Posted on 12/10/2011 2:11:27 PM PST by NYer
Lutheranism is dead, or at least soon will be and it wants to take the Catholic Church with it.
Herbert W. Chilstrom is former presiding bishop of Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. Chilstrom has written an open letter to the Bishops of Minnesota asking them to accept gay 'marriage' becuase gays are like blacks or something.
May I share a word with all of you who now lead the Roman Catholic community of faith in Minnesota?
First, I would go to the wall to defend your right to work for the adoption of the so-called marriage protection amendment. Having said that, I must tell you that I believe you are making a significant mistake.
Over my 35 years as an active and retired bishop I have come to know hundreds of gay and lesbian persons. I have yet to meet even one who is opposed to the marriage of one man and one woman. After all, they are the daughters and sons of such unions.
What they cannot understand is why church leaders would oppose their fundamental desire and right to be in partnership with someone they love and respect who happens to be of the same gender and sexual orientation. They don't understand why they should not enjoy all the rights and privileges their straight counterparts take for granted.
More than a half century ago Father Francis Gilligan spoke out for equality for African American citizens of Minnesota. Though many argued on the basis of the Bible that these neighbors were inferior to others, Gilligan fought tirelessly for justice for these brothers and sisters.
In our generation homosexual persons are subject to the same discrimination. Their detractors often use the Bible and tradition as weapons of choice.
What strikes me about this letter is how utterly juvenile it is in its thinking and how insulting it is to the Catholic position.
Chilstrom challenges the Bishops to "Let me put out a challenge to each of you brothers. Invite 15 gay and lesbian persons from your respective areas, one at a time, to spend two hours with you."
In Chilstrom's mind, the problem is that we don't know and therefore don't like gay people. If we just got to know them, then all these problems would go away. How utterly juvenile. We know them, we love them, that is why we can never support this behavior becuase it destroys them body and soul.
It is no wonder that Lutheranism is dying a milquetoast death.
good analogy
If they won’t stop, you need to separate from them. They have been approached dozens of times from different denominations and internally.
The go and talk to your brother approach has been done. Bible doesn’t say it will always work. If it doesn’t work, depart from them.
And that is the process that is accelerating in their denomination right now.
The Pope would certainly like to interpret them that way. He’d probably have to in order not to be condemned by the Council of Trent affirmations.
He’d probably have to in order not to be condemned by the Council of Trent affirmations.
>>The Pope is the ultimate interpreter of Catholic doctrine. :) He’s not exactly Archbishop Lefebvre.
Both sides at the Reformation were too busy pointing the finger to stop and listen.
I’m hesitant to say that I “earn” my salvation, but I do so by allowing the faucet of God’s grace to enter my soul more.
Our will fights against God’s, so the only merit we get comes in our letting more of the light in. He prepared the way, but he didn’t negate our free-will in the process.
I still hold a certain affection for Confessional Lutherans despite my conversion.
Lutherans taught my my love of Jesus, the Bible and the sacraments.
He’d probably have to in order not to be condemned by the Council of Trent affirmations.
>>The Pope is the ultimate interpreter of Catholic doctrine. :) He’s not exactly Archbishop Lefebvre.
Both sides at the Reformation were too busy pointing the finger to stop and listen.
I’m hesitant to say that I “earn” my salvation, but I do so by allowing the faucet of God’s grace to enter my soul more.
Our will fights against God’s, so the only merit we get comes in our letting more of the light in. He prepared the way, but he didn’t negate our free-will in the process.
I still hold a certain affection for Confessional Lutherans despite my conversion.
Lutherans taught me my love of Jesus, the Bible and the sacraments.
http://www.gotquestions.org/communion-Christian.html
http://www.compellingtruth.org/Lords-Supper.html
http://www.bible-truth.org/church.htm
As a UMC elder, and a conservative one, my advice to you will probably seem mixed.
First, the UMC will remain a viable church until the Lord removes its candlestick. That would indicate to me that that church no longer is a light where others can find salvation in Spirit and Truth. That is a "denominational" answer.
As far as YOUR local UMC, there are some of them quite far down the road of darkness and where there is little to zero hope that they will be a lighthouse for the lost. I would counsel leaving that church and finding one (whether Methodist or not) where salvation can be found.
If your church is one that still sheds the Light of the Lord's Truth, then I would counsel you to stay and fight the good fight along with the remainder of us who resist.
>>If your church is one that still sheds the Light of the Lord’s Truth, then I would counsel you to stay and fight the good fight along with the remainder of us who resist.
Thank you. My church is still worth fighting for. I feel that I was called to be a UM and I can’t walk away until I know that there’s nothing left but a building. I’m developing contacts among the conservatives in the UMC to remind me that we may be insurgents within our own church, but we are still fighting.
On Jan 1, I become chairman of our Church Council, so I am so encouraged to know that the people of the congregation chose me to lead them.
Hardly the Lutheran view. Confessional Lutherans believe that Christ is physically present in, with, and under the forms of bread and wine.
Not only that, Lutherans also believe that Holy Communion forgives sins.
Melancthon’s writings seem reasoned and logical, while Luther’s writing seem erratic and hysterical in tone.
The Book of Concord struck me as strange in my Lutheran days because it quotes from “the apocrypha” as scripture.
Luther frequently contradicted himself on the sacraments. In 1519, he said there were three Sacraments: penance, Eucharist, and baptism. But 10 years later he contracted it to two and redefined the Sacrament of Penance as being connected with baptism.
In America where Calvinism dominates, Lutheran Protestantism is sort out in left field because they have more in common with High Church Anglicans, Roman Catholics, and Eastern Orthodox than say with the Reformed or Baptists.
My first experience with non-Lutheran Protestants at college came as a total culture shock because although we believed in the Solas, we had virtually nothing in common.
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How I wish that weren’t the truth.
Actually, that's already happening.
I am an ARP member, but the closest PCA to me here at Fort Leonard Wood has a Korean pastor who served with the US Army in Vietnam and came to the United States because he wanted to preach the gospel to American soldiers who he saw firsthand were too often ignorant of Christianity or at least not practicing what they supposedly believed. (Don't get offended — he's not talking about the modern all-volunteer force but rather talking about Vietnam-era draftees who he saw in far too many cases were using drugs and hunting for Vietnamese prostitutes rather than being interested in fighting Viet Cong or NVA troops. And obviously, as a Vietnam vet himself, he's not talking about all Vietnam vets, just about his experience that he thought America was a Christian country and was shocked by the conduct of too many American soldiers in the 1960s and 1970s who neither knew nor cared about the Gospel.)
While most Korean pastors in the United States are planting churches primarily intended for Koreans — standard practice for immigrant church life — that inevitably requires reaching out to the second-generation who speak English and may bring their American friends to church, and if they're female, have a significant possibility of marrying American men.
The PCA has a half-dozen Korean-speaking presbyteries. The ARP’s presbytery on the West Coast began as a Korean-speaking presbytery that joined the ARPs and later on admitted some English-speaking churches. Similar things could be said about the Christian Reformed Church in the 1970s and 1980s, but in the mid-1990s most of the large Korean CRCs left the denomination over the issue of women's ordination and growing problems with homosexuality (though the CRC hasn't yet crossed that barrier), including the second-largest church in the whole denomination which happened to be a Korean CRC congregation.
Both Westminster-East and Westminster-West are full of Korean seminary students, and I've said a number of times that if current trends continue, it won't be that long before people assume that if you're a Calvinist you probably use chopsticks and get your fire-in-the-belly theology from kimchi.
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