New Schools of Thought

If your are not currently spending your days, or evenings, on a University campus, you may have lost touch with what is being promulgated.

I read with interest some comments on “embodied theology.” I confess I don’t know what that means – perhaps the comments will help us understand.

Melissa Browning, Ethics Instructor at Mercer University’s McAfee School of Theology and several other Universities, is quoted as saying:

Christians need to formulate “an embodied theology. . .that is rooted in and takes seriously our relationship to our bodies.” That kind of theology rooted in experience challenges Christians to re-examine their views on same-sex relationships, she asserted. “While there are resources within the Scripture for mutuality and equality, there are also texts that devalue women’s bodies or maintain strict gender hierarchies that shape opposite-sex relationship today,” said Browning. “For those of us seeking to dismantle their hierarchies, same-sex relationships can point toward justice, modeling a form of relationality that is not hierarchal and is less caught up in the constraints of gender.” She took issue with the Apostle Paul’s views on the body and sexuality. Browning called on Christians to “do theology from the body,” listening to lived experiences–even those that make them uncomfortable. “How might our gay and lesbian, bisexual, transgender and queer sisters and brothers be teaching us to finally accept sex as grace and gift?” she asked. “When we listen to the body, when we love the body, when we do theology from the body, we learn that lived experiences matter,” she said. (Ken Camp, Baptist Standard)

Well now! Only a very foolish person tries to go from experience to Truth rather than from Truth to experience. I am not sure the mind-set of anyone who would argue with “the Apostle Paul’s views” if one recognizes the Scripture is the work of God’s Holy Spirit. . .not the Apostle. And pardon me for being “intolerant,” but I am going to build my theology from the Word of God, period. I don’t believe we need folks who continue in sin to attempt to teach us “grace” which they obviously have not fully discovered.

Our society’s insanity scares me. Now, I am reaching the point where some of those who teach Theology scare me.