Dr. Tiller, who had performed abortions since the 1970s, had long been a lightning rod for controversy over the issue of abortion, particularly in Kansas, where abortion opponents regularly protested outside his clinic and sometimes his home and church. In 1993, he was shot in both arms by an abortion opponent but recovered.

Dr. Tiller had also been the subject of many efforts at prosecution, including a citizen-initiated grand jury investigation. In the latest such effort, in March, Dr. Tiller was acquitted of charges that he had performed late-term abortions that violated state law.

Both pro-abortion and pro-life groups have condemned the shooting.

According to Reuters, Tiller and his associates had contributed nearly $30,000 to the campaign of former Kansas governor Kathleen Sebelius, President Obama’s new secretary of Health and Human Services. Sebelius oversees the Food and Drug Administration, the National Institutes of Health, and the Center for Disease Control and Prevention.

Among those mourning Dr. Tiller’s death is Faith Aloud, a pro-abortion, pro-same-sex marriage religious group based in St. Louis. From Faith Aloud’s blog:

“Dr. Tiller taught me so much about the spiritual concerns of his patients,” said the Reverend Rebecca Turner, Executive Director of Faith Aloud. “He was a kind, compassionate man who respected women and listened to them. America cannot tolerate this kind of domestic terrorism. We must put an end to the hostile rhetoric that fuels this kind of violence. We must hold people accountable who bully women on the sidewalks of abortion clinics. There is nothing “pro-life” about murder and nothing “Christian” about the hatred that fuels it. My heart goes out to abortion providers all over our country who share in this tragedy.”

Here we can ask Reverend Turner if using such incendiary phrases as “America cannot tolerate this kind of domestic terrorism,” “we must put an end to the hostile rhetoric,” and “we must hold people accountable who bully women” are not themselves discourteous hate speech. Premeditated murder, which appears to have happened today, is a crime that should be punished according to the fullest extent of the law. Apparently, Reverend Turner wants to extend that punishment to include not only Dr. Tiller’s killer, but also pro-lifers lawfully exercising their constitutional rights of free speech and assembly. I think it sad that Reverend Turner chooses to take advantage of this horrible crime to promote her anti-freedom agenda.

We pray that our most compassionate God and Father extend His tender mercies to Dr. Tiller’s grieving family, friends, and members of Reformation parish, and that He would stir up in the hearts and minds of His people an even stronger resolve to condemn all unjustified killings: whether a man in his own church by a gunman, or hundreds of thousands of innocent, pre-born babies by abortion. May God also bring Dr. Tiller’s killer to justice.

That being said, I cannot pray for the soul of Dr. Tiller, who refused to hear and to believe God’s Word concerning life. That he died in church today is only divine irony.

Seems today we’re exporting more than our excess baggage, complemented by convenient love handles, to foreign lands. Reeking faintly of our disastrous consignment of home-brewed eugenics, now comes another produit nouveau: sexuality. True, Americans aren’t the only ones to blame–let’s share the wealth with Canada and the EU. But then again, we did provide the world with contraceptionist, racist, and eugenicist Margaret Sanger and deviant, probable child-abusing sexologist Alfred Kinsey. So, maybe we win the prize after all.

According to this report from the Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute, although gains were made at last week’s meeting of UN Commission on Population and Human Development, more-than-unfortunate verbiage remained in a document passed by thie UN group. This goes to what I’ve cautioned before about Lutherans using the word “sexuality”. It is word freighted with all sorts of sin and evil; namely emotivism and hedonism.

According to the article

The new CPD document, for instance, has new agreed upon language that calls for ‘providing young people with comprehensive education on human sexuality.’ The document does not define ‘human sexuality,’ so UN agencies and committees will likely turn to technical definitions provided by other UN institutions such as the World Health Organization (WHO). The WHO states, ‘Sexuality…encompasses sex, gender, gender identities and roles, sexual orientation, eroticism, pleasure, intimacy, and reproduction.’ The definition further explains, ‘Sexuality is experienced and expressed in thoughts, fantasies, desires, beliefs, attitudes, values, behaviors, practices, roles, and relationships.’ It is likely that many of the delegates allowing for ‘human sexuality’ into the CPD document were not aware of the WHO definition.

Really, some people should stay home.

Image: Wiki Commons. Public Domain.

HT: LifeNews.com.

Notable Puritans. Source: Wiki Commons; public domain.

As this April 4 The New York Times article shows, advocates for same-sex marriage, such as Lambda Legal, are making headway in New England.

Ironically, you can thank the Puritans, advocates of individualism and intellectualism, for some of the success.

This is your last chance.  After this, there is no going back.  You take the blue pill and the story ends. You wake in your bed and you believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill and you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes. Remember that all I am offering is the truth.  Nothing more.

The conclusions and recommendations made in Human Sexuality: Gift and Trust, a proposed social statement by the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, should come as no surprise.

The foundations for them were already being laid by the Twentieth-Century Project, which I define as the efforts of twentieth-century theologians to salvage the perceived essence of Christianity in the face of Darwinism and new, scientific discoveries that on the surface appeared to descredit key elements of the faith. 

For Protestantism, the Twentieth-Century Project resorted to: reductionism (brainiac definition here; lay-friendly here), which would suggest that the whole of Christianity can be reduced to its chief parts; appeals to theologians (notably Luther, Calvin) as the final authorities for contemporary theological discourse; and to theologizing in systematic categories, rather than offering biblical propositions to support an argument.

Thus, faced with a perceived threat of new epistemologies, some theologians “reduced” Christianity either to the biblical fundamentals of faith (fundamentalism), or the discernment of religous truth (modernism). (Yes, fundamentalism and liberalism are the twin daughters of reductionism.)

So, dear reader, you can take either the blue pill and believe whatever you want to believe, or you can take the red pill and come back soon to Bioethike to see how deep the problem of “sexuality” in the Lutheran Church goes.

Knock, knock, Neo.

dilemma for the folks at the U.S. Agency for International Development, which has distributed an estimated 10 billion U.S.-made AIDS-preventing condoms in poor countries around the world.

Which makes me ask,  “Why are my federal tax dollars being used to purchase condoms which, in the African context (see post below), are ineffective anyway?”

The problem with current discourse in Lutheran circles regarding sexuality is, well, the word sexuality. You can’t find sexuality in the Bible (oh, sure, there are male and female, marriage, sex, more sex, approved sex, prohibited sex, and so on), but not sexuality. You can’t find sexuality in the Lutheran Confessions (yeah, there are marriage, procreation, moral prophylaxis, celibacy, and so on). But no sexuality.

Sexuality as a word came into use about 1800 AD. Which means that, until about two hundred years ago, we didn’t talk this way about male and female, the purpose of marriage, and so on.

Which makes me wonder: when it comes to Lutheran ethics within the household of faith, Why do we use it at all? It is loaded with a lot of freight. Sure, the term is popularly used in our culture, especially by sociologists, evolutionary biologists, psychologists, psychiatrists, and so on. And we should rightly familiarize ourselves with the term and all that it implies in the public square.

But in the Church? Shouldn’t we be speaking (and writing) in the language of Scripture?

Interestingly enough, the ELCA’s Human Sexuality: Gift and Trust uses the word “sexuality” 123 times. “Bible” is mentioned 3 times, “Scripture” 20 times, and “Confessions” 13 times. “Marriage” is mentioned 60 times, and “children” 45 times. Although “sin” is mentioned 34 times, specific sexual sins (which we might expect in a document on sexuality), are not mentioned. “Fornication” is mentioned once, “civil unions” beats “heterosexual” 3 to 2, and the sexual virtues of “continence”, “chastity”, “purity”, and “holiness” are down for the count at zero.

Which makes me wonder: If sexuality were not in our Lutheran Church vocabulary, would there be a “human sexuality” document at all?

• invocation of Scripture and Luther (or other Reformers);
• promotion of Lutheran or biblical categories (justification, blessing, Bible, vocation, gift) in order to justify certain predetermined positions;
• promotion of the new über-values of “openness” or “trust” that trump all other ethical values;
• avoidance of actual biblical or Lutheran texts speaking to the issue at hand.

Both documents avoid what the Bible and Luther actually say about marriage, fornication, adultery, and so on. Both documents also theologize in Lutheran systematic categories rather than presenting a coherent theology on the subject.

What Lutherans believe, teach, and confess is not true simply because they say so. Sixty million Lutherans saying something doesn’t make it true. We must demonstrate that what we assert is true on the basis of Holy Scripture in continuity with the classical creeds and confessions which the ELCA accepts in its Constitution.

You can read Braaten’s March 3 Lutheran Forum article here.

the statement avoids making normative judgments about homosexual conduct by neglecting the testimony of the Bible and the Christian moral tradition on that issue. In doing so it departs from the moral consensus that the church has held for millennia… 

 You can read Benne’s entire March 4 Lutheran Forum article here.