Website van Dave Plantinga

De man van de onlangs op 37-jarige leeftijd overleden Amerikaanse schrijfster Rachel Held Evans heeft onlangs postuum haar laatste column geplaatst op haar blog. De column is overduidelijk pro-LBGT. En ook de kerk die niet achter dat standpunt kan staan krijgt ervan langs. Ik citeer uit:

“If you’re a gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, or queer reader, I hope you already know you don’t need my affirmation to live whole and joyful lives, just as God made you. You are beloved children of God, and there is nothing I or any other Christian writer or church leader can say to alter that. I hope you know, deep in your bones, that there is no height or depth, no angel or demon, no denomination or church or pastor or parent who can separate you from the love of God in Jesus Christ. My heart grieves over the ways this truth has been obscured and denied by the Church, often in destructive and deadly ways, and I apologize for years of complicity in that.“

Af en toe heeft ze ook wel een punt:

“Professors at my evangelical college argued against the legalization of same-sex marriage, but had no problem with remarriage after divorce remaining legal, despite biblical prohibitions against it. I never saw anyone kicked out of church for the “lifestyle sins” of greed or gluttony or gossip. We didn’t argue that bakers should be able to refuse service to cohabitating heterosexual couples.“

Opmerkelijk is inderdaad dat sommige kerken bijvoorbeeld (stilzwijgend) accepteren dat een gescheiden persoon hertrouwt, zelfs met een andere gescheiden persoon. Overigens zullen er vermoedelijk weinigen ervoor pleiten om mensen die “in zonde leven” de kerk uit te schoppen. Dat is ook niet de roeping van de kerk.

Dr. Robert Gagnon levert stevige kritiek op haar uitleg van de Bijbel. Hij schrijft:

“Regrettably, she [Rachel Held Evans] does little more than provide us with a reminder of a textbook example of eisegesis (reading “into” the biblical text one’s own ideology) rather than exegesis (reading “out of” Scripture with attentiveness to historical and literary context, even if it conflicts with one’s own personal views). To suggest that Jesus cared little for gender binaries is to distort badly the portrait of Jesus that we find in the Gospels, or for that matter any credible reconstruction of the “historical Jesus” in his first-century Palestinian Jewish context.

Some background: Rachel Held Evans has made a career out of undermining fidelity to the teachings of Scripture by ridiculing simplistic or non-existent notions of biblical interpretation (hermeneutics), while practicing a flawed hermeneutic of her own that often seems to be little more than an extension of her own ideology. After starting in the evangelical tradition, she abandoned that tradition to embrace a non-orthodox sexual ethic and is now a member of the Episcopal Church.

She believes that all who do not agree with her promotion of homosexuality and transgenderism—an overwhelming “cloud of witnesses” from the beginnings of God’s people to the present day—have been proclaiming a “false gospel.” That depends on whether the Gospel is determined by her or by Christ.“