Excerpt from Christianity is Revolutionary: Christians and Social Justice

The Christian story makes little sense initially for many folks because the functioning paradigm of most of Western culture (and especially in the University setting) is Secular Pluralism. Secular Pluralism serves us well in some ways (especially given our multi-cultural country)--it encourages dialogue in order to settle disputes, for example, rather than violence.

However, there are some significant places where the Christian worldview and Secular Pluralism diverge--and where I think that Secular Pluralism breaks down. I think there's a Biblical Pluralism that's pretty phenomenal, but that's a whole other night's talk. Let's take a look at some of the places of divergence in order to more fully understand what we're talking about as we talk about Christianity being revolutionary.

The fundamental supposition of Secular Pluralism regarding Human Nature is that people are essentially good. Now if Freud accused Christians of building a religion around wish-fulfillment, I think we can only say that and more for this beginning assertion. Forget Christianity or anything else for the moment. Does the weight of the evidence of human history over the past 5,000 years really bear this out? Doesn't 5,000 years of bloodshed, mindless violence, political tyranny, conquest, slavery, human trafficking, and exploitation of animals, children, and the environment speak to the contrary?

We would like for people to be good. But in actuality, they aren't. We would like to think that we are good. But I think there are few places where we are more self-deluded than in our estimation of our own goodness.

What if we took every thought you've had for the past 24 hours and projected it on this screen? Every single one. How good would you appear to be then? What if we did that for all 225 of us here in this room? How good would we seem to be collectively then?

As much as we might like for it to be the opposite, people are not essentially good. There is much beauty and goodness all around us, certainly. There are moments of transcendence, grace, love, truth, wonder. But they are all just passing. They are quickly tarnished by brokenness.

Very little is as bad as it could be. But none of it is as glorious, and wonderful, as truly good as it was intended to be.