The (Presumed) Unassailable Rights of Christians

I observe in life that some Christians behave as if they have certain unassailable rights.  Among them are:

1. The right to make or to publish any assertion they like, and to never have to prove it.
2. The right to challenge someone else’s assertion, but not have to prove that challenge.
3. The right to demand that others prove their assertions, but to be exempt from having to prove one’s own assertions.
4. The right to claim that “The Bible” says a thing, without ever having to show explicitly where and how it says it.
5. The right to demand that others “follow the Bible” on verse A, while the person making the demand does not have to “follow the Bible” on verse B.
6. The right to decide which doctrines and passages in the Bible are “core doctrines”, and, alternately, which ones are not important enough to be taken into account right now (or ever).
7. The right to speak or to act in Jesus’ name, even though Jesus has not authorized or commissioned the speech or action.
8. The right to claim that “God is calling me to…” or “God is leading us to…” or “God wants us to…” even when God has communicated no such prophetic message.
9. The right to practice the above, but to do it carefully by first saying, “I believe that….”  or “I feel that…”.
10. The right to commandeer any desirable passage in the Bible as “God’s promise to us” or “God’s promise to me”, no matter who the promise was originally made to, for what purpose it was made, or whether the promise was fulfilled long ago.
11. The right to assign certain happenings either to God’s or to Satan’s working, even though neither God nor Satan have claimed responsibility for those events.
12. The right to claim “faith” as a defense for believing or acting in some way when they are losing an evidence-based (rational) argument on the issue.
13. The right to summarily dismiss—and to refrain from answering—the claims or arguments of any person whom they deem to be “critical”, an “unbeliever”, “ungodly”, “divisive”, etc.
14. The right to dismiss their own arrogance, presumption, impatience, rule breaking, illogic, abuse of scripture, etc., as long as the act in question was done “from a good heart” or “with good intentions” or “for a good cause”.
15. The right to ignore a sin, an error, or an indiscretion of theirs, provided it is pointed out by a person whose “attitude” they don’t like.
16. The right not to mature in godliness of character, and to defend that lack of maturity by appealing to “God’s grace”.
17. The right to judge others as being guilty of the supposed sin of “judging”.
18. The right to ignore the bad behavior of other Christians, rather than to get involved.
19. The right to ignore the erroneous publications of other Christians, rather than to get involved
20. The right to defend the bad behavior or erroneous publications of other Christians, rather than to correct them.
21. The right to defend the failures of the church institution rather than to correct them.
22. The right to read a list like this, as obvious and endemic as these things are, and to pretend there is not a major crisis of character running amok in Christianity.
23. The right to believe that this mess is somebody else’s problem, and not their own.
24. The right to claim that “Jesus will fix it”, even though people have been saying this for generations and generations, and Jesus has not yet fixed it.
25. The right to go on congratulating oneself on his spirituality while being utterly negligent in these spiritual matters.
26. The right to pass all this mess along to one’s children’s generation.

These bad traits are so pervasive that I can scarcely think of any believer known to me who does not exhibit some of them.  Indeed, it seems that such thinking is encouraged in the culture of the churches.

Am I the only one who sees a problem here?

No, of course not.  Many are bemoaning the sad state of the churches today.

But am I the only one with a view toward fixing it?

Well, maybe so.

I’ll admit that many endeavor to “fix it” simply by the practice of more of the same.  They tell themselves, “Ah, but our church is going to do it better than all those other churches.”  They seem not to notice, however, that they are caught in the same “ruts” and bad habits as the others.

Meanwhile, many others seem to prefer to stick their heads into the sand, saying, “Well, I try not to judge.”  They think it is somehow “spiritual” to pretend that there is no crisis.  Still others are afraid to admit a crisis because then they’d have to do some deep “math” to figure out why things are not as they believe them to be.  They are the sort who will condemn this article as “destroying people’s faith” merely because it calls people to look into these matters for themselves.  They believe that because I am “rocking the boat” that I am also throwing people overboard.  They would prefer, therefore, a smooth boat ride in the wrong direction than the unsettling experience of steering the ship to a better course.  Their very existence becomes a practice in pretending that things are better than they are, and that no solutions are necessary.

Thus does the boat rocker become the enemy even of the “judge not” crowd.