Posted on 08/08/2003 1:35:16 AM PDT by kattracks
As Episcopalians this week broached the unprecedented topic of a gay priest's fitness to be a bishop, a vital clue emerged as to what was going on.
A priest from Portland, Ore., the Rev. Sherman Hesselgrave, observed that "God changes God's mind."
Ah. Hmmm. Shall we ponder?
First, the linguistics -- the deliberate avoidance of the possessive "His," so as not to identify God with male patriarchal ideas. Then, the central suggestion -- God as just another head-scratching, chin-cupping water-cooler buddy, with changing viewpoints for changing times.
"God changes God's mind." Is there a nicer precis of the modern mood, in which practitioners of a sexual style once foreclosed to Christians find themselves celebrated as authoritative Christian teachers?
Congratulations, Bishop Gene Robinson. Come talk to us about all the other junk we need to discard to get right with this changeable God.
You could certainly call Hesselgravian theology a piece of arrogance. (Who exactly finds out about God's mind changes and then reports?) But I'd go further. It amounts, as well, to cultural Darwinism: evolution, in other words, as the key to everything. We seem to be constantly "evolving" -- and not just in terms of prehensile tails and opposable thumbs, rather in wisdom, in understanding!
Whereas we once thought and taught particular things, enlightened souls step forward to remind us that was then, this is now. God changes God's mind. We move on. Get with the program!
Human life, evolved or otherwise, has never been tidy. But modern thought and practice, were they to get any grungier, would lie beyond the corrective powers of Procter & Gamble. To speak a thing these days (e.g., "God changes God's mind") is to render it True. You render it enforceable by mobilizing as many "progressive reformers" as possible into voting blocs and pressure groups.
So it happened in the Episcopal Church's upper reaches -- the seminaries, the House of Bishops, the bureaucracy, the church media. Louder and more persistent grew the clamor, inside and outside this venerable Christian body, to deal with homosexuality as if it were a civil rights issue, rather than a moral question rooted in scriptural and theological understanding.
A favorite gambit of the "progressive reformers" involves comparisons of homosexuality to slavery. Start with the fact, according to the question-begging contention, that the Bible endorses slavery (a highly non-factual "fact," as it happens). That means -- on goes the peerless logic -- that other things in the Bible may be false for enlightened modern folk. One of those things, naturally, would be the tradition of heterosexual monogamy as the Christian norm.
Gene Robinson's church-splitting promotion to bishop undermines Episcopal claims to teach the Christian tradition with care and faithfulness. It is necessary nonetheless to be realistic: This is how we do business today. A truth is precisely as true as a show of hands affirms it to be.
The reverberations from cultural evolution shake institutions other than religious ones. One such is the law. The simplistic view of the U.S. Constitution as a "living" document (not unlike the Bible, it would seem!) constantly invites Supreme Court progressives to attempt new spins on old jurisprudence. The latest response: this summer's decision invalidating the Texas sodomy law.
"(G)ay life," reported the New York Times Magazine just the other day, "seems to be heading steadily in the direction of greater visibility and acceptance." There is no doubting it. Not doubting it is, of course, different from viewing that particular evolution as entailing the substitution of a fresh truth for one worn-out and worthless.
What Charles Darwin and the biological evolutionists somehow failed to implant in the mind of the cultural evolutionists is that life can evolve downward no less than upward. The dear, dignified, stately old Episcopal Church seems to have gambled and come up snake eyes on its bet that God is other than who He always said He was.
©2003 Creators Syndicate, Inc.
As a matter of fact it is beginning to look like we don't have much time left at all.
As a matter of fact it is beginning to look like we don't have much time left at all.
Definitely !
Reminds me of what Ann Coulter says in the last chapter of "Treason" entitled "Why They Hate Us". It's because conservatives see that man is made in the image of God, and liberals think they are God. So liberals/secular humanists/homosexuals and their promoters do generally "believe" in God, but the God they believe in is subjective, not objective. They have become infected with the "I am God" disease, and this has lef to super-materialism, no holds barred, whatever I think and whatever are want are good because I am God.
It is like the final throes of a fatal disease. It's hard to imagine what can come next, other than Jeffrey Dahmer style cannibalism. These people are fatally ill in the spiritual sense. An ordinary atheist is far better off than these dead bodies dressed up and propped up as though living.
And anyone staying in the Episcopal "Church" is going to get tainted by this evil.
Well, if He ever does, I wish He'd change it on me. Every time I screw up, I get slapped! So I assume He hasn't changed His mind yet.
Well, they can already adopt.
Psalm 138:2 "...for thou hast magnified thy word above all thy name."
Proverbs 30:5-6 "Every word of God is pure: he is a shield unto them that put their trust in him. Add thou not unto his words, lest he reprove thee, and thou be found a liar."
God has the divine power to change His mind, but if it contradicts His Word, He actually can't (or it would break His Word - a limitation He put on himself, making Him most pure).
Numbers 23:19 "God is not a man, that he should lie; neither the son of man, that he should repent: hath he said, and shall he not do it? or hath he spoken, and shall he not make it good?"
I Samuel 15:29 "And also the Strength of Israel will not lie nor repent: for he is not a man, that he should repent."
Psalm 110:4 "The Lord hath sworn, and will not repent, Thou art a priest for ever after the order of Melchizedek."
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I think that considering the topic of this post, the last scripture above is very ironic, in that God will not repent (change his mind, turn back) when it comes to who is a priest and who isn't.
You Christians are keeping me away from my ma-haaaan!
Somehow I'm trying to be funny, but I can't help but be worried this is somehow prophetic.
How about this?
The Episcipalian leadership found itself without a Church when God suddenly "changed his mind..."
Sounds pretty clear to me.
Unfortunately, yeah. I'm gonna figure it out one of these years.
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