Monthly Archives: August 2024

Rebecca Mclaughlin: Richard Hays Thinks God Changed His Mind About Same-Sex Sex. Is He Right? (GC)

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I am always distressed when brilliant scholars like Hays (or anyone for that matter) get swallowed up by the spirit of the age, and thereby set themselves up for eternal destruction. Shame on him for deceiving God’s people, especially in light of his brilliant career of helping God’s people by upholding orthodoxy. May God call them to repentance so that God might have mercy their souls. I am also grateful for scholars like Mclaughlin for holding the line and exposing the vacuous thinking of heretics for what it is—destructive lies. The stakes are enormous and we dare not be deceived. Lord have mercy.

For those with ears to hear, listen and understand.

For decades, Christians seeking to uphold the Bible’s “no” to same-sex sexual relationships have quoted Richard Hays’s treatment of this topic in his Moral Vision of the New Testament. But Hays (emeritus professor of New Testament at Duke Divinity School) has coauthored a new book, The Widening of God’s Mercy: Sexuality Within the Biblical Story, arguing for “the full inclusion of LGBT+ people in Christian communities.”

Readers might expect to find that Hays has changed his mind about the meaning of the verses that apparently prohibit same-sex sex. But he hasn’t. Instead, he and his son, Christopher (an Old Testament professor at Fuller Theological Seminary), suggest God has changed his mind. If we read the Bible carefully, they argue, we’ll find that “God repeatedly changes his mind in ways that expand the sphere of his love” (2). In light of this, the Hayses “conclude that many religious conservatives, however well-intentioned, are wrong about the most essential point of theology: the character of God” (2).

My conclusions are profoundly different. But we agree on one point. What’s at stake here isn’t theological loose change, as if we can dispense with saying no to same-sex sex and keep the bigger-ticket items. What’s at stake is our understanding of who God is and how we can discern his will.

Read it all.

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Joshua Mitchell: The Age of Incomplete Religions (First Things)

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A sobering analysis. For those with ears to hear, listen and understand.

Second, conservatives have been unwilling to abandon terms for the enemy that have brought coherence to the conservative movement since the 1950s. The terms “cultural Marxism” and “progressivism” are hopelessly out of date and analytically inadequate to the current crisis, yet they are invoked at every like-minded gathering or convention. We are engaged in a monstrous twenty-first-century struggle. The Cold War is over. We must jettison terms that were fitting seventy years ago. 

Regarding cultural Marxism, the “long slow march through the institutions” never happened. Instead, we have witnessed the breathtakingly rapid sprint of identity politics through our institutions. Bernie Sanders is a Marxist; his thinking has been thrown into the dustbin of history by the identitarians who now rule the left. What about progressivism—the belief that the “expert competence” of elites who have been trained in our best universities can redeem the American regime from the founders’ illusions that citizen competence is enough? That movement has been terminated by the left itself. Today, our best colleges and universities do not teach “expert competence.” Students there are taught identity politics instead. They are taught to think in terms of innocent victimhood and transgressive stain. Why do conservatives acquiesce to the “progressive” self-description coming from the left today, which seeks to link a new and destructive movement to a tradition of thought that, even if mistaken, sought to strengthen America? The left today is not progressive; it is identitarian. It does not want experts to rule; it wants innocent victims to rule. It does not wish to strengthen America; it wishes to destroy it.

Conservatives dare to raise questions about church and state because identity politics has so completely overrun our institutions that they now wonder if the constitutional regime set up by the founders was either faulty from the beginning, or is unfixable now even if initially well-established—hence the emergence of serious thinking about Christian nationalism, a post-liberal order, and pre-modern integralism. Conservatives dare think down these paths because they intimate that America is on the verge of a regime change—the new regime being based on innocent victimhood rather than citizen competence, as the one established by the founders was. We should be under no illusion: that is the project of the left today. 

Read and reflect on it all.

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On His Feast Day 2024, St. Augustine of Hippo Muses on the Sacraments

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Your Lord is seated at the Father’s right hand in heaven. How then is the bread His Body? And the chalice, or rather its content, how is it His Blood?

These elements are called Sacraments, because in them one thing is perceived by the senses and another thing by the mind. What is seen has bodily appearance; what the mind perceives produces spiritual fruit. You hear the words “The Body of Christ,” and you answer “Amen” [so be it].

—Augustine of Hippo, Sermon 272.

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Catholic Herald: Shroud of Turin Dates from Time of Christ, Scientists Reveal

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Italian researchers have used a new X-ray technique to demonstrate that the Shroud of Turin dates from the time of Jesus Christ.

Scientists at the Institute of Crystallography of the National Research Council (Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, CNR) studied eight tiny samples of fabric from the shroud, a burial garment which bears the imprint of a man killed by crucifixion, using a method called wide-angle X-ray scattering (WAXS).

They were able to age flax cellulose – long chains of sugar molecules which slowly deteriorate over time – to show that the shroud is 2,000 years old, based on the conditions it was kept in.

They deduced that the shroud was kept in conditions maintaining a temperature around 22.5 degrees Celsius and a relative humidity of about 55 per cent for 13 centuries before it was brought to Chambery, France, in the 1350s; thereby taking the shroud’s chronology all the way back to the time of Christ.

If it had been kept in conditions with a different temperature and relative humidity, the aging of the flax cellulose and resultant dating would have been different too.

“The data profiles were fully compatible with analogous measurements obtained on a linen sample whose dating, according to historical records, is 55-74 AD, found at Masada, Israel,” said the study in the journal Heritage.

The samples were also compared with similar linens from the 13th and 14th centuries but none was a match.

Dr Liberato De Caro, one of the scientists involved in the study, dismissed a 1988 test which concluded that the shroud was probably a Medieval forgery and only seven centuries old as inaccurate because “fabric samples are usually subject to all kinds of contamination, which cannot be completely removed from the dated specimen”.

He added: “If the cleaning procedure of the sample is not thoroughly performed, carbon-14 dating is not reliable. This may have been the case in 1988, as confirmed by experimental evidence showing that when moving from the periphery towards the centre of the sheet, along the longest side, there is a significant increase in carbon-14.”

Read it all.

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V-J Day 2024: Honolulu HI Celebrates V-J Day in 1945

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Originally on Vimeo and since removed.

[On V-J Day 1945] my Dad shot this film along Kalakaua Ave. in Waikiki capturing spontaneous celebrations that broke out upon first hearing news of the Japanese surrender. Kodachrome 16mm film: God Bless Kodachrome, right? I was able to find an outfit (mymovietransfer.com) to do a much superior scan of this footage to what I had previously posted, so I re-did this film and replaced the older version There are more still images from this amazing day, in color, at discoveringhawaii.com

On this, the 79th anniversary of V-J Day (Victory Over Japan Day), a wonderful snippet from time. Watch it all and remember. Give thanks as you do for the greatest generation who have largely passed from our view.

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Remember V-J Day, 2024

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vj-day pict

Today marks the 79th anniversary of Victory Over Japan (V-J) Day and the end of World War II (the formal, unconditional surrender was not signed until September 1, 1945). Stop and remember the brave men and women who fought against the evil of Nazism and Japanese militarism in the 1940s.

Remember too our brave soldiers today who are fighting against another form of evil and keep our soldiers in your prayers.

From the History Channel.

On this day in 1945, an official announcement of Japan’s unconditional surrender to the Allies is made public to the Japanese people.

Read it all.

Also read the text of President Truman’s radio message broadcast to the American people on September 1, 1945.

From here:

My fellow Americans, and the Supreme Allied Commander, General MacArthur, in Tokyo Bay:

The thoughts and hopes of all America–indeed of all the civilized world–are centered tonight on the battleship Missouri. There on that small piece of American soil anchored in Tokyo Harbor the Japanese have just officially laid down their arms. They have signed terms of unconditional surrender.

Four years ago, the thoughts and fears of the whole civilized world were centered on another piece of American soil–Pearl Harbor. The mighty threat to civilization which began there is now laid at rest. It was a long road to Tokyo–and a bloody one.

We shall not forget Pearl Harbor.

The Japanese militarists will not forget the U.S.S. Missouri.

The evil done by the Japanese war lords can never be repaired or forgotten. But their power to destroy and kill has been taken from them. Their armies and what is left of their Navy are now impotent.

Read it all as well.

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A Prayer for the Feast of the Transfiguration 2024

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Father in heaven,
whose Son Jesus Christ was wonderfully transfigured
before chosen witnesses upon the holy mountain,
and spoke of the exodus he would accomplish at Jerusalem:
give us strength so to hear his voice and bear our cross
that in the world to come we may see him as he is;
who is alive and reigns with you,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever. Amen.

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The Feast of the Transfiguration 2024: Origen on the Transfiguration

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Do you wish to see the transfiguration of Jesus? Behold with me the Jesus of the Gospels. Let him be simply apprehended. There he is beheld both “according to the flesh” and at the same time in his true divinity. He is beheld in the form of God according to our capacity for knowledge.

—Origen, Commentary on Matthew 12.37

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Saint Cyprian Explains Why Heresy is a Scourge to the Christian Faith

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Would that all bishops, priests, and deacons heed this warning, especially the bishops, and especially the bishops of the Church of England who are the most recent ones to lead their denomination down the road to perdition. These men and women took an oath to God to defend the faith against all kinds of heresy. But no, they couldn’t be bothered to do this. Why? Because most don’t believe their own Story in the first place! And as Saint Cyprian has warned, heresy is so dangerous because it inevitably leads to apostasy and apostasy leads to eternal destruction.

Nor are the bishops of the CoE the only ones who have led their denominations down the path of destruction. Just look at the Episcopal and United Methodist Churches. It makes the heart sad and angry. Lord have mercy on us.

Heresies have frequently arisen and continue to do so because of the fact that disgruntled minds find no peace and faithless rabble-rousers undermine unity. But the Lord allows and endures these things, while not touching our freedom, so that when our hearts and minds are examined by the norm of truth, the sound faith of those who are approved may clearly stand out. This is foretold by the Holy Spirit through the Apostle when he says: “There may even have to be factions among you for the tried and true to stand out clearly.”

Thus are the faithful approved, thus are the faithless detected; thus even here, before the day of judgment, are the souls of the just and the unjust set apart, and the chaff separated from the wheat. This explains why some, of their own accord and without divine appointment, set themselves over daring strangers, making themselves into prelates regardless of the rules of ordination, and assume the title of bishop on their own authority, although no one confers the episcopate on them.

In the Psalms, the Holy Spirit designates these as sitting in the chair of pestilence; they are the plague and disease for the faith, serpent-tongued deceivers and skilled corruptors of the truth, spewing forth lethal venom from their poisonous tongues; their speech resembles a creeping cancer and their preaching injects a fatal virus in the heart and breast of everyone.

Against such persons the Lord cries out, and from these he restrains and recalls his wandering people, saying: “Listen not to the voice of your [false] prophets, who fill you with emptiness; visions of their own fancy they speak, not from the mouth of the Lord. They say to those who despise the word of the Lord: ‘Peace shall be yours’; and to everyone who walks in hardness of heart, ‘No one shall overtake you.’ I did not speak to them, yet they prophesied. Had they stood in my counsel, and did they but proclaim to my people my words, they would have brought them back from evil ways and from their wicked deeds.”

It is these same persons whom the Lord designates and censures when he says: ‘‘They have forsaken me, the source of living waters; they have dug themselves cisterns, broken cisterns, that hold no water.” Although there can be only the one baptism, they think they can baptize: and although they forsake the fountain of life, they still promise the grace of life and saving water. People are not cleansed by them but simply made foul; and sins are not taken away but only accumulated.

Such a ‘‘new birth’’ does not bring forth children for God but for the devil. Born by a lie, they do not receive the promises of truth. Begotten by perfidy, they lose the grace of faith. They cannot attain to the reward of peace, since they have broken the peace of the Lord with the madness of discord.

—On the Unity of the Catholic Church 10-11

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Tertullian Waxes on the Rule of Christian Faith

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Would that we have bold leaders like this in the Church today.

Now, with regard to this rule of faith—that we may from this point acknowledge what it is which we defend—it is, you must know, that by which we believe that there is one only God, and that He is none other than the Creator of the world, who produced all things out of nothing through His own Word, sent forth before all things; that this Word is called His Son, and, under the name of God, was seen in various ways by the patriarchs, heard at all times in the prophets, at last brought down by the Spirit and Power of the Father into the Virgin Mary, was made flesh in her womb, and, being born of her, went forth as Jesus Christ; thenceforth He preached the new law and the new promise of the kingdom of heaven, worked miracles, was crucified, and rose again the third day; then having ascended into the heavens, He sat at the right hand of the Father; sent in his place the Power of the Holy Spirit to lead such as believe; will come with glory to take the saints to the enjoyment of everlasting life and of the heavenly promises and to condemn the wicked to everlasting fire, after the resurrection of both good and evil, together with the restoration of their flesh. This rule, as it will be proved, was taught by Christ, and raises amongst ourselves no other questions than those which heresies introduce, and which make people heretics.

—On the Prescription of Heretics 13. CCL 1, 197-198

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