“Responsible action must decide not simply between right and wrong, good and evil,
but between right and right, wrong and wrong.”
— Dietrich Bonhoeffer
I wish I’d read that Bonhoeffer sentence last week before babbling on for too long in this post trying to say the same thing.
“I threw out the moneylenders for a reason”
Common Sense Jesus (a response to Herman Cain)
“Survey: Frequent Bible Reading Can Turn You Liberal”
Carol Howard Merritt: “Seven Things Guys Need to Know About Post-Evangelical Women”
Both D. Mark Davis and Nadia Bolz-Weber look at Jesus’ parable of the Wedding Feast — or what Bolz-Weber calls “the worst parable ever” — and both suggest that, as Davis puts it, “the kingdom of heaven has been compared to a king,” but not to this king. The king in this story, Davis says, seems more like Herod than like God. If you’re looking for God in this story, Bolz-Weber says, look at the guy captured and tortured to death by the cruel king.
Ah. OK, then. Read Jesus’ story like Jesus’ story. That makes sense.
If I have to sum this up in one word we have to “witness.” Our responsibility is not to persuade, or to convince, or to defend. Our responsibility is to be a “witness” — but a witness to what? Exactly.
And finally, from the CBE Scroll, a tidy presentation of the unavoidable Protestant argument requiring the full equality of women in the church:
(1) All baptized believers are ordained by God as priests.
(2) Some women are baptized believers.
Therefore,
(3) Some women are ordained by God as priests.
We might thus simply ask our complementarian friends the following: If God has ordained someone as a priest, who are we to deny her ordination?
The problem is that some of these “complementarian friends” are so adamantly opposed to women’s equality that if they can’t come up with some way around that argument they’ll wind up arguing that women are forbidden to become baptized believers.
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In