Humility or Humiliation?

 

Homosexuality is sin; so too is murder, as is wishing for people to murdering oneself. The gospels tell of a time when some people brought a woman caught in sexual sin to Jesus. Jesus said that the one who had no sin should be the first to throw a stone at her. Jesus was the only one present who had no sin, and He did not throw a stone. Jesus did not excuse her sin; He even told her to not commit that sin again. Yet His words also sent away her accusers. We do not properly respond to other people's sins by falling into sin ourselves. Two sins we can fall into are the extremes of either permitting and supporting the other's sins or the opposite extreme of hating the people and wanting to harm or even kill them. The bullying tough-guy act should have no place in churches. It is no more than a perverse caricature of what Christian faithfulness should be. Similarly, the compromising nice guy act also has no place in churches. It is no more than a perverse caricature of what Christi...

...Massachusetts Bay was the first colony to formally legalize slavery in 1641; in 1656 it barred African Americans from serving in the militia; and in 1705 it outlawed interracial marriage, just as the Southern colonies had done in the 1660s. Northern colonists carefully crafted laws to eliminate the possibility of social equality between whites, Native Americans, and people of African descent. Repudiating intermarriage carried powerful legal and symbolic weight, relegating African Americans to the status of “otherness” and alienation, helping to guarantee that Black blood would not flow in white veins. Any Black convicted of raping a white woman would at the very least suffer castration, but a white who raped a Black woman would suffer no penalties whatsoever. Rhode Island even outlawed the right of a Black woman, regardless of legal status, to sue a white man for paternity. ...Northern owners, in what may seem counterintuitive, did not value slave children, as they brought addition...

 

 

 

The inquisitors themselves had no scruples on the subject, and condescended to no subterfuges respecting it, but always held that their condemnation of a heretic was a sentence of death. They showed this in averting the pollution of a Church by not uttering these sentences within the sacred precincts, this portion of the ceremony of an auto de fé being performed in the public square. One of their teachers in the thirteenth century, copied by Bernard Gui in the fourteenth, argues: “The object of the Inquisition is the destruction of heresy. Heresy cannot be destroyed unless heretics are destroyed: heretics cannot be destroyed unless their defenders and fautors are destroyed, and this is effected in two ways, viz., when they are converted to the true Catholic faith, or when, on being abandoned to the secular arm, they are corporally burned.” Lea, Henry Charles. A History of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages (Complete - Volume 1, 2 and 3) (pp. 576-577). Stingray. Kindle Edition.

It is intriguing to ask what was not identified as provoking God. When godly leaders searched for the causes of God’s anger, none to my knowledge publicly repented of the treatment of women in war. No one argued that they should repent of killing more than 100 women at Naseby. No one thundered God’s disapproval of stripping women naked at Colchester and sending them back into a city where they might starve to death. These acts may not have broken military convention, loosely defined. From a modern vantage point, they involved a multilayered violation of these women; violations that could have been critiqued with Scripture. It is hard to imagine any circumstance under which such treatment would be considered either just or godly. However they not only praised God for victories that involved such treatment of women, they published their deeds so future generations could render praise. The past was a foreign country, they weighed sin differently there. Rowley PhD from University of Leice...

 

  Lester Roloff’s Rebekah Home for Girls – A Place of Reformation or Exploitation? | The Wartburg Watch 2024 So what was life like at the Rebekah Home for Girls? According to an eye-opening article in Mother Jones , Roloff's wards were subjected to days in locked isolation rooms where his sermons played in an endless loop. They also endured exhaustive corporal punishment. "Better a pink bottom than a black soul," [emphasis mine] he famously declared at a 1973 court hearing after he was prosecuted by the state of Texas on behalf of 16 Rebekah girls. (The attorney general responded that he was more concerned with bottoms "that were blue, black, and bloody.") ... Letters going both in and out of the home were read first by the staff and censored… Phone calls, which could be placed only to immediate family members, were monitored. If any negativity concerning the home was brought up, the call would be disconnected immediately. No conversations were...

 

I found this article through a link on this page on The Heidelblog. The Puritans Are Not That Precious There’s nothing nuanced about kidnapping, the middle passage, hangings, whippings, rapes, children sold off–and that’s the sanitized listing of atrocities. If anything, the story has been so often told or so often willfully ignored that the sharp edges of truth have been sanded off. I tend to think that all the prickly points of Prop’s song were necessary for those of us whose consciences might be a little dull and imaginations unimaginative when it comes to entering human suffering or the blindness that produces it. There’s something that feels right to me about the “in your face”-ness of the song. We’re left no holes to crawl into, no escape routes, no intellectual deflections. We’re left naked before the gaze of the righteously indignant. Uncomfortable and searching. Uncomfortable because it’s searching. It’s in our–face. ... As Prop puts it in the song, “It sure must be nice ...