Everyone has their fingers crossed hoping that Pope Benedict XVI will accept Tom Wright & Co.'s invite to visit Durham. You can read more about it at the Centre for Catholic Studies website.

Francis Schaeffer's son says no!



New Study on Teen Pregnancy and Conservative Religion

Who are these conservative evangelicals?

They are people who suffer from:

• Read the Bible only in the original version – the NIV, of course! – as if there were a neutral and stable position from which this library of a book could be translated, as if translations weren’t themselves interpretations, and as if our interpretations of these interpretations didn’t go all the way down and resist closure – they do.

• Hold tenaciously to the quite unbiblical, relatively newfangled, and deeply problematical doctrine of biblical inerrancy.

• Act like the doctrine of penal substitution is in the Creeds, find nothing at all sub-Christian in the idea that God “punished” Jesus on the cross, and deploy this model of the atonement as the litmus test for distinguishing “real” Christians.

• Argue that the Levitical and Pauline condemnations of homosexuality conclusively settle the contemporary discussion of same-sex relationships, insisting, however, that “while we hate the sin, we love the sinner.” (Gay/Lesbian Christians: “Yeah, right!”)

• Worship with “choruses” that are four lines long, a half-inch deep, and take 20 minutes to sing.

• Punctuate their prayers with the word “just” (“Father, we just pray this, and Father, we just pray that”) with mind-numbing repetition, and assume that the more people you have praying about something, the more likely you are to get a result.

• Despise Richard Dawkins while actually believing in the kind of God he rightly rejects, as if the existence of God were, in principle, demonstrable, as if the proposition “God exists” were a hypothesis to be affirmed or denied, as if God were simply the hugest of individuals.

• Treat the visions in the book of Revelation as if they were the prognostications of a Nostradamus rather than imaginative murals of encouragement for confessing churches and protest against militant empires.

• Believe, sometimes with quite unpleasant schadenfreude, that hell will be full rather than empty – and that they have access to the Inferno’s census.

• Are fans rather than followers of Jesus when it comes to his absolute rejection of violence; for example, they will kill other people if the state tells them to.

There has been a lot of hub-bub since last month’s news about the Episcopal church and their appointing openly gay bishops (see here and here). Many people have taken sides on “the issue” each tugging at the Bible in support of their own opinion. As long as it remains in the abstract as “an issue” it is easy to either promote or dismiss; especially from the pulpit.

The old adage still rings true, “what the preacher harps on the most, he struggles with most.” It wasn’t until the other night that I began to see the underbelly of coming down hard on “the issues”, or as some preachers like to frame it up as, “preaching the whole counsel of God.” The other night, I watched on HBO a documentary called “The Trials of Ted Haggard.” This was a short but potent film about the following 18 months after his scandal. The camera follows Ted and his family around in a U-Haul as they struggle to earn a living after being exiled from the state of Colorado, not by the state government, but rather by the mega-church he preached at. The documentary quoted a church elder wishing that Haggard “would just disappear.”



Last January, Oprah brought both Ted and his family on her show to show her audience “where are they now”:





For the whole show go here

Now Haggard sells health insurance and is banned from the ministry. Rightfully so, some might say. If your pastor was doing drugs and was employing a male prostitute, then you’d most likely not want him leading your congregation. But while watching this documentary, it dawned on me that Ted’s Church was only following through with the anti-gay protocol that they had received from the pulpit. They were practicing what he was preaching—and made him disappear.  But what was astonishing was that his family didn’t bail on him. The faithful witness to Christ that Ted’s wife gives me hope about the Church.

In the Oprah clip, Ted mentions that he had believed the wrong “ideal” about himself which he couldn’t work out. I wonder how much the Church must take responsibility for this man’s fall from grace because they enabled a situation where Haggard could not be redeemed or find a way out. He was on a pedestal receiving pastor-worship which only pushed him farther away from being able to come to grips with his problems. Since he was a pastor, he was sacred, not like us humans. So when he revealed that he wasn’t sacred, it was a shock and this forced people to gather around him as a sacrifice to be offered in the name of the holy one. He had to be thrown outside the gates, left to fend for himself.

After watching this, I asked myself, what is the Church for? Does the Church exist in the world in order to maintain the moral high ground for a small circle of humanity which is made up of popes, priests, and pastors? If so, what about everybody else? It seems like in situations like these, that people get thrown under the bus in the name of ‘coming down hard on’ what they think is sin. This only pushes people out of the church and into the crumbling health insurance business.

I think Jesus said something about pointing out splinters in other people’s eyes while ignoring the large plank in our own eye. The Church must come to grips with two things: 1) that theology matters; it does, people act and make decisions on how they perceive who God is in Jesus Christ. 2) the Gospel is not ammo for the Church to fire at this hell-bent world, but it is in fact the Church’s worst enemy. So whether that puts you on one side of an issue, or the other, that will continue to be debated. But it brought up questions for me about how well Evangelicals can handle their own medicine when they condemn others. It’s one thing to say all you want about “the issue” but when it comes to one of your own people, how Christ-like are your reactions?

Tomorrow, April & I are headed up north for a 16 hour drive to visit my dad and Katie. We won't brave the trip in one day, but I will be away from the blog for awhile. In the meantime, here are some articles worth reading:

Bill Cavanaugh on the economic faithfulness of the Church (audio)

advice for writers

book review of Letty Russell's Just Hospitality [someone could buy me this as a gift... hint hint]

N.T. Wright project

Rowan Williams and the Anglican Controversy

Sex in Public - Debra Dean Murphy

Reading for Ministry

book review, In the Beginning was the Meal [someone could buy me this as a gift as well]

It's been about a month since I've posted on this blog. I haven't been writing in my journal at all either.

This means that either my life is just too busy or boring.

In the meantime, check out the latest blurb about bob dylan doin' a xmas album!