April 12
To Joshua Farris and his article on gender binary and the back and forth discussion we had on the subject. In particular, the comment below is a response to his April 12th comment at 7:27 PM. This appeared in Mere Orthodoxy.
JF,
Again, your theology is dictating a reality that observation has contradicted (see https://www.news-medical.net/news/2006/10/23/1500-animal-species-practice-homosexuality.aspx and https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/why-is-same-sex-sexual-behavior-so-common-in-animals/ ). I’ve seen other articles report other numbers but the point is clear, that there is scientific consensus supporting the widespread practice of homosexuality in many animal species.
What is the point of my notes to you? The point is rather clear. How we judge homosexuality and transgenderism depends on the context. We agree on the same message about homosexuality and transgenderism when the context involves what is acceptable in Church or evangelism. But when the context is society, we cannot force New Testament sexual morality on unbelievers in society. We cannot not only because there is no New Testament examples or teaching to do so, we cannot because doing so harms the reputation of the Gospel. Now I’ve been clear about context determining how we talk about homosexuality and transgenderism from the beginning.
My citing of Deborah provides a counter example to the binary gender parameter about which you proclaim. That is because, in some Native American Tribes, Deborah would not fit into the binary gender parameter. Not every group works with the same understanding of gender identity.
There is as problem that I mentioned in my very first comment: the conflation of biological sex with gender identity. Whereas the conservative approach seems to say that one’s biological sex should be the only factor in determining gender identity, the LGBT community says that one’s gender identity must be considered ones biological sex. Both sides are wrong.
Finally, by calling my case a revisionist one, my guess is that you are implying that my case is wrong. But what is my case? That we use the Scriptures as the ultimate guide for the Church and in evangelism but that in society, we use history and people’s experiences along with the principle of treating others as equals.
The value of revisionism depends on the reliability and results of older views. After all, would we call abolitionists in the 1800s ‘revisionists’ in an effort to imply that they were wrong? Did Calvin, Luther and the leaders in the Roman Church regard heliocentrism as revisionist even if they didn’t use the exact word? It’s not that we should easily disregard the past, but we can’t afford to make it canon either.
Finally, you know the Christian perspective, but do you understand the varied perspectives of unbelievers? Also, can you escape the intense gravitational pull that your theology has placed on you to see the Christian perspective from the eyes of an unbeliever. It is what I wrote before, you try to deduce too much which is why you employ a plethora of labels from which you then make conclusions. And in so doing, you make it more difficult to share the Gospel.
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April 17
To Harrison Perkins and his blog article on why we Christians must abide by the Church's confessions. This appeared in Heidelblog.
To really represent Post Modernism here, one must first acknowledge that it has real problems with exclusive truth claims. Thus, what light does Post Modernism shed on Confessionalism?
First, we need to acknowledge that the sources for much of Confessionalism comes from Europe and thus comes from a very limited representation of the Church both geographically and in terms of the times. And so some of the above claims made about Confessionalism need to come with a disclaimer besides the fact that there is no single expression of Confessionalism because the Church has multiple sets of confessions. Thus, whose confessions should serve as a guide for the Church as a whole? Perkins favors the Reformed confessions but he doesn't address why those are the confessions we should follow.
Second, if we were to be honest with ourselves, we would immediately acknowledge that confessionals is a kind of traditionalism. And what we should generally note about traditionalism is that it tends to depend too much on the past to interpret and respond to the present. And part of that over-dependence assumes that there have been no significant changes in historical context between then and now so that what was said back then fully applies today as it did back then and what was practiced back then can be strictly practiced to today because what was said and practiced back then run no risk of becoming irrelevant. At this point we should note that it is not that time eventually makes the everything past irrelevant; it is that time does introduce new problems and situations. Thus, some things from the past do become irrelevant while other things require different applications of principles taught in the past.
Third, when talking about traditionalism in the light of the Scriptures, we must always keep Mark 7 in mind lest we become like the religious leaders whom Jesus spoke against then for substituting their pet traditions for God's Word. We must always be cautious to not put our pet confessions on such a high pedestal so that they either replace the Scriptures or become a canon above the canon of the Scriptures. The latter is done by claiming that one's pet confessions almost exclusively, if not exclusively, contain the best explanations of the Scriptures.
Here we should note that like the Scriptures, the writers of our confessions were human and thus contained their own personal issues as well as saw things from the context of the culture and times in which they lived. However, unlike the Scriptures, confessions are not God-breathed which means that they were spared the prevention of errors being entered included in the confessions.
We should note one more thing about traditionalists. Traditionalists are the mirror-image of narcissists. For those from both groups elevate a given set of time periods above all other time periods in terms of some particular goodness such as knowledge or virtue. For example, narcissists elevate the present time above all other time periods so that the past is irrelevant and thus unnecessary to learn because it has nothing relevant to offer to people living today. In contrast to that, traditionalists elevate a given set of time periods from the past above the present so that we only need to consult the wisdom from those given time periods from the past to solve any of today's problems. Thus, what traditionalists do carries with it the implication that those favored teachers from those designated past time periods have nothing to learn from people living today.
So while Perkins would like us to favor his pet set of confessions as almost, if not, exclusive guides to understanding the Scriptures, he is directing us Christians to run into problems and even perhaps even partial threats to our faith all of which have been experienced by others in the past.
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