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Posted on 02/27/2011 8:24:18 AM PST by SeekAndFind
Though many Christians are going to try to deny "the obvious," evangelical leader Dr. Albert Mohler believes gay marriage is going to become normalized.
"I think it's clear that something like same-sex marriage is going to become normalized, legalized and recognized in the culture. It's time for Christians to start thinking about how we're going to deal with that," he said Friday on the Focus on the Family radio program.
Mohler, president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, was speaking in response to the Obama administration's decision this week to stop defending the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act – federal law that defines marriage as between a man and a woman – in the courts.
Conservative groups and Christians have criticized Obama for going against his duty as president to defend the law.
"When a president takes oath of office, he's upholding ... defending the laws of the United States of America," said Mohler, who also noted that DOMA had passed as a bipartisan effort.
"The White House has clearly made a calculation that it can do this now with far less political risk than it could even two years ago."
Though Obama has always expressed his desire to repeal DOMA, his personal view on marriage had been traditional.
While on the campaign trail, running as the Democratic presidential nominee, Obama asserted his belief that marriage is the union between a man and a woman. He added, while being interviewed by Pastor Rick Warren, that "for me as a Christian, it's also a sacred union. God's in the mix."
Recently, however, he has stated that his views on gay marriage are "evolving."
The Obama administration has been pro-gay since taking office two years ago and Mohler noted that there has been a long trajectory on the issue of gay marriage pointing to this day.
With the Justice Department now pulling its defense of DOMA, pending legal challenges against the federal law will likely result with the nullification of DOMA, Mohler predicted.
"You can say, the cards are pretty much stacked against DOMA," he illustrated.
He warned that when Christians feel threatened, they have to be careful not to lash out with a predictable response.
The Southern Baptist made it clear that he was not saying that they are giving up. Marriage is still an institution Christians need to save, particularly in their own community. But Christians also need to start learning how to deal with the shifting culture and even face the fact that they may lose a few from their flock.
"I think we're going to be surprised and heartbroken over how many people are going to capitulate to the spirit of the age," he noted. "We're going to find now that there may not be as many of us as we thought."
Nevertheless, Christians must be prepared to make marriage one of the many topics where parents have to have "the talk."
"It's interesting now that the world is so morally upside down that when we talk about marriage we have to make a distinction between natural marriage – heterosexual marriage – and this new thing that people are calling marriage," Mohler said.
"We have to prepare our children to be in a context in which they're going to be in a playground with children who have two dads or two moms or who knows what kind of combination will come."
Ultimately, the worldview or the belief that God designed marriage to be between a man and a woman only makes sense if one understands the Gospel, Mohler pointed out, which raises a critical point:
"This whole situation reminds us that we are, first of all, to be Gospel people who are fellow sinners ... saved by grace, with the responsibility to share the Gospel with others."
Get your facts right. The Church recognizes civil divorce insofar as it regulates child support and protects the innocent. What the Church does not recognize is the claim that civil divorce permits remarriage.
Annulment does not permit remarriage. It involves a court proceeding that reaches a conclusion that a valid sacramental marriage never existed. A marriage after an annulment is not a remarriage but a first marriage.
Annulments are granted too frequently. On the other hand, in a culture sopping with divorce mentality, it is possible that men and women “marry” today thinking that divorce is a way out. If so, they did not make an irrevocable promise and no sacramental marriage took place. It’s a travesty that Catholic young people are so screwed up by the divorce culture. But the church courts also have been too lenient.
That will change. It should have changed long ago. The annulment process has been abused. But you mischaracterized it.
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You are dead-on correct. Even our “conservative” churches are mainly happy talk in their sermons and song lyrics.
Our evangelical churches are all about getting closer to Jesus (I love you, you love me, I love you, you love me) and utter only banalities about evil, if there is any mention at all.
Our supposedly rightwing fanatic churches never have any deep discussion of the evils of homosexuality. No wonder young people grow up thinking the homosexual lifestyle is OK. They never hear about it in church.
Abused or not, the universally accepted current practice sets the definition. Annulments are seldom denied Catholics; if enough money is offered, and they go through the correct motions and make the right statements, there is seldom any denial. It's possible for a civil marriage to exist for years, with children being produced, and then the Church can declare the couple "never married," while the children are NOT declared illegitimate. Unbelievable hypocrisy.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not singling out Catholicism. Virtually every Christian denomination is guilty of this perversion of scriptural marriage. I'm only aware of a couple of congregations which take the marriage-related scriptural admonitions seriously. And, yes, they severely restrict the potential size of their congregations by doing so. But they have purity and power that mere size can't supply.
You’ll get no argument from me on that!
I see what you mean. I just don’t like the term ‘normalization’. This is not a new battle. It has been ongoing for millenia. As parents, we constantly have to reinforce God’s viewpoint in our children’s lives. The hardest one now is cohabitation and the pitfalls of pre-marital sex. Those are issues that have already been ‘normalized’. When I reveal my viewpoints on those matters, it is clear that I have been castigated outside the societal mainstream. However, I will never consider society to be ‘normal’.
That is what gay marriage has always been about. If a church says they cannot marry people of the same sex, they will lose their tax deductible status and the pastor will be prosecuted.
If they do marry gays, they will lose their parishoners. I would not give a dime to a Church that married gays.
Hence, Church destroyed.
Thanks gays.
That is how they cave. We will marry gays, meanwhile y’all go out and fight it. Pass the plate.
Reproof? We can’t have that in church! Jesus loved everyone, remember? He was never hateful or bigoted or intolerant. He loved everyone, from children and puppies and matzo balls.
He was so sweet and cute. The perfect boyfriend for our contemporary praise music singers.
You characterize the modern “Jesus” perfectly. It’s the same impostor that homosexuals worship in their “churches.”
Depends on how you define “seldom.” They are denied. And the fact that you bring up the canard about not declaring children illegitimate shows that you simply don’t get it as far as annulments are concerned. What prohibits a “remarriage” is the existence of a sacramental marriage. Those who marry without knowing what they are doing are not held to the same standard as those who do. Those who had a sacramental marriage and abandoned it and “remarried” are not permitted to receive Communion. This is well known. Yes, some in such a situation ignore the rule (and some priests, scandalously, wink at it or worse) but far more often they leave the Catholic Church and become Episcopalians or whatever. Or they pursue an annulment. That alone shows that the Church’s discipline on this is stronger than most Protestant denominations.
The system has been abused. But Catholics have not thrown in the towel on divorce the way all the Protestants and even much of the Orthodox have. We’ve got huge problems, but we have not simply capitulated. Increasingly we stand out against the capitulation going on all around us.
I know it makes things smoother for you to lump everyone in together. But it’s just not true.
I do not know about any denominations, but I have known several individual preachers who would not marry divorced persons.
And good for them, say I. Although I am not sure that I would take that position in all cases, if that’s your position, why should you be required to change it?
Who "remarries" them? If they are Catholic, aren't they required to get married by the Catholic Church, which now bars them from marriage? If "civil" marriage is not a factor in what the church recognizes or fails to recognize, except when convenient and expedient, why involve the RCC at all?
And the very fact of rules being ignored and the process being abused is the heart of my argument. If you make a rule, and then allow widespread violations of the rule, it isn't really, effectively, a "rule" anymore, is it?
The bottom line of my thesis is that our culture has infested biblical institutions today to the point where these institutions are hardly recognizable from the world. No one is exempt from this verdict, not even the Catholic Church, "official rules" nowithstanding.
One that I had in mind is Henry Blackaby. I'm not sure recently if he's compromised, but in the past, he's been staunchly firm in this doctrine.
I don’t understand why tax exemption has to be an obstacle. Why don’t churches remain private entities unregistered with the government?
What is the difference between this week and last week? NOTHING! Idiot 0zero evolves while truth remains truth -the only thing inevitable is that useful idiots will worship homosexual sex and the useful idiots idiots will fear its inevitability as if something of substance takes place.
“Name one denomination which won’t marry someone who is divorced.”
Catholics.
Catholics.
(Sigh...)
The acceleration down the swirling vortex of a drain is exponential. One minute, you're floating calmly on the outskirts, and the next, your rushing down the throat.
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