The following article appears in the July edition of GQ magazine, and is reprinted with kind permission of the publishers, Conde Nast. Sadly, it appears that, rather than cross check with third parties what he wrote about theology, author Andrew Corsello swallowed Gene Robinson's post-modern version of Christianity hook, line and sinker.
I anticipate that this article will generate some heated discussion, so let me remind our readers that commentary must be civil. I will not tolerate ad hominems against anyone, and I will be ruthless in rejecting those comments that do not meet our standards of Christian decency.
LET GOD LOVE GENE ROBINSON
Five years ago, Gene Robinson was elected the first openly gay Christian bishop, causing the greatest crisis the modern Protestant community has ever faced. Will his love for another man rip the church in two? We’re about to find out
By Andrew Corsello; Photograph by Gillian Laub
Even before he could speak, he knew it and felt it: knew he would never be separated from it; felt it in the form of light and heat. actually, light and heat belittled what he felt. They were just words, and words were small, man’s way of knowing; words could point and suggest, but never apprehend. When he was old enough to search for better ways to convey what he felt when the love of God came upon him, he would tell his mother and father and minister and anyone else in Nicholasville, Kentucky, that it was like butter, liquid-warm, luminous, drizzled atop his head and descending over and through him in a seamless golden coat to his feet.
As a child, he prayed the way he breathed, and for the same reason. His Sunday-school attendance record was unblemished, from toddlerhood to the time he left for college. One Sunday morning, he woke feeling that his insides were being dry-baked. “Nothing’s wrong,” he told his mother when she saw the color of his face. “Let’s go to church!” So off they went, where he passed his measles on to every student in his Sunday-school class. Weighed against the prospect of not getting his Sunday fill of Jesus, the reprobation that came from being a Patient Zero was a small price to pay.
Read on
11 comments:
Albion, what is the point of posting this "story"? It is your Blog, but again why? It is at best a silly story. I knew Gene Robinson and dealt with him several times regarding serious church matters. I read it and it does not represent the Gene Robinson that I knew and dealt with. Just a tale of emotionally based justifications. His families old Church of Christ pastor lives north of me and we have talked about this. Hard to believe the story found a publisher.
Fr. D.
LET GOD LOVE GENE ROBINSON
What a revealing subtitle.
"If we would only let god love VGR"!
Surely this request is not aimed at the Omnipotent God but at the relativistic god of ECUSA the pantheist one each of them is part of.
If only we would let god...
If I must give this god permission this is a weak god indeed.
Love would have required his bishop to remove him from active ministry when he left his wife, and then to excommunicate him if he would not repent. That would have been love, the kind that cares for the soul of a sinner, and wants him to be saved from sin and death.
It's a blatant piece of blasphemous hagiography. It starts with a good description of the emotional struggles of a boy who, for whatever reason, was homosexually inclined. I recognize those tensions. I knew them intimately myself.
But it uses these feelings to justify an abandonment of the Christian faith. Make no mistake, that is what is going on here, a whole lot more than simply a sexual issue.
It's a glorification of the man, with the principal text that, because he feels something, therefore he is right in yielding to that feeling. Balderdash.
I could say a whole lot more, but will close observing that the piece does serve as a good example of the "reasoning" of such folk and of how far they have strayed from every aspect of the faith.
ed
I feel no need to say anything harsh about this sad sick man. In fact, I do not even feel any need to say anything at all about him. But I am left in utter amazement over the soi disant orthodox reasserters who have made a truce with their consciences and managed to live in the same church with him for five years after his consecration as a bishop. If one can live with priestesses, why not gay bishops? If one has concluded that gender makes no difference in who represents Christ at the altar, then it hardly makes any difference in whom you (or they)take for for a sex partner.
Laurence K. Wells
Yes, Father Wells, just exactly the point. When male and female become identical, everything breaks down.
ed
On Sunday my parish priest gave me a copy of an address by a man called Bill Lind, called 'The Origins of Political Correctness'. Now, I haven't had a chance to try to verify elsewhere the things he was saying, but it seemed pretty sensibly put together and gave me no real cause to doubt it. The message was that PC comes from the 1930s Frankfurt School, whose doctrine was 'cultural Marxism', as a reaction to the fact that WWI did not unite the European proletariat.
Still with me?
Anyway, I was reflecting, and came to the conclusion that this article on Mr Robinson, as well as the things I've heard Mr Robinson say, is an example of the new liberation theology. (Indeed, feminism and other 'victim' ideologies fall into the same class, because they come from the same roots.) The old liberation theology was an attempt to integrate economic Marxism into Christianity; the new one is an attempt to christen cultural Marxism. Never mind that Marxism is at root anti-religious and especially anti-Christian. 'If it feels good, do it,' was coined, according to Mr Lind, by the Frankfurter who didn't go back to Europe after WWII: Herbert Marcuse.
It's completely at odds with classic Christian teaching, which is that we should deny ourselves. (Dr Pusey had a lot to say about that.) The whole 'affirming' culture, and the article on Robinson, are a glorification of self-indulgence.
Now, right at the moment that is all I feel competent to say on the matter, and with any luck some erudite person might put me straight on a few things.
" Sandra McColl said...
On Sunday my parish priest gave me a copy of an address by a man called Bill Lind, called 'The Origins of Political Correctness'."
Sandra I know Bill personally a great guy, brilliant & well educated. He is an active communicant in the ACC and at one time hosted a T.V. program "Cafe Zurich".
Fr. D.
Sandra is so correct to bring the Frankfort School into this conversation as the actions of the Episcopal Church seem to be just another manifestation of the same utopianism present in the Frankfort School - a radicalism that has sought after false messiahs at every time, continuing to turn its back on the true messiah and seeking subvert His Church and the culture it created at every opportunity. This is nothing new really and should be no surprise.
Sorry - the last anonymous comment regrading the Frankfort School was from "Mark".
-Mark
The photo strikes me as a perverted takeoff on Grant Wood's iconic painting "American Gothic."
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