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Geoff's Miscellany

Miscellaneous Musings

Archives for March 2019

The Church in Africa is Unimpressed

March 2, 2019 by Geoff Leave a Comment

In response to efforts of the American leaders in the United Methodist Church to influence Africa’s Methodists to reject the Biblical teaching on homosexual marraige, they did not budge:

I thank God for His precious Word to us, and I thank him for you, my dear sisters and brothers in Christ.
As the General Coordinator of UMC Africa Initiative I greet you on behalf of all its members and leaders. We want to thank the  Renewal and Reform Coalition within the United Methodist Church for the invitation to address you at this important breakfast meeting.
As I understand it, the plans before us seek to find a lasting solution to the long debate over our church’s sexual ethics, its teachings on marriage, and it[s] ordination standards.
This debate and the numerous acts of defiance have brought the United Methodist Church to a crossroads (Jeremiah 6:16).
One plan invites the people called United Methodists to take a road in opposition to the Bible and two thousand years of Christian teachings. Going down that road would divide the church. Those advocating for the One Church Plan would have us take that road.
Another road invites us to reaffirm Christian teachings rooted in Scripture and the church’s rich traditions…

While “we commit ourselves to be in ministry for and with all persons,” we do not celebrate same-sex marriages or ordain for ministry people who self-avow as practicing homosexuals. These practices do not conform to the authentic teaching of the Holy Scriptures, our primary authority for faith and Christian living.

However, we extend grace to all people because we all know we are sinners in need of God’s redeeming. We know how critical and life changing God’s grace has been in our own lives.

We warmly welcome all people to our churches; we long to be in fellowship with them, to pray with them, to weep with them, and to experience the joy of transformation with them.

Friends, please hear me, we Africans are not afraid of our sisters and brothers who identify as lesbian, gay, bi-sexual, transgendered, questioning, or queer. We love them and we hope the best for them. But we know of no compelling arguments for forsaking our church’s understanding of Scripture and the teachings of the church universal.

And then please hear me when I say as graciously as I can: we Africans are not children in need of western enlightenment when it comes to the church’s sexual ethics. We do not need to hear a progressive U.S. bishop lecture us about our need to “grow up.”

Let me assure you, we Africans, whether we have liked it or not, have had to engage in this debate for many years now. We stand with the global church, not a culturally liberal, church elite, in the U.S.

The rhetoric used by Dr. Kulah is excellent. Why? He lulls white American Christians into a moment of agreement by starting the speech with a beautiful call for unity. A cherished idea in modern academia is that while American academics are superior to all the knuckle-draggers in America, ultimately, they are exactly similar to everybody else on the planet. But once he gains that support, he makes a hardline distinction between two roads the church can travel, “One plan invites the people called United Methodists to take a road in opposition to the Bible and two thousand years of Christian teachings. Going down that road would divide the church. Those advocating for the One Church Plan would have us take that road.”

He then reminds them that elite Americans and their western enlightenment values are of no use to the kingdom of God. This is encouraging.

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Filed Under: Contemporary Trends, Christianity, Culture

JUST SAY IT

March 1, 2019 by Geoff Leave a Comment

Beauty, according to the Thomists, is rightproportion, brilliance, and integrity. Evolutionary theorists have tried, and in some cases managed, to find biological grounding for our concepts of beauty. For instance, they at least seem to grasp the relationship between human beauty and reproductive viability, but even these relationships are associational rather than necessary.

But it is more ineffable than that. David Bentley Hart is more expansive:

“Beauty is something other than the visible or audible or conceptual agreement of parts, and the experience of beauty can never be wholly reduced to any set of material constituents. It is something mysterious, prodigal, often unanticipated, even capricious. We can find ourselves suddenly amazed by some strange and indefinable glory in a barren field, an urban ruin, the splendid disarray of a storm-wracked forest, and so on.

Hart, The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss 279-280

But in this evil age, the concept of beauty is being subject to the standard word games. The concept behind the word, however difficult to define, is essentially being deconstructed on two fronts. Some claim that beauty is an invention of the mind, especially the minds of men, and therefore needs to be rejected. Others seek to force the word beautiful to refer to that which is not beautiful, neither in the eye of the beholder nor by objective assessment. One remembers that there are four lights:

If you do not care to watch, a man is told that if he would simply say what he is told rather than speak the truth of which he is convinced, good things will happen. The truth under question is inconsequential. But this character bases his whole life on the principle that his first duty is to the truth. It concludes with him speaking the truth rather than giving in.

What modern art and other forces are attempting to do is get you to look at that which is ugly and call it beautiful. Seriously, watch this documentary some time:

At one point in the film, a sculptor tells Scruton that the artists and philosophers who want us to reject beauty are ultimately tempting us to reject knowledge itself.

If we call ugly beautiful, we become more comfortable calling false tue and evil good. Once we become so comfortable with self-deception, we find ourselves unable to discern the difference between any of those categories any more.

Isaiah 5:20 (NET): Those who call evil good and good evil are as good as dead, who turn darkness into light and light into darkness, who turn bitter into sweet and sweet into bitter.

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Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: education, philosophy, Art

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