APOSTATE SENDS HER FALSE GNOSTIC ADVICE TO KIM DAVIS & ALL GULLIBLE CHRISTIANS, ETC.
Writer and Bible professor Jennifer Grace Bird offers a manual on
fearless reading of the Bible in her new book, 'Permission Granted:
Take the Bible into Your Own Hands.' Bird will be speaking in
Birmingham and Huntsville on Aug. 15 and 16, 2015. (Courtesy/Jessica
Johnson)
An Open Letter to Kim Davis
BY JENNIFER GRACE BIRD
SEE: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jennifer-g-bird/an-open-letter-to-kim-davis_b_8094166.html; republished below in full unedited for informational, educational, and research purposes:
Dear Kim,
In light of all of the attention being focused on you and your family at the moment, there are three things I would like to say to you.
The first is that I am impressed by your ability to stand by your own beliefs and convictions. I absolutely do believe you when you say that this matter is not about holding ill will against anyone but that it is about God and God's Word. And I can identify with the reassurance you have felt and received when you joined your church four years ago. That kind of forgiveness is no small thing and I'm glad that you have found such peace.
The second is related to your strong convictions: I am so terribly sorry that you have received such horrible reactions from people, including death threats, and that you have been under such intense scrutiny by many news outlets, which has brought out the less pleasant sides of many people. Rude and harmful behavior is never appropriate or justified, in my opinion.
The third thing I would like to say comes from my own convictions as an educator. My area happens to be biblical studies, which means that the Bible is so important to me that I spent nine years in graduate school learning more about it. In my twenties, I spent a great deal of time memorizing biblical passages, so that I had them with me at all times, and encouraged others to also become a follower of Christ.
It is because of my own background that I can say that I do understand why this matter is not about what other people think or say; it is truly about God's Word for you. And that is why, as an educator, I would like to ask that you take a few moments to think about the way you read the Bible.
For instance, when you read a passage such as Leviticus 18:22 or 20:13, do you ever stop to think about why that was being said? It is noteworthy that it is in the midst of an incredibly long list of people that men were not to have sexual relations with -- none of which seem to need to be said (all women he would see at a family reunion).
What I do not hear people talking about when they reference Lev 20:13 is the why. For a group of people who had been promised they would outnumber the stars having children, and lots of them, was pretty important. Notice there isn't a parallel command to women. Back then, people tended to believe that all that was needed for a child to begin gestating was the male's sperm. The woman was perceived as an incubator. Thus, there are three passages that warn men against "wasting their seed." (Gen 38:8-10, Lev 18:22 and Lev 20:13). Those passages are not addressing two men in love; they are addressing sexual relations that cannot lead to children.
Many people refer to Genesis 19, the Sodom story, in this conversation, as well. The thing is, if you read that passage slowly and carefully, and try to imagine what music you would put in the background if you were filming it, you are likely to notice that what the men of Sodom had in mind, regardless of the recipients, was harm. When Lot offers up his two virgin daughters to take the place of his visitors he is simply trying to turn the intention of harming someone away from his visitors. The idea that the men of Sodom were going to have sex with the two visitors is misinformed, in part by the wording in the story itself.
"Where are the men who came to you tonight? Bring them out to us so that we can have sex with them" (NIV, Genesis 19: ]5).
The Hebrew verb there is "to know," and we do see this used as a euphemism for sexual relations. The thing is those men did not want to have consensual sex; they wanted to rape the two visitors. Perhaps the people who wrote down this story had not stopped to think about the difference, but I assure you that there is a huge difference. Sex is about pleasure and certainly it is entered into consensually. Rape is about power and often about shaming or humiliating the other person.
In the story, the actions and intentions of the men of Sodom would have been no less harmful if Lot had succeeded in handing over his two daughters to them. Notice that in 19:9 the men say, "Now we will deal worse with you than with them," implying that they would like to inflict harm on Lot, instead. The Sodom story is sending a message that God wants His people to be kind and hospitable.
When people look at Genesis 2:24 and say, "See! There is Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve," I do understand why. This is the first couple discussed in the Bible, and of course it is a man and a woman. The tricky thing about this verse, though, is that it is not even talking about marriage. It is talking about the human tendency to want to pair up and strike out on our own, away from our families of origin, to start our own families. The use of "wife" in 2:24 is a choice by our translation committees. It can just as easily say "woman," instead, just as it does in the previous verse, "this one shall be called Woman, for out of Man this one was taken."
Many people also look at Genesis 1:28 and claim that couples are meant to be able to procreate, since God commands the two newly-formed-humans to, "Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it." I understand the focus on this verse, but again, the story was initially written to a small group of people who had been promised they would outnumber the stars. Today we have an overpopulation issue on this planet, do we not?
Additionally, I do not see people claiming that the very next verse still needs to be upheld. "God said, 'See, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit; you shall have them for food'" (Genesis 1:29). But if a person has to endorse procreation as essential for couples, then it seems to me that you also need to be a strict vegan. As self-proclaimed "hillbilly types," I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that you are not vegans.
I understand that the Bible is central in your life and that you are committed to upholding what you read there. Thinking about how we read the Bible is just as important, it seems to me. It was those same convictions that led me to seek education about the Bible. That education, in turn, led to me teaching many courses on the Bible, and to writing a book that presents important basic information about the Bible on topics such as this one.
Nowhere in the Bible does God say that two men or two women who love each other are going to hell for it. Nowhere. What the Bible does say about marriage and sex is at times rather startling. I think it would be in your own best interest to be fully informed on them, given your stance regarding marriage licenses.
Follow Jennifer G. Bird on Twitter: www.twitter.com/JenniferGBird
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False Biblical "Experts" Agree, Kim Davis was Wrong!
NO AMOUNT OF FALSE TEACHING WILL DISSUADE KIM DAVIS
OR OTHER BIBLICAL CHRISTIANS
Published on Sep 10, 2015
Both conservative and liberal commentators have excoriated Kim Davis for taking a stand against homo-tyranny. In this video, Jio explains how those "experts" miss the mark in their criticisms and are, in fact, teachers that are influential with the itching ears crowd. (2 Tim. 4:3, 4)
Website: http://www.redlettersdialogues.com
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/redletterstalks
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/redlettersdia...
Links:
- Open Letter to Kim Davis from Jennifer Grace Bird: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jennife...
- al.com article delineating Bird's ideology: http://www.al.com/living/index.ssf/20...
Website: http://www.redlettersdialogues.com
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/redletterstalks
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/redlettersdia...
Links:
- Open Letter to Kim Davis from Jennifer Grace Bird: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jennife...
- al.com article delineating Bird's ideology: http://www.al.com/living/index.ssf/20...
DEGREES FROM LIBERAL, CORRUPT SCHOOLS
HER BOOK ENDORSED BY OTHER APOSTATES
"Jennifer Grace Bird 'Grants Permission' To Read Bible Honestly"
EXCERPTS:
"Bird's informal way of speaking belies the fact she holds very serious degrees in her field: her master's in divinity is from Princeton Theological Seminary, and her doctorate in New Testament and Early Christianity is from Vanderbilt Divinity School.
The book has been well received since its publication this spring. Rachel Held Evans, an author with a wide and growing audience among Evangelical Christians, calls the book, "an accessible, encouraging and enlightening guide to understanding the Bible better." Marcus Borg, a theologian long admired by mainline and progressive Christians, read the book in manuscript and encouraged Bird to publish it. His is among the endorsements on the book's cover.
Laced with the substance of a scholarly approach to the Bible is Bird's unabashed and always alert feminism. Most of the Bible swims in a kind of soup of assumed misogyny, she says. It's past time for feminist scholars to help people detect those destructive cultural patterns in the Bible and see how the Spirit of God works to defeat them."
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SEE OUR PREVIOUS POSTS ABOUT RACHEL HELD EVANS:
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MARCUS BORG:
UNIVERSALIST, DENIER OF JESUS CHRIST & BIBLE TRUTHS
BY KEN SILVA
SEE: http://apprising.org/2010/03/07/marcus-borg-and-christians-who-dont-believe-in-jesus/; republished below in full unedited for informational, educational, and research purposes:
It’s always interesting how the Lord works. I’d been feeling led to discuss the issue of how, right now, belief concerning Who Jesus actually is has all but been pushed to the side for the sake of unity in the visible Christian church. But then I started thinking that it’s even kind of silly to have to bring it up at all; until I came across the post Archbishop Rowan Williams on the Uniqueness and Finality of Christ today from Jeremy Bouma.
You may recall Bouma from Radio Interview With Jeremy Bouma The Insider Who Just Left The Emerging Church. Bouma’s timely post begins:
In an address exploring the finality of Christ in a pluralist world on Tuesday, Dr Rowan Williams said people who believed in absolute truth were liable to be branded bigots or intolerant by those who felt that what was right for some was not necessarily right for others.“Belief in the uniqueness or finality of Christ is something that sits very badly indeed, not just with a plural society but with a society that regards itself as liberal or democratic,” he said. (Online source)
And as I said in my comment to Jeremy concerning the phrase “affirming the uniqueness and finality of Christ”:
As I see it, the issue is, what does one mean by those words? In my opinion, it’s time to ask some serious questions and get people to define their terms.One quick example; even Marcus Borg, who denies the Deity (uniqueness?) of Jesus on Nazareth, would agree that the “finality” of Christ is that “Christ” is the way Christians refer to the logos (spark of the divine) of God that’s in all of creation itself.
Years ago in his classic textbook The Kingdom of the Cults Dr. Walter Martin (1928-1989) spoke of the importance of scaling the language barrier because:
The well-trained cultist will carefully avoid definition of terms concerning cardinal doctrines such as the Trinity, the deity of Christ, the Atonement, the bodily resurrection of our Lord, the process of salvation by grace and justification by faith. If pressed in these areas, he will redefine the terms to fit the semantic framework of orthodoxy unless he is forced to define his terms explicitly. [1]
How sad that I’m finding I now have to employ techniques that I once used for evangelizing non-Christian cultists with people who are associated e.g. with the Emerging Church and Brian McLaren. For example, in Brian McLaren Invites You On His Quest To Destroy Christianity I showed you that in his latest book A New Kind of Christianity McLaren confides there was a time when he “began losing faith” in the way he once read the Bible.
But then he goes on to tell us that he was so fortunate to be able to learn a new way to approach the Scriptures “from Christian scholars” such as Roman “Catholics” like fellow Red Letter Christian “Richard Rohr” as well as “Protestants” like Progessive Christian scholar “Marcus Borg.” However, when we consider Borg’s testimony from the interspiritual website Explore Faith, where he’s on the Editorial Board along with Phyllis Tickle of Emergence Christianity [2], we encounter a very serious problem:
To be Christian means to find the decisive revelation of God in Jesus. To be Muslim means to find the decisive revelation of God in the Koran.To be Jewish means to find the decisive revelation of God in the Torah, and so forth. I don’t think that one of these is better than the other. You could even say they are all divinely given paths to the sacred. To be Christian in this kind of context means to be deeply committed to one’s own tradition, even as one recognizes the validity of other traditions. (Online source, emphasis in original)
A nice sentiment from Dr. Borg, but not a Christian view; and taken along with his denial of the Deity of Jesus Christ, I find myself asking: Can you actually be a Christian when you don’t even believe what Christians believe? Jesus Himself said to Jewish religious leaders—men every bit as pious as Marcus Borg — “I said therefore to you that you will die in the sins of you; for if you believe not that I Am [the eternal God], you will die in the sins of you” (John 8:24, literal Greek).
The Good News of Christ Jesus is repentance and forgiveness of sins in His Name; in other words, the regenerated believer will not die in his sins. But Marcus Borg, by his own admission, does not believe Jesus is God in human flesh i.e. very God of very God; so by definition then, 1) this is a different Jesus (see—2 Corinthians11:4), and 2) Dr. Borg is in danger of dying in his sins. Therefore, if we love Marcus Borg, we won’t let him deceive himself into thinking he’s a Christian; no instead, we’ll pray for his repentance and preach the Gospel to him.
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Endnotes:1. Walter Martin, The Kingdom of the Cults, Ravi Zacharias, Gen. Ed. (Minneapolis: Bethany House, 2005), 33.
2. http://www.explorefaith.org/about/editorial_board/index.php, accessed 3/7/10.
See also:
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The False Teachers: Marcus Borg
SEE: http://www.challies.com/articles/the-false-teachers-marcus-borg; republished below in full unedited for informational, educational, and research purposes:
A few weeks ago I set out on a new series of articles through which I am scanning the history of the church—from its earliest days all the way to the present time—to examine some of Christianity’s most notorious false teachers. Along the way we have visited such figures as Arius, Pelagius, Joseph Smith, and Ellen G. White. Today we will look at the life and legacy of a man who assumed and further developed theological Liberalism and paved the way for what became known as Progressive Christianity. His name is Marcus Borg.
MARCUS BORG
Marcus Borg was born in 1942 to a Lutheran family in North Dakota. After high school he went to Concordia College in Minnesota determined to become an astrophysicist but soon changed his major to math and physics, and then again to political science and philosophy. As a young man he experienced great doubts about his Christian faith and decided to pursue postgraduate studies at Union Seminary in New York City and here he was heavily influenced by W.D. Davies, a man who laid the groundwork for what has become known as the New Perspective on Paul. After graduating from Union he moved overseas to Mansfield College, Oxford University, where he earned his Doctorate of Philosophy.
In 1979 Borg became a member of the faculty at Oregon State University, a position he would hold until he retired in 2007 as Distinguished Professor in Religion and Culture and the Hundere Endowed Chair in Religious Studies. However, his career as a professor would be overshadowed by his career as a writer and public figure, and his leadership in what has become known as Progressive Christianity, an updated form of theological Liberalism.
Borg is a gifted writer who is adept at popularizing difficult concepts and his prose is attractive for its lively and meditative style. One person he has influenced writes, “Almost single-handedly among progressives, Borg has opened up new avenues of experience and thought for lapsed Christians or nonbelievers interested in re-visioning the Christianity of their childhood. He writes clearly and concisely about the meaning of wisdom, compassion, justice, the kingdom of God, and life as a journey of transformation. His books boldly take us into fresh fields of wonder, mystery, and passion in regard to Jesus, God, the Bible, and the Christian way.”1
His most significant contributions have been as a scholar whose focus has been on the person and work of Jesus Christ. He has written or edited more than twenty-five books, and the great majority of them have been focused on Jesus. He also led two nationally-televised symposia—one focused on Jesus and the other on God—, served as national chair of the Historical Jesus Section of the Society of Biblical Literature, and has made regular appearances on PBS and other television networks. His bestselling book is Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time, and it is in this book that he most clearly lays out his convictions. He draws on his own journey, from a childhood, childish faith in Christ to the development of what he considers a deeper, richer, and more plausible set of beliefs based on a historical rather than fabled Jesus. He teaches here that the Christian life is not meant to be rooted in dogma or creed, but in compassion and community.
In 1985 Robert Funk founded the Jesus Seminar, a group of 150 critical scholars who were tasked with re-examining the traditions surrounding the historicity of Jesus, and in particular, his deeds and his sayings. Among these scholars was Marcus Borg. The scholars employed social anthropology, history and textual analysis to attempt to reconstruct Jesus’ life and to separate the historical Jesus from what they take as myth. They famously used a voting system that relied on colored beads to represent whether one of Jesus’ deeds or sayings was authentic. Of the over five hundred sayings of Jesus recorded in the Gospels, they determined that only thirty-one were authentic with the rest being possibly authentic, doubtful or completely inauthentic. Over their many meetings and through much dialog they eventually determined that Jesus was a mortal man who, like the rest of us, had been born of two parents, that he did not perform miracles, that any healings attributed to him were merely psychosomatic, that he did not die a substitutionary death, that he was not physically resurrected, and that the post-resurrection sightings of Jesus were merely visions.
Marcus Borg became and remains one of the foremost leaders in what has become known as Progressive Christianity which differs from Evangelical Christianity in a number of important ways. Where Evangelical Christianity emphasizes life after death, sin and forgiveness, the substitutionary atoning work of Jesus Christ, and grace alone through faith alone in Christ alone as the only way of salvation, Progressive Christianity takes a historical and metaphorical (rather than literal) approach to the Bible, affirms that God can be known through every religion, is far more concerned with good behavior than orthodox beliefs, and pursues progressive social and political views.
Today Marcus Borg has retired from Oregon State University but continues to serve as Canon Theologian at Trinity Episcopal Cathedral in Portland. He also remains an active writer and blogs often at Patheos.
FALSE TEACHING
As a Progressive Christian, Borg denies important tenets of the historical Christian faith while affirming what Christians have long held as unorthodox or outright heretical positions. He has long denied the inspiration and authority of the Bible, saying, “I let go of the notion that the Bible is a divine product. I learned that it is a human cultural product, the product of two ancient communities, biblical Israel and early Christianity. As such, it contained their understandings and affirmations, not statements coming directly or somewhat directly from God.” He explicitly denies Jesus’ virgin birth: “Jesus almost certainly was not born of a virgin, did not think of himself as the Son of God, and did not see his purpose as dying for the sins of the world.” He also denies the physical resurrection of Jesus Christ: “I do not think that the gospel stories of Easter require us to think of the resurrection in material physical terms. I see them as parables of the resurrection. Parables are about meaning. They are truth-filled and truthful stories, even as they may not be literally factual.” In fact, he denies so much of the core beliefs of the Christian faith that it becomes nearly absurd to consider him a Christian at all.
FOLLOWERS & MODERN ADHERENTS
As one of the foremost Progressive Christians, Borg has been an influence on many of today’s Liberal and Progressives Christians. These would include Tony Campolo, Brian McLaren, Karen Armstrong, Shane Claiborne, Anne Lamott, Jim Wallis and many others. He has lent the weight of his scholarship to their attempts to renegotiate the place of Scripture in the Christian life and faith, and to rethink many of its most sacred doctrines. He is often quoted favorably by those who want to consider themselves Christians but without holding to inerrancy, the virgin birth, the resurrection, and others beliefs most Christians have long held sacred.
WHAT THE BIBLE SAYS
2 Timothy 3:16 assures us, “All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness,that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work.” Peter speaks of Scripture as God’s inerrant and inspired revelation of himself saying, “no prophecy of Scripture comes from someone’s own interpretation. For no prophecy was ever produced by the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit” (2 Peter 1:20-21). The writer to the Hebrews says that, because Scripture is God’s Word, it is “living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and of spirit, of joints and of marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart” (Hebrews 4:12). If any or all of these things are true, then we do not read and judge Scripture—it reads and judges us. We have no right to stand over Scripture; instead, we have the privilege of sitting under it as it does its work in and through us.
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MARCUS BORG AND THE BIBLE
ACCORDING TO HIS READING OF IT:
