Free Northerner posted on Diana Anderson recently. Basically, she is a “Christian” who rails against purity culture and exalts sex before marriage.
The main point I want to make is in this quote:
My doubt had taken a toll on me; I didn’t know how to process this new perspective of God that I was developing. I was beginning to see the cracks in the armor of the evangelical church, especially as my views on politics became more progressive and I began to be more concerned about loving LGBT people than condemning them to hell.
Technically, she is correct. We are supposed to “love our enemies” and “do good to those that persecute us.”
The actual change comes that when God uses our loving behavior to bring them to salvation, after they have been saved it is then that we help them leave their old lifestyle behind. And that’s when it gets messy.
That’s the main distinction. We are called to love others unconditionally outside of the church, but we are called to police ourselves inside the church. You will see this problem crop up in many separate instances.
For example:
- Premarital sex is seen as good, and sex within marriage is bad.
- Christians condemn the LGBT community and gay marriage, while not calling out divorce in their own community.
- Christians are more concerned with political issues, than teaching their children good values.
When you look at any issue and how the church approaches it now, it is almost always in an incorrect manner. What we can see is that Satan has a foothold such that the truth is twisted to be evil, and evil is twisted to be good. That’s why in the manosphere we see happiness and other feelings becoming truth rather than what God and the Scriptures say is truth.
We shouldn’t be surprised at this, yet most of the time we are when we see someone doing something that is wrong. The lies are there and are meant to twist us from the truth.
The truth of the matter is that Christian doctrine is focused on the self but not selfishness. That is we have a responsibility and stewardship of our lives to become like Jesus. When we become like Jesus, God uses our lives as an example to witness to others.
The truth is that when we fail to realize this, our reality of the truth becomes twisted. We start to judge others instead of ourselves first, and in doing so we become hypocrites. No one listens to hypocrites or takes them seriously, and thus the witness of the Church is destroyed.
Diana is correct in that the Church should not be railing against gays and instead loving them. However, she employs it as an overarching principle when it is only one of many, and thus she throws out the responsibility of Christians to adhere to the Word of God.
Christianity and masculinity 
One thing to be mindful of, in these types of topics: you can be a Progressive or a Christian. You can’t serve two masters. It’s one or the other. Which is why when some Christian uses the phrase “became more progressive”, be sure to read that more closely as “as I threw away my Salvation”. That’s the crux of the matter.
Another is that the “condemn[ing]” done by Christians against those with severe sin problems is as much an invented Straw Man as it is reality. Be mindful, always, that the history & narratives we respond to are mostly inventions. There’s a hint of truth behind them, but where the desired “truth” can’t be found, Satan is pretty brilliant at inventing it. This is why the Fred Phelps of the world exist.
A lot of the backwardness of the Church is not driven by what is said against those outside of it, but by the mass delusion of believing its own hype. We’ve chosen to listen to the father of lies, rather than God. Which isn’t going to end well.
John 8:43-47 (NASB)
43“Why do you not understand what I am saying? It is because you cannot hear My word. 44“You are of your father the devil, and you want to do the desires of your father. He was a murderer from the beginning, and does not stand in the truth because there is no truth in him. Whenever he speaks a lie, he speaks from his own nature, for he is a liar and the father of lies. 45“But because I speak the truth, you do not believe Me. 46“Which one of you convicts Me of sin? If I speak truth, why do you not believe Me? 47“He who is of God hears the words of God; for this reason you do not hear them, because you are not of God.”
“Therefore the Law has become our tutor to lead us to Christ, so that we may be justified by faith.” Galatians 3:24.
Christians and the world need to know right from wrong. The church needs to know that homosexuality is wrong. Look at how much confusion the church and our culture has on this issue:
http://mobile.wnd.com/2014/06/fox-news-star-jumps-into-gay-christianity/
I had an interesting and odd experience of being invited to a group of young adult (20-30) christians D&D game. Well, a modified version so as not to offend ‘christian’ D&D sentiments anyway. Everyone has to be lawful good or no lower than neutral and all that.
The setup right at the get go was that each player charter was being extorted to do work for a mob boss.
I, per character and per self refused outright. We don’t work for evil on a threat, we don’t succumb to extortion, and we don’t go along with evil for the sake of ‘the plot’. Unless I was trying to role-play some evil or careless character this conclusion is foregone.
It wasn’t, the group at large was surprised that I didn’t go along with the plot, so I wound up making a split party taking one with me. The rest spent the rest of the session rationalizing why their character should go along with it or shouldn’t care about the details of the assignment. A lot of talk of ‘moral ambiguity’ came up.
It’s just a game, but I was very disconcerted. Even in a fantasy ‘moral ambiguity’ is a reason to go along with what is expected of them. They cannot make a stand there, they will not make a stand in the real world with their real lives on the line.
Perchance I read too much into these things. But it seems to me that ‘going along with the plot’ no matter weather it’s good or evil is what the church is doing nowadays…
Christians aren’t really confused concerning sexuality and politics, they are spineless children of the world that accept what the world dictates they should do over their loosely stated values as a christian. Christianity is secondary, obeying the GM is primary, and the GM of the world is not God.
”Premarital sex is seen as good, and sex within marriage is bad”
Denial of sex or frigidity within marriage and promiscuity outside of marriage is unchaste. Vice versa with frigidity outside of marriage but with promiscuity being confined to the marital bed is chaste.
Chastity is sexual behaviour pleasing to god. Which is often confused with virginity alone but it is more than that: it is virginity outside of marriage and it is a wild romp in the marital bed.
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