From: mangoe@cs.umd.edu (Charley Wingate)
Newsgroups: soc.religion.christian
Subject: Re: 'my personal savior'
Date: 29 Sep 92 06:43:59 GMT

Louie Crew again:

>"MY personal savior" limits itself to the ego-centric, as does my account
>at Midlantic.  "MY lord" affirms the experience as personal, but connects
>me to a community.  No LORD worthy of the title has just one subject, and
>any one subject's affirmation of LORDship importantly connects the 
>subject to the other subjects.

The phrase doesn't limit it; your preference to view it that way limits it.
One rather commonly sees the phrase "Lord and Savior Jesus Christ", which
would appear to strike some sort of a balance.

>Yes, I agree.   But God is not made abstract by being the savior of my
>neighbors whom I don't like or by the hungry of the world who could be
>fed better if you and I went with less.

This business of community would very much seem to fly in the face of
reality.  Are fundamentalist and evangelical churches really so cursed with
a lack of community?  I think not.  If this lack is what you seek, better to
find yourself a big, dull Episcopal parish where its well-off parishioners
are all secretly congratulating themselves on their donations to the
Presiding Bishop's Fund or to UNICEF or to the Whitman-Walker Clinic.  It is
certianly possible, even likely, that the fundagelical chruch is more
isolated from the community in the sense that you see it here; it seems to
me that this community is likewise intent on at least blocking out the
religion of these people.

>God has already made it quite plain that She spends much of Her time with
>the poor and the needy, that she came to save sinners, not the righteous,
>that the one lost is more important than the 99 in the fold.  Am I right
>to suspect that if my prayers may fall need a megaphone to be heard if
>I fail to put myself into closer range by being with the least of these
>God's children?

The problem with this argument is that you have changed the balance.  It is
no longer the downtrodden who are the "sinners" in your picture-- it is the
churchgoer who does not heed your call.  It is not only AIDS patients and
the homeless whom God loves; it is also all those vaguely amoral, spiritual
undernourished, intellectually vacant people who make up a larger and larger
protion of the world.  There is nothing wrong with ministering to those in
prisons and in shelters and in slums; it is a worthy vocation and the work
of God.

But it is not the only work, and frankly, I find the automatic identification
of rural and suburban churchgoers with Pharisees deserving of strong
criticism.  The Episcopal Church, in particular, has been very willing to
sacrifice its own middle class parishioners to the cause of social justice,
with the fitting result of losing its parishioners.  It is one thing to call
one's people to a life of sacrifical service; it is quite another to
sacrifice them unwillingly.  As a churchman, I see my denomination being
overrun by those who simply have no empathy for the people in the pews and
who are largely directed by an secular, anti-christian view of the world
whose attitude towards the middle class is frankly snobbish.

The "personal savior" perhaps has such appeal because he offers salvation to
insurance clerks as well as to prison ministers.
-- 
C. Wingate        + "The peace of God, it is no peace,
                  +    but strife closed in the sod.
mangoe@cs.umd.edu +  Yet, brothers, pray for but one thing:
tove!mangoe       +    the marv'lous peace of God."