Fr. Lawrence Farley, an Orthodox priest, says that those “Christians” who revise the church’s teaching on marriage are preaching another Jesus, not the Jesus of the Bible. He writes: Groups that preach another Jesus and another Gospel are rightly regarded by us now as heretically non-Christian, and thus the Orthodox Church does not have an official ecumenical dialogue with Mormons (that I know of) or with Jehovah’s Witnesses. Our message to them is simply “Repent and believe”; we do not meet with them for wine and cheese to discuss Christology at conferences or produce scholarly papers at symposia about the thought of Joseph Smith or Charles Taze Russell. In the…
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Three Observations about Tony Campolo’s acceptance of committed gay relationships
Tony Campolo has released a statement today calling for “full acceptance of Christian gay couples into the Church.” Campolo has long been a stalwart of the theological left, so this announcement is no surprise. Still, it is significant as another prominent leader moves away from the faith once for all delivered to the saints. He is not the first to have done this, and he will not be the last. American Christianiaty will be in a period of winnowing for the foreseeable future, and there will be more to come. A few observations about Campolo’s announcement:
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Bruce or Caitlyn? He or she? Should Christians accommodate transgender naming?
How should Christians respond to transgenderism in general and Bruce Jenner’s “transition” in particular? I think Christians are at their best when they recognize a need for both compassion and truth-telling. Compassion for those who experience painful alienation from their own bodies and truth-telling in the face of fictional accounts of gender identity. As I have written before, transgenderism is a denial of God-ordained differences between male and female (Gen. 1:26-27). It is an untruthful suppression of the sexual binary that God has encoded into every cell of our bodies. When a person feels their gender identity to be out of sync with their sexual identity, the problem is not…
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Coach Dabo Swinney cancels fundraiser after backlash from gay rights groups
Here’s the long and short of it. The Palmetto Family Council (PFC) planned to hold a fundraiser to honor Clemson head football coach Dabo Swinney for his charitable work. Gay rights groups and Clemson students found out about it and raised a stink because of PFC’s opposition to gay marriage. Dabo Swinney cancelled his appearance at the event in order to avoid controversy. Read the rest here.
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National Review: For gay marriage and against Christian teaching
I am not going to write an extended refutation of Jason Lee Steorts’s National Review article defending legal same-sex marriage. His arguments have been dealt with extensively elsewhere (see here or here for instance). But several quick comments are in order: 1. The National Review is a leading journal of conservative opinion. It should not be lost on us that many conservatives are eager to shed the albatross of traditional marriage. They view it as a political loser. Younger conservatives can hardly comprehend any reason to oppose gay marriage. At this point, the Republican party is divided on the issue with traditional social conservatives being the only ones holding the…
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Seeking the complete financial ruin of a Christian family
I’ve written numerous times about the Oregon bakers, Aaron and Melissa Klein, who were forced out of business after declining to make a cake for a gay wedding. As the video above shows, that is not the end of the story.
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What is Marriage to Evangelical Millennials?
A college professor name Abigail Rine has an important article over at the First Things website titled “What is Marriage to Evangelical Millennials?” She says that in the last several years, she has noticed a change in the evangelical students that she teaches. Whereas students used to be on board with a biblical view on marriage and sexuality, that is no longer the case. She tells what happened when she recently assigned for her students to read “What Is Marriage?” by Robbie George, Ryan Anderson, and Sherif Girgis: My students hated it, as I suspected they would. They also seemed unable to fully understand the argument. As I tried to…
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The predominant view of “the least of these” in church history
It’s hard to predict when a blog post will be particularly popular or controversial. I had no idea that my post last week about “the least of these” (Matt. 25:40) would provoke the response that it has. Some people have expressed appreciation, and others have been positively outraged at the suggestion that “the least of these” might be a reference to Christians and not to the poor in general. In fact, the comments from some on social media have been downright angry and sometimes even foul. There was even a news story devoted solely to discussing the post. One of the most consistent objections that I have read is that…
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The “least of these” are not the poor but the Christian baker, photographer, and florist
Yesterday during the panel discussion at the Poverty Summit, I noticed a repeated biblical allusion to the “least of these” (Matt. 25:40, 46). I think every speaker on the panel—including President Obama—used the phrase “least of these” to refer to our fellow citizens who live in poverty and who need help. This is how the phrase is commonly understood, and so it wasn’t a surprise to hear the panelists speak this way. The phrase stood out to me because I recently delivered a sermon to my church on this very text from Matthew’s Gospel (download here or listen below). . It turns out that the panelists’ use of this phrase…
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Christian schools to lose tax-exempt status over gay marriage
In a column for USA Today, Michael Farris looks at the implications of legal gay marriage for Christian schools. He writes: If the court rules in favor of same sex marriage, how can religious colleges that refuse to acknowledge such unions avoid [losing tax-exempt status]? No one should think that IRS implications will stop with colleges. Religious high schools, grade schools and any other religious institution will face the same outcome. And this includes churches. All of these entities are exempt from taxation under the same section of the IRS code. And even though churches can be exempt without application, their exemption can nonetheless be revoked. Even if it takes…
