Wow!

Eric Bruntlett, the second baseman of the Philadelphia Phillies, today turned only the fifteenth unassisted triple play in baseball history, and the first to ever end a game.

To Tom Ricketts, the Cubs' new owner....

...please act upon this memo.

Their god is their gonads

Dr. Duane Priebe- professor emeritus of systematic theology at my alma mater, Wartburg Theological Seminary in Dubuque, Iowa- would never come right out and state that everybody will eventually go to heaven. But the message got through in his lectures. There are faddish theologians and trends that can be reconciled to Lutheranism only by such incredible intellectual gymnastics that one wonders why anyone would bother. But Dr. Priebe would generally find a way.

His favorite theologian was Wolfhart Pannenburg. Not, mind you, that Dr. Priebe would necessarily commit exclusively to one particular theological system, as opposed to others which might even directly conflict with it. Suffice it to say that Dr. Priebe will never be confused with the reincarnation of C.F.W. Walther (though of one of my classmates declared a belief in reincarnation, I would in no way be surprised).

I've already posted this quote. But on the day when the the allegedly Evangelical, allegedly Lutheran, alledged Church in America officially approved the rostering of non-celebate gay pastors, and at the end of the week in which it formally declared anal intercourse between two men to be the moral equivalent of conjugal relations between husband and wife, it's worth repeating.

Thus speaks Dr. Preibe's favorite theologian, Wolfhart Pannenberg:

If a church were to let itself be pushed to the point where it ceased to treat homosexual activity as a departure from the biblical norm, and recognized homosexual unions as a personal partnership of love equivalent to marriage, such a church would stand no longer on biblical ground but against the unequivocal witness of Scripture. A church that took this step would cease to be the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church.

The ELCA took that step this week. It made it clear that its god is not the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. True, its god is not its belly. That god is located somewhat lower on the anatomy than the belly.

The ELCA worships a god who permits what the God of the Bible, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, forbids. More than that, it proclaims grace to the manifestly impenitent, and promises salvation to those expressly warned by the Apostle Paul that, absent repentance, they will not see the Kingdom of God.

This moment became inevitable when, in 1991- only three years after it was founded- the ELCA officially pronounced that homosexuals are "sinners only in the sense that all of us our sinners" (what an elegantly equivocal phrase!), and invited them, with no mention made of repentance, to "participate fully" in the lives of its congregations.

It was inevitable when I and a handful of others stood up at assembly after assembly and warned the ELCA's laypeople that this moment would happen, pointing out that the arguments advanced by the homosexualists were not based on exegesis (scholarly interpretation of a biblical text based on the best available information) but eisegesis (the imposition on a text of a wholly alien meaning based on the interpreter's desire to force it to say something it does not say on its own terms).

We warned that this was no mere disagreement over an obscure theological point; that to accept the homosexualist position was not simply to give in to the contempt for scriptural authority and the willing embrace of eisegesis in the place of exegesis already manifest at every level in the ELCA (fraudulently masquerading as "scientific scholarship), but actual apostasy. The false teaching that it is possible to live in open rebellion against God and in unrepented, deliberate sin and still retain justifying faith- an argument repudiated in no uncertain terms by Jesus, by Paul- and, yes, by Luther and the Lutheran Confessions- was already a cardinal assumption of the ELCA as an institution. But officially extending a divine blessing to an entire class of unrepentant sinners as a church body makes the matter impossible to ignore. From this moment onward, it simply is not possible to pretend that, as an institution this wretched denomination acknowledges the same God Paul and Luther and their own grandparents worshipped.

Despite the mantra we kept hearing from the official ELCA ever since that sneaky committment to the full acceptance of homosexuality was slipped past most of us back in 1991, the acceptance of homosexuality as appropriate behavior for Christians is an inherently church dividing issue. It is an issue which makes concrete and therefore impossible to ignore the fact that the ELCA is in error on the article of faith by which, according to Luther, the Church stands or falls: the article of justification.

As of the events of this week, the ELCA as a church body is not only in error on the doctrine of justification, but is in the business not only of promising salvation to people to whom Scripture denies it- even placing them in positions in which they are shepherds of Christ's flock and called to teach and even exemplify the Christian life to those they serve.

It's not enough to say, as I've said for years, that the ELCA is not in any historically or theologically meaningful sense a Lutheran church body. The events in Minneapolis this week make it impossible to ignore the fact that ELCA antinomianism can no longer be dismissed as merely a heresy which happens to be held by a considerable number of ELCA pastors and laypeople, and which informs its every theological decision. With the bald equation of sodomistic fornication and conjugal marital relations between man and wife, and the intentional decision to ordain and install in the pastoral office individuals who, according to scripture, absent repentance will not see the face of God, the ELCA as a church body is now in formal heresy on the doctrine of justification.

It has been said that the Holy Roman Empire was neither holy nor Roman nor an empire. Well, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America is no longer merely neither evangelical nor Lutheran. Pannenberg is exactly right: it is also no longer the Church.

So what should Christians who remain members of ELCA congregations do? Simple: everything in their power to get their congregations out of the ELCA, just as soon as proves feasible. And the moment it becomes clear that getting their congregations to leave the ELCA is itself not feasible, it is their absolute duty before God to leave those congregations. As long as they remain members of them, their public witness- whether or not this is their intention- is of support for the abominations which took place in Minneapolis this week.

I spent twelve years trying to turn first a suburban St. Louis ELCA parish and then two Iowa ELCA congregations into something they had not been before: Lutheran, by the standards the grandparents of their members would have assumed as self-evident.The problem in one case was a history first of Pietism, and then of liberalism, in the  pulpit; the problem in the other was the ten-year pastorate of a charismatic immediately before my own.

During all that time, and  two different synods, I tried to warn my flocks that this day was coming. I well remember the day when ELCA mission executive Mark Thompson- confronted by a group of us confessional pastors moments before he was to address the Southeast Iowa Synod Assembly- got up on the rostrum and blurted out, "Why, it may take ten years to convince you people to accept homosexuality!"

It actually took a bit longer than that. But given the events in Minneapolis this last week, nobody desiring to be faithful to Christ and to the Christian faith can pretend anymore. The events of this week are not going to be reversed. From this moment onward, one can be a follower of Jesus, or one can be a member of the ELCA.

One simply cannot consistently be both.

Let there be no talk any longer of a "faithful remnant." The hour of confession has arrived; our brothers and sisters in the ELCA- crippled as they are, for the most part, by generations without sound, confessional Lutheran teaching and preaching- need at this very hour to declare themselves.

Choose this day whom you will serve.

You can follow Christ, or you can burn incense to the emperor.

You cannot do both.

Sometimes God isn't subtle

Here is more on the sudden, small tornado which developed over downtown Minneapolis yesterday afternoon, knocked the cross from the steeple of Central Lutheran Church (the Holy of Holies for Minnesota's ELCA) precisely at the time when, next door, discussion was scheduled to begin on the social statement which declared anal intercourse between men the moral equivalent of conjugal relations between husband and wife, did minor damage to the arena in which the Churchwide Assembly itself was being held- and then, simply dissipated.

One delegate actually expressed the hope that the weather was not a commentary on what the church was in the process of doing. It was supposed to be a joke. It is not recorded whether anyone laughed.

Sometimes, it seems, God isn't particularly subtle.

HT: Lori Sievert

ADDENDUM: According to Dr. Robert Benne, the statement passed with exactly 66.6% of the vote.

Honesty is the best policy

While the trouble the gay community has with monogamy is a commonplace- freely admitted by gays, as a rule, when they aren't trying to promote the concept of gay "marriage-" the Dutch study which is often used to document that difficulty in fact does not offer support for the conclusion that "married" gay men are nearly as promiscuous as those who cite it claim, nor that gay "marriages" tend to be as short-lived as is claimed. The study based on a study of legally-partnered AIDS patients, and not of legally partnered gay men as a group. So what it says about "married" gay AIDS patients cannot be fairly extraoplated to prove anything in particular about "married" gay Dutch men in general.

I've just deleted a post from several years ago based on that study. The fact that monogamy is not necessarily an expectation for "married" gays stands- but it seems that the statistics I quoted are a distortion of the data, so I want to clearly disavow them.

Sometimes, deviled eggs hatch

Central Lutheran Church in Minneapolis was, to a member of The American Lutheran Church, about as close as a church could get to what St. Peter's Basillica in Rome is to a Roman Catholic. It remains, even after the 1988 merger, the holiest ELCA shrine in Minneapolis.

Yesterday morning a breakfast was served at Central Lutheran to delegates to the ELCA's Churchwide Assembly. As events progressed toward last night's official declaration by the ELCA that anal intercourse between two men is the moral equivalent of conjugal relations between a husband and his wife, a delegate was heard to ask, "What did they serve at that breakfast? Deviled eggs?"

As Pomeraneus reports in a comment on my previous entry, as the Churchwide Assembly moved last night toward its vote on the sexuality statement, a small tornado hit downtown Minneapolis and knocked the cross off the steeple at Central Lutheran.

Eisegete that.

It is finished: the ELCA renounces biblical sexual ethics

Friday's anticlimactic vote on actively gay pastors could theoretically still go either way- apparently some delegates had left the hall for dinner- but the "Evangelical" "Lutheran" "Church" in America has, by a single vote, approved a social statement declaring the essentially mythological beast (at least among males) the "chaste, monogamous and lifelong" homosexual relationship to be OK with its god.

That such relationships are so rare as to be almost imaginary seems not to have mattered. And

in view of this act of apostasy, the outcome of Friday's vote hardly matters: the ELCA has finally renounced biblical sexual ethics once and for all.

Yet the laity of the ELCA will, for the most part, doubtless continue to rationalize remaining a part of this cult- which simply cannot credibly be seen, at this point, as worshiping the God of the New Testament. But from this point forward, to continue as a member of the ELCA is to be an accomplice in apostacy and in the death of many, many souls.

Thus ends a saga which began with the ELCA itself, and the determined drive of the institutional leaders of that sorry entity ever since to wear the laypeople and the pastors who were faithful to their calling down until they managed to get sexual perversion officially declared to be acceptable Christian behavior.

ADDENDUM: I'm wrong. Upon further review, after the procedural vote the other night, approval of non-celibate gay pastors will only require a simple majority. Wednesday night's blessing of sodomy required two-thirds.

There is absolutely no question that the proposal to ordain non-celibate gays will pass.

Homosexualists win procedural vote in Minneapolis

The homosexualists in Minneapolis won a major victory yesterday on a procedural vote.

It seems that while adopting a social statement or amending the ELCA Constituiton requires a two-thirds majority vote, overthrowing the clear teaching of Scripture regarding homosexuality and changing two thousand years of Christian teaching and practice will require only a simple majority.

Tales from the darkside

The Churchwide Assembly the ELCA nomenclatura has been working toward ever since the 1988 merger is now in session in Minneapolis. This is it, people. The long effort of the Powers that Be in the ELCA to force homosexuality down the throats, so to speak, of the church's laity will culminate in final success at this convention.

Only the naive believe that the assurances that nobody will be forced to act contrary to their "bound consciences" with regard to gay pastors or gay "marriage" are worth the paper they're printed on. The entire logic of the homosexualist position is that rejection of active homosexuality on moral grounds constitutes "discrimination" against gays. The difference between rejecting a race or ethnic group and rejecting behavior escapes the sexual Left; after all, they reason, if homosexuality is inborn (or at least a matter beyond a person's control), then to disapprove of it is bigotry. The thought that one could choose, on biblical grounds, to be celibate even if one is of homosexual orientation is not even to be discussed. As it was with women clergy, so it will be with gay clergy: within a decade, those who oppose the ordination of gays will themselves be marginalized and perhaps even denied the right to serve as ELCA pastors.

The usual nonsense about how this is all a matter of biblical interpretation, and how different people interpret the rather clear and straightforward passages in both Testaments concerning homosexuality, is being spouted not only by the homosexualists, but also by the secularist Left in the media. The ELCA's new study bible, it should be noted, has a footnote explaining that the Greek words used throughout Greek literature to describe the active and passive partners in consensual homosexual acts somehow actually only refer to non-consensual acts. In a church body in which Post-Modernism holds sway to the extent that it does in the ELCA, facts are never allowed to get in the way of The Agenda, and the argument that black is actually white and that contradiction of the clear meaning of words is nothing more than a difference in interpretation has been standard for decades.

The interesting thing about the grotesque events in the Twin Cities will be how the relatively conservative laity of the ELCA will react. A church sponsored poll recently revealed that 54% of ELCA pastors favored the full acceptance of non-celebate homosexuals in so-called "covenanted relationships;" that such relationships are rarely exclusive and tend not to last very long does not stop the homosexualists from making the same grotesque arguments made in the civil realm for homosexual "marriages," which- at least where gay men are concerned- are seldom either sexually exclusive or lasting. The laity, on the other hand, tend still to believe that words mean things, and are much less accepting of this nonsense than their pastors.

The trouble is that hitherto they have lacked the courage to do anything about it. When I walked out of our Synod Assembly over a decade ago after it defeated a resolution calling on a synodical sexuality task force to be balanced between traditionalists and homosexualists, explaining that I could no longer recognize the ELCA as the church as defined in the seventh article of the Augsburg Confession, it took me half an hour to get out of the hall. Lay people kept stopping me and asking me not to leave the ELCA, announcing their own intention to "stay and fight."

They had done precious little fighting when a handful of us pastors had stood up to oppose the homosexualist juggernaut, choosing to remain silent in their seats. And if I had a thousand dollars for every lick of fighting the people I spoke to on the way out of the hall that day have done since then, my guess is that I would not have enough money to buy a good used car.

My own congregations, rationalizing that "it doesn't affect us," accepted then- Bishop Phil Hougen's tap dance concerning the authority of Scripture in the ELCA very willingly indeed. A decade of work trying to turn St. Paul's and St. Andrew's into Lutheran congregations went out the window virtually at the moment I ceased to be their pastor. They are now served by a woman; even among these people, who sincerely spoke of their desire to be governed by Scripture, the epistemology of the ELCA has prevailed. That epistemology was stated well by the Mad Hatter in Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland: "When I use a word, it means exactly what I want it to mean, nothing more or less."

That Mad Hatter hermeneutic will climax this week in an action which, as I have already noted, even Wolfhart Pannenberg, the favorite theologian of retired Wartburg Seminary systematician Duane Priebe, maintains will deprive the ELCA of any claim to membership in the one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church.

But what will the laity do? There is talk of a split in the ELCA. I would not be surprised if a small number of conservative congregations do break off. The new church body they form will likely have very little about it that is Lutheran, either; the Confessions have played no real role in the theological life of the average ELCA congregation for so long that even ELCA conservatives tend, as a practical matter, to be Reformed Evangelicals with a high view of the Sacraments. Sometimes. In the more pietistic corners of the ELCA, not even a belief in the Real Presence of Christ in the Lord's Supper or baptismal regeneration can be taken for granted.

I wonder what the people at St. Paul's and St. Andrew's are saying to themselves right now. Whatever it is, I predict that they'll find a way to live with the travesty in Minneapolis, and tell themselves that "it doesn't effect us here."

They're wrong, of course. The content of the preaching and the catechesis in a church body which has no real regard for either Scripture or the Confessions cannot help but differ from those in a church body in which they hold real authority. But having rationalized their way to this point, I have no doubt that the laity of the ELCA will be able, for the most part, to rationalize their way even around this.

Most, I suspect, will chose to stay and tell themselves that they're fighting.

Interesting

According to a new Gallup Poll, more Americans consider themselves conservatives than liberals in all 50 states. This despite the Democratic party's advantage in registration (the GOP has an advantage in only four states).

Not good news for the Obaminator.

HT: Drudge

Some dogs are smarter than people

So speaks Wolfhart Pannenberg

“If a church were to let itself be pushed to the point where it ceased to treat homosexual activity as a departure from the biblical norm, and recognized homosexual unions as a personal partnership of love equivalent to marriage, such a church would stand no longer on biblical ground but against the unequivocal witness of Scripture. A church that took this step would cease to be the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church.”

Thus does the favorite theologian of one of my most liberal seminary profs unchurch, to all practical purposes, the church body which ordained both of us. And rightly so.

HT: Rev. Paul McCain

ADDENDUM: The full article can be found here.

A Short Course in (Canadian) Brain Surgery

Think single payer health care, ala Michael Moore, is the way to go? This video says it all:

Do people who use these words really not realize this, or do they just not care?

Consider.

First of all, let it be said that despite being a clergyman of a conservative Christian tradition, I personally am not hypersensitive to bad and even vulgar language. To be honest, when a youth group member has stood up in a canoe and dumped me into a river, or a tire has gone flat on the way to visit a shut-in who lives in the uncharted depths of Darkest Iowa, I myself have been known at times to use language not generally associated with my profession.

That said, I was not raised to use bad language. In fact, I have always been mindful of the observation of my Uncle Walt- a professional journalist- that those who use such language demonstrate at least the presumptive lack of an adequate vocabulary.

Anyway, I have a bone to pick with a contemporary development in popular English.

For a long time, people without the guts to use the other "F word-" for which it is a synomym- have used another expression which I think of as "the chicken word." First, it rhymes with "chicken." And secondly, it is used by chickens (in the sense of "cowards"). This word is a corruption of yet another, well-established vulgar term for sexual intercourse, which rhymes with "digging." And make no mistake: whether the verson that rhymes which "chicken" or the one which rhymes with "digging," the alternative "F word" has precisely the same meaning as the "F-bomb" itself. These are nothing more or less than vulgar words for the sex act, and they are absolutely out of place in polite company.

But recently we seem in our society to have come to a common consensus that somehow these words are acceptable, whereas the other "F word" is still not. I find this puzzling. When I challenge people for their inappropriate use of these vulgar words, they usually point out with great indignation they said the word which rhymes with "chicken," or the one that rhymes with "digging," rather than the one that rhymes with "clucking-" as if that made the slightest difference.

We're encountering the "chicken word"everywhere these days- including in the mouths of people who would never use the one remaining word which, by general consent, is out of place in polite company. I get the feeling that the overwhelming majority of people who use the alternative "F-word" really don't realize that they're nothing but a synonym for the other one. They just don't realize that they're being vulgar, much less just how vulgar they're being. More and more, the alternative "F-word" is turning up on line, and even in television dialog, in places where its synonym would never be regarded by most people as acceptable.

I recognize that I'm on a slippery slope here. "Darn" originated as a "polite" way of saying "damn," back in the days when Rhett Butler's response to Scarlett O'Hara was still generally regarded as shocking. In the States," "bloody" has traditionally been seen as innocuous, since the history which makes the term less than polite in England is one with which most Americans are utterly unfamiliar. But that doesn't erase its vulgarity in a British context. Even the innocent "gosh" is essentially a substitute way of taking God's name in vain.

There is a difference, though: nobody actually prays to Gosh. It is not a synonym of "God." The "chicken word," on the other hand, is nothing more or less than a direct synonym of the One Great Remaining Verbal Taboo That Isn't an Ethnic or Racial Slur.

There is no question that our culture is rapidly coarsening. There are very few words which have not at one time or another passed the lips of even those of us who make an effort to keep our discourse on a higher level- including people like me, who hold an office even more incompatible with that sort of language than simple Christian profession. One of the reasons why I think attention needs to be paid to the rapid spread of the substitute "F-word"is that, whether we realize it or not, it represents a quantum leap in that coarsening.

But doubtless part of the problem is that Western society has been "dumbing down," as well as coarsening, for quite a while. I was one of those who was bent out of shape- probably more so than was warranted- when the entire world celebrated the arrival of a new millennium a year early, unaware that there had never been a year zero- and thus, that 2001, rather than 2000, actually marked the beginning of the Third Millennium. "What difference does it make?," people asked- even when the media, which at the turn of previous centuries had kept the public well-informed enough about the application of simple mathematics to avoid that particular blunder, this time bought into it right along with everybody else.

The difference it makes is that being ignorant isn't a good thing, especially when an entire society goes in for it. The early celebration of the change of millennium was one thing; its endorsement by the very organs of society dedicated to literacy and accuracy of thought was quite another.

The people we rely on to inform us on the issues of the age really ought to be able to count from one, even if we can't. And that, I think, is what is really going on with that amazing alternative "F word." Yes, mores are coarsening. But not, I think, so fast that most of the people who have begun using the "chicken word" of late have simply forgotten their breeding. No, I think what is going on here has more to do with such seemingly innocuous bits of stupidity as the entire Western world celebrating the arrival of a new millennium in what was in fact the final year of the old one.

People have begun using a vulgar synonym for sexual intercourse in common, everyday conversation for the same reason they thought that the new millennium began in 2000: they don't know any better. They really don't realize that the words which rhyme with "chicken" (and the one that rhymes with "digging") are every bit as vulgar as the that rhymes with "plucking." And they don't know any better because the people whose job it is to make sure that they do know better simply aren't doing their jobs.

It's bad enough that the "chicken word" has crept into everyday usage. But it utterly unacceptable that it's common usage is even reflected by network television. I'm not saying here that the networks should impose some kind of puritanical standard which differs from that of commonly accepted public mores. But I am saying that network television- as well as the other media- have an absolute obligation to assist an increasingly illiterate and ill-informed society in at least using language in accordance with the standards which it intends to use it, and honestly believes that it is using it.

When people say "frickin," much less "frigging," we who are at least somewhat literate need to confront them as to what they are really saying. And if people really want to use vulgar language, they ought to realize that that is what they are doing- and to have the guts to go the whole way and say it in terms that no one can mistake.

ADDENDUM: Here's one I myself have been known to run afoul of: how many of us stop and think that when we say, "that sucks," we're using an expression which actually refers to fellatio?

What will they think of next?

Ah, the wonders of modern technology...

Stossel exposes Canada's health care system

Seems that ABC's John Stossel blew the argument for socialized medicine out of the water Friday night with his expose on the Canadian and British systems- as well as a clip of President Obama saying during the primaries that he'd like to see us go there.

Anybody interested in the issues surrounding the debate about how health care is provided in this country needs to read the article linked to above- and if possible somehow, see the Stossel segment.