Lorie Alexander of The Transformed Wife tackles Emily McFarland Miller’s interview with Jen Hatmaker. Miller’s piece appeared in the progressive news site Religion News Service. Recently LifeWay Christian stores pulled Hatmaker’s books from its shelves over her very vocal and unbiblical stance on homosexuality — she believes gay relationships can be holy — so she has some explaining to do. It’s not terribly surprising that Miller threw her this softball question: You took a stand last fall saying LGBT relationships can be holy, and it got your books banned from LifeWay stores. Why was that important to you?
Good grief.
Professor of Biblical Studies at Boyce College, Denny Burk, recently wrote that Progressive Christians (PC) like Hatmaker have a propensity to erase 2,000-years of Church history in an effort to see that the Church becomes more inclusive, more relevant, more open-minded. “There are many voices within the North American evangelical movement,” says Burk, “that are turning away from what the church has always believed and confessed. Hatmaker is now among them.” In his view the PC agenda (yes, liberals have an agenda) is to “re-imagine” Christianity to look a lot less like historic orthodox Christianity and more like the world. (source)
So with this in mind, following is Lorie Alexander’s post:
If we don’t like parts of the Bible can we simply decide they aren’t agreeable to us and refuse to believe them? Jen Hatmaker believes she can and she does. Here are a few of her quotes from a recent article:
She was asked: “You took a stand last fall saying LGBT relationships can be holy, and it got your books banned from LifeWay stores. Why was that important to you?”
Jen replied, “I just sort of have this dream for the church where it is safe and it is wide and it is generous and it includes all of our voices. For the longest time, the church has essentially had one voice — sort of the white, male voice. I’m starting to realize how much the church is missing when we silence whole people groups, like you’re either not welcome at all, or you’re welcome but not your voice, not your experience, not your life, and I saw that with the LGBTQ community.”