Southern Baptist Convention’s Russell Moore criticized prosperity gospel preachers who literally sit upon thrones of gold and say Christianity is the best way to live, even if Christ was not real.
“That’s easy to say from a golden throne on television,” Moore said in a recent podcast. “That is not easy to say in first-century Ephesus when identifying yourself with a crucified and resurrected Messiah means that you are going to lose your standing in the marketplace. That is not easy to say in an unregistered house church in China right now. That is not easy to say in Sudan. And in fact, that is never what Christianity has proposed itself to be.”
Indeed, Jesus told His disciples in John 16:33 that the world would bring them troubles. Christianity was never meant to be normal, Moore says.
“Christianity is speaking a strange and scandalous word into whatever culture that it comes into,” Moore says.
And in America, there are “those who want nonetheless to keep Christianity as a discount store prosperity gospel in which we are able to say Jesus is the means by which you achieve all of the things all of the things you want to achieve as a normal American and heaven too at the end of it.”
Christianity was never meant to be easy, Moore says. It’s always been attached to a scandal and will always be hated by many.
Rather than believers tone down some of Christianity’s greatest mysteries like the virgin birth and the resurrection, they should embrace the “scandal,” and carry their crosses.
Do you agree? Sound off!
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