Recovering Baptist

Another blogger recently found me and invited me to review his Home Brewing Beer and Christianity series. I’m a bit slow at times, but I finally got around to reading his four posts and the comments. It is good to see other conservative (or orthodox, fundamentalist, evangelical, insert word here) Christians dealing with the same issues I have over the past 17 years. For people who were not raised in the Christian subculture that either explicitly or implicitly forbids alcohol, it can be very hard to even understand why booze is even an issue, but it is a very real issue nonetheless.

The inclination to mix cultural norms and scriptural mandates is older than Christianity itself. Christ spent a fair amount of time debating the religious leaders of his day over which “laws” were really required to gain God’s favor and which ones were man-made. With His physical departure from this earth came the Gospel which states that there is nothing that man can do to make himself more or less desirable to God apart form accepting the work of Christ. Yet, while that is the Christian message, many followers of Jesus still confuse culture and scripture and demand that others conform to their ideal.

Christians, however, aren’t the only ones who try to feel better about themselves by being “good.” One friend recently noted that environmental responsibility is the current trend in feel good legalism. It provides people with a sense of something they can do that is good while also giving them a yardstick by which to measure the badness of others. Similarly, John Stossel and Miguel Sancho recently wrote about what happens when healthy eating is taken too far. Orthorexia is a debilitating problem disguised as healthy eating. Orthorexics live in fear of eating “impure,” unhealthy foods, and in some horrible cases it leads to death. There are plenty of other examples of people who act as if they are in constant fear, but perhaps the worse are the adamant anti-smokers. These folks act as if a single whiff of someone’s cigarette will send them to the cancer ward, and since the smoker doesn’t know better himself, he should have his tobacco taken away immediately.

When we first look at things like the environment or healthy eating or smoking or alcohol, it is easy to say that avoiding these things are “good.” And to be sure, there is some good in treating the environment and our bodies with respect, but those of us who call ourselves Christians, need to be careful. We need to take a careful look at Peter’s dream. Not only did God convince Peter that it was acceptable to eat non-kosher foods, but He commanded him to take a bite. And this is an important step. For generations Peter’s family had believed that they were religiously justified because of what they didn’t eat, and now Peter was completely stripped of that justification. He was left only with Christ.

Once in a while Christians (both conservative and liberal) should review our list of do’s and don’ts and compare it with the Bible. There are plenty of scriptural moral requirements; chances are we aren’t living up to those standards. But we should also identify the moral code that we are following which is extra-Biblical and do something to ensure that we’re not adding to the Gospel. That might mean smoking a cigar or throwing an aluminum can in the trash can or even just eating a fat-filled steak wrapped in bacon and covered in blue cheese. We might decide that none of those things really do anything for us, but we have the freedom to do them without guilt. And, besides, we might realize that God has given us some good things that our culture might have prevented us from enjoying. Like bacon.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 8th, 2008 at 3:28 pm and is filed under Beer, Church, Food, Fun, Health, Religion, Self Reflection, Tobacco. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.