Stand Firm

In the Medieval period of teh West, scholars were oppressed for not following Church dogma to the letter. Today it is gender dogma.

I challenge anyone who would use Scripture or tradition to support homosexual practice and/or SSB to air their views in an open debate with Rob Gagnon. (He must be under tremendous heterophobic attack, but his voice remains steady.)

Anyone up for it? SR? VGR? KJS? How about all three? I’ll bet he could handle a 3 on 1. Or, a 2 on 2. Two of the above plus Gagnon and Ryan Sorba.

Is there a diocese (or a large parish) that would have the guts to set this up? How about inviting him to an HOB meeting?

Not really fair, of course. A debate is only useful when there are two legitimate views on a controversial topic. Still, it would be interesting. Hopefully, popcorn would be available.

Actually, there was a surprising amount of intellectual freedom in the medieval university, which is why 50 years after the Sorbonne banned Aristotle, it made the works of Aristotle a required part of its curriculum. The university itself is entirely a creation of the Middle Ages.

The Middle Ages lasted about a thousand years-- a very long time. The power of the Church--and its authoritarian tendencies--varied over the course of that time. Our impression of the medieval church is often distorted by the way the RCC functioned between Trent and Vatican II, by the bias of Protestant historians, and by the enormous corruption of the RCC during the time leading up to the Reformation.

You know, this is beginning to sound like “Expelled,” the movie about the intolerance of Darwinian scientists as re those scholars who entertain the concept of Intelligent Design. In that movie, a scientist from Poland points out that the US (and North America) has these problems because they--WE--support “political correctness; he says it is not a problem in Poland because they are not so concerned with that. Here it is a matter of excluding a point of view--that homosexuality is NOT the same as being black. The movie points out that such a practice is like the Berlin Wall: it isolates two points of view, one from the other rather than allowing the two points of view to occupy the same space and be considered in a fair manner.
Gagnon is SO right: She should be praised!

Michael Gerson had an interesting OPED this week. He studied how science is often used to create authority for cultural or religious beliefs, the stem cell argument or this one. As we use science to make these determinations that will lead to results such as 90% of all Downs Syndrome children are aborted, we disprove the idea that we are all created equal. In this case the science proves we are equal;therefore, queerness is sin (choice) as opposed to not sin (no choice). The same equation still exists: science is used to examine cultural/religious definitions which ultimately try to identify differences, undermining the concept that we are created equal. We are playing with fire as Europe found out during the period 1933-1945. Queers should praise God that no identifiable gene definition of Queerness has been found for then we will not be equal and societies often react to that type of disturbing evidence in gruesome ways. Sin can be forgiven. Bad genes are genetically engineered or eliminated.

As an aspiring NT scholar myself, Rob Gagnon is my hero in this fight. No one has fought more tenaciously or successfully to refute our liberal foes. No one else has made the orthodox case so compellingly and forcefully.

I had lunch with him one day in Pittsburgh. Prof. Gagnon is as winsome and humble in person as he is convincing and impressive in print. I wish we had someone like him in Anglican circles, with the fire in the belly that he does on this issue.

Interestingly, Dr. Gagnon was almost denied tenure at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary because he has been so outspoken on the homosexuality issue. So political correctness is a problem everywhere in modern academic circles, even in “mainline” seminaries, and not just at secular institutions like the Univ. of Toledo.

And as for the vaunted claim of most colleges and universities to promote a free environment for the critical discussion of any and all ideas, it’s worth noting that on the vast majority of faculties across thsi country, surveys show that Democratic instructors overwhelmingly outnumber Republicans, often by a margin of 5 or 10 to 1.

Yep. That’s an unbiased place for you. There’s real freedom of thought. It reminds me of Henry Ford’s old joke about his Model T’s. “You can get them in any color you want, as long as it’s black.”

Two thoughts: first, to my mind the most important thing is what he says toward the end of his letter--"an appeal to a biologically based orientation is not a moral argument...No clear conclusions about the morality of a behavior can be made from the mere fact of biological causation.”
Second, I wonder how President Jacobs will receive this letter--will he recognize that it comes from a formidable scholar who is worth engaging, or will he dismiss it as something from “another Christian crackpot”?

The First Amendment protects Crystal Dixon’s right to voice her opinions in a newspaper. That is so regardless of whether her opinions are accurate or inaccurate, sensitive or insensitive.

Unfortunately, free speech does not cover someone who speaks against the stated goals and mission of the college. She will be allowed due process which means a hearing and then an appeal and then a defense of the appeal ad infinitum. She could do quite a bit of public relations damage to the college, maybe even drop enrollment a thousand or two students and ruin the political career of the President who is trying to make a career out of defaming her. Like the President of Duke, this president will be meeting with lawyers for years which careerwise is over. He’s damaged goods and with a touch of divine intervention, he did it by his own hand. She can sue their brains out but in the end it is a Schori like court that will judge her. Heck, Toledo ain’t no big thing, GO FOR IT!

"Unfortunately, free speech does not cover someone who speaks against the stated goals and mission of the college.”

But does this mean that the University of Toledo openly admits it lacks the academic freedom that the academy is always trumpeting and does not have the goal of imparting honest research results? Does it also mean that its orientation diversity trumps racial/ethnic diversity?

And the State’s Constitution defines marriage as between one man and one woman, plus, explicitly, does not recognize any other arrangement. I helped to pass the amendment, so I do know that for a fact. This poor woman was forced to resign for following State Law. Real fair of the University of Toledo.

The letter by Professor Gagnon is a real tour de force - an excellent reference to bookmark. I am glad someone suggested posting it. ;^)

The lady who was forced to resign should hire an attorney to sue the university. I don’t see how she could lose given that her civil rights were so blatantly violated. It doesn’t matter what the university’s policies are; they are not allowed to violate the Constitution.

For those suggesting a public debate, excellent idea and long overdue. Gagnon and NT Wright could represent New Testament scholars and Christopher Seitz and another could represent Old Testament scholars. Other theologians could be included as well. It is long overdue. They should have a nationally known moderator such as Margaret Warner or perhaps a high profile attorney or someone else who could follow intricate arguments with ease. When VCR and KJS evade the invitation, it should be publicized, they should be confronted publicly with video cameras rolling, and those tapes should be displayed in as many places as possible.

I certainly agree that a high profile debate would be desirable between the likes of Dr. Gagnon, +Wright, and Dr. Seitz on the orthodox side and whoever they can get to represent the liberal side (retired NT prof Dan Via worships at an ultra-liberal TEC parish in Charlottesville, VA and might do it; he was Gognon’s adversary in the Two Views book). But sadly, this kind of thing has been tried before, with surprisingly little effect. The strange thing is that experience shows that no matter how clearly and convincingly experts like Dr. Rob Gagnon set forth the biblical and orthodox case, many leaders in TEC still just don’t get it. It’s wierd.

Personally, as I’ve said on other threads, this sort of experience has persuaded me that there is something demonic or supernatural going on. It reminds me of the veil that Paul talks about in 2 Cor. 4:3-4, by which Satan kept so many Jews in his day from accepting the gospel and finding life through their Messiah. There is a level of spiritual blindness here that is more than human.

Or, if you are willing to consider an even more radical and disturbing idea, I think that there is some kind of divine hardening of hearts at work here. Recall the familiar story of the deliverance from slavery in Egypt. In Exodus 4-11, there are repeated mentions of the motif of Pharaoh’s hardened heart. But sometimes the text says that Pharaoh hardened his own heart, and sometimes it says that the LORD himself hardened Pharaoh’s heart, to accomplish his saving purposes. That is a great mystery, involving the impenetrable mystery of the complex interplay between divine sovereignty and human free will.

But personally, I have no other way of explaining the obtuse inability of so many fine colleagues in TEC to get it. I am forced to conclude that there is something supernatural going on, whether it involves the actions of our Enemy, the Father of Lies, or even the providential action of God himself (or likely both).

But nevertheless, we ought to take every opportunity we can get (or create) in order to keep presenting the truth and refuting the errors of our heretical foes.

If my experience is any indicator, it may not be as weird as you think it is. Based on a number of years of therapy/counseling when I was a young adult in the early ‘60s, supplemented by reading a lot of C. G. Jung, my very strong surmise is that most progressives (what a lot of people call liberals) are what the Jungians would identify as feeling personality types. (I won’t formally define the term, but anyone who doesn’t know what that signifies can find a reasonably good discussion on the Web here.)

Stated simply, if one’s judging function is significantly biased towards feeling, as opposed to thinking, one makes decisions based, not on sequential logical processes, but rather on whether or not the conclusion feels right. Note that feeling in this usage is not primarily about emotions, but more on whether a conclusion appeals to a non-rational sense. If one’s judging function is at all strongly imbalanced towards feeling, evidence makes very little difference to one’s conclusions. Appeals to evidence and reason are simply incapable of outweighing the listener’s sense that the profferred conclusion simply cannot be correct, as it just doesn’t feel right.

Well, you are on to something very significant. I agree with you. And it’s worth noting that the very popular Myers-Briggs Personality Inventory shows that an overwhelming majority of TEC clergy are F or “feeling” types, versus T or “thinking” types. And especially, TEC is dominated by NFs, either ENFJs, INFJs, INFPs or ENFPs. Over half of our priests fall in that broad NF group (I’m relying on David Kersey’s categories here from his best-selling book, “Please Understand Me!").

Maybe I’m particularly sensitive to that fact because I don’t fit into the mold. I’m an INTP myself, i.e., I’m most definitely a thinking type.

FWIW, other denominations show different patterns. A friend of mine who knows a lot more about Myers-Briggs than I do tells me that among Southern Baptist and Roman Catholic clergy, the predominant type are the SJs. Virtually the polar opposite of the NFs. Maybe that doesn’t explain everything (I would never suggest that), but it certainly does play a role.

"The lady who was forced to resign should hire an attorney to sue the university” ---Seen Too Much [#14]

“Every person who, under color of any statute, ordinance, regulation, custom, or usage, of any State ..., subjects ... any citizen of the United States ... to the deprivation of any rights, privileges, or immunities secured by the Constitution and laws, shall be liable to the party injured”
---42 U.S. Code § 1983

This is just way to easy. It makes an opponent sub-rational and hence easy to dismiss. In fact, the left does this to us all the time. The charge of ‘homophobia’ is simply a technique designed to move the argument towards a discussion of fixing those who morally disapprove of homosexuality. Our arguments become sub-rational because they are not tied to reason but to sub-rational processes rooted in an alleged fear of homosexuality.

This assertion of ‘feeling’ versus ‘logic’ is no different. We become logical. They become the sub-rational. But Liberals are not sub-rational. They simply reason according to a completely different set of presuppositions and so come to completely different (albiet logically consistent) conclusions. If we expect them to treat our arguments with respect, we must first accord them the same courtesy.

carl

Martial Artist, notice that these progressives are the very people who are always praising the Episcopal Church in the following terms:
“It’s the church that doesn’t require you to leave your brains at the door.” (This particularly bothers me.) They are the very ones who are always crying out about “science” when, indeed, they mean some kind of pseudo-science of the yuppie mythologies and have little contact with real scientific method. I say this despite the fact of the PB’s previous profession. (Note that she did not continue far in it.)

You’ve made a good point. It’s indeed all too easy to belittle our opponents in the heat of theological battle. But I’d hasten to add that in the Myers-Briggs system of analyzing personality types, there is no value judgement placed on the thinking versus feeling functions, as if one were superior to the other. They are simply different. I intended no slur against our foes. After all, a lot of my fellow orthodox clergy are NF types.

Perhaps it may be helpful to add another dimension to explaining the mystery of why so many ordained and lay leaders in TEC “just don’t get it.” And that is the strong influence of our culture, or the dominant “paradigm” by which most of us Americans now interpret everything.

Here I’m using the familiar language of the historian of science, Thomas Kuhn, in his best-selling book, “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.” In it, Kuhn introduced the now widespread concept of “paradigm shifts.” That is, it’s not by the mere accumulation of more data that sciences makes its major advances, but by reorganizing what we know in some new “paradigm” or overarching theoretical construct. Classic examples are the Copernican Revolution with its new paradigm of a solar-centered, not earth-centered system of planets. Or how Einstein’s Theory of Relativity revolutionized Newtonian physics etc. Copernicus and Kepler didn’t really produce that much new astronomical data; they just put it in a new framework or perspective, and that changed everything. Same with Einstein. Or quantum physics etc.

And part of what makes this debate so difficult is that we are dealing with two fundamentally different theological paradigms here, two mutually exclusive worldviews, i.e., the biblical and orthodox one versus the contemporary post-modern or liberal one. And thus, when we ask a liberal to change their mind on the issue of gay sex, we are actually asking them to change their whole worldview along with that. And naturally, they resist that. And vice versa.

David Handy, I think the mistaken leaders of TEC are enough of political animals that if the laity in their churches started to get the point of what is happening, they would change, not because they are convinced by theological arguments. They might change because the people who employ them demand it.

Right you are. There is some hope in that prospect, if the laity can only be awakened in time.

I agree that ECUSA suffers from an overabundance of NF (intuitive feeling) clergy who have not properly developed or maintained their judging function---and their ability to stand for truths that conflict with their feelings.

By the same token we need to take care not to suggest that the NF personality is itself problematic for ministry.

Let’s start from the other extreme. An independent evangelical church in Boston taught that Jesus was an ESTJ, that this was the idea personality type for Christians, and we should all strive to grow into it. Bah! Sounds like egotistical projection by some bossy ESTJ preacher.

More broadly, in the old evangelical brimstone tradition, preachers often gravitated towards an extreme ST model---like a punitive, uncompromising father redolent with disapproval and blame. The extreme T helped make sure he never gave an inch. The extreme S also helped guard against any interest in new ideas. The RCC had its own ST model, perhaps lighter on the brimstone, perhaps more overtly legalistic, but equally rigid.

All of which underscores the danger in taking any aspect of personality to an extreme.

ECUSA has emphasized the pastoral-accepting and the secular-trendy at expense of rigorous thinking. But I question whether the emphasis on feeling is really the root of the problem.

Consider “clinical pastoral education,” which the Revisionist_Dictionary defines as follows:

“Assigning a seminarian to an emergency room, nursing home, hospice, or other place of acute human need to provide value-neutral, answer-free spiritual counsel. ‘My clinical pastoral education taught me not to offer easy comfort to bereaved families but to give them space to discover for themselves the meaning of their suffering.’”

The “value-neutral, answer-free” emphasis (perhaps copied from secular psychotherapy) reflects a T-compatible agenda of moral relativism.

I do suspect that ECUSA’s pre-seminary screening process has been particularly hostile to orthodox Ts.

And we could certainly use some strong orthodox Ts in the House of Bishops (as I have often argued in other contexts).

I do think this NF personality type is an interesting and potentially helpful way of looking at things - but not in the way it’s been defined here.

As I understand it, the F personality type is not illogical and emotive. They (’we’, because I come out in this category myself) tend, when looking at a problem to say ‘How will it effect the well-being of the people concerned?’. Whereas a T(hinking) type says ‘What are the principles here and what are issues at stake, and where do we want to get to?’

I can see how liberal Christians approach the same-sex issue as F-personality types. The F-type senses someone else’s pain and wants to make things all right for that person. I see that as a big driver in TEC-theology rowards homosexual people.

The T-type looks at the issue and says ‘There’s no way we can go back on the clear teaching of scripture . . . now we’ve got that straight, how do we deal with the personal issues?’

I am enormously helped by T-types in my church and other settings who keep me focussed on issues and don’t let my concern for people’s feelings cloud issues and drive policy. The problems besetting TEC seem to me typical of what happens when F-types are allowed to make policy without the the T-types to keep the central things central.

I welcome your comments on the limitations of making too much of the personality differences discussed here. There is nothing inherently bad about being an NF. In fact, I enjoy being married to one! She complements me beautifully. It’s just that when one personality type (take your pick) becomes dominant in a religious tradition, as NFs have in TEC, then you have imbalances that can cause problems.

William S, I particularly agree with your read on how NF’s tend to approach this whole homosexuality issue from a compassionate desire to help those suffering as men or women struggling with their sexual attractions and the social opprobrium still attached to them in much of our culture. Clergy usually go into parish ministry from the desire to help people. The ministry is one of the “caring” professions. And then there is the whole perception (or misperception) that it’s mainly a civil rights or justice issue. It’s so very easy to jump to that conclusion in our culture today, since it seems to make sense on the surface and it’s powerfully reinforced by the mass media all the time.

Well, of course, NRA! That just goes without saying. I’m a Calvinist. I always make good points - typically about five of them. :D

Christian organizations, from seminaries through vestries, should cultivate the sort of healthy balance William describes. This needn’t involve touchy-feely talk or even references to indexes like the Myers-Briggs. The key is to have leaders appreciate (and when appropriate, acknowledge) the different kinds of strengths people bring to the group’s work.

One of my favorite professional activities involves serving on a mediation-and-arbitration panel with people from a variety of backgrounds. All are very conscientious. It’s a pleasure to see how, as we deliberate, the group is often wiser and more discerning than the sum of its parts.

"I’m a Calvinist. I always make good points---typically about five of them” ---Carl [#27]

LOL. If it were up to me, instead of Br_er Rabbit, I’d award you a free pass to the Laffin’ Place.

But you know, as lovely as a TULIP is, they do tend to fade all too quickly. Like the tulips now out in my son’s yard in the Chicago area. Some have already lost their petals.

Per request:
One free pass to the Laffin’ Place for Carl.
The TULIPs are in bloom.
The Rabbit.

I dunno. Laughing seems somehow ... Truly Unreformed. I might end up Methodist or something equally disagreeable.
carl

<-- Calvinist Smiley

Nothing I said was in any way asserting superiority to either side. An individual’s “judging function” influences how that person comes to conclusions. All I was pointing out was that making a sequentially rational argument to a person for whom feeling is the dominant function will generally not produce the expected result. This observation makes no one, in your words, “sub-rational,” nor does it demonstrate that an individual thinking type is correct in her argument. If you will read what I wrote in the context of Fr. Handy’s comment, to which mine was a response, I believe you may wish to withdraw the assertion that your imputed understanding was the intent or result of my observation.

P.S. I happen to be an INTJ, and the last time I tested thinking was my dominant function and intuition my secondary function.

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