Pope Francis puts the cart before the horse and offers the world MRSA for the soul

Sadly, Pope Francis, it seems, doesn't know the first rule of Christian preaching: preach the Law, convicting the sinner and convincing him that he needs a Savior, and only then tell him about the Savior that he has.

To do the opposite is to confirm the sinner in his sin and cause him to treat anything you have to say thereafter with a massive yawn.

I can't say that I'm surprised that this particular pope has this disastrous misunderstanding of the nature of the Christian message. Karl Barth  had a similar misunderstanding of the Church's proclamation, and the mainline churches positively wallow in it-.which is why they're both dying and spiritually irrelevant.

The approach His Holiness recommends just doesn't work. Very few people go to the doctor or change their lifestyle because of the news, "Guess what! You aren't going to die!" What it does is not to administer the cure for humanity's disease, but effectively innoculate against the cure and doom the patient. To a person who has no reason to suspect that he or she has cancer, the news that she does not is not simply not good news; it's no news at all!

He who follows Barth's advice- and that of Pope Francis- might as well save his breath because it won't be God's Word his hearers will encounter in his preaching. It will be a vaccine mixed with water, sugar pills for a mortal illness, and an effective inoculation against the only real cure: repentance and faith in the Gospel which, unless it's preceded by the Law, isn't the Gospel at all, but just so much puerile blather.

Worse, it will be a vaccine which will innoculate the disease against the cure. It's a nice, juicy injection of antibiotic-resistant bacteria  for the soul.

HT: Cranach, the Blog of Veith