Ulla Dixon | Obituary | The Daily Star thedailystar.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from thedailystar.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Multiple decades late has come a new report that adds a critical layer to earlier reports of many Falls Church youth who at the time, in the 1990s, attested .
What happened to some of the boys under Jeff Taylor’s pastoral care is heartbreaking. But my heart aches for all the young people in our church who have been (and may still be?) victims of this bad theology of “purity,” who have been taught to feel shame or to seek forgiveness where no forgiveness is needed; who have been taught to be at war with their own bodies in the name of sanctification; who have been guilt-tripped into masturbating to visions of doorknobs and trees, rather than to the comforting embrace of a loving partner.
The English translation “Son of Man” doesn’t seem adequate because it emphasizes - in contrast to the original Greek and Hebrew - Jesus’ masculinity over his humanity. Moreover, this is the opposite of how Jesus is characterized in rest of Scripture. Paul, for example, stresses Jesus' humanity more than his maleness: “the grace of God and the free gift in the grace of the one human (anthropos) Jesus Christ abounded for many" (Rm 5:15). If Paul had instead wanted to stress Jesus' masculinity, he could have used the Greek word aner, which means man, but he did not. Unfortunately, most English translations of the Bible do not note the distinction in Greek here between human and man. Thus the original sense of anthropos is lost, and the word that Paul avoided, man, is used instead.