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My third article today and I would reason that the 32 Celsius local heat and my inability to sleep well up in this basically third floor condo has something to do with it.
Thankfully shortly, I will be playing 'football' outside.
My other two posts from today are short and hopefully sweet: Satire And Theology
A post from the same material and more footnotes February 1 2011
A continuation of the theme of certainty:
Preface
A philosophy point to ponder on in light of progressive attempts to reinvent Christianity for the 21st Century and make human nature as it presently is more acceptable is that universal human death in this realm is a very strong cumulative point and indicator that God is not pleased with humanity in its current state (Genesis 1-3, Romans 1-6) and that the atoning and resurrection work of Christ is essential to be applied to a Christian believer (Hebrew 7-9, I Corinthians 15) for everlasting life with a perfected although still finite nature.
Sovereignty
Theodicy And Certainty
A rejection by
some within the Christian Church of the Reformed idea that God predestines with
soft determinism individuals to salvation is important.[1] This would work hand in hand with the
rejection of the idea that God causes evil by allowing sin to exist. In both
cases God’s divine sovereignty is downplayed, by Reformed standards. With free
will theory God would be viewed as allowing the problem of evil for greater
purposes, but not willing it.[2] A praxis of free will theodicy would be that
God can desire to save all persons, but cannot because human beings refuse to
turn to God.[3] Moral choices are not caused or uncaused by
another being, but are self-caused.[4] God therefore would be unable to save persons
that freely reject him and they have made a moral choice to oppose God.[5] In contrast to the sovereignty perspective,
since God does not cause evil and does not predetermine human actions such as
who shall believe in him, human beings
are a greater impediment to a culminated Kingdom of God with a free will
theodicy than with a sovereignty one.[6]
This fits into Plantinga’s reasoning
that in every situation transworld depravity will cause wrong human actions.[7] Transworld depravity provides the concept
that in any possible world, including our own, each person would make at least
one wrong decision and the resulting bad action would lead to evil occurring
within creation.[8] It can be reasoned that the praxis related
end goal of free will theodicy is for God within an incompatibilist,
libertarian system to convince many human beings to accept Christ and turn from
evil in order to fully establish the Kingdom of God.[9]
In contrast,
with a compatibilistic sovereignty perspective, God is reasoned to transform
and mould persons he chooses for salvation,[10]
so that the culminated Kingdom takes place at God’s appointed time.[11] Both free will and sovereignty perspectives
accept the Biblical idea of the culminated Kingdom, but free will places much
more emphasis on the individual freely deciding that this is for him/her,
rather than being determined in any way to
do so.[12] Free will advocates will understand the
process as God making an offer and over time convincing persons to believe it. A devotion to God can only be a good thing
when persons freely accept it.[13] Sovereignty perspectives reason that God
alone makes the choice to begin a regeneration process that leads to salvation
in a human being. F.F. Bruce (1996)
explains that because of the universal fact of human sin, there is no way to be
accepted by God by human means.[14]
This divinely guided change in a person
must occur in order for salvation to ever take place within a human being with
a corrupted nature.[15]
Free will
theodicy, unlike soul-making theory, does not necessarily accept universalism[16]
as part of its praxis and it could logically be argued that Plantinga’s
transworld depravity would apply in all post-mortem situations.[17] In my view, these are perils of a praxis that
rejects compatibilism and soft determinism.
Even as traditional Christian free will theory would not accept
universalism, it still reasons eventually those citizens saved by Christ would
not sin within the culminated Kingdom. Those within the Kingdom will have been
brought to God through Christ.[18] The resurrection work would be reasoned to
change the entire nature of saved persons to sinless and allow everlasting
life, but without God also determining that sin would never again occur, I
reason that transworld depravity could always be a concern.[19]
A praxis of
sovereignty theodicy would be that, from start to finish, salvation is
primarily the goal directed[20]
plan of God. Human beings are not
brought to Christ through compulsion, but when predestined in election shall be
convinced to accept the offer of salvation. Praxis shifts from the incompatibilism of free
will that assumes God desires to save all persons, but can only save those who
are eventually persuaded to believe, to an understanding that whom God desires
to save shall be regenerated and placed in a process of salvation.[21] The problem of evil is therefore not
primarily subject to, and in existence, because human sin is stalling the
culmination of God’s plans. I do not
doubt that human beings do often oppose God’s plans, but God being almighty can
overcome the problem of evil, and is working through this process slowly in
history. Within a sovereignty
perspective human sin does oppose God, but God will use sin for his purposes
and regenerate and mould those he chooses towards salvation. As long as one can accept the idea that a
perfectly moral God wills and allows evil within his plans for the greater
good,[22]
there is a degree of intellectual certainty with sovereignty theodicy that free
will theodicy lacks. God could
inevitably bring about, through the use of the regeneration and the
resurrection of elected human persons, the
end of human corruption, and even
Plantinga’s concept of transworld depravity.[23] If God willed and created a finalized Kingdom
of restored persons that had experienced the problem of evil and were saved
from it, then it could be reasoned that with God’s constant persuasion through
the Holy Spirit and human experience and maturity, transworld depravity would
never take place again.
No human wrong
decision[24]
would need to occur as God always determines otherwise, and restored human
beings do not lack experience as did the first humans who rebelled against God
causing corruption. I speculate that
theological praxis of sovereignty theodicy is more certain and comforting than
free will theodicy, as transworld depravity is overcome by taking the primary
choice of human belief in God away from corrupted human beings and placing it
in the hands of a sovereign God.
AUGUSTINE
(388-395)(1964) On Free Choice of the
Will, Translated by Anna S.Benjamin and L.H. Hackstaff, Upper Saddle River,
N.J., Prentice Hall.
AUGUSTINE
(398-399)(1992) Confessions,
Translated by Henry Chadwick, Oxford, Oxford University Press.
AUGUSTINE
(400-416)(1987)(2004) On the Trinity,
Translated by Reverend Arthur West Haddan, in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers,
Series One, Volume 3, Denver, The Catholic Encyclopedia.
http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/130104.htm
AUGUSTINE
(421)(1998) Enchiridion, Translated
by J.F. Shaw, Denver, The Catholic
Encyclopedia.
AUGUSTINE
(426)(1958) The City of God,
Translated by Gerald G. Walsh, Garden City, New York, Image Books.
AUGUSTINE
(427)(1997) On Christian Doctrine,
Translated by D.W. Robertson Jr., Upper Saddle River, N.J., Prentice Hall.
AUGUSTINE
(427b)(1997) On Christian Teaching,
Translated by R.P.H. Green, Oxford, Oxford University Press.
BLOESCH,
DONALD G. (1987) Freedom for Obedience,
San Francisco, Harper and Rowe Publishers.
BLOESCH,
DONALD G. (1996) ‘Sin, The Biblical Understanding of Sin’, in Walter A. Elwell
(ed.), Evangelical Dictionary of Theology,
Grand Rapids, Baker Books.
CALVIN, JOHN
(1539)(1998) The Institutes of the
Christian Religion, Book II, Translated by Henry Beveridge, Grand Rapids,
The Christian Classic Ethereal Library, Wheaton College.
CALVIN, JOHN
(1539)(1998) The Institutes of the
Christian Religion, Book IV, Translated by Henry Beveridge, Grand Rapids,
The Christian Classic Ethereal Library, Wheaton College.
http://www.ccel.org/ccel/calvin/institutes.html
CALVIN, JOHN
(1540)(1973) Romans and Thessalonians,
Translated by Ross Mackenzie, Grand Rapids, Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company.
CALVIN, JOHN
(1543)(1996) The Bondage and Liberation
of the Will, Translated by G.I. Davies, Grand Rapids, Baker Book House.
CALVIN, JOHN
(1550)(1978) Concerning Scandals,
Translated by John W. Fraser, Grand Rapids, William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company.
CALVIN, JOHN
(1552)(1995) Acts, Translated by
Watermark, Nottingham, Crossway Books.
CALVIN, JOHN
(1553)(1952) Job, Translated by Leroy
Nixon, Grand Rapids,
Baker Book
House.
CALVIN, JOHN
(1554)(1965) Genesis, Translated by
John King, Edinburgh, The Banner of Truth Trust.
EDWARDS,
JONATHAN (1729)(2006) Sovereignty of God,
New Haven, Connecticut, Jonathan Edwards Center, Yale University.
EDWARDS,
JONATHAN (1731-1733)(2006) Law of Nature,
New Haven, Connecticut, Jonathan Edwards Center, Yale University.
EDWARDS,
JONATHAN (1754)(2006) Freedom of the Will,
Flower Mound, Texas. Jonathanedwards.com.
http://www.jonathanedwards.com
http://www.jonathanedwards.com
GEISLER,
NORMAN L. (1975) Philosophy of Religion,
Grand Rapids, Zondervan Publishing House.
GEISLER,
NORMAN L. (1978) The Roots of Evil,
Grand Rapids, Zondervan Publishing House.
GEISLER,
NORMAN L. (1986) Predestination and Free
Will, Downers Grove, Illinois, InterVarsity Press.
GEISLER,
NORMAN L. (1996) ‘Freedom, Free Will, and Determinism’, in Walter A. Elwell
(ed.), Evangelical Dictionary of Theology,
Grand Rapids, Baker Books.
GEISLER,
NORMAN, L (1999) ‘The Problem of Evil’, in Baker
Encyclopedia of Apologetics, Grand Rapids, Baker Books.
HICK, JOHN
(1970) Evil and The God of Love,
London, The Fontana Library.
HICK, JOHN
(1978) ‘Present and Future Life’, Harvard
Theological Review, Volume 71, Number 1-2, January-April, Harvard
University.
HICK, JOHN
(1981) Encountering Evil, Stephen T.
Davis (ed.), Atlanta, John Knox Press.
HICK, JOHN
(1993) ‘Afterword’ in GEIVETT, R.
DOUGLAS (1993) Evil and the Evidence for
God, Philadelphia, Temple University Press.
HICK, JOHN
(1993) The Metaphor of God Incarnate,
Louisville, Kentucky, John Know Press.
HICK, JOHN
(1994) Death and Eternal Life,
Louisville, Kentucky, John Knox Press.
HICK, JOHN
(1999) ‘Life after Death’, in Alan Richardson and John Bowden (eds.), A New Dictionary of Christian Theology,
Kent, SCM Press.
LUTHER,
MARTIN. (1516)(1968) Commentary On The
Epistle To The Romans, Translated by J.Theodore Mueller, Grand Rapids,
Zondervan Publishing House.
LUTHER,
MARTIN. (1518)(1989) ‘Heidelberg Disputation’, in Timothy F. Lull (ed.), Martin Luther’s Basic Theological Writings, Minneapolis, Fortress Press.
LUTHER,
MARTIN. (1525)(1972) ‘The Bondage of the Will’, in F.W. Strothmann and
Frederick W. Locke (eds.), Erasmus-Luther:
Discourse on Free Will, New York, Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., INC.
MCCANN, HUGH
J. (2001) ‘Sovereignty and Freedom: A Reply to Rowe’, in Faith and Philosophy, Volume 18, Number 1, January, pp. 110-116.
Wilmore, Kentucky, Asbury College.
PLANTINGA,
ALVIN C. (1977)(2002) God, Freedom, and
Evil, Grand Rapids, Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company.
PLANTINGA,
ALVIN C. (1982) The Nature of Necessity,
Oxford, Clarendon Press.
PLANTINGA,
ALVIN C. (2000) Warranted Christian
Belief, Oxford, Oxford University Press.
[4] Geisler (1986: 75).
[6] An atheist and
critic could reasonably and rightly suggest that persons use free will to such
a corrupt degree that God will never be able to culminate a Kingdom where
significantly free creatures do not continue to at times commit horrendous
evils.
[7] Plantinga (1977)(2002: 53).
[8] Plantinga (1977)(2002: 53).
[9] This assumes that
human beings by grace through faith can be convinced into belief in Christ and
then regenerated and indwelled by the Holy Spirit.
[10] Luther (1525)(1972: 133). Calvin (1543)(1996: 204).
[11] Calvin (1539)(1998: Book II, Chapter 3,
6). Calvin (1552)(1995: 13).
[13] Augustine (388-395)(1964: 78).
[14] Bruce (1996: 93).
[17] Plantinga (1977)(2002: 53).
[18] Augustine viewed the atoning work of
Christ as a means by which humanity can be brought back to a proper
relationship with God. Augustine
(398-399)(1992: 178). Christ would
mediate humanity back to God. Augustine
(398-399)(1992: 219).
[19] Without compatibilism in my view,
incompatibilism and free will theory is left with the problem of explaining how
human corruption and Plantinga’s transworld depravity will not prevent the
salvation of persons and the completed and finalized Kingdom of God.
[21] Calvin (1543)(1996: 204).
[22] Calvin (1543)(1996: 37-40). Edwards (1729)(2006: 414).
[23] Plantinga (1977)(2002: 53).
[24] Moral wrong
decisions is meant here. A lack of
infinite knowledge could still lead to a human being making a non-moral mistake,
for example, not playing a perfect game.
When God sends you help, don't ask questions!
ReplyDeleteSpeed Trap
ReplyDeleteMy sister Candice's husband drove right into a radar trap. And because Candice was following him in her car, the police officer nabbed her too.
After the officer had written up one ticket, he approached Candice. Her defense was that she was merely following her husband. When that appeal failed, she tried another tack:
"Do you give family discounts?"
…..Doc’s Daily Chuckle (docsdailychuckle@associate.com) by way of “Christian Voices” (ChristianVoices@att.net)
Commie Pope
ReplyDeletePosted By Matthew Vadum On June 24, 2015 @ 12:25 am In Daily Mailer,FrontPage | 22 Comments
Pope Francis
[1]Two years into his reign, Pope Francis has emerged as an extreme socialist obsessed with the usual phony leftist problems such as manmade global warming, American institutional racism, and income inequality.
Muslims are indiscriminately slaughtering Christians around the world while Christianity itself seems on the verge of being eclipsed globally by Islam, but these things barely register with this pope.
This pseudo-intellectual pope keeps on spouting the same misanthropic Marxist platitudes as he hitches his papacy to global warming, the new international totalitarian cause. Sounding like Mao Zedong, Francis said a “bold cultural revolution” was needed to save the planet.
The pope ignores the keen insight of former Czech President Vaclav Klaus who likened environmentalists to watermelons: they are green on the outside and red on the inside. After the collapse of the Soviet Union leftists the world over migrated to the environmentalist movement and began regurgitating the party line, which is that human activity, and in particular, capitalism, is killing the planet. Mocking the Enlightenment, Francis accepts their unscientific drivel on faith and in the process transports the papacy back to the Dark Ages.
Christians and communists are the same, Francis maintains. Communists are closeted Christians who “have stolen our flag,” he says. Why the pope would want to be associated in any way with communists is unclear. He ought to know that it was V.I. Lenin who said, “The more representatives of the reactionary clergy we manage to shoot, the better.”
Lenin and his successors in the U.S.S.R. followed through. Priests, monks, and nuns were scalped, crucified, given Communion with molten lead, drowned, strangled, and thrown into cauldrons of boiling tar. In Republican Spain, nuns were raped before being shot, and people associated with the church were forced to swallow rosary beads, thrown down mine shafts, and made to dig their own graves before being buried alive in them.
Anyone with eyes knows that the proliferation of capitalism over the past two decades has lifted a billion people out of dire poverty — and in coming decades is projected to rescue another billion from pauperism — but Francis robotically slams global capitalism, or “globalization” as the Left calls it, foolishly blaming markets for poverty. Markets, not handouts, accomplish humanitarian feats that the Roman Catholic Church could never, ever hope to match.
It’s one thing to preach charity and warn against becoming preoccupied with worldly things, but the pope’s harangues suggest he actually believes capitalism, a system of abundance and uplift that is the greatest eliminator of poverty the world has ever known, exploits and punishes the poor.
Some of Pope Francis’s statements sound like they could have come from the deranged late dictator of Venezuela, Hugo Chavez. The pope condemns technology, including air conditioning and automobiles, along with consumerism, markets, inequality, waste, modernity, ideologies, urbanization, suburbs,multinational corporations, and financial speculation. Presumably he agrees with Bernie Sanders who said there are hungry children in the world because we have too many different varieties of deodorants.
The pope sometimes says things one might expect to hear coming from Michael Moore or Noam Chomsky. In one interview Francis ranted against capitalism [2] like a rabid community organizer.
ReplyDeleteWe are discarding an entire generation to maintain an economic system that can’t hold up any more, a system that to survive, must make war, as all great empires have done. But as a third world war can’t be waged, they make regional wars … they produce and sell weapons, and with this, the balance sheets of the idolatrous economies, the great world economies that sacrifice man at the feet of the idol of money, are resolved …
V.I. Lenin, of course, shared this view that capitalism creates warfare states.
And if he were alive today, Lenin would no doubt rush to join the global warming cult in order to get communism on the march again.He would be manning the barricades at an Occupy Wall Street rally while the pope passionately embraces the boneheaded idea that so-called anthropogenic climate change disproportionately affects the poor and is certain to hurt impoverished people in the long run. He ignorantly opines in his new encyclical titled Laudato Si’ (Praised Be) that “[t]he earth, our home, is beginning to look more and more like an immense pile of filth,” smearing those who disagree that mankind is ruining the planet by claiming they suffer from “obstructionist attitudes.” This rhetorical tack seems much like the Marxist refrain that when the exploited masses fail to recognize their true plight they are beset by a “false consciousness.”
Republican officeholders don’t agree [3] with the pope’s big government solutions.
As National Journal reports, Rep. Steve King of Iowa, a practicing Catholic, questioned the pope’s activism. “When you talk about unpredictable science, I have to ask where’s the nexus between that and the theology of the Vatican?” King said. “I’ve studied the science … and I doubt the pope is going to embrace my position. But this is science, not theology.”
ReplyDeleteAnother Catholic GOPer, Ohio Gov. John Kasich said:
The environment was given to us by the Lord and it needs to be taken care of. It shouldn’t be worshiped; that’s called pantheism. So I think the pope pointing out the fact that we need to take care of this environment is good. I don’t agree with his conclusion that all of it is bad because of free enterprise because it’s lifted people out of poverty and he cares about the poor and so do I.
Roman Catholics are not, strictly speaking, required to obey papal encyclicals, but such high-profile communiques are supposed to carry great moral authority given their source. Even if they disagree with scientific or political statements in the document, Catholics are expected to consider what the pope has to say. “I think people need to accept that with an open and docile heart,” Father Thomas Petri, vice president and academic dean at the Pontifical Faculty of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, D.C., told the Catholic News Agency [4].
By accepting the patently absurd theory that carbon dioxide, the gas we all expel from our lungs that is also essential to life on earth, is a pollutant, Francis is using his office to help environmentalists argue for stricter regulations over industry. Carbon-emission restrictions shrink economic output, leaving everyone including the poor with even less money.
ReplyDeleteBut unlike most popes, Francis doesn’t just preach; he organizes.
Saul Alinsky, a hardened atheist idolized by President Obama and Hillary Clinton, would have loved this pope. Alinsky built his community-organizing empire by infiltrating Catholic congregations. His Holiness is infiltrating the U.S. government — but President Obama isn’t worried because the two are ideological soulmates.
In March Holy See officials met with the far-left EPA administrator, Gina McCarthy, to plot and scheme. Just this week McCarthy implied global warming skeptics were subhuman. “Normal people,” as opposed to “climate deniers,” have not placed “politics above science” and “want us to do the right thing,” she said.
In April the pope convened a summit that examined the relationship between poverty, economic development, and climate change. UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon was the keynote speaker.
The pope has been working with notable global warming alarmists, including left-wing American economist Jeffrey Sachs and German climatologist Hans Joachim Schellnhuber. Sachs is the adviser who went to post-Soviet Russia to counsel officials on how to transition to a market economy. Instead of arguing for something even remotely resembling laissez-faire capitalism, he pushed for a mixed economy with a strong central government holding the upper hand. In other words, Sachs is one of the reasons Russia is now a fascist state, rife with cronyism and corruption.
ReplyDeleteTimothy E. Wirth of the United Nations Foundation delights in the pope’s radical enviro-activism. “We’ve never seen a pope do anything like this,” Wirth said. “No single individual has as much global sway as he does.”
At the First Things website, Maureen Mullarkey takes on Francis, saying he “sullies his office by using demagogic formulations to bully the populace into reflexive climate action with no more substantive guide than theologized propaganda.” This pope, “an ideologue and a meddlesome egoist,” suffers from “megalomania” and “views man as a parasite.”
Francis is solidly plugged in to the American Left. Earlier this month community organizers and union thugs flew to Rome to collaborate with Vatican officials in advance of the pope’s scheduled visit to the U.S. in September.
ReplyDeleteAs the National Catholic Reporter [5] reported June 9:
A group of some 20 American community organizers and union leaders are holding meetings with Vatican officials this week to sway Pope Francis into addressing a number of lingering national social justice issues in his upcoming visit to the United States.
Organized by the national faith-based action network PICO and the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), the leaders are meeting with four pontifical councils, the head of two pontifical academies, leadership of two global religious orders, and the executive director of Caritas Internationalis.
Among the key issues they are asking officials to advise the pope to consider discussing with President Barack Obama or during his address to Congress: immigration reform, economic injustice for low-wage workers, pervasive racism in U.S. institutions and society, and mass incarceration.
Not surprisingly, it seems like the spin doctors of Vatican City are coordinating with the Obama White House communications office to maximize the public impact of their misinformation campaigns.
This past weekend as Obama was ramping up his umpteenth anti-gun propaganda effort, Francis ridiculously asserted that those who make or invest in weapons cannot be considered good Christians.
ReplyDeleteHe condemned “people, managers, businessmen who call themselves Christian and they manufacture weapons. That leads to a bit of distrust, doesn’t it?” This statement comes from a man whose predecessors commanded a real-life Papal Army up until 1870.
Pope Francis has been promoting Obama’s foreign policy monstrosities. Cuba’s Communist dictator Raul Castro thanked the pope last month for brokering the deal that set in motion the ongoing restoration of diplomatic relations between the U.S. and that Caribbean island hellhole.
Last summer the pope condemned America. As wave after wave of unaccompanied minors washed over the U.S.-Mexico border, Francis whined, complaining that the illegal aliens’ “rights are violated … unfortunately, [they] continue to the subject of racist and xenophobic attitudes.”
Lately Francis started resembling President Obama. Obama doesn’t care much that Christians are being slaughtered overseas by Islamists and the pope, it seems, isn’t doing as much to help these Christians as he could. And like Obama, the pope has come to the rescue of homicidal Muslims on multiple occasions.
Late last year around the time Islamic State and other Muslim militants were busy torturing and killing Christians (often using grisly methods such as crucifixion) in Nigeria, Indonesia, Somalia, Libya, Central African Republic, Uganda, Lebanon, Kenya, Pakistan, Sudan, and Iraq, Pope Francis gave Islam the seal of approval.
“Islam is a religion of peace, one which is compatible with respect for human rights and peaceful coexistence,” he said. On a separate occasion he said, “authentic Islam and the proper reading of the Koran are opposed to every form of violence.”
Jihadist violence is merely an offensive stereotype, according to the bishop of Rome. He called on Muslims to promote a “more authentic image of Islam, as so many of them desire.” This, of course, mirrors the stated dogma of President Barack Hussein Obama who speaks in monotone about his alleged Christianity but waxes poetic when reflecting on Islam.
And just as Obama ignores the never-ending “death to America” chants by senior Iranian officials, the pope doesn’t appear to take seriously the Islamic State’s threats to kill him and conquer Rome. In March the pope told reporters that if he is assassinated he hopes death will be quick. “I’m a real scaredy cat when it comes to physical pain.”
ReplyDeleteThe pope is squandering his moral authority by pretending that Islam is a religion of peace and that cutting an unenforceable deal on nuclear weapons with the mullahs of Iran is a fine idea.
President Obama, obviously, buys into the same nonsense, but unlike the pope, he ran out of moral authority long ago.
In many ways, Pope Francis is the opposite of Pope John Paul II, who was canonized last year.
Saint John Paul the Great was the Polish-born former Karol Wojtyla. He was ordained after the U.S.S.R. took over Poland and made it a satellite state. While the Iron Curtain still existed, John Paul stood heroically against Communism, the great cancer of the twentieth century.
He miraculously survived a KGB-sanctioned assassination attempt in 1981 and an al-Qaeda-funded attack was foiled in the Philippines in 1995. Polish secret police tried in 1983 to embarrass John Paul by claiming he fathered an illegitimate child. The Soviet Union had wanted to eliminate this proud son of Poland because he supported the Solidarity trade union movement that gave his homeland’s dictatorship heartburn.
John Paul reportedly sent a letter in 1980 to then-Soviet President Leonid Brezhnev vowing to fight if the U.S.S.R. took action against Poland. If the Soviets acted, he said he would “lay down the crown of St. Peter and return to his homeland to stand shoulder to shoulder with his people.”
The defenders of Pope Francis try to paint him as above politics. They say, unconvincingly, that he rejects Marxism, liberation theology, and unrestrained capitalism.
It is clear the one thing this pope rejects the most is freedom.
I do not know much about Pope Francis.
ReplyDeleteHe seems to be trying to politically make the Roman Catholic Church through definitions a little more palatable by his careful use of words in a secular age. How much will this change things? Doctrine?
As a moderate conservative, I am not in favour of income equality but as a Biblical Christian I am also not in favour of corporate and government greed.
That Court Helps Us Think Better
ReplyDeleteSo is marriage better than a hookup? That sounds like an easy question, but put in the word "same-sex" and then how does it look to you? Commitment plus sin all together? Try this feeble analogy, did the murders that Godfather Marlon Brando pulled off feel better to you than a hit-man killing just for money? Since sexual activity doesn't go on non-stop, can you see value in committed same-sex friendship the rest of the time? Did the Court send a message of love or of indifference? If today the Court were promoting man/woman relationships, would you see that as progress—or if it were without trust in Jesus Christ, would it be just another kind of respectable rebellion against God?
I think the last question is the key one. Do we value unbelieving conventional marriage too highly? Do we think respectable sinners are more likely to love Jesus Christ than the other kind? When the short word for "respectable" is clearly "Pharisee?" Doing the right thing is good but not if anyone takes it as deserving God's blessing. I shudder now at my memories of funerals, strolling past the open casket and hearing, Griff wasn't a church person but if anyone's going to heaven he will. Overweighted respectability.
ReplyDeleteAre good people closer to Jesus than bad? That's not the way the gospels see it. Isn't the main thing seeing your need? Knowing you're so sick that you need a doctor? Right now believers in Jesus are tempted to see our real friends as the respectable people—but we know a lot better.
ReplyDeletePaul told us he was the greatest sinner ever, and he was serious. When the real message is, that our only hope is the Lord's grace and patient love, then we need to live that way too. Can we learn to say to the watching world, respectable and not: we can't look down on you or anyone because we know who we are. So can we talk together about the only real hope there is for anyone? That's our way ahead, always but right now especially.
ReplyDeleteThat's the first thing, but there are practical decisions we need to make. We should distance ourselves from civil marriage. Just ask the man and woman to show us the form from the government office that says they've been married, then call what we will do in church a Celebration, and leave out the final words "according to the law of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania I now pronounce you man and wife." You wouldn't have to return the card to the PA Orphans Court either. No big deal. We would be just like Europe or Canada, and it works well there.
ReplyDeleteThat upcoming presidential election, that will be big. I hate making anything a one-issue thing, but now I think this one is. The next president will make several crucial Supreme Court nominations, so what kind are they likely to be? That's more important than the economy or foreign policy or whatever, isn't it?
ReplyDeleteD. Clair Davis
My friend Chuck has suggested the Church get out of the marriage business.
ReplyDeleteVery much worth considering.
The state does all legal marriages.
Private Biblical marriages, non-legal are done by Biblical churches.
ReplyDeleteHUMOR
A Sunday school teacher asked, "Johnny, do you think Noah did a lot of fishing when he was on the Ark?"
"No," replied Johnny. "How could he, with just two worms.
…..Copyright 2014 Mike Atkinson (www.mikeysFunnies.com) by way of “Christian Voices” (ChristianVoices@att.net)
If you get into the bottom of a well or a tall chimney and look up, you can see stars, even in the middle of the day.
ReplyDeleteI think that thanks for the valuabe information and insights you have so provided here. Best PhD Proposal Writing Service
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