In some regions of society, parents are being urged to stay away from the titles of “mother” and “father.” They insist we use, instead, “parent A” and “parent B.” (This is particularly big in my wife’s field: doula services. Every vestige of “mother” in the literature is being scrubbed and replaced with “pregnant person.”) I would venture to guess that most conservative Christians who are fine with adopting alternative gender pronouns for the sake of being “hospitable” will say, “Ok, that’s crazy. I’d never shy away from addressing fathers and mothers as such. We draw the line here.”
(Sam Parkison – For The Church) The apostle Paul was a divider. This is not to say he was against unity per se. In fact, in a very real way, you could say that the unity of the Church was one of Paul’s hallmarks (Eph 4:1-7)….
But the unity Paul was after was thick. Much thicker than “politeness” or a shallow sense of getting along. Which is why he had no problem dividing the world up into two kinds of people: those who are in Christ, and those who are in Adam (Rom 5:12-21). Those who are dead in their trespasses (Eph 2:1-3), and those who are alive together with Christ (Eph 2:4-10). Those who view Christ according to the flesh, and those who view him thus no longer because they are “a new creation, the old has passed away, behold, the new has come” (2 Cor 5:16-17).
And Paul’s division doesn’t stop there. Not only does he divide humanity in half, he also divides the universe’s systemic order in half: “He has delivered us from the domain of darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of his beloved Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins” (Col 1:13-14). This is a stark distinction: there is a “domain of darkness,” and there is a “kingdom of God’s beloved Son.” Every individual on planet earth is a part of one of these two cosmic orders. We’re all born into the former, and some of us are born again into the latter.
Research