Last month, Steve wrote a post on the NH Diocese of the Episcopal Church as it was time to replace retiring Bishop Gene Robinson (the first openly gay Bishop whose ordination pretty much set afire the whole of the Anglican Church). At the time, the choices were another gay man, a divorced woman, and a heterosexual man. The post he linked to assured everyone that even the latter was “a friend of the LGBT movement”.
One of our loyal readers decided to take us to task for putting up such a post:
Skip – I’m calling you to task. This is inappropriate. But mentioning whether someone upholds all ten commandments would be nice.
I share your frustration – I just think there’s a better way to express it.
OK, confustion time on my part (not a hard state of being for me to be in, somehow):
You can call me to task any time you want – but I point out that I didn’t write the post. To be honest, I haven’t figured out the conjunction of your “This is inappropriate.” and “I share your frustration” – they seem to be diametrically opposed. I get the second sentence (altho an Evangelical Christian, I am saddened by Churches that purport to be Christian but their leadership stray from Biblical teachings. That’s why, when I was a Deacon in my church, I helped make the decision that we would withdraw from the American Baptist Convention because it was moving away from Biblical teachings to a more “social gospel” that was more in line with pop culture (in our estimation)).
But please explain your first sentence of “inappropriate”.
There are churches whose theology seems to reflect the Political Correctness of the Day. Instead of using Biblical principles and interpret current events and issues through that lens of absolute standards, they twist those two things around and use that shifting sand of pop culture instead – after all, we can’t be hurting anyones’ feeling for telling them “er, that’s wrong”. EVERYthing has become a target of the “non-judgmentalism movement”. Problem is, then, what is right and what is wrong becomes entirely relative. Is that anyway to deliver a Gospel message, when anything is permissible?
Skip – I mis-spoke – I meant that I wish to take GraniteGrok to task. [It] seems inappropriate to mention someone’s sexual deviance…
Take the highroad and mention what they could have been measured against, or what they were measured by, not what the media wishes to distract with.
Well, I was floored by this answer from this normally soberly outlooked friend. In essence: “let’s not “see” the wrong in those that purport to be our spiritual Leaders and that are supposed to be the examples for their flocks; just see them as they are. And besides, we can blame the media for this anyways.” I am not a Calvinist in that I do not believe that everything in our lives is pre-ordained; we, given that we are created in the image of God, have Free Will – we can and do decide our own behaviors (all Progressive philosophy aside that holds that evil corporations and the dreaded 1% manipulate us all to make the decisions they want us to).
WE decide to do right and wrong, as an act of Individual Free Will, and sexual deviance is one of those areas of life and behavior that has spiraled downward (less and less of deviance is considered to be, well, deviant) and upward (we accept more and more of deviancy as “normal”, as US Senator Daniel Moynihan (D-NY)’s article in 1993 warned against, just so as to not “hurt other people’s feelings). This is the trap that the Episcopal (and other) Churches have put themselves into. Now having done so, they do not wish to be held accountable because, hey, we just don’t do that in polite society.
Nonsense! Wrong is wrong and needs to be labeled as such.
When I keep being called a bigot or a lot of other words that you have NEVER heard cross my lips, or ANY of us at GraniteGrok, simply because our religious beliefs against homosexual marriage, what Steve did (and I back him 100%) IS the high road. You have NO idea what militant gays say to us or write about us simply because we simply say “no, that behavior is wrong”.
I think you have fallen for the Liberal tactic of “oh, you’re just being judgmental!” as they know that among those of us of faith, judgmentalism can be problem [growing up in a strict church, “legalism” still rings loud and clear”]. But remember this – at the end of the parable of the Woman at the Well when the Pharisees and Saducces were trying to trip Jesus up on The Law (and after dealing with their judgmentalism with “he who hath no sin cast the first stone”), he then turned to the woman and said “Go, and sin no more“.
I make no claim to be Christ [and often, far from being Christ-like], but the parable is about not being judgmental but to truly judge right from wrong based on Biblical heterodoxy – and by the example He set, be willing to say what is right and what is sin to the person who is sinning. He also called out the Leaders that were acting badly too. I believe that this parable fits [this situation] exactly – calling out a sin (or, as you put it, sexual deviance) and calling out those leaders that are leading their flocks astray from Biblical teachings.
After all, a Biblical standard stands forever, vs pop culture standards which morph over time.
Or they used to…there is a reason why the Pro-abortionists and the militant gay marriage folks go after those of faith; they know that they can only succeed when they can turn the culture to a relativistic sense of right and wrong where then they can determine what is right and what is wrong – to suit their purposes. An absolute sense of right and wrong cannot be bent to a special interest group’s whims. No should mean no, not “well, maybe yes in the future”.
