This Is Our City

"Bailey suggests that our government would be more faithful to our God and to our Founders if it would protect this character in the people against corrosive economic, cultural, and political influences, and promote it where it was lacking." Wow! That is one terrifying sentence! Can you imagine bitter bureaucrats determining what is economically, culturally and politically best for the character of the people?!!!! Wait a minute! That's what the OWS and Tea Partiers are attempting! That's what the socialists and conservatives are all about - mind control.

Insightful comments and good evaluation of the film! History reveals that sometimes our ultra-emotional Christian sensitivity to the needs of others impedes our ability to focus on the reality of the necessity of the Cross. While some emphasize right living (legalism), others stress good deeds (social gospel), ignoring or finding it difficult to accept that people either can’t do what is right of their own volition or can’t save the world through the improvement of social conditions. God created with one purpose in mind, the Cross. And the reason the Cross is pivotal is because through the Cross God purposed to eliminate, eradicate, and emancipate all of creation from the potential inevitability, certain probability, and existential reality of corruption (sin, evil, pain, and suffering). Clearly order, discipline, compassion, and responsibility play an indispensable role in the Christian life. However, when put in perspective, there is no Scriptural support for either the extremes of legalism or indiscriminate pity in the Christian Gospel. Just as Christ achieved a balance between condemnation and compassion, we too must strike that balance in recognition of the fact that the Cross is the ultimate and only dispensation for corruption and hope of redemption.

"the revival in the church for which she had been praying might actually come outside the church, when non-Christians hunger for justice. This is a strikingly political notion of revival and thus of the gospel. As she presents it, revival is something non-Christians are capable of experiencing while remaining strangers to Christ." That is a very common sentiment in Portland among Post-Modern evangelical Christians who want to "de-construct" (Derrida and Brueggeman) and "un-pack" the Bible. Tattoos on women, occupy Wall Street, social justice, the usual suspects. My concern is that what George Fox College, Multnomah and Western Seminary (Portland Christian schools) all call Post-Modern evangelical is actually a road stop on the way to apostasy. Again, we're leaders. As they say, Keep Portland weird.

Nice sunny outlook Mr/Ms D.C. Innes. Wish I could have a similar hope that the Kingdom is possible now, in our government, in the human heart/character, without or before the second coming of Christ. I think the "documentary" proposed with two sincere and fine people was way too short to take much of anything substantial from it. Nice flash but a way too deep and serious topic for the time it was given. It didn't serve either view well...and may have even been unfair.