Tag: Election

In this election year, we are launching the #ELCAElectionActivator network, a facilitation of monthly virtual gatherings and email messages from the ELCA Witness in Society advocacy team to support and mutually equip our ELCA community in their localities interested in activities encouraging people to participate in the electoral process.   ACTIVE CITIZENS This church understands government as a means through which God works to preserve creation and build a more peaceful and just social order in a broken world. Our “civic participation is not simply voluntary, idealistic, or altruistic. The ELCA holds to the biblical idea that God calls God’s…

CONTENT UPDATED: May 10, 2024 Civic engagement is happening this election year in many diverse communities and contexts—and being activated and led by congregations, rostered leaders, ELCA-affiliated state public policy offices and members. Here’s a sampling of INITIATIVES & TRAINING OPPORTUNITIES and RESOURCES & REFLECTIONS. Consider taking part or taking inspiration for your locality! Also check out: ELCA Civic Engagement Guide Guidance for churches and clergy participating in the electoral process Plus resources at ELCA.org/votes and ELCA.org/civicengagement   INITIATIVES & TRAINING OPPORTUNITIES Jun.-Oct. 2024 6-session, monthly ONLINE SERIES | What does it mean to be Lutheran in a crucial election…

More strongly than Calvin, Beza thinks when dealing with the “elect” [“electi”) [sic] of particular persons with particular names. He directs his interest toward what is going on inside them, their questioning and receiving answers, their unsettledness followed by quiet resolution and then more unsettledness in their souls, the entire process of strange ups and downs, back and forths, which constantly goes on there. -Karl Barth, The Theology of the Reformed Confessions, 121-2 This is what happens when election is thought of in “Latin” terms, in abstraction from both its objective and subjective ground in the Godman, Jesus Christ. This…

There was a debate, very recently, between Dr. James White and Dr. Leighton Flowers with reference to John 6:44-45. The theological locus under disputation was on the Calvinist doctrines of unconditional election and the effectual call. White argued the positive position, i.e., affirming unconditional election and the effectual call; whilst Flowers argued the negative, i.e., denying unconditional election and the effectual call. For the purposes of this post, I am just going to assume the reader understands the entailments of said doctrines, and cut right to the chase in offering the Athanasian Reformed (AR) (Evangelical Calvinist) reading of John 6:44-45….

Here’s a post I found in my drafts from 2013, not sure if I ever posted this. Election. Election has been such a source of consternation for so many of us through our own theological years. The battle continues to fray on and on between the rascally classical Calvinists and Arminians—at least in its most popular expression—there is a trading of proof texts that sail right past each other as two ships in the dark navigate precariously past one another. There is a more sophisticated way to engage with this tumultuous topic. I like to think that Myk Habets and…

You go online in the Reformed space, and you get the same old trope on a doctrine of election and reprobation; you essentially get the L (imited Atonement) of the TULIP served up as the ‘hard teaching’ Gospel truth reality about the way God relates to part of humanity in a God-world relation. I am here to set the record straight once and for all! This is simply not how God has related to the world, and this based on the analogy of the incarnation. We aren’t groping around in the darkness for snipes, but as Christians, instead, we have…