Unintended consequences of Lutheranism: An unhinged band of female lunatics decorates the tree year round, but for things other than Christmas

Go Ahead, Leave Christmas Tree Up -- Decor Turns Year-Round...

 

 

Always deny there's any evidence to the contrary when promoting the virgin birth

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 As does Walter Russell Mead, who says Christmas is a feminist holiday lol, here:

The early church wasn’t facing a sea of rumors about Mary’s prenuptial behavior, and if it had been, there are more convincing ways of scotching rumors than proclaiming a miraculous virgin birth. 

 Meanwhile . . .

I speak that which I have seen with my Father: and ye do that which ye have seen with your father. They answered and said unto him, Abraham is our father. Jesus saith unto them, If ye were Abraham's children, ye would do the works of Abraham. But now ye seek to kill me, a man that hath told you the truth, which I have heard of God: this did not Abraham. Ye do the deeds of your father. Then said they to him, We be not born of fornication; we have one Father, even God. 

-- John 8:38ff.

LOL Evangelical feminist wymyn throw a fit, think Connubial Christ talk is misogynist, Reformed parachurch group The Gospel Coalition retreats in fear

How dare you objectify me and call me a fertile field!

In the wake of growing controversy, evangelical Reformed parachurch group The Gospel Coalition (TGC) has retracted an article that used explicit sexual language as a metaphor for salvation. However, some say the retraction does not address underlying issues of concern. ... “They do know, right, that the idea of women as a fertile field to be planted with male sperm is not only misogynist but inaccurate? Don’t they????” tweeted author and Baylor University Professor Beth Allison Barr.

More. 

 

Rod Dreher ably defends Josh Butler from an historical point of view here.

Such discussions inevitably ignore the development of ideas within the New Testament itself.

A brief history of feminism

 

Atheist, feminist from a Texas family full of Trump supporters says Trump has ruined Christmas and turned it ugly

Here:

He ruins everything he touches. ... Now [Christmas] has morphed into something even uglier.

So it was already ugly, right?

But Ms. Amanda Marcotte obviously hasn't seen the big, ugly above-ground pool my new liberal neighbors installed next to my rear lot line. They are big Rachel Madcow fans and proponents of gun control who chose to live out here in rural America where gunfire is something of an evening ritual. Nor has the Salon writer heard the loud, drunken parties until the wee hours of the morning these liberals have brought with them, disturbing the peace. And now we've got a big ole SUV in the front yard with the hood up for at least the last month! Who leaves their hood up in the rain and the snow? It's a $330,000 house on two acres, quickly turning into White Trash America.

I sure do miss those Calvinists who used to own the property, even if they didn't think too much of me because I wasn't Dutch. At least they were tidy and quiet. And they had a beautiful lawn, too, underneath that pool.

Donald Trump has no corner on ugly.   

Donna Zuckerberg, sister of Mark, opts for Athenian ostracism (and maybe worse): Lincoln and Douglas debates = good, Socrates' debates = bad

The unemployed classics PhD (Princeton) lives in Silicon Valley with her husband and two children, and runs a much fancier online presence than yours truly. She remains discomfited that America is more Rome than Athens.

The problems with online ‘debate me’ culture:

As the editor of an online publication that runs articles about the intersections of classical antiquity and the modern world, often from a feminist and progressive perspective, I’ve gotten my fair share of “debate me” challenges. Many of these have come after I began writing about far-right interest in ancient Greece and Rome in 2016. Blocking some of my would-be adversaries on Twitter seemed to just energize them — and convince them I was afraid to engage.

A call to debate may seem intellectual, even civilized. In theory, well-structured and respectful debates are an ideal opportunity to reach an audience that isn’t fixed in its views. In reality, however, most “debate me” types seem to view them mainly as a chance to attack their opponent’s credibility. Their model is not Lincoln and Douglas, but rather Socrates: By needling their interlocutors with rapid-fire questions, they aim to reveal, as they see it, their opponents’ ignorance and stupidity, and their own superior intelligence and logic. ...

These modest men also identify with Socrates, the original “debate me” troll. The Platonic texts show Socrates pulling any number of Athenians into debates, and although some are eager to argue with him, others can hardly wait to escape him by the end of the dialogue. Plato’s “Euthyphro” concludes with Euthyphro insisting that he has to leave, while Socrates calls after him, complaining that they haven’t yet figured out the nature of piety. Many of the dialogues end when the interlocutor has been bludgeoned into submission and seems to find it easier to agree with Socrates than continue further — every “debate me” man’s dream. ...

As Laurie Penny noted last year with respect to Milo Yiannopoulos, deplatforming white supremacists is a much more successful way to shut them down than insisting that “sunlight is the best disinfectant” and allowing them to air their hateful views in a structured debate setting. 

A social Darwinist dangles a preposition in defense of materialism against feminism, with a dash of Freudianism thrown in

Some choice! Would you like the bullet in your head, madam, or in your heart?

Here:

[M]ediocrities never lack admirers among the Second Sex, who, having very little judgment, are naturally taken with the vulgar world’s appearances. Women are by nature very willing and eager status whores, although certainly this ugly truth is not something that any man wants to believe, least of all the conservative Christian, who is happy to make “a victim” out of a shameless whore-on-the-payroll like Holly Madison. In women the ordinary man is looking for a mother figure whom, however, he shall also sleep with. From a moral point of view, man has throughout his savage history been an essentially evil being. Shaped in response, woman finds that the proverbial “nice guy” is the last thing she craves. In the face of evil, woman thinks, “He is worthy.” “Nice guy,” in her subtle vocabulary, is code for wealth, and, God willing, a way to philistinism.

When there is no God to inform reality, your only choice is servitude to the distortions of full-throated ideologies.

Even N.T. Wright Has Occasionally Come Close To Saying Jesus Was Nuts

My case has been, and remains, that Jesus believed himself called to do and be things which, in the traditions to which he fell heir, only Israel’s God, YHWH, was to do and be. I think he held this belief both with passionate and firm conviction and with the knowledge that he could be making a terrible, lunatic mistake. I do not think this in any way downplays the signals of transcendence within the Gospel narratives. It is, I believe, consonant both with a full and high Christology and with the recognition that Jesus was a human figure who can be studied historically in the same way that any other human figure can be. Indeed, I have come to regard such historical study not just as a possibly helpful source for theology but a vital and non-negotiable resource: not just part of the possible bene esse, but of the esse itself. Partial proof of this drastic proposal lies in observing what happens if we ignore the history: we condemn ourselves to talking about abstractions, even perhaps to making Jesus himself an abstraction. Fuller proof could only come if and when systematicians are prepared to work with the first-century Jewish categories which are there in the historical accounts of Jesus and which shaped and formed his own mindset.

-- Jesus' Self-Understanding, N.T. Wright (2002)

Western orthodoxy has for too long had an overly lofty, detached, high-and-dry, uncaring, uninvolved, and (as the feminist would say) kyriarchical view of god.  It has always tended to approach the christological question by assuming this view of god and then fitting Jesus into it.  Hardly surprising, the result was a docetic Jesus, which in turn generated the protest of the eighteenth century and historical scholarship since then, not least because of the social and cultural arrangements which the combination of semi-Deism and docetism generated and sustained.  That combination remains powerful, not least in parts of my own communion, and it still needs a powerful challenge.  My proposal is not that we understand what the word “god” means and manage somehow to fit Jesus into that.  Instead, I suggest that we think historically about a young Jew, possessed of a desperately risky, indeed apparently crazy, vocation, riding into Jerusalem in tears, denouncing the Temple, and dying on a Roman cross—and that we somehow allow our meaning for the word “god” to be recentered around that point.

-- Jesus and the Identity of God, N.T. Wright (1998)

When his family heard what was happening, they tried to take him away. "He's out of his mind," they said.

-- Mark 3:21

In a dull stream, which moving slow . . .

 

In a dull stream, which moving slow,

You hardly see the current flow;

When a small breeze obstructs the course,

It whirls about for want of force,

And in its narrow circle gathers

Nothing but chaff, and straws, and feathers:

The current of a female mind stops thus,

and turns with ev'ry wind;

Thus whirling round, together draws

Fools, fops, and rakes, for chaff and straws.

-- Jonathan Swift, 1713