Turning away from God

In the early '70s, comedian Flip Wilson created a character for his NBC television program called ``Reverend Leroy'' of ``The Church of What's Happenin' Now.'' Like some contemporary ``reverends,'' Rev. Leroy was a con artist who, among other things, once took up an offering to go to Las Vegas, explaining he had to study sin in order to effectively preach against it.

Rev. Leroy would feel right at home in the modern Episcopal Church, which recently voted at its denominational meeting in Anaheim, Calif., to end the ban on the ordination of gay bishops and permit marriage ``blessings'' for same-sex couples.

Denominational leaders explained they are attempting to stem the exodus from their church by embracing a new doctrine they call ``inclusivity,'' which they hope will attract young people.

Apparently church leaders think that if they can reach people before they have fully matured in their faith, they can sidetrack them into beliefs that have nothing to do with the God that Episcopalians once claimed to worship and that they can be shaped into practical secularists who are willing to seek the approval of men, rather than God.

Inclusivity has nothing to do with the foundational truths set forth in Scripture. The church, which belongs to no denomination, but to its Founding Father and His Son, is about exclusivity for those who deny the faith. The church is inclusive only for those who are adopted by faith into God's family.

There are more biblical references to this than there is room to cite here, but for the Episcopal leadership, biblical references no longer have the power to persuade, much less compel them to conform. That's because Episcopal leadership has denied the teachings of Scripture in favor of, well, inclusivity, a word that appears nowhere in Scripture.

Even if it did, Episcopal heretics -- for that is what they are -- would choose another word to make them feel more comfortable, since accommodation with the world seems to be a more important objective than the favor of God.

Not to single out Episcopalians for special sanction. Other denominations have been putting themselves through theological makeovers in recent years, as have some of their more prominent members.

Take former President Jimmy Carter (and someone should). Carter, who once attended and occasionally taught a Sunday school class in Washington, which I visited, then claimed to believe much of what Scripture teaches.

In practice, though, he was pro-choice on abortion and recently announced his support for same-sex ``civil unions.'' He says he sees nothing prohibitive in Scripture to such arrangements.

Carter has announced he is leaving the Southern Baptist Convention -- the nation's largest Protestant body -- because he claims it treats women as inferior to men.

In a statement he said, ``At its most repugnant, the belief that women must be subjugated to the wishes of men excuses slavery, violence, forced prostitution, genital mutilation and national laws that omit rape as a crime. But it also costs many millions of girls and women control over their own bodies and lives, and continues to deny them fair access to education, health, employment and influence within their own communities.''

Carter must have missed the passage about mutual submission between married couples and the requirement that a man love his wife ``as Christ loved the church,'' a very high standard that implies such love be equal to the self-sacrifice demonstrated by Christ on the cross.

Such sacrifice can hardly justify any of the sins against women that Carter unfairly ascribes to the Southern Baptist Convention.

If the church -- Episcopal, Baptist or whatever -- is to be a beacon to an increasingly dark world, it must know not only what it believes but in Whom it has placed its faith.

For these Episcopalians and the kinds of Baptists admired by Jimmy Carter, it is a church that has made its bed in the world, and it has as much power to illuminate as a burned-out bulb.

"Wasn't it St. Paul that said..."

He said a lot of things, some meant for specific groups. One thing is quite clear. When dealing with this type of church issue, his advice in ICor5 simply can NOT be dismissed lightly.

Not only is the behavior of some individuals considered such bad leaven that they should be booted out of the group. But he was so upset with one fornicating fool that Paul demanded they "deliver such an one unto Satan for the destruction of the flesh, that the spirit might be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus."

While we are expected to live in the world and to come into contact with much sin while attempting to spread His word, we are clearly NOT to tolerate the leaven of false doctrine and the 'traditions of men' within our own faith-based institutions. What the churches in the article above are doing would be considered, by Paul, as similar to having a leaven shaker right next to the holy water.

From my Fourth of July Tea Party Speech:

We Americans were the first in all the history of the world to claim that freedom as our inalienable right, granted to us by our Creator. But it didn’t take long - less than a generation after the first American Revolution, really - for the assault on the foundations of liberty to begin.
Where and from whom did that assault come from?
Paul Johnson, a contemporary British historian, identified three main sources of the anti-American, anti-freedom ideas that are now written into our institutional DNA:
Karl Marx, father of modern communism, writing in the mid 1800s, described a world in which the central dynamic was purely economic. For Marx – and all those who followed him - human beings were merely bricks and mortar from which a new utopia would be built. For Communists, human lives were – and still are - disposable. Individual conscience and the rule of law are obstacles to be overcome.
Sigmund Freud was the father of modern psychiatry, notorious cocaine addict and a suicide. To Freud we were little more than primitives ruled by our sexual impulses. Our civilized personae, we were told, is little more than a thin veneer, easily discarded. Freud’s ideas regarding human nature sowed the seeds of the family-destroying sexual revolution of the Sixties.
Both Freud and Marx were atheists and both assumed that religion, the impulse that moved men and nations, the source of our notions of right and wrong - was a fantasy and always had been.
Friedrich Nietzsche, noted German philosopher, was also an atheist. But he saw God not as an invention, but as a casualty. He wrote in 1886: "The greatest event in recent times - that 'God is Dead,' that the belief in the Christian God is no longer tenable - is beginning to cast its first shadows upon Europe." The Christian God, he wrote, would no longer stand in the way of the development of the New Man who he said would be ‘beyond good and evil’. Nietzsche knew that in Europe, the decline of religion as a guide to conscience and morality would leave a huge vacuum.
What would fill that vacuum?
Nietzsche thought that the most likely candidate would be what he called the 'Will to Power,' which offered a better and more persuasive explanation of human behavior than either Marx or Freud.
In place of religious belief, there would be secular ideology. Notions of good and evil would be discarded as the product of weak minds.
But above all, Nietzsche believed that the Will to Power would produce a new kind of messiah, uninhibited by religious sanctions, without moral restraint of any kind, and with an unappeasable appetite for controlling mankind.
Let's say that again: the Will to Power would produce a new kind of messiah, uninhibited by religious sanctions, without moral restraint of any kind, and with an unappeasable appetite for controlling mankind.
We now know that over 220 million - that’s 220 MILLION - people have been killed by their own governments since the beginning of the 20th century. Not casualties of war, but a casualty of the same evil that now appears to have gotten the upper hand here today. It’s that unappeasable appetite to control - and ultimately to consume - mankind.

Yes, ideas matter. And the same ideas that have animated the 20th century’s worst mass murderers now have a happy home in the White House. Obama's just another worshipper in the same pew as Stalin, Castro, Mao, Chavez and Pol Pot. They bow before the same altar of human sacrifice and power for power’s sake. Godless bastards, all of them.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.