Alienation
Many in the church are frustrated with all the right wing worldliness and backbiting that they see and feel that they don't belong. I can't remember exactly when I started feeling that same disconnection but I was having a hard time and it was years before I could go back to church. Sometimes I feel that I understood when I started studying liberation theology but that only confirmed my feelings and gave me understanding of the disconnection, not when it started. I am trying to think back and can't put my finger on it, I just knew then as I know now that there was something wrong with the church and that I had to do something about it in whatever small way that the Lord would lead me to. I suppose it was when I was baptized in the Spirit and the Lord started teaching me ways that was different from what the church had taught.
Traditional Marxist thought may have you believe that being cut-off and estranged is a direct consequence of the alienation of man from the product of his labor. There is more to alienation than economics however and to what you put your hand to do. Our kingdom is not of this world. Whenever life activity alienates men from other men, an authority is enforced that is distrusted. Breaking the law might be of no concern if alienated enough. Alienation as a sickness then, can be cured only at its peak when alienated man joins others toward a common cause toward blessed hopes and dreams.
Unless we have been poor ourselves, it is hard to realize the extent in which alienation freezes people into withdrawing. Oppressed people are willing to live with the status-quo rather than change things which are uncertain to them. Robert Kennedy wrote that the "poor man looks upon the law as an enemy... For him the law is always taking something away." Erich Fromm says that one of the clearest manifestations of widespread alienation is the fact that we let ourselves be governed by laws that we do not control and that we do not want to control.
Alienation is an important concept to understand. The lukewarm church is alienated from a spiritual connection because of its compromise with the world with its consumerism, pop culture, media brainwash, pew warming in the church, self-righteous finger pointing, blindness and apathy, these things all have a part in separating us from being led by the Spirit. The important thing to realize here is that we are told to get out of Babylon - this is the Christianity that we feel disconnected from and that is a good thing, a real good thing. Understanding this will bring us closer to dealing with the struggle that we have and give us fresh insight to deal with what the Lord would have us to do. As a Christian, mind you, albeit a true one.
There is in alienation five different human attitudes: powerlessness; meaningless; perception of normness; isolation; self-estrangement. There is the alienation that transfers the allegiance in society to the things that are eternal rather than perishing but because misunderstood, are therefore withdrawn. Worshipping God can cause alienation from structured and institutionalized church forms.
[143, 151, 166, 264, 273, 219, 171]
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