Faith: October 2019 Archives
Is the Church Abandoning Its People in Their Toughest Dilemmas? - Tom Gilson - Thinking Christian
"Three ethical dilemmas, each of them a true story. What do they have in common, other than the obvious?
"An analyst working at a major corporate headquarters says, 'If I eat lunch at Chick-fil-A, I don't dare mention it when I return to work. Chick-fil-A is 'homophobic,' they say, and they'll report me to HR for creating a hostile work environment.'
"All the managers in one corporate department have placed LGBT 'Ally' stickers on their office doors. All but one, that is: the one Christian there, who feels caught. By not putting a sticker on his own door, he's making an unpopular statement -- one that could earn him disciplinary action.
"A manager at another corporation sees his company throwing great public support behind last June's LGBT "Pride" month. He feels an ethical urgency to talk to his boss about the Christian view being overlooked -- if not outright steamrolled -- in the process. His boss is homosexual, by the way.
"I didn't make up these stories. These are friends of mine. At first, when the one friend mentioned the Chick-fil-A issue, I thought he was exaggerating for effect, but he assured me he was deadly serious.
"Obviously all three of these are about dilemmas these friends have faced at work. But they've got one more thing in common: Not one of them has ever heard any clear advice from the pulpit on how to handle tough situations like these."
Found via The Stream
The Gospel Coalition's Drift Toward Identity Politics - Sovereign Nations
"[Colin Hansen] writes, 'If millennials and Gen Y don't learn from [Young, Restless, and Reformed] leaders how the gospel equips them to fight the injustice they see as they scroll through their Twitter timelines, will they choose to look elsewhere for leadership, purpose, and belonging?'
"The big worry is that the older generations will fail to understand our cultural moment and, as a result, fail to address the younger generations' most pressing concerns. Without equipping them with ways to fight injustice, they will look elsewhere. They will leave the Church.
"In the much-discussed Q&A at the 2019 Shepherd's Conference, Ligon Duncan affirms a similar view. He says, 'I don't want to drive our grandchildren into the arms of the LGBT issue....who are already wavering on a whole host of cultural issues.' This abandonment of Christianity would happen, he argues, if the church fails to get serious about what energizes the younger generations, namely, matters of social justice, particularly racial injustice.
"So we have an important council member and the lead editor of The Gospel Coalition affirming that the purpose of the shift to social justice in the last few years is to keep Millennials (Gen Y) and Generation Z in the faith....
"In a recent article in The Gospel Coalition, Rebecca McLaughlin, who seems to be enjoying an ascendancy in TGC circles, calls for Christians to 'go on the offensive.' But the nature of this offence is quite startling. She claims that we must take 'our lead from those with the credibility to speak' and she's clear on what constitutes 'credibility.'...
"Only certain voices are 'credible' and can 'be heard.' Absent from the A-team in the public square is the straight white man--the identity that represents homophobia, racism, and misogyny. McLaughlin is not seeking to elevate marginalized voices so that all can equally speak truth in Christ to the world. Rather she is calling for a sort of reverse marginalization. McLaughlin's strategy involves nothing less than the marginalization of the straight white man. And if this interpretation of her words seems extreme, she confirms it in an interview with Colin Hansen for The Gospel Coalition: "'But in an age where who you are determines what you have the right to say, we also need to stop fielding straight white men.'"
The Amazon Synod Is a Sign of the Times | Douglas Farrow | First Things
"The Synod of the Amazon is a sign of the times. So its Instrumentum laboris says. Who could disagree? And what times these are! Some are saying hopefully that the Synod of the Amazon will change the Church forever, that the Church will never be the same again. Others are saying that the Synod is an instrument of apostasy. In the grim humor of Dom Giulio Meiattini, 'if there is still something Christian in this Instrumentum laboris, that is, a few words and expressions here and there, there is no need to worry: it is undoubtedly biodegradable!'
"Biodegradable Christianity--now there is a sign of the times, a sign of our times. For our times are times in which even the faith of the Catholic Church threatens to disappear into the wetlands of our own confused and decaying cultures. Our times are times when eco-theology in the Amazon basin and sexual theologies in the bowels of Europe can, with a 'liberationist' flourish, flush the gospel of Jesus Christ down Leonardo Boff's drain."
A Paper Church by Julia Yost | Articles | First Things
"But the appetite for papal pronouncements is perennial, and it reveals the ultramontane clerisy as a distinct class with its own ideology and interests. In the Francis pontificate, ultramontane discourse declares that capital punishment must be abolished; that climate change is un-Catholic; that plastics in the ocean are worse than sex abuse; that national borders are worse still; that mercy entails never excluding the stably married from communion, even to save their souls.
"From the start of his pontificate, Francis has posed a hermeneutic Âchallenge. Conservative papalists struggle to regularize his verbal output with their notions of the privileges of infallibility. ('What did he say? Peter can't say that. Ergo, he meant something other than what he said.') A few years in, one commentator was reduced to presenting the Holy Father as a practitioner of Straussian esoteric writing who sneaks subversive conservative messages into apparently progressive texts.
"...papalism pursued too far dictates piety to the person of the pope at the expense of the tradition he nominally secures."
