nothing new under the sun

If Kevin DeYoung is accurately reporting history, we once again have a generation who believes they are onto something revolutionary but are instead simply recycling yesterday's rebellion (it is important here that I admit to being guilty of the same). In Marcionism and the New Mood DeYoung tackles the issue that seems to be hitting me on all sides these days, that is this heresy of christian universalism and the rejection of the full nature of God as He is re-imaged into some romanticized definition of love.

DeYoung captures this weltgeist accurately with this.

The New Mood is squeamish about hell and uncomfortable with God's wrath. The New Mood envisions a Christianity where the attribute of God's love eclipses all other attributes, especially God's justice and power. The New Mood tells the Christian story not first of all (or at all) as good news about a Substitute who saves us from the wrath of God, but as a message which means to inspire us to live a life of sacrifice and shalom.

He follows that with a brief description of Marcion and then a quote from Angela Tilby in Heresies and How to Avoid Them: Why it Matters What Christians Believe that paints a clear picture of what went on then and now.

For him, there was a fundamental contradiction between law and love, righteousness and grace. Marcion thought that true Christianity was flawed by the incompatibilities at the heart of its teaching. His solution was radical. Nothing less than a restatement of faith would do, and for Marcion that restatement had to focus on what for him was the essential gospel: the love, mercy and compassion displayed in the life and teachings of Jesus. This, for him, was all that was necessary, it was the blueprint for a new and pure humanity. There was no other truly Christian foundation for belief or morality.

What Marcion couldn't bear was the note of judgment that went along with the preaching of the Christian message, the warnings that came with the teaching of the law, the call to obedience and the threat of hell. For Marcion, the picture of God given in [Exodus 20:18-20], a God whose presence is manifest in thunder and lightning and smoke on the mountain, was simply unbelievable. A God who makes his people tremble with fear, a God with whom they are afraid to communicate, could not be the God and Father of the Lord Jesus Christ. In fact, passages like this seemed to him to cast doubt on the central claim of the gospel. As he saw it, the Christianity of his day needed purging so that the pure gospel could be received in all its radical simplicity and appeal to the heart (75).

Sound familiar?

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