[#] nutter second helping

Listen: I'm done reminding you to read the original nutter post. You have to keep up on your own; I'm not your summer school teacher.

Yesterday I covered the matter that from inside the Gospel we can see two kinds of work being done in the world – the actual Gospel work, and the work of a backwards Gospel which advocates that if we would only do "X" to charm the world, everyone would fall over for the Gospel and that would be that. There is a type of this backwards gospel I'd like to talk about today which we ought to be very concerned about.

You might be surprised to find out I'm not going to bash the Emergent gospel or the Purpose-Drive® gospel. Let me tell you about this backwards gospel by way of illustration – and to be as transparent as possible, this example is the one communicated to me by the meta-haunter who is now banned whom I referred to in yesterday's post.

Axwell Tiberius, Southern Baptist Deacon i'll turn you down, pal !

There's a kind of Christian who incessantly listens to Christian talk radio without any regard to who is talking. They play Christian music all the time. They have a plastic fishy on their car. And when you say to them, "hey pal: do you think that's a Christian way to drive," or "Hey bub: turn it down a notch because I'm trying to concentrate over here," or "geez: do you really think that God hates gay sin any more than he hates adulterers or murderers" they crack like a baseball through pane glass and shout you down – as if you have assaulted the Gospel and God.

This kind of Christian is exactly the same kind of Christian as the person who thinks that if they concede enough ground to the culture they can entice the culture to accept the Gospel – the only difference is what they think they have to do to create "good will" for Jesus. The conceder thinks that if I make the Gospel look enough like, for example, Oprah or Dr. Phil, then people will think it is a nice idea and think about it some more; the other guy – the one who makes everything about whether or not he's allowed to be a Christian, and makes everything an equal moral stand about his right to practice "Christianity" (as if having a fishy on your car makes you a Christian, or if listening to R. J. Helton or Southern Gospel makes you a Christian) – has decided that if he does what he does long enough and loud enough, then he has practiced and preached the Gospel, and selah: come Lord Jesus.

This second kind of culture monkey is not any more or less effective or offensive than fat people who wear spandex or parents who take their kids' sports too seriously. But they are employing the same methodology: I'm going to put my "thing" in your face until you give up, and if you try to stop me, well, don't try to stop me. You can't stop me!

And let me say that I have some sympathy for those who run into these people because they get the worst flavor of the backwards gospel, and when they come up to the actual Gospel, it's like smelling tequila for the first time after your first tequila drunk: please, take it away unless you have a clean-up plan and the means to carry it out.

So there's a double warning for those who think they are talking about the Gospel, and a double-sided question for those who don't accept the Gospel to ask themselves.

There's one more thing I need to cover in this series, and I'll get to it tomorrow.

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