A favorite target of the liberal religionists and media for decades has been the Southern Baptist Convention, the second-largest religious denomination in the country. The Roman Catholic group is the largest but its adherents are born into membership, not the case with the Baptists, who must choose. In its annual convention recently, the SBC passed a resolution opposing the Boy Scouts decision to allow homosexual members.
With this as a backdrop, Herald-Leader columnist Paul Prather (22 June) did his number on the SBC and wondered if the decision was biblical, though he reckoned it was according to SBC-think but obviously not considered so by him. Prather lamented the fact that people on all sides of a sex-issue castigated him no matter what he wrote about it but that his shtick, New Testament-wise, is unconditional love, whatever that is. It would be hard, for instance, to love Adolph Hitler or a serial-killer, but to each his own.
Prather wrote that the New Testament’s position is: “I’m a train-wreck and so are you.” Prather even threw in Shakespeare and Faulkner, besides the NT writers, to indicate that ALL humanity is “wildly flawed.” If the collective flaw-ness is that pronounced, one could expect anarchy in the nation as each citizen does whatever feels good, the hell with the impact on anyone else.
That’s not the case, of course, even though Prather presented a laundry list of “sins,” laziness being one of them. Maybe he was just listing his own and judging everyone else by them. Strangely, Prather said St. Paul’s position regarding the “Bible’s moral rules” existed mainly to demonstrate how imperfect we are but that they never make us holy. One can imagine St. Paul snickering while he propounded that position to his church…you guys are bad and there ain’t no hope.
The fact is that not everyone is a “train wreck,” wildly flawed, as proven by the ability of people to get along with each other, notwithstanding that there are some bad apples. There always will be those but they’re “wildly” outnumbered by their opposites; otherwise, the USA would be a cesspool.
Prather wrote that scripture indicates that no sin is worse than any other, notwithstanding the second parable of Matthew 25, in which Jesus remarked different levels of unworthiness, along with the appropriate punishment. Hitler wasted 11 million human beings. Was that no worse than shoplifting?
The everyday subject in the media is homosexuality and the virtual glorification of it these days and Prather gets to the subject, writing that the scripture does not condemn “gay sex” as unusually wicked even though the scriptural rules militate against it. Prather may not appreciate St. Paul, but St. Paul, in chapters 3 and 6 of I Corinthians, made it plain that the human body is the TEMPLE of God, the implication being obvious.
So, not only do the rules about unnatural sex apply as written in both the Old and New Testaments as biological behavior gone awry, but they have to do with what actually is God’s residence on earth. Nothing is filthier or in more violation of the human body (God’s temple) than oral and anal sex and any other practice defiling the obvious uses for body-orifices, i.e., making God’s temple into a gay-bar or weird whorehouse of sorts.
There’s a deeper meaning to the matter of “gay sex” than just the act. This is why the Bible is so vehement in its condemnation of homosexual behavior. In Matthew 11, Jesus used the subject as the bellwether of evil. The misuse of the body, engendered by the misuse of the mind, is endemic to a people-group on its way to oblivion. The inordinate attention and approval granted “gay sex” currently by the media and folks like Prather is proof of a culture sliding into depravity, a la ancient Rome and Greece and Olde Europe today. After all, Plato, the icon of the “enlightened,” was a homosexual as well as a pedophile and probably a pederast in the bargain.
Prather wrote that Christians (though probably not his brand) so disbelieve the good news of the gospel that, “They’re only happy when they can find someone somewhere to look down on.” He obviously had the Southern Baptist Convention in mind, even though the SBC does good works and supports about 10,000 missionaries around the world.
No. Not everyone is a “train wreck.” There are no perfect people, but there are still a lot of good guys out there.
And so it goes.
Jim Clark
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