Jim Wallis’s Sojourners’ magazine has decided not to publish an ad by “Believe Out Loud,” an organization which describes itself as follows:

We believe Jesus’ message compels us to welcome all, regardless of sexual orientation and gender identity. Show the world that you can be Christian AND believe in LGBT equality. Join the movement to unite a million Christians for LGBT equality in the church and beyond.

Although in past years, Sojourners has taken stridently liberal positions on all manner of hotly-contested issues, tacitly endorsing homosexuality is, apparently, too far a stretch.  “Sojourners’ constituency, board, and staff are not of one mind on all of these issues,” wrote Wallis at the Sojourners blog this week.

This indubitably is true: At least one of the publication’s Board members, Ron Sider, is a signer of the Manhattan Declaration, as is contributing editor Samuel Rodriguez of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference.  In signing the Declaration, they  joined other signatories (including this author) in affirming that “we pledge to labor ceaselessly to preserve the legal definition of marriage as the union of one man and one woman and to rebuild the marriage culture. How could we, as Christians, do otherwise?”  How, indeed.

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Tags: Homosexuality, Jim Wallis

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To an eclectic group of religious leaders[1], President Obama spoke movingly today at the White House about the meaning of Easter:

The humility of Jesus washing the disciples’ feet.  His slow march up that hill, and the pain and the scorn and the shame of the cross. And we’re reminded that in that moment, he took on the sins of the world — past, present and future — and he extended to us that unfathomable gift of grace and salvation through his death and resurrection. In the words of the book Isaiah:  “But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities:  the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed.” This magnificent grace, this expansive grace, this “Amazing Grace” calls me to reflect.  And it calls me to pray.  It calls me to ask God for forgiveness for the times that I’ve not shown grace to others, those times that I’ve fallen short.  It calls me to praise God for the gift of … His Son and our Savior.

Remarkable: A pretty clear presentation of the Gospel from a man who arguably is America’s first post-modern President.  He even quotes from Isaiah 53, a prophetic passage that describes vividly the suffering of the coming Messiah.

Here’s what he said about the Bible:

… in the middle of critical national debates, in the middle of our busy lives, we must always make sure that we are keeping things in perspective.  Children help do that.  A strong spouse helps do that.  But nothing beats Scripture and the reminder of the eternal.

He’s right.  Yet Mr. Obama’s reading of Scripture seems highly selective.  In a speech to the Evangelical Leftist Jim Wallis’ “Call to Renewal” conference in 2006, here’s what then-Sen. Obama said:

Which passages of Scripture should guide our public policy? Should we go with Leviticus, which suggests slavery is ok and that eating shellfish is abomination? How about Deuteronomy, which suggests stoning your child if he strays from the faith? Or should we just stick to the Sermon on the Mount – a passage that is so radical that it’s doubtful that our own Defense Department would survive its application? So before we get carried away, let’s read our Bibles. Folks haven’t been reading their Bibles.

This statement trivializes serious biblical interpretation. Mr. Obama’s apparent philosophy of exposition is that no one can ever say with any real authority “thus saith the Lord” since, one is left to assume, the Lord said so many obscure, grim, and evidently impracticable things.  The Bible according to Mr. Obama becomes a Rorschach blot to which we each bring our own meaning.  This is particularly troubling in a President who frequently invokes the Bible in his speeches, often to justify his political stances.

The reality, of course, is that the Old Testament civil code was intended only for theocratic Israel.  The ceremonial rituals of Israel’s religious worship were representative, and fulfilled in Christ.  The moral law, however, is constant from Genesis through Revelation.  The Sermon on the Mount is Jesus’ intensification of the Law of Moses, intended to demonstrate both the way His followers should treat others and the inability of fallen men to practice perfectly God’s standards – which is why they need the Savior.

President Obama persistently refuses to acknowledge the personhood of the unborn child.  He is the strongest advocate for the homosexual agenda ever to work in the Oval Office.  His position on religious liberty is captured by the notion that faith is best expressed within the walls of a church, but is taken outside those walls only at the legal peril of the faithful (and if the Employment Non-Discrimination Act were enacted into law, profound intrusions by the state within those four walls would happen, as well).

It is good to read the President’s expression of Christian faith.  Now if he would search the Scriptures and apply them, as appropriate, to public policy, many believers would sing “Amazing Grace” with even greater gratitude this coming Resurrection day.

 

Tags: Easter, Jim Wallis, Nancy Wilson, Obama, Prayer Breakfast, Tim Keller

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“Democracy demands that the religiously motivated translate their concerns into universal, rather than religion-specific, values. It requires that their proposals be subject to argument, and amenable to reason. I may be opposed to abortion for religious reasons, but if I seek to pass a law banning the practice, I cannot simply point to the teachings of my church or evoke God’s will. I have to explain why abortion violates some principle that is accessible to people of all faiths, including those with no faith at all. Now this is going to be difficult for some who believe in the inerrancy of the Bible, as many evangelicals do. But in a pluralistic democracy, we have no choice. Politics depends on our ability to persuade each other of common aims based on a common reality.” – Barack Obama

Then-Senator Obama made this statement during his speech to Jim Wallis’ “Call to Renewal” conference in 2006.  Note two things:

(1)   He effectively denies the commonality of natural law and the conscience – the foundation of the “universal values” he commends – and links opposition to abortion only to the revelation of Scripture.

(2)   He also suggests that opposing abortion cannot be justified by our “common reality.”

As the first point, is the President prepared to argue that no “self evident truths” exist?  Is the assertion that “all men are created equal” and have rights endowed to them by a Creator too culture-specific for Mr. Obama?  And is the validity of these assertions determined simply by the number of people who agree with them?

As to the second point, is the “common reality” determined by the 50 percent plus one?  If so, did the “common reality” of the Japanese military state in the 1930s surely justify the rape of Nanking?

Mr. Obama calls for our being “amenable to reason.”  Yet he is unreasonable in refusing seriously to interact with the irrefutable scientific evidence that personhood begins at conception and, if so, that every person has value independent of his or her mother from that moment – and therefore possesses and should obtain a legally-recognized right to life.

Perhaps the German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer captured it all most clearly:

Destruction of the embryo in the mother’s womb is a violation of the right to live which God has bestowed upon this nascent life. To raise the question whether we are here concerned already with a human being or not is merely to confuse the issue. The simple fact is that God certainly intended to create a human being and that this nascent human being has been deliberately deprived of his life. And that is nothing but murder.

Ethics (New York; Macmillan, 1965), pp. 175-6.

Tags: conscience, Jim Wallis, Obama

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