http://www.megaupload.com/?d=O7HXWT3J

Especially when those arguing for a change in the church's historic teaching claim that this is a justice issue analogous to segregation, that it is a matter of justice that a married (or unionized, or whatever) gay person should be allowed to be a priest/pastor of our church, or in our denomination, and that the church should pronounce God's blessing on same-sex unions. OK – we now aren't just coexisting, we have to make a decision and one side or the other is gravely in the wrong. It makes me tremble as one who takes the traditional view, to acknowledge that for all my certainty, I may be the moral equivalent of an oppressive racist segregationist on this issue. I hope that helps me walk humbly and speak as charitably as I can. I hope it keeps me from being smug. But I'm still convinced in the end that the case hasn't been made for changing the church's teaching on the issue. And it should make those on the progressive/revisionist side tremble too, to acknowledge that just maybe the church's millennia old teaching may be correct. And then even after acknowledging all of that, we still have to decide – we can't just continue in limbo going along and getting along, not on this particular issue (and others).

For me, this is coming out of the Episcopalian context in which those battles were very real, and the battle was being initiated, advanced and waged by the progressives/revisionists as a justice issue. Change was the goal, not just live and let live and maintain the status quo. It was very different from the evangelical context I grew up in and am now more or less back in. In the evangelical context, discussion of this issue tended to be more exclusionary and self-righteous and consist of preaching to the choir about how bad everyone else was when in reality our evangelical body was in no danger of changing its traditional stance and really needed lessons on how to welcome and love gay people, even if we weren't going to change our stance on sexual morality.

The necessity and manner of addressing a particular non-gospel issue like, for example, what the church should teach about homosexual practice and whether the church should sanction/bless homosexual unions, might be different in a church body or denomination where people are actively trying to change what the church historically teaches on the subject, than it is in a different church body or denomination, where there is little if any disagreement on the issue and the subject is just used to make everyone feel better about themselves and how "right" they are compared to others. In the latter context, I could see more where Moltmann's comments and approach might apply.

To quote David Mills, who is speaking here in the Episcopal/Anglican context:

"To forestall the usual criticism that we are "obsessed" with sex, I should note that if orthodox Anglicans seem to talk too much about sex, it's not our fault. Of course some "traditionalists" are homophobic, and some organizations do raise money by trumpeting the horrors of homosexuality in a way that approaches gay bashing . . . [y]et I and my colleagues think far less about sex than the Bishop of Newark, Integrity, and the faculty of the Episcopal Divinity School . . . But if we tend to talk a lot about sex, we do so only because it is the aspect of biblical teaching most obviously challenged by our culture and powerful and vocal movements in the Episcopal Church. The use of sex is the question of the hour. To accuse orthodox Anglicans of being obsessed with sex is somewhat like accusing firemen in a city victimized by arsonists of being obsessed with fires."

This'll be probably be the last time I blog here. I get tired of the same old political-correctness. I wonder what InterVarsity would say, since they've been victims of this whole mentality on certain campuses…too bad