The sad, silent evil of ‘religious’ freedom
The Layman August 2005 Volume 38, Number 3, however, having done away with the standard for discerning good and evil, there is no such thing as heresy. Thus, the institutionally religious continue to go about their business, presuming that it is God’s business.
And that’s the sad, silent evil of “religious” liberty, and is illustrative of a denomination grown more political, bloated and distorted in its failed attempt to be all things to all people. Today’s curia seemingly has forgotten what the church leaders in the “bad” old days never did: “I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me” (John 14:6).
The Apostle Paul didn’t forget. When preaching in Athens, a city whose diversity welcomed multiple and mutually contradictory truths, he emphasized the truth – the one truth that Athenians of that day and their progeny among today’s denominational leaders find intolerable.
The upshot, without that truth, is that we are living within the shadow of the fall without the sense of wonder engendered by the hope of the resurrection. We have become church wanderers searching for the rebirth of wonder, bereft of a safe and secure faith in which to take refuge from a world that seemingly has gone mad, escaping from a denomination that has strayed from the faith that was once for all entrusted to the saints.
In the “bad” old days, church leaders knew that “the truth and the life” was the only “way.” Too bad some of today’s church leaders can’t see that.