17 April 2008

It Kind of Leaves One Speechless, No?

Concordia Portland Prof

33 comments:

Brandon Ross said...

Speechless because my jaw hit the floor while trying not to cry at the same time.

A teacher of the heap that teaches according to the satisfaction of itching ears. He should be removed immediately.

Anonymous said...

once again I am glad I left that place after one year.

Cha said...

Pretty far down the slippery slope, I'd say.

It's what I hate about that slope.

Anonymous said...

I need to go wrap my head in duct tape to keep it from exploding!

With everything that has been transpiring over the past month, I have learned to keep a roll handy.

Shaun M

J.G.F. said...

Kyrie Eleison!

Dan @ Necessary Roughness said...

Good grief. This prof needs to be a STUDENT at the CTSFW Islam conference.

Anonymous said...

It seems every day there is something else in the LCMS that gives cause for sadness. Ironic that tomorrow is the anniversary of Luther willing to die for his conviction: here I stand, I can do no other. From Luther to hey, don't be so specific, you might hurt someone's feelings.

J.G.F. said...

Does anyone know if there has been any official action taken against this professor? He needs to be removed immediately. I'd be more than happy to affix my name to the charge. I am scandalized by this.

John

dgkirch said...

A timely Gospel reading (3-year) for this Sunday: John 14:1-14.
But then if:

"It would be best simply to avoid the term [Son of God] in our preaching and guide our people also to avoid it in their witnessing"

and if using the name of Jesus in a service feeds Muslim misconceptions, then proclaiming this reading from the gospel according to St. John would be "unhelpful" if not downright inflammatory!

Kyrie Eleison indeed!

Anonymous said...

Having graduated from there, I am not surprised. Saddened, yes, but not surprised. Fortunately, most of the damage has been undone at Seminary.

Anonymous said...

And people keep making this argument that Christian parents should only send their kids to Christian colleges, to prevent their kids' faith from being corrupted!

Reverend Christopher Jackson said...

This is interesting to me because it is a wake up call. This sort of thing is not that different from many of the approaches used by people in our culture in the attempt to be relevant and "incarnational."

Maria said...

Please tell me that was a joke...

Josh Schroeder said...

Is this another attempt to appeal to a "broader audience"?

We're not called to camouflage our confession and appeal to the lowest common denominator; at least not in a worship setting. It's one thing to use arguments that appeal to Greeks in the Areopagus, but something entirely different to rewrite our confession to make it Islamic-neutral.

Doesn't the host of Law and Gospel on KFUO, Pastor Tom Baker, say that theology is the art of drawing distinctions? The differences between Islam and Christianity must be clear and distinct. How can we witness to non-Christians when we blur the lines between confessions?

I'm sorry, but kumbaya theology is an offense to the Gospel and an enemy of evangelism.

Lutheran Lucciola said...

Reading this causes pain in my stomach.

Chris said...

...this is a joke right?...please?

Kurt Onken said...

No joke. This is just a sampling of the kind of garbage that we hear frequently from the CU Portland crowd out here in the Northwest.

Anonymous said...

And...you want yet one more "minor detail"?

Herb Hoefer works for The LCMS' Board for Mission Services as Area Director for India and Asia!!!

Yup, our man on the mission field.

Read it and weep.

But let's not get too hung up on incessant doctrinal purification, this is not our grandfather's Synod, let charity prevail!

+ Robert Wurst said...

Why is everyone *so* surprised?

Do you not remember Yankee Stadium? Do you not remember the same District President saying that Christians and Muslims worship the same God? Do you not remember that our Synodical President did not correct these things?

This is simply a logical outgrowth of such seed. It is nothing new.

Very distressing, absolutely. New and shocking, not really.

Lord, have mercy.

Anonymous said...

It beggars the imagination. What education must one recieve, what journey must one travel to reach this level of obfuscate thinking?

Re write the Creeds so that they don't offend Muslims?

Change the wording of our prayers so they don't offend Muslims?

Substitute the elements of the Sacraments so they don't offend Muslims?

Remove images, crucifixes etc. so that they don't offend Muslims?

I lived in Saudi Arabia for six months, and I can tell you that they would not move so much as a prayer rug to accomodate a Christian should he dare step into a Mosque.

If we have no respect for our creeds, doctrines, sacraments, traditions or furnishings, why should the Muslims have any respect for us or what we believe? What this sort of rolling over implies is that Islam is superior to Christianity because the Christian is more worried about offending men than he is about offending his God.

Each paragraph of this article is worse than the last, but the worst is that it was written in September of 2007, and this torpid ignoramus didn't get fired as soon as his muddled words saw the light of day.

Rev. Shane R. Cota said...

Apparently there is absolutely nothing you cannot say or do in this synod, just so long as you do it in the name of "evangelism" or being "missional."

You can even give up Christianity in order to be "missional."

I think I need to take a "missional" trip to the pub to do some "evangelism" after hearing this nonsense.

This is likely the kind of stuff that gets the answer, "Depart from me..."

Anonymous said...

Hmm... ok... am I missing something? I have, while being dismayed at the heterodoxy in LCMS, comme to expect it to some extent...

I have come to expect some unionism and syncretism...

But.. as I see it, this has gone far beyond either... and is clearly heretical... a heresy...

His words are clearly the words of "anti Christ".

So instead of calling for his dismissal from the position he is in... why is he not excommunicated from the Church?

Is tolerance for heresy the natural outgrowth of tolerance for Unionism, syncretism and seeker sensitive babbling?

This pains me ... but also angers me beyond belief... this goes so far beyond "being sensitive".

The words of the Athanasian Creed come to mind...

"This is the catholic faith, which except a man believe faithfully he cannot be saved."

Oh... but wait... he is advocating we re write all the creeds... to problem solved.

Matt B.

Anonymous said...

Matt, interestingly he never went near the Athanasian Creed, probably too much work to 'adapt.' Now I see why Luther appreciated it so much.

Anonymous said...

a. bergstrazer...

Yes... it is interesting that he did not explicitly touch the Athanasian creed...

Then again, that may have been by design... because he would not be able to "modify" or "edit" the Athansian creed to minimize mentions of Jesus, or "the Son" etc...that creed is replete with explicit references to Jesus, His Divinity etc...

Matt B.

William Weedon said...

What I would dearly love to hear is a dialog between the author of that paper and Dr. Adam Francisco! I wonder if he's commented on it anywhere? He addresses the matter of witnessing to Muslims, but from quite a different standpoint.

Anonymous said...

Did the essay get pulled off the web?

William Weedon said...

Hmm. It appears so.

Anonymous said...

Down the memory hole...

Anonymous said...

Same thing used to happen back in Texas; turn on the light and the coaches scurried back under the rug.

Sorry, that's a little gross, but entirely apropos, I think.

kjslutherisch said...

C'mon. I couldn't have been the only one who saw that coming. That's why I saved a copy. I posted a PDF at my blog http://oldparson.blogspot.com.

If someone publishes something publicly on the website of a synodical university, he needs to own up to it. The only way we will resolve the tensions in synod is by open and frank discussion. Simply making it disappear and pretending it wasn't there won't cut it.

Dan @ Necessary Roughness said...

It's interesting that he pulled it. Either he felt a sense of shame about such notoriety, or someone called him and said, "HEY, you're making us look bad!" That recognition is a plus in itself.

How many students transferred how of his classes when they read that? It would be like one of my old chemistry profs saying let's call chlorine helium, and it won't be harmful.

Unfortunately standard laymen haven't read enough enough C.S. Lewis to recognize Tashlan when they see it. Lord have mercy, we have work to do. :)

Anonymous said...

If you click on the link on the ALPB forum, you can still get to the paper. Maybe the roaches own the house now.

Anonymous said...

Oh wait, no you can't.

All the more interesting since the quote from Hoefer on that forum had him acting like had done nothing untoward nor intended to deny the Trinity and the incarnation, only proposed some points for discussion.