Here lies the boundary of a Christian church that knows itself to be bound by the authority of Scripture. Those who urge the church to change the norm of its teaching on this matter must know that they are promoting schism. If a church were to let itself be pushed to the point where it ceased to treat homosexual activity as a departure from the biblical norm, and recognized homosexual unions as a personal partnership of love equivalent to marriage, such a church would stand no longer on biblical ground but against the unequivocal witness of Scripture. A church that took this step would cease to be the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church. ("Should We Support Gay Marriage? No") Wolfhart Pannenberg
Since 10-A passes, we all know where to go if you: 1) Are married, but don't think your sex life should be confined to your spouse. 2) Can't abide being married to just one person at a time. 3) Are single and want to "test the milk" before you "buy the cow." 4) Reject the basics of human biological gender.
“Not to oppose error is to approve it; and not to defend truth is to suppress it, and, indeed, to neglect to confound evil men - when we can do it - is no less a sin than to encourage them” St. Felix III, Bishop of Rome, 483-492
Best wishes, though, to all my friends of evangelical persuasion still on that ship. May you find a lifeboat soon.
They resort to throwing pies in the face of their opponents.
Archbishop Leonard of Brussels, Belgium, has been targeted for his stance that AIDS spread through risky sexual behavior, at that a large part of that spread had to do with the homosexual culture of the late 1970s. This is factually true, but he is being assaulted for it.
This is what happens when reason breaks down. For now, it's just pies. He's also had lawsuits thrown at him. In the future, who knows what sort of violence will break out (and be justified as "retributive justice" or payback for past grievances)?
I’ve become convinced that you can tell a lot about somebody’s religious beliefs if you know what they think about the Council of Nicea in AD 325.
How would you complete this sentence? “The Council of Nicea…”
1. “…was a genuine work of the Holy Spirit, codifying for all time the true apostolic teaching on the person and nature of Christ.”
You are a conservative Catholic or Orthodox Christian. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
2. “…was a good thing, and it may even be said that the Holy Spirit was in it, leading the church to affirm Christ’s full divinity and humanity in terms that have stood the test of time. Shame about those anathemas at the end.”
You are a run-of-the-mill conservative Christian. If you’re Protestant, you can probably recite the Four Spiritual Laws. If you’re Catholic or Orthodox, I bet you’ve had some interesting discussions with some of your fellow parishioners.
3. “…contextualized the Christian message for a Greco-Roman audience. In those terms, I have no problems with it, although I do cross my fingers at certain points when (if) I recite the Creed in church.”
You are a centrist or liberal Christian in a mainline denomination. You probably subscribe to The Christian Century and wear a jacket with elbow patches.
4. “…is irrelevant to my faith. It was just some bunch of Catholic bigwigs asserting their authority over plain, Bible-believing Christians like me. Of course I believe in the Trinity, why do you ask?”
You are a fundamentalist Christian. And you need to take a church history course.
5. “…is irrelevant to my faith. It was just some bunch of Catholic bigwigs asserting their authority over plain, Bible-believing Christians like me. Of course I deny the Trinity, why do you ask?”
You are a Mormon, Jehovah’s Witness, or similar. And you need to take a church history course.
6. “…was the final nail in the coffin of the inclusive spirituality of Jesus, replacing theological diversity and egalitarianism with patriarchal regimentation and the silencing of all dissent. Oh, and they wrote the New Testament.”
You are a pagan or Gnostic who appreciates the teachings of Jesus—at least the ones that conform to your religious presuppositions—although you distrust most traditional, institutional forms of Christianity. You need to take a church history course, and you need to quit reading Dan Brown books.
7. “…was the final nail in the coffin of the Judaic faith of Yeshua ha-Mashiach, replacing Torah-observance and traditional Jewish piety with syncretistic pagan mythology. Oh, and they wrote the New Testament.”
You are an Ebionite. You appreciate the teachings of JesusYashuaYehoshuaYeshua—at least the ones that conform to your religious presuppositions—but want nothing to do with Christianity or the New Testament as classically defined. The Greek language probably makes you break out in hives.
This is a youtube video - you'll have to come to the blog or go to the host. Because some people still don't understand basic economics.
If your healthcare reform doesn't deal with the rising cost of healthcare by opening the path to private competition, then you're just shuffling money around.
James Delingpole has been doing yeoman's work exposing the disgusting underbelly of the anthropogenic global warming sham. He recently exposed a massive conspiracy among climate 'scientists' to cover up data that undermined their hypothesis.
Sorry, Goracle, you're just going to have to find another way to make a living than jetting around the world telling people that they have to...stop jetting around the world.
Read it and keep an eye out. There are people who love to concoct a crisis so they can use it to take away your freedom. (Yes, GWB did this. Yes, BHO is doing it now. Yes, the one-worlders are still trying to use the dead horse of "climate change" to undermine the economies of the West.)
Here's my point. People are falling for the apocalypse now garbage coming from these groups because they've stopped listening to the one person who actually knows how the world is going to end. (Hint: it's the same person who actually knows how the world began.)
President Obama began his visit to China with an exhortation to free up censorship and allow the citizenry to question and criticize their government without fear of reprisal.
President Barack Obama pointedly nudged China on Monday to stop censoring Internet access, offering an animated defense of the tool that helped him win the White House and suggesting Beijing need not fear a little criticism.
Yeah. Ask Fox News how well Obama takes a little criticism. Anita Dunn, the White House communications director, was interviewed last month and said: “We’re going to treat them the way we would treat an opponent. As they are undertaking a war against Barack Obama and the White House, we don’t need to pretend that this is the way that legitimate news organizations behave.” (Source: NYT)
It was a delicately balanced message and Obama couched his admonitions with words calling for cooperation, heavy with praise and American humility.
Our country needs to apologize to China? When did that happen? We've stood up for their freedom for 70 years! And our economies energize each other, raising the standard of living for both countries.
"I think that the more freely information flows, the stronger the society becomes, because then citizens of countries around the world can hold their own governments accountable," Obama told students during his first-ever trip to China. "They can begin to think for themselves."
I'm in a conundrum. I have no idea which government snitch line I should report this to. - should I report this quote to fishy@whitehouse.gov or flag@whitehouse.gov? I just can't decide which one best holds the populace accountable to the government. OOOPS! I meant that the government is accountable to the people.
“I am amazed that church officials would threaten to stop helping the disadvantaged because they are being asked to treat all citizens of the District fairly,” he continued. “They seem to have lost all perspective. How strong is their commitment to helping the poor if they’re willing to take this hardline stance?
It seems that everybody is required to take a break from any opinions that religious persons may have, but religious people don't have the same right of reprieve?
I think the "REV" in "Rev. Barry Lynn" stands for revisionista.
So they want us to keep the church from advocating for conscience bound issues in healthcare, but it's okay for the Roman Church to lobby for healthcare in general? GIVE ME A BREAK!
Here are some lightly edited extracts from J. I. Packer's Latimer Studies booklet "A Kind of Noah's Ark? The Anglican Commitment to Comprehensiveness."
Although this booklet reflects on the theological situation in the Church of England, and that at a particular time, some of the following observations hold good for more contemporary movements. For although there have been several historic forms of liberal theology there is also a liberal mood or mindset:
First, the basis of all forms of this position is the hypothesis that no universally right way of thinking about God is given in Christianity.
Unable to accept what might be called a Chalcedonian view of Scripture (i.e. that it is fully human as well as fully divine, and fully divine as well as fully human), they have doubted both the reality of the Chalcedonian Christ to whom the New Testament witnesses and the propriety of reading Scripture as more than a rag-bag of traditions, intuitions, fancies and mythology whereby good men celebrated and shared their sense of being in touch with God - a contact occasioned for New Testament writers by a uniquely godly man named Jesus.
That prophets and apostles no less than creeds and churches can all be wrong on questions of reality and truth, is plank one in the liberal platform. Scripture and the Christian literary heritage are certainly stimulating, inspiring and effective in communicating God, but that does not make them true.
So the constant endeavour of the liberal fraternity from the start has been to go behind and beyond biblical witness to reformulate the faith in terms which to them, as modern men, seem truer, clearer and less inadequate (whether evolutionist, idealist, panentheist, deist, existentialist, Marxist; sociological, psychological, syncretistic; or whatever).
Certainly, for today’s liberals there are no fixed fundamentals; everything, not excluding the doctrine of God - indeed, some say, that first - is regarded as in principle open to review and change.
...liberals have no united platform or policy, for they hold in common only...negations...plus the sifting, reshaping methodology which these negations entail. They agree only in what they are against; beyond this it is every man for himself.
Sykes notes that ‘a “liberal” theological proposal is always in the form of a challenge to an established authority, and thus necessarily implies a dispute about the appropriate norms or criteria for any theology whatsoever.’ He notes too that ‘it is impossible to be merely a “liberal” in theology one’s theology … will be liberal in as much as it is a modification of an already existing type’ - liberal catholic, liberal evangelical, or even liberal latitudinarian.
And he rightly stresses that any church in which liberals do their thing, querying the traditional and jettisoning the conventional, will have to endure real divergences of belief as some negate what others affirm and affirm what others cannot but negate.
[A]ll forms of liberalism are unstable. Being developed in each case by taking some secular fashion of thought as the fixed point (evolutionary optimism, historical scepticism, Marxist sociology, or whatever), and remodelling the Christian tradition to fit it, they are all doomed to die as soon as the fashion changes, according to Dean Inge’ s true saying that he who marries the spirit of the age today will be a widower tomorrow.
It is not always realised that the history of the past century and a half is littered with the wreckage of dead liberalisms. Though liberalism as an attitude of mind (going back at least to the Renaissance, if not indeed to the temptation of Eve) has persisted, and persists still, particular liberalisms have so far been relatively short-lived, and can be expected to continue so. Some liberals cheerfully acknowledge this and never treat their current opinions as more than provisional, anticipating that they may think differently next week.
This is what happens when you substitute human religious impulses for God-revealed truth. This man has forgotten the power of the gospel.
As far as gospel-truth, McLaren is no different than other anthropocentric panderers like Joel Osteen.
Singing songs like this, I'm not surprised he doesn't have the doctrinal fortitude to resist sycophantic submission to Islam. Now if he'd sung something like this, he would have known better.
Clyde McLennan - Stand up, stand up for Jesus (Webb)
Scheduled to meet 23-26 September, on its agenda is the following resolution:
“That this Synod
Affirming a pastoral response to racist land-owners in our parish families.
Notes the negative statements of previous Provincial Synods that racist white members of our Church share in full membership as baptised members of the Body of Christ, and are affirmed and welcomed as such;
Affirms our commitment to prayerful and respectful dialogue around these issues, mindful of the exhortations of previous Lambeth Conferences to engage with those most affected.
Commends giving serious and prayerful consideration to the acceptance of racist white landowners as valued members of our parish, bearing in mind the long standing tradition within the Anglican Communion of respect for individual conscience, in seeking to be faithful disciples of Jesus;
Asks the Bishop to request the Synod of Bishops to provide pastoral guidelines for those of our members who are seeking to restore Apartheid structures as faithful members of our parish families.”
At the end of August the Diocese of Cape Town passed a similar resolution asking the Bishops “to provide guidelines for the pastoral care of racist white landowners”.
Ever noticed how the stuff coming from the highest levels of church government in the mainline (or legacy) denominations always seems to skew left, while the folks in the pew underneath keep tellin' em to keep right?
Seriously...where has the government forcibly taken over an industry and made it better?
Government has never reduced the cost of a service - it cannot - but it can redirect access through the use of force (in the end, the police power of the state to harm or imprison us). Seniors know this, and that's why they're being so patriotic right now. Here's comment from today's WSJ.
Obama's Senior Moment
Elderly Americans are turning out in droves to fight ObamaCare, and President Obama is arguing back that they have nothing to worry about. Allow us to referee. While claims about euthanasia and "death panels" are over the top, senior fears have exposed a fundamental truth about what Mr. Obama is proposing: Namely, once health care is nationalized, or mostly nationalized, rationing care is inevitable, and those who have lived the longest will find their care the most restricted.
***
Far from being a scare tactic, this is a logical conclusion based on experience and common-sense. Once health care is a "free good" that government pays for, demand will soar and government costs will soar too. When the public finally reaches its taxing limit, something will have to give on the care and spending side. In a word, care will be rationed by politics.
Mr. Obama's reply is that private insurance companies already ration, by deciding which treatments are covered and which aren't. However, there's an ocean of difference between coverage decisions made under millions of voluntary private contracts and rationing via government. An Atlantic Ocean, in fact. Virtually every European government with "universal" health care restricts access in one way or another to control costs, and it isn't pretty.
The British system is most restrictive, using a black-box actuarial formula known as "quality-adjusted life years," or QALYs, that determines who can receive what care. If a treatment isn't deemed to be cost-effective for specific populations, particularly the elderly, the National Health Service simply doesn't pay for it. Even France—which has a mix of public and private medicine—has fixed reimbursement rates since the 1970s and strictly controls the use of specialists and the introduction of new medical technologies such as CT scans and MRIs.
Yes, the U.S. "rations" by ability to pay (though in the end no one is denied actual care). This is true of every good or service in a free economy and a world of finite resources but infinite wants. Yet no one would say we "ration" houses or gasoline because those goods are allocated by prices. The problem is that governments ration through brute force—either explicitly restricting the use of medicine or lowering payments below market rates. Both methods lead to waiting lines, lower quality, or less innovation—and usually all three.
A lot of talk has centered on what Sarah Palin inelegantly called "death panels." Of course rationing to save the federal fisc will be subtler than a bureaucratic decision to "pull the plug on grandma," as Mr. Obama put it. But Mrs. Palin has also exposed a basic truth. A substantial portion of Medicare spending is incurred in the last six months of life.
From the point of view of politicians with a limited budget, is it worth spending a lot on, say, a patient with late-stage cancer where the odds of remission are long? Or should they spend to improve quality, not length, of life? Or pay for a hip or knee replacement for seniors, when palliative care might cost less? And who decides?
In Britain, the NHS decides, and under its QALYs metric it generally won't pay more than $22,000 for treatments to extend a life six months. "Money for the NHS isn't limitless," as one NHS official recently put it in response to American criticism, "so we need to make sure the money we have goes on things which offer more than the care we'll have to forgo to pay for them."
Before he got defensive, Mr. Obama was open about this political calculation. He often invokes the experience of his own grandmother, musing whether it was wise for her to receive a hip replacement after a terminal cancer diagnosis. In an April interview with the New York Times, he wondered whether this represented a "sustainable model" for society. He seems to believe these medical issues are all justifiably political questions that government or some panel of philosopher kings can and should decide. No wonder so many seniors rebel at such judgments that they know they could do little to influence, much less change.
Mr. Obama has also said many times that the growth of Medicare spending must be restrained, and his budget director Peter Orszag has made it nearly his life's cause. We agree, but then why does Mr. Obama want to add to our fiscal burdens a new Medicare-like program for everyone under 65 too? Medicare already rations care, refusing, for example, to pay for virtual colonsocopies and has payment policies or directives to curtail the use of certain cancer drugs, diagnostic tools, asthma medications and many others. Seniors routinely buy supplemental insurance (Medigap) to patch Medicare's holes—and Medicare is still growing by 11% this year.
The political and fiscal pressure to further ration Medicare would increase exponentially if government is paying for most everyone's care. The better way to slow the growth of Medicare is to give seniors more control over their own health care and the incentives to spend wisely, by offering competitive insurance plans. But this would mean less control for government, not more.
***
It's striking that even the AARP—which is run by liberals who favor national health care—has been backing away from support for Mr. Obama's version. The AARP leadership's Democratic sympathies will probably prevail in the end, perhaps after some price-control sweeteners are added for prescription drugs. But AARP is out of touch with its own members, who have figured out that their own health and lives are at stake in this debate over ObamaCare. They know that when medical discretion clashes with limited government budgets, medicine loses.
Copyright 2009 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Traditional Anglicanism that is robustly orthodox is alive in Central Kentucky! We are gathering people who need to be welcomed by the Church of Christ, loved in the name of Christ, taught the Word of Christ, and fed on the Most Precious Body & Blood of Christ!
A confessional Christian ruminates on life. While "adiaphora" refers to "things indifferent" to orthodox Christianity, it also sums up much of the mainline churches attitudes of indifference to the heresy in her ranks (and by "rank" I mean the positively mephitic aroma!).
Oh, and if you post anonymously, make sure you identify yourself - or at least keep it on target. Don't expect me to post your incognito invective. If that's your bag, get your own blog.
I welcome disagreement. Say what you will, but back it up. I'm from Dixie - not ipse dixit!
Here lies the boundary of a Christian church that knows itself to be bound by the authority of Scripture. Those who urge the church to change the norm of its teaching on this matter must know that they are promoting schism. If a church were to let itself be pushed to the point where it ceased to treat homosexual activity as a departure from the biblical norm, and recognized homosexual unions as a personal partnership of love equivalent to marriage, such a church would stand no longer on biblical ground but against the unequivocal witness of Scripture. A church that took this step would cease to be the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church. ("Should We Support Gay Marriage? No") Wolfhart Pannenberg
