Truth is absolute and sinners must convert

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And your point is? We’ve known this for two thousand years.
 
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Congratulations once again to Father Lucie-Smith. He has a gift for arguing his case clearly and concisely. These two paragraphs are the key to his article, I think.

… Our Protestant brethren in their preaching often work to a set scheme which has as its first movement what they called ‘conviction of sin’. (This is brilliantly sent up by Stella Gibbons in Cold Comfort Farm, where, you may remember, the wedding sermon starts with the memorable words “You are all damned!”) But conviction of sin is not to be dismissed: an essential part of the Christian proclamation, though not its first part necessarily, is the narrative of human failure with which the hearer should be able to identify. This is sometimes expressed by theologians this way: the revelation of God calls us into question. Put another way, Jesus did not come to give us a pat on the back, he came to make us profoundly uncomfortable and to make us realise we all have to change. Or as the great Rowan Williams once put it: “Jesus is not the one who answers our questions, He is the one who questions our answers.” And let us remember that our answers are not very good ones, as the state of the world and the state of our own lives gives ample evidence.

However, the incontrovertible fact that sin exists is one that one hardly dare whisper these days, as Dr Gregg makes clear. After all, we are expected by the world to be in the business of affirming people not challenging them. But affirming people can often involve lying to them, and that is not good. We have to tell the truth, and insist on it, in or out of season, as someone once said. This does take a modicum of guts, however, and can make the preacher unpopular. But the fact remains that truth must be proclaimed and untruth must be challenged. Not all the choices we make are good; many of them are sinful; to tell sinners that they have in fact not gone astray is to lead their souls into grave danger.
 
In view of so much ambivalence encountered on this forum and at large, it seemed appropriate and beneficial to share this new article from the Catholic Herald.
 
The fact is that most of our sins hurt other people. They are not just theological abstractions. Pointing out how actions hurt other people does not have to come across as religious superiority or self righteousness.
 
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