Is anyone really surprised, man?
What? Am I a Republican? Why did I even bother taken this test?! I guess I’ll back to my George W. Bush fan club and tell them I just wasted 10 minutes of my life. At least I don’t stink, man.
Debunking theologies of glory since, well, last November.
If you have an hour to waste, click on some of these links and see just how seriously some take the Harry Potter books...
For all our efforts in trying to explain away JKR's ridiculous plot holes and unforgivable character assassinations in HBP, it turns out that JKR really is a shallow, short-sighted, and highly irresponsible writer.
I hang up on them. Not rudely at all. I don't rant and rave or swear at them (even if I'm at home alone and no one knows I'm a pastor). But I hang up on them.
...of Braaten's bombshell, and that we are less than one month from Orlando 2005.
"Oedipus Rex came to mind. I know the reference is only a partial one. That particular tragedy is about someone who fought and killed a man whom unknown to him was his father. I wonder if Hanson will is going to be seen as the tragic figure who unknowingly presided over the poisoning of his own mother (our mother the Lutheran tradition in which we were weaned)."
We can perhaps staunch the flow. We must rebuild our educational system. We need to help the faithful clergy. We need to reassure the membership that ours is a sound church built on sound doctrine and the experiments in liberal theology have had their day.
Dwight is back. In a big way.
...the kind of Lutheranism that I learned – from Nygren, Aulen, Bring, Pinomaa, Schlink, P. Brunner, Bonhoeffer, Pannenberg, Piepkorn, Quanbeck, Preus, and Lindbeck, not to mention the pious missionary teachers from whom I learned the Bible, the Catechism, and the Christian faith -- and taught in a Lutheran parish and seminary for many years is now marginalized to the point of near extinction. In looking for evidence that could convincingly contradict the charge that the ELCA has become just another liberal protestant denomination...there is not much there to refute the charge. As Erik Petersen said about 19th century German Protestantism, all that is left of the Reformation heritage is the aroma from an empty bottle.
"Recently in an issue of the Lutheran Magazine you expressed your hope that Lutherans could some day soon celebrate Holy Communion with Roman Catholics. My instant reaction was: it is becoming less and less likely, as the ELCA is being taken hostage by forces alien to the solid traditions Lutherans share with Roman Catholics. The confessional chasm is actually becoming wider. So much for the JDDJ! The agreement becomes meaningless when Lutheranism embarks on a trajectory that leads to rank antinomianism."
My friend Wolfhart Pannenberg has stated that a church that cannot take the Scriptures seriously is no longer a church that belongs to Jesus Christ... Does the ELCA take the Scriptures seriously? We will soon find out. Whoever passes the issue off as simply a hermeneutical squabble is not being honest – “we have our interpretation and you have yours.” Who is to judge who is right? The upshot is ecclesiastical anarchy, sometimes called pluralism. To each his own.
I've been watching this off and on for the past few days. Foote died earlier this month.
Title: The American Religion
"Freedom, in the context of the American Religion, means being alone with God or with Jesus, the American God or the American Christ. In social reality, this translates as solitude, at least in the inmost sense. The soul stands apart, and something deeper than the soul, the Real Me or self or spark, thus is made free to be utterly alone with a God who is also quite separate and solitary, that is, a free God or God of freedom. What makes it possible for the self and God to commune so freely is that the self already is of God..." (p. 15)
"Mormonism is a wonderful strong misprision, or creative misreading, of the early history of the Jews. So strong was this act of reading that it broke thorough all the orthodoxies - Protestant, Catholic, Judaic - and fopund its way back to elements that Smith rightly intuited had been censored out of the stories of the archaic Jewish religion. Smith's radical sense of theomorphic patriarchs and anthropomorphic gods is an authentic return to J, or the Yahwist, the Bible's first author." (p. 84)
"Visiting a prostitute was [Jimmy] Swaggart's equivalent of the Holy Ghost cultist passing a lighted blowtorch over hands or face. We are in the pattern that Gershom scholem, meditating upon such Kabbalistic figures as Nathan of Gaza and Jacob Frank, named "Redemption through Sin." Swaggart's genius was to convert his falling forward on his face, as it were, into being slain in the Spirit, thus falling back into the arms of the congregation, his television viewers." (p. 179)
"The Californian God differs in that he is a kind of public orange grove, where you can pick as and when you want, particularly since he is an orange grove within. His perpetual and universal immanence makes it difficult for a newager to distinguish between God and any experience whatsoever, but then why should such a distinctinon occur to a California Orphic? Matthew Fox, ostensibly a Catholic priest, has formulated a curious doctrine of 'panentheism' to avoid this collapse into pantheism, but Fox is one of my defeats. Several attempts on my part to read through The Coming of the Cosmic Christ have failed, as no prose I have ever encountered can match Fox's in a blissful vacuity, where all things flow to all, as rivers to the sea." (p. 186)
"The Baptist experience of knowing Jesus, in a solitary and renewable encounter, takes priority over public worship, doctrine, or acts of charity. And since what can know Jesus, in some way already is akin to Jesus, then the saved Baptist participates now in the Resurrection and the Life...If one's undying spirit accepts the love of Jesus, walks with the resurrected Jesus, knows what it is to love Jesus in reurn, alone with jesus in the only permanent and perfect communion that ever will be, then tehre can be no churchly authority over one. As for the authority of Scripture, even it must yield to the direct encounter with the resurrected Jesus." (pages 205-206)