Author Archive
Dan Martin
Open? Yes! Affirming? No.
Tuesday, November 29th, 2011
I’ve been running into a lot of comments from friends across the blogosphere lately, revolving around the issue of how the church should respond to homosexuality today. I write this response with trepidation, because I have a hunch it’ll upset many of my more “liberal” friends with about the same level of fervor many of my other writings upset my “conservative” brethren. However, I feel we have got to cut to the chase on a couple important points that I do not see showing up in these dialogs. The most important is this:
If we insist that the church should be affirming of gay unions, we better come clean and admit that we’ve decided that Biblical Christianity has nothing left to say regarding sexuality in any form.
Would Jesus Occupy Wall Street?
Monday, October 31st, 2011
The other day, a Facebook friend of mine posted a big caption on his profile: “JESUS Is With the 99%.” Predictably, he got a bunch of “likes” from his liberal buddies, and just as predictably, he got some major push back from his conservative friends. The Christian camp has divided along the usual lines, with one side loudly shouting that Jesus would join the rowdy crowd occupying the parks of our major cities, and the other side decrying the suggestion that Jesus might be even a tiny bit “socialist.” Sadly, if not entirely surprising, the proclamations on either end of the spectrum seem to reflect the political biases of the speaker with little, if any consideration for what Jesus actually said.
Whether or not Jesus would be with the whistle-blowing, bucket-thumping folks camped out in the parks is an interesting thought exercise, and one I’ll address in a bit. Quite apart from this question, any reasonable reading of the gospels and the prophets should make it patently obvious that Jesus would absolutely NOT be defending the Wall Street bankers and financial elite against whom the protesters are shouting.
