Civil Commotion

I’m leaving town for a couple of days at the end of the week, and have a lot to get done between now and then, so posting will be negligible to non-existent; back next week. Y’all have a good Memorial Day.

And … there you go. A healthy marriage is NOT about “undivided devotion” to the pleasure of Our Invisible Friend (whose Will is the subject of pastoral expertise), and therefore problematic. I am not kidding y’all: These guys approve of animal husbandry — and that’s all; healthy marriages threaten their total ownership and control of their congregation.

I feel kind of sorry for Target, but mostly I’m happy that these morons are so proud of themselves that they shoot video and post it to YouTube. Nobody, nobody, has any excuse any longer for failing to recognize what a destructive sickness the evangelical right actually is.

I bet I’m not the only guy who forgot, but May 21^st was the fifth-anniversary of the day that Harold Camping said the good, decent, godly folk were going to get whisked out of here.

In 2001 American Christian radio host Harold Camping stated that the Rapture and Judgment Day would take place on May 21, 2011, and that the end of the world would take place five months later on October 21, 2011. The Rapture, in a specific tradition of premillennial theology, is the taking up into heaven of God’s elect people.

Camping, who was then president of the Family Radio Christian network, claimed the Bible as his source and said May 21 would be the date of the Rapture and the day of judgment “beyond the shadow of a doubt”. Camping suggested that it would occur at 6 pm local time, with the rapture sweeping the globe time zone by time zone, while some of his supporters claimed that around 200 million people (approximately 3% of the world’s population) would be ‘raptured’. Camping had previously claimed that the Rapture would occur in September 1994.

The vast majority of Christian groups, including most Protestant and Catholic believers, did not accept Camping’s predictions; some explicitly rejected them, citing Bible passages including those stating “about that day or hour no one knows” (Matthew 24:36). An interview with a group of church leaders noted that all of them had scheduled church services as usual for Sunday, May 22.

Following the failure of the prediction, media attention shifted to the response from Camping and his followers. On May 23, Camping stated that May 21 had been a “spiritual” day of judgment, and that the physical Rapture would occur on October 21, 2011, simultaneously with the destruction of the universe by God.

The universe is still here, but Camping was ‘called home’ on December 15, 2013, still puzzled that the universe hadn’t blown-up.

Once upon a time, I quite seriously intended to write a sort of history of the End Times, and I have a couple of shoeboxes filled with 3×5-cards of notes. The narrative difficulties with such a book are profound, however. Seriously: How many salable chapters can you write beginning with the words, “And then this other pack of nutjobs said the world would end on … whatever.”? Knowing, even as you peddle the book that, somewhere, some brand-new con artist is selling the same lie to the same fools?

Albert the Pious devoted his entire radio broadcast today to the contentious, just-finished quadrennial meeting of the United Methodists. As everybody who pays attention to these sorts of things knows, the meeting was dominated by sharp disagreements over homosexuality; specifically, should the denomination ordain LGBTQ persons, and perform same-sex marriages?

In the event, the UMC decided not to decide.

Mohler’s commentary included this remark, a splendid enunciation of the intellectual dishonesty that Christianity requires of its clergy.

Either the Bible is the Word of God, or it merely contains the Word of God. If it merely contains the Word of God, then we’ve got to find the Word of God within it. We’ve got to look at Scripture as a basically fallible human witness within which there is some degree of divine inspiration. Once we adopt that understanding of Scripture, the church itself becomes its sole authority and there’s no reason why the church can’t simply decide it will abandon this particular biblical teaching while claiming to continue others.

I cited the proposal by Adam Hamilton in order to demonstrate that it’s not just the fact that these liberal denominations include outright theological liberals who deny the authority of Scripture, we also see the presence of those who, like Hamilton, are arguing for a more neo-orthodox understanding that places the church in the position of judging Scripture while continuing to claim that the Scripture at least contains the Word of God.

But there is an infinite gulf between claiming that the Scripture contains the Word of God and affirming and confessing that the Bible is the Word of God. The historic faith of the church is rightly described as orthodoxy, not neo-orthodoxy. The moment you put any qualifier — “neo” in this case, meaning new — you actually don’t have orthodoxy at all, because the very reality of orthodoxy is making certain that we are saying exactly what the Apostles said, teaching exactly what the Reformers said, understanding that we want to state the Christian faith — affirm it, teach it, preach it, and apply it — exactly as there has been a consensus of the faithful throughout the centuries based upon the prior authority of the Bible as the Word of God.

So: What began as a marketing lie intended to aggrandize preachers — Inerrancy, “This book is totally true, and we are the experts about its meaning, so you have to do as we say!” — is now the cause of, literally, global heartache.

As a class, or type, Christian clergy are among the most dishonest men in society.