Trump Hispanics and Evangelicals

This is quite interesting. The response of Hispanic Southern Baptists to some Southern Baptist preachers joining Trump's 'evangelical advisory board'. To me it casts light on the one of the central issues of the American election, i.e. what's wrong with Christians supporting Trump (as usual in politics the pendulum swings the other way, too far), the comments at the bottom are interesting too.  It's a shame that in the US election, as in ours, there is a paucity of credible candidates.

Our Response to the “Trump Evangelical Advisory Board”

OKLAHOMA CITY, OK – As Christian pastors, and Hispanic Baptist leaders, we have witnessed with sadness and concern the joining of the “Trump Evangelical Advisory Board” by several respected brothers and leaders, including some pastors in our Southern Baptist Convention. Let us be clear, they all have the right to join any political body, and they have done so on a personal level.

Nevertheless, we think that is not the wisest move by those we call brothers to join this particular board. We understand we need to be of “influence” or salt and light in a very dark world, but joining this board is not the wisest way to be salt and light. Upon occasion, we can influence more by holding forth the unquenchable light of the Gospel outside the camp, rather than jumping into a crowded office where the weed and wheat are undistinguishable.

It is not only Mr. Trump’s questionable character; the boasting about his fornications and his lack of repentance, and the use of an outrageous and disrespectful language to refer to the Hispanic community, igniting the hidden racism still imbedded in parts of our society. it is the joining as evangelicals with people who profane the evangelio.

This is our greatest concern. It is heart breaking to see brothers joining an “evangelical board” with false teachers like Kenneth Copeland and Paula White. These people have profaned the gospel of Christ. They teach a different gospel –i.e. the so-called prosperity gospel. They have deceived many in our Hispanic communities. In our churches, we have received many who have been victims of their fairy tales and false promises. The truth of the Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ is too precious for us to be silent. By being part of a board with people like Copeland and White we send the wrong message to our churches and to our society, as if they are “evangelicals” as we are. Our main concern is not “political correctness”, it is about the testimony of the Gospel that has saved us and the Gospel that we proclaim.

Council Hispanic Baptist Pastors Alliance

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/2016/06/23/hispanic-southern-baptist-pastors-criticize-trumps-evangelical-advisory-board/

Strength made perfect in weakness

How hard we try to be strong! How we brush our weakness under the carpet, and try to pretend it doesn't exist! The show of competence we increasingly portray in our society, the show of invulnerability, a kind of act. (Note that the word hypocrisy comes from the Greek word meaning 'actor.')

Yet God said to St Paul, when he asked Him to remove his affliction, that 'thorn in the flesh' that remains unspecified, (2 Corinthians 12) “My grace is sufficient for you, for My power is made perfect in weakness.”

Marriage, problems and prayer

One of my students, a little Jewish girl, once said, "Andrew, you need a wife. You see you're so disorganised and you need someone to help you get organised." I said, "Why don't you pray for me that God sends me a wife then?" She said, "I don't  think I know the words in Hebrew for that." I said, "Well, why don't you ask Him in English then? I'm sure God will still understand your prayers if you say them in English."
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I worry because my problem is I don't have a wife.
Then I worry because if I get one, she might become my problem!
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Pulse nightclub shooting - context.

The Pulse nightclub shooting is terrible.

Our sympathy needs to go to the families of the people killed, and we should pray for those wounded in hospital.

Some surrounding facts - if this casts any light on this terrible act, I do not know. At the least it was an outrageous act of hypocrisy, or perhaps misdirected anger by the gunman at former abuse.

For it seems Seddique Mateen, the father of the Orlando nightclub gunman, Omar Mateen, runs a TV show on a Californian TV channel called Payam-e-Afghan that supports the Afghan Taliban, who are ruled by the Pashtun ethnic group. Callers into the show regularly espouse support for Pashtun domination over the other ethnic minorities in Afghanistan. Payam-e-Afghan espouses sympathy for the Taliban and criticizes US actions in Afghanistan too. The name of the show references the disputed border with Pakistan. Seddique Mateen, it seems, was a dedicated cultural Pashtun.

And amongst the Pashtun, child abuse of boys by older men is a rampant cultural custom, here is an article - the US Military when they moved in were horrified by this behaviour once they discovered what was going on. Apparently for these strict Taliban men, women are so unapproachable (they have the full body burqa in Afghanistan) that their culture has developed an institutionalised form of child abuse of boys instead.

Members of the army wondered why they were protecting a group that practiced such an abhorrent custom.

Addendum: Apparently Seddique told NBC news on Sunday that religion had nothing to do with the shooting, and offered another possible motive: in Miami a few months before his son had become enraged when two men kissed in front of his own young son.  (same link) All these facts together suggest a possible interpretation of his motives, and one hopes journalists and investigators in the US look further into the background here. Some of my questions - surely a TV show supporting the enemies of US shouldn't be allowed? It is treachery and used to be an offence punishable by death in most Western countries. And did the Pashtun bring their abhorrent customs with them to the US?

Also - Apparently when the Taliban came to power they put a stop to the practice of child abuse. Such is the complexity of real events... Seddique supports the Taliban, who tried to enforce a ban on homosexuality in Afghanistan including the rampant abuse of boys, something clearly wrong. His son then goes and shoots up a gay night-club - was he influenced by Seddique's views? You can imagine what he grew up hearing his father saying about the West...

***Further Addendum: It seems Omar Mateen was a regular attender at the nightclub and was actively gay, apparently. I wonder if the biggest attraction of martyrdom for these Moslems who commit these acts is the prospect of the forgiveness of their sins - this is, perversely, why many of them seem in fact to be very much 'integrated' into Western Society before they commit acts of suicidal terror. After becoming 'integrated' (i.e. joining in on drinking, extramarital sex, using drugs, etc etc, things which are apparently forbidden under Islamic law) they get a guilty conscience and look for a way out. I think the Quran to many Moslems is not a book that encourages the view that God forgives sins with no strings attached - no, sins need to be balanced, weighed up against good deeds, and when judgement happens you're at the mercy of whatever the scales decide. Whereas a martyr goes straight to heaven, according to their belief. So the attraction of martyrdom.

It is so very sad that these people don't believe in Jesus as Lord and Saviour - then they would know that their sins are forgiven, shown by the fact that He went to the cross and died on their behalf. They would know that they don't need to commit even more atrocious acts to gain forgiveness. Instead they despair of any solution except causing mayhem and destruction, and suicide.

Sorry

There is a great song in Bad Girls. One of the girls in prison is on the phone to her son. She has lied to him, saying she is travelling the world with her business, making money etc, because she was afraid he wouldn't accept her if she told him the truth, that she is a prostitute in prison. But it turns out he has found out that she has been lying to him. She says sorry, explains how she didn't want him to know the depths to which she had sunk, and the outcome is clear from the conversation on the phone (you only hear her side). It really is a great song.

In life, one of the greatest things anyone can receive from another is unexpected forgiveness, acceptance, love, when you expected or perhaps deserved rejection. That moment really is a mirror of divine love, the love of God, in human existence.

Pensive Thoughts.

The Christian church has two venerable traditions of (completely wrong) theology, each of which says:

1) God is love but I'll be able to get away with it even though I know I'm doing the wrong thing.
2) You're all sinners but I'm not because I'm doing the right thing but the rest of you are going to roast in hell.

But the real aim of life is to come to know God as He is in Himself.

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I once thought you could only "see" the Kingdom of God when you die. But the Kingdom of God can be seen now and operates in this world.

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Everyone wants others to do the same vices as they do. Thieves want others to be thieves. Drug addicts or users want others to take drugs. Drunkards want everyone to drink. Corrupt officials try to corrupt others. People who use prostitutes want their friends to come along with them. Christians are not the only ones who evangelise.

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We all feel incomplete, broken, messed up. Everyone hides it, so everyone thinks everyone else has it together much more than they do. This brokenness is the effect of the fall, the effect of human sin, we all share in it, we are in the same boat. Like a sect, the LGBT* movement want to convince people that they feel this way because they are not expressing their (supposedly latent) sexuality - but in the end, sexual 'freedom' only enslaves people more certainly in their messed up, broken lives.

*I don't include Intersex here because it is a different issue

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The brokenness of humans is convenient for psychologists because it gives them an income.

Sex Difference and Jesus.

Some time ago I commented on a blog post by a New Testament theologian I really respect. I won’t identify him or the particular subset of theology/New Testament studies he’s in, just to say that he was one of my heroes (still is in some respects).

The blog post was about gender identity. I commented that his discussion left out intersex people. I asked what he thought about their situation and how that fit into his conclusions.

He deleted my comment and did not reply to it. I was quite staggered that my intellectual hero would do this*.

Anyway, in my recent reading and internet searches I stumbled across a book by someone who really has troubled to tease out the issue of intersex in relation to Christian faith.

If you don’t know, intersex people are people whose biological identity does not neatly fit into one category or other - and they are people who often left out of any discussion of gender these days in Christianity - and I really believe that this oversight shows a fundamental blind spot in Christian theology.

The book is called, “Sex Difference in Christian Theology: Male, Female, and Intersex in the Image of God”, by Megan K. De Franza, and so far it is a great read.

What is wonderful about the approach she takes is that after looking at the issues she brings it right back to Jesus.

You see, she makes a good case that He didn’t forget about intersex people in His discussions about gender. In fact, she says that when Jesus talks about ‘eunuchs’ in Matthew 19, He is using a category that in the ancient world probably included intersex people.

The context of the discussion of eunuchs in the gospel is directly after the discussion about marriage in Matthew 19, and his discussion of divorce as a concession by Moses to the hard-heartedness of men (in the sense of, males). The disciples cannot quite accept this conclusion:

The disciples said to him, “If this is the situation between a husband and wife, it is better not to marry.” Jesus replied, “Not everyone can accept this word, but only those to whom it has been given. For there are eunuchs who were born that way, and there are eunuchs who have been made eunuchs by others—and there are those who choose to live like eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. The one who can accept this should accept it.” Matthew 19:10-12

Megan De Franza points out that Jesus is holding up the state of being a ‘eunuch’ as something to emulate.

Some thoughts I had about this: what is interesting to note is that under the Torah (the Jewish law) eunuchs were prohibited from entering the temple because they were considered unclean. Here Jesus widens the compassion of the Jewish Torah to include eunuchs, indeed, he widens the Torah to the point where the excluded become the ideal. The eunuch becomes an ideal, the eunuch for the kingdom of heaven is someone to emulate.

This opens my eyes to a fact I have partially glimpsed beforehand: at every point in Jesus’ ministry He widens the Torah to include the excluded. He heals lepers by touching them - they were ritually unclean and not allowed to be touched. He includes women (second class citizens in Judaism, not allowed to sit with men in the temple) and women in fact were the first witnesses to his resurrection. Prostitutes, tax collectors, outcasts, sinners all were included in the kingdom, because they responded when the respectable and proper did not. Jesus elevated the poor above the rich in the kingdom, and even slaves embodied the ideal for Christian leadership.

Even after Jesus’ resurrection, too, God continues widening the Torah to include everyone, thus the church is born. We gentiles forget that before Jesus we were the outsiders in God's kingdom.

And this is Jesus' vision of the Kingdom of God!  - an outrageous kingdom where everyone is welcome, where the poor, the outcast, the sinner is welcomed, and the only ones outside are those who trust in their own righteousness and not in God's outrageous mercy. Truly God is 'Abba, Father' in this kingdom!

I haven’t finished Megan De Franza’s book yet, about a quarter way through, but I can say so far it is really excellent, clear and simple in style, with outstanding Jesus-centred reasoning. I really am looking forward to getting further on, so that I can see whether she deepens her arguments further.

http://www.eerdmans.com/Products/6982/sex-difference-in-christian-theology.aspx

http://www.amazon.com/Sex-Difference-Christian-Theology-Intersex/dp/0802869823