I am profoundly troubled this morning as I read the various social media reports and messages regarding the mass murder in Orlando. I have read many posts which call for us as Christians to pray for, love, and help those who have been victims of the shooting.
I am appalled that when I first heard of the shootings, I felt nothing. I am deeply troubled that I have such a cold and indifferent heart to human suffering, and am so unlike our Lord in having love for all sinners.
What does the West have to do with this? Precisely this:
I attended Southern Fried Fundamentalist churches for 13 years. I had just come out of a life of tremendous evil myself, yet through the preaching in these churches, I was made to feel that somehow I am now "better than those terrible sinners" who have not come to Christ. There is a kind of triumphalist preaching in Fundamentalism (you know - we are right and God loves us because we are right, and everyone else is going to the hell they deserve). This sort of preaching breeds contempt for others, not Christian charity.
And it finds a particularly warm and inviting home in the hearts and minds of people who are already quite broken and who latch onto this sort of preaching as a way of feeling better about themselves. The ultimate expression of this is, of course, the Westboror Baptist bunch.
Then I went to PCA Calvinism for the next 12 years. Again, that Western mindset crops up: we are "the elect," and all others who are not elect are God's enemies. And you can tell who are God's enemies by how much they love sin and how depraved their sins are.
Finally, the preaching of God's wrath against sinners (think Jonathan Edwards) in both of these denominations made it quite clear to me that I was right to hate and despise these sinners. After all, our pastor hated them, called them "sodomites" and spoke, sometimes with great relish, of their eternal torment in a deserved lake of fire forever.
Do you see what I have lacked for 25 years - anything to do with the love of God. Any idea that God loves every single human being, that God is love, and love is how we are to treat all men and women, was either not preached, tepidly mentioned, or sometimes made fun of. I remember sermons in which God was presented as the angry, vengeful God who hates sinners.
God hates? I thought the Bible says that God is love.
Anyway, because of deep psychological scarring in my own soul, this putrid way of thinking has taken deep root in my soul. I am stunned at how heartless I am, yet professing to be a follower of the One who is love incarnate.
Not much I can do except pray, ask for the Holy Spirit, and continue to repent of such thinking. But this poison runs deep, and I again blame the Western theological approach - the vengeful God who hates sinners and tosses them into hell with glee - as bringing me to such a terrible place in my life.