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Gandalf_wise

Listed below are comments made by Gandalf_wise between Saturday, 5th July 2008 and Saturday, 19th July 2008.

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Should the government 'implement God's Law' 10:35am on 19 Jul 2008 Reconstructionism!!?? Heaven help us! Imprisonment for adultery and working on Sunday? How does the Government enforce the worship of God rather than idols? What is binding on Christians is not to have these laws written into the stature book, but to make sure that we "love God with all our hearts souls and minds" and "our neighour a ourselves", which was how Jesus summarised and a-temporalised the Mosaic law. That will give us plenty of work to attend to without having to rewrite the law of the land in the terms of the Sinai covenant. That would be entirely to miss the point of the both that covenant and the New Covenant in which it is both fulfilled and surpassed.
Gay man takes the Bible to court 1:48pm on 14 Jul 2008 Yes indeed. The Bible has a great deal to answer for. The apostle Paul, if he were alive today, would (rightly?) be hauled before the courts. He routinely maligns the behaviour of homosexuals, adulterers, thieves, alirs and many others. It's about time some of the victims of these repugnant prejudices started to stand up against the abusive language with which Paul and other Biblical writers lash out these practices. Let's not stop at homosexuals. All of us at some time or other cannot fail to feel that the Bible is "getting at us". Let's do something about it! Let's get that hideous book banned from the public square. What right does anyone have to tell us how we should be living or not be living? I recommend public book-burning, in the absence of the kind of legislation that would enable us to stage an auto da fe.
My Archbishop is a 'false teacher' says priest 10:14pm on 06 Jul 2008 ANd by the way Marcus Aurelius, the Faraday institute in Cambridge is actually made up of Christian theists who are also scientists in a variety of fields, the majority of whom, if not all, also accept, without blushing, evolution and natural selection as the dynamic whereby the created order, once initiated, developed into what we see around us today. They are also, as it happens, evangelical inerrantists. They don't believe that the Bible made mistakes in scientific description of phenomena when its purpose was not in fact to offer a scientific description of the said phenomena.
My Archbishop is a 'false teacher' says priest 10:08pm on 06 Jul 2008 The Catholic church did not fight the advance of science, and the Protestant reformers positively stimulated it. Copernicus, Galileo, Descartes and Pascal were all Catholic theists. Kepler, Newton, Locke, Priestley, and Faraday (to name but a few) were all Protestant theists and their work in science was faith-driven rather than faith-hampered. How on earth did people get hold of the idea that the Christian faith somehow held back the advance of science. The opposite is in fact the case. Even Richard Dawkins admits that without the Christian faith, the belief in a Law-giver behind every scientific law, science in the West would never have got off the ground!
Peter Tatchell says homosexuality 'isn't natural' 7:35pm on 06 Jul 2008 It'd be interesting to gauge reactions to Thatchell's comments here. I actually agree with a lot of wht he says, but the implications are scary. What he is saying is not that the 5% or so of people who are born gay should be given all the help and support that they need as they come to terms with who they are, with who God or nature has made them. He is saying that a predisposition one way or the other can be overcome ... several times! He does not actually seem to consider switching from gay to hetrerosexual as an option (except in the interests of collecting. aother experience) . This is actually the tenor of a lot of talk from the gay lobby. They want to see themselves as constructing, deconstructing and reconstructing their sexual identities. And they seem to think, judging from Thatchell's comments, that the more that dynamic is going on, and the more people there are wh are doing it, the better. It is at this point that the discourse of the gay lobby, in so far as this is what they are saying, becomes deeply subversive of social cohesion. The main (or indeed only) reference point is myself, and whatever I want myself to be, and whoever I want to have sex with and however long I want the arrangement to last. There is no long-haul commitment to "the other" (of whichever sex- that's not the issue at the moment). My only commitment is to my "self" - that is to the "self" that I happen to want to be at any given time. This is the me-centred quicksand that certain members of the gay lobby (not all homosexuals!) want to plunge us into. The Christian church must not be so naive as to imagine that their agenda is all about helping people to be themselves as God made them. We must listen to the voices of those who insist (as even Peter Thatchell does, in fact) that this so-called natural predisposition can be challenged. If it is to be challenged, however, it should not be in the pursuit of an undetermined, open-ended and multi-variable sexual "identity", but in the interest of social cohesion and stability for the families that we are nurturing.
Archbishop of Armagh says St Paul may be wrong about homosexuality 1:13pm on 06 Jul 2008 Brian, I'm sorry but your view on the Bible's position re slavery and the role of wome is just plain wrong. It was into a society that was systematically and visciously sexist and slave-ridden that the Christian gospel was first preached. And the results were revolutionary, with women (not just the members of the aristocratic elites as in Roman society) enjoying a status and respect within the Christian church that they could never even have dreamed of having in contemporary society. Here was a community too where slaves and masters were treated as equals, and treated each other as equals. Paul might not have launched abolitionist campaigns, but with the kind of dynamic inherent in the Christian gospel (when obediently adhered too) slavery could not survive, except as something akin to employment in the sense we understand it.

The Christian church caved in to surrounding culture, and ended up endorsing slavery in colonial times, with spurious justificatio. We cannot cave in to surrounding culture now!
Archbishop of Armagh says St Paul may be wrong about homosexuality 07:05am on 06 Jul 2008 Augustine, the bible was NOT wrong about slavery, divorce or taxation. The kind of "slavery" that was endorsed in the Old Testament was more like our preset-day "wage dependence" employmet structure than it was like the kind of slavery that (mainly Christian) abolitionists launched their campaign against in the 19th century. Slaves in the Old Testament did not "belong" to their "owners". They belonged to God, and every 7 years all slaves who wanted to move on were liberated. The arrangement was the means whereby those who did have land of their own to farm could nevertheless make a living by farming someone else's. But they came and went as they wished, they lived with their own families - they were, to all intents and purposes, like employees. The Bible did not conceive of slavery as the purchase of another human being as if he or she were just another possession, or a "beast of labour". That kind of slavery would have (and did - if you read the prophets) incur divine anger and bring down God's judgement on the nations.

Yes the church IS in danger (as the Israelite people were then) of sliding sleepily into the moral quicksand of the surrounding culture, and of that, rather than the Word of God, becoming the "measuring rod" of the sexual and other practices they approve of and indulge in. That was how Israel in the OT and large swathes of Christendom throughout the history of the church sold out; that was why God's people (in the Old Testament) actually ended up depriving the poor and the "alien" of justice, sacrificing their children to Molech, engaging in ritual prostitution in the temple itself; that was why "Christian crusaders" stormed into Palestine wreaking havoc on the people living their and pillaging their towns and villages; that was why, in the 18th and 19th centuries, they looked for Scriptural "justification" for the trade in human flesh. If we are unfaithful to God we do indeed end up "reflecting the cultural prejudices" of the age we live in. That is why the Church must take a stand against this cultural tidal wave that would sweep aside the foundational (from the point of view of the stability of human society) principles regarding sexual morality. Christians who insist on this are not anachronistic kill-joys. They are arguing for adherence to a life-enhancing and society-enhancing Biblical paradigm without which the fabric of society is in danger of unravelling.
Archbishop of Armagh says St Paul may be wrong about homosexuality 8:32pm on 05 Jul 2008 Portwyne, this is not a historical error. It is the Bible's teaching with regard to what behaviour God approves of and what he does not. If Paul (and Christ himself for that matter) is wrong about what arrangement of individuals legitimately constitutes a one-flesh relationship, then why stop at homosexuality? Can any human sexual relationship reflect the covenantal relationship between God and mankind which is central to Paul's teaching and central to the whole Bible?
Archbishop of Armagh says St Paul may be wrong about homosexuality 7:41pm on 05 Jul 2008 Graham I agree with you 100% here. If we conclude that Paul was wrong about sexuality (and you are right to point out the difference between "natural" as being in conformity with the created order and "natural" in the sense of what individuals are driven or inclined towards by instinct) then whay should be believe that he was right about anything? Was he not equally prone to error when he wrote about justification by faith, the implications of the resurrection for the whole of creation? We cannot do that with Scripture. Skeptics do it, of course, for the whole of Scripture. There is no such thing for them as an authoritative and absolutely binding Word of God. It's all down to "common sense" (or rather "common sentiment"), pragmatic, eclectic, consequentialist ethics - and more often than not "whatever the prevailing culture happens to endorse". It really seems as if large swathes of the Christian church are sliding into this kind of skepticism: "Did God really say ...?" (Satan to Eve)
'Stand up to Gafcon bullying' 10:53am on 05 Jul 2008 Edited version:

I must say that though not an Anglican I fully identiy with Tom Wright's comments here. He makes a very telling point about the inherent instability of the "coalition" that Gafcon represents. It simply must remain possible for conservative evangelicals to continue to be outspoken in their opposition to same sex marriage and the appointment of gay bishops, but from within the Anglican communion. Driving them into a spurious coalition with people with whom the only thing they have in common is their opposition to gay marriages cannot be right. It's a kind of press-gang, which Wright and others are right to hold out against.

And by the way Graham, I think Tom Wright's views on justification have been misunderstood. He is as fully committed to the doctine of substitutionary atonement as any evangelical scolar in the UK or the US. He may not seem as clear-cut as we would like on the issue of when justification takes effect: at the moment of conversion or in the final judgement. But then the apostle James also said that justification was validated by works ("faith without works is dead"), which necessarily come after and not before conversion.

I think Tom Wright is a voice that not only Anglicans but also all the rest of us need to start listening to, on the subject of GAFCON and on every other issue that he addresses.

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