Here’s the quote that jumps out at me: “To bypass God’s plain commandments in the name of some higher guidance means to commune with one’s own self to justify a course of action obviously condemned by Scripture.” How would one even begin to describe the gravity of such a sin?
He didn’t live to see churches performing “gay marriages,” but it wouldn’t have surprised him. Really–what could be more wicked, or more absurd, than claiming to have received a special dose of “divine guidance” that lets you break God’s plainly stated moral law?
He didn’t live to see “Clergy for Choice,” either.
I think if you’re claiming that God told you it’s all right to promote abortion, you’re in for a really bad time in the afterlife.
Uh-uh. Not buyin’ it, sunshine. You’re the one who’s wrong.
I smelled a rat, so I peeked behind the curtain. Baptist News Global is, according to itself, part of “the wider progressive movement.” Gotcha. But let’s see what he says the churches were “wrong” about.
Wrong about 1) “race.” Here he just rehashes boilerplate left-wing “white privilege” blather. Apparently he doesn’t know any white people who are poor. 3) Women. Ordain ’em all. To me it’s a debatable point, but he’s not here to debate it. 4) “What it means to be ‘pro-life.’ He seems to be saying it’s wrong to focus on abortion when there are other bad things, like genocide and slavery, going on in the world. Is he saying tackle everything in the world that’s really bad, and only then can you oppose abortion? Or is he just putting words on paper that he thinks sound smart?
“Sexual orientation and gender identity”–some of us think the latter is a lot of bunk–is No. 5 on his list. Churches were wrong to expel homosexuals et al and probably should’ve made them pastors and elders instead, he says. Somehow the Bible got that wrong. 6) Something about measuring progress “by numbers instead of souls.” How does he know what kind of progress a church has made in saving anybody’s soul? And no such list would be complete without 7), we “put our hope in politics.” Translation: Christians voted for Donald Trump. So it must have been “right” to vote for Hillary Clinton, the most corrupt woman in the world?
No. 2 was a charge of churches ignoring sexual predators among the clergy. Do you know anyone who thinks that should have been ignored? Do you know anyone, besides a few leftids, who thinks there should be more sexual predators among the clergy?
The key to understanding where this guy is coming from is his assertion that the churches need to have “various ways to understand Scripture.”
Oh! You mean like the doctrine of “the living, breathing Constitution,” in which the meaning of the Constitution is subject to incessant reinterpretation, depending on whatever innovation Democrats wish to extract from it?
So here we have a kind of “living Scripture,” which changes all the time according to the worldly fad of the moment–never mind how many times God reminds us, in the Bible, that He does not change.
“Living Scripture” is why the liberal churches are dying on the vine.
I wrote a satire in 2011 featuring a “New New Testament,” and lo and behold, two years later, a bunch of flatline churchmen actually published what they called a “New New Testament.” I hate being right all the time.
Now, who’s so dumb as to be unable to guess what’s in the New New Testament? Go ahead, give it a shot. It’s easy. Just ask yourself, “What would Rosie O’Donnell or Obama put in the Bible, if they were writing it?”
On second thought, who needs that kind of nightmare?
Squeaker of the House Nancy Pelosi says she and her Democrat playmates are “prayerfully and patriotically” going about the business of annulling the 2016 election by impeaching President Donald Trump (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zvFxmUVFqBY).
Somehow the idea of Democrats praying is inherently grotesque, like pirates collecting for the UJA. Who would they be praying to?
Well, that would be a god who 1) really likes abortion, right up to and including the moment of a baby’s birth, 2) wants to see boys turned into girls and girls turned into boys, 3) endorses and blesses sodomy, 4) blesses atheism and idol worship, 5) recognizes and confirms innumerable and mutually contradicting versions of “truth,” to the point where there is no truth at all, and 6) leaves it up to well-paid liberals here on earth to decide whatever might be sin on any given day.
Now, what god fits that description? [Cue “Jeopardy” theme music]
When Mr. Toad brags about his intellectual attainments, we think it’s funny and we laugh, because it’s only Mr. Toad, a fictional character. But it’s not so funny when the real, live clever men at Oxford and other dives of “higher education” do the same.
Biblical Archaeology Magazine this month is advertising a book, Jesus and After, produced by the savants at University of Massachusetts at Amherst. “What lies at the bottom of the highly stratified Biblical texts from the First Century?” one asks.
Answers Stephen W. Durrant from the University of Oregon:
“The author has accomplished something rare in this outstanding book… Freed from such ‘stumbling blocks’ as the doctrines of blood atonement and bodily resurrection, the original Christian teaching shines forth with simplicity and directness.”
“For the preaching of the cross,” observed St. Paul, “is to them that perish foolishness” (I Corinthians 1:18).
So the doctrines of blood atonement and bodily resurrection are stumbling blocks? Stumbling blocks to what–getting your doctorate in “Religion”? Winning the approval of an unbelieving fallen world?
“Now if Christ be preached that he rose from the dead,” Paul continues, “how say some among you that there is no resurrection of the dead? But if there be no resurrection of the dead, then is Christ not risen: and if Christ be not risen, then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain… If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men most miserable” (I Cor. 15:12-14, 19).
So these sophomoric twaddlers wish to go back to some supposed “original Christian teaching” that does not provide any cleansing from sins because it jettisons the blood atonement, and does not provide any hope of resurrection–what’s left? “Be nice”? “Sharing is caring”? What kind of shabby excuse for Christianity would that be?
Seest thou a man who is wise in his own eyes? There is more hope of a fool than of him (Proverbs 26:12).
This is the kind of plop that gets taught at our seminaries, and this is why we have “clergy for choice” and “feminist clergy” and all the rest of the smorgasbord of crapola served up by left-wing pseudo-Christianity.
The answer, I am sorry to say, is “Yes.” At least for some pastors. Especially liberal pastors, if that’s not a contradiction in terms.
So it’s five years ago and a notorious pervert, who’s already been publicly charged as such, is running for mayor of New York City… and this walking bird-bath of a pastor likens him to Moses and Ezekiel.
Wallis was much more prominent in 2006 than he is now. Back then, he still clung, however feebly, to Biblical sexual morality. But after he took the plunge for “gay marriage,” that made him just another liberal with no distinguishing marks; so his stock as an oracle has gone down.
This little book of his is a spectacular example of the leftids’ use of straw men in an argument. Wallis has a black belt in the martial art of knocking down opinions that no one actually holds.
Lest there be confusion, this is the same Hillary Clinton who was Planned Parenthood’s “Champion” of abortion and who said, last year, that the core beliefs of “religions”–that is, Christianity–“have got to change” to accommodate and “affirm” abortion and public sodomy.
That Hillary is the subject of a recent book, Strong for a Moment Like This: The Devotions of Hillary Rodham Clinton, by a Rev. Shillady–relish the irony of that name–the Clinton family pastor–more irony. With the thinly veiled likening of Hillary to Queen Esther, we go beyond irony into uncharted, murky waters of I don’t know what. What lies beyond irony?
The news turns out to be what we’d expect. Right smack-dab in the middle of the book is a prayer written not by Mr. Shillady–who named this guy? Charles Dickens?–but by someone else who was not given credit for it (http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_HILLARY_CLINTON_PASTOR_PLAGIARISM?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2017-08-15-10-07-55). Usually we call that plagiarism. But as any liberal would, Mr. Shillady says it was only a mistake, nobody could have been as surprised as he was when he found out the prayer had actually been written by another man, and he’ll give the guy due credit in subsequent editions and everything’ll be just hunky-dory.
It’s raining like mad and this is what I’m reading about instead of working on my own book. I have bypassed the truly disastrous news of the day in favor of this wee tidbit of cultural decay.
I suppose we expect our politicians to be hypocrites, especially if their last name happens to be Clinton. But this is a bit thick even for Hillary. I mean, really–plagiarizing a prayer?
And we’re supposed to be sorry that she’s not our president. The nooze media all tell us so.
