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DLW
Registered Member
Date Joined Apr 2003
Total Posts : 2457
| Posted 10/13/2003 8:15 AM (GMT -6) |   | Bear in mind that after the Protestant/Catholic schism, most Churches in Europe lost all their autonomy from the state and became basically their mouthpieces.
This has contributed over a long period of time to them rejecting what they had learned over so many centuries...
dlw
Faith Fades Where It Once Burned Strong
October 13, 2003
By FRANK BRUNI
ROME, Oct. 12 - Like many Italians in decades and
childhoods past, Giampaolo Servadio used to go to Roman
Catholic Mass every week. He even served as an altar boy.
But last Sunday morning, as church bells tolled around this
city of storied cathedrals, he followed a different ritual:
he went running. It struck him as a more relevant use of
time.
"The church seems really out of step," said Mr. Servadio,
39, mentioning issues like birth control and questioning
the very utility of prayer. "I don't see how something like
a confession and a few repetitions of the `Hail Mary' are
going to solve any problems."
He wondered if he should call himself Catholic: "When you
realize that for 20 years you don't do this - you don't
even go to church - what kind of Catholic are you?"
A fairly typical one, at least in Italy and much of Europe,
where the ties of Christianity no longer bind the way they
once did - and often seem not to bind at all.
This week Pope John Paul II is to celebrate his 25th
anniversary as the head of the Roman Catholic Church, which
is both Europe's and Christianity's largest denomination.
It has been a quarter century of enormous changes, and few
have been more significant, for his church and mainstream
Protestant denominations, than the withering of the
Christian faith in Europe and the shift in its center of
gravity to the Southern Hemisphere.
Christianity has boomed in the developing world, competing
successfully with Islam, deepening its influence and
possibly finding its future there. But Europe already seems
more and more like a series of tourist-trod monuments to
Christianity's past. Hardly a month goes by when the pope
does not publicly bemoan that fact, beseeching Europeans to
rediscover the faith.
Their estrangement has deep implications, including the
prospect of schisms in intercontinental churches and
political frictions within and between countries.
The secularization of Europe, according to some political
analysts, is one of the forces pushing it apart from the
United States, where religion plays a potent role in
politics and society, shaping many Americans' views of the
world.
Americans are widely regarded as more comfortable with
notions of good and evil, right and wrong, than Europeans,
who often see such views as reckless.
In France, which is predominantly Catholic but emphatically
secular, about one in 20 people attends a religious service
every week, compared with about one in three in the United
States.
"What's interesting isn't that there are fewer people in
church," said the Rev. Jean François Bordarier of Lille, in
northern France, "but that there are any at all."
Debates Over Gays and God
While France is an extreme
case, its drift from Christian institutions and disparity
with the United States hold true throughout much of Europe,
where faithful attendance at Christian services, be they
Catholic, Protestant or Orthodox, is the province of a
small minority of people.
They show up to mark crucial milestones in their and their
loved ones' lives. But they pay minimal heed, between those
visits, to their churches' exhortations and admonitions.
The tension between contemporary attitudes and traditional
church teachings has forced an emergency meeting this week
of the leaders of the worldwide Anglican Communion.
They are expected to debate the acceptability of openly gay
bishops in their church. Representatives from congregations
in the developing world have threatened to break the church
in two if their Western peers head in a permissive
direction.
The preamble of a new, unfinished constitution for the
European Union omits any mention of Christianity or even
God among the cultural forces that shaped Europe, although
the pope and other Christian leaders raised vehement
objections.
"My own view is that there is a form of secular intolerance
in Europe that is every bit as strong as religious
intolerance was in the past," said John Bruton, a former
Irish prime minister who was involved in the drafting of
the document. He lobbied for God's inclusion.
Mr. Bruton's vantage point is Western Europe, but many
Eastern European countries - with a few exceptions, like
the pope's native Poland - are no more demonstrably devout.
Having gone through religious outbursts after their
emergence from Communism, they too seem poised to pivot in
a secular direction.
Christianity's greatest hope in Europe may in fact be
immigrants from the developing world, who in many cases
learned the religion from European missionaries, adapted it
to their own needs and tastes, then toted it back to the
Continent.
In cities like Paris, Amsterdam and especially London,
there are many thriving independent black churches, packed
with newcomers from Nigeria, Sierra Leone and other African
countries.
A recent report by Christian Research, a British group,
determined that blacks and, to a lesser extent, Asians
represent more than half the churchgoers in central London
on a given Sunday, though they represent less than a
quarter of the area's population.
By some estimates, more than 25 million people in England
identify the Church of England as their denomination. Only
1.2 million actually go to one of the church's services
every week.
Other Protestant denominations are in the same shape.
"In
Western Europe, we are hanging on by our fingernails,"
wrote the Rev. David Cornick, the general secretary of the
United Reformed Church in Britain, in the June-July edition
of Inside Out, a religious journal. "The fact is that
Europe is no longer Christian."
Believing vs. Attending
That is something of an overstatement. Despite a recent
influx of Muslim immigrants and the rise of mosques in
countries like Britain, France and Germany, an overwhelming
majority of Europeans who profess religious devotion
consider themselves Christian. But for most, Christianity
has evolved into an amorphous spiritual inclination rather
than an exacting creed.
Stéphanie Vercamer, a 31-year-old florist in Lille, wears a
gold cross around her neck and said it saved her from
injury in a car crash several years ago. "There is a God,"
Ms. Vercamer said. "I wouldn't be here today if there
wasn't."
But she said that she almost never sets foot in a church
and that while she wanted to arrange a Roman Catholic
baptism for her daughter, who was born out wedlock, she had
not been able to yet. The little girl is 3 years old.
At the Saint Sacrement church in Lille, attendance at Mass
often drops below 50 but rose above 125 on a recent
weekend. The Rev. Émile Reyns, a priest there, gladly
reported that he had recently done prenuptial counseling
for six couples: proof, he said, that young adults still
wanted Catholic weddings.
But he sadly conceded that all the couples had been living
together for a while.
"They say it without blushing," said Father Reyns, 66, who
added that he did not expect to see the couples much once
they moved on to their honeymoons. At Saint Sacrement, like
many other congregations, the regulars tend to be much
older.
"In terms of religion, Europe is very complicated," said
the Rev. Andrew M. Greeley, the author of "Religion in
Europe at the End of the Second Millennium," which was
published this year.
Sizable majorities of people in most European countries
believe in God, and sizable majorities believe as well that
some kind of religious service is important when a person
dies, according to the European Values Study, a sweeping
survey conducted in 1999 and 2000 and published this
summer.
But they are less familiar with, or tethered to, the
specific rituals and roots of Christian worship. "If you
ask the average European the basic credo or statements of
the Christian church, most of them don't know," said Grace
Davie, a sociologist at the University of Exeter and the
author of several books about religious trends in Britain
and Europe.
That assessment is supported by the caretakers of the faith
themselves.
Last month Cardinal Dionigi Tettamanzi, the archbishop of
Milan, said at a news conference, "The parishes tell me
that there are children who don't know how to make the sign
of the cross."
"At the elementary schools, they don't know who Jesus is,"
added the cardinal, who is widely considered to be a strong
candidate for the papacy.
According to the European Values Study, only about 21
percent of all Europeans said religion was "very important"
to them. Although the methodology was not precisely
comparable, a Gallup Poll this year showed that 58 percent
of Americans defined religion that way.
Even in Italy, where 33 percent of respondents described
religion as "very important," the percentage of Italians
who go to church every week is as low as 15 and no higher
than 33, according to various polls.
Most Italians seem not to listen to the Vatican, even
though about 85 percent identify themselves as Roman
Catholic and the pope resides smack in the middle of their
country.
John Paul has exhorted them to be fruitful and multiply,
forbidding artificial birth control. But Italians have had
one of the world's lowest fertility rates for a quarter
century now.
In a 1981 referendum, Italians defied an aggressive
campaign by John Paul and other Roman Catholic leaders and
voted by a margin of two to one in favor of legal abortion.
Abortion is now readily available and commonplace in most
European countries, as it is in the United States.
Europeans are moving well ahead of Americans - and more
aggressively challenging traditional Christian teachings -
by providing civil recognition for same-sex couples.
Despite stern opposition from the Vatican, the French,
Belgian, Dutch and German governments have granted same-sex
couples legal entitlements and protections, and Britain is
considering it, too.
But the diminished sway of Christianity is evident in more
than low fertility rates and bold new legislation.
Public schools throughout Western Europe have removed
crosses from walls. Many congregations have been forced to
close or combine operations, to make do with part-time
ministers or to import pastors from the developing world.
On this continent, ministry has lost much of its luster.
"In Western Europe," said Archbishop Giuseppe Pittau, the
secretary of the Vatican congregation in charge of
seminaries, "it's been almost a tragedy. A diocese that
once had 10 priests ordained every year might have two, or
one, or less."
The desperation is evident. In September, when a group of
Catholics in a rural town near Rome heard that the local
monastery would be closed and the monk would be sent away,
they kept him there for several days by bricking up and
barricading the entrances.
Urban Stresses, Wider Choices
There are many suggested reasons for Europe's drift, which
happened gradually, over decades, as the continent grew
wealthier and better educated.
One is a modern European cynicism about big institutions,
grand ideologies and unfettered allegiances, manifest not
only in partly empty churches but also in weakened support
for labor unions and political parties.
"It's an overarching thing, a diminishing trust," said
Rüdiger Noll, director of the Brussels-based Church and
Society Commission of the Conference of European Churches,
an interdenominational group.
The process of urbanization moved Europeans from quiet
places where the church was at the center of life to
chaotic bazaars where it got lost in the din.
The Rev. Enzo Bianchi, a Catholic theologian in Italy, said
that in today's heterogeneous and often hedonistic European
capitals, "there are more and more morals and ethics on the
market."
"There's Buddhism, Hinduism, New Age spiritualism,
consumerism," Father Bianchi said. "With all these
competitors, it's harder for the church to sell."
But in the United States, to name one country, many of the
same dynamics have not prompted a similarly pronounced
estrangement. Some experts say that in Europe, suspicion of
major denominations may run higher because religious
leaders directly wielded political power in the past.
Others say the unchallenged supremacy of state-blessed
faiths in Europe - like the Lutherans in Scandinavia and
Anglicans in Britain - perhaps turned out to be a curse.
"Monopolies damage religion," said Massimo Introvigne, the
director of the Center for Studies on New Religions in
Turin and a proponent of the relatively new theory of
religious economy. "In a free market, people get more
interested in the product. It is true for religion just as
it is true for cars."
It also has reverberations well beyond the pews.
"I've
been struck by the way in which religion now serves to
underpin the divergence between Europe and the United
States, and where I particularly saw that over the last
year or two was in attitudes about the Middle East," said
Philip Jenkins. Dr. Jenkins is a British scholar who
teaches history and religious studies in the United States
and wrote "The Next Christendom" (2002), about changing
patterns of Christian worship around the world.
"Americans still take biblical and religious arguments very
seriously, and therefore give a credence to the Zionist
project that Europeans don't," Dr. Jenkins said.
He said that for many Americans, the frequency with which
President Bush invoked morality and religion in talking
about the fight against terrorism was neither striking nor
discomfiting. "But in Europe," he added, "they think he
must be a religious nut."
The president's brand of certainty and fervor is not easily
found here. But it exists, if one knows where to look for
it.
`Hallelujahs' and Pragmatism
At least 3,000 people, some clapping, singing and swaying
from the moment they left their cars, turned out on a
recent Sunday at the Kingsway International Christian
Center in East London.
That was just for the first of three scheduled services.
Pastor Matthew Ashimolowo could not welcome each of the
worshipers personally, but his face beamed from screens and
monitors scattered throughout the gargantuan assembly hall.
His voice thundered over loudspeakers.
His message was a blend of Corinthians and Hallmark, gospel
truth and pop psychology, rendered in the style of a
convention center motivational speech.
"If you don't change your thinking from stinking thinking,
your life will stink," he told the parishioners, who
shouted <object.title class="Movie" idsrc="nyt_ttl"
value="73806;21311">"Hallelujah!"</object.title> and
"Amen!"
"Turn the dream machine on," he said.
Pastor Ashimolowo, a Nigerian immigrant, started Kingsway
11 years ago, and it now claims about 10,000 members in
East London, along with thousands more elsewhere. Many are
from Africa, or their parents were.
They belong to a stream of European newcomers who were
already Christian when they arrived in Britain - or France
or Switzerland or Holland - but did not find in the
Protestant and Catholic churches of Western Europe what
they remembered and relished from home.
They wanted excitement, spontaneity and a kind of
inspiration that spoke directly to them. Throughout many
European cities, independent Pentecostal churches that are
unaffiliated with traditional denominations sprung up to
deliver that.
London today is full of them. Some are gigantic, like
Kingsway. Others inhabit narrow, indistinct storefronts in
working-class neighborhoods.
Worshipers often speak in tongues and take part in faith
healings, practices that have begun to crop up as well in
more traditional settings, like a United Reformed
congregation in East London.
A decade ago, that congregation had dwindled to fewer than
10 members, some white and some black. Then the Rev. John
Macauley from Sierra Leone took over. He gambled that the
future of the parish was in a more ebullient style of
worship.
"I was the only one clapping my hands back then, like I was
from Planet Cuckoo," he said.
But that sound and sensibility, which soon led to a drum
kit and baptismal pool on the altar, tugged new congregants
into his orbit. His church now has more than 250 members.
Both it and Kingsway deliver more than an adrenaline rush.
They strive to be practical, and they market themselves
that way.
At Kingsway, glossy brochures for a new religious seminar
promise advice on "how to be entrepreneurs," "mastering
your finances" and "managing your relationships."
There is emerging evidence that the promise of a tightly
knit community and a certain intensity of experience can
lure more affluent, established Europeans into church as
well, especially if those Europeans are young.
Some sociologists say new data suggest a possible
reawakening of Christian interest in people under 30, and
Christian movements throughout Europe are reaching out
aggressively to them.
The Emmanuel Community in France has wooed hundreds to
gatherings like one in Paris on a recent Saturday night,
where scores of well-dressed professionals nibbled quiche
and sipped wine in a courtyard under the moonlight.
Then, around 10 p.m., they hurried across the street to a
centuries-old cathedral where they titled their heads
backward, lifted their palms heavenward and rocked back and
forth, in thrall to a religious ardor that most of Europe
has lost.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/13/international/europe/13CHUR.html?ex=1067067327&ei=1&en=f25e1643b03cec77
Niebuhr thought that sustained moral energy in politics depended on religion's power to mobilize reason along with self-transcending love. The prophetic tradition, meanwhile, gave Jews and Christians some protection against the temptation to identify their social causes with God's will. Lincoln's second inaugural address expressed the prophetic insight, "The almighty has His own purposes." | | Back to Top | | |
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DLW
Registered Member
Date Joined Apr 2003
Total Posts : 2457
| Posted 10/13/2003 9:40 AM (GMT -6) | | quote:
Originally posted by Tigress
In my experience, non-Christian people don't want Christians participating in government if their Christian beliefs are what is influencing their political views. The non-Christians claim that we're not separating Church and State when we do that. Yet, we can't vote or participate in politics without our Christian morals and beliefs influencing our decisions because if we don't, we're compromising our faith and denying Christ's Lordship in our lives.
Yes, it wrong to view the separation of Church and State as their segregation, rather than their autonomy. I think though that we need to do a better job of translating our political views into terms that don't require for others to assent to our religous beliefs, to join us in supporting certain changes.
We get into this at the following thread over at TheoWeb...
www.theologyweb.com/forum/showthread.php?s=&threadid=11779
quote:
It seems better to leave the political realm to the non-Christians. When the Church in Europe got political, and eventually took over - that's what turns off Europeans from Christianity today. Plus, the Church became compromised and worldly when it did that, so that it became nothing more that a pawn of the devil.
The Church had always been political in Europe. The thing is that after the Protestant/Catholic Schism, it lost its autonomy from the gov't and became its mouthpiece.
Avoiding power, just lets others get more power and be unchecked in their use of it. As such, seeking purity/holiness can have the unintended consequence of permitting much that is wrong to occur.
Christianity fell, not because of us not being political, but because we weren't political enough. Political decisions were left to the elites/leaders who fell to easy to the sway of power...
I go into this at this other link where I give my views/analysis of the RCChurch...
http://www.theologyweb.com/forum/showthread.php?s=&threadid=11368
dlw
Niebuhr thought that sustained moral energy in politics depended on religion's power to mobilize reason along with self-transcending love. The prophetic tradition, meanwhile, gave Jews and Christians some protection against the temptation to identify their social causes with God's will. Lincoln's second inaugural address expressed the prophetic insight, "The almighty has His own purposes." | | Back to Top | | |
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DLW
Registered Member
Date Joined Apr 2003
Total Posts : 2457
| Posted 10/13/2003 10:06 AM (GMT -6) | | quote:
Originally posted by Tigress
I understand all that, but we're living in a nation where there are more than just Christians. And non-Christians resent a religious group having any sort of political power or influence. That would stand in the way of saving those non-Christians.
The Catholic church got greedy when it governed Europe and her kings. It wasn't just the Pope, Cardinals, and Bishops. The laity fully supported their religious leaders despite all the corruption. The Church leaders became like the Pharisees and other corrupt religious leaders in Israel of Jesus' day.
Well, if we are more autonomous as a group and hold the balance of power with reasonable moderate political goals then they will have to get used to us being a political factor.
Sure, but my point is not that we know what is "right" politically, but that we may participate in the political process and should be able to do so wrt more than just pursuing our self-interests.
quote:
I fear that American Christian leaders that are already active in politics today, are becoming more like those Jewish religious leaders and so appear bigoted and extreme to non-believers - turning them off to Christ. Only salvation can change hearts and therefore obedience to political laws. Jesus is more concerned with people's eternal salvation, than He is with the temporary obedience to mad-made laws by non-believers. Because again, once they get saved, they will obey those laws gladly - not before.
I agree that many of our "Christian" leaders are in the pockets of the Republican Parties and do us a disservice with their pharasaical ways. However, Jesus did criticize the laws/customs of the Jews of his day. He was political in the area in which he had voice. Wrt the Roman Empire, he like all the other Jews had no voice and so he didn't waste his scarce time on such things, but taught passive resistance deigned to change Roman hearts.
Our public behavior wrt politics is a public witness that will affect our ability to evangelize at the personal level. It will put up or tear down barriers to the Gospel. We Christians did play an important role in the politics in the past, the fact we didn't establish the millenium/Kingdom of God and got burned out politically after the Prohibition fiasco doesn't mean we shouldn't see our collective political activities as an important part of our collective witness that plays an important role in affecting our ability to make disciples of all nations.
dlw
Niebuhr thought that sustained moral energy in politics depended on religion's power to mobilize reason along with self-transcending love. The prophetic tradition, meanwhile, gave Jews and Christians some protection against the temptation to identify their social causes with God's will. Lincoln's second inaugural address expressed the prophetic insight, "The almighty has His own purposes." | | Back to Top | | |
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PotOnWheel
Registered Member
Date Joined Jul 2001
Total Posts : 9890
| Posted 10/14/2003 9:09 AM (GMT -6) | | Found on a Reformed discussion board, written by a Calvin Sem. prof.
quote:
. . .
One final postsciipt. If we want to learn lessons from history, then we should not only look at the history of doctrinal decline---tragically all too true---but also at the equally tragic history of schism. Today, the healthiest branch of the Reformed faith in the Netherlands arguably is found in the Gereformeerde Bond within the Hervormde Kerk---those who followed Groen van Prinsterer's advice and stayed rather than leave the national church. They may have been right even though they remained a minority and had little ecclesiastical power in the 19th Century. What if schism is the result of unholy desire for worldly influence and political power and remaining in a church a willingness to bear a cross? I've seen the results of schism in churches and families and I think that a life of humble cross bearing is preferable to the ecclesiastical power politics that has characterized Reformed church life during the last 200 years. That is of course true in a free country like ours---the 1834 secessionists were hounded by the state---theirs is a different story.
Surely something to think about ! ! ! ! | | Back to Top | | |
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PotOnWheel
Registered Member
Date Joined Jul 2001
Total Posts : 9890
| Posted 10/14/2003 9:12 AM (GMT -6) | | quote:
Originally posted by PotOnWheel
If we want to learn lessons from history. . .Today, the healthiest branch of the Reformed faith in the Netherlands arguably is found in the Gereformeerde Bond within the Hervormde Kerk---those who followed Groen van Prinsterer's advice and stayed rather than leave the national church. ..... What if schism is the result of unholy desire for worldly influence and political power and remaining in a church a willingness to bear a cross? ..... I think that a life of humble cross bearing is preferable to the ecclesiastical power politics that has characterized Reformed church life during the last 200 years.
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DLW
Registered Member
Date Joined Apr 2003
Total Posts : 2457
| Posted 10/14/2003 10:35 AM (GMT -6) | | Vatican eggs on Anglican split in US
http://www.guardian.co.uk/religion/...1060019,00.html
Cardinal praises conference planning break over gay bishop
Stephen Bates, religious affairs correspondent in Dallas
Friday October 10, 2003
The Guardian
“ The Vatican has publicly endorsed US Episcopalian hardliners gathered in Dallas to plan the breakup of their liberal national church.
In a surprise letter from Rome on behalf of Pope John Paul II, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the Catholic enforcer of doctrinal purity, wrote to the organisers praising their stand. Support has also come from one of Britain's most respected evangelicals.
Some 2,600 Episcopalians from all over the US, including up to 10% of its clergy, gathered to consider ways of extricating all those opposed to the appointment of Canon Gene Robinson, who lives with a male partner, as bishop of New Hampshire.Yesterday they acclaimed a motion repudiating the canon's election and calling on church leaders to repent and reverse "unbiblical and schismatic actions".
It added: "We declare our commitment to the Lord's life-giving teaching about sexuality and marriage embraced by Christians throughout all ages ... we celebrate God's unconditional love for all people, and we proclaim God's transforming power for everyone seeking sexual purity and wholeness."
There were standing ovations when the cardinal's letter was read out, and also for a message from John Stott, the London-based octogenarian former chaplain to the Queen. Mr Stott is revered in evangelical circles around the world as one of their modern founders, so much so that he is occasionally called the evangelical pope.
The moves increase pressure on the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, who has called an emergency meeting of the worldwide Anglican communion's 38 primates in London next week to discuss the threatened schism .
Yesterday's Dallas motion appealed to the primates to discipline the Episcopalian church (though in fact they have no power to do so), and guide the realignment of Anglicanism in north America. Observers in the mainstream Episcopalian church believe that, in practice, engineering a split in the US will be much more difficult than those at the conference have been led to believe. The church's canon law vests all its buildings in the national body, and it holds all the pension funds; any who left might find themselves out in the cold, or facing years of litigation.
Some African and developing world dioceses want to declare themselves out of communion with the more liberal US and Canadian churches - even though these provide large proportions of their funding. Yesterday the US Episcopalian church denied it was considering cutting its $106,000 (£70,000) grant to the Council of Anglican Provinces in Africa (a third of its budget), following the election of the most outspoken critic of gays, Archbishop Peter Akinola of Nigeria, to the organisation's presidency.
The cardinal wrote to the conference: "I hasten to assure you of my heartfelt prayers for all those taking part in this convocation. The significance of your meeting is sensed far beyond [Dallas] and even in this city, from which St Augustine of Canterbury was sent to confirm and strengthen the preaching of Christ's gospel in England ... I pray God's will may be done by all those who seek that unity in the truth, the gift of Christ himself."
Such an intervention in another church is highly unusual, though less so by the standards of the ailing pontiff's highly conservative court. The Vatican takes an even harder line than the evangelicals, issuing a document this year condemning homosexuality as evil and disordered. When Dr Williams made a visit to Rome last weekend, even though the Pope could hardly speak, he found breath to warn against any accommodation.
The letter will however also cause intakes of breath among some evangelical Anglicans still suspicious of Catholic good intentions, even though they may agree with the Vatican's sentiments.
At a session on Wednesday lawyers warned the conference not to take precipitate unilateral action: "This is no time for Lone-Rangerism," said one. Advice to dissident parishes in this land of litigation was, first, get a good lawyer and then only later to pray. The Rev Jan Nunley, spokeswoman for the national church, said: "I think people will go away from this conference feeling rather confused, expecting to see action for their money and not getting any for quite a while. You could say it was a case of the old Texas saying: All hat and no cattle."
Bishop Frank Griswold, primate of the church, who supported Gene Robinson and will attend next week's meeting in London, has thanked his bishops for their great grace in unsettling and uncertain days: "Whatever the outcome may be ... I hope all of us might move beyond a spirit of condemnation and reaction."
Niebuhr thought that sustained moral energy in politics depended on religion's power to mobilize reason along with self-transcending love. The prophetic tradition, meanwhile, gave Jews and Christians some protection against the temptation to identify their social causes with God's will. Lincoln's second inaugural address expressed the prophetic insight, "The almighty has His own purposes." | | Back to Top | | |
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PotOnWheel
Registered Member
Date Joined Jul 2001
Total Posts : 9890
| Posted 10/14/2003 11:31 AM (GMT -6) | | quote:
Originally posted by PotOnWheel
I think that a life of humble cross bearing is preferable to the ecclesiastical power politics that has characterized Reformed church life during the last 200 years.[/size=3]
THERE IS POWER IN THE CROSS.
ASK ST. FRANCIS.
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PotOnWheel
Registered Member
Date Joined Jul 2001
Total Posts : 9890
| Posted 10/14/2003 12:05 PM (GMT -6) | |
Matthew 6:21
For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.
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Tigress
Registered Member
Date Joined Feb 2003
Total Posts : 1252
| Posted 10/15/2003 7:59 AM (GMT -6) | | quote:
Originally posted by DLW
quote:
It does if the bishop openly practices homosexuality without repentance. Repentance, after all, means that one won't commit the sinful acts anymore.
You don't practice homosexuality, because homosexuality is a sexual orientation. He probably does have some form of relations with his longterm partner, but whether having such a relationship as a constitutional homosexual is sinning is another debate. If he was engaging in serial sexual relationships at gay-bars or pedophilia then that would be appropriate grounds for his being disbarred from church leadership altogether.
quote:
And furthermore, anyone who engages in sexual acts would only do so if they are attracted to/aroused by a same-sex person. Therefore the people in Paul's day who did this were also born gay or bi and therefore were what you call constitutional homosexuals. Those people were no different than what you call constitutional gays today and their acts were considered sin - therefore the acts of constitutional gays today are also sin.
You don't have to be a constitutional homosexual to engage in same-sex acts. We are influenced by social mores or their absence and there is room for us all to have some ambiguity in our sexuality.
This is part of why the LBGT message is so radically destructive of important social mores we have inherited.
dlw
What I'm saying is that there were what you call constitutional homosexuals in Paul's day, whether they were recognized as such or not, and they were still expected to not engage in sexual behavior of any kind in a homosexual way. To do so, would have been sin - just as it would be for straight people who chose to engage in gay and lesbian acts. No one can help who they're aroused by, so people who are mainly heterosexual and yet who sometimes get aroused by their same sex, are doing so because of something innate - just like those who are born strictly (constitutional) gay or lesbian. It's all the same - it's all sin. Stop trying to rationalize sin based on worldly pop psychology.
Tigress 
"Name a shrub after me. Preferably one that's prickly and difficult to eradicate."
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DLW
Registered Member
Date Joined Apr 2003
Total Posts : 2457
| Posted 10/15/2003 8:45 AM (GMT -6) | | quote:
What I'm saying is that there were what you call constitutional homosexuals in Paul's day, whether they were recognized as such or not, and they were still expected to not engage in sexual behavior of any kind in a homosexual way. To do so, would have been sin - just as it would be for straight people who chose to engage in gay and lesbian acts. No one can help who they're aroused by, so people who are mainly heterosexual and yet who sometimes get aroused by their same sex, are doing so because of something innate - just like those who are born strictly (constitutional) gay or lesbian. It's all the same - it's all sin. Stop trying to rationalize sin based on worldly pop psychology
Anybody else wanna handle Tigress for awhile?
I don't know the statistics for Roman times(I doubt there are any), but constitutional homosexuality occurs for a rather small fraction of individuals, I'm sure that homosexual acts were far more common in Roman times.
All I'm saying is that Paul didn't know about how some people were constitutional homosexuals and would have taken into account that fact if he had known about it. This is not pop-psychology but rigorous science.
dlw
Niebuhr thought that sustained moral energy in politics depended on religion's power to mobilize reason along with self-transcending love. The prophetic tradition, meanwhile, gave Jews and Christians some protection against the temptation to identify their social causes with God's will. Lincoln's second inaugural address expressed the prophetic insight, "The almighty has His own purposes." | | Back to Top | | |
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