Christian anthropology vs identity politics
by Mark Tooley, Juicy Ecumenism.
Last weekend I attended the Missio Alliance annual convo. It’s a network of mostly left-of-center but not necessarily liberal Evangelicals…the Missio Alliance event, amid its many biblical appeals full of hope, often seemed to lack a strong sense of Christian anthropology and ecclesiology. The institutional church was often condemned for its failure to confront social inequities. But the Body of Christ as an ongoing teaching authority was frequently minimized or ignored. Our society’s current battles over sexuality, gender and the human body were also largely ignored, though these threats to human prosperity are arguably equal to if not greater than the latent historical impact of racism and discrimination based on sex.
Of course, sexual and gender identity politics are all the rage in Mainline Protestantism even more than in parts of Evangelicalism. Disgruntled churches and clergy upset over the recent United Methodist General Conference posted newspaper ads nationally pledging solidarity with LGBTQIA+. The plus signals the endlessly growing acronym for so-called sexual minorities. It should offend any Christian or believer in human dignity to definitively define any person based on particular sexual preferences or lack thereof. And yet this dehumanizing lexicon is boastfully pervasive.
The United Methodist General Conference was of course enormously good news overall, provoking widespread shock and horror among all who assumed every mainline denomination must surrender to abstract forces of history. But history is more unpredictable than often supposed because it belongs not to abstract forces but to a dynamic Divine Personality.
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