“Queerness as the redemptive message of Christianity”

Greetings in the name of Jesus Christ.

I have received Gene Veith’s permission to forward to the Parish an article from his blog.  See below.

Gene is a convert to the Lutheran Church, who is a retired English Professor.  His daughter is married to Pastor Adam Hensley, one of the Seminary Lecturers in Australia who had his call terminated and offered a half call, without any consultation with the Seminary board.  He has since moved to the USA and taken up a teaching role in a Lutheran Church Missouri Synod (LCMS) seminary.

What is reported below is a picture of what happens when one no longer sits under the word of God but sits in authority over the word of God.  Where feelings and ideas of humanity are the lens through which God’s word is examined.  This is not new.  In the Garden of Eden, the devil worked on the emotions of humanity asking, “did God really say?”

Ever since then the rights and glory of God has been usurped by man.  Today in the church the sacredness of God is being replace with the sacredness of the self, which is finding expression in rejection of authority, put in place by God for good order. 

Nevertheless, this authority has been found lacking in the past, due to sin!  But now the pendulum has swung to the polar extreme as all authority is rejected, God, family (community), and the human body’s own ordered code.

What has this to do with the Warrnambool Lutheran Parish, you and me?

Already in the LCANZ anti biblical variety is being celebrated in its auxiliaries.  Same sex relationships and gender diversity are being publicly supported more and more by our schools and welfare sectors.  As Christians we are called to forgive and care for them, but at the same time we do not support them as being normal or okay in the eyes of God.

It may surprise you to know that this is not in the fringes of the LCANZ, but many you know in the mainstream of the church are openly supporting these movements.

Some congregations of the LCA are beginning services with a welcome to country ceremony, encouraging racial sanctification and denying that creation is God’s gift for all people to care for and share. 

Climate change is the new law preached by politicians and is being welcomed in our denomination.  

God tells us in his word that the world will die and end.  Climate change is happening!  But its reality is occurring because of human greed and selfishness.  God calls all people to a climate change of the heart, and not to wantonly pillage creation for profit, nor fix what he is allowing to perish by forcing others to pay.

We are all students of the age.  Individualism leads us to point the finger at others while permitting ourselves to do the very thing we are calling others to stop. 

In the church the word of God is being used to bash others over the head and at the same time used to allow us to enforce our own freedoms and righteousness.

This is what happens when we sit in authority over the word of God. 

But when we sit under the word of God it calls every one of us to repentance. 

Feeling and ideas don’t interpret the word of God, but the hearts and thoughts of people are interpreted by the word of God.

I can no longer say evil is over there, or if we do the right thing evil will not exist.  But rather, I am capable of evil, it lives within and therefore I flee to the cross and  live under the forgiveness of God.

Therefore, we need to qualify the direction of love,  “Is God’s love coming to life in the LCANZ, or is my love coming to life in the LCANZ?”

Or to put it another way, see which way the glory is going, “Are we glorifying God, or is it coming to us, or someone/thing else?” 

Suspicions dealing in the LCANZ, put the church in a position of being drawn into a situation where our biblical submission will be undermined and diluted.  God calls us not to capitulate to these anti biblical human ways, nor does he call us to be marauding zealots. 

He calls you and me to “stand” on the authority of his word, and faithfully confess his word as unhidden truth.

Pastor Heath

23/06/2023

Note:  Underlined text have links one can click on to see more information.

“Queerness as the redemptive message of Christianity”

June 21 2023 by Gene Veith

We often assume that if we give in just a little, the other side will be satisfied.  But it never is, pushing for more and more and more, going to ever greater extremes.

The issue in progressive churches is no longer gay rights, or accepting LGBTQ+ members and pastors, or performing same-sex weddings, or being inclusive of transgendered individuals.  Rather, all of this is only preparatory to Queer Theology, according to which Christianity itself is all about homosexuality and transgenderism.

In order to know what is happening in mainline churches and liberal seminaries, you must read  Queering Jesus: How It’s Going Mainstream at Progressive Churches and Top Divinity Schools.  The article, by John Murawski of RealClearInvestigations, shows just how pervasive “queer theology” has become in these  ostensibly Christian circles.  Here is an excerpt, with my bolds:

Progressive churches are moving beyond gay rights, even beyond transgender acceptance, and venturing into the realm of “queer theology.”  Rather than merely settling for the acceptance of gender-nonconforming people within existing marital norms and social expectations, queer theology questions heterosexual assumptions and binary gender norms as limiting, oppressive and anti-biblical, and centers queerness as the redemptive message of Christianity.  

In this form of worship, “queering” encourages the faithful to problematize, disrupt, and destabilize the assumptions behind heteronormativity and related social structures such as monogamy, marriage, and capitalism. These provocative theologians and ministers assert that queerness is not only natural and healthy but biblically celebrated. They assert that God is not the patron deity of the respectable, the privileged, and the comfortable, but rather God has a “preferential option” for the promiscuous, the outcast, the excluded and the impure. . . .

Queer theology presents itself as an apocalyptic, revival movement, rendering queer people as angels and saints who are a living foretaste of what’s to come, when all binaries and man-made social constructs fall away as remnants of heterosexual oppression and European colonialism. There is a sense in which to be queer is to be the chosen people, those favored by God to spread the good news. 

I can’t bring myself to quote any more of what Murawski describes and critiques on this blog.  Read it yourself.

This is not just the speculations of academic theologians.  Murawski shows how this is showing up everywhere in mainline churches.

We keep hearing that the split in the United Methodist Church, the Anglican Church in North America (ACNA) breaking away from the Episcopal Church, the North American Lutheran Church (NALC) breaking away from the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, the revolt of global Anglicans against Canterbury are all about “accepting gay pastors” or the like.  But the bigger issue is surely the rise of Queer Theology and whether it will be allowed to replace actual Christianity.

Back when the main issue with liberal theology was the higher critical approach to the Bible, as accompanied with the “social gospel,” J. Gresham Machen wrote Christianity and Liberalism,

 in which he argued that liberal theology was not just a strain of Christianity or a theological option in the church universal.  Rather, liberal theology is a different religion than Christianity.

He was right then in 1923.  And Queer Theology, as the decaying fruit of that rebellion against the authority of Scripture, is certainly a different religion than actual Christianity.