They call it "Christian Twitter." It's the side discussions, conversations, exchanges, debates, and too-often verbal bloodbaths that occur on social media between segregated, warring cultural sects within American Christendom. To say I've spent too much time observing it recently would be an understatement.
If ever it was clear why Jesus prayed fervently in the Garden of Gethsemane for the unity of His followers, this over-politicized mayhem raging between those who are simultaneously telling the world how awesome and humbling God and His grace are is it. I wrote about that and the threat it poses to our effective communication of the gospel Monday in my new Monday/Friday MEMO.
How fitting that just two days later I saw this making its rounds through the politically left side of Christian Twitter:
I don't know Zach, and want to believe he has the best of intentions. But this is the type of comment that is extraordinarily destructive to unity in the body of Christ. It seems to not only intentionally misrepresent the issues of disagreement between the two sides, it tragically lacks goodwill and good faith in representing fellow Christian brothers and sisters to the world.
While the words themselves, if properly defined, may be accurate, the spirit and implication of the remark is both spoiled and spiteful.
Again, I don't know Mr. Lambert, and appreciate that he is working in a church with the intent of saving souls to God. But anyone faithfully engaged in a godly struggle, seeking to build the Kingdom of Christ on earth, recognizes the issues within the body aren't whether or not white supremacy or homophobia are good or bad. The issue has always been what constitutes white supremacy and homophobia.
What his more conservative brethren push back against is not the idea that it is wrong and un-Christlike to mistreat or abuse those who surrender to homosexual lusts. They push back against the idea that rebuking homosexual conduct is itself abuse.
They are not objecting to the premise that racism is evil. They are objecting to the notion that by resisting the neo-racism espoused by the non-Christian movement of Ibram X. Kendi and others they are enabling or fostering white supremacy.
To put it more directly:
- The world is quick to condemn the Biblical teaching of marital submission for both husband and wife as "patriarchy."
- The world is quick to condemn the Biblical teaching of one blood, one race for humanity as a ploy of white evangelicals to ignore past racial transgressions.
- The world is quick to condemn the Biblical sexual ethic as some "othering" strategy of the "cis-hetero authority."
These are all unfair, unjust, and unwarranted slanders of Christ's bride, the church. Jesus told us to be prepared for those slights, and demonstrate in the face of such vilification that we are His by the way we show love for one another. (Jn 13:35)
That is, the world would know that by our hesitancy to assume the worst of fellow confessors of Christ's name, by our refusal to throw our brothers and sisters under the bus, by our unity in defending one another against the hostile accusations of the unsaved, by our lack of interest in attaining worldly street cred by offering ourselves up as the "good Christian" over against our "bad Christian" brothers, that we are the church.
Christians are not showing each other love on Twitter. At all. And I can't help but think Satan is more than pleased by it all.
