‘Calumny’ the cardinal says

The anticipated Swedish television broadcast aired discussing who knew what, when, about SSPX Bishop Richard Williamson’s Holocaust denial.

Catholic Culture reports:

Cardinal Dario Castrillon Hoyos has heatedly denied a report that he had been informed about the extreme views of Bishop Richard Williamson prior to the January 2009 announcement that the Pope was lifting the excommunications of Williamson and other bishops of the Society of St. Pius X (SSPX).

In a Swedish television broadcast earlier this week, Bishop Anders Arborelius of Stockholm disclosed that he was aware of Bishop Williamson’s statements questioning the severity of the Holocaust, and had alerted Vatican officials to those statements. But Cardinal Castrillon Hoyos — who, as president of the Ecclesia Dei commission at that time, was primarily responsible for Vatican talks with the SSPX, told the German newspaper Suddeutsche Zeitung that it was “calumny” to say that he had been informed of Williamson’s views.

Francesco Colafemmina writes that Cardinal Castrillon said that prior to the lifting of SSPX Bishop’s excommunication “none of us knew nothing about Bishop Williamson’s statements. None of us! And no one had the duty to know it!”

Thus ends the finger-pointing, for a while.

Birthermercial bumpersticker with help from LivePrayer.com

Send faxes and get a birthermercial bumper sticker for just $30 (Call now: Supplies are limited?). Let Bill Keller and Gary Kreep mislead you (Baptist Center for Ethics, PolitiFact 1 & 2, FactCheck 1 & 2,Wikipedia) with musically attended claims that this is a legitimate debate. Just watch the new ad full of dramatic rehashes of claims about where Obama was born. TPM reports that it’s running in seven Southern states.

The infomercial is hosted by Keller, a Liberty University educated fundamentalist minister who served “nearly three years in prison” for insider trading and whose LivePrayer.com produced the ad. Keller explains that LivePrayer.com was “founded for the sole purpose of having a site on the internet where people can go 24 hours a day, 7 days a week for prayer.” although the LivePrayer.com site has become complex and is decorated with, for example, a photoshopped image of Obama with Hitler. A copy of the birthermercial is also hosted there.

Keller interviews Kreep, who not only heads the birther organization U.S. Justice Foundation but also sponsors Defend Glenn (Beck), is attorney for Obama death pastor Wiley Drake and has been general counsel for the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps.

Both are wonderfully certain of themselves. Although in a recent ruling on one of the court actions filed with regard to this matter. U.S. District Judge Clay Land said that, “Unlike in ‘Alice in Wonderland,’ simply saying something is so does not make it so.”

Below is the introduction to the 28-minute ad:

Great Commission Desurgence?

Is it a Desurgence or a Resurgence?. As of this writing the Southern Baptist Convention’s Pray4GCR had signed up 5,458 prayer partners

That’s 0.034% of the roughly 16 million Southern Baptists and fewer than the 6,182 regular attendees at GCR task force chairman Ronnie Floyd’s church.

Yet Floyd offered the number of registrants to the Florida Baptist Witness as evidence that “God is making His will known to those leaders about their future. Therefore, I trust God and trust them.”

Even if God shows a certain lack of initial enthusiasm for the project? Or is this simply Southern Baptists responding to the dearth of straight GCR answers? Gobbledygook won’t get it with practical-minded Southern Baptists, we fear.

Seven unsolid BSCNC pillars

Why did the Baptist State Convention of North Carolina would include Eddie Hammett on a list of employees it let go in August?

He’s a prolific author, well-known church consultant and someone who draws crowds to breakout sessions about reaching young people while keeping older people.

The rational for throwing Hammett overboard lies deep within a speech made by BSCNC Executive Director-treasurer Milton Hollifield three months before the layoffs.

Hollifield told the BSCNC’s Board of Directors on May 20 that the organization had been streamlined based on a document called “Seven Pillars for Ministry,” which outlines Hollifield’s vision for the BSCNC. Hollifield told the directors then that he did not know if the BSCNC would be able to get by without downsizing.

“I shared that possibility with our staff this week. Painfully, I told them, I could not promise that we would be able to avoid eliminating positions,” he said. “If we do, however, it will be based upon what we consider to be mission critical in the direction of the work as documented in the 7 Pillars booklet.”

One would assume, therefore, that Hammett’s role was not considered “mission critical” under the “seven pillars.” They are:

1. Practice fervent prayer.
2. Strengthen existing churches.
3. Promote evangelism and church growth.
4. Plant new multiplication churches.
5. Increase work with the international community.
6. Escalate technology improvements and upgrade the web site.
7. Reclaim the younger generation of church leaders.

Several of the areas don’t seem to fit Hammett’s strengths. Yet it is still true that Hammett helped strengthen N.C. Baptist churches and helped reclaim younger leaders.

The Cooperative Baptist Fellowship of North Carolina understood that. That group hired Hammett about a month after he was let go by the BSCNC.

“Eddie brings to the table a unique awareness of the challenges and needs of congregational life in the 21st century,” said Larry Hovis, the CBFNC coordinator. “His background as a staff minister in local churches, coupled with his experience and expertise in coaching and consulting, will be an invaluable asset to what CBFNC is already doing in bringing Baptists together in North Carolina for Christ-centered ministry.”

BSCNC’s loss is clearly CBFNC’s big gain.

All of which leaves us with an nagging question: If they rationalize bad decisions, how can those pillars hold the BSCNC roof up?

Abandoned

When Christians leave a church, members go find them, if for no other reason to make sure they’re alright. Don’t they?

Real Live Preacher writes:

Most of the time when people leave our church, however, they just disappear. We notice their repeated absence after some weeks have passed.

After which he tries to track them down, to find out why they left. Which is, after all, his job. Otherwise, although he does not say so, they might actually disappear or be abandoned. As often happens in our society, as Norman Jamison doesn’t quite say either when he chronicles the cases of:

• Mary Sue Merchant, 74, whose body was discovered in her Sandy Run, S.C., residence more than a year after she died.
• Marvin Schur, 93, who froze to death after his electricity was cut off.
• Angel Torres, 78, who died a year after he was left paralyzed and mute in a hit-and-run accident that was mostly ignored by witnesses.

Those were headline-grabbing, heart-rending cases in a nation which both systematically and accidentically abandons people. We abaondone people because they have become inconvenient. And when that aspect of our nature comes home to us, we look briefly and turn away. As we did in 2005, when the evidence was massive:

“Let me tell you about abandoned people,” whispered J.R., his voice rising above the sighs and soft snores of sleepers curled on the church pews around him.

“Those people who were abandoned in New Orleans,” he said, “they were abandoned long before that hurricane hit. We all were.”

J.R. (he gave no other name) spends his days with 100 others, embraced in the warmth of a magnificent edifice, 103-year-old St. Boniface Church.


Sunlight streams through stained glass and gilded saints smile down upon them from the domed ceilings; the smells of their sour, acrid clothes and bodies mix with the lingering scent of incense.

This looks like an evacuation center – row after row of desperate people and their sparse belongings, a backpack here, a blanket there.

But this roomful of displaced people is neither an emergency shelter nor a temporary situation.

This is an ongoing, daily, chronic disaster.

Or visit a nursing home, where able-bodied family members have discarded those with whom they no longer wish to be bothered. You don’t have to look far. We’re Americans. We abandon the inconvenient.

Abandon reality all ye who enter there

Kelly Boggs of the Louisiana Baptist Messenger does not list, link to or provide pictures of a single item in his “litany” of “positions” he says liberals take regarding sexual matters.

He chooses instead to make it up, asserting as fact:

When it comes to all things pertaining to sexuality and sexual expression, ardent liberals advocate for nothing less than sexual anarchy. A litany of the left’s positions affirms that the previous statement is an ironclad truth.

Reality thus abandoned, Boggs thunders right along to endorse as our collective guide to sexual sanity British anthropologist J.D. Unwin’s 1940 paper “The Sexual and Economic Foundations of a New Society.” As though Unwin’s theories were fully developed.

Unwin, who was not a Christian, didn’t live to fully develop his theory of “the sexual foundations of a new society,” notes Christianity Today. Although the incomplete works were published in Hopousia. Boggs nonetheless uses Unwin’s scholarship to forecast the fall of American civilization. That does, however, fit nicely with the attention to facts with which Boggs launches his argument.

Georgia Batholic/Cathist incursion [Addendum II: Still no answer]

The Southern Batholics and Cathists have proposed what could become the legal framework of a Georgia Inquisition. Depending, of course, on how it is applied.

It is an amendment to the Georgia Baptist Convention Constitution that Enid, Oklahoma, Southern Baptist pastor Wade Burleson rightly dubs “horrible” — one Girolamo Savonarola could have greeted warmly.

Yet calmly Michael Ruffin, First Baptist Church of Fitzgerald, GA., offers the text of it to the readers of his blog, On Jericho Road. The keystone section says:

A cooperating church is one that gives evidence of its belief in Holy Scripture as its authority in matters of faith and practice and is in harmony and cooperation with the work and purpose of this Convention. A cooperating church does not include a church which knowingly takes, or has taken, any action to affirm, approve, or endorse homosexual behavior.

Matter of factly, Ruffin addressed some questions about the proposed amendment to the editor of the Georgia Christian Index. And in his first set of questions, Ruffin captures of spirit of the amendment as stated:

First, what is the nature of the “evidence” that is going to be required? Will it be good enough for a church to say, “Why yes, we believe in Holy Scripture as our authority in matters of faith and practice”?

Or will each local Georgia Baptist church that desires to continue as a cooperating GBC church be required by the GBC to adopt a confessional statement that affirms its commitment to biblical authority? If such an adoption is to be required, will a church be expected or allowed to compose its own statement or will it be permitted — or maybe even required — to adopt the Baptist Faith & Message Statement (rev. 2000) article on Scripture — or perhaps the entire statement — in order to be seen as providing sufficient “evidence”?

What Pastor Ruffin and a great many other thoughtful readers cannot help but read in the proposed amendment is Baptist ministerial behavior which has about it the scent of doctrinal inquisition.

Having seen and understood the obvious, then, Ruffin is really just asking how far it will go.

Certainly not to death by burning such as Savonarola suffered in the Piazza della Signoria. But how far? How much of the rich heritage of freedom of Baptist thought will be lost to creedalism if the amendment is adopted?

One commenter on Ruffin’s blog predicted his questions and their answers will not see publication in the Georgia Christian Index Web site.

We asked @IndexEditor Gerald Harris via twitter whether he plans to publish the answers to Ruffin’s questions on the Georgia Christian Index Web site.

For a mainstream daily newspaper, the answer would be an immediate “yes,” followed by publication.

That outcome seems to us likely to be in this case, because newspapers exist to inform their readers, and this is a matter of considerable concern.

Addendum: No answer from @IndexEditor

More than a day after our first tweet and second tweet to Georgia Christian Index Editor Gerald Harris (@indexeditor), there has been no reply.

But his recent twitter stream reveals neither replies nor consistent, daily status messages.

Harris’s recent, public twitter history suggests that he simply doesn’t know how to use the service.

Lessons?

Addendum II: Sunday about 6 p.m.: No answer.

Whither straight GCR answers?

Southern Baptist Convention President Johnny Hunt thinks state baptist newspaper stories about North American Mission Board/International Mission Board merger are “ludicrous.”

Meanwhile Ronnie Floyd, the chairman of the Great Commission Resurgence task force. is feeding that ludicrous fire.

Floyd reportedly told the Florida Baptist Witness three times in a recent email interview:

. . . the search committees of the respective entities should be “very prayerful and watchful of the work of the Great Commission Resurgence Task Force” when asked if the GCR Task Force may be considering recommendations that could alter the structure of those entities.

Now what do you suppose he meant by “alter the structure” of the NAMB and/or IMB?

Clarification was sought by the Baptist Witness. Asked to if the retirement announcements of Jerry Rankin (IMB) and Morris Chapman (CEO of the SBC Executive Committee), and the forced resignation of Geoff Hammond (NAMB) indicated a restructuring, Floyd said:

“These developments have clarified that God is doing something among us and we need to be intentional on finding out what He is doing and joining Him in it.”

Okey-doke.

Still needed: straight GCR answers.

‘Atheistic fundamentalism’

Mark Silk rationally answers P.Z. Myers abandonment of the data. Read the entire entry here.

Domestic violence & Baptist divorce

Confusing, both because correction was delayed until the raging controversy quieted, and because the original statement was clear. Nonetheless, a Saddleback Church minister reportedly told church members that he never intended to say Baptist women are obligated by scripture to stay in violently abusive relations.

It began on Jan. 8 when Associated Baptist Press (ABP) lit a fire simply by reporting:

Rick Warren, the Southern Baptist megachurch pastor chosen to offer the invocation at President-elect Barack Obama’s Jan. 20 inauguration, says the Bible does not permit a woman to divorce a spouse who is abusing her.

Half a year passed before Saddleback Teaching Pastor Tom Holladay, who actually voiced the controversial audio clip, said in a statement to Saddleback Church members that it was all a misunderstanding. According to ABP, he said he was just trying to explain to explain “the difference between an angry exchange between spouses and domestic violence” and:

“We believe that one violent incident is obviously more than enough to demand the need for a separation … .” And if an abusive spouse refuses to repent and try to change, there eventually comes a point at which he or she has abandoned the marriage and it cannot be saved.

That’s a little convoluted but not incomprehensible. Even so, in the course of the audio clip (transcript) he said, “I wish there were a third [reason for divorce] in Scripture, having been involved as a pastor with situations of abuse… There is something in me that wishes there were a Bible verse that says, ‘If they abuse you in this-and-such kind of way, then you have a right to leave them.’”

Momlogic has former Saddleback Church member Sheri Ferber’s account of receiving the kind of counsel apparent in the now-deleted audio clip. Momlogic notes that Saddleback has been asked to comment but has failed to do so.

This is of more than passing importance in part because Warren was chosen to give the invocation at Barak Obama’s presidential inauguration, in part because Warren has a politically active ministry which includes calling presidential candidates to his Faith Forum and in part because the submission Southern Baptist doctrine requires of women can be dangerous.

The foundations, impact and validity of that submission are a matter of ongoing debate.

The necessity of keeping the vulnerable women and children safe should not be.