Too Selective in Love and Judgment
As a raging heterosexual, I confess that the notion of same-sex attraction has always been a puzzle to me.
Theology Archives
February 28, 2007 10:53 AM
Comments (95)March 22, 2007 10:36 AM
We've Got the Whole World In Our Hands
Growing up fundamentalist, I spent a lot of my childhood thinking and worrying about the end of time as predicted in the New Testament book of Revelation. I was taught that history would come screeching to a halt and the world as we know it would dissolve in some kind of apocalyptic judgment.
June 8, 2007 8:11 AM
Belief and Behavior Inseparable
I think the Bible is pretty clear that faith and works are inseparable, though I’m enough a creature of the Reformation to hold that good works do not earn salvation. Martin Luther (following St. Paul) believed that good works would issue spontaneously out of the life of the believer, but they were not the catalyst for salvation.
And it must be an arid spirituality indeed that makes protestations of faith, but those commitments find scant expression in how one lives from day to day.
July 19, 2007 7:42 AM
Peter, a Rock He Was Not
Roman Catholics believe that one bishop, the pope, has authority over all others because he is the linear spiritual successor to Peter, the first bishop of Rome. The scriptural basis for this, according to the Catholic Church, is Matthew 16, where Jesus declares to Peter that he is “the Rock” and upon that rock Jesus would build his church.
I certainly mean no offense to the Roman Catholic Church or to our Catholic sisters and brothers. But I respectfully disagree with this interpretation. I think this is one of the rare stabs at humor in the New Testament, or at least irony. Jesus was making a play on words – Peter or petra means “rock” – and we all know that Peter was anything but solid. When Peter wanted to walk on the Sea of Galilee, like Jesus, he stepped out of the boat, did okay for awhile, but then took his eyes off of Jesus and sank below the waves. Like a rock.
August 27, 2007 9:23 AM
The Church's Sexual Fixation
I continue to be flummoxed by the current fixation on homosexuality in Protestant denominations. Jesus himself said nothing about the matter, although he did affirm the Levitical proscriptions (which also, by the way, include prohibitions against the interbreeding of livestock and wearing garments made of two different kinds of fabric).
Jesus did talk about such issues as peacemaking and care for the poor and divorce. Regarding the latter, Jesus had nothing good to say, and he was pretty clear in his condemnations. Yet, curiously, that proscription against divorce has all but dropped out of view.
When I was researching "Thy Kingdom Come," I sat in on a gathering of conservative religious leaders as they were strategizing how to take control of mainline Protestant denominations. They were confident that the current struggle over the ordination of openly gay clergy and the ecclesiastical blessing same-sex unions would provide them the leverage they needed to wrest control of these denominations. For a day and a half in that Holiday Inn conference room, I heard almost nothing other than talk about sex.
