Read the rest.
On his show Jim Rome is Burning yesterday, Rome asked his guest, Matt “Money” Smith what he thought of Tressel. Smith called attention to the dichotomy between Tressel’s spiritual claims and his worldly actions. ”You can’t have it both ways,” Smith said, claiming that Tressel’s facade was a fraud. How indeed, can Tressel be BOTH a man of faith AND a selfish sinner. Rome, on the other hand, suggested that he could be both, even tough the two were irreconcilable.
Martin Luther would have agreed with Rome. Luther’s description of the Christian condition was simul justus et peccator, or “at the same time righteous and a sinner.” Faith such as Tressel’s (or yours) doesn’t prevent you from still being human. Remember when a young Britney Spears was a young Christian? She was a sex-symbol, but claimed that she was saving herself for marriage. When it came out that she had slept with Justin Timberlake, she said, “I thought he was the one I was going to marry,” and the world accused her of hypocrisy and stopped taking her seriously as a Christian. Matt Smith and many of his colleagues in the media (with Rome’s notable exception) are doing the same thing to Jim Tressel.
Christians need to be able to say, “I’m a Christian and I messed up. My messing up is the reason I’m a Christian.” This is the Christian answer to the world’s accusation that those who mess up can’t really be Christans, that we can’t have it both ways. We live in two worlds, inescapable sin and glorious salvation.
Owen Strachan offers his take on this matter here.
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