equal to fallen man. The reality is, Jesus didn\u2019t heal everyone who came to him for healing (John 2:23-25). She further humanizes Jesus by forgetting that the reason Jesus never asked why a person was sick before healing them was because he didn\u2019t need to. As God, he knew why they were sick. Hillary is implying here that Jesus never associated a person\u2019s behavior with their illness, as evangelicals associate the sinful behavior of homosexuals with AIDS\/HIV.<\/p>\n

But Hillary is wrong. On at least one occasion, the healing of the paralytic in Matthew 9, Jesus healed the man by saying, \u201cYour sins are forgiven you.\u201d Jesus demanded repentance as he went about healing the sick, an important part of the Gospels Hillary seems to have forgotten.<\/p>\n

In addition to walking the audience through her own comprehensive AIDS\/HIV agenda, she offered at least three objectives her presidency would seek to achieve relative to the AIDS\/HIV crisis which expose her socialistic worldview: she would ask for $50 billion dollars over five years to combat HIV\/AIDS, make the education of the world\u2019s children a priority in the fight against AIDS (what she called \u201ca social vaccine against the spread of HIV\/AIDS\u201d), and \u201cstand up for Women\u2019s Rights\u201d by \u201cworking to empower women to take responsibility for themselves and for their futures with initiatives on everything from maternal health, to micro credits, and entrepreneurship.\u201d For Hillary, \u201cmaternal health\u201d is a code word for \u201creproductive rights\u201d which is itself a code word for \u201cabortion on demand.\u201d Her words were greeted with rousing applause by an evangelical audience.<\/p>\n

Senator Clinton also offered six things the church could do to combat AIDS\/HIV: care for those who are infected and their families; encourage testing, even become testing centers; unleash volunteers; reduce the stigma by showing it\u2019s not a sin to be sick; champion healthy behavior; and be treatment coaches for those taking medication. She added that churches \u201cmust tend to the spiritual side of this crisis,\u201d which she defined as comfort care for orphans, and psychological care for those diagnosed with AIDS\/HIV. Nothing in Hillary\u2019s list vaguely resembles the mandate Jesus left his Church.<\/p>\n

While Hillary is correct that Jesus spent one-third of his ministry healing the sick, she conveniently leaves out that the BULK of Jesus\u2019 ministry, the other two-thirds, was spent preaching and teaching, calling men and women to repent of their sins. This is the priority of the church. While we should not ignore the plight of the suffering, the sick, and the dying, neither should we fail to fulfill the one mandate our Savior gave to us: \u201cGo into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature.\u201d<\/p>\n

Rick Warren has become the new face of the Evangelical Right in America. Mark Pinsky, religion writer for the Orlando Sentential, in an opinion piece for USA Today last August<\/a>, described Warren as \u201cpragmatic, politically sophisticated,\u201d and among the evangelical leaders who make up the \u201cemerging face and voice of American evangelicalism.\u201d<\/p>\n

As the new face of American evangelicalism, Rick Warren has a responsibility to resist the temptations of political expediency by remaining true to his first calling: preach the word (2 Timothy 4). But it would seem Pastor Rick has learned you get much more favorable media coverage when you cover what the media favors. Rather than take a bold stand for the gospel and its clear message of repentance, Warren has opted to follow today\u2019s religious Left as they revive the social gospelism of the early decades of the Twentieth Century, allowing Hillary\u2019s mishandling of the word of God and the presentation of her socialistic agenda to go unchallenged.<\/p>\n

Not only did he not challenge her agenda, at the conclusion of the Senator\u2019s speech Rick Warren came to the podium and in remarks that were picked up by the microphone he said to Hillary, \u201cFantastic! Home run\u2026home run\u2026home run!\u00a0Wonderful message! You did a great job.\u201d<\/p>\n

Either Rick Warren wasn\u2019t intently listening to what his guest was saying for the previous thirty minutes, or Rick Warren is being less than candid with evangelicals about his own agenda.<\/p>\n

LISTEN HERE<\/a><\/strong> to Senator Clinton’s speech at Rick Warren’s Global Summit on AIDS and the Church<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The problem is not that Rick and Kay Warren invited Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton to keynote their third annual Global Summit on AIDS and the Church at Saddleback Church. Giving Senator Clinton a platform in one of the largest evangelical … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-253","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.godandculture.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/253","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.godandculture.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.godandculture.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.godandculture.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.godandculture.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=253"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.godandculture.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/253\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.godandculture.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=253"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.godandculture.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=253"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.godandculture.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=253"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}