Okay, I’ll confess: “I’m old”—at least in memories of the past. Let me explain what I mean and why it’s important.
I recently took some time off to visit some places in New England (that’s in the U.S. for young people that are no longer taught geography in school). Memories of parts of my childhood came alive seeing places I lived and enjoying foods unique to my childhood. Though I moved a lot as a child having been raised in a military family, of all the places I lived, that part of the country hold my fondest memories.
It was a time when one knew their neighbors, you could walk down the street and feel safe and people respected other people. This is not to say that life was a utopia, but there were certain things that were definite.
Today, nothing seems certain but the fact that nothing is certain. A good example is in the world of sports, where the issue of transgender athletes are the topic of discussion and its impact on sporting events. A quick internet search will bring up dozens of recent articles in the past week on this subject. Men claiming to be women, competing in women's sports and women complaining that's it's going to ruin women's competitions. Yet, many of these same women complaining, are the same ones pushing agendas that include the right for transgenders to use whatever bathroom they deem correct for them.
I am a Christian and a minister of the Gospel of Jesus Christ and I shake my head (almost daily) when I read the news events taking place in the world. I find myself often (almost too often) saying, “How did we get here from the way things used to be?” And that’s the rub with many people today: they have no history to the past—nothing to compare the present to.
I recently read that Union Theological Seminary, on September 17 tweeted, “Today in chapel, we confessed to plants. Together, we held our grief, joy, regret, hope, guilt and sorrow in prayer; offering them to the beings who sustain us but whose gift we too often fail to honor.”
The purpose of this article is not to mock what took place in this chapel service. Instead, it is to point out the theological and moral bankruptcy of a seminary that has thrown out the full inspiration of Scripture and denies the uniqueness of Jesus’ work of redemption.
Accordingly, a seminary spokesperson explained that at their chapel services, you might encounter a Muslim prayer service one day, a traditional Anglican service another day, then a Buddhist meditation the next. They said that, “...given the incredible diversity of our community, that means worship looks different every day!”
In 1939, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who attended Union and then briefly taught there, noted that the students “are completely clueless with respect to what dogmatics is really about. They are not familiar with even the most basic questions.”
Bonhoeffer remembered that “students ‘openly [laughed]’ at a lecture on sin and forgiveness and accused the seminary of having ‘forgotten what Christian theology in its very essence stands for.’” I wonder what he would think today?
While I'm am for environmental stewardship, it’s more of a biblical based ecology with the understanding that the Bible says that this world is one day going to burn and be transformed. Having that understanding, I find it beyond contradictory that a steadfastly liberal seminary which supports a woman's “right” to abortion, would hold a special chapel service to make confession to plants. So, it's fine to take the lives of unborn babies in the womb, but we must confess our sins to plants?
So, I’ll confess one more thing: “God help us!”
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