If only Sweden permitted Women priests and bishops.

An entire national Lutheran Church rejects 5,000 years of Judeo-Christian understanding of God's relationship to Creation.


//The Church of Sweden has voted to adopt a controversial new handbook which says masculine references to God, such as “He” and “Lord” should be scrapped so as to be more “inclusive”.
Despite heavy criticism from organisations including Royal Swedish Academy, on Thursday the church approved the new handbook with a large majority.

The Church Handbook  — which was last updated in 1986  — sets out how services, baptisms, weddings and funerals should be conducted, in language, liturgy, theology and music, and is therefore central to the church’s activities.

According to local media, many priests have objected to directions in the new handbook regarding language, which have been added with the goal of making the church “more inclusive”.

This includes instructing clergy to refer to God in a gender-neutral fashion, without “unnecessarily” using the male pronoun “He”, or terms like “Lord”.//

On the 500th Anniversary of the Reformation it seems we are all Catholics again.

(That's ironic hyperbole for the confused.)

According to this study, most people on some level know that good works are actually important to salvation and part of the journey to salvation.

Anyone who denies this has to do an incredible amount of hair-splitting while engaging in unconvincing contortions.

Not that there aren't some people - usually on the interent - who aren't up to the task.

//Today, half of American Protestants say that both good deeds and faith in God are needed to get into heaven (52%); the same number believe that in addition to the Bible, Christians need guidance from church teachings and traditions, according to two studies released today by the Pew Research Center.

The numbers don’t change in Western Europe. In Luther’s home country of Germany, 61 percent of Protestants believe good deeds are needed for salvation. In John Calvin’s Switzerland, 57 percent agree, as do 47 percent in Abraham Kuyper’s Holland.//

Here's another finding that gives scientific support to a droll comment I have been making for decades:

//However, most Americans know the two aren’t exactly the same. When asked to define Protestantism in their own words, a plurality of adults said “not Catholic” (32%) or generally Christian (12%).//

You shall know that you are Protestants by what you protest.

We need a more Catholic General Conference of the United Methodist Church.

Protestant Bible-Scholar Ben Witherington - writes "we need a younger person with fresh ideas not to mention someone in the peak of physical health."

What "we"??? Witherington is a Protestant.

Also, based on his 3rd and 5th points, it appears that "we" need a pope who is basically a Protestant.

Also, note the ignorant stereotype linking celibacy to "pederasty" as if Protestant denominations didn't have as great or worse a problem.

Other than that, great post.

*Sheesh*

Here is a portion of the post:

 I have no say whatsoever over who should be the next Pope, but if I did here is what I would use as criteria:

1) Pick someone over 50 but under 65 for a change. We need a younger person with fresh ideas not to mention someone in the peak of physical health.

2) If you can find someone who is as good and critical a thinker and theolog as Pope Benedict, by all means pick that person;

3) Pick someone who is not so wed to Catholic traditions that have not been part of ex cathedra pronouncements that he would tend to avoid some serious changes— like for example the option of a priest to be married if he did not have the gift of celibacy. This in itself would probably reduce the danger of pederasty considerably.

4) Pick someone who is prepared to continue the ecumenical discussions with Evangelical Protestants, working towards more concordats on faith and praxis.

5) Pick someone who is prepared to continue the process of weeding out superstitious practices and inessential ideas. For example, the recent dropping of the expectation that a good Catholic ought to believe in limbo is a good thing. In short, a more Biblically focused faith, and one less steeped in traditions that do not comport with the Bible (for example Jesus’ descent to the dead) would be a welcome development.

6) Pick a Pope more concerned with protecting his sheep than his shepherds when crisis arises, especially when the crisis is caused by the behavior of the shepherds themselves. Continue to set up accountability structures to protect the young, the innocent, the naive, the poor, and so on.

7) Pick a Pope from somewhere other than Europe. It would be nice to have a North American one for once, considering that English both on the Internet and off of it is the lingua franca of an increasingly global community, society, market.

Evangelical rediscovers the Communion of Saints...

...and realizes that the saints in Heaven know what's happening on Earth.

Laurie preached that he is not the only one fascinated with the topic of the afterlife. "There are a lot of books that have been written on this subject. If you go over to Amazon right now and type in the word 'heaven' you'll find 200,000 options ranging from books to music to different things that you could purchase about the subject of heaven.

"My belief is everything I need to know about heaven is found in the pages of the Bible," he said.

Laurie's message on Sunday was a continuation of the series he is doing on the book of Revelation. He asked by way of the title of his sermon, "What do people in heaven know about what is going on here on earth and do they even care?"

"There are two trains of thought on this topic. For some it would seem like that once we're in heaven we will be so preoccupied with worshipping God that the last thing in our mind would be what's happening on earth – besides, with all the tragedy and sadness in this world, heaven would just not be heaven if we were made aware of it," Laurie described.

"Then, the other train of thought is pretty much the opposite of that. People would think that folks up in heaven are sitting and watching our every move almost like it's their form of entertainment," he said. "They would even think that sometimes those in heaven might be intervening in our lives and directing our steps and helping us to know what to do."

Laurie added, "You might be surprised to know that I believe both views are actually incorrect."

"The question might be well, why would you even care about this? The answer is you will care if you have a loved one in heaven," he said.

Pointing to scripture found in Revelation, Luke chapters 15 and 16, Laurie explained that he believes that people in heaven have knowledge of what is happening on earth.

I was at an Evangelical study recently where the Evangelical pastor explained - perhaps stunned - his Evangelical audience with the suggestion that the Orthodox/Catholic idea of praying to saints has a biblical foundation, pointing to Revelation 15, 16.

The big drawback is occasionally the question of "how do people in Heaven hear prayers on Earth."

The answer is obviously, "they have really good hearing."

Actually, there are a variety of answers from various Church Fathers, but the gist is, "God makes sure that they know what they need to know."

Pot meet Kettle...

...Rock meet glass house.

Michael Voris deconstructs Pastor Jeffres criticism of Mormonism.

Why there are so many Protestant denominations...

...because somebody notices something in the Bible, gets excited and runs away with a brand new doctrine, entirely innocent of the fact that their discovery has been considered "no big deal" for 2,000 years.

A case in point from Facebook -

I have been studying the old testament and I believe I have come to the conclusion that "The Angel of the Lord" is the third person in the trinity (pre-incarnated Jesus).

"The angel of the LORD went up from Gilgal to Bokim and said, "I brought you up out of Egypt and led you into the land that I swore to give your forfathers. I said, 'I willo never break my covenant with you." Judges 2:1

The interesting thing here is that he speaks in the FIRST PERSON.

You see similar strange incidences in Genesis 16:7,9-11; 13; Genesis 31:11,13 and Exodus 3:2-6

What are your thoughts? Is this just an 'Angel' of the Lord or is it a person in the tTtrinity?

Various responses:

"Angels are messengers and agents of the divine will, so you could say it was both."


"my seminary president, Dr. Paige Patterson held this view. He believed the Angel of the LORD was a christophany theophany because Melchazisldek in the OT and in the Book of Hebrews."


"I believe that the Angel of the Lord was/is Jesus too. I was actually getting ready to write a series about this on my blog. I can send you a link once I have some of these articles up."


"The Arians/Unitarians try to claim that all of these theophanies are just "office of agency", perhaps some are but others are clearly not that."


"I think those were Christophanies, but you can't prove it."


"It would be a mistake to imagine that "the angel of the Lord" has to be "an angel," exactly. The word is "malach," a form of the same word used to designate a king. Hebrew does not have a rich vocabulary. The same word would refer to anything that's powerful and other-worldly -- a demon, and angel, a space alien, God Himself, or whatever. I think if the Lord appeared in any form, the Hebrews would have used "angel" to describe Him."

My response:

"*Sigh*


This is why you guys need to get away from "private interpretation."

Seriously, your discovery has been known for about 2,000 years, and thre has been an explanation during that time. Read Book 2 of St. Augustine's "On the Trinity" and note that St. Augustine recognizes that "angels of the Lord" speak as God:

"23. But when Moses was sent to lead the children of Israel out of Egypt, it is written that the Lord appeared to him thus: Now Moses kept the flock of Jethro his father-in-law, the priest of Midian: and he led the flock to the back side of the desert, and came to the mountain of God, even to Horeb. And the Angel of the Lord appeared unto him in a flame of fire, out of the midst of a bush; and he looked, and, behold, the bush burned with fire, and the bush was not consumed. And Moses said, I will now turn aside, and see this great sight, why the bush is not burnt. And when the Lord saw that he turned aside to see, God called unto him out of the midst of the bush, and said, I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob. He is here also first called the Angel of the Lord, and then God. Was an angel, then, the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob?"

In Book 3, Augustine explains the quandary of an angel speaking in the first person as God (in the case of the burning bush to Moses) as follows:

23. But some one may say, Why then is it written, The Lord said to Moses; and not, rather, The angel said to Moses? Because, when the crier proclaims the words of the judge, it is not usually written in the record, so and so the crier said, but so and so the judge. In like manner also, when the holy prophet speaks, although we say, The prophet said, we mean nothing else to be understood than that the Lord said; and if we were to say, The Lord said, we should not put the prophet aside, but only intimate who spoke by him. And, indeed, these Scriptures often reveal the angel to be the Lord, of whose speaking it is from time to time said, the Lord said, as we have shown already. But on account of those who, since the Scripture in that place specifies an angel, will have the Son of God Himself and in Himself to be understood, because He is called an angel by the prophet, as announcing the will of His Father and of Himself; I have therefore thought fit to produce a plainer testimony from this epistle, where it is not said by an angel, but by angels.

I was honestly surprised to find that the so-called "theophany" of the Moses and burning bush involved an angel. St. Augustine actually suggests - tentatively - that all theophanies prior to Christ's incarnation - involved angelic appearances.

So, no reason to redefine the Trinity."

Inerrancy - What about those saints in Matthew 27?

Apologianick at Deeper Waters is tracking the ongoing debate between Mike Licona and Norm Geisler on whether the resurrection of the saints mentioned in Matthew 27 was an allegorical vibration from apocalyptic literature or whether it was really and truly something that happened. Licona holds to the former position and Geisler holds to the latter.  (Nick is invested in the issue because Licona is his wife's father.)

Here is a further post on the issue, which includes a letter signed by various bible scholars who opine that Licona's position does not conflict with the doctrine of "biblical inerrancy," which, if that's true, makes literalism and fundamentalism a whole lot less literal than it has previously been.

Baptists embrace cult-like practices.

According to the Associated Baptist Press:

Easter Sunday -- the celebration of the resurrection of Jesus Christ -- is for Christians the culmination of their community life, expressing the heart of their faith. But among Baptists and other evangelicals, an intentional period of preparation for their holiest day is often understated or absent -- in contrast to Christmas, the other great Christian observance, typically the focus of elaborate church festivities for weeks prior to Dec. 25.


Many Baptists are seeking to reclaim that pre-Easter focus -- historically called Lent -- which has been an integral part of many Christians’ experience since the earliest years of the church.

“It’s a biblical thing, not a made-up Catholic thing,” says Kyle Henderson, pastor of First Baptist Church in Athens, Texas, acknowledging a robust Baptist suspicion of spiritual practices seen as too closely associated with the Roman Catholic Church or its distant cousins, the Anglicans.

Some Baptists are apparently rediscovering the benefits of a kind of liturgical calendar:

 “I’m surprised at how much our folks have embraced [the services],” says Lynn Turner, senior associate pastor at First Baptist, who is staff liaison for the events. “Not just accept -- embrace.”


Turner attributes that response in part to the use of prolonged silences.

“It’s simply a time to be quiet,” she said. “Complete silence is a form of prayer we almost never use. We don’t have periods of sustained silence -- of even three to five minutes -- in our traditional worship services. The rhythm of the contemplative service is different.”

And the reality that we are embodied spiritual beings for whom knowledge of the truth involves more the intellect:

First Baptist in Athens does not rigidly adhere to a liturgical Christian calendar, but Henderson estimates he has led some sort of Ash Wednesday observance during his 14 years at the church -- normally during a regularly scheduled Wednesday evening prayer service.


Typically, the service involves members writing their sins on slips of paper, collecting and burning the folded pieces of paper, and having their foreheads marked with the sign of the cross using those ashes.

A Protestant's Protest Against Sola Scriptura.

Caleb Roberts at Genu(re)flections explains why he no longer accepts the doctrine of Sola Scriptura.  Part of his explanation:

Now this question of the certainty of Scripture is not one that has been ignored by the various Reformed confessions. The language of the Westminster Confession states that:


“…our full persuasion and assurance of the infallible truth and divine authority thereof, is from the inward work of the Holy Spirit bearing witness by and with the Word in our hearts.”

So, our assurance of Scripture’s infallibility rests upon an inward work of the Holy Spirit’s witness that takes place within our hearts that testifies to the proper and true books of Scripture, the true canon. I know I am treading upon nervous ground here, but given the principle of Sola Scriptura, how is a Spiritual inward working in our hearts an any more appropriate foundation on which to place canonical certainty than a Spiritual inward working in the Church? If you have Catholics on one side that argue that our certainty of Scripture is based on the inward working and guidance of the Holy Spirit in the magisterium that organized the canon and Protestants on the other that argue that our assurance is based on the Holy Spirit’s inward working in the hearts of believers, the difference does not seem to be Sola Scriptura. Rather, the difference is only in regards to the object on which assurance rests which in both cases is extra-biblical and therefore fails as an adequate foundation of certainty within Sola Scriptura. In fact, it seems that all one has to do to distinguish the Catholic position from the Protestant is to take that phrase from the Confession and replace “our hearts” with “the Church.”

And:

Related to this is my next concern, which is that of the binding of the conscience. Sola Scriptura maintains that only that which is contained in Scripture can bind the consciences of men. Well, since the list which properly constitutes which books belong in Scripture is not contained within Scripture itself and the canon was fallibly organized by the extra-biblical Synod of Hippo, was that council violating the consciences of believers by authoritatively establishing a canon outside of Scripture? Moreover, logically speaking, could someone as a Protestant decide for himself that, say, James isn’t a valid part of the canon? As opposed as he would be, on what grounds, beside any denominational vows he had taken, could his conscience be bound? For no where in Scripture does it state that James is Scriptural except within James itself and if he already believed that James was invalid, nothing from within that book could convince him otherwise. As far-fetched as this example seems, Martin Luther himself did this very thing with not only James, but Jude and Revelation as well. Even if we accept what I understand to be Calvin’s understanding, that true Christians “know the voice of the Shepherd” which is the Scriptures, this doesn’t resolve the issue of someone deciding that James or Esther is not canonical and inspired. What would the argument against them be: “The majority of Christians hear, and have always heard, the Words of God in Esther, therefore you should too?” Again, the basis of the certainty in the inspiration and canonicity of any book is not founded upon Scripture alone. Again, if the canon is a “fallible collection” then it seems totally plausible that someone might come to object to a certain book’s place within it for whatever reason and Sola Scriptura would have no way of binding his conscience against his beliefs. Sola Scriptura again seems to implode on itself. If only that which is contained in Scripture can rightly bind the consciences of men, it seems as though you have to first improperly bind consciences in order to possess an established and organized canon with which you can then go out and properly bind consciences.

Those are conundrums, except that in practice Protestants did exactly what the Catholic/Orthodox church did - define the canon through the institutional authority of the church and base the decision on the canonicity of particular books on the conformity of those books to core Christian principles.  Of course, that doesn't solve the Protestant problem which denies that such an approach is infallible.

"I Think My Wife's a Calvinist" - A Love Song.

Sheep Stealing.

In Maryland, an entire Episcopal parish - founded in 1842 - has voted to leave the Episcopal Church and is considering becoming a Catholic "Anglican Use" parish.

So, how is that drive for "inclusiveness" working out for mainstream Protestantism?

Cats and Dogs Living Together.

First, a Catholic Archbishop gives two cheers for early American Calvinism, and, now, a low-church Protestant at Evangel blog offers two cheers for Pope Benedict XVI for his poise in England:

And through all this, Benedict’s leading message has been a high-level critique of the aggressive secularism that has such a death-grip on the British mind. It’s a powerful argument, and he’s honed it very well over the years. I’ve been reading Benedict since he was Ratzinger; since he was just a theologian. Of course he’s said lots of other, capital-R capital-C Roman Catholic stuff, but the main point he’s been driving home has been his sustained, principled critique of the secular ideology of the contemporary world.


It seems to me that my interests are being represented by the Pope. What I mean is, the reproaches that fall on him are also directed at me and mine. When the tribes of village atheists come out to the streets with their postmodern versions of “écrasez l’infâme,” they are not upset about the things that divide my Protestant principles from his Catholic commitments. These semi-literate stepchildren of Voltaire simply hate religion, period, and want it all to go away. They lash out at the Pope because he’s famous, he’s said Christian things in public, and now has dared to come near enough to yell at. That’s mere Christian hate there.

So here’s what I learned from the public reaction to the Papal visit. I have a lot of objections to the distinctive elements of Roman Catholic theology. It occurs to me to blog them, or say them, or bring them up on this occasion. But that would be stupid. The Pope protesters are protesting me and my church as well. He’s using his platform to deliver my message to that hostile crowd, and I’m grateful for that.

Besides, when the last king is hung with the entrails of the last priest, I would rather be found among the blessed dead than in the howling crowd trying to shout “sola scriptura” over the deafening roar of “to hell with religion.”

Is the eschaton imminent?

America needs to preserve its classic Protestant heritage...

...according to Archbishop Chaput:

One of the key myths of the American Catholic imagination is this: After 200 years of fighting against public prejudice, Catholics finally broke through into America’s mainstream with the 1960 election of John F. Kennedy as president. It’s a happy thought, and not without grounding. Next to America’s broad collection of evangelical churches, baptized Catholics now make up the biggest religious community in the United States. They serve in large numbers in Congress. They have a majority on the Supreme Court. They play commanding roles in the professions and in business leadership. They’ve climbed, at long last, the Mt. Zion of social acceptance.

Chaput discusses the Protestant tradition that permitted - actually required - Christian religious principles to influence American public policy:

The roots of the American experience are deeply Protestant. They go back a very long way, to well before the nation’s founding. Whatever one thinks of the early Puritan colonists—and Catholics have few reasons to remember them fondly—no reader can study Gov. John Winthrop’s great 1630 homily before embarking for New England without being moved by the zeal and candor of the faith that produced it. In “A model of Christian charity,” he told his fellow colonists:

We are a company professing ourselves fellow members of Christ . . . That which the most in their churches maintain as truth in profession only, we must bring into familiar and constant practice; as in this duty of love, we must love brotherly without dissimulation, we must love one another with pure heart fervently. We must bear one another’s burdens. We must look not only on our own things, but also on the things of our brethren . . . We must be willing to abridge ourselves of our superfluities, for the supply of others’ necessities. We must uphold a familiar commerce together in all meekness, gentleness, patience and liberality. We must delight in each; make others’ conditions our own; rejoice together, mourn together, labor and suffer together, always having before our eyes our commission and community in the work, as members of the same body. So we will keep the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace.

Not a bad summary of Christian discipleship, made urgent for Winthrop by the prospect of leading 700 souls on a hard, two-month voyage across the North Atlantic to an equally hard New World. What happened when they got there is a matter of historical record. And different agendas interpret the record differently.

The Puritan habits of hard work, industry and faith branded themselves on the American personality. While Puritan influence later diluted in waves of immigrants from other Protestant traditions, it clearly helped shape the political beliefs of John Adams and many of the other American Founders. Adams and his colleagues were men who, as Daniel Boorstin once suggested, had minds that were a “miscellany and a museum;” men who could blend the old and the new, an earnest Christian faith and Enlightenment ideas, without destroying either.

The positive assessment of Puritanism came to an end in the 19th Century when the Puritans were reconceived as ignorant and dour bigots, a reconception that served one side of a cultural war, the side that ended up winning the war by 1960, although at the time that victory seemed like a very good thing from the Catholic perspective.

The same Puritan worldview that informed John Winthrop’s homily so movingly, also reviled “Popery,” Catholic ritual and lingering “Romish” influences in England’s established Anglican Church. The Catholic Church was widely seen as Revelation’s Whore of Babylon. Time passed, and the American religious landscape became more diverse. But the nation’s many different Protestant sects shared a common, foreign ogre in their perceptions of the Holy See—perceptions made worse by Rome’s distrust of democracy and religious liberty. As a result, Catholics in America faced harsh Protestant discrimination throughout the 18th and 19th centuries. This included occasional riots and even physical attacks on convents, churches and seminaries. Such is the history that made John F. Kennedy’s success seem so liberating.


The irony is that mainline American Protestantism had used up much of its moral and intellectual power by 1960. Secularizers had already crushed it in the war for the cultural high ground. In effect, after so many decades of struggle, Catholics arrived on America’s center stage just as management of the theater had changed hands -- with the new owners even less friendly, but far shrewder and much more ambitious in their social and political goals, than the old ones. Protestants, Catholics and Orthodox, despite their many differences, share far more than divides them, beginning with Jesus Christ himself. They also share with Jews a belief in the God of Israel and a reverence for God’s Word in the Old Testament. But the gulf between belief and unbelief, or belief and disinterest, is vastly wider.

According to Chaput, we are now seeing a surprising consequence of the decline of the mainstream Protestantism that informed so much of American history:

If government now pressures religious entities out of the public square, or promotes same-sex “marriage,” or acts in ways that undermine the integrity of the family, or compromises the sanctity of human life, or overrides the will of voters, or discourages certain forms of religious teaching as “hate speech,” or interferes with individual and communal rights of conscience—well, why not? In the name of tolerance and pluralism, we have forgotten why and how we began as nation; and we have undermined our ability to ground our arguments in anything higher than our own sectarian opinions.

Interesting.

Religious Rorschach Test.

Your sense of the sacred - or where you come from doctrinally - probably determines your reaction to this story on the Canadian Anglican priestess who gave a Communion wafer to a new parishioner's dog.

Reverend Marguerite Rea of St Peter's Anglican Church, in Toronto, received complaints from Christians all over Canada after she fed communion bread to a German Shepherd cross named Trapper.


Area Bishop Patrick Yu said the priest had contravened church policy with her "strange and shocking" actions.

Ms Rea said it had been a "simple church act of reaching out" to a new congregation member and his pet.

"If I have hurt, upset or embarrassed anyone, I apologise," she told her congregation on Sunday morning, the Toronto Star reports.

And:

Mr Keith has since been told that he and his dog are most welcome at the church, but Trapper can no longer receive communion.


"This has blown me away. The church is even getting e-mails from Catholics," said the truck driver.

"Ninety-nine-point-nine per cent of the people in the church love Trapper and the kids play with him. It was just one person who got his nose out of joint.

"Holy smokes. We are living in the downtown core. This is small stuff. I thought it was innocent and it made me think of the Blessing of the Animals."

Mark Shea opines:

If we actually take the Catholic Church's teaching seriously concerning the validity of Anglican sacraments, then all that happened here was that a woman pretending to be a priest gave a dog a treat she pretended was the body of Christ. "Woman feeds dog" is not something I choose to spend energy getting upset about. How Piskies choose to conduct their liturgical antics in the privacy of the own sanctuary is up to them, just so long as they don't try to tell my communion what we should believe and do. I'm much more concerned with Piskies whose antics are aimed at the public square. And, of course, I hope that the people whose minds are so clouded that they can't see any problem with this kind of nonsense wlll come to an appreciation of actual apostolic Christianity.

Maybe so, but if I were Episcopalian, this would be another reason to wish for a Reformation.

Huh?  PCUSA agrees to ordain active homosexuals but declines to ordain homosexual marriages.

And the principle behind this would be what? 

This is "perspicacious" in Scripture how?

Hours after giving their blessing to ordaining noncelibate gays and lesbians, leaders of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) declined late Thursday to change the church's definition of marriage, in effect refusing to allow same-sex marriages within their denomination.


If the proposal had been approved, the church's definition of marriage would have changed from a commitment between "a woman and a man'' to "two people" and allowed church weddings in states that have legalized gay marriage.

The late-night decision to table the proposal and subject it to two more years of study caught many delegates at the denomination's gathering at the Minneapolis Convention Center by surprise, and there was a stunned silence as delegates absorbed the action.

One, Virginia Thibeaux of San Anselmo, Calif., said she was "devastated and disappointed" by the shelving of a decision on whether to change the church's definition of marriage. "It's the M.O. for Presbyterians to do more studying," she said.

Cindy Bolbach, the general assembly's moderator, said the proposal's failure indicated that delegates just weren't ready to make a decision on the marriage definition question, and "want to continue to talk about it."

Oh, it's the "more time to talk about it" principle.

Michael Liccione in the comments at Called to Communion offers this explanation:

I notice that the PCA has just approved ordaining actively gay and lesbian clergy while refusing to bless same-sex unions. As my friend and ex-colleague Kevin Staley-Joyce remarks: “The fact [that] this is an incremental compromise is evidenced by the logical incompatibility of the two decisions: If gay romance is not only ethical but healthy and appropriate for spiritual leaders, how can it not be enshrined in a church marriage?”


This whole kabuki dance is evidence that mainline Protestantism has simply lost a truly Christian understanding of sexuality as well as of ordination. Many of the more conservative Protestants, of course, still insist that sodomy is wrong and that same-sex “marriage” is an abomination. They say that stance is biblical. Indeed it is, if we assume that what the human authors meant then is what God means even now—an assumption that the leadership of mainline Protestant denominations increasingly rejects. But once it’s conceded that married couples may actively render infertile sexual acts that would otherwise be fertile, there simply is no logical barrier to holding that a sexual relationship can be good, even sanctifying, when the sexual acts are not the sort of acts that can lead to conception. That’s why resistance to same-sex marriage is slowly but steadily collapsing in the Mainline. The ordination of actively gay and lesbian clergy is only a stage in the dance.

The Orthodox theologian who compared the PCUSA's gay agenda to modern paganism....

...probably won't be asked to deliver the opening speech to the next PCUSA General Assembly:

An Orthodox Church theologian who was invited to greet the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) has criticized its approval of non-celibate homosexual clergy.


The Reverend Siarhei Hardun of Belarus said that vote and efforts to approve same-gender "marriage" looked to him like an attempt to "invent a new religion -- a sort of modern paganism."

"Christian morality is as old as Christianity itself. It doesn't need to be invented now," he said of attempts to create what he described as a "new morality."

Hardun added, "When people say that they are led and guided by the Holy Spirit to do it, I wonder if it is the same Holy Spirit that inspired the Bible."

The Orthodox priest's remarks drew applause from conservative Presbyterians who made similar arguments at the gathering in Minneapolis.

Concerning arguments about "going beyond the text" and "stealing second base."

A little while ago, over at Theology for Dummies, I attempted to respond to Russ's buried argument that Aquinas - and other attempts to reason to theological doctrines - were suspect because they "went beyond Scripture":

Likewise, when Russ says that we have to be careful about "going beyond the text" that assumes that we are going beyond the text. As I pointed out on Saturday, no Church Father ever felt that they were "going beyond the text." Aquinas didn't feel that he was "going beyond the text." Rather they, and Aquinas, felt that they were staying within the text by properly applying reason to the the text.


They might have been wrong. Maybe they are going beyond the text. However, saying that we have to be careful not to go beyond the text is problematic because it assumes that the person who says "let's be careful about going beyond the text" is in a privileged position to know where the text ends.

Where a text "ends" depends on how the community that reads the text actually reads the text. This tells us a lot about where a given community says a text ends, but little about the proper reading of the text. Moreover, if we really were going to know where a text "ends" then we ought to give a lot of weight to how the text was originally read, since the best way of knowing what a text means is what its original writers and readers thought it meant. (But this is not always the case since texts can have latent meanings and implications.) This, then, means that if we want to know where a text "ends" we should give weight to the original understanding, which would mean looking at the Early Church Fathers, but, ironically, they tended to say things like that which we have been saying and which Russ says "goes beyond the text."

Over at Called to Communion, the ever-perspicacious Bryan Cross explains the problem with the "going beyond Scripture" argument better than I could ever hope to.

I hear this “over-realized eschatology” claim quite often. The problem with this frequent appeal to “over-realized eschatology” is that the principled basis for the standard for what is “properly-realized eschatology” is usually not provided. So in practice the claim amounts to “anything that goes beyond what I myself get out of Scripture.” For that reason, the standard by which to judge what is “over-realized eschatology” and what is “under-realized eschatology” is in that way subjective and relative, and so is no standard at all. My statement that persons have an unlimited potency with respect to interpretive self-clarification has nothing to do with eschatology. My statement follows from the very nature of persons as rational beings. For example, if you ask me to clarify something I have said, and then you still need further clarification, you can ask for it, and, because I can hear you and understand you and have memory and communicative ability, I can provide it. And if you need still more clarification you can ask me for it, and I can provide it. So long as I remain alive and conscious and capable of communication, I can provide interpretive self-clarification. That’s what I mean when I say that persons have unlimited potency with respect to interpretive self-clarification. We can get to the point where you say, “Are you saying x?” And I can reply, “Yes”. And that point, with respect to that question, the hermeneutical spiral comes to an end.

Books do not have unlimited potency with respect to interpretive self-clarification. And because books don’t have that, they cannot function as interpretive adjudicator when there are competing interpretations facing the Church: each side can appeal to the book to support its own position, and without a magisterium, the disagreement can be a perpetual deadlock or impasse. But a living magisterium can not only adjudicate an interpretive dispute, it can also provide clarification regarding previous statements or judgments it has made. That is why having a living magisterium does not leave us in the same epistemic quandary that we would be in if we had only a book and no interpretive authority.

This is what has made it possible within the history of the Catholic Church for theological disputes to be resolved. The reason the Church is not still wrestling with Arianism and Nestorianism and Monophysitism, etc. is precisely because she could speak definitively and authoritatively in condemning them. But the Bible alone could not do that. Because the Bible does not explicitly address those questions, persons on both sides could and did appeal to the Bible to defend their interpretation. And so a living personal divinely authorized voice was necessary in order to provide the authoritative interpretive decision in those cases.

As for St. Paul’s statement about seeing through a glass dimly, we (Catholics) understand that to be referring to the Beatific Vision. Faith is the evidence of things unseen. The object of faith is presently unseen, but we have some awareness of it, by way of the gift of faith. So we are neither ignorant of the object of faith, nor do we see the object of faith. But then, in the paraousia, we will see Him face to face, we will see even as we are seen. We do not take this verse to be teaching that until Christ returns we cannot have certainty regarding doctrinal or interpretive questions. In other words, the verse is not denying that we can know with certainty what are the dogmas of the faith and which positions are heretical; rather, it is talking about our present inability to see the object of the faith, and that object is God Himself.

Cross also makes this interesting empirical point about the claim that we don't need a human authoritative interpreter for scripture:

In other words, at this present point in history, almost five hundred years down the road from the start of the Protestant experiment, it seems safe to say that the historical evidence shows that Scripture is not sufficiently perspicuous to maintain unity of the faith, without a divinely authorized teaching and interpretive authority. Apart from the magisterium, Scripture cannot fulfill its authoritative function within the Church, because apart from a magisterium, there can be no unified Church preserved for Scripture to govern and guide. Without a magisterium, the situation necessarily reduces (in principle) and collapses (in time) into solo scriptura. So for these reasons, Scripture functions authentically as the divine word only as divinely interpreted by a living and divinely authorized magisterium. The content of the Sacred Scriptures can be understood only by the same Spirit who inspired them, and thus only with the guidance of those persons to whom Christ gave that gift of the Spirit by which it became true to say, “The one who listens to you listens to Me, and the one who rejects you rejects Me; and he who rejects Me rejects the One who sent Me.” (Luke 10:16)

Episcopalian Bishop Robinson is a part of the problem, not part of the solution.

Virtue Online reports that Episcopalian Bishop Gene Robinson, the Bishop of New Hampshire has written an "open letter" to the Pope telling him in no uncertain terms that the sex abuse scandal in the Roman Catholic Church is about pedophilia and that he has it all wrong about homosexuals.

Because if you can't learn morality and the abilty of people to discipline their appetites from a priest who abandoned his wife in order to have a homosexual affair, who can you learn from?

Robinson writes:

He wrote, "As a gay man, I know the pain and the verbal and physical violence that can come from the thoroughly debunked myth connecting homosexuality and the abuse of children. In the media, representatives of and advocates for the Roman Catholic Church have laid blame for sexual abuse at the feet of gay priests. These people know, or should know, that every reputable scientific study shows that homosexuals are no more or less likely to be child abusers than heterosexuals. Psychologically healthy homosexual men are no more drawn to little boys than psychologically healthy heterosexual men are drawn to little girls.


"Sexual activity with children or teenagers is child abuse, pure and simple. Meaningful consent is impossible, by definition, for the underaged. You will not rid your church of sexual abuse by throwing homosexuals out of your seminaries or out of the priesthood. Homosexual priests have faithfully and responsibly served God throughout Catholic history. To scapegoat them and deprive them of their pulpits is a tragedy for the people they serve and for the church. Yours is a problem of abuse, not sexual orientation."

Well, perhaps throwing homosexuals out of the seminary won't end all pedophilia, but apparently it would have ended around 85% of the cases that are smearing the good name of the 98% Catholic priests who do adhere to their vow of celibacy, unlike the 1.7% of priests that comprise homosexuals with ephobophiliac tendencies.

Now whether the cost of including disciplined homosexuals in a simple rule exceeds the benefits of eliminating 85% of the claims that have disgraced the clergy is a matter of prudential judgment by those in charge.  I'm inclined to think that at this moment, given the social prejudice against Catholic priests, it probably is worth it.

Virtue Online offers this on the differential attitude of the press toward reporting Catholic scandals vis a vis Episcopal scandals:

Not to put a too fine point on it, a gay Episcopal activist, Frank Lombard, a Duke University official was arrested in Raleigh, NC on pedophile charges he molested his own children. He claimed that he was a "fan of New Hampshire Bishop V. Gene Robinson."


Or what about the case of the convicted pedophile Episcopal Priest Lynn C. Baumann who was allowed to host a spiritual retreats with Presiding Bishop's blessing!

In an exchange of correspondence with David Clohessy, National Director of Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP), Mrs. Jefferts Schori, through her Pastoral Development Officer Bishop F. Clayton Matthews, said Baumann could function as a spiritual retreat master on the understanding that "Mr. Baumann's contact (is) to adults only".

One should point out to Robinson that despite all the fine talk about how high the standards are now for sexual abuse being spotted and dealt with in TEC, as recently as February of this year, an 82-year old Episcopal priest in the Diocese of Central New York was charged with multiple counts each of involuntary deviate sexual intercourse, indecent assault, and corruption of a minor. He got away with it for years.

Stories VOL wrote at that time suggested a possible cover-up of the priest's sexual activities by Episcopal Bishop Gladstone (Skip) Adams. Why did we hear nothing from Robinson about these cases when they erupted in the press?

Another reason to regret the Reformation.

Episcopal Priest Barbie.

"You say you want a Reformation"

First Things Evangel blog posts a lengthy diatribe on the recent resignation of the German Lutheran head bishop:

Things have changed among Lutherans: So eager not to anger public opinion — no doubt, with the good intention of making church more attractive and appealing to unbelievers! — one is drawn into operating according to the rules of engagement established by the world. And the world cares little about doctrine and lots about life, e.g., about the church’s proposal for saving failing families or a failing ecosystem, depending on one’s political preferences. “The world sets the agenda of the church” — maybe Dr. Käßmann picked up that maxime of the ecumenical movement somewhere along her path through one of the many ecumenical organizations. Yet, if this slogan is embraced, then the world — it always changes but always remains the same: fallen — has become the lord and god of the church. Such a church is then no longer the church of Jesus Christ.


In summary, Dr. Margot Käßmann is not an isolated case. Pastors and churches everywhere strive to impress and please the public by displays of moral righteousness, also known as “authenticity,” that follows the public’s standards and thereby compromises or belittles doctrine. It doesn’t really matter whether that takes place in ultimately meaningless public pronouncements to any and all topics already digested in daily talk shows of the correct political persuasion or in the form of worship services that have been made devoid of any “offensive” characteristics of genuine Christianity. The thinking is: hey, if we buy into the world, maybe the world will buy into the church. Unfortunately, it’s working: the world is taking over the church more and more where such a course of action is followed. — Dr. Käßmann’s quick rise and fall is thus, above all, a cautionary tale for all Christians and church leaders. Let us focus on what God has given us to do and to speak in our respective vocations. Let us not do violence to the First Commandment by taking what he has not given us (cf. Large Catechism, I, 26-27).