Bp. Jenky of Peoria IL: "Why is your bishop ranting and raving about hell fire and damnation?"

Bp. Jenky

Jesus taught that our temporal choices have eternal consequences. Jesus revealed there is not only an everlasting heaven but there is an everlasting hell. Today’s popular, liberal Christianity tends to beige all of that over. The God of our liberal therapeutic culture is usually presented as only a benign kind of higher force. This concept of God is almost like a tolerant psychiatrist, who for $400 an hour will patiently listen to absolutely everything we may have to say. There is no right or wrong, no judgment and certainly no punishment for deliberate sin. All the challenging and disturbing rough edges revealed in the Holy Scriptures are simply ignored or polished away. A tame, almost domesticated God, without any real power or authority is invoked mostly for comfort and to ritualize our happy and sad occasions. It’s nice to have a God something like Santa Claus invited to our baptisms, our marriages, our anniversaries and even our funerals. But the one true God, revealed throughout the bible, the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, is certainly a God both mercy and of judgment. The living God demands our obedience and insists that we love and serve Him with our whole heart, mind, strength and soul, and insists that we love our neighbor as ourselves. God’s commandments are not optional. The law of God is not a suggestion. Sin is always a sham, a lie. Sin promises so much but delivers so little. And without any recognition of our sins there can be no experience of God’s grace.

Why is your bishop ranting and raving about hell fire and damnation? The short answer is I have no choice. We do not choose the scripture readings for Sunday’s. The Church chooses them for us and for our good. In the course of three years of appointed readings we will hear the whole Gospel. Not just words of comfort and joy, but also words of awe and trembling. I, like all priests was ordained to preach Jesus Christ in season and out of season. Not only his reassuring words but also His hard sayings, even His saying that if we do not repent in time in eternity we may find ourselves locked outside and hear the terrible words of judgment, I do not know you. Knowledge of Christ without any recognition of our need of Him only leads to loss. Just as knowledge of our need without any experience of Christ only leads to despair.

Wow, home run.  Bp. Jenky is excellent and definitely one of those new evangelization bishops, he's on Blogger, Facebook and Twitter.