Posted on 01/30/2017 11:25:25 AM PST by Maudeen
The gender war has now moved from bathroom regulations and into the recommended language in theology classes.
The divinity schools at Duke and Vanderbilt Universities have rekindled debate, previously addressed at Notre Dame and Harvard, by issuing gender neutral guidance to their professors.
(Excerpt) Read more at prophecynewswatch.com ...
They better buy their lightning rod hats now before they’re sold out
God, the Father and Creator, is not amused. He has commanded that we pray “in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.” These false prophets will be rejected by the Father.
Why do they even have divinity schools since religion has lost it’s meaning for them? Seems to me they are holding out until they remove all the values of faith and morality from our culture.
This is becoming more and more a problem, even in Biblical evangelical churches. Seminaries are now refusing to teach Bible prophecy and the young pastors barely know half of the Bible. They don’t teach the End Times events of Daniel, Ezekiel, Matthew, Mark, Luke or Revelation. These problems are seeping deeper and deeper into the church. When my wife and I changed churches a couple of years ago, because our old pastor died and the new one was as dumb of the Bible as a box of rocks, we had to visit over 10 different churches before we found a church were the pastor taught the entire Bible. This was a very small church with less than 110 people. The larger churches, 150-750 in our area all had liberal pastors or ignorant of the Scriptures. It is an extremely sad testimony of our churches.
This subject makes me more apprehensive of Pope Francis’ impending change to the liturgy.
Our church has just finished a sermon series regarding the core beliefs that we, as followers of Jesus, would die for. Beliefs that simply cannot be compromised and which we will not budge on.
First among those “To die for” beliefs is that the Bible is the word of God. The Bible is unambiguous, certain, and consistent in referring to God as our Father. God made Adam in HIS image.
If you do not believe that God is your father then you are simply not a believer in the Bible or a believer in God
I gotta keep looking up. Christ is coming back any day now.
No need to stock up on salt. There will be pillars of it before long.
Lemme guess, the Pope is all for this. I got it right, huh.
What about spirits that aren’t holy? Are we to exclude them?
Man creating a god in their own image. A manufactured god, even if it has some similarity to the True God, is an idol. And we know what the Bible teaches about idol worship.
Uh. Think God made male and female in His image.
Same here. When I started looking, it took me ten years to find something and thousands of miles on the car. My new church (LCMS) is very small. Maybe 50 or 60 attend on Sunday. I live in the Baltimore metro area.
We are no longer “slouching towards Gomorrah”; we’re galloping. And these fake religion divinity schools are helping to lead the charge.
Jesus is my authority. He said, “Father” (masculine in Greek); that settles it for me.
Idiots...might as well pray to lent balls.
Fortunately for us, people like John Tyndale, Jan Hus and others died so that we could read the Bible in our native tongue and teach ourselves.
Oh, that America had more churches like yours. May God Bless you and your congregation.
Jesus is the one who instructed us to “pray saying our Father”. I suppose Duke thinks themselves above Christ.
Recently someone complained about the way we name God in the liturgy. I thought I’d share that conversation just in case one of our readers worries about similar things.
The basis of the complaint, as far as I can tell, was an underlying objection to the use of masculine language. The formula, “Creator, Sustainer, and Redeemer” seems like a more inclusive way of naming God, at least from the plaintiff’s perspective.
I don’t want to enter into a debate about whether we should or should not strive for more inclusive language in the liturgy. I take it as a given that we want what we say about God to be serious and true. I postulate the standard I embraced at Duke: it’s a good thing to avoid the suggestion that God has a gender in the sense we mean when we tell stories of Zeus or Jupiter, for then our words would not be serious and true.
I want instead to focus narrowly on the question raised about using a formula like “Creator, Sustainer, and Redeemer” as a substitute for the traditional trinitarian name of “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.” On the surface it seems like it doesn’t matter. But there is a good reason that most theologians I know resist that particular way of avoiding the suggestion that God has the male gender.
The problem is that the formula deploys functions or attributes to name God. The point about not using function titles to name God is that God is not a functionary. God is One whom we know only in a personal way. God is personal. Which is to say God is one with whom we live a history and we know only through history. To name God merely as Creator is like naming Mom as Cook, Chauffeur, Nurse, etc. The Mom we know is far more than any attributes we could use to describe her. No one who loves Mom would name her based on her utility to us. No one who loves God should name God based on God’s utility to us. Rather, we use language that denotes the reality of a profound, ongoing relationship. We don’t objectify Mom and we don’t objectify God. Faith is relational.
The essential point is to protect our truth-telling commitment to naming God as One with whom we have a personal relationship, a history, and as One whom we know only through that history. Just as any good Mom is known to us through the infinite things we share in life – the loving, caring history of our mutual participation in each other – so, too, is God known to us through our mutual history, our mutual indwelling. God is not a function or an attribute, but One we know always as Person.
Humans know many gods, but the Church consists of those who tell the story of a particular God, distinct from Zeus, Baal, Thor, and “the god in the rock over there.” We can’t narrate the richness of this theodrama of which we are a part without telling you about our personal experience of the God we know in the deepest places of our soul.
The Christian naming of God using the Trinitarian formula begins with Jesus. Christians know God as revealed in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, who, when he referred to God, named him as “Father,” which is why we name Jesus, “Son.” As Robert Jenson notes, “Spirit” is the enabling future of Christian community. “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit” is the most compact telling of our story with God that is possible, for the name encapsulates the totality of human history and our future with God.
It is true that God is the One who creates, sustains, and redeems. And it is appropriate to name God, as my bishop frequently does, as “God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, whom we know as our Creator, Sustainer, and Redeemer.” But without the prior naming of God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit our language could refer to any god – an allusion to a god who is merely creator, sustainer, and redeemer could name any and all human gods. It does not specify the distinct One whom we know through Jesus – it does not point to our history. And thus it is just another name for “the god of ultimate vagueness” (as Stanley Hauerwas famously dubbed that god).
That’s why we name God as we do in the liturgy.
It's hard to improve the old standards.
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