http://behe.uncommondescent.com/2009/08/bloggingheads-tv-and-me
'nuff said.
Sunday, August 30, 2009
Wednesday, August 5, 2009
More words of wisdom from a PCUSA pastor
A bit of background for this one. John Shuck has posted a series that he calls A New Reformation. It seems as though his intent is to posit a "New Reformation" based on the work of such scholars as Spong, Funk and others. This is one of the series.
I am enjoying this series on A New Reformation. Here is my pal, Bishop John Shelby Spong. I like him. I don't like him because he ticks off the fundies, but I have to say, that is an added bonus.
The good bishop nailed these theses to the internet over ten years ago. They are a bit dated and actually familiar-sounding now. They are more fully outlined in his book, Why Christianity Must Change or Die.
They are posted all over the web. Here is an accompanying article that goes with them in The 4th R. Like Holy Writ, they have slight variations from place to place. Here is a version I found on the website of St. Peter's Church, Nottingham.
1. Theism as a way of defining God, is dead. God can no longer be understood with credibility as a Being, supernatural in power, dwelling above the sky and prepared to invade human history periodically to enforce the divine will. So, most theological talk today is meaningless unless we find a new way to speak of God.
2. Since God can no longer be conceived in theistic terms, it becomes nonsensical to seek to understand Jesus as the incarnation of the theistic deity. So the Christology of the ages is bankrupt.
3. The biblical story of the perfect and finished creation from which human beings fell into sin is pre-Darwinian mythology and post-Darwinian nonsense.
4. The virgin birth, understood as literal biology, makes the divinity of Christ, as traditionally understood, impossible.
5. The miracle stories of the New Testament can no longer be interpreted in a post-Newtonian world as supernatural events performed by an incarnate deity.
6. The view of the cross as a sacrifice for the sins of the world is a barbarian idea based on primitive concepts of God that must be dismissed.
7. Resurrection is an action of God, who raised Jesus into the meaning of God. It therefore cannot be a physical resuscitation occurring inside human history.
8. The story of the ascension assumed a three-tiered universe and is therefore not capable of being translated into the concepts of a post-Copernican space age.
9. There is no external, objective, revealed standard writ in Scripture or on tablets of stone that will govern our ethical behaviour for all time.
10. Prayer cannot be a request made to a theistic deity to act in human history in a particular way.
11. The hope for life after death must be separated for ever from the behaviour-control mentality of reward and punishment. The church must abandon, therefore, its reliance on guilt as a motivator of behaviour.
12. All human beings bear God’s image and must be respected for what each person is. Therefore no external description of one’s being, whether based on race, ethnicity, gender or sexual orientation, can properly be used as the basis for either rejection or discrimination.
I am enjoying this series on A New Reformation. Here is my pal, Bishop John Shelby Spong. I like him. I don't like him because he ticks off the fundies, but I have to say, that is an added bonus.
The good bishop nailed these theses to the internet over ten years ago. They are a bit dated and actually familiar-sounding now. They are more fully outlined in his book, Why Christianity Must Change or Die.
They are posted all over the web. Here is an accompanying article that goes with them in The 4th R. Like Holy Writ, they have slight variations from place to place. Here is a version I found on the website of St. Peter's Church, Nottingham.
1. Theism as a way of defining God, is dead. God can no longer be understood with credibility as a Being, supernatural in power, dwelling above the sky and prepared to invade human history periodically to enforce the divine will. So, most theological talk today is meaningless unless we find a new way to speak of God.
2. Since God can no longer be conceived in theistic terms, it becomes nonsensical to seek to understand Jesus as the incarnation of the theistic deity. So the Christology of the ages is bankrupt.
3. The biblical story of the perfect and finished creation from which human beings fell into sin is pre-Darwinian mythology and post-Darwinian nonsense.
4. The virgin birth, understood as literal biology, makes the divinity of Christ, as traditionally understood, impossible.
5. The miracle stories of the New Testament can no longer be interpreted in a post-Newtonian world as supernatural events performed by an incarnate deity.
6. The view of the cross as a sacrifice for the sins of the world is a barbarian idea based on primitive concepts of God that must be dismissed.
7. Resurrection is an action of God, who raised Jesus into the meaning of God. It therefore cannot be a physical resuscitation occurring inside human history.
8. The story of the ascension assumed a three-tiered universe and is therefore not capable of being translated into the concepts of a post-Copernican space age.
9. There is no external, objective, revealed standard writ in Scripture or on tablets of stone that will govern our ethical behaviour for all time.
10. Prayer cannot be a request made to a theistic deity to act in human history in a particular way.
11. The hope for life after death must be separated for ever from the behaviour-control mentality of reward and punishment. The church must abandon, therefore, its reliance on guilt as a motivator of behaviour.
12. All human beings bear God’s image and must be respected for what each person is. Therefore no external description of one’s being, whether based on race, ethnicity, gender or sexual orientation, can properly be used as the basis for either rejection or discrimination.
One more PCUSA pastor.
heology
1. The universe has meaning and human life has purpose. Human beings are meaning-finding and purpose-finding machines. I'm actually pretty sure we could not even experience a meaningless universe, or go through our lives seeing them as literally meaningless. The question is what meaning? My society, in aggregate, gives one answer. Pillage the world, hurt your enemies, dull your mind and then you die. That is the default. What I call "God" embodies another way.
2. The doctrine of special creation has been magnified by the discoveries of the scope of the earth in time and space as well as the history and functions of life. Our cosmos, drawn within the lines of the limits of our imagination, is always revealed to be shocking and amazing to each successive generation. I take this as evidence that it came to be through forces and mechanisms that will eternally be outside our understanding. That's pretty damn special. And here we are, apparently able to appreciate this cosmos more than any living creature.
3. Death is natural. So is rape. So is war. To say that death is the enemy is to say something that is true for every person who grieves. Everything we say in the face of death is simply intended to blunt its edge as it cuts us to our core. Is this a punishment for sin? (The "wages" of sin?) If we see sin, in part, as enmeshment in an eternally unsatisfactory world full of pain and suffering and want an injustice, then yes, I think one could say that. What the world pays everyone, for all of their efforts, in the end, is death. This is natural, but it is also tragic, and we seek for things that we hope will transcend our deaths.
4. The Bible is full of instances where God is demonstrated to be unpredictable. Job puts to rest the idea that the righteous are protected from suffering and Jesus and the prophets reverse this entirely, saying that the righteous are promised suffering in a world gone wrong. So will we find an algorithm to determine when, where and how God will intervene? Can we find the on-switch for God's action in our lives? Of course not. No one ever will, and looking will always be fruitless. But is the guy who attributes overcoming addiction to the intervention of God a lunatic or a liar? Possibly neither. If God has no impact on our lives whatsoever apart from our conscious volition, then we need to retire theology forever and find something else to talk about.
5. Prayer is a broad term for a technology of spiritual practice. It is a technique, and a vague one at that. A huge weakness of Protestantism is the loss of the monastic tradition and the majority of ancient spiritual practices that have sustained Christians for millennia. We need to reach back for the broad array of practices that we have forgotten, and build new practices as we find we have needs in a world that is unlike any in the past. If people choose to ask God to intervene, then what good is it to stop them or put them down? I've had a few experiences myself where coincidence and bias don't seem to quite cut it. It just saddens me that our rich heritage of spiritual practice has been reduced to a laundry list whispered to God.
Christology
6. I think that Jesus Christ changes everything. Jesus is an eternal, ineffible and incomprehensible paradox that as Christians we are to embody, even without really understanding most of the time what it is we're getting ourselves into. Would we dare do so if we really understood? Would we line up to be crucified the way we line up to shake the preacher's hand after the sermon? Doubt it. I do not think we should ever surrender a transformative mystery we are called to live into for the sake of a comprehensible, domesticated, just-another-teacher.
7. Jesus Christ was never, is never, and will never be credible. Jesus Christ is crazy. You know that concept of what your life means, what makes you valuable and good, what you are called to do, and who you are? Jesus shatters that. Then he shatters it again. Pontious Pilate was credible. The Sanhedrin was credible. The credible people are the ones who killed Jesus. It was his followers who had no credibility. We frame these truths in myth because there is nothing else in the human toolbox that is anywhere near equal to the task.
8. Heather Reichgott challenged me here, and I'll go halfway. I think that acknowledging Jesus as coming from Mary's sexuality, at least in part, is important. It also is interesting that men were not involved at all except as a foster parent. I still don't like the virgin birth because I believe it does denigrate sexuality as a dirty thing that cannot really have touched Jesus. If Jesus is human, then he had to come from the same messy, fun stuff we all came from - or as I see it, no deal.
9. Its the classic neon sign, flashing in the urban night; the roadside sign in hand-painted letters on a country road: Jesus Saves. If this is not true, then we quit now and find something that will actually help us become whole. Historically, we've called that "Saving" atonement, something Jesus did at a particular time and place in the past, has done throughout the history of the cosmos from beginning to end, past and future, and seeks to get us to participate in with every moment of your life and mine. For me, penal sub atonement doesn't come anywhere near to covering that.
10. The resurrected Jesus teleports around and passes through crowds, appears and disappears. Clearly the resurrected Jesus, even in a very literalistic reading of the Gospels, was not just Jesus' same body walking around with the same properties other bodies have. The resurrection is a thing, at its core, that we cannot understand fully. We are just like the first disciples and apostles - Paul in particular. The resurrection is something we experience, something we participate in, with our whole lives. Even if a modern nurse could step out of a time machine and do a full physical exam of the risen Jesus, I don't think the resurrection would be affected one bit. If it would be, then it is not the resurrection depicted in the Gospels.
11. Apocalyptic elements have not been part of the main "Christian agenda" for a while now. Well, I guess there's "Jesus is coming, look busy" type evangelism, or fear-of-Hell evangelism, but a lot of even conservative evangelical types look down on this as simply leveraging self-preservation to get people into the pews. I'm fine with tossing that part out. To lose all of the apocalyptic, though, would mean we also have to lose, say, the thoughts and words of Martin Luther King Jr. I am not willing to "expunge" that. When, mere days from his assassination, MLK says he has seen the promised land, he is talking apocalypse. He is talking about the turning of time, the bending of the arc of the universe. Who cares about Jesus floating in the sky and pointing at us in judgement at the end of history like a work of Baroque art? When I read MLK's words, I shiver in my bones, because I know the apocalypse is coming.
God's Domain according to Jesus
12. The Gospels are chock-full of Jesus' suspicion of the essential character of neighbors. It is not about trusting your neighbor, it is about loving your neighbor even when s/he is a certified asshole to you all day long. Even given the guarantee that you will be hurt by others, you are never to hurt in return. That is not a trust ethic, that is a nonviolent ethic. The domain of God is ruled by one who gave up all the trappings of power that we expect and was tortured and executed at our hands. Think of any human government, ever. The domain of God is not that.
13. Jesus urges his followers to celebrate life as though they had just discovered a cache of coins in a field or been invited to a state banquet. They are urged not to worry about the future but to be present to the beauty of the moment. They are exhorted not to hold onto their lives but to lose their lives, and in losing them, they find them at last.
14. For Jesus, God's domain is a realm without social boundaries. In that realm there is neither Jew nor Greek, male nor female, slave nor free, homosexual nor heterosexual, friend nor enemy, liberal nor conservative, insider nor outsider, rich nor poor, less nor more abled, gendered nor transgendered...
15. For Jesus, God's domain has no brokers, no mediators between human beings and divinity. There is a state of atonement, when separations fall, even separations between us and God. In the end, we are all in God. We are Christ's body in the perfected sense of God's purpose culminated.
16. For Jesus, the rites of entry into the domain of God are open to all regardless of the things that separate us from each other in other domains. If you can have water dumped on your head, you are in. If you eat bread (or another fruit of the earth for those allergic to wheat or something) then you are in. And now you have to deal with, as family, everyone else who has water dumped on them and who eats food. Good luck :)
17. In the kingdom, forgiveness is reciprocal: individuals can have it only if they practice it. Forgiveness is the hallmark of restorative justice, in contrast to retributive justice.
18. The kingdom is a journey without end: one arrives only by departing. It is therefore a perpetual odyssey. Exile and homecoming are the true conditions of authentic existence.
The canon
19. The canon is the collection of writings that have, historically, connected people with God and helped them grown in wisdom and understanding. Throughout history, the Church has made use of other writings, words and practices which are not found in the "canon" of the Bible, and the Church will continue to do this. It is right and good to do this, and we should just be honest about it. "Canon" means "we consistently, across time and space, find a way to God there".
20. We do not use the Bible as a rule-book. If we did, the result would be hysterical. The Bible is not intended to be a rulebook, in my opinion. If you go looking for rules, best of luck. If you go, however, looking for identity - now there's something you might find.
The language of faith
21. In continually articulating who we are and what we are about, we should continue to use the full breadth of human written expression found in the Bible - paradox, hyperbole, exaggeration, metaphor, simile, aphorism, epistle, narrative, poem, song, allegory, folktale, martyr cycle, instruction, debate, drama, liturgy and so on, as well as the fuller variety of human expression including music, visual arts, and dance which go beyond a literal text and express meaning in new ways. Our language should be as limitless as creation.
1. The universe has meaning and human life has purpose. Human beings are meaning-finding and purpose-finding machines. I'm actually pretty sure we could not even experience a meaningless universe, or go through our lives seeing them as literally meaningless. The question is what meaning? My society, in aggregate, gives one answer. Pillage the world, hurt your enemies, dull your mind and then you die. That is the default. What I call "God" embodies another way.
2. The doctrine of special creation has been magnified by the discoveries of the scope of the earth in time and space as well as the history and functions of life. Our cosmos, drawn within the lines of the limits of our imagination, is always revealed to be shocking and amazing to each successive generation. I take this as evidence that it came to be through forces and mechanisms that will eternally be outside our understanding. That's pretty damn special. And here we are, apparently able to appreciate this cosmos more than any living creature.
3. Death is natural. So is rape. So is war. To say that death is the enemy is to say something that is true for every person who grieves. Everything we say in the face of death is simply intended to blunt its edge as it cuts us to our core. Is this a punishment for sin? (The "wages" of sin?) If we see sin, in part, as enmeshment in an eternally unsatisfactory world full of pain and suffering and want an injustice, then yes, I think one could say that. What the world pays everyone, for all of their efforts, in the end, is death. This is natural, but it is also tragic, and we seek for things that we hope will transcend our deaths.
4. The Bible is full of instances where God is demonstrated to be unpredictable. Job puts to rest the idea that the righteous are protected from suffering and Jesus and the prophets reverse this entirely, saying that the righteous are promised suffering in a world gone wrong. So will we find an algorithm to determine when, where and how God will intervene? Can we find the on-switch for God's action in our lives? Of course not. No one ever will, and looking will always be fruitless. But is the guy who attributes overcoming addiction to the intervention of God a lunatic or a liar? Possibly neither. If God has no impact on our lives whatsoever apart from our conscious volition, then we need to retire theology forever and find something else to talk about.
5. Prayer is a broad term for a technology of spiritual practice. It is a technique, and a vague one at that. A huge weakness of Protestantism is the loss of the monastic tradition and the majority of ancient spiritual practices that have sustained Christians for millennia. We need to reach back for the broad array of practices that we have forgotten, and build new practices as we find we have needs in a world that is unlike any in the past. If people choose to ask God to intervene, then what good is it to stop them or put them down? I've had a few experiences myself where coincidence and bias don't seem to quite cut it. It just saddens me that our rich heritage of spiritual practice has been reduced to a laundry list whispered to God.
Christology
6. I think that Jesus Christ changes everything. Jesus is an eternal, ineffible and incomprehensible paradox that as Christians we are to embody, even without really understanding most of the time what it is we're getting ourselves into. Would we dare do so if we really understood? Would we line up to be crucified the way we line up to shake the preacher's hand after the sermon? Doubt it. I do not think we should ever surrender a transformative mystery we are called to live into for the sake of a comprehensible, domesticated, just-another-teacher.
7. Jesus Christ was never, is never, and will never be credible. Jesus Christ is crazy. You know that concept of what your life means, what makes you valuable and good, what you are called to do, and who you are? Jesus shatters that. Then he shatters it again. Pontious Pilate was credible. The Sanhedrin was credible. The credible people are the ones who killed Jesus. It was his followers who had no credibility. We frame these truths in myth because there is nothing else in the human toolbox that is anywhere near equal to the task.
8. Heather Reichgott challenged me here, and I'll go halfway. I think that acknowledging Jesus as coming from Mary's sexuality, at least in part, is important. It also is interesting that men were not involved at all except as a foster parent. I still don't like the virgin birth because I believe it does denigrate sexuality as a dirty thing that cannot really have touched Jesus. If Jesus is human, then he had to come from the same messy, fun stuff we all came from - or as I see it, no deal.
9. Its the classic neon sign, flashing in the urban night; the roadside sign in hand-painted letters on a country road: Jesus Saves. If this is not true, then we quit now and find something that will actually help us become whole. Historically, we've called that "Saving" atonement, something Jesus did at a particular time and place in the past, has done throughout the history of the cosmos from beginning to end, past and future, and seeks to get us to participate in with every moment of your life and mine. For me, penal sub atonement doesn't come anywhere near to covering that.
10. The resurrected Jesus teleports around and passes through crowds, appears and disappears. Clearly the resurrected Jesus, even in a very literalistic reading of the Gospels, was not just Jesus' same body walking around with the same properties other bodies have. The resurrection is a thing, at its core, that we cannot understand fully. We are just like the first disciples and apostles - Paul in particular. The resurrection is something we experience, something we participate in, with our whole lives. Even if a modern nurse could step out of a time machine and do a full physical exam of the risen Jesus, I don't think the resurrection would be affected one bit. If it would be, then it is not the resurrection depicted in the Gospels.
11. Apocalyptic elements have not been part of the main "Christian agenda" for a while now. Well, I guess there's "Jesus is coming, look busy" type evangelism, or fear-of-Hell evangelism, but a lot of even conservative evangelical types look down on this as simply leveraging self-preservation to get people into the pews. I'm fine with tossing that part out. To lose all of the apocalyptic, though, would mean we also have to lose, say, the thoughts and words of Martin Luther King Jr. I am not willing to "expunge" that. When, mere days from his assassination, MLK says he has seen the promised land, he is talking apocalypse. He is talking about the turning of time, the bending of the arc of the universe. Who cares about Jesus floating in the sky and pointing at us in judgement at the end of history like a work of Baroque art? When I read MLK's words, I shiver in my bones, because I know the apocalypse is coming.
God's Domain according to Jesus
12. The Gospels are chock-full of Jesus' suspicion of the essential character of neighbors. It is not about trusting your neighbor, it is about loving your neighbor even when s/he is a certified asshole to you all day long. Even given the guarantee that you will be hurt by others, you are never to hurt in return. That is not a trust ethic, that is a nonviolent ethic. The domain of God is ruled by one who gave up all the trappings of power that we expect and was tortured and executed at our hands. Think of any human government, ever. The domain of God is not that.
13. Jesus urges his followers to celebrate life as though they had just discovered a cache of coins in a field or been invited to a state banquet. They are urged not to worry about the future but to be present to the beauty of the moment. They are exhorted not to hold onto their lives but to lose their lives, and in losing them, they find them at last.
14. For Jesus, God's domain is a realm without social boundaries. In that realm there is neither Jew nor Greek, male nor female, slave nor free, homosexual nor heterosexual, friend nor enemy, liberal nor conservative, insider nor outsider, rich nor poor, less nor more abled, gendered nor transgendered...
15. For Jesus, God's domain has no brokers, no mediators between human beings and divinity. There is a state of atonement, when separations fall, even separations between us and God. In the end, we are all in God. We are Christ's body in the perfected sense of God's purpose culminated.
16. For Jesus, the rites of entry into the domain of God are open to all regardless of the things that separate us from each other in other domains. If you can have water dumped on your head, you are in. If you eat bread (or another fruit of the earth for those allergic to wheat or something) then you are in. And now you have to deal with, as family, everyone else who has water dumped on them and who eats food. Good luck :)
17. In the kingdom, forgiveness is reciprocal: individuals can have it only if they practice it. Forgiveness is the hallmark of restorative justice, in contrast to retributive justice.
18. The kingdom is a journey without end: one arrives only by departing. It is therefore a perpetual odyssey. Exile and homecoming are the true conditions of authentic existence.
The canon
19. The canon is the collection of writings that have, historically, connected people with God and helped them grown in wisdom and understanding. Throughout history, the Church has made use of other writings, words and practices which are not found in the "canon" of the Bible, and the Church will continue to do this. It is right and good to do this, and we should just be honest about it. "Canon" means "we consistently, across time and space, find a way to God there".
20. We do not use the Bible as a rule-book. If we did, the result would be hysterical. The Bible is not intended to be a rulebook, in my opinion. If you go looking for rules, best of luck. If you go, however, looking for identity - now there's something you might find.
The language of faith
21. In continually articulating who we are and what we are about, we should continue to use the full breadth of human written expression found in the Bible - paradox, hyperbole, exaggeration, metaphor, simile, aphorism, epistle, narrative, poem, song, allegory, folktale, martyr cycle, instruction, debate, drama, liturgy and so on, as well as the fuller variety of human expression including music, visual arts, and dance which go beyond a literal text and express meaning in new ways. Our language should be as limitless as creation.
This is the view of someone who is appearantly an ordained PCUSA pastor
Members of the Committee,
It is a Christian obligation to acknowledge, affirm, welcome and create an environment in which the love between two persons, regardless of sexual identity or preference, is fully invited and held to a high standard of mutual obligation between partners. I believe this because those who have struggled within the closet often cannot receive the love of God and proclaim it until they emerge as the person that God has intended them to be.
The closet is not a euphemistic metaphor to which we can casually refer in some derogatory or humorous manner. The closet is a prison cell that society has constructed for those who are not heterosexual. Yet as the witness of countless persons who have struggled within the closet and emerged alive attests, it was Christ who released their soul from captivity, and it was only out of the closet that Christ could fully be received. For it is the emergence of the person from out of the closet that attests to the power of the Gospel to liberate the lonely, the oppressed, the outcast and the sinner to a new life in Christ irrespective of sexual identity.
Christian theology needs to be tempered with a pragmatic realism that understands one consistent feature in the map of Christian history: Its functional social mutability. How Christian theology and Scripture functions among people is constrained by the cultural boundaries a given society constructs. In this regard the notion of sin is a socially constructed understanding of Biblical rules and mandates for conduct. What we truly believe to be absolute sin today is not the same as it was ages ago, regardless in some cases of what Scripture actually says. The meaning of Scripture mutates with each culture and civilization as different peoples construct different meanings of the text to communicate and reveal the risen Christ in their midst.
Many who claim authoritative interpretations of Scripture maintain that women ought not hold offices of teaching men theology or holding any position of authority over men in the church or in the home. Women are commanded by God to inhabit specific social roles. The social equality of women in the West is a recent development after centuries of what we now assert were poor interpretations of the role of women as revealed in Scripture. That women have a vital function in the ministry and can indeed hold offices of authority over men in theological matters is far more normative than ever and will continue to be more normative with succeeding generations. This is certainly the case within the PCUSA. The same discussions about the role of women, slaves and people of color have taken place within the PCUSA as we are now discussing concerning homosexuality. We need to observe this from a rational perspective lest we fold into some irrational progressivism where we simply assume that our age is more enlightened than previous ages.
One reading is to assert what Paul or Jesus would have said in our current context. Such assertions inevitably take the shape of whoever is doing the arguing for a given position. As one assertion runs, Paul would have not supported even benevolent slavery today. However it is quite clear from the text that benevolent slavery was something he with Jesus most likely accepted. Such a supposed trajectory does not change the fact that there is good reason to believe that Paul supported an owner’s authority over a slave who works for no wage at all other than a forced exchange of shelter and food. This sort of authoritarian situation does not justify benevolence no matter how familial it is rendered. Most sovereign states have laws that are binding to prevent this sort of economic exchange. Yet many Christian traditions, PCUSA notwithstanding, would oppose a repeal of slavery laws or the equal treatment of women or people of other races on moral grounds rooted in Scripture – the same Scripture that once justified slavery. This is reasoned through how a particular social structure mediates what it believes to be the revealed Word in Scripture for them at a given moment in time.
The point is that we make assumptions on how we read these texts based on variability of contextual matters. I have been on several sides of the debate regarding those in relationships other than traditional, monogamous, heterosexual relationships and the turning point was not in how I understood sin, but in how I understood love and what healthy and up-building relatedness looks like. Our society and psychology mediate our relatedness to God in often intractable ways. We can only relate to God through the media of our experience with the world. If we regulate behaviors in ways that reinforce disordered relationships between non-heterosexuals such as forbidding marriage among other things, our systems of purity and social constructs function as media that will inevitably reinforce disordered relationships with God, or altogether kill off any such possibility. Sin as something prohibitive of behavior is not the issue as much as what kind of relationships serve to mediate the ability of one to receive what is good from God and what relationships fail in that capacity. The assertion that all same gendered relationships are inherently disordered is at stake.
Can a non-heterosexual couple receive the love of Christ in their relationship more fully than outside that relationship? The evidence from same-gender relationships tells us that we should affirm this claim and reject that same-gender relationships are inherently disordered. It is clear that any form of slavery is unjust and ultimately dehumanizing; and women in places of theological and Biblical authority over men is up-building and not destructive to the church. Likewise we are obligated to affirm where the love of Christ is being revealed, experienced, expressed and witnessed among those who happen to have found Him in a place that the church currently rejects as legitimate. Not to respond to this revelation of Christ is to grieve the same Spirit that gives life to the church universal.
Andrew Tatusko, M.Div., Th.M.
Duncansville, Pa.
It is a Christian obligation to acknowledge, affirm, welcome and create an environment in which the love between two persons, regardless of sexual identity or preference, is fully invited and held to a high standard of mutual obligation between partners. I believe this because those who have struggled within the closet often cannot receive the love of God and proclaim it until they emerge as the person that God has intended them to be.
The closet is not a euphemistic metaphor to which we can casually refer in some derogatory or humorous manner. The closet is a prison cell that society has constructed for those who are not heterosexual. Yet as the witness of countless persons who have struggled within the closet and emerged alive attests, it was Christ who released their soul from captivity, and it was only out of the closet that Christ could fully be received. For it is the emergence of the person from out of the closet that attests to the power of the Gospel to liberate the lonely, the oppressed, the outcast and the sinner to a new life in Christ irrespective of sexual identity.
Christian theology needs to be tempered with a pragmatic realism that understands one consistent feature in the map of Christian history: Its functional social mutability. How Christian theology and Scripture functions among people is constrained by the cultural boundaries a given society constructs. In this regard the notion of sin is a socially constructed understanding of Biblical rules and mandates for conduct. What we truly believe to be absolute sin today is not the same as it was ages ago, regardless in some cases of what Scripture actually says. The meaning of Scripture mutates with each culture and civilization as different peoples construct different meanings of the text to communicate and reveal the risen Christ in their midst.
Many who claim authoritative interpretations of Scripture maintain that women ought not hold offices of teaching men theology or holding any position of authority over men in the church or in the home. Women are commanded by God to inhabit specific social roles. The social equality of women in the West is a recent development after centuries of what we now assert were poor interpretations of the role of women as revealed in Scripture. That women have a vital function in the ministry and can indeed hold offices of authority over men in theological matters is far more normative than ever and will continue to be more normative with succeeding generations. This is certainly the case within the PCUSA. The same discussions about the role of women, slaves and people of color have taken place within the PCUSA as we are now discussing concerning homosexuality. We need to observe this from a rational perspective lest we fold into some irrational progressivism where we simply assume that our age is more enlightened than previous ages.
One reading is to assert what Paul or Jesus would have said in our current context. Such assertions inevitably take the shape of whoever is doing the arguing for a given position. As one assertion runs, Paul would have not supported even benevolent slavery today. However it is quite clear from the text that benevolent slavery was something he with Jesus most likely accepted. Such a supposed trajectory does not change the fact that there is good reason to believe that Paul supported an owner’s authority over a slave who works for no wage at all other than a forced exchange of shelter and food. This sort of authoritarian situation does not justify benevolence no matter how familial it is rendered. Most sovereign states have laws that are binding to prevent this sort of economic exchange. Yet many Christian traditions, PCUSA notwithstanding, would oppose a repeal of slavery laws or the equal treatment of women or people of other races on moral grounds rooted in Scripture – the same Scripture that once justified slavery. This is reasoned through how a particular social structure mediates what it believes to be the revealed Word in Scripture for them at a given moment in time.
The point is that we make assumptions on how we read these texts based on variability of contextual matters. I have been on several sides of the debate regarding those in relationships other than traditional, monogamous, heterosexual relationships and the turning point was not in how I understood sin, but in how I understood love and what healthy and up-building relatedness looks like. Our society and psychology mediate our relatedness to God in often intractable ways. We can only relate to God through the media of our experience with the world. If we regulate behaviors in ways that reinforce disordered relationships between non-heterosexuals such as forbidding marriage among other things, our systems of purity and social constructs function as media that will inevitably reinforce disordered relationships with God, or altogether kill off any such possibility. Sin as something prohibitive of behavior is not the issue as much as what kind of relationships serve to mediate the ability of one to receive what is good from God and what relationships fail in that capacity. The assertion that all same gendered relationships are inherently disordered is at stake.
Can a non-heterosexual couple receive the love of Christ in their relationship more fully than outside that relationship? The evidence from same-gender relationships tells us that we should affirm this claim and reject that same-gender relationships are inherently disordered. It is clear that any form of slavery is unjust and ultimately dehumanizing; and women in places of theological and Biblical authority over men is up-building and not destructive to the church. Likewise we are obligated to affirm where the love of Christ is being revealed, experienced, expressed and witnessed among those who happen to have found Him in a place that the church currently rejects as legitimate. Not to respond to this revelation of Christ is to grieve the same Spirit that gives life to the church universal.
Andrew Tatusko, M.Div., Th.M.
Duncansville, Pa.
More awesomeness from P-BO, and open letter to el Presidente.
An Open Letter to President Obama Regarding the Appointment of Science Advisor John Holdren
Dear President Obama,
I note with dismay your appointment of Dr. John Holdren as Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, Assistant to the President for Science and Technology, and Co-Chair of the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. Although Dr. Holdren’s experience in academia and administration may be adequate, his publicly expressed views regarding population control disqualify him from holding office.
I will set aside objections to Dr. Holdren’s scientific competence. Despite his strong scientific credentials, he advanced theories in the 1970’s and 1980’s that have become the paradigm of ideologically motivated junk science. He and his collaborators (such as co-author Paul Ehrlich) predicted world-wide famine as a consequence of over-population by the late 20th century, and they advocated radical coercive public policies to avert catastrophe. These predictions were explicit, public, and were published under professional imprimatur. Obviously, the predictions were wrong. Dr.Holdren’s predictions are an exemplar of scientific incompetence.
But it is the spectre of Dr. Holdren’s competence, not his incompetence, that concerns me. In 1977 Dr. Holdren and his colleagues Paul and Anne Ehrlich published the book Ecoscience. In it, Holdren and his co-authors endorse the serious consideration of radical measures to reduce the human population, particularly third world populations, such as India, China and Africa. The measures include:
• People who “contribute to social deterioration” (i.e. undesirables) “can be required by law to exercise reproductive responsibility” — in other words, be compelled to have abortions or be sterilized.
• Women — particularly women of insufficient means due to poverty, nationality, marital status, or youth — could be forced to abort their children and undergo sterilization.
• Implementation of a system of "involuntary birth control," in which girls at puberty would be implanted with an infertility device and only could have it removed temporarily if they received permission from the government to have a baby.
• Undesirable populations could be sterilized by infertility drugs intentionally put into drinking water or in food.
• Single mothers and teen mothers who managed to have their children despite measures to prevent fertility should have their babies seized from them and given away to others to raise.
• A transnational “Planetary Regime” and a transnational police force should be assembled to enforce population control.
Although Dr. Holdren recently has asserted that he does not support coercive measures to reduce population, he has continued to champion population control ‘science’ and he includes his book “Ecoscience” prominently on his CV, without disclaimer.
In other words, Dr. Holdren dissembles. He insists, despite the record, that he no longer believes what he 'didn’t believe' then. Evidently you accept his denial. As you are, Mr. President, a man of good will, inclined to see the best in people, you may have misunderstood Dr. Holdren’s ideology. It has a history that runs from early 20th century eugenics to the German T4 program to the modern population control movement and eco-fundamentalism. It is a view of man as pestilence. No one who holds that view, or has held that view, or who has publicly endorsed serious consideration of that view, should be in a position of influence in our government.
There is a deep and disturbing irony in your appointment of Dr. Holdren as Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. The irony, sir, is this: Dr. Holdren endorsed the serious consideration of radical measures — including involuntary sterilization and abortion — to cull mankind. And he was not an equal-opportunity culler. He betrayed a particular animus to children conceived of third world parentage to young mothers of limited means. He asserted that they were a burden that we dare not bear — for the sake of humanity and for the sake of the Earth. He implored us to ensure that these children were never given life.
He meant you.
Sincerely,
Michael Egnor, M.D.
Dear President Obama,
I note with dismay your appointment of Dr. John Holdren as Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, Assistant to the President for Science and Technology, and Co-Chair of the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. Although Dr. Holdren’s experience in academia and administration may be adequate, his publicly expressed views regarding population control disqualify him from holding office.
I will set aside objections to Dr. Holdren’s scientific competence. Despite his strong scientific credentials, he advanced theories in the 1970’s and 1980’s that have become the paradigm of ideologically motivated junk science. He and his collaborators (such as co-author Paul Ehrlich) predicted world-wide famine as a consequence of over-population by the late 20th century, and they advocated radical coercive public policies to avert catastrophe. These predictions were explicit, public, and were published under professional imprimatur. Obviously, the predictions were wrong. Dr.Holdren’s predictions are an exemplar of scientific incompetence.
But it is the spectre of Dr. Holdren’s competence, not his incompetence, that concerns me. In 1977 Dr. Holdren and his colleagues Paul and Anne Ehrlich published the book Ecoscience. In it, Holdren and his co-authors endorse the serious consideration of radical measures to reduce the human population, particularly third world populations, such as India, China and Africa. The measures include:
• People who “contribute to social deterioration” (i.e. undesirables) “can be required by law to exercise reproductive responsibility” — in other words, be compelled to have abortions or be sterilized.
• Women — particularly women of insufficient means due to poverty, nationality, marital status, or youth — could be forced to abort their children and undergo sterilization.
• Implementation of a system of "involuntary birth control," in which girls at puberty would be implanted with an infertility device and only could have it removed temporarily if they received permission from the government to have a baby.
• Undesirable populations could be sterilized by infertility drugs intentionally put into drinking water or in food.
• Single mothers and teen mothers who managed to have their children despite measures to prevent fertility should have their babies seized from them and given away to others to raise.
• A transnational “Planetary Regime” and a transnational police force should be assembled to enforce population control.
Although Dr. Holdren recently has asserted that he does not support coercive measures to reduce population, he has continued to champion population control ‘science’ and he includes his book “Ecoscience” prominently on his CV, without disclaimer.
In other words, Dr. Holdren dissembles. He insists, despite the record, that he no longer believes what he 'didn’t believe' then. Evidently you accept his denial. As you are, Mr. President, a man of good will, inclined to see the best in people, you may have misunderstood Dr. Holdren’s ideology. It has a history that runs from early 20th century eugenics to the German T4 program to the modern population control movement and eco-fundamentalism. It is a view of man as pestilence. No one who holds that view, or has held that view, or who has publicly endorsed serious consideration of that view, should be in a position of influence in our government.
There is a deep and disturbing irony in your appointment of Dr. Holdren as Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. The irony, sir, is this: Dr. Holdren endorsed the serious consideration of radical measures — including involuntary sterilization and abortion — to cull mankind. And he was not an equal-opportunity culler. He betrayed a particular animus to children conceived of third world parentage to young mothers of limited means. He asserted that they were a burden that we dare not bear — for the sake of humanity and for the sake of the Earth. He implored us to ensure that these children were never given life.
He meant you.
Sincerely,
Michael Egnor, M.D.
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