Posted on 07/07/2015 5:02:54 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
Former Democratic president and born-again Christian Jimmy Carter declared today that he believed that Jesus would embrace gay marriage. In support of this belief, flying in the fact of 2,000 years of scriptural and historical scholarship, Jimmy Carter cited noted theologian Jimmy Carter.
Let’s take a look at some of the language Carter and host Marc Lamont Hill used:
All of which seems be a tacit admission that Carter realizes there’s basically no textual or historical support for his assertion. He just believes that he’s right. And feelings, as the modern left will tell you, trump all.
There are two major and popular perceptions of Jesus, the divine Jesus Christ and the so-called “Historical Jesus,” historians’ attempt to reconstruct Jesus’ life without making any claims of divinity. Either way you conceive of Jesus, it’s extremely unlikely he was a gay marriage supporter.
If Jesus was just a man, he was a peasant in 1st century Galilee. He was a member of a religious community with extremely strict, patriarchal marriage laws and that believed homosexuality should be punished with death. The notion that he would have positive beliefs towards gay marriage literally millennia before any of the world’s brightest minds even considered that marriage could exist outside of a man-woman marriage… well, it’s more than a little far-fetched.
If there are any atheists or skeptics who do believe that Jesus was so incredibly prescient and ahead of his time, I earnestly suggest you might as well embrace His omniscience and divinity. But of course, you’d have to believe that the same disciples who copied down Jesus’ radical claims of divinity and complete equality of the sexes, races, and classes accidentally forgot to add the gay thing.
As for the notion that the Jesus of the Gospels — the Messiah and Son of God that Carter has worshiped for a lifetime — would support gay marriage… well, Carter was right to admit he didn’t have any scripture to quote. The kindest interpretation is that the Gospels are silent about gay marriage. At worst, they are explicit that marriage is intended to be between man and woman.
“Have you not read that He Who made them in the first place made them man and woman?” Jesus told the religious leaders of the day, “It says, ‘For this reason a man will leave his father and his mother and will live with his wife. The two will become one.’ So they are no longer two but one. Let no man divide what God has put together.” How heterocisnormative, am I right?
And again, one would have to believe that Jesus’ followers remembered and put to writing Jesus’ radical assertions that men and women were equal, that slave and free were equal, that poor and rich were equal, that Gentiles and Jews alike could worship and find eternal life in the God of Israel, but forgot to jot down that gay marriage was a-okay. Instead, St. Paul’s letters– which Christians like Carter believe were divinely inspired– rather explicitly condemn homosexuality alongside adultery and other sexual immortality.
Carter’s belief that Jesus would approve of gay marriage stems from his belief that Jesus would “approve of any love affair that was honest and sincere, and was not damaging to anyone else.” But this is simply false. Jesus was categorically opposed to relationships outside of marriage and divorce and remarriage, regardless of whether they “damaged” anybody. On the contrary, He taught that even looking at someone lustfully was a sin. No damages there.
Even when Jesus saved the adulteress from execution and told her tormentors to judge not lest they be judged, He told her to “sin no more.” He simply wasn’t a proponent of America’s post-Sexual Revolution anything-goes ethos. If Jesus lived today, we’d get weekly Jezebel articles explaining how he was a slut-shaming mansplainer waging a War on Women.
So setting aside the Gospels and historic conceptions of Jesus, what is Carter left with? His personal feelings and “intuition.”
But far, far more Christians across the globe believe he’s wrong. As Abraham Lincoln pointed out in the Gettysburg Address, both sides of the Civil War believed Providence was on their side. So did the Nazis and the United States, and the Crusaders and the Turks. When men decide what God would support based on their “institution” and personal beliefs, they almost always end up with a God parroting their own beliefs back to them. That’s why we Christians believe God inspired the Bible in the first place: so we could read it to figure out his stance on certain issues.
Liberals mocked George W. Bush mercilessly for claiming that God wanted him to invade Iraq and that God wanted him to be president (despite those quotes coming secondhand). We will see similar mockery of Carter’s presumption to know the heart of God, divorced from the actual language of the Bible and any historical context?
Somehow I doubt it.
No, Jimmy Carter, Jesus would SURELY CONDEMN gay marriage.
i believe Jesus would punch Jimmy Carter is his ugly face if he were here.
i have just as much biblical support for my belief as that demented old fool has for his.
Hey, Jimma Peanut, Jesus was a Conservative. Read the Bible for a change.
“God gave them over to their own vain thinking.”
Sorry Jimmy; God did have something to say after all.
Well there is one way to be carnal, and then there is another way.
If a man lies with a male as he lies with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination. They shall surely be put to death. Their blood shall be upon them. (NKJ, Leviticus 20:13)
Do you not know that the wicked will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: Neither the sexually immoral nor idolaters nor adulterers nor male prostitutes nor homosexual offenders nor thieves nor the greedy nor drunkards nor slanderers nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God. And that is what some of you were. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God. (NIV, 1st Corinthians 6:9-11)
They exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator— who is forever praised. Amen. Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural relations for unnatural ones. In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed indecent acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their perversion. (NIV, Romans 1:25-27)
Probably?
If you think your ideas are better than God’s revealed word, of course you will all kinds of things that aren’t in the Bible and put them above the Truth. I believe God expected this to happen and warned repeatedly NOT to add or take away words and meaning: “Deuteronomy 4:2, Deuteronomy 12:32, Proverbs 30:6, 1Corinthians 4:6, Psalms 119:160, Proverbs 30:5-6, and, the big bang statement: “I warn everyone who hears the words of the prophecy of this book: if anyone adds to them, God will add to him the plagues described in this book,and if anyone takes away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God will take away his share in the tree of life and in the holy city, which are described in this book.” Revelation 22:18-19
Matthew 19: 4-5:
“Haven’t you read,” [Jesus] replied, “that at the beginning the Creator ‘made them male and female,’ and said, ‘For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh’? So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate.”
Yeah, I know that liberal and “gay” “theologians” have ways of squirming out of this one—”it’s only about divorce”, “Jesus didn’t know the results of “modern science” that shows “they are born this way”, etc. etc.
Then why did Jesus Christ send His All Holy and Life-Creating Spirit, who inspired several New Testament writers, and a host of Holy Fathers, to TOTALLY CONDEMN HOMOSEXUALITY, and to say NOT ONE POSITIVE WORD in its favor?
And why won’t the liberals and “allies” admit that the “modern science” that favors the “gay” agenda is really POLITICAL science—NOT biological or medical science? There’s not one valid piece of scientific evidence for “born this way”!!!!
Once again, Jimmy Carter proves to be a LOSER! Phooey, phooey, and PHOOEY again!!!!
Well, we have to remember that during his first year in office he said he lusted. I don’t remember any women saying “Wow! I hope he lusts after me.” If it had been Clinton....my how times have changed.
That from a guy in the Abortion Party?
If we all killed a homo, wouldn't that solve the problem? There's a lot more of us than them.
Jesus also said:
“For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished.” [Matthew 5:18]
And just before the above, He said:
“Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them.” (Matthew 5:17)
So, what does the law say, Mr. Carter?
Here it is:
“You shall not lie with a male as one lies with a female; it is an abomination.” (Leviticus 18:22)
“If a man has sexual relations with a man as one does with a woman, both of them have done what is detestable. They are to be put to death; their blood will be on their own heads.” ( Leviticus 20:13)
They will kill themselves with Aids and other diseases. Homos have very short life spans.
Even at age 90 or whatever, Jimmy Carter is still spewing nonsense, but at least he’s doing it as a private citizen.
Just when you think this guy has displayed just how stupid he is, he opens his mouth again. SMH....
Bet he hates Jesus because he was born of a Joooo.
Steve Deace was all over this today. Worth a listen if he has a podcast.
Why is it that doddling old codger can’t say or do anything that is not idiotic? And why does ANYONE listen to him? Maybe he just likes the sound of his voice.
not strong enough . Jesus DID condemn homos. Not “surely “
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