The Outraged Are Always Right; Lesbian Methodist bishop defiant...more

The Outraged Are Always Right
...Polarization has become weaponized. Nobody wants to hear from people they disagree with. If I don’t like your Facebook posts, I’ll unfriend you. If I don’t like your column, I’ll boycott the paper until they fire you. I want to hear from good people who think and talk and live like me. That’s polarization. And polarization meets weaponization because many in our culture are willing to use whatever they have, whatever they can leverage, to make this polarization work for them–whether money, friends, jobs, hobbies, even sports. There are lots and lots of folks willing to blow up their lives to make sure there’s no presence of the people and ideas they hate...

Lesbian Methodist bishop defiant in the wake of challenge to her election   A lesbian bishop in the United Methodist Church asserted her calling to the ministry after a council hearing to determined whether her election last summer was valid.

Karen Oliveto said she is not the first gay bishop and will not be the last

The church's judicial council hearing took place in a hotel in Newark, New Jersey.

A decision will be issued in a few days on whether the Church's Western Jurisdiction had the right to elect her a bishop...

The Most Serious and Severe Departure from the Faith in Our Day ...Kathryn Tanner is not an evangelical. She is Professor of Theology at Yale University Divinity School. Many who claim to be evangelical Christians are embracing a view similar to hers. In Jesus, Humanity, and the Trinity, Tanner declares that “the sacrifice on the cross has nothing essentially to do with a blood sacrifice for the expiation of sin; Jesus’s death is the simple consequence of the life he led on behalf of others – his soteriological mission – in a sinful world” (29-30). Elsewhere she argues that “God’s forgiveness is a statement of fiat rather than a consequence of Christ’s passion.”

In other words, Jesus didn’t have to die in your place, suffering the judgment you deserved by shedding his blood on a Roman cross, in order that you might be forgiven. No, says Tanner, God forgave you by “fiat,” that is, by a simple, sovereign declaration that you are forgiven. “Christ’s passion” was not the necessary precondition for forgiveness. His blood need not have been shed at all for you and me to be “freed from our sins.”

If Jesus did not in fact voluntarily, lovingly, and freely take upon himself the guilt and condemnation that our sin deserved, thereby setting us free from the well-deserved consequences of our moral and spiritual rebellion against God, we have no hope. More than that, we have no “good news” (no “gospel”) to proclaim to a lost and dying world. To lose this is to lose Christianity. This denial of the penal substitutionary sacrifice of Jesus Christ is, in my opinion, the most serious and severe departure from the faith in our day...

Bravo to the Truth: What’s Wrong with Transgender Ideology   ...When people feel that their biological sex doesn’t match their internal sense of gender, they are typically diagnosed with gender dysphoria. This is defined as “discomfort or distress that is caused by a discrepancy between a person’s gender identity and that person’s sex assigned at birth.” In other words, the medical diagnostician simply listens to and affirms the patient’s own verbal self-identification and self-diagnosis.

No objective tests can prove that the transgender condition exists. No physical examination, blood test, bone marrow test, chromosome test, or brain test will show that a person has gender dysphoria. It is a condition revealed solely by the patient’s feelings. Yet the recommended treatment is extreme—cross-gender hormones and sex-reassigning surgery.

Don’t be duped when trans activists conflate the unrelated condition of intersexuality with transgenderism to gain sympathy for a trans agenda. People with intersex conditions are not the same as self-identified transgender people. Being intersex is verifiable in the physical body; being transgender is not. People who identify as transgender usually have typical male or female anatomies...