Parents Cautioned: Look Out for LOGOHomosexual Cable Network Going Into Millions of Homes, Whether They Want It or Not
By Mary Rettig and Jody BrownJune 30, 2005

(AgapePress) - The director of research for the American Family Association (AFA) says parents need to be on the lookout for a new cable network designed for homosexuals.
The new MTV network, LOGO, launches today (June 30) in about ten million homes with digital cable in major metropolitan areas like Los Angeles, New York, and Atlanta. It is designed to appeal to a "gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender audience," and will feature such programming as the Annual Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) Awards, Queer As Folk, and homosexual films.
Unlike other homosexual networks, LOGO will be available in homes without paying any premium. AFA's Ed Vitagliano says that should pose a major concern for parents.
"LOGO is going to be on local cable systems, not as a premium channel like Showtime or HBO -- which you pay for if you want it. It is going to be, at least in some markets, part of the general, regular [cable] package," he says. "So what's going to happen is that parents are going to find one day that, as their kids are flipping [the channels] to go to Cartoon Network or Nickelodeon or something of that nature, they're going to go past LOGO [and] the homosexual programming on that network."
Rest of the story: http://headlines.agapepress.org/archive/6/302005b.asp

A Look at Gay Marriage Around the World
By The Associated Press
June 30, 2005

The following is a look at gay marriage in nations where it is legal in all or part of the country or where such legislation is pending.

NETHERLANDS -- Legalized in 2001. Same-sex couples also have the right to adopt children, either within the Netherlands or from abroad.
BELGIUM -- Legalized in 2003. Gay couples cannot adopt children, although that is being discussed by lawmakers.
SPAIN -- Legalized on Thursday. Gay couples have all the rights enjoyed by heterosexual couples, including for adopting children.
CANADA -- The House of Commons passed legislation Tuesday that would legalize gay marriage by July 31 as long as the Senate also passes the bill, which it is expected to do.
UNITED STATES -- Massachusetts is the only U.S. state that allows gay marriage. Vermont and Connecticut have approved same-sex civil unions.


Methodist leaders vote to bless gay couples
The Methodist church yesterday became the first big Christian denomination in Britain to offer the prospect of blessings services for same-sex couples.
Although adamant that such services would not be regarded by the church as marriages, officials admitted that they could well be seen as such by the couples themselves and by the wider society.

Story here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/gayrights/story/0,12592,1517862,00.html

Tennyson

STRONG Son of God, Immortal Love,
Whom we, that have not seen Thy face,
By faith, and faith alone embrace,
Believing where we cannot prove.
* * * * *
Thou seemest human and divine,
The highest, holiest manhood Thou;
Our wills are ours, we know not how,
Our wills are ours to make them Thine.
* * * * *
O Living Will that shalt endure,
When all that seems shall suffer shock
Rise in the spiritual Rock,
Flow through our deeds and make them pure.
* * * * *
That we may lift, from out the dust,
A voice as unto Him that hears,
A cry above the conquered years,
To one that with us works, and trust
* * * * *
With faith that comes of self‑control
The truths that never can be proved,
Until we close with all we loved
find all we flow from, soul in soul.

N.T. Wright's Sermon

If you haven't already done so, please read Bp. N.T. Wright's sermon below. You don't want to miss it!

http://titusonenine.classicalanglican.net/index.php?p=7544

Term paper about 'God' earns student failing grade
'He told me you might as well write about the Easter Bunny. He wanted to censor the word God.'

By LEROY STANDISH/Staff Writer
VICTORVILLE — For using the "G" word 41 times in a term paper, Bethany Hauf was given an "F" by her Victor Valley Community College instructor.Hauf's teacher approved her term paper topic — Religion and its Place within the Government — on one condition: Don't use the word God. Instead of complying with VVCC adjunct instructor Michael Shefchik's condition Hauf wrote a 10-page report for her English 101 class entitled "In God We Trust.""He said it would offend others in class," Hauf, a 34-year-old mother of four, said. "I didn't realize God was taboo." Hauf has received legal assistance from the American Center for Law and Justice. The ACLJ is a conservative Christian legal foundation founded by Dr. M.G. "Pat" Robertson, who is also the founder, chairman and face of the Christian Broadcasting Network.

The rest here: http://www.vvdailypress.com/2005/111996392756993.html

Canadian Bill C-38 Final Passage Eerily Coincides
With Sodom and Gomorrah Readings at Catholic Masses

TORONTO, June 28, 2005 (LifeSiteNews.com) – The likely final passage this evening of Canada’s same-sex marriage bill C-38 was eerily highlighted by today’s daily Mass readings, encountered by Catholics who attended Mass across the nation. Today’s scripture readings, which are established years ahead according to an international liturgical calendar, contained passages that astonished many by their direct relevance to the disturbing culmination of the same-sex marriage legislation battle.
The first reading, from the book of Genesis Chapter 19, relates the infamous story of the punishment of Sodom and Gomorrah as a result of its sexual and especially homosexual immorality. The second reading from the Gospel of Matthew, Chapter 8:23-27, in the New Testament, relates the story of the apostles’ terror while in a boat in the midst of a violent storm.
When they ask Jesus to save them he responds “Why are you terrified, O you of little faith?”

See the article: http://www.lifesite.net/ldn/2005/jun/05062810.html

(note: the bill did pass Tuesday night)

Bishop N.T. Wright: Closing Address to the ACC Conference in Nottingham

"Ever since the eighteenth century, western protestantism has been pulled more and more towards a denial, explicit or implicit, of the great central truths of Christian faith – sometimes, indeed, towards watering them down while still saying the words, sometimes actually to open mockery of the idea of the Trinity or the resurrection or the full meaning of the cross. And what has happened, exactly as the eighteenth-century Deists intended it should, is that God is no longer a player on the world scene; Jesus is Lord far away in heaven, or in the secret places of my heart, perhaps, but he can’t tell me how to run my business or which way to vote. And when that happens Caesar smiles his grim smile and pulls in the rope, and the worlds of money and sex and power all dance to his tune, exhibiting that tell-tale imperial pattern, the pagan pattern, the pattern that says there is no resurrection, that Herod is King of the Jews and Caesar is Lord of the world, that Mammon, the money-god, is divine and rules our pockets, that Aphrodite, the goddess of erotic love, is divine and rules our loins, that Mars the god of war is divine and doesn’t mind who wins as long as people keep fighting each other. My brothers and sisters, is it surprising that, if every doctrine from the Trinity to the divinity of Jesus to his saving death and bodily resurrection and ascension has been dismissed as outdated, disproved or irrelevant, the church should then have no means of protesting against massive economic injustice, against the erosion and inversion of sexual morality, against rampant militarism – in other words, against Caesar and all his weapons? Is it not time to be grasped once more by the real authority of scripture, which is not about quoting a verse here and a line there but about being reshaped by the full story, the whole narrative, the entire drama of a book like Acts until the picture becomes clear and we see who Caesar is and how he works, who Jesus is and how he rescues God’s lovely world from corruption and slavery, and who we are called to be as his Spirit-led witnesses to the ends of the earth?"

The whole thing: http://titusonenine.classicalanglican.net/index.php?p=7544

Lord, thank You for bishops like NT Wright who boldly proclaim the the truth of Your Gospel. Fill us all with like zeal so that this world can be transformed!

Two Missing Verses
From Lent and Beyond

(referring to last Sunday's readings)
Did any of you other faithful readers note the verses that were omitted from yesterday’s ECUSA lectionary? I was very startled when yesterday’s Epistle reading began with Romans 6:3. Romans 6 has been a very important chapter for me in my personal spiritual walk and I’ve memorized much of it. So I immediately realized what verses were missing:
Rom 6:1-21 What shall we say, then? Shall we go on sinning so that grace may increase?2 By no means! We died to sin; how can we live in it any longer? (NIV)

The rest is here: http://lent.classicalanglican.net/?p=952

Irenæus: Against Heresies

1. Inasmuch as certain men have set the truth aside, and bring in lying words and vain genealogies, which, as the apostle says,“minister questions rather than godly edifying which is in faith,” and by means of their craftily-constructed plausibilities draw away the minds of the inexperienced and take them captive, [I have felt constrained, my dear friend, to compose the following treatise in order to expose and counteract their machinations.] These men falsify the oracles of God, and prove themselves evil interpreters of the good word of revelation. They also overthrow the faith of many, by drawing them away, under a pretence of [superior] knowledge, from Him who rounded and adorned the universe; as if, forsooth, they had something more excellent and sublime to reveal, than that God who created the heaven and the earth, and all things that are therein. By means of specious and plausible words, they cunningly allure the simple-minded to inquire into their system; but they nevertheless clumsily destroy them, while they initiate them into their blasphemous and impious opinions respecting the Demiurge; and these simple ones are unable, even in such a matter, to distinguish falsehood from truth.

More here: http://www.ccel.org/ccel/schaff/anf01.ix.ii.i.html

Court Issues 'Dangerous' Decisions on Ten Commandments

by Pete Winn, associate editor

Two key decisions on public display of the Decalogue fail to clarify what's constitutional.
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled on a pair of Ten Commandments cases today, decisions Focus on the Family Chairman James Dobson, Ph.D., said "tore a hole through the First Amendment."
On separate 5-4 votes, the Court ruled unconstitutional Ten Commandments displays in two Kentucky courthouses, while it upheld the constitutionality of a Ten Commandments monument on the grounds of the Texas Capitol.
But the Texas ruling is far from a victory, according to Dobson.
"This was no affirmation of the right of religious expression — particularly Christian religious expression — in the public square," Dobson said. "It was an argument rooted in logic along the lines of, "Well, the Commandments have been around for a long time, so long, in fact, that they're kind of like any other historical decoration that might be used to adorn the walls or the grounds of a public building. So let them stay in place and keep accumulating dust."

Read the rest at: http://www.family.org/cforum/feature/a0037014.cfm

Rediscovering the Historical Jesus:
Presuppositions and Pretensions of the Jesus Seminar
Dr. William Lane Craig

In this first part of a two-part article, the presuppositions and pretentions of the Jesus Seminar are exposited and assessed. It is found that the principal presuppositions of (i) scientific naturalism, (ii) the primacy of the apocryphal gospels, and (iii) the necessity of a politically correct Jesus are unjustified and issue in a distorted portrait of the historical Jesus. Although the Jesus Seminar makes a pretention of speaking for scholarship on the quest of the historical Jesus, it is shown that in fact it is a small body of critics in pursuit of a cultural agenda.

More here: http://www.leaderu.com/offices/billcraig/docs/rediscover1.html

A Must Read

A Position Paper on Scripture, Authority, and Human Sexuality of the Church of Uganda
From titusonenine

Worth a reread:
Cardinal Ratzinger's (now Pope Benedict) sermon on moral relativism

"Every day new sects are born and we see realized what St. Paul says on the deception of men, on the cunning that tends to lead into error (cf. Ephesians 4:14). To have a clear faith, according to the creed of the Church, is often labeled as fundamentalism. While relativism, that is, allowing oneself to be carried about with every wind of "doctrine," seems to be the only attitude that is fashionable. A dictatorship of relativism is being constituted that recognizes nothing as absolute and which only leaves the "I" and its whims as the ultimate measure."

More here: http://www.zenit.org/english/visualizza.phtml?sid=69555

African Anglicans Make New Push to Split Over Homosexuality

Churches and Prisoners
by Raymond Dague

What do pious churchgoing folk share in common with jailbirds serving prison sentences for serious crimes? More than you might expect. They both share the same federal statute which protects their religious freedom. That statute was just declared to be constitutional when the United States Supreme Court unanimously decided the case of Cutter v. Wilkinson on May 31, 2005. So churches and prisoners can now assert religious rights with greater assurance that they will get maximum protection from the courts.

The story about how it came about is an interesting one. It speaks well of the willingness of the congress to protect religious liberties when the courts have dropped the ball. Hence the importance of the current battle in the senate over the filibuster of President Bush’s nominees to the courts. The president cares about religious freedom, whereas his opposition seems more concerned about protecting abortion and gay rights.

Religious liberties have been eroded since 1990 by a case which said that if there is a general law, you have to obey it, even if that law impinges on your religious beliefs and practices. You get no exceptions. Before 1990 the government could not abridge religious liberties unless firstly, the government had a compelling interest to do so, and then secondly, only if they used the least restrictive means available to accomplish that compelling government interest.

So for example, if the government passed a law which said that everyone had to attend school between the ages of 6 though 16 (which all states have done), it had to show that the government had a compelling reason why all kids should go to school. That is not hard. There is plenty of data which shows that it is important to have an educated citizenry. It is also clear that a lifetime of problems occur for most people if they do not have a basic grade school education. But that is not enough. The government also had to show that the goal of an educated citizenry and eliminating the problems of being uneducated are best met by a law which forces everyone without exception to attend school between the ages of 6 and 16.

It happens that the Amish do not send their children to school after they have learned how to read the Bible at a good level of comprehension, which is well before age16. So in 1969 the Amish father of a 15 year old boy was tried by the State of Wisconsin for violating their compulsory education law. He was convicted, and his case went to the Supreme Court. There the Court decided, yup, Wisconsin has a compelling governmental interest in seeing that all of its citizens are educated, but that in the face of the religious objection of an Amish father to sending his son to school, the state had to make an exception. A universal law applicable to everyone had to make exceptions for the deeply held religious convictions and practices of those who could not follow the law without violating their religious beliefs.

All this changed in 1990 with a case entitled Employment Division v. Smith. In Smith the Supreme Court reversed the rule of the Amish case (without admitting that they did so) and said, no exceptions for religious practices. Three years later in response to Smith, the congress, after an intense lobbying effort by the Christian Legal Society and other religious groups, passed a law called the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. This law re-established the rule of the Amish case, and again allowed for exceptions based on deeply held religious convictions. But the Supreme Court in 1997 declared the Religious Freedom Restoration Act to be unconstitutional based on various technical aspects of how congress justified passing the statute. Back to the “no exceptions” rule.

When religious groups tried to correct those technical defects with a new and improved law which would allow the religious exception, the political climate had changed. The rise of the homosexual rights movement lead many former supporters of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act to grow concerned that the anti-discrimination laws for homosexuals which were being manufactured by the courts would have holes punched in them by religious objections.

Apparently the gay rights crowd thought that churches using their land and prisoners in jail could not endanger gay rights. Christian leaders such as Sam Casey of the Christian Legal Society and Chuck Colson of Prison Fellowship were able to successfully lobby congress to get a law which again gave religious conscience an exception to a general statute. Such a statute might be reasonable on its face, but occasionally oppressive to religious freedoms. A statute by the long and odd sounding name of the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act of 2000 was born.

Readers might not care about the new statute (unless you happen to be reading this in jail), but pastors and churches should take careful note. The next time the local zoning board says, “no, you can’t do that with your own property because it violates our zoning law,” there now may be a good legal response from the church attorney.

Maybe there is a hint of Providence in the political compromise which linked Jesus’ call to outcasts to follow him (now called the church) with those jailed for theft, drugs, and murder. There is an old maxim which says “politics makes strange bedfellows.” Jesus might like that, but say it slightly differently. “I came not to call the righteous, but sinners.”

Raymond Dague is a Syracuse, New York attorney who represents many churches in their disputes with zoning boards, and is a member of the Christian Legal Society and the parish chancellor of St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church in Syracuse. His law office can be found at (315) 422-2052 and on the web at www.DagueLaw.com.

Albany Bishop Herzog's Address to the June 2005 Diocesan Convention at Camp-of-the-Woods

http://www.albanyepiscopaldiocese.org/
documents/pastoral/bpconv05.html

Thank you Lord for the faithful diocese of Albany! How wonderful are the blessings You have poured out upon the Bishops, clergy and lay people there. I thank You that it is Your work that they are doing and Your Holy Spirit that they are seeking.

Psalm 31: 19-20

Do you hunger for God?

Do you want more of the Lord? Do you want to know his presence in a deeper way? Spend a week meditating on A.W. Tozer's The Pursuit of God.

Check it out:
http://calvarychapel.com/library/Tozer-AW/PursuitOfGod/0.htm

I pray it may bless you greatly and increase your zeal for the things of God!

Check out the Diocese of Albany's

Spiritual Life Center

http://www.albanydioceseslc.org/

Lord, we ask You to bless this place where You are honored. Pour out Your riches that it may continue to grow and prosper. May people come here to behold the beauty of Your creation in rest and peace where

"The heavens declare the glory of God!"

AAC: ECUSA Shameless in Its Defense of a New Gospel
read account by Cynthia Brust

http://www.americananglican.org/site/apps/nl/content2.asp?c=ikLUK3MJIpG&b=675589&ct=1075943

Raymond Dague: The Theology of Heresy in Central New York

On Saturday, June 4, 2005, the famous liberal theologian Marcus Borg is coming to central New York to give a public lecture and to speak to the clergy of the Episcopal Church. The Diocese is bringing him here. Marcus Borg is one of the founders of the Jesus Seminar in 1985. The Jesus Seminar is a group of liberal scholars who have decided that very little of what is portrayed in the Gospels is historically accurate. They say that they are in search of the “historical” Jesus, rather than the Jesus of “myth” as portrayed by the Church for the last 2000 years.

How did we get to a state in the Episcopal Church where orthodoxy as set forth in the Nicene Creed is out, and heresy is taught to our clergy by Marcus Borg at the request of the officials of this diocese? That is an interesting story which requires some recent and not so recent history.

The recent history we mostly know, because we have been living it for the last two years. Lately the entire world wide Anglican Communion has been racked by wars over the new bishop of New Hampshire who is living with his homosexual lover. Also by vote of the 2003 General Convention, each diocese can now decide whether it wants to bless homosexual unions. Some bishops, like the new bishop of Florida, are saying that all is well, but events speak differently.
Six rectors in Connecticut are under threat of being removed by their bishop. Three parishes in Los Angeles have transferred their ecclesiastical authority to an Anglican bishop in Africa. The bishop of Los Angeles is pouring hundreds of thousands of dollars into a lawsuit against these parishes which legal experts say he will lose, and with it three of his fastest growing parishes. A similar lawsuit by the bishop of Pennsylvania has generated a legal bill over $1 million to that diocese,and the bishop there still has another appeal before he can seize thechurch he is suing.

All across the country whole parishes are walking away from their property and starting new churches, sometimes turning the keys over to their bishop to do what he wants with empty buildings with no parishioners. The Anglican Mission in America (AMiA) is picking up many of these parishes. Independent Anglican parishes are forming. Almost every diocese in the country has taken a big financial hit, and church attendance is down practically everywhere.
Traditionalist groups such as the American Anglican Council and the Anglican Communion Network are flourishing in an apparent backlash against the slide of the entire denomination.

Weird things continue to pop up around the country with the name “Episcopal” attached. Last fall a husband and wife pair of Episcopal rectors in Pennsylvania were discovered as having been long time Druids.Surely you would think that the bishop of these two priests would discipline them. But when they renounced their Druid practices and resigned from the “Order of Bards, Ovates and Druids” their bishop disciplined neither of them. He issued a press release touting the positive contributions they had made to the church. The husband later renounced his Christian faith to become a Druid priest. The wife is still rector of her Episcopal Church. Presiding Bishop Frank Griswold has uttered not a peepover this apostasy.

The official website of the national Episcopal Church carried a “Women’s Eucharist” which is pure pagan worship of the female body. When a circle of women drink from a cup of wine they invoke the image of their menstrual blood in an act which looks like Satan worship.

One of the most prominent Episcopal churches in the nation, Trinity Church on Wall Street in New York City, had a very interesting celebration on Trinity Sunday 2005. While we at St. Andrew’s were celebrating the Father,Son, and Holy Spirit with the liturgy of the faith used for almost 2000 years, Trinity Wall Street had a clown mass. No words were said for the readings which were instead acted out in mime. The congregation responded with noise makers rather than said or sung prayers. The priest was dressed up like Bozo the Clown, rather than wearing liturgical vestments. Instead of incense they blew bubbles around the altar. If you go to the Trinity Wall Street website you can watch this entire hour-long liturgy travesty.

In the diocese of Central New York the Thornfield Conference Center was recently deconsecrated when the “vision committee” of the diocese decided that the Center had no future, and its buildings were torn down. As the diocesan budget is shrinking, church attendance is off.

St. Andrew’s in Syracuse and some other parishes have cut off sending money to the diocese. As a result St. Andrew’s, one of the largest and fastest growing parishes in the diocese, was denied a seat at the 2004 diocesan convention. A new parish has not been started in this diocese in well over 30 years, and many have been closed, or yoked under a single priest with other parishes which are failing.

The problems of the Episcopal Church did not begin with the 2003 General Convention and the advance of the homosexual agenda. The root of this decay is far deeper than the events of a single church convention in the summer in Minneapolis two years ago.

In 1958 a liberal dean of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City was elected bishop coadjutor of the diocese of California, and within a year was bishop of California. Until he resigned in 1966 James Pike, like Bishop Spong of New Jersey, was the darling of the liberal news media. His antics even won him a spot on the cover of Time Magazine. Pike’s first career was that of a lawyer, but his real splash was as maverick bishop. Actually “heretic bishop” is a better characterization. Pike’s descent into heresy involved his denial of the doctrines of the virgin birth and the infallibility of scripture. As early as 1960 he called the doctrine of the Trinity “outdated, incomprehensible and nonessential” to the Christian faith. The Episcopal Church largely ignored Pike until he became so outrageous that he was impossible to ignore. When Pike’s son committed suicide, he engaged in séances to contact his deceased son. Pike married three times, divorcing his first two wives.

Finally Pike was presented with changes of heresy. In October of 1966, the House of Bishops of the Episcopal Church voted to censure him. This was a rather mild rebuke considering that Pike’s widely publicized views completely contradicted the Christian faith. Some of the bishops wrote a minority report defending Pike saying, “We believe it is more important to be a sympathetic and self-conscious part of God’s action in the secular world than it is to defend the positions of the past, which is a past that is altered by each new discovery of truth.” In other words, even our belief in the Triune God is up for grabs as each generation discovers new truths.

When the divided House of Bishops gave only a censure rather than any real discipline, it was a signal to the entire Episcopal Church that there was no longer any church discipline about what you believed or did.

Bishop Pike then took a drive in the desert of Israel south of Jerusalemwhen his car got stuck. He tried to walk back to civilization, but lost his way. He died in the barren wilderness of the Israeli countryside as he was trying to find his way out of the desert – perhaps an apt metaphor for his entire life.

After Pike another heretic Bishop came on the scene. From 1976 to 2000 John Shelby Spong was the bishop of New Jersey. He is another Pike, but even more public and sensational. Spong wrote more books than Pike did,and rather than just being on magazine covers, he is constantly on television with interviews, has his own online web column, and rides the lecture circuit peddling heresy. Central New York’s former bishop O’Kelly Whittaker invited Spong to be the speaker at one of our diocesan conventions. While his diocese was in serious decline due to his disbelief of everything Christian, Spong made a good living. He became famous as a debunker of the things which his Church believed as set forth in the Bible, the Nicene Creed, the 39 Articles, and the Prayer Book. And in doing so he is helping to pave the way for the Episcopal Church to renounce Trinitarian doctrines in favor of a doctrine of radical love and inclusiveness.

What Spong believes is set forth in his own words in what he calls his “12 Theses.”

1. Theism, as a way of defining God, is dead. So most theological God-talk is today meaningless. A new way to speak of God must be found.

2. Since God can no longer be conceived in theistic terms, it becomes nonsensical to seek to understand Jesus as the incarnation of the theistic deity. So the Christology of the ages is bankrupt.

3. The biblical story of the perfect and finished creation from which human beings fell into sin is pre-Darwinian mythology and post-Darwinian nonsense.

4. The virgin birth, understood as literal biology, makes Christ’s divinity, as traditionally understood, impossible.

5. The miracle stories of the New Testament can no longer be interpreted in a post-Newtonian world as supernatural events performed by an incarnate deity.

6. The view of the cross as the sacrifice for the sins of the world is a barbarian idea based on primitive concepts of God and must be dismissed.

7. Resurrection is an action of God. Jesus was raised into the meaning of God. It therefore cannot be a physical resuscitation occurring inside human history.

8. The story of the Ascension assumed a three-tiered universe and is therefore not capable of being translated into the concepts of a post-Copernican space age.

9. There is no external, objective, revealed standard writ in scripture or on tablets of stone that will govern our ethical behavior for all time.

10. Prayer cannot be a request made to a theistic deity to act in human history in a particular way.

11. The hope for life after death must be separated forever from the behavior control mentality of reward and punishment. The Church must abandon, therefore, its reliance on guilt as a motivator of behavior.

12. All human beings bear God’s image and must be respected for what each person is. Therefore, no external description of one’s being, whether based on race, ethnicity, gender or sexual orientation, can properly be used as the basis for either rejection or discrimination.

To analyze these would take too much space here, but notice one thing about Spong’s 12 Theses: they say much about what he does not believe, but little about what he does believe. Much liberal theology is similar. It criticizes what it claims is wrong belief, but has few positive statements to describe faith in Christ. Other than “God is love”, “inclusiveness,”and “gender neutral” language, there is not much substantive content to liberal theology.

Borg is in the tradition of Spong and Pike. In a well-written book The Meaning of Jesus: Two Visions by Marcus J. Borg & N. T. Wright, Borg describes what he thinks about Jesus, and often what he does not think about Jesus.

Borg believes that Jesus was not conceived by Mary as a virgin, but was the biological child of Joseph and Mary. Jesus was “more likely” born in Nazareth and not in Bethlehem as recorded in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke. None of the things associated with the nativity of Jesus such as the appearance of the star, the shepherds seeing the angel, or the magi visiting the baby ever happened. Also the geneologies of Jesus were fabrications, or as Borg likes to say, “history metaphorized.” Jesus did not know that he was the Jewish Messiah. Jesus did not predict his own death, nor did he see his death as the salvation for the sins of man.Jesus did not utter the words of the Eucharist at the Last Supper over the bread and the wine. There was never a trial of Jesus before the Jewish or Roman authorities. Whether the tomb was empty on Easter morning is “irrelevant” to the Christian faith. He describes the Nicene Creed as “not…a set of literally true doctrinal statements to which I am supposed to give my intellectual assent, but as a culturally relative product of the ancient church” which he prefers to chant or sing, rather than say.

Borg is an attractive and glib speaker, and a fine writer. He cranks outbook after book debunking orthodox Christianity, and is a bit better than his predecessors Pike and Spong in trying to articulate actual content to what he believes. But basically his calls himself Christian by remaking Christianity as he “imagines” Jesus. When you see a theologian, bishop, or priest speak about “imagining” or “re-imagining” God, watch out. They, like Pike, Spong and Borg, are remaking God in their own image, and to their own liking.

In a very real sense, the Episcopal Church in the United States is doing just what Bishop Pike did. It is lost in the wilderness, has embraced heresy, and is dying as its membership and finances dry up. It is dying of thirst for the Holy Spirit as it wanders in a wilderness of theological and moral experimentation. It claims that it is acting prophetically at the behest of the Holy Spirit revealing new truth, but it is lost in the Wilderness of Sin.

Marcus Borg is another step along the proud road to renouncing the truths of the Christian faith and replacing them with a quasi-Christian jargon of love and inclusiveness with no requirement for repentance, transformation and holiness. This next weekend, the Diocese of Central New York will take one more step down that road as it listens to Marcus Borg. I plan to stay home to work in my garden and mow my lawn.

–Raymond J. Dague, Esq., is Chancellor to St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church in Syracuse, New York

ECUSA and Canadian Anglican churches excluded from ACC

http://www.canada.com/national/nationalpost/news/story.html?id=b5ff64b3-d1b0-431f-94d8-a1074e3076d6&page=1

http://washingtontimes.com/upi/20050623-083726-8376r.htm

http://www.anglicancommunion.org/acns/articles/39/75/acns3994.cfm

Lord, we pray that Your Holy Spirit would guide and direct Your church to all Truth and that we would walk in repentence and obedience to Your Word.

Welcome to Transfigurations!

Welcome to Transfigurations! This blog is intended to serve the conservative Episcopal/Anglican community and the wider Christian community in Central NY.

" Therefore, since we have such a hope, we behave with great boldness, and not like Moses who used to put a veil over his face to keep the Israelites from staring at the result of the glory that was made ineffective. But their minds were closed. For to this very day, the same veil remains when they hear the old covenant read. It has not been removed because only in Christ is it taken away. But until this very day whenever Moses is read, a veil lies over their minds, but when one turns to the Lord, the veil is removed. Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is present, there is freedom. And we all, with unveiled faces reflecting the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another, which is from the Lord, who is the Spirit." 2 Corinthians 3:12-18 net Bible

I pray all that is posted here will speak the truth in love, will edify, bless and transform this local body of Christ, and be an impetus for revival, repentence, prayer and intercession.