June 29
To R. Scott Clark and Peter Jones and Jone's criticisms of the PCA as they discuss the Church and LGBT issues. Clark quotes from an article written by Jones. Clark's article appeared in Heidelblog.
The link for Jone's article is
https://truthxchange.com/2020/06/what-the-pca-study-committee-did-not-study/
The above quotation and the article from which it came proclaim that important binaries along with lessons from creation are being ignored when it comes to the Church and LGBT issues. In addition, it calls on our nation's past heritage with its claim that our nation is 'one nation under God' and that we have inalienable rights from the Creator to guide the Church today with those issues.
There are significant problems with with what has been proclaimed above. For example, the saying 'one nation under God' was more of a political statement inserted into the pledge in the 1950s as a way of canonizing Capitalist America and demonizing Communist Soviet Union. Of course, Jim Crow was still the rage during that time and thus, we need to question the validity of the claim that we were one nation under God back then.
And the reference to Jefferson's 'inalienable rights' given by the creator needs further examination too. For we need to ask who was Jefferson referring to when he referred to the creator when his version of the Gospel failed to include the supernatural side of Jesus. In addition, we might ask R. Scott Clark and Peter Jones, the latter who wrote the original article, about what is guaranteed in the 1st Amendment. We should also ask them about the end of I Cor 5 where Paul explicitly states that his concern is only for the purity of the Church, not society.
We need to do this because the above article and its source isn't just about LGBT issues with regard to the Church, it is in regard to society as well.
In terms of the Church, we cannot bring up the creational context without also mentioning the effects to nature as a result of the Fall. For with Adam's sin, nature becomes corrupted and thus any reference to people justifying homosexuality or gender dysphoria as being due to nature making them that way becomes moot. But we should also ask about what similarities and differences there are in the struggles that celibate Christian homosexuals have in terms of desires and those of heterosexual Christians who sexually desire those from the opposite sex outside of marriage before judging the former.
As for gender identity, not everything is a twoism. For example, some Native American tribes recognized up to 5 different genders and they honored those whose gender identity differed to varying degrees from their biological sex. Though the genders recognized by those Native American tribes do not always correspond to the gender identity practices seen in today's society, one thing is certain. Gender identity is not a simple twoism. That both the religiously conservative Christian response to gender dysphoria and the LGBT claims make the same mistake from different sides of the same coin. Both equate gender identity with one's biological sex. While the conservative Christian response reduces gender identity to one's biological sex, the LGBT response has one's gender identity override and deny one's biological sex. The problem with both approaches is that while one's biological sex is physical, gender identity can involve far more variables than one's biological sex and we even see that in the Scriptures where women have sometimes taken the roles of men such as with Deborah.
The real crux of the Biblical response to the challenges made by the LGBT community is seen in the failure of a previously unmentioned twoism: the differences between what we should allow society to accept/prohibit from what the Church should preach and accept/prohibit. Again, the 1st Amendment on the freedom of religion and Paul's words from the end of I Cor 5 play significant roles not acknowledged by either Clark or Jones. The conservative Church's failures in recognizing those differences is at the heart of many sincere Christians who feel like they are forced to choose between promoting and supporting the conservative Church's efforts to have society marginalize those in the LGBT community and compromising Biblical standards on sexuality.
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To R. Scott Clark and his two articles, the one links to the other, on Christianity and Post Modernism. This appeared in Heidel Blog.
Clark's 2nd article
https://heidelblog.net/2008/11/on-being-truly-postmodern/
The article cited presents selectively filtered view of Church history, especially of Calvin, so as to imply that Modernism was Post Modernism's only foe. Post Modernism had rejected Pre Modern faiths that claimed to have exclusive ownership of the truth.
As for Church history, one only needs to look at the religious wars, the persecution of heretics and witches, the blatant anti-Semitism, the Inquisition, and religion's roles in colonialism, imperialism, and wars to see why an outcome-based truth system of Post Modernism led it to reject Pre Modernism with faith being its meta narrative along with Modernism. BTW, Clark's defense of Calvin is disingenuous.
The Church also has had run ins with science in both the past and present such as with its insistence on geocentrism, scapegoating ethnic groups for diseases, denying certain aspects of evolution, and denying climate change. Also, latter Church history shows the Church's penchant for aligning itself with wealth and power as it had done in the pre-revolutionary times of France, Russia, and Spain and along with its current support of Neoliberal Capitalism.
In America, we could add to the list of sins committed by the Protestant branch of the Church. They would include the promotion of the belief in white supremacy as evidenced in its support of slavery and Jim Crow, and its current partial denial of systemic racism, its defense of the ethnic cleansing of Native Americans from the land, and its persecution of the LGBT community.
How ironic it is that those religious faiths that brag the most about God's mercy and forgiveness are the most reluctant to acknowledge the blatant sins of its own troubled past.
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