I like President Bush. I like some of what he has done. I wish him well. We pray for him regularly at church, that he would come to govern in accordance with the Word of God. But because I like him, I wish that he would drop the theology of empire and listen to evangelical Christians who have not compromised.
Like Constantine, who had the peace of the empire in the forefront of his mind, and could not fathom why all the ruckus about the Deity of Jesus Christ was important, so President Bush does not understand that Allah and God the Father are not the same. I have said several times here that, by every evangelical and Bible-believing standard, the president is a false teacher. He is using his position to promulgate doctrinal lies, and they are lies of the most fundamental nature. But he is not the main problem, because it is likely that he is doing what he is doing simply as a pragmatic politician. He doesn’t want to rock the boat of empire, and that means flattering all the divergent faiths, and trying mightily to smush them into one basic faith. “Let’s build a pantheon. Let’s worship Tashlan.” And the condition of the Church is such that this can be seriously proposed and advanced, and numerous Christian leaders offer their services in shilling for this.
So the real problem we face is with Christian elders, teachers, preachers, and theologians, all of whom know better, and yet who refuse to address the problem, or who, in varying degrees, defend it. But those Christian leaders who refuse to recognize the fact of this lie, or the abominable nature of it, or the importance of it, have disgraced their office. The pressures of syncretism are not absent from the so-called “conservative” evangelical Church. There is nothing new here — the pressure to compromise is always real pressure. And when the pressure is on, arguments crowd into the mind. “How would just a pinch of incense to Caesar hurt anything?”