Saturday, June 7, 1997

So much for the First Amendment

By Michael O'Connor / Abilene Reporter-News

Jots and tittles:

What were they thinking?: Christianity Today reports that the Miami Herald refused to carry an Easter advertisement from the Jesus Fellowship, an 800 member, nondenominational church in the city.

The church had wanted to buy advertising space about its Easter services on the wrappers the papers are delivered in so subscribers would see the ad first thing when they picked up their newspapers. The newspaper, however, said the ad would be offensive to its readers and refused to carry it.

After the church protested - and sent a lawyer to visit the publisher - the paper ran the ad on inside news pages for free. The publisher said the paper serves readers of many faiths who wouldn't care to be confronted by the ad, and he believed Christian readers would be offended by an ad from another faith.

The church's pastor found this reasoning to be ridiculous. In his view, if the ad is offensive on the outside of the paper, it would be offensive inside the newspaper. He might just have a point.

Blessed are the victors: Well, the fundamentalists won. The International Bible Society and Zondervan have scrapped plans to produce a gender-neutral version of the popular New International Version of the Bible.

The Associated Press quoted professor Andreas Kostenberger of Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary as saying, "It's a victory for the word of God. You don't compromise Scripture just to make women feel included."

Piffle.

Scripture has been compromised in innumerable ways to include some groups and exclude others. The simple fact is that every translation of Scripture has been produced out of someone's agenda, including the beloved King James. Read your church history. This is no victory for the word of God. This is a victory for a bunch of theological hoodlums.

Keep it in-house please: Finally, I saw a brief story on the AP wire a week or so back about a church that had been ordered by a judge to hold an election on keeping its pastor. The details were sketchy, but congregation and pastor were having a dispute and decided to take to the courts to settle it.

Surely the matter could have been resolved without dragging it into court. Actually, I was surprised the court intervened. The state has no compelling interest in the matter, at least not that was reported. Why mess with it?

But what I thought of first was that the apostle Paul would have had a conniption. He tore into the Corinthian church for taking their disputes to the secular courts - granted they were Roman courts, not the kind one American judge believes is founded on the Ten Commandents, but secular courts nonetheless.

In his view, the church would be better off letting the lowliest member settle the matter than air its disputes in a secular court.

"The very fact that you have lawsuits among you means you have been completely defeated already. Why not rather be wronged? Why not rather be cheated? Instead, you yourselves cheat and do wrong, and you do this to your brothers," he wrote. (At least according to the acceptable version of the NIV)

Pretty harsh words, and ones that seem to have been totally abandoned by the church in our society.