Take a look at the sermon delivered by a Riverside Church pastor in New York City. You can also see this clip:
The Rev. is the homilist. Adriene Thorne says in the clip, that David is the central character of the Bathsheba and David story, not poor Bathsheba. He also states that David’s repentance does not excuse him. She ends by pointing out that Scripture refers to David as “a man after God’s own heart”. This is an indication that God is a bad god.
This is the way it works with the woke. Every every must be viewed through the prisms of Critical Race Theory, queerness and all the rest. David’s story is simplified into a neat narrative about contemporary politics that calls God out as a bigot.
This is the type of preaching that you hear at your church. You need to stop allowing these lies to destroy your faith. Riverside Church and any other church that promotes false prophecies will not have a single congregation in the years to come.
Woke cannot build, but can only destroy. This music teacher is trying to get rid of classical music because it was composed by Bad Men. We know this because they were 18th-century western European cis straight male composers.
Liberals and Conservatives say this is nutstacking. But if you have ever studied arts or humanities at college, you will know that this type of mindless anti-intellectualism has become commonplace. David Rieff, who is, I should remind you, a man from the Left, decries this idiocy. Excerpts
The Guardian reports that New Zealand’s arts council pulled funding for a Shakespeare festival. The program had been sponsored by secondary school students for over three decades. The council claimed that the program did not “show the relevance to Aotearoa’s contemporary art context” and that it was “located within an imperial canon and missed the chance to create a living curriculum.” * The festival will be able to survive because the arts council grant is 10% of its annual budget. This story is representative of the ongoing cultural self-mutilation that mistakenly assumes it is emancipation in the Anglosphere.
Whatever was wrong about “Art for Art’s Sake”, it was infinitely better than the current cultural convention wisdom that art that doesn’t serve the moral or political ambitions of the present either is irrelevant, as New Zealand’s arts council’s declaration explicitly states, or is actually an obstacle to such ambitions as in the reference of “the canon to imperialism.”
This worldview is unable to distinguish between art and its history. This is why the crisis in English-speaking universities’ classics departments has been so severe: young militant scholars examine the Western imperialism used of Classical Greek and Imperial Rome, and find it much more fascinating than Rome or Greece. To claim that these effects are not the domain of classics departments and should not be their primary concern is to be complicit in the imperial project.
The argument is being made by the New Zealand arts council. Shakespeare “exists within the canon of Imperialism,” which is, like the case with the imperialist use the classics, historical fact and is therefore not only irrelevant to the present but also toxic to the [desired] futur.
More:
Art that is real, art that is transcendental and inspires, can enchant and move people across time and space and can sadden, delight, and move them. It is dangerous and too autonomous and too uncontrollable. This is why it is so threatening for the cultural apparatchiks in the current Anglosphere. They are trying to strangle it, but too often succeeding.
This is what Church Woke is doing to the Bible. They consider it too dangerous, autonomous, and uncontrollable. They must domesticate it even if this means throwing out God. Do you not see how absurd this is?
Don’t be surprised to find yourself immersed in the Wokeness waters once you have tried it. Several years ago, Denny Burk, a conservative Baptist theologian, was strongly criticized for his negative views on the Revoice conference. This conference was a movement within Evangelicalism that created a space for lesbian and gay believers, while still adhering to Biblical orthodoxy. Burk criticised the movement in 2018 primarily because he opposed the idea that Christians could choose to be “celibate homosexual” as their identity. While he supports celibacy for gays, lesbians, and unmarried straights, he cautioned that it was destructive to claim that status as an identification marker. Burk’s claims were something I found a little skeptical about, I will admit. I believe churches should encourage gay people to be celibate, while also making sure they are part of the life of the church. I was not clear on what Revoice was doing.
Here are the words of Burk today:
World magazine attended the Revoice conference and was amazed by the sights it saw. Excerpts From the World report:
Revoice has also changed. Homosexuality has always been emphasized by speakers as an identity and not just as a behavior. This year, however, speakers seemed to be more insistent in stating homosexuality as an identity, rather than a behavior. This identity rhetoric was extended to transgender ideology. Many speakers used the term “sexual and gender minorities” as a way to refer to them. Leaders now focus on parachurch activities. The church’s ongoing rejection was often a theme that speakers frequently used and encouraged attendees to start their own Revoice chapters.
Revoice’s message has been criticized for being deceptive. It conflates Biblical teachings and the good news about the gospel with cultural messages regarding sexuality and gender. They claim that these seeds of error are leading Revoice to depart from Biblical orthodoxy, and they are undermining the Creation ordinance, “males and female he created them.”
“Sin is progressive and what we see with Revoice, is the progression of this sin,” Rosaria Butterfield, a former feminist lesbian and tenured English professor at Syracuse University, said. She is now a pastor’s spouse and mother to four.
While there are subtle debates about the moral and nature of same-sex attraction, the appearance of preferred pronouns is something else. The use of the plural they/them to refer to an individual is the most absurd example, with the exception of the royal “we”, of the British monarch. While ordinary Christians may be forgiven for not understanding the details of sexual concupiscence discussions, the arrival of gender confusion should be something that all Christians should be able grasp.
This development is unfortunately predictable. I hoped that dialogue would continue, and that those following the celibate gay Christian Christian path would listen to those who feel such a move is pastorally incorrect. As someone who has watched from the sidelines over the years, I have noticed that dialog can only occur when people treat each other with good faith. Although my knowledge of Side B and Revoice debates is limited, it is difficult to find one prominent critic who was treated seriously by Revoice supporters. Any criticism seemed to be dismissed as stupid, ignorant, or misunderstood.
It’s the same with the woke. Either you agree with them or you are a Hater. This is because you clearly operate from a position based on bigotry. This is why wokeness pollutes all it touches. Its first victim is the ability to think.
This 2013 piece “Sex After Christianity” was one of my most popular essays.
As older Americans leave the scene, the magnitude of the defeat suffered will be even more obvious. According to poll after poll, homosexuality is accepted by young people. However, gay marriage is not a big deal for older Americans.
This is a far bigger issue than most people realize. It’s also a reason that even staunch opponents of gay rights can’t understand. In 1993, The Nation published a cover story that identified the gay-rights cause to be the keystone and summit of the culture war.
The gay struggle encompasses all the current liberation struggles. While the gay moment may be reminiscent of other communities’ past experiences, it is also unique in that it encompasses all aspects of today’s liberation struggles. It is not certain that the changes will be easy. It’s possible, however, that America will be transformed by a small, disregarded sexual minority.
They were correct, and although the term “cosmology” might seem philosophically lofty to some readers, its current use seems downright prophetic. If the Christian cosmology was still in use, then the struggle for rights for “a small and disregarded sexual minority” would have failed. In other words, gay-rights has been successful precisely because the West’s Christian cosmology is no longer relevant.
Let me explain. Yesterday, I finished Matthieu Pageau’s short, dense and provocative book Cosmic Symbolism in Genesis. This book is not a work on culture-war apologetics, but a symbolic analysis. It helped me understand why the Bible is teaching what it does about homosexuality and why those who defend it are losing the culture-war apologetics war in postChristian America. Let me explain.
Pageau, brother to Jonathan, the iconcarver, talks about the cosmic meaning of male and female in Scripture:
This is the basic pattern upon which all reality was built. Pageau states in Biblical Cosmology that the universe is “a series of embedded representations its cosmic principles”. This means that matter is and that this order is woven into reality’s very fabric. Denying the gender binary is to deny biological reality and the meaning of reality. Continue reading:
It might seem strange, but this book analyzes what the symbols meant to those who wrote the Bible. This Pageau book will be a great addition to your collection if you enjoyed Jordan Peterson’s excellent lectures on Genesis. Even though our teachers and preachers don’t talk about it, those who are bound to the Bible (Jews for the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament and Christians for both Old & New) are also bound to its Cosmology. I quote Peter Brown, a leading scholar on Late Antiquity. He said that people believed the human body was the only thing in the world that could sustain it.
It was embedded in a cosmic matrix, allowing it to perceive itself in ways that were profoundly different from ours. In the end, sex wasn’t the expression of inner desires, or a place for the body to rest. It was instead viewed as the pulse of the same energy that kept the stars alive, and it was. It doesn’t matter if this pulse of energy was from malevolent demons or benevolent gods, sex cannot be considered a thing that is only for the human body.
This was destroyed. This has been destroyed. Matthieu Pageau explains how the Bible’s purity laws are meant to maintain stability. Violation of the purity laws, including sexual sin, can bring chaos to the community, and if it spreads, cause social order collapse. We live in the reality of this Biblical insight. We believe that matter doesn’t really matter and that breaking the Bible’s sexual prohibitions is just a matter of what your group can do. You can rationalize this within your own mind. We have strayed so far from Biblical cosmology, that we no longer consider sex and the person as a part of a larger order to which we are responsible and bound.
It is impossible to negate the Biblical cosmic order by focusing on and defending queerness. This was what the Nation essayist did back in 1993. It is impossible to avoid it. Let us not forget that LGBT people won this battle without heterosexuals first destroying the Biblical sexual order through the Sexual Revolution. You can see the destruction and chaos all around. It will only get worse before it gets better.
In my 2013 essay, I wrote:
Gay marriage is the end result of the Sexual Revolution, and dethroning Christianity. It rejects the core concept Christian anthropology. The divinely approved union of males and females is a symbol of Christ’s relationship to His church, and ultimately God to His creation. Gay marriage is a violation of Christian cosmology. This is how we get our modern conception of human rights and other fundamental benefits of modernity. It remains to be seen if we are able to keep them in the postChristian era.
It remains to be seen if we can maintain Christianity while accepting Christian chastity. Christian Smith, a sociologist, has done extensive research on “moralistic therapeutic Deism”, a pseudo-Christianity that has replaced the normative version in modern America. His findings suggest that it will be very difficult.
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Can we keep Christianity intact without Biblical Cosmology? Can Christianity be reconciled with the Sexual Revolution Yes, absolutely not. It is categorically not. It’s one thing to not harmonize with God’s order. We call it sin and all of us are guilty. It is quite another to deny the divine order. The Christian sexual morality is not derived from just a few lines in St. Paul’s letters. It is built upon the most solid foundations. You should know this as a Christian or Jew. Matthieu Pagesau is a great place to start.
UPDATE Just posted. Team Francis will ultimately be able to question the Catholic Church’s moral teachings, I believe. What then? Schism? The Great Apostasy
