Conservatives and liberals generally use dramatically different lenses to interpret the Bible. Christian conservatives tend to emphasize an interpretation of the Bible that doesn’t change with the times. They say the Bible describes marriage as only between a man and a woman.
“You’ve got the California Supreme Court rewriting sacred heritage,” said Steve Madsen, pastor of Cornerstone Fellowship, an evangelical megachurch in Livermore.
Liberal Christians tend to emphasize that divine revelation can come from many places, even outside the church. For example, many denominations don’t allow same-sex marriages, while California law does.
“Culture is going to manifest Christ in a way that summons the church to new realities,” said Episcopal Bishop Marc Andrus.
[blockquote] “Culture is going to manifest Christ in a way that summons the church to new realities,” said Episcopal Bishop Marc Andrus.[/blockquote]
If I am going to follow culture I don’t need Christianity.
Culture manifests Christ to the church?!?!?! Wow. So much for being called to be salt & light. No, we don’t need to transform the culture, we are to be transformed by it.
That is a pretty good synopsis of what’s wrong with TEC in a single sentence.
Good for the SF Chronicle for digging deeper to find the “WHY” behind the actions of liberal Christians vs. conservative Christians in regards to Proposition 8.
Two different views of truth, authority and the source & nature of revelation. Bingo.
I have harped on for years about what I see as the fundamentally Erastian foundations of Anglicanism and Anglican churches, most explicitly (if polemically) here:
http://www.newoxfordreview.org/reviews.jsp?did=0599-tighe
And if one should object, understandably, that the Episcopal Church had never been the established church in any US state since 1790 (when it was disestablished in South Carolina), I will reply simply with that distinction (which I first heard from Fr. Geoffrey Kirk of FIF/UK) between “the Established Church” (CofE) and “the Church of the Establishment” (TE”C”), and affirm that the latter’s inveterate confounding of the Zeitgeist with the Heilig Geist produces results as profound and even apostatical in their consequences as ceding authority in spiritualibus to Caesar (which is what the English Reformation, as a legal and political process, effected).
I have posted this comment here, but it would apply just as well, if not better, to the succeeding posting on “communion of the unbaptized” — a piece of Erastianism that even Dr Erastus himself might have boggled at.
A Christian MUST believe that the Church should try to shape the culture, not be shaped by the culture. “Bishop” Andrus is a prime example of the problem of TEC, they have denied the authority of scripture, which is not unclear as to homosexuality, and he and his “brothers and sisters” in the TEC House of Bishops have collectively denied Christ as divine. They are not fit to be called Christian leaders. They are the servents of Satan and are condeming their followers to Hell by their actions. The remaining Chritian Clergy within TEC need to be fighting this culture of Satan, not promoting it.
Dr. Tighe, please explain “erastian.” Larry
Once again, I post a favorite quote from Dr. Martin Luther King:
“The church once changed society. It was then a thermostat of society. But today I feel that too much of the church is merely a thermometer, which measures rather than molds popular opinion.”
-Dr. Martin Luther King, Interview by Playboy Magazine, 1965.
It is often helpful to discern the third or fourth [i]underlying[/i] level of “why.” In this case, I suspect the religious Left knows that regardless of however they might attempt to parse the Bible on homosexuality, there is absolutely no doubt what Scripture says about sex outside of marriage — fornication and adultery.
Therefore … if they can arrange for same-sex “marriage,” the fornication and adultery arguments will be rendered moot. Problem solved. In their childish minds, at least.
“Erastian” is explained, briefly, in the review that I linked.
Thomas Erastus (d. 1585) was a German Calvinist physician. By the Religious Peace of Augsburg of 1555, which put an end to the first round of religious warfare in Germany, German princes were able to choose to be Lutheran or Catholic, and either to enforce their chosen religion on their subjects or to grant a degree of toleration to adherents of the other confession (but they were forbidden to put to death adherents of the other confession if they chose not to tolerate them, merely to expel them from their territories). Other forms of Christianity (Reformed Christianity, or Calvinism, on the one hand, and “Radicals” such as the Anabaptists) remained illegal, and hence subject to persecuation.
The period from 1560 to 1615 is known to some as the “Second Reformation,” in which a number of German Lutheran princes and states embraced Calvinism, and enforced a Calvinist Reformation upon their territories. These was a distinct minority of German Protestants, but included some significant states, such as Bremen (1565), Brandenburg (1613) and, first of them all, the Palatinate (1560), centered on Heidelberg. (Few German Catholic territories, if any, embraced Calvinism; the Calvinists claimed to be “completing” the Reformation that Luther began by eliminating its resuidue of Catholic beliefs and practices. German Catholics, by and large, applauded the Second Reformation as both demonstrating and promoting Protestant disunuity — a number of German states and rulers “reverted” to Catholicism as a consequence of intra-Protestant strife — while Lutherans detested it, and wished to have recourse to forceful methods to halt it, but could never agree among themselves, not secure the cooperation of Catholics, to undertake it.)
Among the features of German Calvinism that distinguished it from Lutheranism was a strong belief in moral discipline, usually involving draconian penalties for moral offenses (such as the death penalty for adultery); and one aspect of this was the exclusion from the infrequently-celebrated Lord’s Supper of notorious “public sinners” and “profane persons.” The issue in the Palatinate was whether determining the grounds for excommunication, the act of excommunication itself, and the lifting of excommunication for those determined to be properly penitent, was to be determined by the civil authorities or by the clergy and “consistories” (church governing boards composed of ministers and select laity, such as church “elders”). The former was the system of most Swiss cantons that had embraced the Reformation, the latter that of Geneva (and, later on, of Scottish Presbyterians). Dr Erastus was a radical proponent of the former view, insisting not only that church discipline was entirely a matter for the civil authority (or “the godly prince”) to determine, but that the same civil authority should determine which doctrines are essential, which are not, which opinions constituted heresy, and whether or not heresy should be punished, and, if so how; and it was Dr. Erastus’s views that triumphed in Calvinist Germany.
In England, it was the single biggest difference between the Presbyterians that triumphed in Scotland in the 1630s (and again in 1689) and the English “Puritans” who wanted in the 1640s to replace episcopacy with either presbyterianism or congregationalism as the polity of the Church of England that while the Scots were clericalist and anti-Erastian, almost all the English were Erastians. In reality, however, the Church of England itself, however much the survival of much of its pre-Reformation structure may have disguised the fact, was thoroughly governed on Erastian principles from 1559 onwards, and the odium that attached to Archbishop Laud and his fellow-bishops in the 1630s was due as much to their percieved desire to free the Church of England from State control (with the “duped” acquiescence of King Charles I), as to their supposed “popish” theological inclinations.
I am well instructed. I appreciate this, Dr. Tighe. I should have gone to your link. Now, that WAS instructive. My thanks. Larry