The Unredemptive Blogs

The blog phenomenon is of great benefit in many ways, including offering great resources for spiritual growth and expression. Like most things, however, it has also provided a platform for destructiveness and merciless judgment, which was there before the internet, but now has an informational conduit with which to spread its venom. Such is the blog called Slice of Laodicea overseen by a woman named Ingrid Schlueter. She operates this blog as a spiritual correction to everyone and everything she deems in need of her doctrinal authority, including questioning the ordination and calling of scores, perhaps hundreds, of ordained pastors and preachers. She herself has only a radio program on a station started and I assume still overseen by her father. But her ecclesiastical usurpation aside, I want to address a broader issue that she, as well as other Christian bloggers, exhibit regularly.

Last year the governor of Alaska was nominated to run for vice president on the Republican ticket. Since I am non-political, including abstaining from voting, I have no political axe to grind and Ms. Palin seemed to be a nice woman who also professed a faith in Jesus Christ. During the campaign it became known that her 17 year old daughter, Bristol, was pregnant out of wedlock. As you can imagine the press had a field day with that from all perspectives within our culture. Some were absolutely horrible while others thought nothing of it.

Bristol Palin, with the guidance of her parents decided to have the child and not have an abortion. She is on the beginning of a journey that will have some unique struggles. Recently she decided to go with her mother and give an interview to Fox news about her situation. She tells of her desire to be an example of what not to do, and to even speak to teenagers on the subject. She expresses remorse in a 17 year old language, and nowhere does she say what she did was right, even though she does not regret the baby itself. How could she?

But now enters the “Christian” blogashpere, ready to pounce on her every word and demanding she show more shame and contrition, such as would meet their criteria. One such post emanated from the blog Slice of Laodicea, written by Ms. Schlueter. It is a treatise on condemnation and self righteousness, and presents in stark relief what Christianity looks like when redemption and grace is missing and replaced by self righteousness camouflaged as “Biblical morality”. It is not enough for people like Ms. Schlueter to speak disparagingly about preachers and churches, or to demean the ordinations and callings of pastors and elders, but she and others must investigate the moral failings of ordinary young women in the midst of a difficult situation and pile on with her caustic rhetoric regardless of the circumstances.

Some of these bloggers, if you can believe what I am going to share, actually subscribe to secular news outlets that give them daily e-mail reports, some with key words like “pastor” or “church” or other catch phrases so that each morning they receive secular reports about the moral failures of others. And when things like a pastor from Nowhere, USA is caught in adultery comes to their attention they immediately can spread it and add their self righteous editorial about the state of evangelicalism, excluding their own piety of course. And if you read the interview juxtaposed with Ingrid’s post you will see a mischaracterization, not to mention the “stick your nose in other people’s business” foundation of the post. So the internet can provide the perch from which anyone can write as if they had authority and divine direction, even when the love that should cover a multitude of sins is absent.

I cannot tell you how repulsed I was to read her self serving mischaracterization of that interview. She is absolutely obsessed with everyone else’s business, and shows no compassion whatsoever for hardly anyone. Her blog is a demonic tabloid. In reality, her post about Bristol Palin is nothing more than a lie and could even be legally slanderous. I preached strongly against premarital sex, but when my own daughter became pregnant before she was married our entire faith community gathered around her to forgive and restore her. No one had to tell her she had sinned, but “a bruised reed will He not break”.

As a father, I cannot put into words what I would have felt if some woman had used our family heartbreak as a launching pad for her vicious attack blog. Ingrid continues to reveal the depth of her self righteous darkness and she is without feeling for those she castigates.

Let it be known, without compassion and mercy there is no Christianity, just a hollow moral construct that self righteously suggests the heart of the one who judges is much better than the ones she castigates. Christianity is infinitely more than a set of moral commandments that are policed within the community by the modern midnight riders of the spiritual Klan, enforcing their own legalism by the outstretched tentacles of their viperous electronic tongues.

It has become apparent that these teachers of the law are deconstructing the very faith once delivered to the saints with every bit as much diligence as are some who reject some cardinal tenants of the faith itself. It has become a rejection of the cross, every bit as deceptive and deadly as those who reject the substitutionary essence of that cross. These moral storm troopers delight in the failure of others and are only too happy to inflict additional wounds to those who have fallen, and that, my friends, is demonic at its core.

Let us not be deceived, what some are projecting is not Christianity, it is a modern day revelation of the parable of the publican and the tax collector. Just because one seems outwardly moral, and goes to church to sit and revel in their own righteousness, and just because one checks all the doctrinal boxes on the theological test, does not mean that person is living out the Christian faith.

Discussing issues, even in uncivilized verbiage is unfortunate but understandable. Even attacking certain preachers with adolescent and ignorant labels and phrases is fleshly and carnal. But attacking, lying about, and using the sins and failures of young men and women to further your own twisted hubris is unconscionable and does despite to the Spirit of Christ. God’s Spirit is searching for a bride for God’s Son, and like Eliezer He draws this bride with gifts of mercy, grace, forgiveness, and love, not a judicial construct that not only condemns the future Mrs. Isaac, but publishes her sins with an effervescent editorial that makes her as unattractive as possible and elevates the publisher as the owner of the tree of good and evil. There is nothing in that carnal “ministry” that remotely resembles the ministry of reconciliation, and in fact it works as the opponent of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

So go ahead all you who desire to rid the culture of all unpleasantness and sin through the capture, tagging, and mounting of those sins on your blog room wall. Many continue to hunt for the sins of others, and with the skill of a taxidermist you preserve them as discernment trophies and invite as many visitors as possible to view the success of your transgression safaris. Go ahead and keep exhibiting your psychotic behavior by receiving daily secular updates on the sins of the world with which you can whisper that same gossip into the ears of your eager readers, presented with your own garnish of hyperbole, judgment, and twisted mischaracterizations.

All of you who do these things are working for the kingdom of darkness, not the kingdom of God’s Dear Son.