Rev. Erudite Redneck, B.S., B.S., M.A., M.Div.

I've actually used Chick Tracts... Still do, in fact.
 

I'm sure ya do. :-) I hold them up to examination, not just to ridicule -- although if you'll note things like this, uit';s hard to take them very seriously: Public school teachers are depicted as evil-looking, dark-eyed ghoulish types.

I think "This is Your Life" and "Holy Joe" are the only ones worth the paper they're printed on. :-) Although there might be some new ones I haven't seen.
 

What was that about ridiculing your brothers in Christ's name, ER?

Not baiting--just asking, mate.
 

You know as much about this whole deal as I do. I don't recall ridiculing you much, not other than in reaction to your own attacks on me, to be honest. Here, I'm laying out my cards.
 

Oh. I misunderstood.

I absolutely do ridicule big mission efforts and companies and organizations that I think doi as much harm, or more, than good.

I try to keep the ridicule of individuals to a minimum. You bring out the worst in me, though.
 

I've reread these tracts for the first tiem in a long time.

The Gospel is in them. I think they're terribly oversimplified. I think they promote a literal reading of Scripture that causes problems. But the Gospel is in them -- the ones I linked to, at least, becauee Chick also publishes a bunch of crap.

Whether a voting place should be so close to them is a question for someone else. I raise the question. But I stand by the Gospel.
 

Except for "Big Daddy," which is among the crap.
 

I haven't seen these in 20 years. They're still a loada crap.

I'm sure this company is well-intentioned but these folk don't understand how ridiculous they make Jesus look.

Do we really need to make school teachers out to be maniacal fascists to make a point? How many educators do you suppose that would win over?

Do we really need a BIG MANLY MAN to talk about how Jesus wasn't a sissy?

I'd think that maybe if these were directed towards kids (which they're not), they MIGHT be okay, but no. Kids are more sophisticated than that. They'd see these as the blatantly manipulative and cheaply made junk they are.

It is a good thing to criticize bad ideas.
 

I imagine that some of them do some good in spite of their badness.

And, some people probably do need a way to get past the notion of Jesus-as-sissy. I know he's not, and you know he's not, but pop culture does tend to depict him as "meek and mild, like a child," or whatever.
 

" I imagine that some of them do some good in spite of their badness."

Tough call. What if they actually reach 10 people who, through the art and artful writing of Chick, find Christ. But then, what if it turns 20 people away...how does one measure crude success?

I reckon the civil libertarian in me supports this guy's/group's right to write "gospel" the way they want, even if the Christian in me finds it offensive.
 

"But then, what if it turns 20 people away...how does one measure crude success?"

God only measures our faithfulness... not our success. Our job is to spread the Gospel, it's God's job, or rather the Holy Spirits' job, to work on the conscience.
 

Aahhh, but what if we attempt to spread what we think is the Gospel, but it has little to do with what Jesus actually taught? And, as a result, people are repelled by this anti-Christian message disguised as a Christian one and it keeps them away from Christ? Will it be better for them if they'd placed a millstone around their neck and took a short swim in a deep ocean?
 

Oh, come on. The millstones are for deliberate fakers and actual enemies of God.

God starts dissing people for their feeble efforts to grasp the Truth and all our unholy gooses are cooked.

I have found Jesus, as I see Him today, amid a red sea of fundamentalism. God's ways are mysterious, indeed.

Yes, I gripe about FOTF a lot. But not because of the Gospel FOTF people profess. Because of the fundie, in-your-face aspects of it, and its atempt to remake this whole dang country in its own image of what it thinks Christianity is.
 

Timely Q&A from Spong:

Bob Waldo from the Internet writes:

"Why not refer readers both Christian/Church alumni/and non-Christian readers to the recent publication of James Robinson's "The Gospel of Jesus." It is a very well written account of how the New Testament came to be but is most effective in ... his account of Jesus' own gospel as opposed to that of Paul and Rome. He paints a picture of what I truly believe the man Jesus was about that can only be described as "awesome!" But mostly he points me, a retired minister, to the tremendously exciting truth I could have been preaching...but sadly, I just didn't know."

Dear Bob,

I am happy to recommend James Robinson's book along with many others. Marcus Borg's "The Heart of Christianity" and "Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time." Robert Fink's "Honest to Jesus," perhaps even my own book, "This Hebrew Lord" may be helpful to others.

The sad truth is that the scholarship present in the Christian Academy for at least 200 years has not been shared with the people sitting in the pews. This conspiracy of silence has been carried out quite consciously for fear that these biblical insights might destroy the faith of lay people and make the minister's task more difficult. I have always believed that any god who can be destroyed ought to be destroyed. If one's faith has to be protected from truth, it has already died.

If the clergy would accept the fact that lay people are not dumb sheep who cannot learn and stop insulting their intelligence with the theological drivel, masquerading as a sermon, and would take their educational task seriously, there might be some excitement in the Christian Church.

Instead we are offered a choice between hysterical fundamentalism and vapid liberalism. In my opinion both are dead end streets.

There is a hunger in the church for truth, not illusion; for education, not propaganda; for the honoring of our questions rather than the pretense that the clergy have all the answers; for a journey into the mystery of God, not the memorization of creedal formulas.

Across America and Canada and perhaps the world, there are some local churches awakening to these possibilities and the response is heartening.

It takes courage to risk. However, the alternative is to die or to try to put a face-lift on the corpse of yesterday's religious system.

For you to recognize this, even in retirement, is a beautiful thing.

-- John Shelby Spong
 

Like Dan, I had not seen these in more than 20 years -- until last Halloween. That's when I took my then 2-year-old daughter and 5-year-old son (A bumblebee and Batman) to a couple of the neighbors' houses on my same block for a taste of trick-or-treating.

One of the neighbors, who had always been kind, appeared at the door scowling, threw a handful of Chick tracts in the kids' bags and slammed the door. I didn't realize what they were until we got home. They had a lot of sensational (and false) history of Halloween and a schoolteacher (my son had just started kindergarten) who was really an evil agent of Satan.

Other Chick tracts include claims that Catholics instituted the Holocaust, that people who attend Catholic churches are going to hell, as are Jews (See the "Where's Rabbi Waxman?" tract). And on and on. His false claims are almost legendary, and he was involved for years with a guy (later discredited in several mainstream Christian publications) who made up a lot of stuff about being involved in a lot of Vatican plots.

I don't know Jack Chick's heart, but I have prayed for him. If you read Jimmy Akin's interview with him on the Internet, he doesn't seem to be living the abundant life available through Jesus Christ. He has spent his days in seclusion, paranoid that Vatican agents were plotting to kill him. He doesn't allow photographs.

There may be some Gospel in the Chick tracts, I must admit, but there is a lot of bad theology to wade through, too. He paints a picture of a God more eager to catch you and zap you on a technicality than who has made his love available unconditionally.

God is not in the business of selling fire insurance; He seeks relationships.

"There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love." 1st John 4:18 (NIV)

And Christians who really take sin seriously cannot give Jack Chick a pass simply becauses he expresses faith in Christ.

"If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal.

2 If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but have not love, I am nothing.

3 If I give all I possess to the poor and surrender my body to the flames, but have not love, I gain nothing."
From 1st Corinthians 13
 

You're right, GP, and-but we both know that the following is the nut of prevailing views on what it means to be a Christian!

"He paints a picture of a God more eager to catch you and zap you on a technicality than who has made his love available unconditionally."

My fond memories of making light of Chick tracts as a teen may have confused my perception of the fact that they probably *do* do more harm than good.

The Gospel is in them. There was a Christian church in Hitler's Germany, too, tho.