GAY TRUTH

U.S. Supreme Court building. (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) As I write this, the Supreme Court has handed down what will be the “ Roe v. Wade ” of marriage, redefining marriage in all 50 states. This is a sober moment, and I am a conscientious dissenter from this ruling. The Court now has disregarded thousands of years of definition of the most foundational unit of society, and the cultural changes here will be broad and deep. So how should the church respond? First of all, the church should not panic. The Supreme Court can do many things, but the Supreme Court cannot get Jesus back in that tomb. Jesus of Nazareth is still alive. He is still calling the universe toward his kingdom. Moreover, while this decision will, I believe, ultimately hurt many people and families and civilization itself, the gospel doesn’t need “family values” to flourish. In fact, the church often thrives when it is in sharp contrast to the cultures around it. That was the case in Ephesus and Philippi and Cor...

Image via Wikipedia By Elodie Ballantine Emig The most natural place to turn, after an examination of Paul’s vice list in I Corinthians , is to his vice list in I Timothy .  Since the early 19th century, it has been alleged that Paul couldn’t possibly have written the Pastorals. The most common objections are: The writing style and word choices are different from Paul’s earlier letters. The Pastorals don’t fit with what we know of Paul from Acts . The heresy combated is second-century Gnosticism . The church is too developed for the first century. The theology of the Pastorals lacks Paul’s distinctives. The Pastorals are not contained in the oldest (mid-third-century) codex we have of the Pauline epistles . Before briefly answering these objections, I must state my conviction that the burden of proof is on the scholar who denies Pauline authorship to books regarded as genuine for eighteen centuries. I Timothy claims to have been written by Paul, and it was preserved and ca...