Dear Pastor Johnston

Dear Pastor Johnston (A fictitious name):


A short time back I was waiting for something, I don’t remember what, so I clicked on an I-Tunes freebie named Rise UP. It’s played and sung by a new – at least new to me – artist named Diane Burch. Her voice is clear, crisp, and seems to just draw one into listening. There aren’t many popular “stars” like that anymore. Mostly they make noise, talk dirty, and call what they scream singing.

I don’t know if she wrote the lyrics but they make for a thoughtful poetic kind of tune. Today, finding a popular song with words that have actual meaning is a treat. Much of the popular stuff we are all subjected to is nothing more than sexual innuendo with a thumping guitar rhythm driving it. I wish more of the new worship-choruses we sing were oriented more for poetic, meaningful, God-centered language rather than what appears to be words thrown together to accommodate the off-beat rhythms of a garage-band guitar.

I suppose the younger people enjoy the garage-band sound, at least they pretend they do so we cater to their whims. All of Christendom, at least in the U.S., seems to cater to what people like and not what they need. Forget that boring stuff like sin, repentance, obedience, redemption people don’t like to hear that stuff; It makes them feel bad. Instead let’s continue to lead them to believe they can choose to avoid hell if they're in the mood. Tears of sorrow for the guilt of sin(?), man it’s been a long time since I’ve seen that. But I digress.

Back to Diane Burch. One line that stands out in her tune is “…if it’s happiness you want, life is what you’ll get.” Whoever wrote that actually thinks and is a poet. There is another stanza that deserves comment as well:

Why not say it like it is
Like you know you should
Before they break your little heart
Ooh, break it good
Feelings on the inside
Never let you down
So why not say it like it is
Even if it don't make your mama proud

From our past conversation's you know I’m absolutely against the premise of this song. “Feelings on the inside never let you down,” is the kind of information recent generations of American children have been raised and on which our grandchildren are being raised. Feelings are not the means of cognition, yet we have allowed this irrational, evil concept to insinuate itself into our minds’. We have abrogated our responsibility in that we no longer seem able to make the crucial distinction between our privatized experiences and the reality of God speaking to us through the cognitive message that is the Word.

Immanuel Kant, a German philosopher, who, for the most part influences much of American thinking today, made the point long ago that in changing our concepts we will change how we experience the “phenomenal” [reality]. We can see this Kantian philosophy, for example, mirrored in Oprah's push for the Zen-like nonsense of Eckhart Tolle. Little do we realize that Zen Buddhism in disguise is quickly becoming the religion of America. Many Church leaders, no longer able to differentiate God's reality from wishful thinking, preach using nothing but the language of "values" and "feelings," both of which are the mainstay of Zen Buddhism, Oprah, and Eckhart Tolle.

Personal experience is everything in the minds of most Americans. If we have a bad experience we are told all we need do is change how we think about it and we will find peace and harmony. Feelings, rather than thought, are what we use to feed our emotional experiences so as to change our consciousness of reality. We do this because we actually believe "feelings on the inside, never let you down.” So the feelings we have about our experiences is what we preach, teach, and talk about. We live, breath, think, eat, and sleep, feelings. What we fail to recognize is that by buying into this lie we have slipped into the relativistic-realm where truth becomes a matter of personal preference and not the objective absolute Truth that is embodied in Jesus Christ.

Here is the problem in all of this: My feelings about my experiences are indefinable impressions of the past with no basis in the reality of the present moment. They are nothing more than a fleeting emotional response to a moment in time which has passed by the time my autonomic nervous system sends its sensory signals. In other words, as soon as the present moment passes - the feeling passes. A Zen Buddha understands this since it is his life-pursuit to empty his consciousness of God's reality because he believes the empty mindedness of Nirvana is the only true reality.

We do, however, remember what we thought about that fleeting sensation, but as humans we are unable to remember the actual feeling. The result of this inability to remember the actual sensation leads millions of us into addictions, family breakups, crime, narcissism, all the ills of our sinful-humanity as we go on a quest for the Holy Grail of a ethereal feeling which can never be relived in exactly the same way.

Each new moment presents a different situation with a new and different feeling. Therefore, If we do not mediate our emotional response to sensory input through our mind’s we live more like instinctive animals than as creatures made in the image of God. That is why Jesus gave us this as the 1st commandment, “And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength: this [is] the first commandment.” (Mk 12:30).

Too many, maybe most, of America’s citizenry believes feelings are the only legitimate validation for our ethical, moral, teleological, and theological choices. Even pulpit talk is generally about "feelings" and "values" with seldom a word about "character" or "virtue;" and never any about the use of the mind in relation to our physiological makeup as image bearers of the living God.

I realize character and virtue are old fashioned words which suggest living in harmonious communal unity based on shared principles as codified in Scripture: And I realize that using our mind's to actually think is hard work. But, if we continue to let our emotions (feelings) rule our lives as Christians or as a nation, we can only expect more and more evil to prevail as we slowly descend into ever more barbaric patterns of living.

Pastor’s nation-wide should be talking about this stuff. But they won’t. Too many of them were supposedly educated in Universities and Seminaries which have lost the ability to teach our young how to think. They don't know how the mind works, and don't know that they don't know.

The shame is that careful attention to the actual words in scripture taught as fact to our congregations would go a long way toward reversing this travesty. But, I don’t see that happening any time soon.