The Christian Community

I wrote in a previous blog post that the term Christian is a term that carries with it a very narrow and distinct meaning. Furthermore, I argued that the only proper source for understand the term ‘Christian’ is the Scriptures of Christian theism, also known as the Bible. I pointed out that from the very beginnings of Christianity, the term Christian was synonymous with Disciple. Without getting into too much technical jargon then, we can say that the Christian community is quite simply that community of people that have entered into the master-disciple relationship. This arrangement is governed by the biblical term we call the New Covenant. Ignoring what passes as Christianity in American and western cultures, I am going to talk about entrance into and life within the community of disciples of Jesus Christ as governed by the divine arrangement known as the New Covenant. It is this structure and this structure alone that the New Testament is talking about when it talks about the Church, when it talks about being a Christian.

To begin with, it is important that we make sure we are properly identifying the community of disciples, which we call in modern times, the Church. According to Jesus Christ, His Church did not exist until He built it sometime after Matt. 16:18. Christ said to Peter, οἰκοδομήσω μου τὴν ἐκκλησίαν, I will build my Church, indicating that the Church did not exist at this time and indicating that the Church would have a very specific identity as belonging to Christ. Jesus said that the Church would be His Church. This points to a very specific identity. A weakened ecclesiology has only added to the problem of the identity crisis around the terms Christian and Church in contemporary western cultures mentioned on my previous post. In Acts 5:11 great fear is said to come over the church. Paul is said to have persecuted the church. The church is said at one point to have enjoyed peace, meaning a temporary reprieve from persecution. The point is that when the Bible talks about the Church, it is talking about something very specific. It is talking about the community of disciples that have been called out of relationship with the world and into the master-disciple relationship with Christ. Jesus informed His disicples that no one in this community of disciples would be allowed to remain and fellowship if they insisted on living a lifestyle defined by unrepentant sin (Matt. 18:15-18). So the Church is a community of individuals that have entered into a master-disciple relationship with Christ whose lives reflect an attitude of intolerance toward continuous sinful living, an attitude of love for that community, and an acceptance of all that Christ teaches and demands. In other words, the Church is a group of people that have accepted without question or hesitation the teachings and ethic of Jesus Christ viewing Him as their Lord, their Savior, their Master, and their God.

So how does a person go from their relationship with the world to the master-disciple relationship pictured in the New Testament Scripture? First, they do not enter that relationship as an independent act of the will. Becoming a Christian is not simply a rational or emotion decision left to the discretion to the individual. Jesus said that a person must be γεννηθῇ ἄνωθεν, born from above, or born again. A human being is entirely unable to be born from above or to be born again. John tells us that Christians are not born by the will of the flesh, but rather, they are born of God. Water baptism does not make a person a Christian. Signing a card and joining a church does not make a person a Christian. Attending church your entire life does not make one a Christian. Reading the Bible and giving to the church and even to the poor does not make one a Christian. Getting emotional about Jesus and crying or feeling a certain way about Jesus does not make a person a Christian. Only God can make a person a Christian.

Unbelievers do not go through a process of hearing the arguments for Christ, evaluating them objectively, and then decide that Christianity makes sense. Unbelievers do not observe the love of God at the cross and consider that event and think that God’s love is pretty impressive and decide to join up. The Christian Scripture describes unbelievers as alienated and hostile in their minds toward God. In other words, the Christian message has no hope of being fairly treated in the mind of an unregenerate person. Either the unregenerate mind will reject the message overtly or covertly. Overt rejection is the outright disposition that Christianity is absurd. There is no question about this attitude toward the Christian message. It is easy to see. It is outspoken against Christ and the Christian message. The covert rejection of Christ and the Christian message is the more dangerous form. This can range of apparent acceptance of Christ, baptism, joining a community to the more simple wink and nod in the direction of Christ. Make no mistake about it, both those who reject Christ overtly and those who reject Him covertly are outside the boundary of the community of faith even though the latter group may appear to be inside the circle.

The entrance into the Christian community is granted by an act of supernatural work of the Holy Spirit on the individual. Titus 3:5 tells us that God saved us by the washing of regeneration and renewing by the Holy Spirit. The Greek word παλιγγενεσίας is an idiom literally meaning to be born again. It refers to a complete change of life and outlook. The work is said to be completed by the Holy Spirit as opposed to anything we could do. This is the only way for one to enter the Christian community. Jesus said I am the way, the truth, and the life, no one comes to the Father but through me (Jn. 14:6) He is the door through which every person must enter into the community of faith.

Entering through Christ means surrendering to Him entirely. It means embracing His beliefs and teachings. It means pursuing his ethics. It means making His values your values. It means accepting His Word without question or hesitation. It is one thing to seek understanding regarding His word, but quite another to call it into question as being binding or true.

There is a clear demarcation in Scripture around those in a Master-disciple relationship with Christ and those who are in relationship with the world. The sons of God and the sons of the devil are obvious. How do we know? By this the children of God and the children of the devil are obvious: anyone who does not practice righteousness is not of God, nor the one who does not love his brother (1 Jn. 3:10). The Christian life is defined by a life of love and righteousness. It is not defined by a life of love as defined by the unregenerate mind. Both holy living and love define Christian living. It cares about truth just as much as it cares about others.

Michael Horton writes, “Jesus has been dressed up as a corporate CEO, life coach, culture-warrior, political revolutionary, philosopher, copilot, cosufferer, moral example, and partner in fulfilling our personal and social dreams. But in all of these ways, are we reducing the central character in the drama of redemption to a prop for our own play?” [Horton, Christless Christianity, 25]

“Be on guard for yourselves and for all the flock, among which the Holy Spirit has made you overseers, to shepherd the church of God which He purchased with His own blood. 29 “I know that after my departure savage wolves will come in among you, not sparing the flock; 30 and from among your own selves men will arise, speaking perverse things, to draw away the disciples after them. 31 “Therefore be on the alert, remembering that night and day for a period of three years I did not cease to admonish each one with tears (Acts 20:28-31).

A Christian Understanding of Hell: Part One

This series of posts on hell is a response to some of the things that are being posted over at patheos, a blog site that claims to be Christian but in reality is anything but Christian, in my opinion. And I will be happy to explain why as I go along. Ben Corey and Rebecca Trotter have written several things about why orthodox Christian doctrine is wrong on the subject of hell. This post will address Rebecca Trotter’s posts beginning here.

Now, Christian Doctrine is formed and shaped by Scripture, not by the claims of people professing to be Christians. When we talk about God, Christ, man, sin, and things like hell, we must first ask, “how do we know?” How we do know things about God? How does one come into knowledge and truth about important doctrines like our doctrine of God, of Christ, of sin, and more specifically, of hell? The first thing we must do is to try and remove any preconceived ideas about these subjects that are based on anything other than our source for understanding them. Now, that source of understanding is God’s divine self-disclosure in Scripture. If you find my appeal to Scripture dissatisfying at this point, let me warn you: you will only become more and more dissatisfied with this post. But I encourage you to keep reading.

Whatever we believe about hell then, must be the result of what the Bible says about the subject within that cultural, historical, social, and grammatical context. Christians are not interested in human opinions about the doctrine of hell. What we are interested in is the truth about hell. And the truth about hell can only be located within the text of God’s divine self-disclosure. Moreover, that truth is not dependent upon the interpretation of fallible human men from any era. In other words, appeals to the early church, while they may shed light on the subject, are not authoritative in any sense. It is not difficult to find men so early in the life of the Christian church believing all sorts of things because, well, the Church was immature and learning its way around during this period. We must extend grace on the one hand, but avoid naivety on the other.

Now, I wish to turn your attention to Rebecca Trotter’s blog entitled, “Hell Week – Back to the Beginning.” In the very first paragraph, Rebecca unwittingly tells us something about her philosophy, and subsequently, what forms and shapes her theology. She writes,

“As I read the bible again, I was a bit overwhelmed by a lot of the mucky stuff in it. The guy who sacrificed his daughter to fulfill a pledge. Lot offering his virgin daughters to a mob. Samson killing everyone and cutting off their foreskins. The cannibalism. The commands to kill men, women, children, babes-in-arms.”

What I want to drawn your attention to is the sentence, “I was a bit overwhelmed by a lot of the mucky stuff in it.” The word mucky is a nice way of informing us that Rebecca found the records of Scripture messy, dirty, filthy even. In other words, Rebecca was offended by much of what the Bible had to say about these things.

The first thing I want to address is the philosophical presupposition upon which Rebecca entered Scripture. Rebecca already had a view of God and the Bible in mind before she ever started reading it in order to truly absorb it. Her preconceived ideas of God were based on a variety of things, not the least of which was her own vision of who God had to be and what God had to be like. Her characterization of the Bible in this sentence reveals that what was being revealed about God in Scripture, specifically the OT was not quite in harmony with her preconceived idea of God.

Scripture challenges conceptions of God that consist entirely of human origin. We already know that Paul informs us in Romans one that the sinful human heart naturally seeks to change the reality of God’s nature into one that we find acceptable to our own senses. In other words, we seek to reinvent God to be something that is consistent with our sinful view of Him and our elevated and ignorant view of ourselves. It is this very issue that Rebecca fails to recognize as she embarks, from the very beginning, to study the issue of the doctrine of hell. From the very start she has uncritically accepted her own ideas about God rather than allowing her ideas to be shaped and informed by God’s disclosure of Himself. The bloggers at Patheos repeat this error to a person from what I read over there.

Rebecca even resorts to the filthy “W**” question when she reads about Jael putting a spike through Sisera’s head. I think I am safe in saying that such an ungodly expression has no place in a Christian blog. Rebecca does not seem to understand or grasp the concept of divine wrath and God’s right to punish the wicked when she makes this observation and raises her forbidden question. How dare we ask God what He thinks He is doing!

The next comment Rebecca makes about herself is very interesting and revealing:

Part of the problem was that at the time I was a pretty standard Evangelical. Which means that I was inordinately concerned with who is saved and who is going to hell.

As a Christian I have to wonder what she means by being “inordinately concerned” about the number of people rejecting the gospel of Christ and as a result coming under divine judgment. It seems to me that I will eventually have to direct some comments toward the subject of universalism. For now, I think the focus needs to be on Rebecca’s basic approach. If our approach to Scripture is flawed, it only follows that our understanding will be flawed as well.

Rebecca then shows her hand with this remark,

At any rate, the idea that God could say, “I work it all out” about these crazy stories and thousands of lives that had been cut short didn’t make much sense to me.

There is a very common lack of trust in God to work His plan according to His divine purpose. In addition, the lack of understanding around God’s holy character and man’s sinful nature creates tension that many people simply refuse to live with. You see, this kind of error begins at foundational levels and wrecks havoc on Christian Doctrine.

Rebecca then introduces the concept of universalism and she calls upon three verses in her attempt to create a version of Christianity she can live with. Rebecca calls upon the typical verses which she thinks supports a universal perspective. The first one is 1 Tim. 4:9-10, in which Paul refers to God as the “Savior of all men.” Nothing in this phrase actually suggests that all men have actually been saved or will be saved. As Knight rightly points out, the word soter may be employed in the broadest sense as Preserver and Giver of life for all people. After all, one has to look no further than 2 Thess. 1:7-10 where this same author, Paul, informs us that Christ will return bearing the wrath of God for those who do not know God.

However, Knight brings an even more interesting argument for what Paul is actually getting at in this text. He argues that the word malista in some cases should be understood to further define what follows it rather than being rendered “especially. It is used this way in 2 Tim. 4:13 and Tit. 1:10,11. In other words the phrase should be understood to say that God is the Savior of all men, that is, believers. There is significant evidence for this use in papyrus letters from this time. It seems likely that this is the meaning here since universalism would place the Bible in clear contradiction of itself.

I wish to avoid the distraction of universalism at this time even though I am sure it will be something I have to come back to later. In summary then, Rebecca begins her supposed research on hell from a very specific perspective. She has already made certain decisions about the kind of God that exists. She already has some sort of version of Christianity in mind as she begins to supposedly search for the truth about what the Bible teaches about hell. Most of these folks make these false claims to objectivity in their challenge of orthodox doctrine. The truth is they already know where they want to go. So, they search for any verse they can find that could possibly, in any way whatever, cast even the slightest doubt on the offensive teaching in question or one that could, if even in the most wild hermeneutic imaginable, support their claim. In addition, they desperately search for anyone in church history that may have even a little agreement with them on the matter. Using the flimsiest of arguments, they proceed to think they have made a reasonable case against orthodoxy. What must be kept in mind is that the reason these people are so successful in spreading their false teachings is because false converts are so eager to embrace anything that gives them a weak, watered-down version of Christianity that they find tolerable and worth embracing. In my next post I will begin to investigate what the bible actually teaches about hell. In so doing, I will examine hell in its historical, cultural, social context as we exegete the grammar of the Hebrew and Greek texts of Scripture.

Ben Corey, John MacArthur, and A Gay Thing

In my last post I wrote about Ben Corey’s issue with John MacArthur’s perspective on how Christians should deal with the professing Christians that also claim to be gay. I wanted to return to this issue briefly to point out a couple of things that I did not mention in my most recent post.

Returning to 1 Corinthians 5 where we have the case of what I think is a man that has married his former stepmother. The Jewish and Greco-Roman cultures prohibit such an act in the strongest of language. Paul uses a word that I think is vital to this discussion. It is translated immoral in the English translations of our Bible but in the Greek the word is pronounced PORNEIA. This is very broad Greek word that means any kind of illicit sex whatsoever. In other words, in sex outside of the context of marriage as defined by God would be classified as PORNEIA. Adultery, fornication, pedophilia, bestiality, homosexuality, and so forth would all be included in this definition.

Now, the interesting thing is that this word is used to describe an illegitimate marriage. It was immoral in Jewish culture as well as Greco-Roman culture for this sort of arrangement to occur. The sin was no less serious than if the two were carrying on an affair. However, an affair is highly unlikely because of the public nature of this incident. What man would allow his son to humiliate him by having sexual relations with his wife? It is much more plausible to think that these two were in a relationship and that the father had either died or was no longer in the picture. Paul called the arrangement immoral and ordered that the man be removed from the community immediately and without hesitation.

Now, I want to draw your attention to this word PORNEIA as another biblical author uses it. Jude 7 uses a form of PORNEIA, specifically, EKPORNEUW, which means debauchery. THE NAS translates it “gross immorality.” What does Jude mean by gross immorality? How can we get a glimpse into some of the behavior that is classed as gross immorality? It is really quite simple; Jude references Sodom and Gomorrah as his example. Our next step then is to understand the sin of these two cities so that we can understand Jude’s characterization of this behavior he is referencing.

We get a glimpse of God’s attitude toward Sodom and Gomorrah in Gen. 18:20, And the Lord said, “The outcry of Sodom and Gomorrah is indeed great, and their sin is exceedingly grave.” For those who wish to take a casual approach to this issue, I suggest you read the story in Genesis 18-19 very carefully. So far we have recognized that Jude was inspired by God to classify the behavior of Sodom and Gomorrah as immoral. Second, God has said to Abraham that their sin is exceedingly grave.

As the messengers of the Lord arrive in the city, Lot recognizes their uniqueness and compels them to spend the night in his home with his family. The men of Sodom, all of them, surround Lot’s home and demand that Lot send the men out to them so that they may have sexual intercourse with them. Now, some modern scholars have attempted to recast this story in an attempt to defend homosexual behavior. Perhaps the most developed is Morschauser’s contention that when the men say they want to “know” the visitors, they are expressing distrust in Lot’s ability to protect the city from spies and they want to “interrogate” the men.^[1] The problem with this view is that the Hebrew word “to know” always connotes sexual relations when used with a personal direct object. In fact, when Lot offers his daughters, Morchauser argues that he offered them as hostages just in case the men were spying out the city. The problem again is that Lot uses the same word “to know” in the context of his virgin daughters. They have never known a man! Hence, such an interpretation of Sodom and Gomorrah, while creative, has nothing to commend it and should be dismissed as modern liberal bias.

Lot referred to the act of homosexual sex as he pleaded with the men of Sodom not to do this “wicked thing.” But the men would have none of Lot’s pleading and began to force their way into his house. It was at this time that the angels smote these men with blindness and rescued Lot and his family from the wrath of God that was to be poured out on those cities.

Jude refers to the men of Sodom and Gomorrah as behaving immorally when they went after strange flesh. This is a reference to homosexual behavior. Jude actually uses the idiom ἀπελθοῦσαι ὀπίσω σαρκὸς ἑτέρας, which means to engage in unnatural sexual intercourse (BDAG). There can be little doubt about the story of Sodom and Gomorrah when it is read without bias in its historical context and allowed to stand on its own two feet. Paul spoke about homosexual sex and stated plained that it was unnatural. In Rom. 1:27 Paul refers to same sex relations as indecent and shameful acts that are disgraceful and a violation of the natural function of the human body.

Wolves have existed from the very inception of the Church. In fact, wolves were here long before the Church was born. We have always had to contend with them. They have had a history of being more sneaky, more stealthy than what we are witnessing today. Today, they show up with their new ideas of what Christianity is supposed to be about, plant seeds of doubt about established doctrine, play on the dissapointments of thousands, and use their counter-Christian thinking to gain acceptance. They begin with the end in mind. Ben Corey, Rob Bell, Brian McLaren and several others have twisted, bent, rehaped, and contorted nearly every ounce of histroric Christian orthodoxy in an attempt to hi-jack Jesus and His gospel. They are not the only problem in my opinion. What is just as much a problem are the silent pastors, teachers, professors, and Christians who refuse, for whatever reason, to call these false teachers and heretics out publicly. We have a duty to honor God by standing for truth, defending the truth, proclaiming the truth living the truth, and teachers others the truth. Its about time we got on with it and stop worrying so much about how unpopular and marginalized we will become. Persecution is a way of Christian life. We need to let that settle in and get used to it.

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^[1] John H Walton, Zondervan Illustrated Bible Backgrounds Commentary (Old Testament): Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, vol. 1 (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2009), 93.

John MacArthur, Gay Christians, and the Hypocrisy of the New Christianity

Recently, John MacArthur was asked a question about how a Christian parent should respond to learning that their child is gay. John gave two basic courses of action based on two very different scenarios. First of all, if your child is a not a professing Christian, you essentially do nothing other than love and continue to give them the gospel. However, it is the second scenario that has Ben Corey over a Patheos seeing red these days. According to MacArthur, if a Christian parent has a child that is professing to know Christ while at the same time embracing the gay lifestyle, that is a very different animal.

In the case of gay children who profess Christ, we must take a very difficult path. Confessing that Christ reigns in your heart is the single most serious and solemn confession any human could ever make. It is not to be done lightly. Those who are aware of the presence of sin must confront any Christian that professes Christ and that has sin in their life. Our children are not excluded from this treatment simply on the ground that they are our children. MacArthur follows the text faithfully even if it is painful. And for that, he should be respected and applauded. Our spiritual family takes precedence over our temporal family. Our love for God trumps our love for our children. These false professions must be dealt with seriously, up to and including excommunication if they refuse to repent of their sin or admit that they do not know Christ. There can be no middle ground.

Well, according to Ben Corey, John MacArthur has it all wrong. On his blog Corey writes,

What troubles me about MacArthur’s advice, and so many who think like him, is the horrible inconsistency that often is used when it comes to shunning. One of the key passages folks use to support shunning comes from 1 Corinthians 5– the unfortunate truth, however, is that Paul lists several sins he thought were shun-worthy. Folks like MacArthur have lifted sexual immorality out of that passage while completely ignoring the rest of what Paul taught.

First of all, at best Corey demonstrates that he does not know John MacArthur or Grace Community Church very well. People are not removed from the community only for sexual immorality and to imply that is ridiculous. I mean, how would Corey know? And if he doesn’t know, is such a statement slanderous of John MacArthur. Surely it is. Second, are we really to believe that Corey believes in the practice of Church discipline for all these sins? I have communicated with Corey personally and I can tell you that he does everything he can to give homosexual sex a pass. I could not even get him to admit that homosexuals should have to abstain from sex until marriage even if such a thing were truly possible. No, there is more to Corey’s objection here than meets the eye and the hypocrisy only comes into more focus as he continues with his objection.

Corey then wonders if MacArthur would excommunicate someone making $200,000 as an annual salary if they did not tithe or give to charity. Clearly, this demonstrates that not only does Corey not know MacArthur’s views on these subjects he doesn’t seem to understand what Scripture teaches about them either. Tithing was a Jewish practice never carried into the Church and it never involved money. In addition, the amount of money Christians contribute to the Church giving is a matter of individual conscience and if between that person and God. The Church is not to police a person’s giving. It is something that each person should do as their own heart directs and as they have ability. This is Paul’s teaching to the Corinthians in 2 Cor. 8-9.

The more pressing issue is twofold: excommunicating family members and Jesus teaching on family relationships within the context of the kingdom. In Matthew 18:15-18 Christians are commanded by Christ to go to any brother they see committing a sin. There is no caveat. Jesus did not give us permission to treat blood relatives differently. In the kingdom, we are all family. If that brother does not repent of his sin, we are to take witnesses. If that brother does not repent after hearing the witnesses, we are to take it to the church. If they do not repent after hearing it from the church, they are to be excommunicated and treated like unbelievers because of their obstinate disposition. Corey attempts to bring in a variant reading in the text to personalize the sin but the variant has little to commend it.

Paul dealt with this in real life but in a more urgent way in 1 Cor. 5. First, Paul acknowledged that there was immorality among the Corinthians and that the immorality was of a very serious nature. Apparently a man had taken his stepmother as his wife. This was forbidden not only in the Jewish religion but in Roman culture as well. The punishment was severe. It does not matter if the son was having an unfair (unlikely) as Corey thinks this might make the situation worse, or that he had married his father’s wife. Moreover, it does not matter even if the man’s father had died. The act was still considered reprehensible. Paul’s action was swift and decisive, “Remove the wicked man from among yourselves.” 1 Cor. 5:13. Not only this, Paul told the Corinthians that in such cases, “But actually, I wrote to you not to associate with any so-called brother if he is an immoral person, or covetous, or an idolater, or a reviler, or a drunkard, or a swindler—not even to eat with such a one.” (1 Cor. 5:11) Not only were Christians not to allow people in this community that were living immoral lives, but they were not to eat with immoral people if they were also professing to be Christians. According to Paul, we may eat with immoral people so long as they do not profess to be Christian.

Paul gave the very same instructions to the church at Thessalonica: If anyone does not obey our instruction ^ain this letter, take special note of that person ^band do not associate with him, so that he will be put to shame. (2 Thess. 3:14) John said the same thing in 2 John 10-11, “If anyone comes to you and does not bring this teaching, do not receive him into your house, and do not give him a greeting; for the one who gives him a greeting participates in his evil deeds.”

I now want to turn your attention to Jesus to see what Jesus actually said about Him impact on families as opposed to what men like Ben Corey claim Jesus said His impact would be on families. Jesus said in Matt. 10:35-37, “For I came to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; and a man’s enemies will be the members of his household. “He who loves father or mother more than Me is not worthy of Me; and he who loves son or daughter more than Me is not worthy of Me. Jesus knew that devotion to Him, to His life, to His teachings would cost even intimate families their intimacy and their loyalty and even their bond.

Jesus also said that brothers and sisters and fathers and mothers would hate their Christian blood relatives so much that in some cases they would have them killed: “Brother will betray brother to death, and a father his child; and children will rise up against parents and cause them to be put to death. This is a far cry from the one-sided picture that Ben Corey paints of the Jesus we have all heard about but apparently not all of us accept Him for who He is. And He is precisely Who Scripture reveals Him to be.

The problem with Ben Corey, the emergent church, and the young know-it-alls who are out to redefine everything that has already been defined is that they have an idea already in mind. They already know, before reading a single text about Jesus, about God, about Christianity what they want them and it to be. They want a very specific kind of Jesus, God, and Christianity. And nothing is going to get in their way of having it; not even divine truth.

You do not love people by allowing them to remain ignorant and lost in their sin. It used to be that these people thought that we could win them with our love and acceptance. They thought that if we just lived a certain way around unbelievers that unbelievers would be attracted to our Christianity and give up their wicked behavior and join the group. Now they don’t even care if the wicked give up their behavior. In fact, they argue that the wicked should be able to continue in their wicked behavior. They were wrong then and they are wrong now. These people are not fellow believers within the Christian community with minor differences from historic orthodox Christianity. They are wolves seeking to subvert the truth of the gospel top to bottom.

I mentioned hypocrites in my title. While Ben Corey and the emergent like to refer to conservatives like MacArthur and reformed Christianity as modern day Pharisees because of our ethic, what they fail to see is that they are the ones that resemble the Pharisees. You see, the Pharisees ignored God’s word and set up their own standards and then judged everyone, not based on God revealed truth, but based on their own traditions and rules that had gone far beyond anything Scripture taught. When one of these former fundies criticizes a pastor because he drives a car of a certain value or a Christian because they earn a certain income, they are guilty of doing exactly what the Pharisees did. They have established an ethic of their own and imposed it on others. Moreover, that ethic is the result of twisting the Scripture. In fact, I have even had conversations with professing Christians at Patheos who were SHOCKED that heterosexual sex outside of marriage was a sin as well. Now, unless this person was a brand new Christian, they were entirely ignorant of the teachings of Christianity. How can someone claim to love Jesus and be so disinterested in His teachings, His ethics, and His values?

When Ben Corey says the Church must accept homosexuals as they are and challenges the view that homosexual sex is a sin, and demand that we receive them as regenerated believers, he is setting up his own standard and judging everyone else according to it. You see, the Pharisees were not wrong because they were conservative. They were not wrong because they had a particular ethic. They were wrong because their views subverted God’s word. They were not wrong because they were not accepting of others. They were wrong because they rejected what God accepted. It is not ipso facto wrong to reject someone. There is a place for that. It is wrong to reject what God accepts and to accept what God rejects. Ben Corey and the emerging church is guilty of resembling the Pharisees because they are accepting homosexual sex when God rejects it. I am reminded of the prophet that said woe to them that call evil good, and good evil.