Posted on 03/22/2012 7:58:02 AM PDT by darrellmaurina
Call a spade a spade...r2k is heresy.
The point I'm making here is that those who ignore the culture wars, including gay marriage, are not going to be spared. They're in for a most unpleasant surprise. Even if they don't want to fight in this culture war, the war will be coming to them, whether they like or or not......and soon!
Since I attend a PCA church, I figured I’d read the post and linked website to see what the issues are. It’s like walking into a cafeteria at the end of a food fight and trying to figure out what the original argument was about.
Traditions of men expanding to overfill the entire creation; obliverating everything He says and does:
“You are the salt of the earth; but if the salt has become tasteless, how can it be made salty again? It is no longer good for anything, except to be thrown out and trampled under foot by men.” Matthew 5:12-14
Let's be fair: that's an inherent problem of theology. Theologians write a lot and they're writing about complicated things. As Reformed Christians we're used to our preachers caring about doctrine in detail and that's not bad. We're not broad evangelicals who subscribe to a brief two-page statement of faith; we're Calvinists who subscribe to the Westminster Standards, Three Forms of Unity, or one of several other very detailed doctrinal standards with literally thousands of Scripture proof texts.
Also, “Two Kingdoms” advocates are all over the map on many issues. Some of them are probably more or less okay.
Others of them... well... let's let these quotes speak for themselves:
“In response to the question posed in #275, Pastor Stellman says that a pastor preaching on the sin of abortion and praying in pastoral prayers for the legality of abortion to be overturned wouldn’t turn any heads or cause any concerns at all. Such ministerial activity falls within Escondido 2K boundaries”
http://greenbaggins.wordpress.com/2012/02/29/review-of-_the-escondido-theology_-general-considerations/#comment-94597
OK, I can live with that though those aren't the words I would have used. I'm a little hesitant to say I like it given the context (see the following links for examples) but it's not too bad.
http://archbishop-cranmer.blogspot.com/2012/03/why-is-church-of-scotland-silent-on-gay.html
However, read this item by Jed Paschall and I think it frames the problem clearly. He's actually arguing that the church should not take a stand against legalization of gay marriage. However, read this item by Jed Paschall and I think it frames the problem clearly. He's actually arguing that the church should not take a stand against the legalization of gay marriage.
If that isn't one of the "cases extraordinary" envisioned by the confessions, I can't imagine what else could be.
If by speaking against gay marriage you mean, for example:
“We, ministers of the Church of ________ assert that the Scriptures clearly affirm that homosexuality is a sin. Moreover, we also assert that the Scriptures clearly affirm that marriage is to be shared between a man and a woman. Therefore, we affirm, in line with Biblical teaching that gay marriage is a sinful distortion of the biblical intent for human marriage and sexuality. As such, our congregations will neither condone nor perform gay marriages within our membership or clergy.”
Then, yes, I would say that this an important clarification of the church’s stance on a pressing cultural issues.
However, if we were to add to this example:
“…Furthermore, we call upon the state to maintain the biblical, creational norms regarding marriage, by banning all possibilities of gay marriages, etc, etc.”
I would say that the church qua church has overstepped itself, because they now are seeking to exercise power in the civil realm by enacting or endorsing policy. I do not believe that this lies within the charter of the Church given by Christ in the Great Commission. Now if an individual believer, speaking as a citizen were to petition the state in this manner, I would argue that he is fully within his freedoms to do so.
Read my post #6 on this thread, which has direct reference to the mess in the Church of Scotland. While Roman Catholics are fighting against gay marriage in England, the Church of Scotland (which has its own internal homosexual problem) is avoiding speaking out.
Rev. Jason Stellman, a PCA minister in Washington state who is a former missionary in Europe and is a prominent “two kingdoms” advocate, was asked what he thinks about whether the Church of Scotland (and by extension other Reformed bodies in Britain) have the right to speak up.
His answer was interesting, and not too bad.
The more radical “two kingdoms” people continued, however, to say the church ought not to be talking about gay marriages since it's a political rather than a religious question.
That is simply not biblical or Reformed.
At best, it's an overreaction to the craziness of twentieth-century liberalism in which the assemblies of the church wasted tremendous amounts of time fighting over whether to endorse liberal political goals, and (in the South) a sincere desire to follow the old Southern Presbyterian tradition of avoiding political statements on things like slavery. I believe the Southern Presbyterians were dead wrong on that — slavery was a moral issue and the slaveholders were wrong — but I can at least respect people who are following what they believe is an “Old School” theological conservative viewpoint.
At worst, this refusal to take a stand on “political questions” it's nothing but an attempt to carve out room in the church for liberal political positions.
(And no, none of you are on any kind of formal ping list; I'm simply sending this to people who I've noticed commenting on Calvinist postings and may be interested in the Reformed faith.)
When things have gotten to the point that there are “Two Kingdoms” advocates who profess to be conservative Calvinists but are seriously arguing that the church ought not to take a stand on gay marriage because it is a “political issue,” it's time for conservative Reformed laymen (and especially elders) to stand up and say, “Enough is enough!”
I have a long history with the URC and Westminster-West — up to and including being accepted for admission to the seminary many years ago and then deciding not to go for personal reasons totally unrelated to this “Two Kingdoms” issue. I have great respect for the seminary's founders, several of whom I know personally. I'm particularly pained because some of these “Two Kingdoms” advocates are deserving of real credit for many years of work done in the church to fight liberalism and heresy.
However, these views on politics being advocated by some of the Westminster-West professors (not all) are not just wrong but dangerous. They are harming the reputation of the seminary as well as causing problems in the church, and they need to be fought against now.
The stakes are simply too great to let politically uniformed pastors muddle things up for our churches. They may mean well, but they're causing major problems at a time when we need to be unified to fight against the culture wars that threaten to destroy what is left of biblical Christianity in America.
Excellent...thanks
We are commanded to spread the Gospel. That alone will change hearts, not passing laws.
We certainly don't disagree that the gospel alone changes hearts, but it's a matter of both-and, not either-or. Surely we should preach the gospel to liberals and pray that God converts them, but we also need to stop them from imposing their evil wickedness on society through congress, the courts, and lower legislative bodies.
2 posted on Thursday, March 22, 2012 10:06:24 AM by crghill: “Call a spade a spade...r2k is heresy.”
I can't agree, crghill. Take a look at the posts by guitarplayer1953 and gamecock. This is part of why I won't call R2K heresy — it's close enough to the old Southern Presbyterian “spirituality of the church” view that even some people here on Free Republic, who can be assumed to be right-wing politically active conservatives, are saying things which John Calvin and John Knox likely would have regarded either as anabaptist or as tending toward anabaptism.
Calvin and Knox believed in imposing not just general Christian principles but explicitly Reformed principles through civil law. I'm not advocating that for a long list of reasons, but there are issues where there can be no compromise between crystal-clear Christian values and the values of secular liberalism, and it's those issues on which I believe Christians must fight in modern America.
12 posted on Thursday, March 22, 2012 10:03:45 PM by guitarplayer1953: “Yes that is true and that is why Ben F. said you can not legislate morality.”
Benjamin Franklin was not a Christian by any evangelical definition of that word. The idea that government can't legislate morality is totally false: government will **ALWAYS** be legislating someone’s version of morality. The only question is **WHOSE** version.
Leftist liberals typically value personal choice over all else, and therefore advocate things such as homosexual marriage and women's “rights” to choose to abort their babies. They may call it “human rights” or “values” rather than morality, but there's no difference between liberals passing laws in accord with their values and conservatives passing laws in accord with our values.
Christians can't get around these issues. Either our government will say women have a right to kill their babies, or our government will say babies have a right to life and should be protected. Same for gay marriage. There is no middle ground. Christians have to either follow the anabaptists and say Christians have no need to be concerned about government (in which case, posting on Free Republic is quite inconsistent) or we have to fight against wickedness in our courts and legislatures and congress.
9 posted on Thursday, March 22, 2012 5:28:57 PM by guitarplayer1953: “One question did Christ ever speak out against Rome (government)? No He spoke out against the religious leadership.”
Jesus was not a Roman citizen and had no right under Roman law to speak out against the government. Paul, who was a Roman citizen, could and did demand his rights under the law.
Look at this, for example:
Romans 16:35-39: 35 When it was daylight, the magistrates sent their officers to the jailer with the order: “Release those men.” 36 The jailer told Paul, “The magistrates have ordered that you and Silas be released. Now you can leave. Go in peace.” 37 But Paul said to the officers: “They beat us publicly without a trial, even though we are Roman citizens, and threw us into prison. And now do they want to get rid of us quietly? No! Let them come themselves and escort us out.” 38 The officers reported this to the magistrates, and when they heard that Paul and Silas were Roman citizens, they were alarmed. 39 They came to appease them and escorted them from the prison, requesting them to leave the city.
The fact that we participate on Free Republic is proof that we want to change our government's seriously wrongheaded views and want to stop liberals from legislating their version of morality.
It's time we speak up and stop letting liberals run our government, and to the extent that they've wrongly taught our ministers that Christians can't speak up, we need to convince our ministers that the Bible not only allows but arguably requires Christian citizens to try to stop evil in the world around them.
I don't have a problem with saying that the church isn't typically the best organization to speak out officially and formally. Individual Christians are usually better equipped to do that than the church as institute. However, the leftists aren't satisfied with emasculating the church and want to stop all Christians, not just institutional churches, from speaking out against evil, and unfortunately, they're being aided and abetted by some people advocating R2K views inside some Reformed churches.
But it's also true that bad laws do change hearts, and in the wrong way.
It's also true that there's such a thing as objective moral truth (also called "natural law"), and civil laws ought to correspond to that objective moral truth unless there's a very, very good reason not to in specific cases. (For example, because the government is sufficiently corrupt that it can't be trusted with the additional power.)
Why? Well, for one thing, correspondence to objective truth ("reality") is the definition of sanity. Laws permitting, e.g., abortion are literally insane, and it's insane not to oppose them.
Don't forget the "community effects". Laws that permit (or worse, encourage) bad things mean that you and your family have to live in a society where those bad things are tolerated. Straight from scripture: "Bad company corrupts good morals." Well, a society that legislates bad things is "bad company".
Finally, God judges nations as well as individuals. Much of the Old Testament was written to tell that story.
Being crucified as a political rebel wasn't his mission. Jesus was a member of a subjugated people in a state which was effectively a more-or-less benevolent (and utterly pagan) dictatorship.
Is that the kind of America you want your grandchildren to inherit?
Infiltrate and destroy from within.
AMEN!!!
Read your bible the last days will be as the days of Noah, the whole world is going to hell in a hand basket and that is the way the plan is, all of creation groans for the day of the new heavens and the new earth.
As a conservative, I certainly affirm what the First Amendment says, namely, that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” I am in no way an advocate of official state-sanctioned established churches with government-paid clergy, and I don't want to have civil rulers prohibit members of Catholic parishes, Unitarian churches, or Jewish synagogues from exercising their faith — though precisely that was happening in parts of colonial America.
I strongly suspect that won't answer your question, so let's clarify my answer with the original intent of the founders.
John Adams wrote that “We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion ... Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
Seems pretty good to me.
Let's take a look at the views of another Founding Father who, in addition to being the primary author of the Declaration of Independence, was a governor of Virginia, then one of the most powerful states. Perhaps especially important for this purpose, Thomas Jefferson was the author of the Statute of Virginia for Religious Freedom, probably the most “liberal” of the colonial documents on that subject apart from the two historically tolerant colonies of Rhode Island and Pennsylvania.
Jefferson had certain views about homosexuality. He was the head of a committee which wrote this law: “Whosoever shall be guilty of Rape, Polygamy, or Sodomy with man or woman shall be punished, if a man, by castration, if a woman, by cutting thro’ the cartilage of her nose a hole of one half diameter at the least.”
http://www.monticello.org/site/research-and-collections/bill-64
I think I might argue that Jefferson's penalty for homosexuality could perhaps be modified to be a bit less harsh, and I think I might argue, contra Adams, that an atheist can be a good citizen of America, but Jefferson and Adams give pretty clear indicators of how the Founding Fathers would have applied their views of religious freedom to our current discussions in modern America.
In this regard, I ought to add that Jefferson was a Deist and Adams was a Unitarian. These were two of the most religiously liberal Founding Fathers.
If castrating homosexuals and saying atheists can't be good Americans is included in the proper “original intent” definition of religious freedom, I think it's pretty obvious that modern Americans use the words "religious freedom" very differently from what the Founders meant.
I've given you facts which show pretty clearly that America today has greatly changed from what the Founders intended. You may think that change is good, and to some extent I may agree with you. What you can't do is argue that my views are something out of line with the Founders — except that they might consider me to be too liberal in my views of what should be tolerated.
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