God is Sin and Jesus is a Bigot: Teachings of Lutheran Theological Seminary at Philadelphia

4/27/2014

The Lutheran Theological Seminary at Philadelphia (LTSP) is an ELCA seminary that is charged with the responsibility of teaching and preparing the future leaders and pastors of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. Bible-believing Christians should be outraged at what is being taught at LTSP.

Rev. Dr. Wil Gafney is an associate professor of Hebrew and Old Testament at LTSP, and she has some very non-Biblical and heretical thoughts and teachings which she imparts to her students. Dr. Wil Gafney writes -

“Jesus said to a woman kneeling at his feet begging for help for her child, “Let the children be filled first, for it is not good to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” Did Jesus just call that woman a b----? I know this is Jesus and we’ve been trained to read him and hear him religiously, more than religiously, divinely, incarnationally. But where I come from you cannot call a child a dog without calling her mama a dog and you cannot call a woman a dog without calling her a b----.”

“And I’m standing up to Jesus, talking to and about women like me using language like that.”

“Apparently even Jesus needed a little help”

“How human, how divine is your Jesus? Is he human enough to be bigoted and biased? Or does your preconceived notion of the divinity of Jesus mean that whatever he said was holy.”

This ELCA seminary teacher is posing the thought that not everything the Son of God said was right, true and holy. At the same time she is presenting to future ELCA pastors that Jesus was bigoted and biased. (read here)

An additional quote from the seminary professor is this, ''The image of God is old, young, strong, weak, pregnant, infertile, nursing, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered, straight and crooked, saint and sinner.” (read here)

Let's be clear: there is no sin in God. Sin is not an element of God's nature, yet this ELCA professor is stating that it is. She is saying God is a sinner, a lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered. Humans are made in the image of God (Genesis 1:26) but our sinful ways are not part of God.

3 Comments

Didaskalos link

4/29/2014 09:39:28 am

When Joan Osborne sang " What if God was one of us? Just a slob like one of us?", she probably didn't know that ELCA seminary professors were busy making her questions the capstone of their deconstructionist theology.

Who better to put a stamp of approval on ELCA-voted, ELCA-promoted apostasies and heresies than an anthropomorphized "god" created by the ELCA in its own image?

Wil Gafney almost hits for the circuit in these two sermons, dragging the Father and His Son down to her "womanist” eisegetical depths. Jesus (known by the eponymous founder of Lutheranism as Lord and Savior) is demoted by Gafney to Jesus the Passably Good Example (when He’s not being bigoted or sexist). God the Father is so busy creating sinful proclivities in the humans occupying Gafney’s universe, it’s a wonder He's ever had time to make a whale or an anemone.

Martin Luther wrestled with the Bible passage about Jesus and the Syrophoenician woman. Not surprisingly, he reached a different conclusion from Gafney:

“. . . All this, however, is written for our comfort and instruction, that we may know how deeply God conceals his grace before our face, and that we may not estimate him according to our feelings and thinking, but strictly according to his Word. For here you see, though Christ appears to be even hardhearted, yet he gives no final decision by saying "No." All his answers indeed sound like no, but they are not no, they remain undecided and pending. For he does not say: I will not hear thee; but is silent and passive, and says neither yes nor no. In like manner he does not say she is not of the house of Israel; but he is sent only to the house of Israel; he leaves it undecided and pending between yes and no. So he does not say, Thou art a dog, one should not give thee of the children's bread; but it is not meet to take the children's bread and cast it to the dogs; leaving it undecided whether she is a dog or not. Yet all those trials of her faith sounded more like no than yes; but there was more yea in them than nay; aye, there is only yes in them, but it is very deep and very concealed, while there appears to be nothing but no.

"By this is set forth the condition of our heart in times of temptation; Christ here represents how it feels. It thinks there is nothing but no and yet that is not true. Therefore it must turn from this feeling and lay hold of and retain the deep spiritual yes under and above the no with a firm faith in God's Word, as this poor woman does, and say God is right in his judgment which he visits upon us; then we have triumphed and caught Christ in his own words. As for example when we feel in our conscience that God rebukes us as sinners and judges us unworthy of the kingdom of heaven, then we experience hell, and we think we are lost forever. Now whoever understands here the actions of this poor woman and catches God in his own judgment, and says: Lord, it is true, I am a sinner and not worthy of thy grace; but still thou hast promised sinners forgiveness, and thou art come not to call the righteous, but, as St. Paul says in I Tim 1, 15, "to save sinners." Behold, then must God according to his own judgment have mercy upon us.

"King Manasseh did likewise in his penitence as his prayer proves; he conceded that God was right in his judgment and accused himself as a great sinner and yet he laid hold of the promised forgiveness of sins. David also does likewise in Ps 51, 4 and says: "Against thee, thee only, have I sinned, and done that which is evil in thy sight; that thou mayest be justified when thou speakest, and be clear when thou judgest." For God's disfavor in every way visits us when we cannot agree with his judgment nor say yea and amen, when he considers and judges us to be sinners. If the condemned could do this, they would that very moment be saved. We say indeed with our mouth that we are sinners; but when God himself says it in our hearts, then we are not sinners, and eagerly wish to be considered pious and free from that judgment. But it must be so; if God is to be righteous, in his words that teach you are a sinner, then you may claim the rights of all sinners that God has given them, namely, the forgiveness of sins. Then you eat not only the crumbs under the table as the little dogs do; but you are also a child and have God as your portion according to the pleasure of your will.

"This is the spiritual meaning of our Gospel and the scriptural explanation of it. For what this poor woman experienced in the bodily affliction of her daughter, whom she miraculously caused to be restored to health again by her faith, that we also experience when we wish to be healed of our sins and of our spiritual diseases, which is truly a wicked devil possessing us; here she must become a dog and we become sinners and brands of hell, and then we have already recovered from our sickness and are saved.”

Martin Luther, “The Faith of the Syrophoenician Woman: Ser

Scott Burton

5/13/2014 02:21:46 am

We can paraphrase Dr. Gafney's thesis in the form of a syllogism like this:

A) Jesus metaphorically referred to the Gentiles as "dogs" (Mark 7:27; Matt. 15:26), meaning, in the contextual analogy of a household, "peripheral members."

B) A female dog is (correctly) called in English a "bitch"; and the same word (in vulgar usage) has ALSO the completely different and unrelated meaning of "a malicious and spiteful woman."

C) Therefore, Jesus was speaking to the Syrophoenician woman insultingly, calling her malicious and spiteful, using a vulgar, sexist, and abusive English word which nowhere occurs in the text, and which did not exist until centuries after Jesus' death.

Eric Yeutter

7/24/2014 03:37:53 pm

Nothing but utter BLASPHEMY!
This false teacher is trying to force her current day, pc, ultra-liberal, radical women's rights agenda onto a totally different time period.
I refuse to acknowledge her supposed academic credentials because she teaches utterly false garbage.
A professor of Ivrit (Hebrew) and the Tanakh (Old Testament) would fully know that when Jeshua (the REAL name of Jesus.... His Hebrew name, not the Greek Jesus) said "dogs", that He was 100% referring to the Samaritan people. He was NOT referring to the well woman in the terms of todays urban youth vocab. The Jews of that time were opposed to the Samaritans because of their mixed race and religious beliefs. The. Jews of then did not think Samaritans were true Jews.
This so-called professor of Hebrew and Old Testament should know better. She needs to abandon her rabid, bitter and false ideology and stick with the Truth of HaShem......what Jews use to refer to God, King of the Universe, and His Son, Jeshua.

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God is Sin and Jesus is a Bigot: Teachings of Lutheran Theological Seminary at Philadelphia

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