HIM Conference, Part 3; Tony Campolo

Another portion of the conference we went to was a lecture by Tony Campolo on the challenges of Marxism, Fruedianism, and Darwinism. We were pretty excited to hear this because we have seen him other places and read some of his stuff, but had never heard him in person. Well, Tony's lecture was great, he speaks without notes (he knows his stuff front and back) and is super personable and funny. While he was talking, he talked about Darwin and how terrible Darwin's second book is (it talks about eliminating humans based on disabilities), he also talked about Nietzsche and his form on atheism. Tony's basic premise about guys like Nietzsche is that atheists of our time want to take Christianity out of the equation, but still expect a basic Christian morality. They think everything is ok as long as everyone treats each other humanely. Tony posits that this is like weak atheism, he contended that guys like darwin and nietzsche were real atheists. These two guys took social darwinism to its extreme and were all for literally wiping out 'inferior' people. He contends that they didn't want God, so they threw out everything God stood for and encouraged taking darwinism to the extreme in the social and human aspect.

Well, to hear this is absolutely terrifying. I can't help but thank God for giving we humans innate general senses of right and wrong. Now I know post-modernism throws out all absolutes, but even modern atheists speak to what CS Lewis (in Mere Christianity) calls the Law of Nature. Even in our world of vagueness and fluidity, there still seems to be something deep in humanity's senses that speak to some moral standard, and that we often fail to live up to that.

So Tony went on and also talked about Marxism and Capitalism and Free-Market economy and all this stuff. I think the best thing I took away from this portion was the idea that "the Christian" should be a free-market economist rather than a socialist or communist or capitalist. His reasoning behind this was that "the Christian" in business should be out to make a profit, but the ends of that profit is to pour our blessings on others. His phrase was, "The Christian should be interested in Free-Market economy, because they should be making money to bless others. The difference comes in the motivation, The Christian is never motivated by profit, The Christian is motivated by love. Now you need to make a profit, or you wont be in business long and then you wont be blessing anyone. But the key is motivation, The Christian is motivated by love."

What I love so much about this is that last sentence, The Christian is motivated by love, not should be or will be or any other wishy-washy phrase. He says real Christians, those who follow Christ's teachings and life, are absolutely and solely motivated by love. I definitely get excited and fired up to here someone challenge those of us who call ourselves Christians in that way.

Well, Tony got sidetracked and didn't finish talking about the subject he was supposed to, because he went down an awesome path of liberation theology and how different people read the bible differently, and I will talk more about that in my next post, but the absolute best line of the night, that had the whole auditorium roaring in laugher was when he talked about his age. He said, "Now, I'm getting old. I'm 73 and I'm getting old. You know how to tell if you are old, when your wife tells you, 'let's go upstairs and have sex,' and you say great, but I can't do both. Well, we moved to a one-story house." and then he chuckled while the entire crowd (of mostly married and married aged people) laughed themselves silly. Indeed Tony, indeed.