Obama the theologian
by joelmartin
A couple months ago, Barrack Obama issued some theological pronouncements. Speaking on March third he said:
I will tell you that I don’t believe in gay marriage, but I do think that people who are gay and lesbian should be treated with dignity and respect and that the state should not discriminate against them. So, I believe in civil unions that allow a same-sex couple to visit each other in a hospital or transfer property to each other. I don’t think it should be called marriage, but I think that it is a legal right that they should have that is recognized by the state. If people find that controversial then I would just refer them to the Sermon on the Mount, which I think is, in my mind, for my faith, more central than an obscure passage in Romans. That’s my view.
Here Senator Obama is practicing what theologians call ‘canon within a canon.’ That is, he is saying that we should view some parts of the Bible as more important than other parts, and read the other parts in light of those more privileged parts. But let us not concede to the Senator the high ground of the Sermon on the Mount. Loving your neighbor as yourself, which is presumably what he was referring to, does not equal accepting their sin. In fact it might mean just the opposite, as in warning one’s neighbor of his sin so that he does not fall into eternal destruction.
But setting that aside for the time being, just how is a passage from Romans ‘obscure’? Oxford says that obscure means things like: “not discovered or known about; uncertain. Not…easily understood; not important or well known.” For a great part of the American population, the entire Bible is ‘obscure’ – even amongst the baptized. And one could certainly argue that the Sermon on the Mount is one of the more famous passages in the Bible. However, someone acquainted with the Scripture should know St. Paul’s epistle to the Romans with more than a passing knowledge. The passage in question comes from the very first chapter of that epistle, and says:
Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves, because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! Amen.
For this reason God gave them up to dishonorable passions. For their women exchanged natural relations for those that are contrary to nature; and the men likewise gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another, men committing shameless acts with men and receiving in themselves the due penalty for their error. And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a debased mind to do what ought not to be done.
This passage seems abundantly clear based on following basic principles of grammar and logic. In fact, there are many such references throughout the Scripture, including when the Holy Trinity spoke to God’s people in former times:
You shall not lie with a male as with a woman; it is an abomination. And you shall not lie with any animal and so make yourself unclean with it, neither shall any woman give herself to an animal to lie with it: it is perversion. Do not make yourselves unclean by any of these things, for by all these the nations I am driving out before you have become unclean, and the land became unclean, so that I punished its iniquity, and the land vomited out its inhabitants.
But to Senator Obama, all of this should be ignored in light of something ‘more central’ to the faith. Think for a moment about what is occurring here: a sitting Senator is pronouncing on matters theological, exercising his own version of hermeneutics and arguing from his conclusion to his argument. Now, I have no problem with any politician engaging in theology, but where are our leftist friends who despise all Republicans who use the Bible in any way? Where are their cries of outrage about the Bible being deployed as a political wedge? Is there any doubt that all Obama is doing is cherry-picking whatever he wants to justify an agenda that hates God’s law, and sacrifices the unborn to abortion?
Regarding abortion, he said:
I think that the bottom line is that in the end, I think women, in consultation with their pastors, and their doctors, and their family, are in a better position to make these decisions than some bureaucrat in Washington. That’s my view. Again, I respect people who may disagree, but I certainly don’t think it makes me less Christian. Okay.
In our day and age, almost nothing that someone believes seems to ‘make them less Christian,’ but lines need to be drawn somewhere. From the earliest times of the Church, abortion was known as a grave evil. The Didache for example teaches:
And the second commandment of the Teaching; You shall not commit murder, you shall not commit adultery, you shall not commit pederasty, you shall not commit fornication, you shall not steal, you shall not practice magic, you shall not practice witchcraft, you shall not murder a child by abortion nor kill that which is born.
Believing that it is someone’s ‘decision’ whether or not to butcher her baby may not make you ‘less of a Christian’, what it does make you is a Christian in need of repentance and church discipline if you persist in your evil belief. There is no place in our faith for this endorsement of evil, no matter how Obama and others want to muddy the waters to win an election. God have mercy on the unborn in our nation and the world.
