The President this week chose to pervert God’s Word to make the case for a tax increase, but he also chose to ignore God’s word on life and is ordering Christians, while he claims to be one, to violate their Christian conscience on abortion — requiring Christian organizations to provide health insurance that will cover the cost of drugs that induce abortions.
— Eric Erickson on CNN re: Obama’s Prayer Breakfast speech
This is about as blindly arrogant as it gets. This guy proudly flings about the self-assured air of perfection , smug in his “status” as an entirely objective, accurate interpreter of the Scriptures. And in reading his usage here, the amount of “stretch” he has to assume here is wildly more presumptive and illogical as the point Obama was making. Obama merely pointed out what is undeniably a recurring theme of Scripture: that God stresses that how we treat the poor is an indication of how we actually feel about God. Somehow, Erickson seems to ignore this. Somehow, Erickson has adopted the typical stretches of the American Christian Right. One which has to jump through a host of logical hoops in order to ignore this rather clear emphasis of Jesus.
I particularly find his “This cannot end well for him, particularly doing this claiming to be a Christian. ” deplorably judgmental. His “claiming”? Has Erickson taken on a “partisan” judgment here to color his appropriation of Scripture? Because it seems to me that this is a good explanation for ignoring what would seem to be the most “on face value” interpretation of the words of Jesus on the topic of the poor, and replacing it with a strenuous effort to twist the words into something which better serves the aims of the Religious and Political Right wing (which is , of course, what they accusse Obama of doing here).
