A short post today, but here’s a good thread on the unbridgeable gap between Christianity and Liberalism – and here I’m talking about all forms of it back to the so-called Enlightenment.

The author of these tweets speaks of a difference in soteriology (salvation), but I think that’s the wrong doctrine; it’s the doctrine of man which is different, and that’s exactly what this thread is about. Man, on liberalism, is good. A blank slate. Only society can corrupt him. Only the system can cause him to go wrong. Marx is an inevitable stop on this path.

Man, on Christianity, is a sinner. He tends to toward evil and needs God. Societies and institutions, being man-made can be bad, too, but evil goes through every heart, as Solzhenitsyn put it.

This results in a different soteriology, but it starts with a difference in the view of what is wrong with man.

I’ve heard godly Christian men wonder why we can’t have politically liberal Christians; why Christianity is so intimately tied with the political right. There are some (Tim Keller, Russel Moore) who suggest it *is* possible, and I don’t think they are honest here; I think think they have divided loyalties. But for those kind-hearted, godly Christian men who just don’t think in political terms, I think there’s just some confusion.

Why are liberals and Christians so often not the same people? It’s not because the Republican Party is the party of Jesus (they’re mostly liberals, too). It’s not because conserving things is Christian and changing things is Satanic. It’s because liberalism just is a different religion. Conservatism is a disposition which everyone has toward the things they care about most, but it isn’t a religion. Thus one can be a conservative and a Christian in a way one cannot be a liberal and a Christian.

You will never get political liberals to align consistently with Christianity for the same reason you won’t get Buddhists or Muslims or atheists to do so.

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