March 22
To Dan Borvan and his article about how pastors should reject mentioning government advice about the pandemic to their congregations. This appeared in the Heidelblog.
Is the above article objecting to pastors passing along government information per se or just information from silly government sources?
Asking a pastor to pass along what government scientists have determined to be wise actions during a deadly is not telling a pastor how to do their job. Rather, if that information from the government helps people from spreading a deadly disease to other people, that could be thought of as helping Christians in the pews to love their neighbor by giving them helpful advice that could help prevent others from getting sick and possibly dying.
But by rejecting that and calling the government messenger a silly vassal, there is doubt placed on the message itself regardless of the disclaimer Borvan makes in the notes. And that doubt comes from what source of expertise? Furthermore, the above conflates the Gospel with a specific view of the pandemic which involves a rejection of what the government is saying. Such does not come from humility or a desire to be focused on the Gospel. Rather, it is a political rejection of information from specialists who have expertise on this particular situation: the Covid virus and the pandemic. Such a political rejection of scientific recommendations should not be a part of what Church leaders are using to determine what should be said on Sundays and what should not
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March 25
To R. Scott Clark and his article that criticizes Twitter for banning those who refer to a specific person who is biologically male but now identifies as a woman as a man. This appeared in Heidelblog.
What the above article ironically misses is that the standards for what is acceptable in society are not the same as those for the Church. Perhaps 'ironically' is not the best word to use here even though the ability to distinguish what is acceptable for society from what is acceptable in the Church is at the heart of 2KT, which is a theology to which Clark adheres, 2KT's insists that the state and society must follow the Christian view of natural law.
What the above article also misses, because of its insistence on the state and society following the Christian view of natural law, is that the main concern of those who are being criticizing by the above article are trying to undo and prevent future marginalization of the LGBT community in society. That is the real reason for the twitter bans.
What we Christians must learn to do then is to be able to talk about how wrong the above mentioned transgenderism is both in the Church and evangelically without calling for, practicing, or contributing to the marginalization of the LGBT community in society. What we must do calls for the kind of wisdom that allows us to make distinctions regarding how and where we talk about the faults of transgenderism. We must talk about transgenderism as part of sin without even suggesting that it is a threat to society.
We must also acknowledge not just our past contributions to the marginalization of the LGBT community in society, but also our insensitivity to the intense and hard struggles those with gender dysphoria have. We must acknowledge that we are not aware of many of the factors that contribute to gender dysphoria. We must acknowledge the need for full equality in society for those who are transgendered while simultaneously calling on them to repent. The above article fails to make any of those necessary acknowledgements. Rather, the above article seems to promote the continued marginalization of transgendered people in society because of its insistence that the state and society follow its theology regarding how much of the Bible should the state use to write its laws and how much of the Bible should society use to determine which groups it will marginalize.
At the same time, we must acknowledge that it is very difficult for many of us Christians to fail to make the previously mentioned acknowledgments because changing in this issue is too hard for us to do. However, why is the above story so important to mention while basically ignoring the Russian invasion of the Ukraine which could possibly lead to the uses of nuclear weapons?
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To R. Scott Clark and Carl Trueman for the article by Trueman, which Clark partially quotes in his blogpost, that blames today's sexual extremes on what Trueman calls 'expressive individualism.' This appeared in Heidelblog
Complete article written by Carl Trueman:
https://wng.org/opinions/the-third-great-awakening-1647260133
I don't think expressive individualism is the culprit that Trueman makes it out to be. After all, one can be expressive in one's efforts to be an individual and without going to the extremes. That is not to say that expressive individualism, when taken to an extremes, cannot be one of the causes for what we see in adult sexuality today. It is that expressive individual neither has to be taken to the extreme nor always be a cause for what we see today.
Plus, we might want ask about the context for expressive individualism? Why do we see that in society today? Why do we see it taken to the extreme as we see in some people? What is expressive individualism responding to?
An answer to those questions could be found in oppressive authoritarianism. After all, before the 1960s, we saw quite a bit of authoritarianism in our nation simply because we were a very religious nation. We have been since European settlers came to North America. And we need to acknowledge that religiously conservative Christianity leans heavily toward authoritarianism. And that was especially true when Christendom reigned in America. The hostility it showed to other viewpoints was quite considerable. And that is even more true with the hostility it showed to different lifestyles.
Women felt very much oppressed for most of America's history and that oppression did not begin to lift until the sexual revolution. And the problem with undoing long standing social injustices is that that often involves overcorrecting past mistakes. That is because long standing social injustices often result in either an inability or refusal to make distinctions between that which actually contributed to past oppression from that which coincidentally appeared when there was oppression; it involves black-white thinking which is an essential part of authoritarianism. Other groups, in addition to women, have been very much victims of American oppressive authoritarianism too. Non white racial groups have been oppressed here for most of America's history along with the LGBT community. Thus, the extremes that we see in attempts to eliminate an oppressive past are better explained by saying that attempts to undo past injustices often involve overcorrections where distinctions cannot be made and black-white thinking is employed rather than to blame everything on just expressive individualism.
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