On Prop 8.
So, in looking for various arguments on the web, I encountered this post by a Calvinist Conservative Christian. He's against proposition 8.
Here’s where I’d start: there is no question that of course the Christian church does not define marriage the way Ms. Miller has in her opening salvo here. But the reason Ms. Miller can make her point as hap-hazardly as she does in her essay is that the church has done a lousy job of defining marriage in the last 100 years. Someone might want to make the case that the church has been doing a poor job longer than that - I leave that case to that person, whomever he or she may be.
But here’s the truth: nobody can frame Barack Obama as a supporter of the war in Iraq, right? Nobody can frame Bill O’Reilly as a supporter of Barack Obama, yes? Nobody can frame Sean Penn as a political conservative - or even as a moderate. In fact, nobody can frame the advocates against Prop 8 as advocates of marriage in spite of their repetition of the word.
I was shocked. Not at what he says in those paragraphs - I wholeheartedly agree with him there - but that he says it. This is a conservative sort of guy, you see. I'd not expect him to be so... well... disagreeable with the proponents of Prop 8.
“But Frank,” says the politically-conservative reader who has stumbled onto this blog post, “how can you say that? Aren’t the proponents of Prop 8 and like legislation clearly for the union of one man and one woman? Don’t they say that often enough?”
My answer, unequivocally, is:
NO.
And his "no" is in huge type. It shouts, it thunders.
And then he explains why.
See: this is why Ms. Miller can say exegetically- and theologically- ludicrous things about what “Christian” religious conservatives want. Religious conservatives don’t really know what they want, or how to get it.
I'd agree with that. They've been, to my mind, distracted by Mammon (the god of money and greed, for those who don't get the reference).
What the student of the Bible ought to want in this case is not a social agenda. What the student of Biblical principles here should want is not for the government to force people to one kind of, um, gender entanglement over another.
Amen, hallelujah, he gets it.
Here’s why I say that: if the primary need for marriage is a social contract, one which gives me rights over another person, and rights regarding another person’s property so that they do not cheat me or that I am not otherwise cheated, I say plainly: let everyone have that. If that is all, or even principally, what marriage is, then please let every person have that as often as possible and with as many people as possible. Let Government (great “G” intended) protect the rights of each person so that no one is cheated.
I'm beginning to like this guy; he thinks like me in a lot of ways. There's other ways he doesn't, but heck...
But here’s the thing: I think - and historically the church thinks -- that marriage is not the social construction of a network of rights - especially the “right” to some emotive or financial state of being appeased. In fact, the church (since it has come up) reads the Bible to mean that marriage is a surrendering of rights first to God and then to another person for manifold theological purposes - that is, a wide variety of purposes which, when acted out, give glory to God.
Marriage is about God. That is, the God who created us out of the dust for a purpose and subordinated to Himself. Marriage is about the Creator of all things and the purpose He made in mankind.
So, why is government involved? Why must government be used to enforce a religious idea?
Man’s purpose in God’s creation is to work and “subdue the Earth” as it says in another place, and God makes woman to help man. That word “helper” there in the Hebrew is later used in the OT almost exclusively to mean the kind of aid only God Himself can provide -- as in Psa 115:11, or Psa 124:8.
Which is another topic entirely than Prop 8, but we'll not go there now.
Marriage is therefore a glorification of God in our obedience, to do a thing the way He said it should be done, and not to treat it - as we do today in our churches - as something which is often abandoned because the other person has become to us not our own flesh, but merely a room-mate or worse: merely a contractor who we can fire when we aren’t satisfied with their work.
Or, maybe, a doll we can throw away when we're tired of it?
“So what?” #1 is this: if the church was serious about this kind of love - which is Christ’s kind of love, first and foremost demonstrated on the Cross for a specific bride in order to make her holy and spotless before God - it wouldn’t abide a social Gospel of nondescript good will or idiotic exhortations about “your best life now”. Listen: often in marriage, you are not on the receiving end of good things but are in fact in the middle of hard doings. And if you expect that your marriage should be about satisfying you instead of sanctifying someone else through sacrifice, you will want to end your marriage in short order - kids and social appearances be damned. And let’s be honest: since divorce in the church looks like divorce in the world - that is, we do it just as often and for all the same reasons - I suspect we think of “marriage” in the same way the world does. So when the world simply wants to make the law look like what we are actually practicing, we have to look in the mirror and admit to ourselves that we are to blame for what the world thinks of marriage.
I love honesty. I really do.
Now, understand, the blog poster I'm quoting is against "gay marriage" because he does not believe it qualifies as what Jesus Christ and Paul both view as "marriage" - because marriage is a sacrament (in the U.S., government cannot create sacraments - that would be a religious thing), because it is in submission to each other, in united submission to God, and for a host of other reasons.
But he is against Proposition 8, because he doesn't think that church should get entangled with government that way. And I agree with that.
Here’s where I’d start: there is no question that of course the Christian church does not define marriage the way Ms. Miller has in her opening salvo here. But the reason Ms. Miller can make her point as hap-hazardly as she does in her essay is that the church has done a lousy job of defining marriage in the last 100 years. Someone might want to make the case that the church has been doing a poor job longer than that - I leave that case to that person, whomever he or she may be.
But here’s the truth: nobody can frame Barack Obama as a supporter of the war in Iraq, right? Nobody can frame Bill O’Reilly as a supporter of Barack Obama, yes? Nobody can frame Sean Penn as a political conservative - or even as a moderate. In fact, nobody can frame the advocates against Prop 8 as advocates of marriage in spite of their repetition of the word.
I was shocked. Not at what he says in those paragraphs - I wholeheartedly agree with him there - but that he says it. This is a conservative sort of guy, you see. I'd not expect him to be so... well... disagreeable with the proponents of Prop 8.
“But Frank,” says the politically-conservative reader who has stumbled onto this blog post, “how can you say that? Aren’t the proponents of Prop 8 and like legislation clearly for the union of one man and one woman? Don’t they say that often enough?”
My answer, unequivocally, is:
NO.
And his "no" is in huge type. It shouts, it thunders.
And then he explains why.
See: this is why Ms. Miller can say exegetically- and theologically- ludicrous things about what “Christian” religious conservatives want. Religious conservatives don’t really know what they want, or how to get it.
I'd agree with that. They've been, to my mind, distracted by Mammon (the god of money and greed, for those who don't get the reference).
What the student of the Bible ought to want in this case is not a social agenda. What the student of Biblical principles here should want is not for the government to force people to one kind of, um, gender entanglement over another.
Amen, hallelujah, he gets it.
Here’s why I say that: if the primary need for marriage is a social contract, one which gives me rights over another person, and rights regarding another person’s property so that they do not cheat me or that I am not otherwise cheated, I say plainly: let everyone have that. If that is all, or even principally, what marriage is, then please let every person have that as often as possible and with as many people as possible. Let Government (great “G” intended) protect the rights of each person so that no one is cheated.
I'm beginning to like this guy; he thinks like me in a lot of ways. There's other ways he doesn't, but heck...
But here’s the thing: I think - and historically the church thinks -- that marriage is not the social construction of a network of rights - especially the “right” to some emotive or financial state of being appeased. In fact, the church (since it has come up) reads the Bible to mean that marriage is a surrendering of rights first to God and then to another person for manifold theological purposes - that is, a wide variety of purposes which, when acted out, give glory to God.
Marriage is about God. That is, the God who created us out of the dust for a purpose and subordinated to Himself. Marriage is about the Creator of all things and the purpose He made in mankind.
So, why is government involved? Why must government be used to enforce a religious idea?
Man’s purpose in God’s creation is to work and “subdue the Earth” as it says in another place, and God makes woman to help man. That word “helper” there in the Hebrew is later used in the OT almost exclusively to mean the kind of aid only God Himself can provide -- as in Psa 115:11, or Psa 124:8.
Which is another topic entirely than Prop 8, but we'll not go there now.
Marriage is therefore a glorification of God in our obedience, to do a thing the way He said it should be done, and not to treat it - as we do today in our churches - as something which is often abandoned because the other person has become to us not our own flesh, but merely a room-mate or worse: merely a contractor who we can fire when we aren’t satisfied with their work.
Or, maybe, a doll we can throw away when we're tired of it?
“So what?” #1 is this: if the church was serious about this kind of love - which is Christ’s kind of love, first and foremost demonstrated on the Cross for a specific bride in order to make her holy and spotless before God - it wouldn’t abide a social Gospel of nondescript good will or idiotic exhortations about “your best life now”. Listen: often in marriage, you are not on the receiving end of good things but are in fact in the middle of hard doings. And if you expect that your marriage should be about satisfying you instead of sanctifying someone else through sacrifice, you will want to end your marriage in short order - kids and social appearances be damned. And let’s be honest: since divorce in the church looks like divorce in the world - that is, we do it just as often and for all the same reasons - I suspect we think of “marriage” in the same way the world does. So when the world simply wants to make the law look like what we are actually practicing, we have to look in the mirror and admit to ourselves that we are to blame for what the world thinks of marriage.
I love honesty. I really do.
Now, understand, the blog poster I'm quoting is against "gay marriage" because he does not believe it qualifies as what Jesus Christ and Paul both view as "marriage" - because marriage is a sacrament (in the U.S., government cannot create sacraments - that would be a religious thing), because it is in submission to each other, in united submission to God, and for a host of other reasons.
But he is against Proposition 8, because he doesn't think that church should get entangled with government that way. And I agree with that.