Showing items filed under “February 2017”

¿Que es un "Evangelico"?

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Palabras iguales pueden tener varios usos. Su historia nos lo enseña y nos puede traer más claridad conocer los significados de las palabras. Muchas Iglesias cercanas se llaman ‘evangélicas’. Podemos distinguir tres significados de esta palabra. La primera era de la Reforma del Siglo 16, los Cristianos separados de la Iglesia Romana estaban enfatizados en: La Palabra del Dios, el ministerio de toda la gente Cristiana, la salvación por la gracia solamente, el rechazo del purgatorio, el rechazo de las indulgencias y de la oración por la santos. Este significado es la fundación de todos los otros significados de la palabra "evangélico".

Después de dos siglos y medio, en Inglaterra y Alemania, comenzó un movimiento para Cristianos que querían renovar la vida espiritual. Querían que los fieles tuvieran una experiencia de conversión de corazón y así extender el Evangelio para la gente que no lo había escuchado. Eran los niños de la Reforma, pero algunos nos enseñaron sus doctrinas varias , como la predestinación.

Finalmente otros cristianos de Estados Unidos han agregado compromisos políticos y sociales. Nosotros los Episcopales tenemos raíces en la Reforma. Algunas se derivan del movimiento de renovación. Sin embargo ambos son diferentes del evangelismo político.

Tenemos que distinguir todos los tres significados, porque la gente tiene sentimientos fuertes sobre todos.

Saludos,

+GRS

 

Canaries

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I am not sure the question of assisted suicide/euthanasia receives the attention it deserves. Perhaps this is because of the heart-wrenching pastoral situations which it addresses and which are familiar to many of us. Still, it raises a set of issues as basic as any can be in a society. They go to the core of what we think a human being is. They include the following: what about the doctor’s Hippocratic oath to do no harm? Even if Christians agree about an ethic of life, what about the secular realm including those who do not share our belief? And isn’t a society judged by its care for the most vulnerable? This includes the elderly who may be made to feel the burden of expending family resources at the end of their lives, as well as the seriously depressed, the demented, the cognitively impaired, etc. At just this point don’t we show with our actions what we think a human being really is? Such people, the ‘least of these my brothers and sisters,’ may be canaries in the mineshaft who tell us what kind of society we are coming to be. The voice of the Church will be crucial in all these questions. 

My immediate goal is simply to open up this question for our consideration thoughtfully, theologically and prayerfully. As with all moral questions, we need to be clear about first principles and then honest and serious about conundra, which arise. The first principle is that God is indeed the Lord of life and death, and that moral life is to be lived out within that boundary. This initial clarity still leaves subsequent questions. For example, Catholics have a concept of ‘double effect,’ according to which an action might be moral whose primary intention is good, though it may have a different secondary effect. The doctor gives a narcotic to alleviate pain, though the doctor knows it may also shorten the patient’s life.

These issues cannot be resolved in a blog! Still, I would like to offer here a footnote and a worry. As to the first, Gilbert Meilaender in his Bioethics offers what he calls an ‘ethic of care.’ He places this as the mean between excessive intervention through machines to prolong life on the one hand, and action to end life on the other. Obviously this requires judgment as to where the mean is, which opens new questions. Still the concept is helpful.

And the worry? We need to be realistic about fallen human nature. Though at the beginning assisted suicide erects lots of barriers and conditions, the record in Europe shows that these do not last long - there is indeed a slope, and it is slippery. Everyone is terminal sooner or later. And if depression is included as a sufficient ‘grievous condition,’ you can imagine where that brings one quickly. In Belgium every single request for death was accepted in the first years of their liberalized law - there was clearly a preferential option for death.

Let us take the debate as a backdrop against which the Gospel about life and new life can more clearly be heard.

Peace

+GRS

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Complete the Race (II Timothy 4:17)

At the end of our vacation we find ourselves in Chicago for its Marathon weekend (the fastest, I have read this morning, perhaps because it is cool and relatively level). Marathons offer many good things. You can see world-class athletes from places like Ethiopia and Kenya. There is a feel of fiesta with signs by family members, getups by some for-fun runners, and food for sale.

But as I looked out my hotel window at 7:30 a.m., I watched the race of competitors who have lost legs or their use. Wheeling vehicles by arm for 26 miles means serious fitness and determination.

Those competitors were to me, this morning, a symbol of the Church too. For each is wounded. The larger family cheers them on. Each by grace has risen up to run the race. Ahead is the goal, the prize, the welcome home. We find the companionship of Jesus the Lord, there, and along the route too.

Amen.

GRS