This blog post from Desiring God has been floating on a few friends’ blogs and Facebook walls … but I still wanted to share it here.
As a leader in a denomination in the midst of a “conversation” about our approach to homosexuality, I need to pay careful attention.
In the article, they talk about how Dietrich Bonhoeffer stood against the unity of the German church because they had departed from true Christianity.
The “Aryan Paragraph” was a Nazi demand that all Jewish officers and eventually members be excluded from the German church. For Bonhoeffer, that un-churched the church.
Un-churching the church means that you’ve walked away from the three marks of a real church, which are defined in the Belgic Confession (Article 29) as:
| “ | The true church can be recognized if it has the following marks: The church engages in the pure preaching of the gospel; it makes use of the pure administration of the sacraments as Christ instituted them; it practices church discipline for correcting faults. In short, it governs itself according to the pure Word of God, rejecting all things contrary to it and holding Jesus Christ as the only Head. By these marks one can be assured of recognizing the true church– and no one ought to be separated from it. |
In the light of history, we can easily agree that Bonhoeffer made the right decision.
Looking at the church of today, we don’t have to worry about an Aryan Paragraph. We do have other dangers to the church … and in the RCA one of the biggest is the embracing of homosexuality as an accepted practice.
Wolfhart Pannenberg, 84, is the retired professor of Systematic Theology at the University of Munich where he served since 1968. Where Boenhoffer drew the line of church purity at the rejection of Jews, Pannenberg draws it at the approval of homosexual relations. He wrote:
Here lies the boundary of a Christian church that knows itself to be bound by the authority of Scripture. Those who urge the church to change the norm of its teaching on this matter must know that they are promoting schism. If a church were to let itself be pushed to the point where it ceased to treat homosexual activity as a departure from the biblical norm, and recognized homosexual unions as a personal partnership of love equivalent to marriage, such a church would stand no longer on biblical ground but against the unequivocal witness of Scripture. A church that took this step would cease to be the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church. (“Should We Support Gay Marriage? No“)
Read the full post here.
