"The gospel of inclusion has won..."

Translation, via the Chicago Sun-Times:

For the first time, clergy in same-sex committed relationships can serve the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America without threat of discipline to them, their congregations or their bishops.

The historic decision, made today at a national assembly at Navy Pier, was spearheaded by Bishop Paul Landahl of the Metropolitan Chicago Synod.

A day earlier, attendees voted down a measure that would have ended a ban on non-celibate gay clergy. But Saturday’s vote calls on church leaders to “refrain from or demonstrate restraint” in disciplining those who violate the policy.

One interpretation:

“It’s a huge victory,” said Jeremy Posadas, 26, a voting church member from Decatur, Ga. “The gospel of inclusion has won and we’re going to keep winning.”

No word yet as to what the winner will receive or if the Jesus Seminar will define, via voting with beads, the "Gospel of Inclusion" as the "Sixth Gospel." Or, better, the "Gay Gospel." Meanwhile, the Washington Post has this not-so-surprising bit of news:

Membership in the 4.8 million-member ELCA, like other mainline churches, has declined over the last two decades; only 30 percent of Evangelical Lutherans attend worship weekly.

The Post also remarks: "Theological liberals believe that the overarching message of Scripture is full acceptance for all people." So, the question, increasingly, appears to be: does the "Gospel of Inclusion" include those who stop going to weekly worship?

Comments

[Account Deleted]

I am continually amazed by the willingness of otherwise faithful Christians to cast judgement and make wild accusations (ex. "the Gay Gospel") against brothers and sisters who just happen to have seen things differently. Then again, the Jerusalem leaders gave Peter hell because he said he had seen the Holy Spirit show up in the home of a Gentile named Cornelius...and even dared to baptize the guy. Christians, I guess, have always had to work at keeping their heresy meter under control. Given what I've read at your blog, I think you'd be an interesting conversation partner. But given this post I wonder if that would even be possible. The truth is, the folks who see this issue differently than you do are far more complicated than you give us credit for - and working just as hard at trying to be faithful. If you're interested, I'm blogging at http://reclaimingthefword.com. The f word = faith.

[Ted Krasnicki]

Kelly:
I fail to see your problem. I cannot judge the worth of anyone as a person for by nature every person is good and I am commanded to love him absolutely; but I can sure judge his actions, and whether they conform to God's will or not. Surely I can judge a married person caught having an affair with another person's spouse. That is what laws and courts are about, and why we have commandments. I think many men are born adulterers; but the Gospel is about changing the people in the world, not be changed by them. Whether or not a person is born in a certain way, free will makes faith possible for we are not morally determined, and we are meant by the grace of God, to freely change and conform to God's will, to become, in other words divinised. Some sins are harder to overcome for some than for others, but please do not try to either turn a sinful action into an action that is outside the scope of moral valuation, or pervert it into a good. It is not up to individuals to determine what sin is, but up to the Church. And the Church has spoken authoritatively on the issue of homosexual activity to be sinful since its very beginning.

[John Petty]

Where did you get the idea that you can judge other people? Just curious.

[Account Deleted]

To clarify: I'm not debating homosexuality with you. I'm responding to your critique of Christian brothers and sisters who believe the Holy Spirit is up to a new thing...something the leaders in Jerusalem had a hard time believing, too. I'm wondering why those Christians who claim to have the corner on Biblical interpretation don't take the Biblical stories more seriously, specifically those that show God overturning God's own rules for the sake of something more than God's people were able to see or understand at the time. Today, it's a no brainer than Gentiles ought to be baptized. Not so back then. Would you really limit God today?

[LJ]

--"I'm wondering why those Christians who claim to have the corner on Biblical interpretation don't take the Biblical stories more seriously, specifically those that show God overturning God's own rules for the sake of something more than God's people were able to see or understand at the time."--

So where is this new public revelation coming from? Our Catholic Catechism points out that there will be no new public revelation. In the revelation that we have, most notably in St. Paul's letters, the Holy Spirit is quite unequivocal about unnatural sexual activity. The Holy Spirit is up to a new thing? How about America is up to a new thing? Or that western culture is up to a new thing?

Actually, there is nothing new about this at all in the context of world history, or Scripture. But the game now is to accuse those who point out God's view on homosexual activity as judgemental. Listen, it doesn't matter what the Lutherans say, or the Episcopaliens, or the Baptists or whoever. The Catholic Church cannot approve of homosexual acts because she is being prevented by the Holy Spirit from doing so. There are many who deeply desire the endorsement of the Catholic Church for their homosexual lifestyle precisely because they know that in the end it is the only one approval that matters because of St. Peter's power to bind and loose. If Peter approves, then Christ approves, and that is what they really want and can never have, God's approval for the lifestyle. Even if they make every Protestant ecclesial communion in the entire world bow down and worship at the altar of the Gay lifestyle, it won't mean a thing.

The Holy Spirit is up to a new thing? Don't blame the Holy Spirit for the capitulation of people outside of the security of the guarantee that Jesus gave to St. Peter. They did that with artificial birth control and Paul VI could not go along. It was the Holy Spirit that would not allow it, even if he had wanted to. Now, these forty years later, he has become a prophet. All the predictions that the mainstream of Protestant Christianity laughed at have come true. Was the Holy Spirit doing a new thing in 1968? Or at the 1930 Lambeth Conference? Or was it perhaps the fact that people shut their ears to the Holy Spirit and listened to another spirit.

[Carl Olson]

I am continually amazed by the willingness of otherwise faithful Christians to cast judgement and make wild accusations (ex. "the Gay Gospel") against brothers and sisters who just happen to have seen things differently.

Kelly: What "wild" accusations? I simply reported the fact that the ELCA has voted, in essence, to accept homosexual acts as morally acceptable. Is reporting this news an accusation?

And you are apparently claiming, if I understand your comments correctly, that homosexual acts are now considered morally agreeable, because to uphold traditional teachings about homosexual acts would be to "limit God". Am I incorrect in my assessment of your position?

The truth is, the folks who see this issue differently than you do are far more complicated than you give us credit for - and working just as hard at trying to be faithful.

Ah, yes, the argument from "complication," also known as the argument from "complexity"—that is, it's too complex for us traditional, narrow-minded Christians to understand. Sorry, but I don't buy it. The issue is quite simple. Either homosexual acts (to be distinguished from inclinations to homosexuality) are sinful or they aren't. Period. If they now are not sinful, that means that 2,000 years of Christian morality (and many more years of Jewish moral teaching) have been tossed out the window. The appeal to the issue of Peter baptizing Gentiles does not hold water for a number of reasons, not the least that the Old Testament, as Jesus emphasized, is filled with evidence that God's desire has always been the salvation of all people, with the Old Israel meant to be the first-born among many nations. The fact that most Jews at the time of Jesus had either ignored or missed this teaching meant that it had to be reiterated and then brought to fruition by Jesus, especially through the establishment of the New Israel, the Church, and the New Covenant. In other words, it's not as though the baptism of Gentiles came out of the blue, with nary a hint; on the contrary, the Prophets often spoke of a time when all nations would be gathered to God despite the opposition of those Jews who mistakenly identified themselves as the sole recipients of the blessings promised to Abraham, Moses, and David.

Would you really limit God today?

Not at all. But neither do I believe that God would change clear and consistent moral teaching because it has become fashionable in the 21st century in many places to accept homosexual acts as true and authentic expressions of love. This is not about "limiting" God but humbly examining and accepting what He has revealed through divine revelation.

[Anonymous]

How to eliminate the Catholic three-legged stool of authority and enthrone the imperial autonomous self in three easy steps:

1) Eliminate the Magisterium (done during the Protestant Reformation).

2) Eliminate, or at least remove the teeth of, Tradition (also done during the Protestant Reformation).

3) Desiccate Scripture through reducing it to a collection of myths that have no authority over Christians today except where they agree with it and/or say that "God is doing a new thing" and that this "new thing" supercedes Scripture (being done since the 18th century to one degree or another, finding its full maturity in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries).

When done, Christianity becomes whatever modern consumerist, hedonistic Western society needs it to be.

[Anonymous]

Would you really limit God today?

That is more or less what Shift said in The Last Battle to those who questioned the "new thing" he said Aslan was doing.

[brendon]

I'm always amazed that in the past the Holy Spirit "blowing where it willed" and "being up to new things" caused conversions and led Christians to martyrdom, while today is indistinguishable from the zeitgeist and leads Christians to take socially acceptable positions.

[Jackson]

"Where did you get the idea that you can judge other people? Just curious."

Here, for example:

"The spiritual man judges all things, but is himself to be judged by no one."

-1 Cor. 2:15

Conveniently, our Oprahists forget this verse and instead focus only on Matt. 7:1 - and they give it a thoroughly vacuous reading, forgetting who Christ is talking to there, etc.

God, being Logos, surely knows that life must include constant judgment. Before one marries, for instance, one rightfully engages (hopefully) in severe and thorough judgment of a potential spouse. Not to do so would be foolish. Again, a parent rightly scrutinizes his child's potential friends, his teachers, etc. And if uncle Bob is a pedophile, a parent rightly judges Bob as unfit to spend time with his children.

An infinite number of examples of right judgment could be provided. The issue is not judgment pe se, but right or wrong judgment.

Finally, it's always amusing to be severely judged as judgmental by today's self-appointed guardians of "non-judgment."

[joanne]

"the Holy Spirit is up to a new thing".
Because God IS, the Holy Spirit is always up to "a new thing". But it is always a new GOOD.
And as the nature of God does not change, "His new thing" will never be a design for the destruction of souls. The perversion of a good (marriage, for instance)such that it is either neutralized or destroyed and its opposite exalted cannot be from the Holy Spirit.