Not the precious Name, but the empty Name of Jesus.

Posted as a comment this morning to a friend's post.

Jack Burhenne I think the name of Jesus gives "love" a run for its money. From Francis Schaeffer's Escape from Reason -

"I have come to the point where, when I hear the word Jesus - which means so much to me because of the Person of the historic Jesus and His work - I listen carefully because I have with sorrow become more afraid of the word Jesus than almost any other word in the modern world. The word is used as a contentless banner, and our generation is invited to follow it. But there is no rational, scriptural content by which to test it, and thus the word is being used to teach the very opposite things from those which Jesus taught. Men are called to follow the word with highly motivated fervency, and nowhere more than in the new morality which follows the radical theology. It is now Jesus-like to sleep with a girl or man, if she or he needs you. As long as you are trying to be human, you are being Jesus-like to sleep with the other person - at the cost, be it noted, of breaking the specific morality which Jesus taught. But to these people this does not matter, because that is downstairs in the area of rational scriptural content.

We have come then to this fearsome place where the word Jesus has become the enemy of the Person Jesus, and the enemy of what Jesus taught. We must fear this contentless banner of the word Jesus not because we do not love Jesus, but because we do love Him. We must fight this contentless banner, with its deep motivations, rooted in the memories of the race, which is being used for the purpose of sociological form and control. We must teach our spiritual children to do the same.

This accelerating trend makes me wonder whether when Jesus said that toward the end-time there will be other Jesuses, He meant something like this. We must never forget that the great enemy who is coming is the Anti-Christ, he is not anti-non-Christ, He is anti-Christ. Increasingly over the last few years the word Jesus, separated from the content of the Scriptures, has become the enemy of the Jesus of history, the Jesus who died and rose and who is coming again and who is the eternal Son of God. So let us take care. If evangelical Christians begin to slip into a dichotomy, to separate an encounter with Jesus from the content of the Spriptures (including the discussable and the verifiable portions of Scripture), we shall without intending to, be throwing ourselves and the next generation into the millstream of the modern system. This system surrounds us as an almost monolithic consensus."