Vapour Trails

 The Signs of Christ At Work Amongst Us

Some of our readers will be familiar with Rosaria Butterfield.  In this video she responds to questions put to her by Russell Moore, one of the prominent theologians and teachers in the Southern Baptist Confederation.

To those who have not yet come across Rosaria, her experience of coming out of militant lesbianism to faith in the risen Christ is salutary and of great moment for the modern Church.  There is much to learn.  One of the most salutary and encouraging things is how Butterfield responds to questions about her experiences by placing her life within the context of the fundamentals and depths of the Christian faith.  This is what being saved by Christ “looks” like.  There is also important stuff in this video about what the community of the redeemed must be and become. 

Douglas Wilson’s Letter From Moscow

Sexual Smithereens

Douglas Wilson

Blog and Mablog

Monday, December 29, 2014

In a remarkably prescient joke, Bob Hope said this back in the seventies. “I’ve just flown in from California, where they’ve made homosexuality legal. I thought I’d get out before they make it compulsory.”

As we look at what remains of sexual ethics in America — the old sexual norms that somebody took a weed eater to — we need to come to grips with what is actually happening. There are two principles that we have to learn. We have to get them down in our bones. When we have done so, we will be able to understand what our only objective must necessarily be.

The first is the inescapable concept. This is a “not whether, but which” situation. It is not whether a sexual norm will be established for all society, but rather which sexual norm will be established for all society. But there is another layer. More is involved here than just competing norms. A battle between Islam and Christianity would be a battle between competing sexual norms, but what we are up against here is a collision between a norm and an anti-norm. The sexual devolution that is now clamoring for acceptance is not a stable norm with “some differences” that could simply replace the old norm.

This is not simply a choice between a tux and wedding gown on the one hand, and a tattered and stained overcoat on a dirty-old-man-hanging-out-near-the-city-playground on the other. No, the overcoat is expansive enough to cover a large amount of explosives, and the point of everything here is sexual smithereens, which is another way of saying societal smithereens. In other words, their enemy is not heteronormativity, their final enemy is civilization. Civilization requires norms, and Christian civilization requires heterosexual monogamous norms. This is simply anarchism.

First he was extreme for predicting that this was all going to end by screwing the pooch, and now he has become extreme for objecting to the pooch having access to a mutually affirming relationship.

The second point is that any normal person who predicts what is coming next will find that he is going to be labeled extreme twice. He will first be called extreme for arguing that if we allow x, then we will also have to allow y and z. “You’re crazy — nobody is arguing for the normalization of bestiality, polygamy, pedophilia, etc. You’re a loon from the fever swamps.” And then, when precisely this has transpired, right on schedule, he will then be called extreme for daring to oppose what all progressives have always known was the destination all along. He is clearly a hater, and the fact that he is a hater with a good memory — recalling that just three years ago all these same people were taunting him for his dire predictions — only helps to add another layer of irony to the whole affair. First he was extreme for predicting that this was all going to end by screwing the pooch, and now he has become extreme for objecting to the pooch having access to a mutually affirming relationship.

Asa and Jehoshaphat were good kings who had suppressed the demands of the sodomites in the land of Judah. First Asa: “And he took away the sodomites out of the land, and removed all the idols that his fathers had made.” (1 Kings 15:12). Then Jehoshaphat: “And the remnant of the sodomites, which remained in the days of his father Asa, he took out of the land” (1 Kings 22:46). Neither Asa nor Jehoshaphat were well read in the latest developments of R2K theology. But what they did should not be whitewashed. They suppressed sexual perversion. But if we have been paying attention, we have learned above that it is not whether, but which. What is the only alternative? The only alternative is Bob Hope’s prescient joke. It is not whether we suppress something, it is what we suppress.

Jehoram, the son of Jehoshaphat, assumed the throne upon the death of his father, and his first move was to have his brothers all killed (2 Chron. 21:4). He then sought to arrest, and then reverse, the sexual reforms established by his father and grandfather.

“Moreover he made high places in the mountains of Judah, and caused the inhabitants of Jerusalem to commit fornication, and compelled Judah thereto” (2 Chron. 21:11).

And so this brings us to our only reasonable objective in this conflict. We are kidding ourselves if we think that this downward slide can simply be halted. We are out of our minds if we think we can just say “thus far and no farther.” If we keep gay pride, we are going to get a lot more than gay pride. And if we avoid the final destination set for us by this long parade of the sad people, it will only be by reversing course. We cannot pitch our tents toward Sodom without eventually winding up in a townhouse there.

In other words there is hope, but the hope is to reverse the sexual revolution, to undo it. This would be sexual reformation. What is not possible is to simply fight the thing to a standstill, pausing awkwardly where we are in order to teeter for a bit. No, if Yahweh is God, follow Him. If Baal is god, then the pooch awaits.

Too Right!

I Was Born This Way

One of the weasel words employed by homosexual apologists is that for some, same sex attraction is “natural”.  By which is meant that some people are born to be homosexuals; they are wired that way.  To which we respond with a firm affirmation: of course homosexuals are wired to be homosexuals.  For them it is natural.  When they enter into homosexual thought, desires, social patterns, expectations, activity, and even more permanent relationships they are acting naturally, according to their natural inclinations and desires.

That’s precisely what the Apostle Paul means when he says, “The natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned.”  The natural person has his natural heart set on things which are opposed to the Spirit of God.

Consider the person who seeks justifies his adulterous lechery as he leers at others by claiming it is natural.  Our Lord, recognizing the depravity that either rules or insinuates itself into every human heart, condemned such desires, their very naturalness notwithstanding:

But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart. (Matthew 5:28)

Woe to him who would retort:  “How dare Christ criticise or condemn the natural desires with which I was born.  I have been wired this way.  It is natural.  It is not just harmful, but positively evil to require me to deny who I am.”

So we have a problem, Houston.  On the Day of Judgement, when we are all arraigned before the Judge of all, we will have the divine Prosecutor condemn all those who have lived according to their natural passions, lusts, and desires.  The Lord will say, “Did I not command you, that if your right eye caused you to sin, tear it out and throw it away.  For it is better that you were to lose one of your members than that your whole body be thrown into hell.  And if your right hand caused you to sin, cut if off and throw it away.  For it is better that you were to lose one of your members than that your whole body go to hell. (Matthew 5: 28-30).

The arraigned will then doubtless say, “But I was born with these desires.  They have been natural to me.  I was only acting in accordance with the way I was made.”  Good luck with that argument.  For it can be (and has been) made in defence of every sin, lust, illicit desire, and evil appetite known to man.  Since David’s lament, “I am evil, born in sin” is common to every converted man, the attempt to justify sin by saying it is “natural”, whilst true, is no defence at all, for if it were to be a valid excuse, nothing at all can be considered evil.  All could be excused on the grounds that it is natural.  Nothing at all can possibly be evil or wrong.  It also means that our Lord’s warnings above would be not just inappropriate, they themselves would be evil utterances.  And that, dear, friends is an utterly blasphemous notion. 

But, thanks be to God for those who are willing to submit to the judgement of God upon their natural desires and seek not just His mercy, but His deliverance from all evil.  The Spirit of God is able to deliver them most powerfully and completely.  At a stroke the guilt is removed; throughout our life upon this earth the power and hold of natural lusts is weakened and attenuated; and upon death, we are removed from the presence of such things entirely. 

The repentant homosexual who by God’s grace has cast himself upon the mercies of Christ and has crucified the flesh and its natural desires passes into glory.  But those who have stubbornly clung to their natural appetites and lusts are cast into Hell. Thus passes the natural man from the earth.  

Douglas Wilson’s Letter From Moscow

Remanded to Sensitivity Camps

Douglas Wilson

Blog and Mablog

Tuesday, November 11, 2014

When two armies happen to meet, the battle is not necessarily over the terrain they are fighting on. Sometimes it is that, of course, but there are also occasions when the place where they are fighting and the place for which they are fighting are two entirely different places.

The current battle is at the place of same sex mirage. It is where we are fighting right now, and may God grant success to us here, holed up in our little gender-normal Alamo. Our God is able to deliver us, but even if He does not, be it known, o king, that we will not consent to applaud the use of a man as though he were a woman.

Homosexual vice is a bad business, one that the apostle Paul describes as the end of the ethical road. But that is simply where the battle is right now, not what the battle is over. And so, since I have raised the point, what is the battle over? The battle is over the right to define the world.

Man wants to be God, and he wants to be able to declare the way things shall be, and then have them be that way. He hates God and wants to replace Him, and wants to replace how the way things stand fast whenever God declares them. Man wants to speak the ultimate and authoritative word.

Some people have asked from time to time, usually with some petulance, why I write about same sex mirage so much. The answer is found in the disputed nouns — the marriage/mirage issue.
The issue is not an instance here or there of same sex coupling; the central issue is what we as a culture are going to call it when it happens. We have always had those who were in the grip of this lust; why should Christians raise an uproar about it now?

Well, I would say mildly, we are not the ones raising an uproar. You can tell what the real issue is by where the enforcement is. When do the cops show up? When do evangelical bakers get remanded to sensitivity camps? Whenever we refuse to use their vocabulary, the goons come out. That alone, that by itself, should tell you what the real issue is. Under their regime, you do not have to commit homosexual acts. But under their regime, you must agree to pretend that what they have decided to call it has in fact come to pass. But it hasn’t come to pass.

At the end of the day, you have two dudes in bed, with no decent place to put things, or two women there, with nothing real available for either of them. The emptiness, the vanity, the loneliness, the folly, is manifest. And comes now the state, demanding that whatever else we do about this, we must agree to call this state of high loneliness and desperation a state of holy matrimony. I might not be as courageous as I think I am, or as faithful to Jesus as I think I am, and so you might be able to get me to say something like that after pulling out my fifth fingernail. But if you think you can get me to do it by coolshaming me into an approval of round squares, then I guess I had better type a little bit more, in order to make my sentiments clear.

So in a city of one million, I would much rather have a thousand illicit homosexual acts, unrecognized by the public, than to have just one illicit sexual act, covered over with the thin film of all our solons calling it an official marriage. Why? In the former instance, we have a thousand instances of sin. In the latter we have a million. There is a difference between a city with sin in it, and a sin city. In the former, the sin is instances of homosexual sin; in the latter the sin is with our shared language, the currency of all. Both strike at the image of God in man, but the latter is far more serious.

Because the Word was with God, and the Word was God, the latter sin is heinous. You could drop the sexual element out of this altogether, and still have the same problem. I would want to be fighting in the same way if federal judges were declaring that two and two make five, and were applying stiff fines to all born-again mathematicians. We happen to be fighting in the sexual arena because when a people are addled by their lusts, or are grossed out by people so addled, it is far easier to distract them all from the real issue.
The real issue is that man bears the image of God. He is not a god in his own right. He cannot declare, and have it be necessarily so. He must be content to repeat what God has said. Man’s only possible glory and dignity is as God’s vicegerent. And that is dignity enough.

When he sets up shop on his own, everything spirals down into autonomous folly. Revolts against God’s holy order cannot achieve a higher dignity for us. We cannot achieve linguistic independence. God’s gravity is infinite, and there is no escape velocity. We cannot speak the word, and create a new sex — we can only blur the meaning of words, and go out in drag. We can also fine people who refuse to go along with our big pretend.

A Bridge Too Far

The Roman Catholic Bishops’ Synod

The Revolution that didn’t happen, and the Counter-Revolution that did

By J.C. von Krempach, J.D. 

October 24, 2014 

Turtle Bay and Beyond

[A Bishops’ Synod was recently held in Rome.  It considered the question of homosexuality.  The media was primed and ready.  Changes were afoot.  Or were they?  The outcome was quite different in the end.  What was going on?  J. C. von Krempach presents his thoughts.  Ed.]

This blog being sponsored by the Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute, the way in which the Catholic Church discusses issues related to marriage and the family cannot leave us indifferent. But even without C-Fam being our sponsor, we would have been following the Bishop’s Synod on the Family with a keen interest, given that the Catholic Church is today the most significant institution world-wide to continue defending the natural rights of the family. If the Catholic Church betrays the family, then the family will have no defenders anymore.

The Extraordinary Bishops’ Synod on the Family is now over, and the dust is slowly beginning to settle, although the true significance of the event will probably be understood only many years from now: it probably is too early to draw any definitive conclusions, and we still have to wait and see what follows between now and October 2015, when another Synod will meet in order to deal with the subject matter yet once again. Nevertheless, what we can say already now is that this was indeed an extraordinary event – a true turning point in history. The Church’s history is long enough to offer a precedent for nearly everything, but in this case I must say I don’t recall one.

Catholics, especially conservative ones, have a strong attachment to the Pope who, as the successor of Peter, has the supreme power not only in governing the Church, but also in exercising the Church’s magisterium. In this case, however, something rather unprecedented seems to have happened: conservative bishops have stood up against the Pope and his curia to defend the truth of the Catholic faith as it has been handed down by the Church right from the beginning – and they have been successful. The Pope and the Bishops, it has become clear, are only servants of the faith, not its masters.

The spectacle that unfolded before the eyes of an astonished world-wide audience was not an entirely edifying one. Despite assertions that the Pope wished every participant to speak freely, there is overwhelming evidence that the Synod in fact was planned to be a “piloted” exercise with the purpose of ushering in a considerable shift in the Church’s teaching. The idea was to leave the “theory” intact, but to radically alter the practice. With regard to the two issues that turned out to be the most controversial ones it would have meant that (1) whilst continuing to claim that the bond of marriage cannot be dissolved the Church would act as if it could, and (2) while continuing to teach that sodomy is a sin the Church would act as if it weren’t.

Other observers than I have the merit of having compiled all the information that shows how the Synod and its preparatory stages was following a carefully prepared script that, as it seems, had been designed in order to provide the appearance of legitimacy to those shifts in discipline. Looking back, it is difficult to believe in mere coincidences: there was a plan, and that plan was to use the mass media in order to artificially create certain “expectations” that the bishops participating in the Synod would find hard to disappoint. In addition, the procedural arrangements were, to say the least, rather not conducive to the kind of free and open exchange of views that the Pope had publicly been calling for. Synod Fathers had to send in their intended speeches as long as six weeks before the event. They were given assurances that all contributions would be duly taken into account when drafting the final report – but in fact none of the Synod Fathers was able to know what the other participants had written. Neither the written submissions nor the oral inventions during the Synod itself were to be published. Thus, even if there was free speech inside the Synod Aula, there was in fact no transparency: only the Synod’s secretariat, headed by Cardinal Lorenzo Baldisseri, had a complete overview as to who was saying what – and they were free to use this advance knowledge however they liked.

I fully understand the interest a Synod may have in keeping its deliberations secret from the public. But if such an approach is chosen, then there must at least be some transparency for the participants of the Synod themselves. This was apparently not the case. With procedural rules like this, it is no wonder that the interim report (“relatio post disceptationem“) that the secretariat released last Monday amazed not only the world-wide public, but also the participants of the Synod themselves, many of whom felt that this report did not at all reflect what they had been discussing.

What followed, was mere damage control: the ten working groups (“circuli minores“) worked hard to bring the process back to track, and came up with more than 700 drafting proposals to amend the controversial interim report. All the greater was the general astonishment among the Synod Fathers when Cardinal Baldisseri announced that the opinions elaborated by the working groups would, too, not be published. This was the moment when open rebellion broke out. According to some accounts, Cardinal Pell (a man loyal to the Church if there ever has been one) banged his fist on the table and told Baldisseri that he “must stop manipulating this Synod”. Many other interventions followed, all going into the same direction. Baldisseri turned his regard to Pope Francis looking for help and support, but when no such support arrived he knew that his game was over. The working group reports were immediately published, and it became clear that the real views and opinions of the Synod Fathers were in many decisive points nearly the opposite of what the Secretariat’s interim report had wanted to make the world believe. . . .

Unavoidably, all regards are now turned to Pope Francis. What was his role in this drama? Although he has carefully avoided any statements through which he might have exposed himself, he has made some choices that indicate rather clearly where his sympathies lie. . . . Very much to one’s regret, one feels therefore compelled to conclude that the rebellion of the Synod against the secretariat was in fact also rebellion against the Pope himself. In other words, despite any subsequent attempts to play down the gravity of the crisis, one of the main results of this Synod is that the Pope has, as a result of his style of governance, lost the trust and confidence of a considerable part of the world’s episcopate (and it is noteworthy, in this regard, that the participants of the Synod were, to a considerable extent, handpicked by Francis himself!). Allegedly, some bishops even threatened not to participate in future synods if the way in which they were organised did not change.

This is a very grave situation. The pontificate of Benedict XVI. was in jeopardy when it emerged that his valet had stolen sensitive papers from his desk – a fact that let some observers ask whether the pope was still in control. But the events at the Synod hint at something more serious. The question is: was Francis simply not aware of what Baldisseri and the secretariat were doing (a rather improbable assumption, which would spare him the reproach of governing through manipulation, but nevertheless expose him to the reproach of “having lost control”), or did he actually want the Synod to be managed in that way (which would raise questions regarding his style of governance)? Whichever of the two it is, this pontificate is now in a serious crisis. . . .

Be that all as it may, it remains that these two issues have – very regrettably – absorbed a good deal of the Synod’s time and energy, and will continue doing so over the coming months. If the Pope fails to intervene in a decisive and clarifying manner, these two topics will remain on the agenda for the “Ordinary Synod” on the Family that will take place in 2015, and thus distract the Church from more pressing issues. Rather than discussing, as it should, how the Church’s doctrine could more successfully be explained and promoted, the coming Synod will once again be dealing with the question whether that doctrine should be changed. What a waste of time.

To summarize it, this “extraordinary” Synod has, through the Pope’s own fault, weakened the papacy. It has created division and strife within the Church, and lead to uncertainty where the faithful would have hoped to get clear guidance. Drawing all attention to marginal issues rather than dealing with the core questions, it has wasted a good opportunity to promote marriage and the family. But at least it has left the Catholic faith intact. Not a very glorious outcome – but those familiar with Church history know that Councils and Synods have often been messy events. Guidance by the Holy Ghost means that in the end the faith will prevail over all errors – but it does not mean that there will be no tribulations.

Let us hope that the 2015 Synod  will produce better results, and let us do all we can to contribute to it!

Contradicting Borg Assimilation

Christian Rapper Jackie Hill-Perry Comes Out 

Ex-homosexual Firebrand

 By David Daniels 

The Washington Times 

Monday, October 27, 2014

Jackie Hill-Perry considers herself not merely an agent of change, but its embodiment as well.

A Christian spoken-word poet from Chicago, Ms. Hill-Perry professes to be a former lesbian — a change she ascribes to God.  God, she says, “not only changes your affections and your heart, but He gives you new affections that you didn’t have.” Now married to a Christian man, the 25-year-old poet is pregnant with the newlyweds’ first child, which is due Dec. 13.  Her debut spoken-word album “The Art of Joy” will be released for free on Nov. 4 by Humble Beast record label.

Ms. Hill-Perry’s experience runs counter to pronouncements by gay rights groups that exclaim sexuality as an inherent, immutable characteristic. What’s more, her assertions come amid wide-ranging reports about the psychological dangers of so-called “reparative therapy,” which aims to change the orientation of homosexuals.

But she remains steadfast in her belief that anything is possible with God as she meets criticism — and outright contempt — for speaking out about her experience. And thanks to her nearly 65,000 followers on social media, as well as encouragement from famed Baptist theologian John Piper, Ms. Hill-Perry’s story has been far-reaching.

“The word of God itself, apart from Jackie Hill, testifies that people can change,” she said in a July 2013 report on Wade-O Radio, a syndicated Christian hip-hop broadcast based in New Jersey.  She was criticizing a lyric in rapper Macklemore’s Grammy Award-winning song “Same Love” that says “And I can’t change even if I tried, even if I wanted to.”

“I think we’ve made God very little if we believe that He cannot change people,” Ms. Hill-Perry said on Wade-O Radio. “If He can make a moon, stars and a galaxy that we have yet to fully comprehend, how can He not simply change my desires?”  Thousands of people on social media shared her comments — with approving or condemning remarks of their own. She estimates that about 40 percent of the messages she has received have been negative.

“On Twitter, this girl wrote me like 15 different tweets, pretty much saying that I was delusional, in denial and brainwashed,” Ms. Hill-Perry told The Washington Times.  After she married Preston Perry, another Christian spoken-word poet, in March, another Twitter critic accused them both of being gay and marrying to “play God to a bunch of ignorant people.”

Ms. Hill-Perry says she was sexually abused by a family friend when she 5. Around the same time, she experienced gender confusion that had coalesced into an attraction to women when she turned 17. She became sexually active with her first girlfriend, and then another. She became a regular at gay clubs and at gay pride parades in St. Louis.

While lying in bed in October 2008, she reflected on her lifestyle and had an epiphany that she addressed in her spoken-word piece “My Life as a Stud”: “Then, one day, the Lord spoke to me. He said, ‘She will be the death of you.’ In that moment, the scripture for the wages of sin equal death finally clicked.”

“What I had been taught in church until the age of 10 coincided with the truth in my conscious that a holy God and just God would be justified in sending me, an unrepentant sinner to hell,” she said, “but also that this same God sent His son to die on my behalf and forgive me if only I believe.”  She left her girlfriend and returned to church. The next year, she met her future husband at the first spoken-word event where she performed “My Life as a Stud.” Over time, she lost her attraction to women and gained an attraction to Mr. Perry, who she began dating three years later.

Now pregnant with a girl, Ms. Hill-Perry is concerned her daughter will face persecution for sharing her beliefs by the time she reaches 25 years old.  “I think we’re moving toward a time in our society when, in the next 20 to 25 years, Christians are going to see a massive amount of persecution when it comes to the topic of homosexuality, and there will be no such thing as tolerance for Christianity,” she says. “[People will believe that] if you’re a Christian, you are a horrible human being, period.”

“The true church of Jesus Christ will still stick to the Scriptures,” Ms. Hill-Perry says. “Now, those buildings that have people in them where the authority of God doesn’t trump their own feelings and emotions, I see a whole bunch of turning away from the faith — turning away from truth.”

© Copyright 2014 The Washington Times

It Would Never Happen, They Said

Leviathan Showing His Claws

When the homosexual “marriage” bill was passed in New Zealand, faithful Christians could clearly see God’s handwriting on the wall.  Like that ancient writing which appeared amidst a pagan feast during the days of Daniel, we knew that the days of our nation were numbered.  We knew that God had weighed us and found that our sin was grossly abhorrent.  We knew that our nation had already been given over to enemies.  We warned that homosexual “marriage” would soon morph into the persecution of Christians and the Church.

Christians have always been an ornery people.  They quaintly claim to believe in God and His Messiah.  They assert that their highest, deepest, and ultimate loyalty is to the God of gods.  They will not transgress His law, even unto death.  Now, in “ordinary circumstances” Christians get along just fine with their neighbours.  They seek to do good to all men.  They care for and serve the poor and the oppressed.  They live peaceable lives.  They mind their own business.  They raise their children to be decent citizens.  So far, so good.  But militant Unbelief cannot help itself.  In the end, it will brook no opposition.  In the end, Christians will be made to conform–or, more accurately, the attempt to make them conform will break out.

When the homosexual “marriage” law was passed, anyone who suggested that it was only a matter of time before Christians were persecuted for their resistant unbelief in the secular religion and for their rejection of illicit sex and perverse “marriage” were mocked as extremists and alarmists.  But Unbelief is implicitly totalitarian.  Given enough opportunity, it will brook no opposition.  Given half a chance, Unbelief will be militantly oppressive, demanding total conformity to its apostate religion.

New Zealand is a small country.  When Unbelief becomes more godless and militant, the very smallness of the country can act as a restraint.  People know people.  Politicians can be approached.  Blogs can influence an entire election campaign.  Avenues are open for redress and correction.  But these things will not protect the faithful when the militant, secular Left get back into power–as it inevitably will..  We have seen their form.

Under the last Labour administration, believers were openly mocked in Parliament as “chinless scarf wearers” because they dared to oppose the relentless secular juggernaut being imposed upon the country by Helen Clark and her cabal.  At that time, Clark crossed more than a few bridges that were too far, and “mainstream” New Zealand dumped her unceremoniously.  It was evident that “mainstream” New Zealand (that is, moderate secularists) did not appreciate being told which light-bulbs they were permitted to buy, and the length of time they would be permitted to occupy a shower to conduct their ablutions.  But note the oppressive, militant spirit that was revealed.  “Ve hav vays of making you konform.”  The animus will come back.  We predict that homosexual “marriage” will be a field of skirmish, then open battle.  And note that the mainstream has, in this instance, applauded the passage of homosexual “marriage” perfidy. 

In the United States, the cause of homosexual “marriage” has been taking over with all the relentlessness of the Borg.  The nation appears to be assimilating at pace.  Whether this is the product of a rogue judiciary or the manipulation of elites, and whether it will eventually be rolled back by peaceful means, remains to be seen.  But the prediction of the persecution of Christians has rapidly emerged into reality.

City officials in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho have informed two ordained ministers that they must perform same sex marriages or face jail time and a fine.

City officials told Donald Knapp that he and his wife Evelyn, both ordained ministers who run Hitching Post Wedding Chapel, are required to perform such ceremonies or face months in jail and/or thousands of dollars in fines. The city claims its “non-discrimination” ordinance requires the Knapps to perform same-sex wedding ceremonies now that the courts have overridden Idaho’s voter-approved constitutional amendment that affirmed marriage as the union of a man and a woman.

“The government should not force ordained ministers to act contrary to their faith under threat of jail time and criminal fines,” said ADF Senior Legal Counsel Jeremy Tedesco. “Many have denied that pastors would ever be forced to perform ceremonies that are completely at odds with their faith, but that’s what is happening here – and it’s happened this quickly. The city is on seriously flawed legal ground, and our lawsuit intends to ensure that this couple’s freedom to adhere to their own faith as pastors is protected just as the First Amendment intended.”

It is likely that eventually judicial appeals will smite the city officials in Idaho on the face.  We shall see.  But expect many more cases like this.  Secularism and Unbelief is becoming unmasked.  It is as oppressive in spirit as all godless, secular governments have been when they have taken control–as the regimes of Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Hitler, and Castro eloquently testify.  Secularism has motive–serious motive.  All it needs is the opportunity and the means.  Then evil will be unmasked in all its diabolical horror.  

For Christians this will be a time of great struggle and hardship.  But, because the Spirit of God dwells amongst us, we will not lose heart.  True–there will be departures.  There will be those who, under foul weather, will prove that they were always fair-weather Christians.  They will leave and prove thereby that they were never really of us, as the Apostle John notes (I John 2:19).  The true Church will be purified and sanctified by going through the deep waters.  But Christ will not leave us.  He will enable us to persevere.  Our Saviour–as always–will command secularist evil to integrate into the void.  Its end is sure and certain.

I have said these things to you, that in me you may have peace. In the world you will have tribulation. But take heart; I have overcome the world.  (John 16:33)

Douglas Wilson’s Letter From Moscow

Jitney Messiahs

Douglas Wilson

Blog and Mablog

October 14, 2014

As the same-sex mirage juggernaut continues to roll through our pathetic little festival, crushing both devotees and opponents alike, a number of conservative Christians have begun to prepare themselves for life in a post-Christian America. Not only so, but they have been encouraging others to do the same. But this is radically unhelpful and unbecoming — nobody much likes seeing the team manager giving up in the fourth inning, and especially when the score is just 10 to 8. And particularly when we are the ones who have 10.

The reason all this is happening is that we are so distracted by the effrontery of the last lie that we are not able to see the current lie being told. We were being told — oh, about ten minutes ago — that there was no reason why individual states could not keep their restrictions on same-sex mirage, and that it was not necessary to have one monolithic approach to marriage within the republic. Anybody remember all that? Ah, good times. And then federal judges started striking down the laws of multiple states as unconstitutional, and you know the rest of the drill.

But that was the last lie.
And as exasperating as it is, perhaps making you want to dance in place a little bit, we really need to focus on what lies we are being told now. Our problem then was that we believed them then. Our problem now is that we are believing them now. The current lie is that all of this is inevitable, inexorable, remorseless, relentless, and hell bent. And except for that last one, none of it is even remotely true.

This is a lie that under-girds all progressive thought, all the time, but it has now come to the forefront again, and some out-maneuvered Christians are helping to propagate it. Progressives are the ones that progressives have been waiting for, but really, nobody else has been. Whenever their jitney messiah arrives — and they find a new one every generation or so — I really see no reason for bowing down.

Chesterton once said that the one taste of paradise on earth was to fight in a losing cause . . . and not to lose it.

So let me give three quick reasons, in ascending order of importance, why this myth of inevitability needs to be rejected, along with the horse it rode in on.

First, they really want me to believe it, and so I refuse to. Should I as the batter swing simply because I hear voices emanating from their dugout, telling me that I need to? Try explaining that to your coach. “But they said I had to . . . they seemed so urgent . . .”

Second, sodomy is fruitless, along with all the pale heterosexual imitations of sodomy. Denial of fruitfulness will result — follow me closely here — in lack of fruit. Sodomy can crash a civilization into a wall, but sodomy and its cousins can never build or maintain a civilization. In the long run, in other words, stupidity never works. You run out of money, you run out of children, you run out of ideas, and you run out of gas. You run out.

And third, the Lord Jesus is at the right hand of the Father. All of this is His doing, not theirs. He has brought our nation to this point in time for His good and perfect purposes. They think they are in control, and a number of us even think so. But if American history were that little joggity car outside the supermarkets that they used to have, where you put quarters in it so that your two-year-old could bounce for five minutes, grinning maniacally, turning the steering wheel back and forth, then all our circuit courts are that two-year-old.

The Lord Jesus rules all of history. This means that our folly is His righteous judgment on us, and not our successful revolt against Him. And His righteous judgment of us is being exercised so that His name would be glorified in the earth. Given the circumstances, His name will be glorified in one of two ways. Either our culture will go out in a flash fire of stupidity, and He will be glorified in that event, or we will go down to our knees in repentance, calling on Him by name, and He will be glorified in our cleansing and forgiveness. And just between us, the latter is what I believe is going to happen.

And when God grants reformation and revival, I have no doubt that more than one federal judge will declare it to be unconstitutional. But we won’t get the word because of all the singing.

 

Deliverance From Pride and Lesbianism

God Would See Me Home

Some instructive thoughts from Rosaria Butterfield: 

In April 1999, I felt the call of Jesus Christ upon my life.  It was both subtle and blatant, like the peace inside the eye of the hurricane.  I could in no way resist and I in no way understood what would become of my life.  I know, I know.  How do I know that it was Jesus?  Maybe it was my Catholic guilt, my caffeine-driven subconscious, or last night’s curry tofu?  We, I don’t.  But I believed–and believe–that it was Jesus.

At this time, I was just starting to pray that God would show me my sins and help me to repent of them.  I didn’t understand why homosexuality was a sin, why something in the particular manifestation of same-gender love was wrong in itself.  But I did know that pride was a sin, and so I decided to start there.  As I began to pray and repent, I wondered: could pride be at the root of all my sins?  I wondered: what was the real sin of Sodom?  I had always thought that God’s judgment upon Sodom (in Genesis 19) clearly singled out and targeted homosexuality.  I believed that God’s judgment against Sodom exemplified the fiercest of God’s judgments.  But as I read more deeply in the Bible, I ran across a passage that made me stop and think.  This passage in the book of Ezekiel revealed to me that Sodom was indicted for materialism and neglect of the poor and needy–and that homosexuality was a symptom and extension of these other sins.  In this passage, God is speaking to his chosen people in Jerusalem and warning them about their hidden sin, using Sodom as an example.

Importantly, God does not say that this sin of Sodom is the worst of all sins.  Instead, God uses the sin of Sodom to reveal the greater sin committed by his own people:

As I live, declares the Lord God, your sister Sodom and her daughters have not done as you and your daughters have done. Behold, this was the guilt of your sister Sodom: she and her daughters had pride, excess of food, and prosperous ease, but did not aid the poor and needy. They were haughty and did an abomination before me. So I removed them, when I saw it. (Ezekiel 16:48-50)

I found this passage to reveal some surprising things.  In it, God is comparing Jerusalem to Sodom and saying that Sodom’s sin is less offensive to God than Jerusalem’s.  Next, God tells us what is at the root of homosexuality and what the progression of sin is.  We read here that the root of homosexuality is also the root of a myriad of other sins.  First, we find pride (“[Sodom] and her daughters had pride . . .” )  Why pride?  Pride is the root of all sin.  Pride puffs one up with a false sense of independence.  Proud people always feel that they can live independently from God and from other people.  Proud people feel entitled to do what they want when they want to.  

Second, we find wealth (“excess of food”) and an entertainment-driven world view (“prosperous ease”).  Living according to God’s standards is an acquired taste.  We develop a taste for godly living only by intentionally putting into place practices that equip us to live below our means.  We develop a taste for God’s standards only by discipling our minds, hands, money, and time.  In God’s economy, what we love we will discipline.  God did not create us so that we would, as the title of an early book on postmodernism declares, “amuse ourselves to death.”  Undisciplined taste will always lead to egregious sin–slowly and almost imperceptibly.  

Thirdly, we find lack of mercy (“did not aid the poor and needy”). Refusing to be the merciful neighbour in the extreme terms exemplified by the Samaritan traveller to his cultural enemy left to die on the road to Jericho (Luke 10: 25-37) leads to egregious sin.  I think this is a shocking truth and I imagine that most Bible-believing Christians would be horrified to see this truth exposed in such bare terms!  God calls us to be merciful to others for our own good as well as for the good of our community.  Our hearts will become hard to the whispers of God if we turn our backs on those who have less than we do.  

Fourth, we find lack of discretion and modesty.  (“they were haughty and did an abomination before me.”)  Pride combined with wealth leads to idleness because you falsely feel that God just wants you to have fun; if unchecked, this sin will grow into entertainment-driven lust; if unchecked, this sin will grow into hardness of heart that declares other people’s problem no responsibility or care of your own; if unchecked, we become bold in our sin and feel entitled to live selfish lives fueled by the twin values of our culture: acquiring and achieving.  Modesty and discretion are not old-fashioned values.  They are God’s standards that help us to encourage one another in good works, not covetousness.  

You might notice that there is nothing inherently sexual about any of these sins: pride, wealth, entertainment-driven focus, lack of mercy, lack of modesty.  We like to think that sin is contained by categories of logic or psychology.  It’s not.  So why do we assume that sexual sin has sexual or affectual origins?  That is because we have too narrow a focus about sexuality’s purview.  Sexuality isn’t about what we do in bed.  Sexuality encompasses a whole range of needs, demands, and desires.  Sexuality is more a symptom of our life’s condition than a cause, more a consequence than an origin.  

Importantly, we don’t see God making fun of homosexuality or regarding it as a different, unusual, or exotic sin.  What we see instead is God’s warning: If you indulge the sins of pride, wealth, entertainment-lust, lack of mercy and lack of discretion you will find yourself deep in sin–and the type of sin may surprise you.  That sin may attach itself to a pattern of life closely or loosely linked to this list.  While sin is not contained by logical categories of progression, nonetheless, sin is progressive.  That is, while sin does not stay contained by type or trope, if ignored, excused, or enjoyed, sin grows and spreads like poison ivy.  . . . 

These passages forced me to see pride and not sexual orientation as the root sin.  In turn, this shaped the way that I reflected on my whole life, in the context of the word of God.  I realized that my sexuality had never been pure and my relationships never honoured the other person or the Lord.  My moral code encompassed serial monogamy, “safe” sex, and sex only in the context of love.  Love, grounded only in personal feelings, as mine had been, changes without warning or logic.  The truth is, outside of Christ, I am a manipulator, liar, power-monger, and controller.  In my relationships with men and with women, I had to be in charge.  I killed with kindness and slayed with gifts.  I bought people’s loyalties and affections.  . . . 

In understanding myself as a sexual being, responding to Jesus (i.e., “committing my life to Christ”) meant not going backwards to my heterosexual past but going forward to something entirely new.  At the time I thought that this would most likely be celibacy and the single life.  Sexuality that did not devour the other person seemed unimaginable to me.  And while I never really liked the idea of growing old alone, I accepted that if God could take me this far in life safely, he would see me through this next part too. 

Rosaria Champagne Butterfield, The Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert: An English Professor’s Journey into Christian Faith. Expanded edition.  (Pittsburg: Crown and Covenant Publications, 2014), pp.29-33. 

Letter From the UK (About An Assault Upon Christian Doctrine)

Forced Promotion of Homosexual “Marriage”

New Government Regulations ‘Compel’ Schools to Promote Same-Sex Marriage

by Gerald Warner  

10 Oct 2014

Breitbart London

The Coalition for Marriage has denounced new Government regulations for independent schools in England which are clearly aimed at compelling schools to promote same-sex marriage, regardless of the wishes of parents or teachers. This measure provides the latest evidence of the insincerity of the Cameron government in claiming that rights of conscience would be respected when marriage for homosexuals was forced onto the statute book.

These coercive provisions are contained in the new Independent School Standards regulations which change the legal framework for academies, free schools and private education. This means that they target a total of 6,238 schools. The number of pupils enrolled in academies alone amounts to 2,423,535, so millions of schoolchildren, teachers and parents will be affected by this new imposition. Ofsted has been charged with enforcing the same minimum standards on all other schools.

The Coalition for Marriage has published an analysis of the new provisions, accompanied by detailed advice from a senior QC consulted by the Christian Institute. This latest aggression by social engineers in a supposedly Conservative-led government is ominously significant, even historic, in that it crosses a red line never before violated by introducing state interference in the curriculum. Even Labour never went as far as that in its social engineering mania.

Colin Hart, Campaign Director of the Coalition for Marriage, observes: “As we know from recent history, reasonable opposition to same-sex marriage is routinely described as ‘homophobia’.” He asks if a school must discipline or dismiss a teacher who voices support for traditional marriage and whether parents of prospective pupils will be interrogated about their beliefs before their child is granted a school place. Such totalitarian inquisition is already practised with regard to fostering and adoption.

In supposed respect for that convention the school curriculum was excluded from the provisions of the Equality Act. Now, however, these new regulations will trample down that tradition of political neutrality in the curriculum in English schools. Regulation (b) (vi) introduces a duty to “encourage respect for other people, paying particular regard to the protected characteristics set out in the Equality Act 2010 (a)”. Note the weasel language regarding “protected characteristics”. Nobody has any problem with pupils being taught respect for other people – they have long been instructed in that duty in religious knowledge classes, civics lessons and in the home.

But respecting “protected characteristics” defined in the most un-British piece of legislation ever passed is an entirely different matter. It involves ideology rather than people. One of the protected characteristics set out in the Equality Act is sexual orientation. The regulations assert a “new requirement for schools to actively promote principles which encourage respect for persons with protected characteristics” with the intention of allowing the Secretary of State to take regulatory action in various situations, including “failure to address homophobia”.

Colin Hart, Campaign Director of the Coalition for Marriage, observes: “As we know from recent history, reasonable opposition to same-sex marriage is routinely described as ‘homophobia’.” He asks if a school must discipline or dismiss a teacher who voices support for traditional marriage and whether parents of prospective pupils will be interrogated about their beliefs before their child is granted a school place. Such totalitarian inquisition is already practised with regard to fostering and adoption.

The sinister term “actively promote” was defined in the Government’s consultation document: “ ‘Actively promote’ also means challenging pupils, staff or parents expressing opinions contrary to fundamental British values.” Anyone who thinks that is simply aimed at jihadist sympathisers is sadly deluded. “Fundamental British values”, in a Government context, bears no relation to the traditional ethos, beliefs and standards of mainstream Britain; on the contrary, it is coded language for political correctness.

This blueprint for indoctrination further insists that in future private schools must conform to “national norms” rather than the expectations of parents. So much for independent education. If this is the climate of enforcement that will prevail in the independent sector, what kind of Stalinist Thought Police can we expect to rule over state schools?

The QC’s opinion commissioned by the Christian Institute, another body alarmed by this interference with academic and moral freedom, quotes a ruling by the European Court of Human Rights: “The state is forbidden to pursue an aim of indoctrination that might be considered as not respecting parents’ religious and philosophical convictions. That is the limit that the states must not exceed.”

The British Government prefers to “challenge” parents. They should accept that challenge and respond, most notably at the ballot box. Some of them took the opportunity of doing so on Thursday. It beggars belief that this offensive against the ideological impartiality of the school curriculum, traditional marriage, parental authority and freedom of speech results from an initiative by a so-called Conservative Prime Minister.

Now we know just how “free” the Tories’ free schools are intended to be. Independent education is an oxymoron when the intruder State attempts to enforce its progressive prejudices on pupils and teachers. We are being herded along a road well trodden by totalitarian dictators before. How long before we arrive at the Orwellian destination where pupils are indoctrinated with the slogan “Be a good citizen – report your parents”? Debauching the school curriculum is an aggression too far by Dave’s PC social engineers.

Arrogance and Irrelevance

Born That Way

It never ceases to surprise how many Unbelievers fail to understand Christians and the Christian faith.  Clearly there are exceptions–some signal and helpful.  But most Unbelievers cannot escape the cocoon of their own Unbelieving perspectives.  When they confront Christians their arguments amount to a bewildered and annoyed “why can’t you think and act like everyone else–that is, like us”?

Why indeed?  Homosexuality right now is a touchstone for highlighting the ignorance of Unbelief when it comes to the Christian position, doctrine, and teaching on homosexuality, in particular and sexual sin, in general.  Unbelievers almost universally assert that homosexuality is genetic: people cannot help be what they are born to be.  To oppose or resist homosexuality is as foolish and blind as opposing blue eyes or red hair.  They cannot conceive why Christians do not grant this.  They are take offence at Christians because they refuse to think in the categories and gratuitous assumptions of Unbelief.  A most bizarre situation.

We will attempt a Christian reply to such nonsense shortly, but firstly, here is an example of that which we speak.  The Guardian, ever a champion of Unbelief, carries a column by Peter Omerod on why discrimination against “Christian homosexuals” must stop!

Church leaders understandably don’t want to appear obsessed with sex but this is a matter of life and death. Festivals for young Christians, such as Soul Survivor, must be explicit about their acceptance of homosexuality, and the wider church’s words on the issue must be matched with actions. The campaign against homophobic bullying in C of E schools is welcome, but when the church itself fails to treat gay relationships as equal to heterosexual relationships, its message is undermined.

Three years ago, the Christian activist Symon Hill embarked on a pilgrimage of repentance for his former homophobia. It’s now time for the church as a whole to follow in his footsteps. As a means of opposing injustice, sitting down and saying nothing may be polite but it’s not what Jesus did, and it’s not what Beeching’s story demands.

Clearly Mr Omerod is frustrated that Christians refuse to think like Unbelievers.  He cannot think outside of his perspectival pre-commitments.  He cannot take off the particular set of glasses that condition, inform, and shape everything that he sees in the world.  He is not alone.  It is endemic.

The Christian is marked by repentance and faith.  Repentance involves a turning away from Unbelief, from disobedience to God, sinfulness, wickedness, and from rebelliousness against the Lord.  It also involves a turning towards God, accepting His pre-interpretation of all reality as true Truth.  Repentance, literally, is a radical change of mind.  Thus, to expect a Christian to think, evaluate, categorise, and assess human realities in the same way as the former Unbeliever he once was, represents a profound ignorance of what it means to be a Christian.

But the Christian also believes in God and entrusts himself to His goodness and care.  What our heavenly Father commands is now our law of life.  If God declares that theft is wrong and that one must not covet, then that’s it.  No matter what pleas or appeals Unbelief might make as to why theft is a natural, ordinary part of what it means to be human, and so forth, the bucket holds no water.  If God declares adultery is evil no amount of Unbelieving rationalising as to why it might be a good thing, revitalising one’s sex life, or some other Unbelieving inanity will ever persuade a Christian because God condemns and forbids it.  Faith requires that response, as well as the profession by faith that all which God commands is for our good.

There have been plenty of people who have claimed that fidelity was not for them because they were constitutionally unable to be faithful.  Fidelity was for people who were wired differently than they.  “I was born with a wandering eye”, they claim–and Unbelief agrees, arguing that impediments to the practice of adultery and sexual promiscuousness are repressive, harmful, and discriminatory.  So all-dominant has this worldview become that “no-fault divorce” is now enshrined in the legal codes.  The Christian, on the other hand, calls this out, accepting God’s commands that, “Thou shalt not commit adultery” trumps any wandering eye.  And our Lord left us in do doubt when He pronounced that even looking upon a woman with lust and sexual desire in one’s heart is adultery in fact.  (Matthew 5: 27, 28).  “I was born this way” may be true, but it is irrelevant when it comes to disregarding and disobeying the holy law of God. 

Which brings us to this touchstone point of difference between the perspectives of Unbelief and of the Christian faith.  The Christian knows and acknowledges that all human beings, apart from the first Adam and the second Adam, Jesus Christ were born constituted as sinful.  “I was evil, born in sin,” lamented David.  Thus, evil and sinfulness are part of the way we all are, unless and until God lifts us out of the miry clay having been born again by the Spirit.

What Unbelievers in general and Mr Omerod in particular repetitively fail to grasp are these crucial differences between the Unbeliever and the Christian.  Christians will agree with Unbelief that all sin is congenital to every human being.  But Christians are those whom God has delivered from the guilt of their sin, whom He is progressively delivering from the power of their sin, and whom He will eventually deliver from the very presence of sin.  To criticise Christians and the Christian faith as if these things were not true simply underscores how ignorant and stubborn Unbelief truly is.  To criticize Christians because they do not think like Unbelievers is about as dumb a position as one can find. 

Homosexuality is an unrighteous lust; it is a vile adultery.  We were all born with such vileness as native to our hearts.  That’s what it means to be fallen, evil, born in sin.  What we Christians, however, cannot accept is the arrogant demand by Unbelievers that we continue to think and act as if we were not Christians; that we should continue to live, move, and have our being in Unbelief.  For Unbelievers to persist in such inanity is to put Unbelief upon the  pedestal of ridicule.  Surely, Mr Omerod can do better.  There are Unbelievers who have.  But, then again, maybe Mr Omerod and his fellow travellers were born that way.

 

Refining Fire

Exiles Departing an Unbelieving Church

We have recently recommenced reading the book of Ezekiel–this time, in large chunks at a time, rather than chapter by chapter.  Ezekiel was an exile, having been “removed” from Judah to Babylon in one of the early Babylonian actions against Judah and Jerusalem.  Other exiles would follow, ending up in the final siege and destruction of the city, and the terrible slaughter of the year 586BC. 

It was in captivity that Ezekiel was called by God to be His prophet to the exiles, even as Jeremiah was called to be God’s prophet to Judah.  Jeremiah has been called the “weeping prophet” because of his heart-wrenching lamentations, mourning, and weeping over the stubborn Israelites and their refusal to listen to Jeremiah’s warning of imminent destruction.  If Jeremiah was the weeping prophet, Ezekiel was the suffering prophet, called by God to act out before the exiles Judah’s heard-hearted refusal to listen to God, and the inevitable consequences that followed.

The first twenty-four chapters of Ezekiel document Israel’s centuries of unfaithfulness and unbelief.  The exiles, watching from afar, hoping for some relief, hated Ezekiel and his message of condemnation and threat–which is to say, they hated God.  The nadir of Ezekiel’s suffering comes when the Lord tells him that He is about to take his wife, but that he must not mourn for her.

“The word of the Lord came to me: “Son of man, behold, I am about to take the delight of your eyes away from you at a stroke; yet you shall not mourn or weep, nor shall your tears run down. Sigh, but not aloud; make no mourning for the dead. Bind on your turban, and put your shoes on your feet; do not cover your lips, nor eat the bread of men.” So I spoke to the people in the morning, and at evening my wife died. And on the next morning I did as I was commanded.
 
And the people said to me, “Will you not tell us what these things mean for us, that you are acting thus?” Then I said to them, “The word of the Lord came to me: ‘Say to the house of Israel, Thus says the Lord God: Behold, I will profane my sanctuary, the pride of your power, the delight of your eyes, and the yearning of your soul, and your sons and your daughters whom you left behind shall fall by the sword. And you shall do as I have done; you shall not cover your lips, nor eat the bread of men. Your turbans shall be on your heads and your shoes on your feet; you shall not mourn or weep, but you shall rot away in your iniquities and groan to one another. Thus shall Ezekiel be to you a sign; according to all that he has done you shall do. When this comes, then you will know that I am the Lord God.’ [Ezekiel 24: 19-24]

The history of the Church, under both Old Covenant and New Covenant  can be written as a pattern of repeated unfaithfulness and ultimately rebellion against God.  God is faithful; men are unfaithful.  To be sure, such a perspective does not encompass everything about the Church’s history–by any stretch of the imagination–but nevertheless unfaithfulness is an abiding theme.  One only has to consider the daily struggle against sin and temptation experienced by every believer to see why this has been the case.

There are compensating factors, however.  In the modern world, in the West, religion is still understood to be a matter of conscience, of belief, and of the human heart.  It is not something which can be compelled, nor dictated.  Therefore, when churches defalcate, turning away from belief, they wither and die.  People who truly believe come to hate the unfaithfulness and apostasy they experience in daily church existence.  They vote with their feet.  They leave.  They seek the Living God elsewhere.

Those denominations and churches which long ago turned away from the authority of God and the Scriptures empty. It is a pattern which has repeated itself over and over.  God’s people are seeking Him elsewhere, since the church in which they once sought Him, found Him, and worshipped Him, no longer fears Him nor believes in Him.  Their former church has become a mere human institution increasingly corrupted by men seeking a name and power for themselves.

The Anglican Church is undergoing just such a departure of exiles–believers who can no longer find a home in that place.  This, from the NZ Herald:

Outspoken Anglican vicar Michael Hewat walked out of the church yesterday over its recognition of same-sex relationships – and other conservative Anglicans are warning of more departures if “recognition” eventually becomes “blessing”.  Mr Hewat, 54, was the executive director until yesterday of the conservative Anglican Affirm movement, which claims to represent a majority of active church-going Anglicans in Auckland and Nelson and a sizeable minority elsewhere.

Affirm chairman Rev Max Scott said the church was now “completely divided” on the same-sex issue, which has been passed to a working party due to report in 2016 on a possible new liturgy to bless “right-ordered same-gender relationships”.  “If this process is not resolved satisfactorily to the biblically conservative group, then we would expect that there could well be further departures,” he said. . . .

In West Hamilton, parishioners voted by 129-6 to “support Michael Hewat and the vestry in their decision of conscience not to sign the submission to general synod”. Mr Hewat and his staff have moved temporarily to a nearby office and will hold services from tomorrow in the Simplicity funeral chapel.

“We are leaving the Anglican denomination but we are not going to be an independent church. We are looking to realign and we will apply in the near future to [join] another denomination.”  He said he could no longer submit to the general synod because he believed the resolution passed at Waitangi was contrary to both the Bible and the church’s constitution.

He and his vestry wrote to Waikato-Taranaki bishops Helen-Ann Hartley and Philip Richardson on May 25 stating that they could not support the resolution.  Bishop Hartley attended a meeting at the West Hamilton church on June 15 in which, according to Mr Hewat, she acknowledged on tape: “Scripture is clear that same-gender relationships are sinful.” But she also pleaded with the congregation to support the unity of the church and respect the process it was going through to resolve the issue.

It would be myopic to ignore the avalanche of vitriol and hatred being poured out upon these Anglican Christians seeking to love God.  According to Michael Hewat:

Amid the swirl of opinion around the Anglican General Synod’s decision to commit to finding a way to bless gay couples, the epithets for orthodox Anglicans have mounted: anti-gay, homophobic, wrong, immoral, betrayers of Jesus, unloving, judgmental, intolerant, bigoted, ostracising, unjust and hypocritical. Doubtless an incomplete list, but enough to paint a nasty picture.   The advice meted out is hardly less blunt: grow up and put your archaic house in order, get loving in the progressive sense – or get out.

There is no doubt that the wellspring of spiritual vitality, energy, and service of the Gospel in the Anglican Church has been amongst those who fear God, believe upon the Lord Jesus Christ, gratefully embrace the Gospel of eternal life in Him, and hold the Bible to be God’s Word.  In other words, these are the folk who believe upon the Lord Jesus Christ.  Those who oppose are either too ignorant to know what the Bible teaches, or they do not care.  They want, not a Christian church, but a social edifice raised to the glory of man’s autonomy.  “Christianity, love, fidelity, truth is what we decide and determine; God, the Lord, Jesus Christ and the Scriptures are all old-fashioned, simplistic, antiquated hooey.” 

Far too many leaders in that church, however, have sought the respect of man, and to accommodate themselves to an increasingly pagan establishment in society at large.  Thus, the defalcations on “women’s rights”, secular feminism, homosexuality–all in the attempt to drag the church (as they see it) into the twenty-first century–which is to say, these false shepherds want to put as much daylight as possible between themselves and the God Who has revealed Himself in the Scriptures.  They seek the approbation of Unbelief, not the commendation of God.

In order to become refined Israel had to walk through the valley of bitterness and judgement.  Things have not changed.  It is still the case.  But in Ezekiel’s day, if one mourned the unfaithfulness all around, where else could one go?  But under the New Covenant, particularly in these days, there are plenty of exits, open doors and options for the faithful.  The Refiner’s fire is burning in every place, all the time.

The Church is always reforming.  Therefore, some churches, wedded to idolatry, are emptying and dying. 

Douglas Wilson’s Letter From Moscow

Bundle Up, Girls!

Douglas Wilson

Blog and Mablog

Monday, May 19, 2014

Last year, when I debated Andrew Sullivan over same sex mirage — he claiming to see it, and me claiming not to, for is it not a mirage? — one of the arguments that I advanced was this one: Given the premises and arguments of same sexery, we have absolutely no reason to limit marriage to two persons only. Andrew wanted to say no, no, no, and that two persons only was traditional and sacrosanct — like anybody cares about that these days. But that was his position anyhow.

In the aftermath of the debate, one of the questions raised to me (from friendly quarters) was whether I was treating same sex mirage as the slippery part of the slope, and polygamy as the bottom of the slope. But Abraham and David were polygamists, and so why would polygamy — a deficient form of marriage, to be sure, but still recognizably marriage — be treated as the reductio ad depravationem of another practice that the Scriptures universally treat as detestable. Is this not backwards somehow?

Point taken, but there are still several ways to defend this argument o’ mine — and it should be defended.
The first is this. The point is not that plural marriage in itself is worse than same sex mirage, but rather that the defenders of same sex mirage like to draw arbitrary and capricious lines whenever it comes to the definition of marriage, and they have absolutely no coherent reason for doing so. When an opponent of same sex mirage is asked to defend his position, he says sure. God made the human body, He created us male and female, the two complement one another in exquisite ways, and together they carry the image of God (Gen. 1:27). When a homosexual activist is asked to defend his opposition to plural marriage, he will say sure. Because math and hate.

Whatever standards for marriage the advocates of same sex mirage still arbitarily have (for whatever reason) they should be made to defend. The point is to make it evident that they have no defense. If they say there should only be two people, make them say it, and them make them say why. If they say the age of consent should be eighteen, make them explain why it shouldn’t be seventeen. Their trajectory is evil, but this point is simpler. Their trajectory is capricious and ad hoc.

I am fully aware that once the goal of same sex mirage is realized, a bunch of people who had been professing themselves horrified at the idea of big love will suddenly discover themselves evolving on the subject. Yay evolution. We know how the drill goes. Action A is proposed, conservatives predict Consequence B, advocates of Action A say ho, ho, ho, what a maroon, Action A is enacted, Consequence B arrives on it’s scheduled flight, the conservatives issue an indigant press release pointing this out, advocates of Action A and defenders of Consequence B say ho, ho, ho, what a maroon, and announce the introduction of Legislation C. This ain’t my first rodeo.

I also realize that this involves a tangle of inconsistencies on their part, and that it is not possible to build a civilization on the foundation of such inconsistencies. This is quite true, but their goal is not to build a civilization — their goal, in case you hadn’t realized it by now, is to tear one down. The inconsistencies don’t bother them. They want to demolish Christian civilization. And in this endeavor they are doing quite well, with a bunch of help incidentally from metrosexual hipster Christians, filled to the brim with thots about serious phillums, the kind with the sort of art nudity that makes you think Heidegger was on to something.

So the point to be made here is that homosexual activists do know how to pressure us to modify marriage into an unrecognizable state, but if someone were to ask them to define marriage de novo and please explain to us why we should accept this definition of marriage, they have absolutely nothing to say. What is marriage and why?

Even though not all homosexuals are pedophiles, all pro-homosexual arguments are pro-pedophile arguments. Name me one that isn’t. Born this way, check. Deeply felt urges and yearnings, check. Who’s to say what’s normal, check. There is not one pro-homosexual argument that cannot be enlisted in the service of toppling the next taboo, whatever that remaining and increasingly lonely taboo might be.

The definition of marriage either comes from outside ourselves (from God’s Word and from natural revelation) or it is an arbitrary arrangement according to the pleasures and whims of those participating in it. And if it is according to the whims of however many people can fit on a California king-sized bed, I don’t see why Andrew Sullivan’s peculiar and very personal hang-ups should dictate to these deeply committed five — it was six but Suzy fell off — any kind of limitation on their love.

Well, there is another problem. It starts with the voluntary desires of all those participating in it, but it always ends in accordance with those controlling the institution. I have in mind here Boko Haram’s approach to marriage, which does not take into account the wishes of the abducted child brides. I also have in mind the supine cravenness of the Western elites, who just award Iran a seat on the UN Women’s Rights Commission. Time to bundle up, girls!

Either we control the definition of marriage or we don’t. If we don’t, it is time for some Bible study, and serious research by sociologists who don’t have the gun of political correctness resting on their collective temple. The coolness of the metal helps them to concentrate. If we do control what the definition of marriage is, then let’s be done with laying down laws of any kind. What right do we have to put the lusts of others in a cage? Unless, of course, doing so gratifies our lusts — returning to the Boko Haram point.

But other than that, what right do we have to dictate to any future generations? Maybe they might want to replicate what Herodotus wrote about that time, and build a society that required all its women to serve a public service stint as a sacred prostitute. I am sure we could come up with a slick way to sell it. We could call it something like AmeriWhore.

Nothing is worse than this namby pamby nihilism. Nothing more tepid than warmed over moralism from ostensible atheists like Sam Harris — a moral landscape, forsooth! If you are hoping to murder God, then at least pretend to have done it, and face the consequences. You will have to go mad like Nietzsche did. But if you don’t want to do it, then come back to Jesus.

It should not be surprising, but children growing up with same sex “parents” show a much greater likelihood of being all screwed up. Allow me to wait for a moment to let the shouting die down — because this is the point in the debate where the shouting usually starts. People like me don’t deserve to be answered, being beneath contempt and all, and so we advance the science by shouting that the science is settled, and people like me are science-deniers. I hope to get to the details of this in a future post, but it is a fact that children who grow up in homes headed by two women or by two men are significantly more likely to have been abused.

This is the point where my argument will be deliberately misrepresented, alleging that I am saying that it never happens with heterosexuals, or that all homosexuals are pedophiles. Of course I am not saying that. But I am saying something that should be noted, and which is likely to be just as offensive.

People who reject biblical morality, and who reject the authority of right reason in the natural world, are much more likely to transgress those boundaries — all of them. This is the reason the risks are significantly higher. Even though not all homosexuals are pedophiles, all pro-homosexual arguments are pro-pedophile arguments. Name me one that isn’t. Born this way, check. Deeply felt urges and yearnings, check. Who’s to say what’s normal, check. There is not one pro-homosexual argument that cannot be enlisted in the service of toppling the next taboo, whatever that remaining and increasingly lonely taboo might be.

One other point. A second way to defend my plural marriage argument is by noting that the problem confronting the decadent western world is not going to be the occasional renegade Mormon. The problem is not how many women live under some little rooster’s roof in a rural county of Utah. The pressing problem is Islam. There is no way to open the door to polygamy without simultaneously opening the door to Sharia law — and that really is dangerous. The secular West does not know what it stands for anymore, and following Chesterton’s dictum, it will therefore fall for anything. The only exception the secularists recognize is Christianity — they won’t fall for that, not until God unleashes His sovereign reformation despite their wishes.

But in the meantime, the Islamic fundamentalists will continue to go through decadent Western societies like a hot knife through butter. And Sharia law really would be the bottom of a bad slide.

 

Pagan Wolves

 A New-Age Leader of the Pack

We read periodically of the return of the wolf to Europe–once feared extinct, now running hunting packs throughout northern Europe and Spain.  But metaphorical wolves are also returning to re-establish a once long thought extinct pagan culture in Europe and the West. 

The following is a call-to-action from an officer in the Anglican Church of New Zealand. 

The newly appointed vicar of Auckland’s Anglican church St Matthew-in-the-City has called on the church to approve same-sex marriages and ordination of gay vicars.  Reverend Dr Helen Jacobi, in her sermon on Sunday, spoke to the church’s two-yearly General Synod, being held this week.

Rev Jacobi said the Synod had a clear choice, “they can and try and keep the church locked in the 1950s or the 1850s, thinking they can stop the movement for justice and inclusion of our lesbian and gay sisters and brothers which our hearts yearn to see.  Or they can come out from behind their fears and prejudices and welcome all equally behind the altar, in the pulpit, and at the altar to be married.”

Rev Jacobi said Ms Matthew’s had long had its doors wide open, and “we are richer for it.  We call today on our leaders to step up, to be without fear and to allow the voice of the Shepherd to call them forward. The time of waiting is over, we will wait no longer.” [NZ Herald]

Ms Jacobi officiates at a congregation in Auckland which has long prided itself on capturing the wisdom of the world and baptising it with Christian platitudes.  The worship of Human Comfort has been its real religion for decades.  

As we read her sermon, er . . . press release, it is helpful to filter her “wisdom” through the following prism:

Many in our churches continue to avoid the issue of gender because, they say, it is not a “confessional issue.”  All I can say is that gender is the major issue in the “confession” of neo-paganism.  We can no longer keep silent.  We must present the Bible’s view of gender as an essential part of the coherence of the Bible’s entire world-view, over again the “coherence” of the feministic, pagan agenda. 

Let’s be realistic.  The pagan agenda has taken over our culture.  Feminists and intellectual neo-pagans in control of the Academy and the media are working to eliminate any vestiges of patriarchy and normative heterosexuality.  At the same time, they are seeking to institutionalize “pan-sexuality” for the coming brave new world, where all gender choices are normative.  At a popular level, on virtually every other page of the wildly successful novel, The Da Vinci Code the author, Dan Brown, speaks of the “divine feminine” as the hope of humanity.  In this view of things, “patriarchy” [responsible male leadership, reflecting God’s creation of order and distinction]  is the demonic centre of an odious power-obsessed hierarchy that places the male over the female, mind over body, heaven over earth, the transcendent creator God over the created world.  It must be replaced with a profoundly pagan, feministic, pantheistic sense of divinity as the life-force within all things, a world of the yin and the yang where nothing is ultimately right or wrong.

These two mutually-exclusive, all-inclusive programs of the pagan and the biblical world-view are presently locked in deadly confrontation.  In this clash, gender, whether exclusive heterosexuality or liberated pan-sexuality, has a leading, integral, and logical part in the whole web of ideas.  [Dr Peter Jones, Professor of New Testament, Westminster Seminary in Escondido, cited in J. Ligon Duncan & Susan Hunt, Women’s Ministry in the Local Church (Wheaton: Crossway Books, 2006),  p.129.]

Ms Jacobi is a poster-child for the pan-genderism of the new paganism.  She has all the sartorial hallmarks of a wolf in sheep’s clothing.

World Views At War: Merry Warriors Needed

Sex After Christianity

Gay marriage is not just a social revolution but a cosmological one.

By Rod Dreher • April 11, 2013

The American Conservative

Twenty years ago, new president Bill Clinton stepped on a political landmine when he tried to fulfill a campaign promise to permit gay soldiers to serve openly. Same-sex marriage barely registered as a political cause; the country was then three years away from the Defense of Marriage Act and four years from comedian Ellen DeGeneres’s prime-time coming out.

Then came what historians will one day recall as a cultural revolution. Now we’re entering the endgame of the struggle over gay rights and the meaning of homosexuality. Conservatives have been routed, both in court and increasingly in the court of public opinion. It is commonly believed that the only reason to oppose same-sex marriage is rank bigotry or for religious reasons, neither of which—the argument goes—has any place in determining laws or public standards.

The magnitude of the defeat suffered by moral traditionalists will become ever clearer as older Americans pass from the scene. Poll after poll shows that for the young, homosexuality is normal and gay marriage is no big deal—except, of course, if one opposes it, in which case one has the approximate moral status of a segregationist in the late 1960s.

All this is, in fact, a much bigger deal than most people on both sides realize, and for a reason that eludes even ardent opponents of gay rights.
Back in 1993, a cover story in The Nation identified the gay-rights cause as the summit and keystone of the culture war:

All the crosscurrents of present-day liberation struggles are subsumed in the gay struggle. The gay moment is in some ways similar to the moment that other communities have experienced in the nation’s past, but it is also something more, because sexual identity is in crisis throughout the population, and gay people—at once the most conspicuous subjects and objects of the crisis—have been forced to invent a complete cosmology to grasp it. No one says the changes will come easily. But it’s just possible that a small and despised sexual minority will change America forever.

They were right, and though the word “cosmology” may strike readers as philosophically grandiose, its use now appears downright prophetic. The struggle for the rights of “a small and despised sexual minority” would not have succeeded if the old Christian cosmology had held: put bluntly, the gay-rights cause has succeeded precisely because the Christian cosmology has dissipated in the mind of the West. . . .

This raises a critically important question: is sex the linchpin of Christian cultural order? Is it really the case that to cast off Christian teaching on sex and sexuality is to remove the factor that gives—or gave—Christianity its power as a social force?

Though he might not have put it quite that way, the eminent sociologist Philip Rieff would probably have said yes. Rieff’s landmark 1966 book The Triumph Of the Therapeutic analyzes what he calls the “deconversion” of the West from Christianity. Nearly everyone recognizes that this process has been underway since the Enlightenment, but Rieff showed that it had reached a more advanced stage than most people—least of all Christians—recognized.

Rieff, who died in 2006, was an unbeliever, but he understood that religion is the key to understanding any culture. For Rieff, the essence of any and every culture can be identified by what it forbids. Each imposes a series of moral demands on its members, for the sake of serving communal purposes, and helps them cope with these demands. A culture requires a cultus—a sense of sacred order, a cosmology that roots these moral demands within a metaphysical framework.

. . . It is nearly impossible for contemporary Americans to grasp why sex was a central concern of early Christianity. Sarah Ruden, the Yale-trained classics translator, explains the culture into which Christianity appeared in her 2010 book Paul Among The People. Ruden contends that it’s profoundly ignorant to think of the Apostle Paul as a dour proto-Puritan descending upon happy-go-lucky pagan hippies, ordering them to stop having fun. 

In fact, Paul’s teachings on sexual purity and marriage were adopted as liberating in the pornographic, sexually exploitive Greco-Roman culture of the time—exploitive especially of slaves and women, whose value to pagan males lay chiefly in their ability to produce children and provide sexual pleasure. Christianity, as articulated by Paul, worked a cultural revolution, restraining and channeling male eros, elevating the status of both women and of the human body, and infusing marriage—and marital sexuality—with love.

Christian marriage, Ruden writes, was “as different from anything before or since as the command to turn the other cheek.” The point is not that Christianity was only, or primarily, about redefining and revaluing sexuality, but that within a Christian anthropology sex takes on a new and different meaning, one that mandated a radical change of behavior and cultural norms. In Christianity, what people do with their sexuality cannot be separated from what the human person is.

It would be absurd to claim that Christian civilization ever achieved a golden age of social harmony and sexual bliss. It is easy to find eras in Christian history when church authorities were obsessed with sexual purity. But as Rieff recognizes, Christianity did establish a way to harness the sexual instinct, embed it within a community, and direct it in positive ways.

What makes our own era different from the past, says Rieff, is that we have ceased to believe in the Christian cultural framework, yet we have made it impossible to believe in any other that does what culture must do: restrain individual passions and channel them creatively toward communal purposes.  Rather, in the modern era, we have inverted the role of culture. Instead of teaching us what we must deprive ourselves of to be civilized, we have a society that tells us we find meaning and purpose in releasing ourselves from the old prohibitions. . . .

By the 1960s, the conviction that sexual expression was healthy and good—the more of it, the better—and that sexual desire was intrinsic to one’s personal identity culminated in the sexual revolution, the animating spirit of which held that freedom and authenticity were to be found not in sexual withholding (the Christian view) but in sexual expression and assertion. That is how the modern American claims his freedom. 

To Rieff, ours is a particular kind of “revolutionary epoch” because the revolution cannot by its nature be institutionalized. Because it denies the possibility of communal knowledge of binding truths transcending the individual, the revolution cannot establish a stable social order. As Rieff characterizes it, “The answer to all questions of ‘what for’ is ‘more’.”  Our post-Christian culture, then, is an “anti-culture.” We are compelled by the logic of modernity and the myth of individual freedom to continue tearing away the last vestiges of the old order, convinced that true happiness and harmony will be ours once all limits have been nullified.

Gay marriage signifies the final triumph of the Sexual Revolution and the dethroning of Christianity because it denies the core concept of Christian anthropology. In classical Christian teaching, the divinely sanctioned union of male and female is an icon of the relationship of Christ to His church and ultimately of God to His creation. This is why gay marriage negates Christian cosmology, from which we derive our modern concept of human rights and other fundamental goods of modernity. Whether we can keep them in the post-Christian epoch remains to be seen.

It also remains to be seen whether we can keep Christianity without accepting Christian chastity. Sociologist Christian Smith’s research on what he has termed “moralistic therapeutic deism”—the feelgood, pseudo-Christianity that has supplanted the normative version of the faith in contemporary America—suggests that the task will be extremely difficult.

Conservative Christians have lost the fight over gay marriage and, as we have seen, did so decades before anyone even thought same-sex marriage was a possibility. Gay-marriage proponents succeeded so quickly because they showed the public that what they were fighting for was consonant with what most post-1960s Americans already believed about the meaning of sex and marriage. The question Western Christians face now is whether or not they are going to lose Christianity altogether in this new dispensation.

Too many of them think that same-sex marriage is merely a question of sexual ethics. They fail to see that gay marriage, and the concomitant collapse of marriage among poor and working-class heterosexuals, makes perfect sense given the autonomous individualism sacralized by modernity and embraced by contemporary culture—indeed, by many who call themselves Christians. They don’t grasp that Christianity, properly understood, is not a moralistic therapeutic adjunct to bourgeois individualism—a common response among American Christians, one denounced by Rieff in 2005 as “simply pathetic”—but is radically opposed to the cultural order (or disorder) that reigns today.

They are fighting the culture war moralistically, not cosmologically. They have not only lost the culture, but unless they understand the nature of the fight and change their strategy to fight cosmologically, within a few generations they may also lose their religion.

“The death of a culture begins when its normative institutions fail to communicate ideals in ways that remain inwardly compelling,” Rieff writes. By that standard, Christianity in America, if not American spirituality, is in mortal danger. The future is not foreordained: Taylor shares much of Rieff’s historical analysis but is more hopeful about the potential for renewal. Still, if the faith does not recover, the historical autopsy will conclude that gay marriage was not a cause but a symptom, the sign that revealed the patient’s terminal condition.

Rod Dreher blogs at www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher.

Douglas Wilson’s Letter From Moscow

Too Thick to Deal With

Blog and Mablog

Posted on Wednesday, April 9, 2014  

by Douglas Wilson

Looking over the comments below Gaywalkers, Gaytards, and the Gaystapo, I can see that it is time for a refresher course in why we talk here the way we do. To write the same thing for me is not grievous, and for you it is safe (Phil. 3:1). But, alongside the refresher course, a hearty well-done for those of you who clearly do get it.

First, we must recognize the utter lack of proportion that this kind of thing represents. The strategy of pc-correctness is calculated to silence any form of effective opposition to their despotic agenda, and it does this by inverting the proportions. So what we see is an ever-expanding circle of taking offense at trifles, coupled with an ever-increasing pile of “acceptable” outrages. It is demanded that we never use any language that might, under some circumstances, considered in the right light, hurt a fly, while at the same time insisting that the savage butchering of millions of children be considered a women’s health issue. We have a professional class of feminist offendees agonizing over “micro-aggressions” against women, for example, while simultaneously demanding their right to continue unabated their macro-aggressions against the unborn.

We demand groveling apologies from the fellows who fail to strain out a gnat, and give Medals of Freedom to those public-spirited figures who managed to choke down the camel.
We are a generation that, in the words of Dabney, are simultaneously sentimental and inhumane. The only way we react with moral outrage anymore is if someone insults our bizarre and disjointed sentimentalist taboos.

But this is not mindless behavior on their part; it is a play they are running. They are running it very successfully. They arbitrarily make more and more things offensive to say, and then well-meaning Christians who want to “maintain a good witness” volunteer to police the boundaries of their new prohibitions. Orwellian double-speak abounds, with Christians who really should know better serving as the double-speak cops. They do this, thinking it our duty for the sake of the witness, when our real duty is to put our foot through the side of every double-painted lie.

Second, when I coined (or so I thought) the word gaytard, I was courteous enough to explain what I thought I meant by it, and that meaning did not include mocking the mentally handicapped. For all anybody knew, I could have been riffing off of leotard. But no, I wasn’t — I actually was combining gay and retarded, and I was describing those people who are being blockheads — whether homosexual or straight — with regard to the sexual propaganda they are being served up. Now while it is offensive to God to taunt a retarded person for being retarded, it is not offensive to tag someone who ought not to be acting that way.

For example, Paul does this very thing to the Galatians. “O foolish Galatians . . .” he says. The word for foolish is anoetos — without reason, without sanity or sobriety, stupid. Is Paul walking through a psych ward, making fun of people? Not if you know how to read.

Third, on top of all this, one commenter noted that the word had an entry in the Urban Dictionary, and so I went and took a look see. And in that august place, the meaning given was not the same as mine. There it referred to someone who was simultaneously gay and retarded — obviously scurrilous and offensive, and unnecessarily so. While there, learning one of the names that you street-wise secularists taunt mentally-handicapped homosexuals with, I was helpfully offered the opportunity to “buy ‘gaytard’ mugs and shirts.”

So if you would like, all you people who are distressed at my word choices might want to head off to the complaints department of the Urban Dictionary and protest their calloused disregard of civilized discourse, and their merchandizing off the actual misfortunes of actual gaytards. Good luck. I’ll wait here for you. While you are there, you might discover that their gaytard entry is one of their milder offenses.

And last, one observer thought that I was interfering with his ability to spread the message of God’s love, and that is why he wanted me dead. You really can’t make this stuff up. At least he didn’t want me dead because our church sometimes sings imprecatory psalms. That would have made the irony too thick to deal with.

Douglas Wilson’s Letter From Moscow

Gaywalkers, Gaytards, and the Gaystapo

Blog and Mablog

Posted on Monday, April 7, 2014  

By Douglas Wilson 

Let us begin, shall we, with some basic distinctions.

The first has to do with the basic sin issue, with politics not involved. When I was in the Navy, and had evangelistic discussions with whoring drunks, sin was always the issue. I was presenting the gospel to them, and the necessary response to the gospel message is “repent and believe.” I would talk with men who were ashamed of their sin, and also to men who were belligerent about it. I would confront them with their tomcatting ways, and they would confront me for being such a Jesus freak. But, to everyone’s credit, after we would have what the diplomats call a frank exchange of views, nobody ran off to tattle.

Those who are tempted with same sex attractions — both those who are ashamed of it and try to resist it and those who are given over to it — are gaywalkers. God built the road, and it is straight road, and he told us to cross at the intersection. Refusing to do so, or wavering on the point, is a sin issue, not a political issue. Let’s talk about it. As we address this kind of thing, the faithful Christian is dealing with the homosexual on exactly the terms as he deals with adulterers, gamblers, liars, drunks, and so on. Sin is sin, and Jesus is the only way out of that death trap. So let’s talk about it.

But then there are the gaytards. These are the people — homosexual, straight, and whatever Justin Bieber is — who are the ideal receptacle for the cultural propaganda served up by our duly appointed thought managers. They believe in “gay rights” for the same reason that they believe in climate change.
The cool kids have decreed what is “in,” and the wannabe cool kids will enforce it on the unconvinced with a ferocity that can scarcely be credited. They do this in the hope that the cool kids will notice them, and promote them to better things. These people amuse themselves by taunting people ten times shrewder than they are as “low information voters.” Low information voters are those who believe that you can’t spend money you don’t have, that climate that doesn’t change isn’t climate change, and that men should marry women.

But then we come to those who are the driving force behind all this. They are in the grip of the libido dominandi, the lust for power, and they have combined it with their lust for flesh just like their own. They are the pink mafia. They are the gaystapo, as one observer put it. They want to establish their sodomite sharia law, starting in Portland, say, and working its way out.

Unless you take their tolerance tattoo, either on your right hand or on your forehead, you will not be able to buy or sell (Rev. 13:16-17). Why should such an enemy of humanity be able to buy or sell? But the problem with taking that tolerance tattoo is that the space is reserved. Everyone who serves the living and true God is called to reserve that space on the hand or forehead for the law of God (Deut. 6:8). And the law of God says to confuse male and female is a root confusion. Someone that confused might wind up having sex with someone just exactly like himself, and then calling it “diversity.”

But the collision here is not over whether or not the anus is a sex organ — that is reserved for the first category above. Our controversy here has to do with who defines love and hate for the public square, and what those definitions are. If they hear you witnessing to an apolitical homosexual in the first category above, and they declare you to be guilty of “hate speech,” what are we to say about this and why?

Behind these efforts of the gaystapo is a false view of history. They are marching, or so they think, from Seneca Falls to Selma, and from Selma to Stonewall. They want this battle to be exactly parallel to that which overthrew Jim Crow, in which the “old white guys” go down in ignominious defeat once again.
But — quite apart from my age and color, which some might consider irrelevant in discussions of morality — there is a stark difference between the two scenarios. The ardent defenders of principled segregation were defending sin. The ardent defenders of biblical marriage are opposing sin. “Sin? Sin? What is this babbler trying to say?”

Compare these passages. The first two address the segregationists, and the last one addresses the sodomites.

“There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus” (Gal. 3:28).

“And they sung a new song, saying, Thou art worthy to take the book, and to open the seals thereof: for thou wast slain, and hast redeemed us to God by thy blood out of every kindred, and tongue, and people, and nation; And hast made us unto our God kings and priests: and we shall reign on the earth” (Rev. 5:9–10)

“For if God spared not the angels that sinned, but cast them down to hell, and delivered them into chains of darkness, to be reserved unto judgment; And spared not the old world, but saved Noah the eighth person, a preacher of righteousness, bringing in the flood upon the world of the ungodly; And turning the cities of Sodom and Gomorrha into ashes condemned them with an overthrow, making them an ensample unto those that after should live ungodly; And delivered just Lot, vexed with the filthy conversation of the wicked: (For that righteous man dwelling among them, in seeing and hearing, vexed his righteous soul from day to day with their unlawful deeds;) The Lord knoweth how to deliver the godly out of temptations, and to reserve the unjust unto the day of judgment to be punished: But chiefly them that walk after the flesh in the lust of uncleanness, and despise government. Presumptuous are they, selfwilled, they are not afraid to speak evil of dignities. Whereas angels, which are greater in power and might, bring not railing accusation against them before the Lord” (2 Pet. 2:4–11).

What this means, in brief, is that in the civil rights movement, the liberals were trying to accomplish a good thing by a false means. Statist coercion cannot create racial harmony, but racial harmony is at least a good thing. The goal was noble, even though their confidence in the saving power of their compulsions was radically misplaced. And those who opposed them had, in the same moment, the task of opposing the murmurings of their own conscience.

In this instance, the liberals are trying to accomplish an evil thing. And when they start cracking heads in order to compel the corruption, they have fully earned their right to the name of gaystapo, and anyone with a Bible and a willingness to read it submissively can tell what they are up to. Their opponents in this one have a clean conscience, which makes all the difference in the world.

Douglas Wilson’s Letter From Moscow

All Stove In

Blog and Mablog

Posted on Friday, April 4, 2014  

By Douglas Wilson 

Andrew Sullivan should receive real credit for saying, as he did, that if the treatment of Brendan Eich is what the gay rights movement is all about, then he, Sullivan, wanted to be dealt out. Eich is the Mozilla CEO who was forced to resign because he donated money a few years ago in defense of heterosexual marriage, which is to say, marriage. In a tweet the other day, Andrew said, “The hounding and firing of @BrendanEich disgusts me – as it should anyone interested in a tolerant & diverse society.”

For those who are opposed to this sort of business, they will have many opportunities to register their dissent. There will be a steady stream of them. As I put it the other day, in this Tolerance Parade, the elephants just keep on coming — ow.ly/vprzA

This stand means that Andrew is not a hypocrite, and I am glad for it. When I debated him a while ago, he said that he would be opposed to some of the things that we opponents of same sex mirage were predicting would come from all this. And good to his word, this incident shows that he meant what he said. He is no hypocrite. If Andrew comes to read this, an honest well done from me.

But the fact that he is not a hypocrite does not keep him from being a patsy. He is like an idealistic revolutionary who labored for years to overthrow the czar, only to have Lenin, three weeks after the revolution, send around a couple of the boys to put a bullet in his head.
It turns out that those adversaries of the revolution knew what they were talking about when they argued it is easier to keep the monkeys in the cage than it is to get the monkeys back into the cage. Our “crazy talk” predictions, laughed at by people like Andrew, are steadily, slowly, inexorably, coming to pass. He who says A must eventually say B.

But Andrew, to his credit, opposes this thuggish behavior. He is wanting to be a classical liberal on this. As he put it, he wants society to be “tolerant and diverse.” And this kind of intolerista warp spasm is nothing of the kind. It is not classical liberalism or, if it is, it is Stage IV classical liberalism. Mencken once described this sort of thing very ably. He said that democracy was the process of establishing truth by means of counting noses, and promulgating it afterward with a club. And here we are.

And so it is that I want to point out what is actually going on. It is not the death of evangelical religion, it is not the death of biblical Christianity, and it is not the death of natural marriage. In times like these, when it is easy for the Church to be at its worst, we frequently find the Church at its best. So what this actually is, what this actually indicates, is the death rattle of the secular project. It is the death of the liberal experiment — and they do not have a god who knows the way back from the grave.

I want to discuss this according to their avowed principles. Let us talk about this within the confines of what the principled liberals have declared to be their great triumph — the establishment of a neutral public space, which in their reckoning would include companies like Mozilla and Hobby Lobby. The issue here is not what I would like to see in an ideal biblical republic, or how I would define the public space. I would like companies to be able to sack someone for his views, but I would want that freedom to be granted across the board to all companies.

No, the issue here is what is classical liberalism going to do about this outrage — on their terms? The answer is nothing, because they are impotent. They have unleashed forces they do not understand, and which they now find to be overwhelming. The whole thing is way beyond them now. They are like a hapless John Kerry, explaining once more to Vladimir Putin that this is the 21st century, and that he can’t just “take Crimea.” To which Putin replies, “Yes? Watch me do.”

The heyday of liberalism in America was probably the civil rights movement. They were up against a segregated establishment that had significant inertial force, but which was nonetheless guilt-ridden because of how blacks had been treated. It felt like a real battle to them. They had the high moral ground. They had dedication, youth, energy, and bad folk songs. They had a dream, and it didn’t involve Al Sharpton. They were going usher in an Eschaton filled with marshmallow clouds and unicorns.

But now . . . something like this happens, and it is evident that this is now standard operating procedure. This is a world in which error has no rights. The central ideal of their whole project is insulted, and with the back of the hand, but because it is done for the sake of irrational lusts, instead of thoughtless bigotries, there is nothing the liberals can do about it. And so they all stand there, hands in pockets, wishing it were a little black girl wanting to go to school — that way they could call out the National Guard. But alas, the victim is a smart, rich, white guy — like most of them — who really wanted to live in a free country — unlike most of them.

This helpless, hapless state of affairs is because the liberal project is rapidly assuming room temperature. All four hooves are pointed at the sky. Their secular city is a smoking crater. Their ship, the USS Mutual Respect, has foundered on the rocks of our public lusts. Their polity ideals are on the fritzing haywire. They are laid-up, stalled out, caved in. Their alabaster blocks for building the new city of man turn out to have been the kind of material they use to make castle walls at Disneyland. They are all metaphored out, and all stove in. I could go on in this vein, but I trust the point has at least been approximated.

And this death of liberalism is a really good thing for real Christians. The apostle John tells believers this — “little children, keep yourselves from idols.” This tells us that the little children of the church are susceptible to that temptation. But the temptation has to be cleverly presented. Your average Christian is not drawn to the yawning maw of Molech. He is easily drawn to the hazily defined god of secularism. He will not be drawn to the next outré Tolerance Fruit Parade. So why should we lament the death of an idol that really was a snare to us, just because it leaves standing an idol that won’t be?

Once the secular experiment is revealed to all of us as a sham and a fraud, there will be many hundreds of thousands of Christians who stop following a tiny Jesus in the privacy of their own hearts and homes. They will then walk out into the daylight of the public square, blinking.

Douglas Wilson’s Letter From Moscow

Queer Theory for the Tea Party

Blog and Mablog

Posted on Wednesday, March 5, 2014 

By Douglas Wilson 

Let us abandon for a moment the idea of culture war, and shift the image over to a game or a sport. Many conservative believers think we are in a straightforward contest of strength, something like sumo wrestling, when we are actually in a chess game with a master who is consistently five moves ahead of us.

I bring this up because of this piece by Michael Hannon over at First Things, warning us off the false ideal of heterosexuality. And if you read that, I would then recommend this response over at Mere Orthodoxy. In this response of mine, I would want to go even farther than Matt Anderson did in registering concern. By “registering concern” I refer of course to the fact that I will be dancing in place, with my hair on fire, and waving my hands over the top of my head.

There are three problems that have each contributed to setting my head ablaze. Let me outline them for you, although concentration might be a problem.

The first problem with this essay is that it represents the triumph of nominalism run amok. Now I have a great deal of sympathy for a particular approach that Christian writers have taken in encouraging Christians struggling with same sex attraction. They do well in teaching these Christians that their identity should not be found in their temptations, but rather in Christ. Whatever our temptations are, of whatever kind, if we have trusted in Christ, we should not be defined by them. We are, all of us, commanded to turn to the form of new humanity in Jesus, and He is the one who sets our foundational identity.

But more than that is going on here.
In many cases, the reluctance to give approval to statements like “I am heterosexual” or “I am homosexual” is actually a reluctance to approve of any abstractions whatever. Everything has to be this table or that one, and we must take care not to veer off into a refried Platonism by seeking to define what a table is in the abstract. But this is overly precious, incoherent, and impossible, all three of which failings are good reasons not to do it. If ever you find yourself teetering on the brink of queer theory in order to avoid Platonism, then you should conclude that Jesus must want you to become a Platonist. I am overstating this, of course, but not by much.

Scripture does not hesitate to use nouns to describe individuals who are classed in that group because of things they do. Presumably they do them because of an inclination to do them, and the apostle Paul does not worry about creating false identities outside of Christ through a simple use of collective nouns.

“Know ye not that the unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God? Be not deceived: neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor abusers of themselves with mankind . . .” (1 Cor. 6:9).

Paul doesn’t worry about it because He knows the power of Christ to change the categories — “such were some of you” (1 Cor. 6:11). But in the meantime, this guy is a fornicator, that guy is an adulterer, and the other guy is a catamite.

So instead of puzzling over what to do about the chess move confronting us right now, we should first reflect on what happened to us five moves back. One of the things that happened was that we lost a particular philosophical battle, and so lost our ability to use collective nouns in making moral judgments. In order to be faithful now, we need to go back and recover that ability. I am heterosexual is a meaningful statement, and as long as I am making it within the boundaries of biblical orthodoxy, I should continue to make it.

The second is the retreat to commitment, where the ever-present refuge of “our faith community” beckons us if the public battle ever gets too hot for us. In his book of that name, William Bartley dissects the pretensions of the liberal mainliners a generation ago, showing how their intellectual “courage” was nothing less than a simple CYA move. Our intellectual evangelicals today remind me of Tallyrand’s observation about the Bourbons — “they had learned nothing and forgotten nothing.” We are in the process of committing the same kind of intellectual suicide, and for all the same reasons, and with the same rationalizations. Hannon mentions that we believers should be fine with Foucault as a strange bedfellow, which I take as a strange suggestion. Professing to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the incorruptible God into the image of a corruptible queer theorist, one who incidentally had already been corrupted. He shouldn’t have been allowed in the house, much less the bedroom.

And the third problematic area is the growing distrust of nature and the natural order. This is actually what lies behind my insistence on the new birth. In order to be given a new nature, I must have an old nature to be delivered from. But that old nature is a fallen nature, not an anti-nature.

If we say, on philosophical grounds, that a person has no quintessential nature that can be transformed in the new birth, this has ramifications for the doctrine of regeneration. But it also has just as many ramifications for our ability to object to sex change operations, and for the same reasons. If a man asks a surgeon to change him from a boy to a girl, what is being violated? There is no express scriptural prohibition of it. It offends middle class sensibilities, but I have been reading First Things long enough to have rejected the idol of middle class sensibilities. The apostle Paul would say that such a move was “against nature,” but Foucault, this strange fellow here in bed with us now, is whispering retorts at a furious pace. Nature? Nature?!

Yes, nature. God made the world in a particular way, and has provided us with a manual for understanding in the Bible. But I have assembled enough products that were shipped to me in a box to be able to tell how the good ones work. Say I am assembling a book case. Not only do I have the manual, but I also discover that the intelligent people at the factory have labeled and marked the various parts. That is what nature is like. The world goes together the way God intends for it to go together.

If you want to make sense of it all, then make this resolution. Reject every form untethered nominalism. Confess that Jesus is Lord outside your faith community. And embrace the grace contained within natural revelation. And don’t try to run any workshops on queer theory at Tea Party rallies.

Now there are good Christian people who, for various reasons, are dabbling with one or more of these three problem areas — unhinged nominalism, a retreat to commitment, and a suspicion of natural theology. I do not regard them as evil or wicked, but I do regard them as hopelessly outmaneuvered.

Letter From Europe (About Defending Marriage Against the Barbarians)

Slovakia Might Amend Constitution to Protect Marriage Against Re-Definition. 

Gay Lobby Gets Angry.

Posted on | February 28, 2014 

By J.C. von Krempach, J.D. 

Turtle Bay and Beyond

Since the origins of human civilization until about ten years ago it was clear to everyone that marriage is between a man and a woman, and that same-sex “marriages” therefore cannot exist. No one should therefore be surprised that in the constitutional laws of most countries there is no definition of marriage – it simply was not needed.

With the adoption, by a small but growing number of countries, of legislation that allows for same-sex “marriages”, the once universal moral and legal consensus on marriage has been destroyed. As a consequence, there is now also a growing number of States that, in order to protect society against attempts of international institutions (such as the UN, the EU, or the European Human Rights Court) to impose on them a new concept of marriage and family from the outside, are amending their constitutional laws to explicitly define marriage as a permanent union between one man and one woman.

In the EU, while eight countries (the Netherlands, Belgium, Sweden, Denmark, England, Spain, France, Portugal) have adopted, usually by a simple parliamentary minority, laws that allow for same-sex “marriages”, there are now seven Member States (Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Croatia) that have constitutional laws to defend the concept of marriage against arbitrary re-definitions. The trend towards recognition of homosexual “marriages” is thus offset by a contrary trend in other countries. Indeed, it is more than offset, given that a law that was passed with a simple parliamentary majority (and, as it happened in France or Spain, against the clearly expressed will of a large part of civil society) does not reflect public opinion in the same way as a constitutional amendment for which a two-thirds majority is needed. One could therefore with right say that the real trend in Europe is to protect marriage against attempts to re-define it.

This is particularly important in the context of recent attempts of the European Court of Human Rights to re-interpret the European Human Rights Convention in the sense that it provides for an obligation of States to legislate for same-sex “marriages” (or at least same-sex civil unions, which then would have to receive equal treatment). Contrary to what one would expect a law court to do, the ECtHR very often bases its findings not on genuine legal arguments, but on perceived legislative “trends”: it has a nasty tendency to argue that once a sufficiently great number of countries have recognized a controversial new “right” (such as abortion, or euthanasia, or assisted procreation), this may be interpreted as an “emerging consensus” with which the remaining countries must comply. Of course, such reasoning is hopelessly nonsensical – but it is nevertheless good to see that with regard to same-sex “marriage” there is not the slightest trace of any consensus upon which such temerarious arguments could be built.

Bratislava, the capital of Slovakia

The next EU Member State joining the club of countries defending marriage and the family might be Slovakia. As a condition for lending its support to a reform of the judiciary system, for which a constitutional majority would be required, the Christian Democrat Movement (KDH, which is led by a former EU Commissioner) has demanded that a definition of marriage as “a union between a man and a woman” should also be inserted in the country’s constitution. The Government, despite being led by a left-wing party, has indicated its willingness to accept this proposal. As a speaker of the government pointed out, this proposal “adds nothing new – it simply confirms what always has been the case”.

While there appears to be broad consensus on the meaning of marriage within Slovakia, it comes as no surprise that homosexualist pressure groups outside the country see this as a threat to their agenda. ILGA-Europe, the notorious fake “non-governmental organization” funded by the European Commission to advance the queering of the EU, has published the following press release:

MEDIA RELEASE
27 February 2014
For immediate release
Slovakia must reject the homophobic proposal to redefine marriage in the constitution
Next week the Slovak Parliament will start its new session and one of the legislative proposals registered for discussion is to amend the Constitutional definition of marriage to limit it exclusively to ‘a man and a woman’. This proposal has been submitted to the Parliament by the opposition Christian Democratic Movement (KDH) in January 2014.
Representatives of the ruling Social Democratic Party (SMER) including government ministers indicated there is enough support for such proposal. Therefore the possibility of Slovakia limiting the constitutional definition of marriage is real and serious.
ILGA-Europe calls on Slovak parliamentarians to abandon this discriminatory and pointless proposal. Slovakia does not provide any legal recognition to same-sex couples.

Gabi Calleja of ILGA Europe: is she “motivated by genuine care for families”? Does she even know what a family is??

Gabi Calleja, Co-Chair of ILGA-Europe’s Executive Board, said:
“We are very concerned to see Slovakia follow in this negative direction. Such amendments are discriminatory. Clearly they are not motivated by genuine care about families, but rather aimed to prevent recognition of rights and protection of same-sex partnerships in the near future.
While Europe at large is moving towards increasing legal recognition and social acceptance of LGBTI families, Slovakia seems to be leaning towards the opposite trend of limitations, restrictions and discrimination.”

ILGA’s Paulo Corte-Real has no arguments – but a big repertoire of hate speech.

Paulo Côrte-Real, Co-Chair of ILGA-Europe’s Executive Board, added:
“Recent and similarly restrictive constitutional amendments in Latvia, Hungary and Croatia demonstrated they are sponsored by religious extremists and ultra-conservatives who do not hesitate to abuse such democratic tools as constitutional amendments or referenda to pursue their narrow homophobic agenda.
Slovak parliamentarians must prevent yet another country falling into such a populist homophobic trap and reject this proposal.”

We reproduce this text here because we think that the wider it is distributed, the better. Indeed, it exposes the homosexualist lobby’s complete lack of arguments, and its questionable strategy:

• It offers no consistent theory on the essence and purpose of marriage – therefore it has no argument why sexual relationships between persons of the same sex should qualify as “marriage”, given that they do not, through procreation and the raising of children, provide a contribution to the common good
• This apparent lack of argument is offset by the consistent use of hate speech: those supporting the proposal are vilified as “homophobic”, “religious extremists” and “ultra-conservatives” who “are not motivated by genuine care about families”. Their proposal is “discriminatory” and “populist”. Thus, rather than providing rational argument, the ILGA strategy is built on ad personam attacks. This is the typical Communist strategy: don’t wast your time with arguments, just attack the man that makes them.
• The release also contains serious factual misrepresentations. Most of all, it is absurd to say that the proposed amendment would “redefine marriage”. In actual fact, the proposal is to protect the current definition of marriage, which has remained the same throughout history, by giving it the status of constitutional law. On the contrary, it is the homosexualist lobby that wants to redefine marriage.

While it is known that ILGA Europe cannot with right be described as part of “civil society”, a media release such as this clearly reveals that it is also not part of civilized society.

The absurd claims of ILGA Europe have been adequately answered by Roger Kiska, the representative of Alliance Defending Freedom, who is also a frequent contributor to this blog. He calls ILGA Europe back to order and raises the question whether an organization that tries to influence public debates with hate speech rather than rational argument can continue to be part of the EU Fundamental Rights Agency’s civil society platform: