Whoever sets conditions for God is an ideologue.

  Christian with the attribute „only if” – this is the one who claims to determine the conditions for God and faith. However, the result is not faith but ideology. Jonah was unwilling to accept that God could be merciful to sinners in Nineveh. It didn’t occur to him that he could give them a real chance and not punish them. Even a Christian can get into a similar attitude: he wants to put conditions on God himself and is unwilling to admit that God could behave differently from his ideas. This is about the so-called „Christians with conditions” who become so withdrawn into their ideas that they end up in ideology.

Jonah, stubborn in his beliefs about faith and the Lord, obstinate in his mercy: he will never leave us, knocking on the heart’s door until the end; he is there. Jonah was stubborn because he understood faith with conditions. Jonah is a model of Christians of the type „only if“, Christians with conditions: I am a Christian, but only if things are done like this. No, no, these changes are not Christian. This is heresy. This is not free. – Such Christians condition God, condition faith, and God’s action.

The attitude expressed in the words „ only if“ is an ugly path from faith to ideology. And there are so many today. These Christians are afraid. They are so scared of growth, life challenges, challenges from the Lord, and historical challenges; they are connected to their beliefs, primary beliefs, and ideologies. They are Christians who prefer ideology to faith and move away from the community, are afraid to surrender themselves into God’s hands, and like to judge everything but out of the smallness of their hearts. Two figures of the Church today are the Church of those ideologues who have nested in their ideologies and the Church showing the Lord who approaches every reality that is not hindered. The Lord will not be disgusted by this, he will not be deterred by our sins, he approaches as he approached to touch the lepers, the sick with love. Because he came to heal, he came to save, not to condemn.