I should say one author failed to "get it." Mollie responded to my piece lutherans make historic vote, and the AP wire F's it up. But rather than engage the clear language issues, she chooses to fall back onto her ideological haunches. It is quite amazing that if a story fits her ideological framework it is good reporting. If it does not, it is bad reporting. Thus she spun this back on the issue of sexual behavior in a complete and utter failure to recognize what same gender couples want – legitimacy that their love is not to be condemned. For what love that is mutually upbuilding and self-giving is not of God lest we call those passages lies?
Mollie spun this back to focus on her own ideological position that homosexuality is a sin. Then she goes to say that those churches that are welcoming and affirming are, by analogy, in effect lying to their people. Unbelievable. The fact that the AP wire report clearly used ideologically loaded language to frame the issue in inaccurate terms, which is in what I thought GR was to focus as a watch dog for religious reporting, was something that Mollie chose to use as a platform to spread more spurious red herrings in the service of her ideology.
My use of snark and harsh language in the style of Luther himself was intentional (just read Against the Roman Papacy – my language is soft compared to Luther). Looks like it worked, as it worked for Luther.
Now, let’s look at that statement in the context of what the Christian church has confessed for thousands of years on the basis of Scripture.
This is the basis for the problem itself. “Is” does not imply “ought.” I wonder if you were to sit in Wittenburg after Luther rightly condemned the political and theological foundations of the Church if you might hear the same thing about everything from papal authority rooted in Peter to the authority of the Church over all things scriptural. Yet this is the same assertion Mollie uses to tell people that the ELCA is lying (note she does not make this claim, but the association is clear by the analogy)? Absolutely absurd and I hope people see that. The entire basis of the second half of her article is rooted in an equivocation that is completely errant. Unless of course you also believe that being gay is a choice. That assumption simply requires more reading on the matter.
Yet I digress. This is an example of how Mollie spun it back to focus on the wrong thing – her own ideological assumption that this is about sex. The fact is that it’s not about sexual activity for those seeking to legitimate their relationships. It’s about recognizing fidelity between two people who are madly in love with each other, who also happen to be the same gender. But see, that’s the hard part to accept for people who refuse to listen to alternative hermeneutics on the six passages that condemn male on male intercourse (Jack Rogers, William Stacy Johnson, and others can help). You can’t frame it in terms of how the ELCA defined these relationships because that part is Scriptural. There is nowhere in Scripture that rejects "a publicly accountable, lifelong, monogamous, same-gender relationship"; nowhere. Instead the focus has to be on sex. It has to go back to what people do with their penises and their vaginas (even though Scripture says nothing about female-female sex in the same context).
I found her nota bene somewhat hilarious. "Your comments should also be civil and focused on journalism." Perhaps Mollie should have focused on the journalism here as well. That she chose not to leaves such a comment wanting. She focused on the theology and her own theological conviction, not the headline. So much for "getting religion" here. It's hard to "get" much when all one is publishing is a justification for their own ideological conviction. As I said with regard to John Piper, this is again insurance to justify one's own ideology.
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