A Complete Divorce of Medicine from Healthcare
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Why Do Parents of Gay Children Change Their Theological Minds
Written by Matthew M. Kennedy |
Monday, March 20, 2023
The contrast between this ethic and the Christian understanding of human nature and God’s law could not be greater. Because we are fallen creatures, we must not look within to find the truth about ourselves. The human heart is darkened. God revealed His law so that, in its light, we might see ourselves clearly. And “through the law,” Paul writes, “comes knowledge of sin” (Rom. 3:20). The law of God serves as a measure against which the human being is shown to be wanting. We are not good, and we cannot do the good that God requires.David Gushee, a professor of Christian ethics at Mercer University, once held the classical Christian view that homosexual relationships are sinful. But after his younger sister came out as a lesbian in 2008, he changed his mind.1 The sequence is important. Gushee did not change his mind because of careful biblical exegesis and reflection. His sister came out and then he changed his mind. Gushee later wrote a book about the process, Changing Our Mind (David Crum Media, 2014). As George Guthrie writes in his review of Gushee’s book,
The book constitutes [Gushee’s] own story of encounter, compassion, cognitive dissonance, and existential change of perspective. As he met LGBT couples, sat with children who’d been traumatized at home or church, processed his relationship with his sister who came out as a lesbian, heard from a student who’d been pained by David’s past teaching, he seems to have been backed into an existential corner….The way he’d been reading Scripture seemed increasingly implausible….At the end of the day, then, Changing Our Mind isn’t so much about David’s reasoned abandonment of 2,500 years of Judeo-Christian teaching on sexuality as it is a telling of his story, a story of seeking to pull together the disparate stories in his world.2
“We Know What the Text Says”
In an even more telling transformation, New Testament scholar Luke Timothy Johnson, an able defender of the historicity of the Gospels,3 whose daughter has identified as gay, wrote in Commonweal,
I have little patience with efforts to make Scripture say something other than what it says, through appeals to linguistic or cultural subtleties. The exegetical situation is straightforward: we know what the text says. But what are we to do with what the text says?….I think it important to state clearly that we do, in fact, reject the straightforward commands of Scripture, and appeal instead to another authority when we declare that same-sex unions can be holy and good. And what exactly is that authority? We appeal explicitly to the weight of our own experience…which tells us that to claim our own sexual orientation is in fact to accept the way in which God has created us. (emphasis added)4
It is difficult to find a professing Christian leader who has relinquished the classical Christian position on sexuality on purely exegetical grounds. The most popular voices in the less academic evangelical realm who claim to have changed their minds — Matthew Vines, Justin Lee, and Jen Hatmaker — are either gay or are very close to someone who is.5 The readiness with which these high profile Christians abandon their former convictions in light of personal experiences suggests that they had, perhaps unknowingly, already adopted a worldview that undermines the classical Christian understanding of human nature and the relationship between God’s law and the human heart.
Establishing a Righteousness of Their Own
God made human beings in His own image and declared everything He had created “very good” (Gen. 1:31).6 Then Adam took the forbidden fruit from his wife and ate, and sin rooted itself in the human soul. Consequently, the apostle Paul writes, “No one is righteous, no, not one” (Rom. 3:10). Jesus, approached by a young man seeking to gain eternal life by his good deeds, declared that “no one is good except God alone” (Mark 10:18). The gospel itself — the good news that God became man, lived, died, and rose again to save sinners — is predicated on the truth that human beings are incapable of self-redemption.7
Yet we strive to establish our own essential goodness. The Pharisees sought to do this by following the “tradition of the elders,”8 a system of practices rendering the law of God, which God gave as the chief means to reveal humanity’s sinfulness and need for His mercy,9 doable.10 Referring to this attempt, Paul writes, “seeking to establish their own [righteousness], they did not submit to the righteousness of God” (Rom. 10:3). Their unwillingness to acknowledge their sinfulness blinded them to the good news that Jesus came to save sinners.
The Luminous Self?
The same self-delusion today takes center stage in what might be described as the Gospel of Self. Look within, its apostles urge. Peel back the layers of socially imposed norms to find your authentic self — the true, inherently good, you —and live in accordance with what you find.
The paradigm has become so culturally predominant that in June 2020 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled an employer must affirm an employee’s gender self-identification without regard to his or her biological sex.11 The employee’s inner sense of the core self must be permitted to determine the workplace environment.
One of the clearest expressions of the Gospel of Self can be found in Ian Morgan Cron and Suzanne Stabile’s best-selling book, The Road Back to You: An Enneagram Journey to Self-Discovery. They write, “Buried in the deepest precincts of being, I sense there is a truer, more luminous expression of myself and that as long as I remain estranged from it I will never feel fully alive or whole.”12 The human person is not merely good, but a being of luminous light. One may have to dig past culturally imposed norms to find oneself, but once found, the true you is a thing of unspeakable beauty.
While the idea of the luminous self directly contradicts the biblical doctrine of original sin, it gains a foothold in Christian circles when its advocates associate it with the imago Dei.13 The shiny self is the self that has been made in God’s image. The imago Dei is not, as Irenaeus described it, a shattered mosaic, but rather a buried treasure waiting to be unearthed. And once found, any refusal to affirm and celebrate the discovery constitutes a wholesale rejection of the person and God’s image in her.
Read MoreJonathan Merritt, “Leading Evangelical Ethicist David Gushee Is Now Pro-LGBT. Here’s Why It Matters,” Religion News Service, October 24, 2014, https://religionnews.com/2014/10/24/david-gushee-lgbthomosexuality-matters/.
George H. Guthrie, “Changing Our Mind,” The Gospel Coalition, January 9, 2015, https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/reviews/changing-mind/.
Luke Timothy Johnson, The Real Jesus (San Francisco: HarperOne,1997)
Luke Timothy Johnson, “Homosexuality and the Church,” Commonweal, June 11, 2007, https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/homosexualitychurch-0.
Matthew Vines and Justin Lee are both quite publicly gay and have been out for some time. Jen Hatmaker’s daughter came out publicly in June 2020, but her family had known “for some time.” “Jen Hatmaker Reveals Her Daughter Is Gay,” Christian Today, June 30, 2020, https://www.christiantoday.com/article/jen.hatmaker.reveals.her.daughter.is.gay/135119.htm.
All Scripture quotations are from the English Standard Version.
“Those who are in the flesh cannot please God” (Rom. 8:8).
See Mark 7:1–13.
Romans 3:20; see discussion below.
Following this system, Paul once considered himself “blameless” (see Phil. 3:6).
Bostock v. Clayton County, Georgia, 590 U.S. ___ (2020). See Melissa Legault, “Landmark U.S. Supreme Court Ruling Prohibits Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity-Based Discrimination in Employment (US),” National Law Review, June 15, 2020, https://www.natlawreview.com/article/landmark-us-supreme-court-ruling-prohibits-sexualorientation-and-gender-identity.
Ian Morgan Cron and Suzanne Stabile, The Road Back to You: An Enneagram Journey to Self-Discovery (Downers Grove, IL: Intervarsity Press Books, 2017), 23.
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Make the West Christian Again?
In a recent interview with LBC host Rachel Johnson, Dawkins expressed concern about London’s growing numbers of Mosques, admitting, “If I had to choose between Christianity and Islam, I’d choose Christianity every single time.” Dawkins went on to say, “[Christianity] seems to me to be a fundamentally decent religion, in a way that I think Islam is not.”
Evolutionary biologist and raging atheist, Richard Dawkins, has made a career denigrating Christianity. But it seems the author of ‘The God Delusion’ may be slowly waking up to the fact that those who drive Christianity out of society are preparing the way for another religion.
In a recent interview with LBC host Rachel Johnson, Dawkins expressed concern about London’s growing numbers of Mosques, admitting, “If I had to choose between Christianity and Islam, I’d choose Christianity every single time.”
Dawkins went on to say, “[Christianity] seems to me to be a fundamentally decent religion, in a way that I think Islam is not.”
Dawkins’ concern is nothing new. Author Peter Hitchens has long been sounding that alarm. Back in 2018, in an interview on Conversations with host Vicky Warren, Hitchens warned that when militant atheists drive Christianity out of Europe, they will not create an atheist paradise in its place. Rather, it will leave a gap for Islam to fill.
According to Hitchens, the West’s material prosperity, military force, and anti-terror laws are not a reliable or sufficient defence against a rise in Islam.
Read More
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The Destruction of the Church As Metaphor
Written by Forrest L. Marion |
Monday, February 13, 2023
Based on the historical record, there is little doubt that at the time of its destruction Washington Street Methodist had been – for three decades – a powerhouse of gospel-focused labor aimed at improving the prospects for eternity of the enslaved population of South Carolina, and beyond.As Northern victory drew near in 1865, on the night of February 17/18 troops under General William T. Sherman set fire to the Washington Street Methodist Church in Columbia, South Carolina. Legend has it – highly plausible – that the soldiers intended to burn down the First Baptist Church. But when approached and queried by Union soldiers as to the Baptist church’s location, First Baptist’s quick-thinking sexton directed the soldiers around the corner to the Methodist church. Within minutes, that church was in flames. So goes the story.
Without a doubt, however, the First Baptist Church was where the first day’s meeting of the secession convention met, on December 17, 1860. But a smallpox epidemic had struck Columbia, so the delegates relocated to Charleston for the remainder of the convention, which voted unanimously on December 20 to withdraw from the Federal Union.
In America, the multitude of misunderstandings, ignorance, and errors of fact surrounding the political and social events from the 1860s are such that this little piece must refrain from addressing those important matters. Instead, it focuses on the burning of Washington Street Methodist and its relevance for today.
Washington Street Methodist is considered the mother church of all Methodists in Columbia. The first meeting house was a wooden structure built in 1804. In 1831, two men, Dr. William Capers – who pastored the church four times during his ministry (1818, 1831, 1835, 1846) – and William M. Kennedy, a former pastor and presiding elder of the Columbia district, laid the cornerstone of a new edifice, which was completed in 1832.
The first decades of the nineteenth century, known as the Second Awakening period, witnessed a mixed-bag of authentic gospel progress as well as more-or-less contrived professions of conversion and Christian faith which often were – and still are for historians – difficult to distinguish. William Capers, seemingly indefatigable and one of the few college-educated Methodist ministers in the area, was active as pastor, missionary, editor, and more. In 1821 he founded the Asbury Mission to the Creek Indians. Eight years later, he “took the lead in establishing plantation missions to slaves” among South Carolina Methodists. The same year, 1829, “Washington Street Church added 116 blacks to its roll.” (In 1830, Columbia’s population was 3,300.) Capers published a Catechism for the Use of the Methodist Missions (mainly for slaves), which, incidentally, is similar to the valuable children’s catechism used by some churches today (including in the PCA). Capers’s catechism began:
Who made you? God.What did he make you for? For his glory.Who is God? The Almighty, maker of heaven and earth.What do you know of him? God is holy, just and true.What else do you know of him? God is merciful, good and gracious.
Later, Capers’s missionary work spread to neighboring states. In the 1840s, Southern Methodists considered the mission to the slaves as “the crowning glory of our church.” When in 1855 Capers died, he had pastored Washington Street Church four times, his influence felt there even when not serving as their pastor. A fellow Methodist pastor preached his funeral service from Acts 13:36, “For David, after he had served his own generation by the will of God, fell on sleep.” A biographer of Capers wrote, “. . . a great many . . . of his beloved flock passed by the altar, where lay the body of the faithful shepherd. . . . It was particularly affecting to see the colored people pass before the coffin with a tear and a sigh.”
Based on the historical record, there is little doubt that at the time of its destruction Washington Street Methodist had been – for three decades – a powerhouse of gospel-focused labor aimed at improving the prospects for eternity of the enslaved population of South Carolina, and beyond.
Readers, try to set aside the all-too-common presentism of today. Dr. Capers and many others devoted themselves to providing the gospel of Jesus Christ to a segment of the population which otherwise was unlikely ever to hear the words of life in a manner suitable to their knowledge and understanding. Capers and a number of ministers in denominations in the South – especially Baptist, Presbyterian, and Episcopal – committed themselves to doing what they could. As the Puritan Matthew Henry wrote, if we may not do what we would, we must do what we could. The Southern ministers had no power to change the institutions of society at-large, even if some believed that to be part of the church’s calling.
The matter of the intentional burning down of any Christian church in a land where the vast majority at least nominally professed the God of the Bible is, of course, a troubling concern, but beyond the scope here. The fact was that Sherman’s men burned to it the ground – probably by mistake – the very church in Columbia that had done more than may be known on this side of glory for the souls of a poor and lowly people in the South.
The burning of Washington Street Methodist, then, is a metaphor in America today for the terrible destruction wrought by those who – regardless of their intent – confidently think themselves pure, righteous above all others. We are surrounded by those who never build anything – they only destroy. While the 94th Psalm refers to a throne, a broader aperture is fair for the purpose here: “Can a throne of destruction be allied with Thee, One which devises mischief by decree?” (94:20). And from Isaiah (with allowance for context), “Who among us can live with continual burning?” (33:14). Christians – those who build, not burn – must think rightly about the controversies of our day, and that means according to sola scriptura.
Forrest L. Marion is a member of First Presbyterian Church (PCA) in Crossville, Tenn
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