Bible church pastor realizes that Donald Trump is not an evangelical

Here:

When asked if asking for forgiveness was central to his faith, Mr. Trump replied, “I try not make mistakes where I have to ask forgiveness”. When pressed about repentance in an interview with Anderson Cooper of CNN, he replied, “I think repenting is terrific. Why do I have to repent or ask for forgiveness if I am not making mistakes? I work hard, I’m an honorable person.”

He really does speak for many Americans. His theological Shibboleth rings true in many ears.

With the media ... lurching forward with everything this guy says, just waiting for him to bury himself, it is fascinating media. I read some who thought his Iowa comments would spell the end of him. “How could any evangelical vote for him after he said such things?”

I laughed. [He] is actually resonating with many spiritual Americans who are untethered [from] biblical Christianity. Far from marking the end of Trump’s relevance, his comments make relevant in a whole new way. “Trump’s a guy who works hard, knows he’s not perfect, and tries his best? And, he is religious. See, he just said so. This is a guy like me!”

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That's right.

Donald Trump is a mainline Protestant of the Presbyterian variety. For him as for many others of his ilk the specific Biblical language about repentance and being made "new" might as well be Swahili. But this country used to be full of such people, and they helped make America great. Since 2007 their numbers are down about 5 million, to 36 million adults, mostly white.

Pew has the data here.

The thing is, their numbers are actually larger since they've unaffiliated or reaffiliated outside the mainline.

And that's one reason why Trump is polling in first place for the GOP nomination as we speak. This is still a Protestant country, at least for a little while longer.

Unborn children by the millions are butchered in the womb and the parts sold, and Jimmy Kimmel cries over Cecil the lion

exoticmeatmarkets.com

Story here.

"The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?"

-- Jeremiah 17:9

Complicit in evil: 65.9 million Americans

"The Democratic Party strongly and unequivocally supports Roe v. Wade and a woman's right to make decisions regarding her pregnancy, including a safe and legal abortion, regardless of ability to pay. We oppose any and all efforts to weaken or undermine that right. Abortion is an intensely personal decision between a woman, her family, her doctor, and her clergy; there is no place for politicians or government to get in the way."

Jesus forgave sins quite apart from the shedding of blood, his own or that of others, and taught it

Thy sins be forgiven thee.

-- Matthew 9:2

Thy sins be forgiven thee.

-- Mark 2:5

Thy sins are forgiven thee.

-- Luke 5:20

For if ye forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you:

-- Matthew 6:14

And when ye stand praying, forgive, if ye have ought against any: that your Father also which is in heaven may forgive you your trespasses.

-- Mark 11:25

Forgive, and ye shall be forgiven.

-- Luke 6:37

Her sins, which are many, are forgiven. ... And he said unto her, Thy sins are forgiven.

-- Luke 7:47, 48

And forgive us our sins; for we also forgive every one that is indebted to us.

-- Luke 11:4

Parochial Joel Miller is offended that Donald Trump doesn't venerate the host

Here:

Trump went on to explain the role of the eucharist in his routine. “When I drink my little wine . . . and have my little cracker, I guess that is a form of asking for forgiveness,” he said. Little wine? Little cracker? I winced both times I read the word. He might as well have said adorable or dainty. Frankly, even Trump’s flippant toss of the word cracker is off-putting. Even if the thing in his hand is identifiably a cracker, it’s not a cracker. It is the bread of life, the broken body of Christ, the bread of heaven, the food of angels, the medicine of immortality. This is how the Bible and early Christians spoke of Trump’s crumb. For him to call it a cracker is to demonstrate he knows nothing of what he is doing.

This may come as a shock to Joel Miller, but hostility to wafer-worship is as American as the father of our country, George Washington, who declined to attend communion so often that when his pastor complained he was setting a bad example stopped coming to church altogether on communion Sundays.

That, too, would no doubt exasperate Miller because the Orthodox and the Catholic cannot imagine a service without the Mass.

Trump, a Presbyterian, has gone to his communion enough times to describe accurately the typical mainline Protestant version of the sacrament, which is more than can be said for the surprisingly parochial Joel Miller.

Lawrence Reed is still trying to convince himself that Jesus was a capitalist for whom private property was inviolable

Here:

"What about the reference, in the Book of Acts, to the early Christians selling their worldly goods and sharing communally in the proceeds? That sounds like a progressive utopia. On closer inspection, however, it turns out that those early Christians did not sell everything they had and were not commanded or expected to do so. ... It may disappoint progressives to learn that Christ's words and deeds repeatedly upheld such critically-important, capitalist virtues as contract, profit and private property."

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Reed cherry picks his evidence, of course, leaving examples such as these still on the tree because they contradict his claims, all the while arguing against a straw man named the redistributionist state which is equally anachronistic:

And all who believed were together and had all things in common; and they sold their possessions and goods and distributed them to all, as any had need.

-- Acts 2:44f.

Jesus said unto him, If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell that thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come and follow me.

-- Matthew 19:21 

Then Jesus beholding him loved him, and said unto him, One thing thou lackest: go thy way, sell whatsoever thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come, take up the cross, and follow me.

-- Mark 10:21

Now when Jesus heard these things, he said unto him, Yet lackest thou one thing: sell all that thou hast, and distribute unto the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come, follow me.

-- Luke 18:22

Sell that ye have, and give alms; provide yourselves bags which wax not old, a treasure in the heavens that faileth not, where no thief approacheth, neither moth corrupteth.

-- Luke 12:33

So then, none of you can be My disciple who does not give up all his own possessions.

-- Luke 14:33

Then Peter said, Lo, we have left all, and followed thee.

-- Luke 18:28

Then Peter began to say unto him, Lo, we have left all, and have followed thee.

-- Mark 10:28

Then Peter said to Him, Behold, we have left everything and followed You.

-- Matthew 19:27

Immediately they left their nets and followed Him. ... Immediately they left the boat and their father, and followed Him.

-- Matthew 4:20, 22

When they had brought their boats to land, they left everything and followed Him.

-- Luke 5:11

And he left everything behind, and got up and began to follow Him.

-- Luke 5:28

Evil is banal . . . it accomplishes its work over lunch

Johannes L. Jacobse, here:

"But evil is seldom sensationalist. It’s banal. It accomplishes its work over lunch and in private clinics by men like the mild and proper Dr. Joseph Mengele — Nucatola’s prototype and in whose steps she walks."

Once more Phil Jenkins stumbles into the truth: that Jesus was a prophet to the Jews, not the Gentiles

Here:

Did the living Jesus recorded in the New Testament believe that his mission extended to gentiles? None of the four canonical Gospels explicitly declare that he recognized any duty beyond the frontiers of Judaism, which is remarkable when we recall that all four were written at a time when the Jesus movement had opened its doors to non-Jews.

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Jenkins cites evidence, but not of the starkest sort which explicitly forbids the Gentile mission:

"Into the way of the Gentiles do not go . . .."

-- Matthew 10:5

Liberal Bishop John A. T. Robinson in 1976 famously put the composition of most of the New Testament before 70 A.D. for the failure to even hint at the destruction of the temple, which would mean that the absence of a Gentile mission sensibility in the gospels isn't an oddity but a marker equal in significance for an earlier dating of the gospel sources. That said, the tyranny of the Passion narrative in the Synoptics speaks to the intrusion of an editorial impulse from the later period which must not be quickly discounted, nor naively accepted (e.g. from the supplied ending to Mark, Mark 16:15: "And he said unto them, Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature").

   

A preposterous miracle: Jesus can raise Lazarus from the dead but must ask others to roll away the stone

Jesus said, Take ye away the stone. Martha, the sister of him that was dead, saith unto him, Lord, by this time he stinketh: for he hath been dead four days.

-- John 11:39

Unless you repent you will all likewise perish

They sow not . . .

A male Eastern Bluebird feeds the female

Behold the fowls of the air: for they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feedeth them. Are ye not much better than they?

-- Matthew 6:26

American delusions: 23% believed to be gay/lesbian when in fact only 3.8% are LGBT

Meaning the specifically gay/lesbian are fewer than 3.8%.

Gallup reported here May 21, 2015:

PRINCETON, N.J. -- The American public estimates on average that 23% of Americans are gay or lesbian, little changed from Americans' 25% estimate in 2011, and only slightly higher than separate 2002 estimates of the gay and lesbian population. These estimates are many times higher than the 3.8% of the adult population who identified themselves as lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender in Gallup Daily tracking in the first four months of this year.

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While the least educated among us are off on the estimate by a factor of over seven, the smartest, with post-graduate degrees, are still off by a factor of nearly four, according to Gallup.

And you thought belief was purely a phenomenon of religion.

Same sex marriage: yet another extraordinary popular delusion and example of the madness of crowds

herd behavior

Erick Erickson, here:

"History is riddled with episodes of mass hysteria. Sometimes those episodes of mass hysteria lead to evil. Sometimes they lead to merely bizarre stories. But society, on occasion, has fits of hysteria and insanity burning like wildfire through it. The wildfire eventually burns out, but it often leaves destruction in its wake.

"The United States of America and much of the West are currently in a fit of hysteria. A wildfire is burning through it. Up is down. Down is up. Good is evil. Evil is good. Wrong is right, and right is wrong. Boys can suddenly be girls. Sex and gender are suddenly different things. And Justice Anthony Kennedy believes that because someone may look at the horizon and find loneliness, the Constitution guarantees him the right to marry another man.

"Leave aside the fact that any judge who can redefine a multi-thousand-year-old institution on a whim has more power than our Founders would want. Our society is going through a round of hysteria."

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"Therefore God sends upon them a strong delusion, to make them believe what is false . . .."

-- 2 Thessalonians 2:11

Joel Miller rebukes the therapeutic view of marriage but is consumed by it like the rest of Christianity

Here (emphases mine):

[T]he church understands marriage to be a sacrament, a gift of God’s grace for the transformation of the recipients. Look for a moment at two examples: baptism and eucharist. The first moves us into relationship with Christ and his church, while the second gives us the life of Christ so we can become more like him. Marriage is the same way. The endgame is union with God as we grow in Christ. ... Our marriages have the power to transform us into the likeness of Christ. ...

Marriage is now primarily a relationship for the betterment and self-fulfillment of two individuals. Two are stronger than one, after all. Together two individuals can better gratify each other’s desires and fulfill each others needs—right up until the moment they no longer seem able or willing, of course.

None of that is false, so far as it goes.

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You will search the essay in vain for the words "baby" or "children" or "reproduction", the essential object of marriage.

It's as if a "proper" view of marriage never existed in the whole history of all humanity before the followers of a crazed Pharisee called marriage a mystery of Christ and the church in the epistle to the Ephesians.

The tyranny of that one line is the culprit behind the distortion of the immemorial view of marriage as humankind's divinely ordained outlet for expressing God's creativity through the family. The idealizing conception of marriage as spiritually transformative has exposed marriage to all the worst elements of an unattainable mysticism which has bred the contempt for the institution which now plagues the West. Instead of ordering our culture around marriage and children and family we have done everything to delay, deny and redefine what nature and nature's God demands. And then we complain when we lose control of our politics.

Maybe if we had done what God has always commanded we wouldn't now be alone and ashamed as a tiny army of homosexual enemies invades our gates and routs us.

"How blessed is the man whose quiver is full of them;

They will not be ashamed

When they speak with their enemies in the gate."

-- Psalm 127:5

Jesus was talkin' 'bout his generation, not some other one

And he said, "Woe to you lawyers also! for you load men with burdens hard to bear, and you yourselves do not touch the burdens with one of your fingers. Woe to you! for you build the tombs of the prophets whom your fathers killed. So you are witnesses and consent to the deeds of your fathers; for they killed them, and you build their tombs. Therefore also the Wisdom of God said, 'I will send them prophets and apostles, some of whom they will kill and persecute,' that the blood of all the prophets, shed from the foundation of the world, may be required of this generation, from the blood of Abel to the blood of Zechari'ah, who perished between the altar and the sanctuary. Yes, I tell you, it shall be required of this generation.

-- Luke 11:46ff.

To prevent losing in court, churches need to remove "standing" by excommunicating the doctrinally unsound

Consider the hypothetical posed here:

"Imagine a same sex couple who consider themselves deeply Catholic want to get married at the Catholic church of their choice. They approach the pastor and he declines to officiate the wedding or be a party to it. The spurned couple might then file a non-discrimination lawsuit against the pastor and his parish making the simple argument that because same-sex marriage is a right protected under the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment, a parish cannot discriminate in who it weds and who it doesn't."

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A number of things come to mind, which church leadership throughout the country ought to begin discussing with their legal counsel as soon as possible.

One, couples who want to marry in church should be required as a condition of membership to get married in their own parish. Churches need to state this explicitly in order to have control of their own affairs. Couples should not be free to roam and pick a "patsy" church of their choosing.

Two, all members should be required to sign doctrinal statements which specifically delineate that they agree with the church's teaching about sexuality and marriage as a condition of membership. Members who transfer to new parishes should have to do the same.

Three, churches should state in writing as a matter of principle that the benefits provided by clergy are only for members who have also completed a course of catechesis, affirmed it and have been publicly accepted into membership.

And four, a clear process of excommunication should be in place and followed in order to remove from membership individuals who come to disagree with the church's teaching.

If taken, these steps ought to help protect churches qua religious institutions, and in a court of law make it difficult for plaintiffs to sue because they do not have standing to sue and have executed evidence which contradicts their claims.

Doctrinally rigorous churches such as the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod and the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod already are well prepared in these respects and represent a good resource for clergy and denominations who are not.