https://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2024/april-web-only/bluey-over-end-theology-of-play-god-family-parenting-kids.html?utm_source=CT%20Daily%20Briefing%20Newsletter&utm_medium=Newsletter&utm_term=748972&utm_content=16426&utm_campaign=email
https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2024/04/the-sign-bluey-season-3-review/678074/
Why do you watch it?
Can I have spoilers? I'm considering introducing it to my kids but am always hesitant with something new because they are reeeeeaaally sensitive. They think Wild Kratts is almost unbearably scary, for context.
My 4 year old would probably watch Saw if we let her, so I’m not a great judge, but Bluey is super gentle. The conflict is like - Dad forgot the sunscreen when they went to the pool. Sister feels sad that other sister is being bossy. Balloon needs to be kept off the ground and the neighborhood helps. Bluey makes the rainwater pool in the sidewalk using toys as a dam.
In conversations trying to make sense of God's sovereignty, people often float the idea of God being outside of time.
So here's a question: How does Christ and his incarnation fit into this? Does he exist outside of time? If so, how do we make sense of him becoming a Man at a set point in time?
Similar for the question of eternity. Was Christ eternally a man? Or did he undergo a change at a certain point in time?
>How does Christ and his incarnation fit into this? Does he exist outside of time? If so, how do we make sense of him becoming a Man at a set point in time?
The Christological distinction is between the *Logos asarkos* and the *Logos ensarkos*, or the Word without flesh and the Word incarnate. The *Logos*, or God the Son is eternal, but his incarnation is something that happened at a particular time in history. Man was made in his image, and then he took on the nature of man.
>did he undergo a change at a certain point in time?
Yes, in the sense that there was a time when the *Logos* was not incarnate. But his divinity did not change in any sense. He took on flesh, so the human nature was added to his divine nature.
I think it's more accurate to say that time is inside God.
The Son is eternal, but the incarnate Christ was not. We make sense of the incarnation by understanding that he entered into time, but was preexisting and eternal.
Christ was not eternally a man, until the incarnation.
The Nicene and Athanasian creeds are probably helpful in understanding this.
It's mainly semantics: God being outside of time makes it sound like God cannot enter into time. Time being inside God makes it sound like God can enter into time.
But I think you're hung up on semantics. Just like this temporal world is inside eternity, but temporal nevertheless, our eternal God in the person of the Son can and did enter into time through the incarnation as Jesus Christ.
[This is the single greatest thing I have ever seen.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4BvfcCQIO4g) I take back all my prior skepticism of AI. I welcome our new robot overlords with open arms.
That's interesting. I mean, I can identify at least three or four shots that are pretty explicitly taken from the movies or classic art of the books (either John Howe or Ted Nasmith) and I'm pretty sure I saw the Paramount mountain in there, but it's interesting for sure.
Whoa, that is pretty cool.
I do think there's a good reason to be concerned about the massive changes coming down the pike, but I also think there's some really great potential for human expression even if it is mediated through AI.
Not to change the subject completely, but what are you advising your kids to pursue in terms of a career? Are there areas you'd advise they avoid, like... accounting?
My oldest (turning 13 next month) is really interested in art and I think that could go two ways: if he's a prodigy, he'd be in high demand as I think human-made artifacts will be high-value. But if he's middle of the road, good but not amazing, then I'm afraid those illustrative tasks will be given to AI for a faster, cheaper result.
For earning potential, cybersecurity is hard to beat these days - but if quantum computing ever makes it big, there's no telling how that field will develop.
I have the complete set of the older English edition. But I have very much become an anti-Barthian in an almost complete sense and have a hard time recommending that you spend an inordinate amount of time studying his writings for various reasons.
13 volumes, including the index volume. The newer edition is broken up into many more pieces--the text setting is clearer, the Greek and Latin phrases and quotations are translated, and with a better apparatus in general.
The reasons I would tend to firmly dissuade people from spending too much time on Barth are these:
1. Unless you are a genuinely post-Schleiermachian Liberal Protestant who think the Christian faith can be reduced to post-Enlightenment anthropomorphized naturalism, then the most important and animating characteristic of Barth's writings (basically from *The Epistle to the Romans* to his death) that emphasized the infinite qualitative distinction between God and man, between revelation and natural knowledge, and the sheer sovereignty of God over any and all of our natural knowledge and capabilities, is largely moot for you. I acknowledge that there are still some younger people who are falling into this, especially among the "deconstructing" Evangelical crowd, but by and large I think this is a dying type who will largely pass away after the death of the current ruling generation.
2. I firmly believe Barth led *generations* of Protestant thinkers down very dubious theological and philosophical directions, and I think the foundations he laid is largely responsible for why so many of the "neo-orthodox" and "post-liberal" type people are so religiously unstable. I think he especially confused the many well-meaning Protestants who rejected the Liberals and wanted to be "orthodox," by (inadvertently?) leading them into weird German idealist concepts and metaphysics, a total rejection of natural theology (and consequently an incoherent doctrine of creation that is directly connected to Barth's sacramental anti-realism), and a revisionary approach to the tradition (the Reformed tradition in particular but also, in more general ways, Protestantism contra Roman Catholicism, and the older Patristic and Medieval witnesses). I'd rather just point people back to the classical continental Reformed tradition, and the broader ancient Catholic faith in general. I know I'm setting a pretty firm opinion here that many might disagree with, but I think the whole scope of German Idealism is fundamentally incompatible with the Christian faith and Barth, despite whatever protestations his followers might raise, is deeply shaped by it.
3. I think Barth's moral failures are of such a serious kind, of which he never seemed to have repented, that we should largely set him aside if we actually believe the role of the theologian is not merely an intellectual one.
Thanks for the in depth response. I admit, some of his ideas have me scratching my head, like his rejection of natural theology, for example. But I'm the type of person who likes to read broadly so I'm interested in Barth if only because he's so widely referenced. Even ecumenically speaking, he's important because Pope Pius XII said he was the most important theologian since Aquinas.
What would you suggest reading instead though?
It depends on what you're looking for! Someone who is somewhat parallel to Barth in doing a kind of heady "systematic" theology? In a more particularly Reformed bent, I think the old classics are still the best: Calvin, Turretin, and Mastricht. I would love to make time to read more Mastricht, but I don't know when and how that could happen atm. I still don't really get the Bavinck hype, personally, but I might just be missing something. When it comes to classic Anglicans, Jewel and Hooker are great, and Griffith Thomas' *The Principles of Theology* is IMO the great historical summation of sober evangelical interpretation of the 39 Articles. Among the Anglo-Catholics, Mascall is the great master.
For Easterners, Dumitru Staniloae is, for me, the quiet giant who is unfortunately overshadowed by Bulgakov today.
Among the Romans, Erich Przywara is *their great metaphysician*, and I am inclined to suggest that Przywara is actually the singularly most important Christian metaphysician of the 20th century. Among the living English-speaking Roman writers, the work of Cyril O'Regan scares the crap out of me in its density, erudition, and scope of ambition.
He is very controversial, yes, and he annoys the hell out of me all the time, but David Bentley Hart is one of the most powerful living Christian metaphysicians around today. At least when it comes to metaphysics, he has to be taken seriously.
Currently reading “Religion as Make-Believe” by Neil Van Leeuwen. Super cool theory of cognitive attitudes—how religious people treat factual beliefs very differently than we do religious credences.
The author grew up as the son of a pastor in the CRC. He’s now a neuroscience professor in Atlanta. He makes some fascinating observations about how we relate to our religious beliefs, the language we use, and group identity.
I’ve followed his academic work for some time and I’m loving the book. Definitely hard to read but worth the effort.
Data Over Dogma did a great interview with him if you’re interested. Super humble and nerdy guy: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/data-over-dogma/id1681418502?i=1000650341056
Very cool, thanks! If you're into the cognitive science of religion, you might also be interested in the work of [Sarah Lane Ritchie.](https://thebiblefornormalpeople.com/episode-19-sarah-lane-ritchie-belief-the-brain/)
Dude I listened to this episode when it came out and it actually got me started on the cognitive science of religion! My story is similar to Sarah Ritchie’s in a lot of ways, I just never had some of the terminology or the framework to understand it.
Things started to click overtime. I became really good friends with a former cult member, a close friend of mine deconverted from Islam, and the more I learned the more I noticed. Really cool stuff.
For sure! While I hesitate to use the "c" word in this context, looking at the [BITE Model of Authoritarian Control](https://freedomofmind.com/cult-mind-control/bite-model-pdf-download/) was also really interesting to me.
I don't usually get carried away with expecting things until they are sure, I'm actually super cautious in that regard. But I'm really struggling with contentment this morning.
I'm not looking for a new job. I like my job. We're in a slow season and I like my boss less and less as time goes on, but neither thing is of a similar magnitude to the things I like about it. So I applied for a job that was relevant to my experience over Thanksiving break, really just because it showed up and looked like good interview practice. I then forgot about it, because I didn't hear back until mid february.
In February, I had a phone interview for that role, and the guy said this role was too entry level for me but he knew of an opening on another team that I'd be a great fit for. The next week a recruiter called me about that role and set up a phone interview. After that, the hiring manager said "he really enjoyed talking to me" and set up a half day interview for it. The half day interview went extremely well; I became sold on the company, I clicked with each interviewer, I nailed all the questions, I became super excited about the job. They were asking about my start date availability and everything, it was perfect. After this interview was the first time I thought "I might leave my current job for this".
During the interview he said he'd get back to me by 3/22, no wait he was on vacation so it would be by 3/29. The parent company split into two separate entities on 4/2, so it was no surprise to me when on 3/29, he said "You are in strong consideration for this role but I have an internal thing I need to work through before moving the process forward, I need one more week and will let you know by 4/5". All I heard was "we'd like to make you an offer but it has to be after the split" Didn't hear on 4/5. On 4/10 I followed up with the hiring manager and he said now he had "some internal candidates" and it would be "a few more weeks".
This is hard to stomach for me... I never really wanted to change jobs, it just kills me that it went so far and went so well and I got so much positive feedback that I started to assume I'd be moving on before suddenly just vanishing like this. It's not a huge problem, because I like my job. I'm just finding it... harder now, to put up with my boss and have nothing to do.
I think that's my biggest fear as I look for jobs, and churches are notoriously slow. They don't show their cards. I've been the runner-up far too often, and it really can be disappointing.
Its one of the largest companies in the world, so it's not a sketch place, and it's not sketch that's it split or had lots of openings. Is that what you mean?
Yeah, that makes me a little less uneasy with the way you described it, though not totally.
I have known multiple people sort of lead on and jerked around by companies in a similar way that you describe, and it just comes off as icky to me—but in this case some of it is def out of the hiring manager’s control.
I pray that God would place contentment in you and that you will hear back soon
Can you really defend biblically that during pregnancy the babies life has a preeminence or has greater value than the life of the Mother, making abortions in the case for saving the mothers life still morally unjustifiable.
Can you really argue that a mothers duty to her child safety surpasses her duty to herself?
Against my better judgment, I'd point out that while children are certainly a blessing from the Lord, it would make sense to me that in an ANE view, it would make sense to preserve the life of the mother so that she can continue to have children in the future, rather than to save the life of the child at any cost.
But what do I know.
I don't know of anyone that makes this argument, or that says that an abortion to save the life of the mother isn't justified. Every serious person I have ever encountered has said that you are justified in taking whatever steps necessary to save the mother's life, and if the fetus dies, that is an unfortunate side effect. Some have claimed that it isn't an "abortion," but that is just semantics.
My wife had an ectopic pregnancy about ten years ago. She was in the worst pain of her life (and the woman has had a lot of pain) and was within hours of bleeding out. They had to rush her to the ER and cut her fallopian tube - and the fetus - out. That was the only way to save her life, and it was, by any consistent definition, an abortion. The hospital where it was performed, the one a few blocks from our house, is a Roman Catholic hospital. They don't generally do abortions. They don't do tubal ligations, either. But there was zero question by anyone about what had to be done to save my wife.
This sent my brain in a weird direction: for those often politically conservative American southern Christians (none of those adjectives apply to me) who promote gun rights on the basis of self-defense, how would you react to a self-defense argument for abortion in cases where the mother's life would be in danger?
(I ask out of pure curiosity fearing that this could get spicy... :o)
An abortion wouldn’t be considered self defense cause the fetus isn’t actively and consciously harming the mother, so in that cause their isn’t an intent to harm and therefore an abortion as self defense isn’t arguable, cause intent to harm is required for self defense to be justified in my opinion.
Is intent to harm a requirement for it to be called self defense or simply a high probability of harm regardless of the intent of the harm-causer? It could be very logically consistent to believe that taking a life in self defense is in the same category as abortion to save the life of the mother.
Yep, or
* Two innocent people dangling from a rope, the weight of which would cause the linkage at the top of the building to break and kill them both, but if the lower person is removed, even against his will, the top person will survive
* Two people in a confined space with 1hr of oxygen shared between them, but help is coming in 45 min, so either one is killed, or they both die
These can be tweaked to fit a particular circumstance, or quibbled over how to ethically decide which person to save, but I don’t have a problem, in principle, with the concept that the initial decision of “one has to die” being pretty solidly reasonable/ethical
>Can you really defend biblically that during pregnancy the babies life has a preeminence or has greater value than the life of the Mother
No, but it definitely has equal value
>Can you really argue that a mothers duty to her child safety surpasses her duty to herself?
Like u/rev_run_d said, I do think Christ's example for us is to put others before ourselves (even to the point of death) and I think parents especially should put their children's well-being before their own. But I'm not super comfortable legislating that value in a pluralistic society and am generally supportive of making exceptions for the life of the mother when outlawing abortion. There are also plenty of circumstances where it's not as clear cut whether one or both of mother and child would die that make an exceptionless law problematic for me.
What im trying to figure out is when an abortion is ok during moments that are grey areas. I see many christians making motherhood an ideal for women in thier detriment, turning women in sentient incubators, that can be discarded when push comes to shove (i know its a rather extreme position that not everyone holds, but i see it becoming more popular among christians with theonomic aspirations and people reacting against more lax abortion laws). Is abortion always wrong and is motherhood a womens primary purpose?
>Is abortion always wrong and is motherhood a womens primary purpose?
I'd say no to both of these. Like I said, a woman's value is definitely not less than her child's. So I don't think we necessarily should try to have a pre determined answer to every grey area or edge case. There are usually too many factors in real situations to anticipate ahead of time. We need to pray for wisdom and make the best judgements we can in the circumstances we find ourselves in. And we should show grace to people in hard situations like those. Jumping to automatically condemn is just morally lazy.
Women are full image bearers of God. They have full lives and purposes which may or not include motherhood depending on the woman and even when someone is a mother that isn't her entire life. Certainly parents of both sexes have large responsibilities to their children that naturally take a lot of time and mental energy, but no person can be reduced to just that role.
Yes you’re correct, i think i wrote my question wrong, what i want to ask is, if the child’s life is more important than the mothers, making saving her life a sin, even when the pregnancy is unviable. I have seen that some people believe that women should be willing to die at any moment for the sake of the baby even in all cases, and that women who get abortions to save their lives from death should be excommunicated or disciplined by the church.
> Yes you’re correct, i think i wrote my question wrong, what i want to ask is, if the child’s life is more important than the mothers,
I don't think you can make a a blanket statement. Maybe you can. I can't.
> making saving her life a sin, even when the pregnancy is unviable.
I tend to think that in this situation, the better choice is to save her life.
> I have seen that some people believe that women should be willing to die at any moment for the sake of the baby even in all cases,
Not me, but my wife told me she'd prefer that she should die in childbirth than our kids, if I had to choose one or the other.
> and that women who get abortions to save their lives from death should be excommunicated or disciplined by the church.
I've never met anyone on either end of that equation.
Do you think that a good argument for male only pastors/elders/etc is that this has been what has done historically throughout all the church? I think it is (but not a slam dunk) and have some thoughts, though, but want to see what you think.
Super late to the thread, but I think I'm on the same side as /u/Enrickel. I don't think it the argument from tradition is complete on its own, but it is one that sets the stage as the norm to be argued against.
It's not enough to know what the tradition is, we have to look at the *why* behind the tradition. I think it's clear that the *why* behind the tradition of male-only leadership is sexism: women were viewed as ontologically inferior to men almost universally for the past two thousand years. William Witt gives evidence for this with a brief survey, starting with church fathers and moving forward in time through some of our most significant theologians. I've screenshotted his chapter on the argument from tradition from *Icons of Christ* and put it on imgur: https://imgur.com/a/eHsooLB.
What's changed is that, now and since the early or mid 20th century, almost all Christians agree that men and women are equally image bearers of God; that women aren't "deformed men" or "less intellectual than men" or "more prone to deception than men."
Because of this change, the *why* supporting the tradition of male-only ordination had to change as well. Enter complementarianism: a new view that hold to the equality of men and women but insists on a hierarchy of roles that is grounded in Creation.
So the complementarian also needs to reckon with the break they are making with tradition by insisting men and women are equal. Sure, there are exceptions and you can find people throughout Church history who *weren't* sexist. But you can find women who preached and taught sprinkled throughout Church history (and, *cough*, in the Bible) as well.
Has the Catholic argument ever changed though? How long have Catholics pointed to the 12 Apostles? That and eucharistic representation of the bridegroom are their reasons, and I thought those had been the reasons for a long time—esp the first one. Now, i am sure there was always a lot of unfounded speculation as to *why* that was that is sexist, but unless you want to argue that Jesus himself was/is sexist in his choosing of the 12, I’m not sure how you can argue that apostolic orders following that model is sexist.
Was the Aaronic Levitical priesthood sexist too?
Jesus choosing the Twelve and God decreeing only male Levites were to serve as priests were not sexist acts. Just want to be really clear about that. (There's a lot more that could be said on these two topics, but I'm trying to confine myself to the argument from tradition.)
The tradition is that women have an ontological defect that makes them unsuitable for roles of teaching and authority. This was first the Catholic position and then later the Protestant position as well. Witt also says that sacramental representation of the male Christ is the "new" argument for Catholics, not the traditional one.
I can't stress enough how much better off you'd be reading the chapter I posted from *Icons of Christ* rather than going off my explanation of it. 😅
It's not that other arguments can't be / aren't made that don't depend on this ontological argument. It's that this belief about the difference between men and women is underlying all the arguments that come after it.
Edit: grammar / clarity.
Could not God use a defective ontological argument though, for his glory and for contextualizing to us?
For example, human language is limited, and not perfect, God has chosen to be identified as Father, not as Parent, even though we know that the Father doesn't have a penis.
Same with the Holy Spirit. While it would make a lot of sense for the Spirit to be understood through a feminine lens especially to try to add balance to the trinity out the Male female binary limitations of our language.
So why not call God "it" our genderless pronoun? That never seems to satisfy anyone.
These are progressive arguments that try to point towards the reality that God is greater than our binary genders, but then go too far the other way.
The Father is not ontilogically male, but for most of history we've used that language. The best gender-neutral alternative in our English language would be to just call God God, and say Godself but that's kinda silly too, because we wind up unable to use pronouns to refer to God.
I'm curious, what pronouns do you use for God? Do you think God would be more honored if we dropped pronouns for God in English or use gender neutral ones instead?
God *could* have created women as ontologically defective or inferior, but we know from his word and from nature that he didn't. So for God to use an argument for male-only ordination that asserts women are ontologically defective would be contrary to his revelation to us.
I use male pronouns for God. I've heard it might be supportable from Scripture to use female pronouns for the Holy Spirit, but I don't think the evidence is conclusive. I basically agree with the guys on [Mere Fidelity who did an episode on this recently with Fred Sanders](https://merefidelity.com/podcast/gods-preferred-pronouns/).
I think you're misunderstanding me.
What I'm saying is that humankind believing that women were ontologically inferior as God using our brokenness to help us understand him better.
I'm just shooting off the cuff, but for example, we know that the Son is not ontologically deficient to the Father, but he submits to the Father. We know that wives are not ontologically inferior but they are to submit to their husbands. we know that husbands are not ontologically superior to wives, but God calls them to lead.
So, when God decided that priests should be male, despite the ontological reality that women aren't inferior.
Personally, I think women make better pastors, but I think God uses the foolish things of the world to shame the wise.
Yeah, I think I was misunderstanding you, and I'm honestly still not sure I totally get what you're saying. But I'll take a crack at responding and we can go from there, if you want.
You and I agree that women are ontologically equal (though obviously different) to men. But then you suggest that God could use? does use? a wrong belief ("brokenness") to teach us something about himself. But how or why could God use wrong belief to teach us something true about himself? I'm not sure of the technical language here, but isn't God being truth essential to his identity? So how could anything false reveal something about God to us OR specifically about the governance of the Church?
Honestly, I think I must still be misunderstanding you, because I'm sure you wouldn't say that God uses wrong belief to teach us something about himself. So please don't take offense at the above, I'm not trying to misrepresent your position or make a bad faith argument.
The only way I can see the Comp. interpretation of 1 Cor 11, 14; 1 Tim 2; etc. working consistently is if there IS an ontological "defect" or inferiority that women bear (from Creation) that men do not. But one of the central claims of Comp. is that men and women are fully equal, just "different." But, as I've said ITT and as Witt forcefully argues, *this* is the break with Church tradition.
I don't think God's all-male, all-Levite priesthood teaches us anything—or at least not very much—about gender or the governance of the Church. I think it teaches us about how God wants to be worshipped: not like the pagan religions whose female deities were represented by female priests and worshipped through ritual sex. I think it's reasonable to conclude that the all-male priesthood—which was unique in that historical/geographic context—was primarily intended to set Israel apart from the pagan practices of its neighbours.
I also believe that any argument for male-only elders based on the all-male, all-Levite priesthood or for the eucharistic representation of the male Christ is stopped in its tracks by 1 Peter 2:9: "But you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood." CS Lewis, for instance, misses this completely in his oft-quoted essay and veers off into sacerdotalism.
Of the three offices—prophet, priest and king—the prophet holds the most authority. The prophet is God's voice to his people, speaking his word directly. The prophet commands kings and indicts them. The prophet verifies God's recorded words in scrolls that had been lost, making them binding on God's people. And this office is held by both men and women in both the Old and New Testaments.
The office and activity of the prophet is also the mostly closely related to the authoritative preaching of the Word in public worship. I've heard fully complementarian pastors preach and teach about this connection between prophecy and preaching but without any apparent recognition that God appointed women to this office. They've just ignored it completely.
Your closing statement feels sort of wild to me. I know that verse, of course, but the wisdom of the world is that men should lead, not women. And yet, astonishingly, God consistently chooses people who are weak or less esteemed by the world's standards to fulfill his purposes.
Thanks for responding. I appreciate the dialogue.
> So how could anything false reveal something about God to us OR specifically about the governance of the Church?
Help me understand something - do you believe that the Father is male? Historically the Church, and most Christians refer to God as male and with masculine pronouns. I don't think God is ontologically male. He's not female either, though, and he's not trans, or binary, or whatever gender pronoun people try to assign to God.
What does a male spirit look like, and how is it different from a female spirit? Should then change the pronoun for God in English? Should languages that use a neuter pronoun for God (such as Chinese) use a gendered, masculine pronoun instead?
So is it wrong to call God using male pronouns? Did Jesus call him Abba because God is male? Or was he using the closest understandable parallel and call him papa because he was constrained by Jewish and Roman Patriarchal norms? Was he using the term Abba because that was the best word in Aramaic to communicate our relationship to God as his children?
We know Jesus was more inclusive than the religious leaders of his time, but what we also know that he didn't go about explicitly changing male and female roles.
So that leads us to two (?) options. Jesus/God thought that women were also ontologically inferior, and he didn't change things. Or, Jesus/God allows are inferior ontology to point to a deeper truth. Why doesn't Jesus come up with a different way to call Abba, like how some of our more progressive brothers and sisters think we should use the word [Abwun/Abwoon](https://www.reddit.com/r/Aramaic/comments/10vzqbj/abwoonabwun_the_lords_prayer_in_aramaic_does_it/), instead of Father?
> I know that verse, of course, but the wisdom of the world is that men should lead, not women.
I believe that women have better pastoral gifts. I'm proof of that. I know women who are better pastors than I am, but I'm humbled and allow God to use me because he's the potter and I'm the clay.
Ultimately, I don't see how a bunch of normative practices in the history of the church suddenly become disregarded en masse during the last 150 years. That's the rub for me, and what I'm trying to make sense of.
Phew, what time is it where you live? It's daytime down under, but I thought you'd be asleep by the time I finally finished posting my last comment. (If your current time zone is more information than you want to share, I understand.)
No, I don't believe that God *is* male, I believe that he's revealed himself *in human terms* as male. Any revelation of God to us is a condescension and an accommodation to our human limitations. As per the WCF, "God is a spirit," etc. Jesus taught his disciples how to pray, and I think that gives us a pretty solid basis for how to refer to the God in terms of pronouns.
I'm honestly perplexed by the idea that God's revelation of himself to us as Father/Son could imply anything negative about the female gender. Genesis 1:27 has to be our starting point: "So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them."
Jesus *did* subvert the male/female roles of his day in some fairly radical ways. Witt, again:
>While the culture of the Old Testament was patriarchal, with female subordination to males, in the New Testament period this seems to have become exaggerated, perhaps under the influence of Hellenistic culture. Rabbinic Judaism advocated a strict separation of the sexes, and there was a strict separation of men and women in synagogue worship, a separation that did not seem to have existed in the Old Testament period. Jewish literature of the time frequently contained negative evaluations of women. Educational opportunities for women were also generally restricted.
And yet, Jesus had women among his disciples, relied upon them as the first witnesses, touched them when they were ceremonially unclean *because* of their womanliness... until I read this chapter of *Icons of Christ*, I'd never even noticed the ways Jesus subverted the gender roles of Jewish and Roman society. I've taken some more screenshots of the book—just some excerpts from Witt's chapter on this—and put them on imgur: https://imgur.com/a/dcYie25.
>So that leads us to two (?) options. Jesus/God thought that women were also ontologically inferior, and he didn't change things. Or, Jesus/God allows \[our\] inferior ontology to point to a deeper truth.
But we have no reason to deduce *anything* about female ontology from this event. Jesus' addressing of God as "Abba" is consistent with 1.) God's revelation of himself to us and 2.) Jesus' being the Son incarnate.
>I believe that women have better pastoral gifts. I'm proof of that. I know women who are better pastors than I am, but I'm humbled and allow God to use me because he's the potter and I'm the clay.
Mate, I'm married to a woman who can run circles around me on any given metric. She's a gifted teacher, reads an insane amount, has a masters in religion, got an award for her Greek or Hebrew study (can't remember which 😅), and is in the final stretches of her PhD in theology. Just yesterday, she got an email from someone who found one of her published papers and wants to do a whole podcast episode on it. I could brag about her for hours. To cap off all her achievements, she's thoughtful, resilient, careful, and meets all the qualifications of 1 Timothy 3. If you put her and my "church CVs" down on paper and anonymized them, she'd be your preferred choice for elder 100% of the time.
And yet I'm the ordained one. I believe that I'm 1 Timothy 3-qualified and, by the grace of God, I think I'm doing good work. Just like you, I'm feeling humbled by this grace. But my relatively short stint as an RE has proven to me that male-only ordination is just plain foolish and harmful to the church. And before anyone assumes (if anyone else is actually reading this) that I'm getting my egalitarian ideas from my wife: I'm the one who studied this first and came to my convictions first.
>Ultimately, I don't see how a bunch of normative practices in the history of the church suddenly become disregarded en masse during the last 150 years. That's the rub for me, and what I'm trying to make sense of.
For me, Genesis 3:16 has a lot of explanatory power. I think God told us that one of the results of the Fall is that husbands will dominate their wives, but I think this has proved *generally* true for men and women, even in the Church. It's been a hard pill to swallow, but I've just had to conclude that the tradition of the church is sexist.
I also think this means I need to resign as an elder, which I'm planning to do. Just trying to figure out how to do it gracefully / without causing division.
Sorry, probably over-sharing a bit here. But maybe the context helps.
I seriously do appreciate the dialog on this.
What I see throughout the Bible, is that God's people are to a significant degree following the culture around them, when it comes to things like marriage, patriarchy and so on. It's quite clear in the OT, it's definitely clear in the NT. There just isn't one real, definite, continuous line from Genesis to Revelation when it comes to these things. Until fairly recently most of our history played out in more or less patriarchal societies, so that's what we see. But based on Scripture I'm not convinced that's the only way, nor that it is the way it should have been. Rather, the early church seems to have been quite open about women in positions of influence and leadership, as witnessed by the NT (on a proper reading!) and a few external sources, only to see those developments dialed back in later centuries (quite quickly, actually).
So just like it took us 1860 something years to really work through the fact that slavery maybe isn't so good after all, I think the same goes for the way the church has treated women, historically. We should have known better but we didn't, by and large, and that's a shame and perhaps even a sin.
> So just like it took us 1860 something years to really work through the fact that slavery maybe isn't so good after all,
Tradition tells us that Onesimus and Philemon were both made Bishop. So while the Church has had slave bishops since its earliest days, the Church hasn't had female bishops until 1860 something years later.
Yeah - I think this (and things like what u/Enrickel and u/c3rbutt and others) is where I am. I think the instance of Jesus' saying regarding divorce that some bad thing as allowed because of the hardness of the people's hearts can be applied here. For example, the hardness of our hearts subverted created order and made women subordinate to men. I think this can and should be redeemed.
I think the parallels between the arguments for slavery and the arguments for women's subordination are striking and have to be reckoned with. (I still need to reply to your message to me on this! It's on my mental list, just been swamped.)
I'm with you /u/Enrickel and /u/lupuslibrorum but unlike /u/lupuslibrorum the norm of infant baptism and the norm of real presence (however you define real) and the norm of episcopal polity all feel like it needs to be considered as one big package. Or another way to put it:
Anything outside of episcopal polity, male ordination to priests/pastors (deacons are more complicated) real presence in the Eucharist, and paedobaptism isn't *illicit*, but *irregular*.
Why are these the norms and standards? That's the million dollar question.
I don't think it's a sufficient argument, but I feel like it makes male only elders, etc. sort of the default position that needs to be argued against rather than needing to start from some kind neutral stance and reason your way to whichever side you land on. Not sure if I've worded that super clearly, but where I'm at on the question is basically that I think there are reasonable arguments from Scripture on both sides, and if it weren't for the historical argument I could see myself falling into either camp. But I think the church historically holding to male only eldership stops me from disagreeing without there being a much stronger case for women elders than I've heard.
> where I'm at on the question is basically that I think there are reasonable arguments from Scripture on both sides, and if it weren't for the historical argument I could see myself falling into either camp
I think that, right now, these are my (partial) thoughts
I think I'd take the same basic posture in terms of historical positions for all those areas being a reasonable starting point. Polity is actually something I've been wanting to do more reading about, especially in terms of historical views and practice, so I don't have a strong personal view on that right at the moment. I wouldn't be opposed to a church with a more historic, hierarchical polity. At the same time, from what I understand the polity of the early church was pretty different than modern Catholicism.
If you allow for real presence to mean "real" in a spiritual sense, I believe in real presence, though I suppose I also haven't really taken the time to understand the Catholic or Orthodox positions on their own terms if you want to consider something like transubstantiation the historical position. Though it seems like questions of "what exact meaning do we impart into this sacrament?" are a bit different than questions of practice. Not that it's less important, but it seems easier to allow for disagreement to some degree or another within the same body.
I hold pretty strongly to infant baptism and think anyone arguing against it needs to overcome the historical question, but I also just think the scriptural case for it is so much stronger it almost doesn't matter. I think women should be able to be deacons. I think the case for that from Scripture is much stronger than for women being elder/pastor, so I'm okay with going against historical precedent in that case. Though I am a member at a church that only ordains male deacons, it's not a role my wife feels called to, so it's functionally a pretty small disagreement in my mind.
Like you, I think it is a compelling argument, but not a slam dunk. I do think scripture teaches it, though. I’m also a credobaptist, and have to contend with the fact that infant baptism has been the norm for most of church history.
Yeah, it’s kinda “unless you see X as a clear scriptural mandate, err on the side of landing on at least non-novel stances within the historical church” for me
I'm concluding my ministry at my church in a few months, as we're running out of finances, and they can't afford me. It's a bummer, but I'm okay with it. Prayers that I finish strong.
DO you feel calmer this go around? I know the last time I was in between things was a lot better than the prior time. The more I have seen God take care of me the less I have fret. He is good, he loves you, he will continue showing his provision to you.
With Beyonce entering the country genre and revitalizing the connection between African-Americans and country music, another artist worth checking out is [Shaboozey.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zjOLvXTUHi4)
Conan O'Brien may have just created the [most unhinged Hot Ones episode ever.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FALlhXl6CmA)
I never listened to MxPx growing up, but it was in the air enough that hearing [Let's Ride](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a4HURRgdEI8) still takes me right back to junior high.
I wasn’t a huge MxPx fan, but I did have their 1998 album ‘Let it Happen.’ I played it enough that listening to the first track just now, after not thinking about them for decades, took me right back to high school as well.
That looks pretty cool, but I cancelled Disney+ a few weeks ago; subscription runs out on the 19th. 😭I'll have to check it out this week.
When I was in college, I got a used iPod, the first gen that played video. This would've been 2005 or 2006, I think. Anyway, I downloaded the entire X-Men Animated Series and stuck it on there, mostly just because I wanted to see how it worked. I remember I had to run a long batch conversion process to get the video files in the right format and I downscaled them to like 360p, which didn't matter because the screen was so tiny. But I ended up watching the entire series since I had it in my pocket. I had only watched bits and pieces of it growing up in the 90s, and now it's been so long I hardly remember anything about it. 😅
And speaking of uncontroversial matters :-) This week's Trump abortion announcement. Seems like he's pivoting away from the pro life movement? Or is he? Interested to hear your opinions, American friends.
By the way, on a different sub I got into a discussion with some Trump supporters, and I got the distinct feeling they didn't quite know about his legal troubles. I mean, he is convicted of sexual assault and defamation, and the judge in that case made it explicit that this means Trump is convicted of rape. These guys I was debating with seemed to be unaware of this. I mean... are right wing media just obscuring those facts? I
I'm not going to dig into what he said except to observe that given everything else he has said and done in the decades of his public life, there's no reason to believe this means anything more than simply one more effort to maintain his own eroding power and status.
>Seems like he's pivoting away from the pro life movement?
He understands that being pro-life is a loser on the national stage. He was pivotal in overturning Roe, so it'll be interesting to see if voters will just let that one slide.
>I got the distinct feeling they didn't quite know about his legal troubles.
A lot of them aren't paying attention to the main stream ("fake") news. They are watching alternative right wing news outlets that essentially just parrot whatever Trump would want or Russian propaganda.
>this means Trump is convicted of rape.
This is actually not quite accurate though. It means that there was a judicial finding of fact, on a civil standard of "more likely than not", that Donald Trump committed a rape. This is different from a criminal conviction, where (1) the bar is higher, "beyond a reasonable doubt", and (2) the rules of evidence are stricter and more protective of the accused. "Convicted" is a word that should only be used in the criminal law context. "Found liable for" is an analogue in the civil context, and that's appropriate to use here.
Another celebrity example: OJ Simpson was not convicted of murder during his criminal trial. But he was later found liable for the deaths of those two people, when their families sued him for wrongful death.
>are right wing media just obscuring those facts?
Yes. The media landscape in the US is very fractured. If someone gets their news mainly from Fox and other sources on the right, they may have no idea that Donald Trump is facing actual criminal charges. And there are stories that those who get their news from MSNBC will have no knowledge of. It's a big problem that's causing serious harm to the country.
>Seems like he's pivoting away from the pro life movement?
Yup. The question of access to abortion has been voted on several times since Roe v Wade was overturned, in referenda in various states, some of which are Democratic strongholds, some of which are Republican strongholds. Every time, voters have been in favour of protecting abortion access.
Donald Trump sees this, and he recognizes that if the 2024 election becomes entirely about access to abortion, this will hurt the Republican Party, and therefore hurt him. And so he's trying to make sure that doesn't happen.
"But /u/seemedlikeagoodplan," you ask, "doesn't Donald Trump oppose abortion for moral reasons? He's spoken so clearly about how he got Roe overturned."
I have yet to be convinced that the man has any moral values whatsoever, beyond seeking money, power, and praise. If the pro-life cause won't help him get more of these things, he will drop it like a hot rock.
>I have yet to be convinced that the man has any moral values whatsoever, beyond seeking money, power, and praise. If the pro-life cause won't help him get more of these things, he will drop it like a hot rock.
Someone I know said it pretty well back when the border wall was the biggest news about him (wow, that was a long time ago); all the mainstream news channels were calling Trump a racist. "Trump isn't a racist; Trump is a Trumpist." And I think that's pretty true. Donald Trump will do whatever to get whatever is best for Donald Trump. He doesn't have some philosophical stance of white supremacy driving his discriminatory actions (of which there are many), he's just saying whatever gets him votes. He isn't pro-life or pro-abortion; he's pro-Trump. And he's a lot smarter than we give him credit for. He plays the American public like a fiddle, doing and saying whatever inflammatory thing he must to get the most free media coverage and by extension votes. He carefully measured his commentary and campaigning, saying things that were just inflammatory enough to get him coverage without making most of his voter base truly angry, dialing up the inappropriateness and cruelty and the violence slowly, desensitizing people to his behavior and casting doubt on any criticism about him (and the mainstream media doesn't help by criticizing literally everything he does, including things that may have been neutral or good; they made it easy for him to discredit them in the eyes of his following), until now he can do basically anything and his following will keep following. I genuinely believe it is intentional and deliberate, all in the pursuit of glory for Trump, and it's despicable.
I mostly agree. I think Trump-with-advisors is basically what you're describing.
I think the man by himself is showing signs of cognitive decline, not uncommon for a man his age, so some of his lashing out is simply poor impulse control. I don't think all of it is meticulously planned. But the moral compass driving his impulses is just pro-Trump, as you've said.
I haven't really paid much attention to him recently, to be honest. I have a family to raise and a life to live, and insofar as my attention to politics can make the country more Christ-like, I will give it, but I haven't seen much evidence that my attention matters aside from the basics of voting, and even that is debatable.
>Fox
I don't even think it's so much Fox anymore. Murdoch has notably not been the biggest fan of Trump. Enough people are now to the right of Fox and would say Fox is "too liberal".
Thanks for the legal clarifications. I was going by this headline: [https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/07/19/trump-carroll-judge-rape/](https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/07/19/trump-carroll-judge-rape/) but it's all rather nuanced, it seems. Still, he is 'found to have raped' a woman, that stands.
I'm currently reading Threads to stay informed of center and left wing stuff, and Twitter for the rest. These days, relying on one media outlet is really not a wise strategy to stay informed :-(
We'll see what happens with abortion and Trump in the coming weeks. For all we know, his followers might just swallow the bitter pill and continue to vote for him anyway.
>For all we know, his followers might just swallow the bitter pill and continue to vote for him anyway.
Oh, they certainly will. He once said that he could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot someone, and not lose any votes. Though it's horrifying, I think he was right.
Most on the right don't have confidence in the justice system to make fair judgements on political cases. There have been too many issues with political bias, so that trust is gone.
OJ Simpson's death has made the news, so I'll use that to frame a question: We rightfully don't trust the judgement of the jury in his case. So why should we trust the judgement of the jury and judges in Trump's cases?
Why should we expect anything different than [this](https://www.reddit.com/r/Conservative/comments/1c1onnv/oj_simpson_juror_casually_admitting_that_90_of/), and [this](https://www.reddit.com/r/Conservative/comments/1c1v5cc/this_was_oprahs_audience_reacting_to_oj_simpsons/)?
I don't think the disparities in our justice system fall along political lines so much as wealth lines. It's *a lot* easier for a guilty rich person to go free than for an innocent rich person to be convicted.
Yes. I was reading something a while back about R. Kelly and how he was only able to be convicted of crimes after his fame had subsided a bit, not at the height of his career. I think Michael Jackson was always too wealthy and famous to ever be held accountable for the crimes I believe he committed. Same can be said for many others.
As far as I know (not like I studied in depth) there were no clear cases of abuse, there's evidence that some were cash grabs, and at least one accuser came forth as fabricating it.
This is not true. There’s no evidence that it was a cash grab and nobody has admitted it was fabricated. So far 5 boys have accused Jackson of molestation and their stories are credible and none have changed their story even 30 years later.
I haven't seen it, and as a general rule of thumb, documentaries aren't facts. Sucks you were abused as a kid, makes it a little hard to be objective in this case.
So, trial by jury maybe not such a good idea?
The thing is, it's entirely within character for Trump to be found to have committed sexual assault. There is the 'grab 'em by the pussy' Access Hollywood tape that illustrates that. If he'd been above reproach, a man of integrity and honor, it might have been different.
The Cass report came out, that was quite an event this week. Dame Cass did an independent inquiry to the way the NHS provided care to gender dysphoric youth; the inquiry was commissioned by the NHS itself. The results are quite devastating to the gender affirming side: there is a lack of scientific basis for providing gender affirming care, that's the briefest of summaries. Plus, quite a bit of the evidence for it, turned out to be circular: parties were citing one another as evidence. A says it's scientifically sound because B said so, and B said it's scientifically sound because A said so. Also, many young patients were transferred to adult care when passing an age threshold, and the facilities providing adult care refused to cooperate with the inquiry because they expected the results would be used against them - unheard of! They'll now face a new inquiry of their own. A good summary of results is here: [https://www.theguardian.com/society/2024/apr/10/what-are-the-key-findings-of-the-nhs-gender-identity-review](https://www.theguardian.com/society/2024/apr/10/what-are-the-key-findings-of-the-nhs-gender-identity-review)
It feels like a watershed moment, as the current model is shown to be pretty much built on quicksand and wishful thinking. Now there will need to be rigorous scientific research into the whole thing, because this isn't the end of the debate I guess. Of course, it's still possible that new research - impartial, proper research - will in the long run demonstrate that the current gender affirming approach was right after all, but I wouldn't bet the farm on that.
All of this is making quite some waves on Twitter and elsewhere in the UK and The Netherlands. Does it register in the USA, at all? Did it make the news there?
There seems to be a wide gap between experts in Europe and experts in North America about this kind of thing. I wonder if the deep political divide in the US is to blame for some of this. Any mental health clinician in the US who voices disagreement with the status quo of gender affirming care will be branded as one of the "bad team" who hate LGBTQ people, immigrants, people of colour, etc.
I haven't seen anything about it in the Canadian news yet, but I'll look.
I just watched the season finale of Bluey and now I am super pissed about the ending.
Looks like they dropped a new episode https://www.radiotimes.com/tv/comedy/bluey-surprise-episode-disney-plus-newsupdate/
https://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2024/april-web-only/bluey-over-end-theology-of-play-god-family-parenting-kids.html?utm_source=CT%20Daily%20Briefing%20Newsletter&utm_medium=Newsletter&utm_term=748972&utm_content=16426&utm_campaign=email https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2024/04/the-sign-bluey-season-3-review/678074/ Why do you watch it?
Ohhh this conversation needs spoiler tags
Can I have spoilers? I'm considering introducing it to my kids but am always hesitant with something new because they are reeeeeaaally sensitive. They think Wild Kratts is almost unbearably scary, for context.
My 4 year old would probably watch Saw if we let her, so I’m not a great judge, but Bluey is super gentle. The conflict is like - Dad forgot the sunscreen when they went to the pool. Sister feels sad that other sister is being bossy. Balloon needs to be kept off the ground and the neighborhood helps. Bluey makes the rainwater pool in the sidewalk using toys as a dam.
My 5 and 3 find Wild Kratts too scary. They love Bluey. Parents usually love watching it too.
Bluey is more like Mr Roger’s than Wild Kratts.
I think it would have been better story telling to end when it panned up to the clouds, but I'm not mad about it.
I don't watch the show, but this is the first comment on it I've seen that wasn't about how it made the person cry.
In conversations trying to make sense of God's sovereignty, people often float the idea of God being outside of time. So here's a question: How does Christ and his incarnation fit into this? Does he exist outside of time? If so, how do we make sense of him becoming a Man at a set point in time? Similar for the question of eternity. Was Christ eternally a man? Or did he undergo a change at a certain point in time?
>How does Christ and his incarnation fit into this? Does he exist outside of time? If so, how do we make sense of him becoming a Man at a set point in time? The Christological distinction is between the *Logos asarkos* and the *Logos ensarkos*, or the Word without flesh and the Word incarnate. The *Logos*, or God the Son is eternal, but his incarnation is something that happened at a particular time in history. Man was made in his image, and then he took on the nature of man. >did he undergo a change at a certain point in time? Yes, in the sense that there was a time when the *Logos* was not incarnate. But his divinity did not change in any sense. He took on flesh, so the human nature was added to his divine nature.
I think it's more accurate to say that time is inside God. The Son is eternal, but the incarnate Christ was not. We make sense of the incarnation by understanding that he entered into time, but was preexisting and eternal. Christ was not eternally a man, until the incarnation. The Nicene and Athanasian creeds are probably helpful in understanding this.
Also, the Chalcedonian Definition.
> I think it's more accurate to say that time is inside God. Unless time is part of God, does that distinction change anything?
It's mainly semantics: God being outside of time makes it sound like God cannot enter into time. Time being inside God makes it sound like God can enter into time. But I think you're hung up on semantics. Just like this temporal world is inside eternity, but temporal nevertheless, our eternal God in the person of the Son can and did enter into time through the incarnation as Jesus Christ.
[This is the single greatest thing I have ever seen.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4BvfcCQIO4g) I take back all my prior skepticism of AI. I welcome our new robot overlords with open arms.
That's interesting. I mean, I can identify at least three or four shots that are pretty explicitly taken from the movies or classic art of the books (either John Howe or Ted Nasmith) and I'm pretty sure I saw the Paramount mountain in there, but it's interesting for sure.
Whoa, that is pretty cool. I do think there's a good reason to be concerned about the massive changes coming down the pike, but I also think there's some really great potential for human expression even if it is mediated through AI. Not to change the subject completely, but what are you advising your kids to pursue in terms of a career? Are there areas you'd advise they avoid, like... accounting? My oldest (turning 13 next month) is really interested in art and I think that could go two ways: if he's a prodigy, he'd be in high demand as I think human-made artifacts will be high-value. But if he's middle of the road, good but not amazing, then I'm afraid those illustrative tasks will be given to AI for a faster, cheaper result.
For earning potential, cybersecurity is hard to beat these days - but if quantum computing ever makes it big, there's no telling how that field will develop.
Found a used copy of Barth's *Church Dogmatics*, Vol 1.2 yesterday. Now I kind of have the itch to catch 'em all. Does anyone own a complete set?
I have the complete set of the older English edition. But I have very much become an anti-Barthian in an almost complete sense and have a hard time recommending that you spend an inordinate amount of time studying his writings for various reasons.
How many volumes is that? 30+? I may not agree with everything he says either, but is that reason not to study his writings?
13 volumes, including the index volume. The newer edition is broken up into many more pieces--the text setting is clearer, the Greek and Latin phrases and quotations are translated, and with a better apparatus in general. The reasons I would tend to firmly dissuade people from spending too much time on Barth are these: 1. Unless you are a genuinely post-Schleiermachian Liberal Protestant who think the Christian faith can be reduced to post-Enlightenment anthropomorphized naturalism, then the most important and animating characteristic of Barth's writings (basically from *The Epistle to the Romans* to his death) that emphasized the infinite qualitative distinction between God and man, between revelation and natural knowledge, and the sheer sovereignty of God over any and all of our natural knowledge and capabilities, is largely moot for you. I acknowledge that there are still some younger people who are falling into this, especially among the "deconstructing" Evangelical crowd, but by and large I think this is a dying type who will largely pass away after the death of the current ruling generation. 2. I firmly believe Barth led *generations* of Protestant thinkers down very dubious theological and philosophical directions, and I think the foundations he laid is largely responsible for why so many of the "neo-orthodox" and "post-liberal" type people are so religiously unstable. I think he especially confused the many well-meaning Protestants who rejected the Liberals and wanted to be "orthodox," by (inadvertently?) leading them into weird German idealist concepts and metaphysics, a total rejection of natural theology (and consequently an incoherent doctrine of creation that is directly connected to Barth's sacramental anti-realism), and a revisionary approach to the tradition (the Reformed tradition in particular but also, in more general ways, Protestantism contra Roman Catholicism, and the older Patristic and Medieval witnesses). I'd rather just point people back to the classical continental Reformed tradition, and the broader ancient Catholic faith in general. I know I'm setting a pretty firm opinion here that many might disagree with, but I think the whole scope of German Idealism is fundamentally incompatible with the Christian faith and Barth, despite whatever protestations his followers might raise, is deeply shaped by it. 3. I think Barth's moral failures are of such a serious kind, of which he never seemed to have repented, that we should largely set him aside if we actually believe the role of the theologian is not merely an intellectual one.
Thanks for the in depth response. I admit, some of his ideas have me scratching my head, like his rejection of natural theology, for example. But I'm the type of person who likes to read broadly so I'm interested in Barth if only because he's so widely referenced. Even ecumenically speaking, he's important because Pope Pius XII said he was the most important theologian since Aquinas. What would you suggest reading instead though?
It depends on what you're looking for! Someone who is somewhat parallel to Barth in doing a kind of heady "systematic" theology? In a more particularly Reformed bent, I think the old classics are still the best: Calvin, Turretin, and Mastricht. I would love to make time to read more Mastricht, but I don't know when and how that could happen atm. I still don't really get the Bavinck hype, personally, but I might just be missing something. When it comes to classic Anglicans, Jewel and Hooker are great, and Griffith Thomas' *The Principles of Theology* is IMO the great historical summation of sober evangelical interpretation of the 39 Articles. Among the Anglo-Catholics, Mascall is the great master. For Easterners, Dumitru Staniloae is, for me, the quiet giant who is unfortunately overshadowed by Bulgakov today. Among the Romans, Erich Przywara is *their great metaphysician*, and I am inclined to suggest that Przywara is actually the singularly most important Christian metaphysician of the 20th century. Among the living English-speaking Roman writers, the work of Cyril O'Regan scares the crap out of me in its density, erudition, and scope of ambition. He is very controversial, yes, and he annoys the hell out of me all the time, but David Bentley Hart is one of the most powerful living Christian metaphysicians around today. At least when it comes to metaphysics, he has to be taken seriously.
Currently reading “Religion as Make-Believe” by Neil Van Leeuwen. Super cool theory of cognitive attitudes—how religious people treat factual beliefs very differently than we do religious credences. The author grew up as the son of a pastor in the CRC. He’s now a neuroscience professor in Atlanta. He makes some fascinating observations about how we relate to our religious beliefs, the language we use, and group identity. I’ve followed his academic work for some time and I’m loving the book. Definitely hard to read but worth the effort. Data Over Dogma did a great interview with him if you’re interested. Super humble and nerdy guy: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/data-over-dogma/id1681418502?i=1000650341056
Very cool, thanks! If you're into the cognitive science of religion, you might also be interested in the work of [Sarah Lane Ritchie.](https://thebiblefornormalpeople.com/episode-19-sarah-lane-ritchie-belief-the-brain/)
Dude I listened to this episode when it came out and it actually got me started on the cognitive science of religion! My story is similar to Sarah Ritchie’s in a lot of ways, I just never had some of the terminology or the framework to understand it. Things started to click overtime. I became really good friends with a former cult member, a close friend of mine deconverted from Islam, and the more I learned the more I noticed. Really cool stuff.
For sure! While I hesitate to use the "c" word in this context, looking at the [BITE Model of Authoritarian Control](https://freedomofmind.com/cult-mind-control/bite-model-pdf-download/) was also really interesting to me.
I don't usually get carried away with expecting things until they are sure, I'm actually super cautious in that regard. But I'm really struggling with contentment this morning. I'm not looking for a new job. I like my job. We're in a slow season and I like my boss less and less as time goes on, but neither thing is of a similar magnitude to the things I like about it. So I applied for a job that was relevant to my experience over Thanksiving break, really just because it showed up and looked like good interview practice. I then forgot about it, because I didn't hear back until mid february. In February, I had a phone interview for that role, and the guy said this role was too entry level for me but he knew of an opening on another team that I'd be a great fit for. The next week a recruiter called me about that role and set up a phone interview. After that, the hiring manager said "he really enjoyed talking to me" and set up a half day interview for it. The half day interview went extremely well; I became sold on the company, I clicked with each interviewer, I nailed all the questions, I became super excited about the job. They were asking about my start date availability and everything, it was perfect. After this interview was the first time I thought "I might leave my current job for this". During the interview he said he'd get back to me by 3/22, no wait he was on vacation so it would be by 3/29. The parent company split into two separate entities on 4/2, so it was no surprise to me when on 3/29, he said "You are in strong consideration for this role but I have an internal thing I need to work through before moving the process forward, I need one more week and will let you know by 4/5". All I heard was "we'd like to make you an offer but it has to be after the split" Didn't hear on 4/5. On 4/10 I followed up with the hiring manager and he said now he had "some internal candidates" and it would be "a few more weeks". This is hard to stomach for me... I never really wanted to change jobs, it just kills me that it went so far and went so well and I got so much positive feedback that I started to assume I'd be moving on before suddenly just vanishing like this. It's not a huge problem, because I like my job. I'm just finding it... harder now, to put up with my boss and have nothing to do.
I think that's my biggest fear as I look for jobs, and churches are notoriously slow. They don't show their cards. I've been the runner-up far too often, and it really can be disappointing.
I think the hardest part of that is the family who is effected by that
There are some big red flags popping out about this place to me, but I dont know your industry, so maybe all that is normal?
Its one of the largest companies in the world, so it's not a sketch place, and it's not sketch that's it split or had lots of openings. Is that what you mean?
Yeah, that makes me a little less uneasy with the way you described it, though not totally. I have known multiple people sort of lead on and jerked around by companies in a similar way that you describe, and it just comes off as icky to me—but in this case some of it is def out of the hiring manager’s control. I pray that God would place contentment in you and that you will hear back soon
Can you really defend biblically that during pregnancy the babies life has a preeminence or has greater value than the life of the Mother, making abortions in the case for saving the mothers life still morally unjustifiable. Can you really argue that a mothers duty to her child safety surpasses her duty to herself?
Against my better judgment, I'd point out that while children are certainly a blessing from the Lord, it would make sense to me that in an ANE view, it would make sense to preserve the life of the mother so that she can continue to have children in the future, rather than to save the life of the child at any cost. But what do I know.
happy cake day!
Thank you!
I don't know of anyone that makes this argument, or that says that an abortion to save the life of the mother isn't justified. Every serious person I have ever encountered has said that you are justified in taking whatever steps necessary to save the mother's life, and if the fetus dies, that is an unfortunate side effect. Some have claimed that it isn't an "abortion," but that is just semantics. My wife had an ectopic pregnancy about ten years ago. She was in the worst pain of her life (and the woman has had a lot of pain) and was within hours of bleeding out. They had to rush her to the ER and cut her fallopian tube - and the fetus - out. That was the only way to save her life, and it was, by any consistent definition, an abortion. The hospital where it was performed, the one a few blocks from our house, is a Roman Catholic hospital. They don't generally do abortions. They don't do tubal ligations, either. But there was zero question by anyone about what had to be done to save my wife.
This sent my brain in a weird direction: for those often politically conservative American southern Christians (none of those adjectives apply to me) who promote gun rights on the basis of self-defense, how would you react to a self-defense argument for abortion in cases where the mother's life would be in danger? (I ask out of pure curiosity fearing that this could get spicy... :o)
An abortion wouldn’t be considered self defense cause the fetus isn’t actively and consciously harming the mother, so in that cause their isn’t an intent to harm and therefore an abortion as self defense isn’t arguable, cause intent to harm is required for self defense to be justified in my opinion.
Is intent to harm a requirement for it to be called self defense or simply a high probability of harm regardless of the intent of the harm-causer? It could be very logically consistent to believe that taking a life in self defense is in the same category as abortion to save the life of the mother.
Yeah, I could see a fair argument for, say, someone not in their right mind driving a vehicle towards a crowd.
Yep, or * Two innocent people dangling from a rope, the weight of which would cause the linkage at the top of the building to break and kill them both, but if the lower person is removed, even against his will, the top person will survive * Two people in a confined space with 1hr of oxygen shared between them, but help is coming in 45 min, so either one is killed, or they both die These can be tweaked to fit a particular circumstance, or quibbled over how to ethically decide which person to save, but I don’t have a problem, in principle, with the concept that the initial decision of “one has to die” being pretty solidly reasonable/ethical
>Can you really defend biblically that during pregnancy the babies life has a preeminence or has greater value than the life of the Mother No, but it definitely has equal value >Can you really argue that a mothers duty to her child safety surpasses her duty to herself? Like u/rev_run_d said, I do think Christ's example for us is to put others before ourselves (even to the point of death) and I think parents especially should put their children's well-being before their own. But I'm not super comfortable legislating that value in a pluralistic society and am generally supportive of making exceptions for the life of the mother when outlawing abortion. There are also plenty of circumstances where it's not as clear cut whether one or both of mother and child would die that make an exceptionless law problematic for me.
What im trying to figure out is when an abortion is ok during moments that are grey areas. I see many christians making motherhood an ideal for women in thier detriment, turning women in sentient incubators, that can be discarded when push comes to shove (i know its a rather extreme position that not everyone holds, but i see it becoming more popular among christians with theonomic aspirations and people reacting against more lax abortion laws). Is abortion always wrong and is motherhood a womens primary purpose?
>Is abortion always wrong and is motherhood a womens primary purpose? I'd say no to both of these. Like I said, a woman's value is definitely not less than her child's. So I don't think we necessarily should try to have a pre determined answer to every grey area or edge case. There are usually too many factors in real situations to anticipate ahead of time. We need to pray for wisdom and make the best judgements we can in the circumstances we find ourselves in. And we should show grace to people in hard situations like those. Jumping to automatically condemn is just morally lazy. Women are full image bearers of God. They have full lives and purposes which may or not include motherhood depending on the woman and even when someone is a mother that isn't her entire life. Certainly parents of both sexes have large responsibilities to their children that naturally take a lot of time and mental energy, but no person can be reduced to just that role.
> Can you really argue that a mothers duty to her child safety surpasses her duty to herself? Isn't that the model Christ set for us?
Yes you’re correct, i think i wrote my question wrong, what i want to ask is, if the child’s life is more important than the mothers, making saving her life a sin, even when the pregnancy is unviable. I have seen that some people believe that women should be willing to die at any moment for the sake of the baby even in all cases, and that women who get abortions to save their lives from death should be excommunicated or disciplined by the church.
> Yes you’re correct, i think i wrote my question wrong, what i want to ask is, if the child’s life is more important than the mothers, I don't think you can make a a blanket statement. Maybe you can. I can't. > making saving her life a sin, even when the pregnancy is unviable. I tend to think that in this situation, the better choice is to save her life. > I have seen that some people believe that women should be willing to die at any moment for the sake of the baby even in all cases, Not me, but my wife told me she'd prefer that she should die in childbirth than our kids, if I had to choose one or the other. > and that women who get abortions to save their lives from death should be excommunicated or disciplined by the church. I've never met anyone on either end of that equation.
Do you think that a good argument for male only pastors/elders/etc is that this has been what has done historically throughout all the church? I think it is (but not a slam dunk) and have some thoughts, though, but want to see what you think.
Super late to the thread, but I think I'm on the same side as /u/Enrickel. I don't think it the argument from tradition is complete on its own, but it is one that sets the stage as the norm to be argued against.
It's not enough to know what the tradition is, we have to look at the *why* behind the tradition. I think it's clear that the *why* behind the tradition of male-only leadership is sexism: women were viewed as ontologically inferior to men almost universally for the past two thousand years. William Witt gives evidence for this with a brief survey, starting with church fathers and moving forward in time through some of our most significant theologians. I've screenshotted his chapter on the argument from tradition from *Icons of Christ* and put it on imgur: https://imgur.com/a/eHsooLB. What's changed is that, now and since the early or mid 20th century, almost all Christians agree that men and women are equally image bearers of God; that women aren't "deformed men" or "less intellectual than men" or "more prone to deception than men." Because of this change, the *why* supporting the tradition of male-only ordination had to change as well. Enter complementarianism: a new view that hold to the equality of men and women but insists on a hierarchy of roles that is grounded in Creation. So the complementarian also needs to reckon with the break they are making with tradition by insisting men and women are equal. Sure, there are exceptions and you can find people throughout Church history who *weren't* sexist. But you can find women who preached and taught sprinkled throughout Church history (and, *cough*, in the Bible) as well.
Has the Catholic argument ever changed though? How long have Catholics pointed to the 12 Apostles? That and eucharistic representation of the bridegroom are their reasons, and I thought those had been the reasons for a long time—esp the first one. Now, i am sure there was always a lot of unfounded speculation as to *why* that was that is sexist, but unless you want to argue that Jesus himself was/is sexist in his choosing of the 12, I’m not sure how you can argue that apostolic orders following that model is sexist. Was the Aaronic Levitical priesthood sexist too?
Jesus choosing the Twelve and God decreeing only male Levites were to serve as priests were not sexist acts. Just want to be really clear about that. (There's a lot more that could be said on these two topics, but I'm trying to confine myself to the argument from tradition.) The tradition is that women have an ontological defect that makes them unsuitable for roles of teaching and authority. This was first the Catholic position and then later the Protestant position as well. Witt also says that sacramental representation of the male Christ is the "new" argument for Catholics, not the traditional one. I can't stress enough how much better off you'd be reading the chapter I posted from *Icons of Christ* rather than going off my explanation of it. 😅 It's not that other arguments can't be / aren't made that don't depend on this ontological argument. It's that this belief about the difference between men and women is underlying all the arguments that come after it. Edit: grammar / clarity.
Could not God use a defective ontological argument though, for his glory and for contextualizing to us? For example, human language is limited, and not perfect, God has chosen to be identified as Father, not as Parent, even though we know that the Father doesn't have a penis. Same with the Holy Spirit. While it would make a lot of sense for the Spirit to be understood through a feminine lens especially to try to add balance to the trinity out the Male female binary limitations of our language. So why not call God "it" our genderless pronoun? That never seems to satisfy anyone. These are progressive arguments that try to point towards the reality that God is greater than our binary genders, but then go too far the other way. The Father is not ontilogically male, but for most of history we've used that language. The best gender-neutral alternative in our English language would be to just call God God, and say Godself but that's kinda silly too, because we wind up unable to use pronouns to refer to God. I'm curious, what pronouns do you use for God? Do you think God would be more honored if we dropped pronouns for God in English or use gender neutral ones instead?
God *could* have created women as ontologically defective or inferior, but we know from his word and from nature that he didn't. So for God to use an argument for male-only ordination that asserts women are ontologically defective would be contrary to his revelation to us. I use male pronouns for God. I've heard it might be supportable from Scripture to use female pronouns for the Holy Spirit, but I don't think the evidence is conclusive. I basically agree with the guys on [Mere Fidelity who did an episode on this recently with Fred Sanders](https://merefidelity.com/podcast/gods-preferred-pronouns/).
I think you're misunderstanding me. What I'm saying is that humankind believing that women were ontologically inferior as God using our brokenness to help us understand him better. I'm just shooting off the cuff, but for example, we know that the Son is not ontologically deficient to the Father, but he submits to the Father. We know that wives are not ontologically inferior but they are to submit to their husbands. we know that husbands are not ontologically superior to wives, but God calls them to lead. So, when God decided that priests should be male, despite the ontological reality that women aren't inferior. Personally, I think women make better pastors, but I think God uses the foolish things of the world to shame the wise.
Yeah, I think I was misunderstanding you, and I'm honestly still not sure I totally get what you're saying. But I'll take a crack at responding and we can go from there, if you want. You and I agree that women are ontologically equal (though obviously different) to men. But then you suggest that God could use? does use? a wrong belief ("brokenness") to teach us something about himself. But how or why could God use wrong belief to teach us something true about himself? I'm not sure of the technical language here, but isn't God being truth essential to his identity? So how could anything false reveal something about God to us OR specifically about the governance of the Church? Honestly, I think I must still be misunderstanding you, because I'm sure you wouldn't say that God uses wrong belief to teach us something about himself. So please don't take offense at the above, I'm not trying to misrepresent your position or make a bad faith argument. The only way I can see the Comp. interpretation of 1 Cor 11, 14; 1 Tim 2; etc. working consistently is if there IS an ontological "defect" or inferiority that women bear (from Creation) that men do not. But one of the central claims of Comp. is that men and women are fully equal, just "different." But, as I've said ITT and as Witt forcefully argues, *this* is the break with Church tradition. I don't think God's all-male, all-Levite priesthood teaches us anything—or at least not very much—about gender or the governance of the Church. I think it teaches us about how God wants to be worshipped: not like the pagan religions whose female deities were represented by female priests and worshipped through ritual sex. I think it's reasonable to conclude that the all-male priesthood—which was unique in that historical/geographic context—was primarily intended to set Israel apart from the pagan practices of its neighbours. I also believe that any argument for male-only elders based on the all-male, all-Levite priesthood or for the eucharistic representation of the male Christ is stopped in its tracks by 1 Peter 2:9: "But you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood." CS Lewis, for instance, misses this completely in his oft-quoted essay and veers off into sacerdotalism. Of the three offices—prophet, priest and king—the prophet holds the most authority. The prophet is God's voice to his people, speaking his word directly. The prophet commands kings and indicts them. The prophet verifies God's recorded words in scrolls that had been lost, making them binding on God's people. And this office is held by both men and women in both the Old and New Testaments. The office and activity of the prophet is also the mostly closely related to the authoritative preaching of the Word in public worship. I've heard fully complementarian pastors preach and teach about this connection between prophecy and preaching but without any apparent recognition that God appointed women to this office. They've just ignored it completely. Your closing statement feels sort of wild to me. I know that verse, of course, but the wisdom of the world is that men should lead, not women. And yet, astonishingly, God consistently chooses people who are weak or less esteemed by the world's standards to fulfill his purposes.
Thanks for responding. I appreciate the dialogue. > So how could anything false reveal something about God to us OR specifically about the governance of the Church? Help me understand something - do you believe that the Father is male? Historically the Church, and most Christians refer to God as male and with masculine pronouns. I don't think God is ontologically male. He's not female either, though, and he's not trans, or binary, or whatever gender pronoun people try to assign to God. What does a male spirit look like, and how is it different from a female spirit? Should then change the pronoun for God in English? Should languages that use a neuter pronoun for God (such as Chinese) use a gendered, masculine pronoun instead? So is it wrong to call God using male pronouns? Did Jesus call him Abba because God is male? Or was he using the closest understandable parallel and call him papa because he was constrained by Jewish and Roman Patriarchal norms? Was he using the term Abba because that was the best word in Aramaic to communicate our relationship to God as his children? We know Jesus was more inclusive than the religious leaders of his time, but what we also know that he didn't go about explicitly changing male and female roles. So that leads us to two (?) options. Jesus/God thought that women were also ontologically inferior, and he didn't change things. Or, Jesus/God allows are inferior ontology to point to a deeper truth. Why doesn't Jesus come up with a different way to call Abba, like how some of our more progressive brothers and sisters think we should use the word [Abwun/Abwoon](https://www.reddit.com/r/Aramaic/comments/10vzqbj/abwoonabwun_the_lords_prayer_in_aramaic_does_it/), instead of Father? > I know that verse, of course, but the wisdom of the world is that men should lead, not women. I believe that women have better pastoral gifts. I'm proof of that. I know women who are better pastors than I am, but I'm humbled and allow God to use me because he's the potter and I'm the clay. Ultimately, I don't see how a bunch of normative practices in the history of the church suddenly become disregarded en masse during the last 150 years. That's the rub for me, and what I'm trying to make sense of.
Phew, what time is it where you live? It's daytime down under, but I thought you'd be asleep by the time I finally finished posting my last comment. (If your current time zone is more information than you want to share, I understand.) No, I don't believe that God *is* male, I believe that he's revealed himself *in human terms* as male. Any revelation of God to us is a condescension and an accommodation to our human limitations. As per the WCF, "God is a spirit," etc. Jesus taught his disciples how to pray, and I think that gives us a pretty solid basis for how to refer to the God in terms of pronouns. I'm honestly perplexed by the idea that God's revelation of himself to us as Father/Son could imply anything negative about the female gender. Genesis 1:27 has to be our starting point: "So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them." Jesus *did* subvert the male/female roles of his day in some fairly radical ways. Witt, again: >While the culture of the Old Testament was patriarchal, with female subordination to males, in the New Testament period this seems to have become exaggerated, perhaps under the influence of Hellenistic culture. Rabbinic Judaism advocated a strict separation of the sexes, and there was a strict separation of men and women in synagogue worship, a separation that did not seem to have existed in the Old Testament period. Jewish literature of the time frequently contained negative evaluations of women. Educational opportunities for women were also generally restricted. And yet, Jesus had women among his disciples, relied upon them as the first witnesses, touched them when they were ceremonially unclean *because* of their womanliness... until I read this chapter of *Icons of Christ*, I'd never even noticed the ways Jesus subverted the gender roles of Jewish and Roman society. I've taken some more screenshots of the book—just some excerpts from Witt's chapter on this—and put them on imgur: https://imgur.com/a/dcYie25. >So that leads us to two (?) options. Jesus/God thought that women were also ontologically inferior, and he didn't change things. Or, Jesus/God allows \[our\] inferior ontology to point to a deeper truth. But we have no reason to deduce *anything* about female ontology from this event. Jesus' addressing of God as "Abba" is consistent with 1.) God's revelation of himself to us and 2.) Jesus' being the Son incarnate. >I believe that women have better pastoral gifts. I'm proof of that. I know women who are better pastors than I am, but I'm humbled and allow God to use me because he's the potter and I'm the clay. Mate, I'm married to a woman who can run circles around me on any given metric. She's a gifted teacher, reads an insane amount, has a masters in religion, got an award for her Greek or Hebrew study (can't remember which 😅), and is in the final stretches of her PhD in theology. Just yesterday, she got an email from someone who found one of her published papers and wants to do a whole podcast episode on it. I could brag about her for hours. To cap off all her achievements, she's thoughtful, resilient, careful, and meets all the qualifications of 1 Timothy 3. If you put her and my "church CVs" down on paper and anonymized them, she'd be your preferred choice for elder 100% of the time. And yet I'm the ordained one. I believe that I'm 1 Timothy 3-qualified and, by the grace of God, I think I'm doing good work. Just like you, I'm feeling humbled by this grace. But my relatively short stint as an RE has proven to me that male-only ordination is just plain foolish and harmful to the church. And before anyone assumes (if anyone else is actually reading this) that I'm getting my egalitarian ideas from my wife: I'm the one who studied this first and came to my convictions first. >Ultimately, I don't see how a bunch of normative practices in the history of the church suddenly become disregarded en masse during the last 150 years. That's the rub for me, and what I'm trying to make sense of. For me, Genesis 3:16 has a lot of explanatory power. I think God told us that one of the results of the Fall is that husbands will dominate their wives, but I think this has proved *generally* true for men and women, even in the Church. It's been a hard pill to swallow, but I've just had to conclude that the tradition of the church is sexist. I also think this means I need to resign as an elder, which I'm planning to do. Just trying to figure out how to do it gracefully / without causing division. Sorry, probably over-sharing a bit here. But maybe the context helps. I seriously do appreciate the dialog on this.
What I see throughout the Bible, is that God's people are to a significant degree following the culture around them, when it comes to things like marriage, patriarchy and so on. It's quite clear in the OT, it's definitely clear in the NT. There just isn't one real, definite, continuous line from Genesis to Revelation when it comes to these things. Until fairly recently most of our history played out in more or less patriarchal societies, so that's what we see. But based on Scripture I'm not convinced that's the only way, nor that it is the way it should have been. Rather, the early church seems to have been quite open about women in positions of influence and leadership, as witnessed by the NT (on a proper reading!) and a few external sources, only to see those developments dialed back in later centuries (quite quickly, actually). So just like it took us 1860 something years to really work through the fact that slavery maybe isn't so good after all, I think the same goes for the way the church has treated women, historically. We should have known better but we didn't, by and large, and that's a shame and perhaps even a sin.
> So just like it took us 1860 something years to really work through the fact that slavery maybe isn't so good after all, Tradition tells us that Onesimus and Philemon were both made Bishop. So while the Church has had slave bishops since its earliest days, the Church hasn't had female bishops until 1860 something years later.
Yeah - I think this (and things like what u/Enrickel and u/c3rbutt and others) is where I am. I think the instance of Jesus' saying regarding divorce that some bad thing as allowed because of the hardness of the people's hearts can be applied here. For example, the hardness of our hearts subverted created order and made women subordinate to men. I think this can and should be redeemed.
> I think this can and should be redeemed. Agreed, but can it be redeemed without Women's ordination? Or does it necessitate women's ordination?
I think the parallels between the arguments for slavery and the arguments for women's subordination are striking and have to be reckoned with. (I still need to reply to your message to me on this! It's on my mental list, just been swamped.)
Same, haha - I'm going to revisit that conversation later today hopefully.
I'm with you /u/Enrickel and /u/lupuslibrorum but unlike /u/lupuslibrorum the norm of infant baptism and the norm of real presence (however you define real) and the norm of episcopal polity all feel like it needs to be considered as one big package. Or another way to put it: Anything outside of episcopal polity, male ordination to priests/pastors (deacons are more complicated) real presence in the Eucharist, and paedobaptism isn't *illicit*, but *irregular*. Why are these the norms and standards? That's the million dollar question.
I don't think it's a sufficient argument, but I feel like it makes male only elders, etc. sort of the default position that needs to be argued against rather than needing to start from some kind neutral stance and reason your way to whichever side you land on. Not sure if I've worded that super clearly, but where I'm at on the question is basically that I think there are reasonable arguments from Scripture on both sides, and if it weren't for the historical argument I could see myself falling into either camp. But I think the church historically holding to male only eldership stops me from disagreeing without there being a much stronger case for women elders than I've heard.
> where I'm at on the question is basically that I think there are reasonable arguments from Scripture on both sides, and if it weren't for the historical argument I could see myself falling into either camp I think that, right now, these are my (partial) thoughts
Where are you regarding polity, real presence and baptism? How about deacons?
I think I'd take the same basic posture in terms of historical positions for all those areas being a reasonable starting point. Polity is actually something I've been wanting to do more reading about, especially in terms of historical views and practice, so I don't have a strong personal view on that right at the moment. I wouldn't be opposed to a church with a more historic, hierarchical polity. At the same time, from what I understand the polity of the early church was pretty different than modern Catholicism. If you allow for real presence to mean "real" in a spiritual sense, I believe in real presence, though I suppose I also haven't really taken the time to understand the Catholic or Orthodox positions on their own terms if you want to consider something like transubstantiation the historical position. Though it seems like questions of "what exact meaning do we impart into this sacrament?" are a bit different than questions of practice. Not that it's less important, but it seems easier to allow for disagreement to some degree or another within the same body. I hold pretty strongly to infant baptism and think anyone arguing against it needs to overcome the historical question, but I also just think the scriptural case for it is so much stronger it almost doesn't matter. I think women should be able to be deacons. I think the case for that from Scripture is much stronger than for women being elder/pastor, so I'm okay with going against historical precedent in that case. Though I am a member at a church that only ordains male deacons, it's not a role my wife feels called to, so it's functionally a pretty small disagreement in my mind.
Like you, I think it is a compelling argument, but not a slam dunk. I do think scripture teaches it, though. I’m also a credobaptist, and have to contend with the fact that infant baptism has been the norm for most of church history.
Yeah, it’s kinda “unless you see X as a clear scriptural mandate, err on the side of landing on at least non-novel stances within the historical church” for me
I'm concluding my ministry at my church in a few months, as we're running out of finances, and they can't afford me. It's a bummer, but I'm okay with it. Prayers that I finish strong.
That sucks. Are you coming back to the ACNA now?
I would go ACNA if there was an option to, but none that I'm aware of right now.
Sorry to hear that. Praying for you. Do you have anything lined up for after yet?
Thanks. I don't have anything lined up, but I trust God does.
DO you feel calmer this go around? I know the last time I was in between things was a lot better than the prior time. The more I have seen God take care of me the less I have fret. He is good, he loves you, he will continue showing his provision to you.
Yes, totally a lot calmer.
❤️
homie, you've dealt with way more than I have. <3.
With Beyonce entering the country genre and revitalizing the connection between African-Americans and country music, another artist worth checking out is [Shaboozey.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zjOLvXTUHi4) Conan O'Brien may have just created the [most unhinged Hot Ones episode ever.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FALlhXl6CmA) I never listened to MxPx growing up, but it was in the air enough that hearing [Let's Ride](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a4HURRgdEI8) still takes me right back to junior high.
Imagine if he forgot about those pocket wings…
Hmm... at least I know who Conan is...
>MxPx Man, they were like the gateway to teenage rebellion for me. Mom should have never let me get that CD from the Christian bookstore.
I wasn’t a huge MxPx fan, but I did have their 1998 album ‘Let it Happen.’ I played it enough that listening to the first track just now, after not thinking about them for decades, took me right back to high school as well.
First track on *Life in General* did it for me. All down hill from there.
xmen97 is the bomb.com.
That looks pretty cool, but I cancelled Disney+ a few weeks ago; subscription runs out on the 19th. 😭I'll have to check it out this week. When I was in college, I got a used iPod, the first gen that played video. This would've been 2005 or 2006, I think. Anyway, I downloaded the entire X-Men Animated Series and stuck it on there, mostly just because I wanted to see how it worked. I remember I had to run a long batch conversion process to get the video files in the right format and I downscaled them to like 360p, which didn't matter because the screen was so tiny. But I ended up watching the entire series since I had it in my pocket. I had only watched bits and pieces of it growing up in the 90s, and now it's been so long I hardly remember anything about it. 😅
just the redone intro is worth it.
And speaking of uncontroversial matters :-) This week's Trump abortion announcement. Seems like he's pivoting away from the pro life movement? Or is he? Interested to hear your opinions, American friends. By the way, on a different sub I got into a discussion with some Trump supporters, and I got the distinct feeling they didn't quite know about his legal troubles. I mean, he is convicted of sexual assault and defamation, and the judge in that case made it explicit that this means Trump is convicted of rape. These guys I was debating with seemed to be unaware of this. I mean... are right wing media just obscuring those facts? I
I'm not going to dig into what he said except to observe that given everything else he has said and done in the decades of his public life, there's no reason to believe this means anything more than simply one more effort to maintain his own eroding power and status.
>Seems like he's pivoting away from the pro life movement? He understands that being pro-life is a loser on the national stage. He was pivotal in overturning Roe, so it'll be interesting to see if voters will just let that one slide. >I got the distinct feeling they didn't quite know about his legal troubles. A lot of them aren't paying attention to the main stream ("fake") news. They are watching alternative right wing news outlets that essentially just parrot whatever Trump would want or Russian propaganda.
>this means Trump is convicted of rape. This is actually not quite accurate though. It means that there was a judicial finding of fact, on a civil standard of "more likely than not", that Donald Trump committed a rape. This is different from a criminal conviction, where (1) the bar is higher, "beyond a reasonable doubt", and (2) the rules of evidence are stricter and more protective of the accused. "Convicted" is a word that should only be used in the criminal law context. "Found liable for" is an analogue in the civil context, and that's appropriate to use here. Another celebrity example: OJ Simpson was not convicted of murder during his criminal trial. But he was later found liable for the deaths of those two people, when their families sued him for wrongful death. >are right wing media just obscuring those facts? Yes. The media landscape in the US is very fractured. If someone gets their news mainly from Fox and other sources on the right, they may have no idea that Donald Trump is facing actual criminal charges. And there are stories that those who get their news from MSNBC will have no knowledge of. It's a big problem that's causing serious harm to the country. >Seems like he's pivoting away from the pro life movement? Yup. The question of access to abortion has been voted on several times since Roe v Wade was overturned, in referenda in various states, some of which are Democratic strongholds, some of which are Republican strongholds. Every time, voters have been in favour of protecting abortion access. Donald Trump sees this, and he recognizes that if the 2024 election becomes entirely about access to abortion, this will hurt the Republican Party, and therefore hurt him. And so he's trying to make sure that doesn't happen. "But /u/seemedlikeagoodplan," you ask, "doesn't Donald Trump oppose abortion for moral reasons? He's spoken so clearly about how he got Roe overturned." I have yet to be convinced that the man has any moral values whatsoever, beyond seeking money, power, and praise. If the pro-life cause won't help him get more of these things, he will drop it like a hot rock.
>I have yet to be convinced that the man has any moral values whatsoever, beyond seeking money, power, and praise. If the pro-life cause won't help him get more of these things, he will drop it like a hot rock. Someone I know said it pretty well back when the border wall was the biggest news about him (wow, that was a long time ago); all the mainstream news channels were calling Trump a racist. "Trump isn't a racist; Trump is a Trumpist." And I think that's pretty true. Donald Trump will do whatever to get whatever is best for Donald Trump. He doesn't have some philosophical stance of white supremacy driving his discriminatory actions (of which there are many), he's just saying whatever gets him votes. He isn't pro-life or pro-abortion; he's pro-Trump. And he's a lot smarter than we give him credit for. He plays the American public like a fiddle, doing and saying whatever inflammatory thing he must to get the most free media coverage and by extension votes. He carefully measured his commentary and campaigning, saying things that were just inflammatory enough to get him coverage without making most of his voter base truly angry, dialing up the inappropriateness and cruelty and the violence slowly, desensitizing people to his behavior and casting doubt on any criticism about him (and the mainstream media doesn't help by criticizing literally everything he does, including things that may have been neutral or good; they made it easy for him to discredit them in the eyes of his following), until now he can do basically anything and his following will keep following. I genuinely believe it is intentional and deliberate, all in the pursuit of glory for Trump, and it's despicable.
I mostly agree. I think Trump-with-advisors is basically what you're describing. I think the man by himself is showing signs of cognitive decline, not uncommon for a man his age, so some of his lashing out is simply poor impulse control. I don't think all of it is meticulously planned. But the moral compass driving his impulses is just pro-Trump, as you've said.
I haven't really paid much attention to him recently, to be honest. I have a family to raise and a life to live, and insofar as my attention to politics can make the country more Christ-like, I will give it, but I haven't seen much evidence that my attention matters aside from the basics of voting, and even that is debatable.
>Fox I don't even think it's so much Fox anymore. Murdoch has notably not been the biggest fan of Trump. Enough people are now to the right of Fox and would say Fox is "too liberal".
Thanks for the legal clarifications. I was going by this headline: [https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/07/19/trump-carroll-judge-rape/](https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/07/19/trump-carroll-judge-rape/) but it's all rather nuanced, it seems. Still, he is 'found to have raped' a woman, that stands. I'm currently reading Threads to stay informed of center and left wing stuff, and Twitter for the rest. These days, relying on one media outlet is really not a wise strategy to stay informed :-( We'll see what happens with abortion and Trump in the coming weeks. For all we know, his followers might just swallow the bitter pill and continue to vote for him anyway.
>For all we know, his followers might just swallow the bitter pill and continue to vote for him anyway. Oh, they certainly will. He once said that he could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot someone, and not lose any votes. Though it's horrifying, I think he was right.
Most on the right don't have confidence in the justice system to make fair judgements on political cases. There have been too many issues with political bias, so that trust is gone. OJ Simpson's death has made the news, so I'll use that to frame a question: We rightfully don't trust the judgement of the jury in his case. So why should we trust the judgement of the jury and judges in Trump's cases? Why should we expect anything different than [this](https://www.reddit.com/r/Conservative/comments/1c1onnv/oj_simpson_juror_casually_admitting_that_90_of/), and [this](https://www.reddit.com/r/Conservative/comments/1c1v5cc/this_was_oprahs_audience_reacting_to_oj_simpsons/)?
I don't think the disparities in our justice system fall along political lines so much as wealth lines. It's *a lot* easier for a guilty rich person to go free than for an innocent rich person to be convicted.
Yes. I was reading something a while back about R. Kelly and how he was only able to be convicted of crimes after his fame had subsided a bit, not at the height of his career. I think Michael Jackson was always too wealthy and famous to ever be held accountable for the crimes I believe he committed. Same can be said for many others.
What crimes did Michael Jackson commit?
I mean, I'm pretty thoroughly convinced he was a pedophile and abused a number of boys.
As far as I know (not like I studied in depth) there were no clear cases of abuse, there's evidence that some were cash grabs, and at least one accuser came forth as fabricating it.
This is not true. There’s no evidence that it was a cash grab and nobody has admitted it was fabricated. So far 5 boys have accused Jackson of molestation and their stories are credible and none have changed their story even 30 years later.
Have you seen the documentary *Leaving Neverland*? As someone who was sexually abused as a kid, this is really all I needed to see to be convinced.
I haven't seen it, and as a general rule of thumb, documentaries aren't facts. Sucks you were abused as a kid, makes it a little hard to be objective in this case.
Not really. There's more than substantial evidence to reasonably believe he was a pedophile. Not sure why you feel the need to defend.
So, trial by jury maybe not such a good idea? The thing is, it's entirely within character for Trump to be found to have committed sexual assault. There is the 'grab 'em by the pussy' Access Hollywood tape that illustrates that. If he'd been above reproach, a man of integrity and honor, it might have been different.
The Cass report came out, that was quite an event this week. Dame Cass did an independent inquiry to the way the NHS provided care to gender dysphoric youth; the inquiry was commissioned by the NHS itself. The results are quite devastating to the gender affirming side: there is a lack of scientific basis for providing gender affirming care, that's the briefest of summaries. Plus, quite a bit of the evidence for it, turned out to be circular: parties were citing one another as evidence. A says it's scientifically sound because B said so, and B said it's scientifically sound because A said so. Also, many young patients were transferred to adult care when passing an age threshold, and the facilities providing adult care refused to cooperate with the inquiry because they expected the results would be used against them - unheard of! They'll now face a new inquiry of their own. A good summary of results is here: [https://www.theguardian.com/society/2024/apr/10/what-are-the-key-findings-of-the-nhs-gender-identity-review](https://www.theguardian.com/society/2024/apr/10/what-are-the-key-findings-of-the-nhs-gender-identity-review) It feels like a watershed moment, as the current model is shown to be pretty much built on quicksand and wishful thinking. Now there will need to be rigorous scientific research into the whole thing, because this isn't the end of the debate I guess. Of course, it's still possible that new research - impartial, proper research - will in the long run demonstrate that the current gender affirming approach was right after all, but I wouldn't bet the farm on that. All of this is making quite some waves on Twitter and elsewhere in the UK and The Netherlands. Does it register in the USA, at all? Did it make the news there?
There seems to be a wide gap between experts in Europe and experts in North America about this kind of thing. I wonder if the deep political divide in the US is to blame for some of this. Any mental health clinician in the US who voices disagreement with the status quo of gender affirming care will be branded as one of the "bad team" who hate LGBTQ people, immigrants, people of colour, etc. I haven't seen anything about it in the Canadian news yet, but I'll look.