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Thanks. Reported as AAQC.
I know that OP brought up abortion, but I wasn’t thinking of abortion here: I was thinking of Martin’s approach to sexual sins, particularly homosexuality but also various kinds of cohabitation. He seems to prefer having a group of massgoers in unrepentant grave sin over the kind of call to repentance that would split them into a smaller group of repentant massgoers and a larger group that eschews the faith entirely. If that reading is correct, it’s hard to see how he isn’t at odds with the gospel.
I suppose that your understanding of Martin’s motives is much better informed than mine, which is largely limited to social media and reading him in quotation. But man, the pattern match is strong.
Interesting. I did not know this.
The contrast to the evangelical experience in twentieth-century America is really striking here. In the early twentieth century, evangelicals in many denominations realized that all of their institutions – seminaries, universities, missions boards, denominational leadership – had come to be controlled by modernists. They fought back, still not realizing how badly outgunned they were, and in all the big denominations they lost.
But of course we evangelicals aren’t permanently tied to any hierarchy, so they were free to build new institutions and leadership structures. In the middle of the century there was a renewed debate about how those ought to relate to the mainline churches, which still had some orthodox believers in them. In 1979, conservative Southern Baptists realized that modernists were beginning to gain control of their denomination and used the convention to begin their own march through the institutions. After his appointment to lead the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in 1993, theological conservative Al Mohler famously (and controversially) purged the faculty.
Different evangelical institutions have taken different stances over the years. Those that accommodate liberal theology in their ranks usually have an easier time dealing with secular institutions, and their leadership may be able to stave off mission drift for a generation or so. But those which play hardball with theological liberals have done a much better job staying on mission across generations. As evangelicals have come to realize that we live in negative world, the Southern Baptist approach has become more popular.
In the first draft of my reply to Sloot, I began to speculate that evangelicalism will become more theologically and politically conservative, and that it will at the same time shrink to become less politically relevant to the secular right’s interests. But of course I cannot say for sure.
A dear friend of mine is Roman Catholic, though by no means a traditionalist. It is remarkable to me just how many things her social environment within the RCC accepts as valid Catholic positions because of the lack of disciplinary boundary drawing from the hierarchy. It’s an ongoing source of temptation to her, made all the more subtle because she doesn’t recognize it.
Of course, I hope that you all come to your senses and convert tomorrow. Failing that, I hope you are right that theological liberalism in the Roman church is just a passing phase. But if the time to wait it out is measured in generations, then the cost must also be measured in generations.
The catholic community has some weird hang ups that I think are a part of the trauma of the reformation and the breakup of Christendom. In general there are only to real “do not cross” lines that really stick out. First, you have to be okay with invoking saints, and second, you have to accept the pope. The church may make frowny faces at other things, but as long as you’re good on those points, they’re not really going to get too mad.
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It may be that he is biding his time. I think there's merit to the idea that if one comes out too strongly against the sins which people are most embroiled in, you lose the opportunity to push them in a positive direction at all. But if you build up trust, it is sometimes possible to be there at the right moment when someone is ready to hear the hard truth that they need.
I have to grapple with this in my own life, when dealing with my sister. The details are different - her issue is that she has an extreme anger towards our parents based on a false memory of our childhood that she has convinced herself is true. But I face a very similar dilemma, because I know that if I push back too hard on her false ideas she will just get angry, cut me out of her life, and then she will have nobody left who cares for her and who might be able to help her. So I bide my time and grit my teeth through many rants about how awful our parents are, and gently push back on her ideas as much as I think I can get away with. All of this in the hope that one day she will be ready to hear the truth, and that God will grant me the wisdom to recognize this moment when I come to it.
I don't know him, but it seems to me that this Martin fellow could be operating under a similar goal. And if that's the case, I don't think he's at odds with the gospel. It doesn't mean that his approach is the right one - after all, you do have to pick a point to gently tell people "hey this really is a sin, you need to change". And it's very easy to rationalize yourself out of taking that step. But even if his approach isn't effective, that doesn't mean it's at odds with the gospel. If his heart is in the right place I would say he can be in accord with the gospel even if he might be better off using a different tactic to reach people.
Thanks. You’re right, of course. I am so used to public figures giving this sort of reasoning disingenuously that I don’t stop to consider whether one might be sincere.
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