ICHABOD, THE GLORY HAS DEPARTED - explores the Age of Apostasy, predicted in 2 Thessalonians 2:3, to attack Objective Faithless Justification, Church Growth Clowns, and their ringmasters. The antidote to these poisons is trusting the efficacious Word in the Means of Grace. John 16:8. Isaiah 55:8ff. Romans 10. Most readers are WELS, LCMS, ELS, or ELCA. This blog also covers the Roman Catholic Church, Eastern Orthodoxy, and the Left-wing, National Council of Churches denominations.
That crashing sound you heard Monday morning was waves of change breaching the levees of the evangelical Christian world when one of its most venerable icons, the Rev. Tony Campolo, came out in favor of full inclusion of LGBTQ people in the life of the church.
While his name may not be as familiar outside the evangelical bubble as his contemporary, the Rev. Billy Graham, Campolo, 80, is undeniably a pillar of the evangelical world and has been for close to 60 years.
Both Campolo and Graham, 96, are best known and beloved first and foremost as preachers largely unencumbered by overt denominational or political biases. Like Graham, Campolo also has been a spiritual counselor to U.S. presidents and has played the role of public pastor in times of national sorrow and joy. (Since I first heard him deliver a version of it during chapel when I was a student at Wheaton College in 1989, I cannot recall a single Holy Week passing without hearing his classic “It’s Friday But Sunday’s Coming!” homily at least once.)
Campolo. The Evangelicals have the same rule as the WELS-LCMS-ELS: no one can criticize their heroes, for any reason.
Graham and Campolo, both Baptist by tradition and creed, have been among the leading voices of mainstream evangelicalism, and their influence spans several generations. Together they helped shape the direction and expansiveness of the church as it attempted to navigate H. Richard Niebhur’s Christ and Culture paradigms and be in the world but not of itin the midst of ever increasing pluralism.
So when Campolo posted a statement on his web site this week announcing that he had changed his mind about homosexuality and was “urging the church to be more welcoming” to LGBTQ people, it was a big deal.
I start the day with coffee and writing. Lately I fixed Mrs. Ichabod some hot tea and brew coffee for myself. She officially approved the new booklet concept.
This will follow the Creation Gardening book.
Luther and the Word: The Lost Dutchman's Mine Discovered
I might reverse the subtitle and title, but that is the concept. I taught in the Suspicion Mountain range, Apache Junction, in the Phoenix area. The Lost Dutchman's Mine was often featured in the news, because no one found it, yet there was proof that exceptional gold was found somewhere out there.
Dutchman is the Americanized name for a German - Deutschman - so I thought that fit Luther very well. Besides that, he compared the Scriptures to a gold mine. The Book of Concord often calls the Gospel a treasure.
Contents
I. First - the historic view of the Scriptures.
II. Second, Luther's view of the Word of God and the Scriptures.
Some dealing with the modernist evasions about infallible and the Bible containing God's Word but not God's Word.
Roman Catholic evasions - gra-a-a-a-a-ay areas of Scripture, the pope needing to clarify it, Holy Mother Synod - all the excuses used by Lutherans today.
III. Annotated Lutheran reading list - the most important books to read for theology students, clergy, and laity. I already have an offer to help with the research and a suggestion for the book list.
IV. Pretty good books. For those building up their libraries, paper or Kindle, additional titles.
The president of Emory University has spoken to demonstrators who said they were frightened after someone wrote 'Trump 2016' in chalk around campus.
Students at the Atlanta school, which has an enrollment of more than 14,000 claim their 'safe space' was violated when the messages appeared on sidewalks and buildings.
Jim Wagner, president of the Atlanta university, wrote Tuesday that the students viewed the messages as intimidation, and they voiced 'genuine concern and pain' as a result. He acted after student government wrote to him and slammed the university's response, prompting a meeting that led to protests. Now administrators want to track down those responsible for the controversial markings. But some commentators on the university's student newspaper website told the students to grow up and accused them of being babies.
GJ - Many are alarmed at the students who cannot bear a different idea being voiced on their campus. The schools offer a safe place for them, hot chocolate, and all the extras for their pre-school emotional state.
The reason is simple. Each college student is a "walking bag of money," as they call foreign students in the WELS system who pay their full share of costs.
I "applied" as a Bethany Lutheran College, Mankato student - a child of alumni, with great SAT and ACT scores. That earned me about $12,000 off and a chance at a very big presidential scholarship. That has to come from somewhere, and foreign students pay 100%.
Even a tiny college with no frills is asking for $30,000 a year for room, board, and tuition. The gain or loss of a few students means a lot of money. Let's say a 200 enrollment college loses 10 students to other colleges charging less (especially for new and transfer students) and offering more frills. They just lost $300,000 from the annual budget.
If the private college is more established, the basic cost is often $50,000 a year. Ten of those goldmines are worth $500,000 a year.
That is why Martin Luther College has been in free-fall for years, always too few students and plenty of competition for Wisconsin Lutheran College and Bethany. Colleges need endowment funds to make up the difference, and the synodical schools lack that, so they throw the difference onto the students in the form of student loans.
No one wants to do anything to offend a single college student, and that attitude reverberates through the whole school.
If a student is offended by a single remark and tweets it around school, everyone is up in arms and getting the administrators to do something about it. The administrators are so worried about losing a few walking bags of money - or a lot of them - that they react with fear and cowardice.
First-hand experience: The official policy was to expel a student who is caught plagiarizing three times. A student is caught three times in the same class and reported. He gets an F for the class, as is proper, and his coach gives him an easy A during the summer in a made up class. The two grades average as C, and the student stays, grinning about his fate, confirmed by his Evangelical school in his blatant dishonesty.
A faculty member told me that everyone was cheating, via tweets, during a test, so she erased the entire test from the gradebook. So - it never happened - and she continued teaching a lot of classes for very little pay.
The coaches, the college president, his mother, his sisters, and his brothers-in-law got the bulk of salaries. Those walking bags of money were precious in their eyes. Can you imagine anything more fun than dressing up as a coach, skipping all academic meetings, and playing ball all day? Only a sucker would teach a real class for McDonalds pay.
The graduation for Martin Luther College trannies. "You Don't Own Me."
Boo!
I had fun with the skittish in class. I grew tired of students who capitalized every word in the english Language but could not manage to capitalize The word bible. I said, "If anyone writes Bible with a small b again, I will flunk you out of this class and have you expelled from this college." The reaction ricocheted through the college for some time, and I saw Bible written the right way from then on.
The gradebook was online and calculated the grade average as soon as scores were put in the right place. I would drop in all the zeroes and watch the reaction. "But I have been sick, busy, pre-occupied, moving to a new place, getting a new job!"
My response was, "I cannot grade nothing with anything but a zero."
College graduates cannot write and spell because no one wanted to offend them with a low grade, so they enter graduate school unable to write at a junior high level.
The Boomers are still in charge of academics in America, and they are the Grifter Generation. We were lucky to have been taught by people who survived the Depression and WWII. The snowflake generation will melt away when challenged to accept adult roles in the future. But the saying goes, the housemates of the Bernie Sanders student cadre are all called "Mom" and "Dad."
A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly.
But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. For the traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their arguments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men.
He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to fear. The traitor is the plague.
Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 B.C.) Roman Statesman, Philosopher and Orator
