Here we go again. Another wolf in sheep’s clothing. Another political leader who claims to be a Christian who violates the very clearest of biblical teachings on matters of faith and practice. Another politician who does not seem to have a clue what her faith is all about.
The Premier of New South Wales, Kristina Keneally claims to be a Christian and a Catholic. Yet she has decided that NSW should grant homosexuals adoption rights. She has been all over the place in trying to defend this decision. At first she said, “My religious views do not play a part in the legislation that I as a leader of the Labor Party bring before the government.”
Yet she soon started waxing lyrical about theology, or at least her rather skewed version of it. When she was asked to explain how her Catholic faith could be reconciled with homosexual adoption rights, she said, “Jesus sat with the sinners and the saints and he was not a man of judgment but rather a man of love”.
That of course got her into trouble with the PC brigade and the homosexual militants. So she had to backtrack from the impression she gave that homosexuals might be sinners: “That’s not at all what I meant to say. My point is this. Jesus loves all. He accepted all. For me, that is the strongest message that comes out of the gospel.”
The further she went with this, the more she mangled Scripture and biblical Christianity: “Jesus was about love.” She continued, “If I look at the gospel message it is one of acceptance, it is one of love.” And even more: “Where in the gospel [sic] do they talk about same-sex relations?”
Using examples of usury, women and slavery, she said we must “reinterpret Scripture in light of human understanding and human experience”. Finally, she said Jesus and Christianity are about unselfish love. “When I see gay and lesbian people giving that unselfish love to a child, that’s something that I – not just as a Christian and a Catholic but as the leader of this state – want to support.”
There is so much sloppy thinking, poor reasoning, and downright unbiblical nonsense here that one hardly knows where to begin. Perhaps it first can be said that we expect as much from a feminist and “progressive” Catholic who has clearly jettisoned traditional Catholic teaching on these issues, let alone basic Christian teaching.
For example, the American-born Keneally wrote a master’s thesis in Ohio in which she argued that God is female, or at least that God should be cast as a woman. So much for historic Christianity. Let’s just rewrite the Bible to fit it in with modern feminist theory.
And she clearly rejects even her own Catholic standards of orthodoxy. The authoritative Catechism of the Catholic Church (1994) is meant to be, as Pope John Paul II declared, “a sure and authentic reference text for teaching catholic doctrine”.
Section 2357 of the Catechism states: “Basing itself on Sacred Scripture, which presents homosexual acts as acts of grave depravity, tradition has always declared that ‘homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered.’ They are contrary to the natural law. They close the sexual act to the gift of life. They do not proceed from a genuine affective and sexual complementarity. Under no circumstance can they be approved.”
Now I am not a Catholic, but even as a Protestant I can see that the Premier is at odds with what her own faith teaches. But of course she is also at odds with what the Bible teaches. As to her various weak and distorted pronouncements on Scripture, I have written about such matters frequently.
Biblical love is not mere sentimentality and letting anyone do anything. Biblical love is tied in with keeping God’s commandments. Jesus made it perfectly clear that if his followers do not keep his teachings, then God’s love is not in them. Consider just a few passages:
John 14:15 If you love me, you will obey what I command.
John 14:21 Whoever has my commands and obeys them, he is the one who loves me. He who loves me will be loved by my Father, and I too will love him and show myself to him.
John 14:31 but the world must learn that I love the Father and that I do exactly what my Father has commanded me.
John 15: 10 If you obey my commands, you will remain in my love, just as I have obeyed my Father’s commands and remain in his love.
John 15:14 You are my friends if you do what I command.
And Jesus was in fact making judgments all the time. He warned people to flee wrath to come, and he spoke about hell more than any other New Testament figure. He rebuked, he challenged, and he spoke the truth. He made it clear that it was a narrow, exclusive road to eternal life which many would reject.
Her backtracking on the S word is also interesting. Of course the Bible makes it clear that we are all sinners. Some however have come to Christ, admitted their sins, repented, and received God’s forgiveness. So in that sense homosexuals are sinners like anyone else, in need of redemption like anyone else.
And even if we leave Christianity out of the discussion entirely, we still have to ask how it is loving to deny children their own mum and dad. Where is the love for these children who will be deliberately denied of the most basic and essential of human rights, to be raised by one’s own mother and father?
Just because homosexual adults want children is no reason to forget about the ones who stand to lose the most here – the children. But in these debates the welfare and wellbeing of children are never considered. It’s all about the selfish desires of adults. Nothing very loving there Kristina.
But we have seen this time and time again: leaders parading their Christian credentials, but when it comes to crunch time, these are chucked out the window, as they bow to every politically correct social engineering agenda. Their faith seems to be all words and no actions.
The Old Testament made much of this situation. It especially targets religious leaders – be they prophets, priests or kings – who claim to be God’s people, but live lives showing they clearly are not. Indeed, some of the sternest and most frightful condemnations found in the OT are reserved for such people.
God has not changed, and he still demands that those who call themselves by his name should walk the talk. Those who do not will have to give an account of themselves one day, and it will not be a day in which cheap excuses or PC rhetoric will get very far.
Once again, we need to pray for our political leaders, whether they call themselves followers of Christ or not. And we also need to exhort them when they need exhorting, and challenge them when they need challenging. We have a watchman’s duty here, and if we do not carry it out, we will be held responsible (see Ezekiel 3 and 33 for example). This is an important obligation which we all need to take seriously.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/video/2010/07/02/2943722.htm
http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/indepth/kristina-keneally-believes-god-is-a-girl/story-fn4lqo4t-1225809552381
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