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. 

Homosexuality is a Sin–Along With Other Things

You Are What—and How—You Read

Rosaria Butterfield
12:05 AM CT
Gospel Coalition

I just returned from a well-known (and well-heeled) Christian college, where roughly 100 demonstrators gathered on the chapel steps to protest my address on the grounds that my testimony was dangerous. Later that day, I sat down with these beloved students, to listen, to learn, and to grieve. Homosexuality is a sin, but so is homophobia; the snarled composition of our own sin and the sin of others weighs heavily on us all. I came away from that meeting realizing—again—how decisively our reading practices shape our worldview.

This may seem a quirky observation, but I know too well the world these students inhabit. I recall its contours and crevices, risks and perils, reading lists and hermeneutical allegiances. You see, I’m culpable. The blood is on my hands. The world of LGBTQ activism on college campuses is the world that I helped create. I was unfaltering in fidelity: the umbrella of equality stretching to embrace my lesbian identity, and the world that emerged from it held salvific potential. I bet my life on it, and I lost.

When I started to read the Bible it was to critique it, embarking on a research project on the Religious Right and their hatred against queers, or, at the time, people like me. A neighbor and pastor, Ken Smith, became my friend. He executed the art of dying: turning over the pages of your heart in the shadow of Scripture, giving me a living testimony of the fruit of repentance. He was a good reader—thorough, broad, and committed. Ken taught me that repentance was done unto life, and that abandoning the religion of self-righteousness was step number one.

The Holy Spirit equipped me to practice what Ken preached, and one day, my heart started to beat to the tempo of my Lord’s heart. A supernatural imposition, to be sure, but it didn’t stop there. I’d believed gender and sexuality were socially constructed and that I was the mistress of my own destiny and desire. Through the lens of experience, this was self-evident. I’d built my whole house on the foundation of “gender trouble” (the title of Judith Butler’s book), and then stood by, helpless, as it burned to the ground.

But the Bible was getting under my skin. Hours each day I poured over this text, arguing at first, then contemplating, and eventually surrendering. Three principles became insurmountable on my own terms: the trinitarian God’s goodness, the trinitarian God’s holiness, and the authority of Scripture. And then, Romans 1 nailed me to the cross: “claiming to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man. . . . Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts . . . because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie. . . . For this reason God gave them up to dishonorable passions” (Rom. 1:22-26).

Homosexuality, then, is not the unpardonable sin, I noticed. It is not the worst of all sins, not for God. It’s listed here in the middle of the passage, as one of many parts of this journey that departs from recognizing God as our author. Homosexuality isn’t causal, it’s consequential. From God’s point of view, homosexuality is an identity-rooted ethical outworking of a worldview transgression inherited by all through original sin. It’s so original to the identity of she who bears it that it feels like it precedes you; and as a vestige of original sin, it does. We are born this way. But the bottom line hit me between the eyes: homosexuality, whether it feels natural or not, is a sin. God’s challenge was clear: do I accept his verdict of my sin at the cross of Christ, or do I argue with him? Do I repent, even of a sin that doesn’t feel like a sin but normal, not-bothering-another-soul kind of life, or do I take up Satan’s question to Eve (“Did God really say?”) and hurl it back in the face of God?

I had taught, studied, read, and lived a different notion of homosexuality, and for the first time in my life, I wondered if I was wrong.

Three Unbiblical Points

As I write and speak today, 14 years have elapsed since my queer activist days. I’m a new creature in Christ, and my testimony is still like iodine on starch. I’m sensitive to three unbiblical points of view Christian communities harbor when they address the issue of Christianity and homosexuality. Everywhere I go, I confront all three.

1. The Freudian position. This position states same-sex attraction is a morally neutral and fixed part of the personal makeup and identity of some, that some are “gay Christians” and others are not. It’s true that temptation isn’t sin (though what you do with it may be); but that doesn’t give us biblical license to create an identity out of a temptation pattern. To do so is a recipe for disaster. This position comes directly from Sigmund Freud, who effectually replaced the soul with sexual identity as the singular defining characteristic of humanity. God wants our whole identities, not partitioned ones.

2. The revisionist heresy. This position declares that the Bible’s witness against homosexuality, replete throughout the Old and New Testaments, results from misreadings, mistranslations, and misapplications, and that Scripture doesn’t prohibit monogamous homosexual sexual relations, thereby embracing antinomianism and affirming gay marriage.

3. The reparative therapy heresy. This position contends a primary goal of Christianity is to resolve homosexuality through heterosexuality, thus failing to see that repentance and victory over sin are God’s gifts and failing to remember that sons and daughters of the King can be full members of Christ’s body and still struggle with sexual temptation. This heresy is a modern version of the prosperity gospel. Name it. Claim it. Pray the gay away.

Indeed, if you only read modern (post 19th-century) texts, it would rightly seem these are three viable options, not heresies. But I beg to differ.

Worldview matters. And if we don’t reach back before the 19th century, back to the Bible itself, the Westminster divines, and the Puritans, we will limp along, defeated. Yes, the Holy Spirit gives you a heart of flesh and the mind to understand and love the Lord and his Word. But without good reading practices even this redeemed heart grows flabby, weak, shaky, and ill. You cannot lose your salvation, but you can lose everything else.

Enter John Owen. Thomas Watson. Richard Baxter. Thomas Brooks. Jeremiah Burroughs. William Gurnall. The Puritans. They didn’t live in a world more pure than ours, but they helped create one that valued biblical literacy. Owen’s work on indwelling sin is the most liberating balm to someone who feels owned by sexual sin. You are what (and how) you read. J. C. Ryle said it takes the whole Bible to make a whole Christian.

Why does sin lurk in the minds of believers as a law, demanding to be obeyed? How do we have victory if sin’s tentacles go so deep, if Satan knows our names and addresses? We stand on the ordinary means of grace: Scripture reading, prayer, worship, and the sacraments. We embrace the covenant of church membership for real accountability and community, knowing that left to our own devices we’ll either be led astray or become a danger to those we love most. We read our Bibles daily and in great chunks. We surround ourselves with a great cloud of witnesses who don’t fall prey to the same worldview snares we and our post-19th century cohorts do.

In short, we honor God with our reading diligence. We honor God with our reading sacrifice. If you watch two hours of TV and surf the internet for three, what would happen if you abandoned these habits for reading the Bible and the Puritans? For real. Could the best solution to the sin that enslaves us be just that simple and difficult all at the same time? We create Christian communities that are safe places to struggle because we know sin is also “lurking at [our] door.” God tells us that sin’s “desire is for you, but you shall have mastery over it” (Gen. 4:7). Sin isn’t a matter of knowing better, it isn’t (only) a series of bad choices—and if it were, we wouldn’t need a Savior, just need a new app on our iPhone.

We also take heart, remembering the identity of our soul and thus rejecting the Freudian ideal that sexual identity competes with the soul. And we encourage other image-bearers to reflect the Original in knowledge, righteousness, and holiness, not in the vapid reductionism that claims image-of-God theology means he loves you just way you are, just the way your sin manifests itself. Long hours traveling the road paved by Bible reading, theological study, and a solid grasp on hermeneutical fallacies gets you to a place where as sons and daughters of the King, people tempted in all manner of sin, we echo Owen: “The law grace writes in our hearts must answer to the law written in God’s Word.”

We also take heart, remembering that God faithfully walks this journey with us, that victory over sin comes in two forms: liberty from it and humility regarding its stronghold. But it comes, truly, just as he will.

Douglas Wilson’s Letter From Moscow

Blowing Bubbles From the Bottom

Posted on Friday, February 7, 2014 

B by Douglas Wilson 

Blog and Mablog

 

If you think you are up to it, and if you have a cast iron stomach, and if you have not ingested your recommended weekly allowance of piffle over the last few days, you may go here and fix everything.
The short form is that Rosaria Champagne Butterfield — whose book was fantastic, by the way — was invited to speak at Wheaton College. This, all by itself, was sufficient to set off a small protest festival of marginalization and hurt.

I would draw your attention to the last several paragraphs, where the crucial task of telling the gospel story is transformed into a bizarre form of narratival masturbation. The central human predicament, what Luther called incurvatus in se, is transformed into a narcissistic virtue, resulting in a self-righteous circle jerk, only without the sex.

As for the response of Wheaton as an institution, I believe that someone should tell the authorities there that blowing bubbles from the bottom of the pool is not the same thing as breathing.

And . . .

With Tongues Hanging Out

Posted on Saturday, February 8, 2014 

 

I posted something here about a small dust-up at Wheaton College over the appearance of Rosaria Champagne Butterfield there. My post was blunt, as it needed to be, and at least a couple of additional things need to observed after the fact.

The concern of Scripture is holiness, not propriety. Chesterton teaches us that virtue and respectability are not the same thing. They are not synonyms, sorry. In our time, basic Christian morality is being surrendered by the effete evangelical elites, and it is being surrendered for the sake of their own very precious (to them) respectability. Thus, when someone identifies what they are doing in blunt terms that cannot be denied or evaded, the only standard they can appeal to in an attempt to make you back off is the appeal to respectability. I am afraid, however, that I don’t care. I distinguish here, incidentally, the kind of respectable integrity that Paul says all elders ought to have (1 Tim. 3:7), and the kind of respectability that makes men run after the world’s honors with their tongues hanging out (John 5:44).

Second, the issue of the student protest there, and the response to it, simply identifies that the immune system of evangelicalism is just flat busted. The issue isn’t the presence of the sin, or the reality of such temptations, or the fact that this kind of thing shows up everywhere. Of course. Those are pastoral givens. The problem is the anemic response, the weak sister answers, the galling timidity. That is the problem.

But it is not the case that discipline is gone. No, remember the inescapable concept — not whether, but which. Every human society disciplines, of necessity. The issue is what gets disciplined, and what gets invited to further dialog parties. Here’s a thought experiment for you . . . or any conservative Wheaton students with a taste for high-jinks might actually want to try it. They could organize a protest of their own — sponsored by the Wheaton Alliance for Normal Sexual Pleasure, Biblically Defined — and see how far they get. I will go so far as to hazard the guess that invitations to warm dialog will not enter into it. They will be seen as the troublemakers, which is quite right. They would be — disruptors of flaccid respectability.

And about time.

Of Train Wrecks and Car Crashes, Part II

 Faith and Haste Are Usually Like Oil and Water

Conversion for the Apostle Paul appears to have been like a fatal car crash.  The old was smashed.  But out of the wreckage, something new, something wonderful was born.  The Scriptures do not give many details, but it seems that some time after Paul’s dramatic Damascus road experience, when the shards of his former identity lay scattered on the ground, he retired to obscurity and privacy.  It would appear that he needed time to be reconstructed, rebuilt by the Spirit to equip him for the ministry ahead.

Paul tells us that after his initial conversion, he went away into Arabia (a desolate and relatively uninhabited place); then he returned to Damascus and then after three years he “came out”, going up to Jerusalem to visit with the apostles.  Then, subsequently, he went to Syria and Cilicia  (Galatians 1: 11-24)  All up, it appears that there was a period of about fifteen years between his initial conversion and before his public call to the work of apostleship. 

The breaking of an old identity–particularly one very strongly etched and inscribed–takes time.
  In Rosaria Butterfield’s confessions or “Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert”  there are many passages detailing doubts, questions, struggles, pain, and suffering as she moved from darkness into the light.  The idea, fable really, of people painlessly and without friction instantly transforming from the old man to the new is never real. 

At one point she describes it this way:

Two incommensurable worldviews clashed together: the reality of my lived experience and the truth of the world of God.  In continental philosophy, we talk about the difference between the true and the real.  Had my life become real, but not true?  The Bible told me to repent, but I didn’t feel like repenting.  Do you have to feel like repenting in order to repent?  Was I a sinner, or was I, in my drag queen friend’s words, sick? How do you repent for a sin that doesn’t feel like a sin?  How could the thing that I had studied and become be sinful?  How could I be tenured in a field that is sin?  How could I and everyone that I knew and loved be in sin?

In this crucible of confusion, I learned something important.  I learned this first rule of repentance: that repentance requires greater intimacy with God than with our sin.  How much greater?  About the size of a mustard seed.  Repentance requires that we draw near to Jesus, no matter what.  And sometimes we all have to crawl there on our hands and knees.  Repentance is an intimate affair.  And for many of us, intimacy with anything is a terrifying prospect.  [Rosaria Champagne Butterfield, The Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert: An English Professor’s Journey into Christian Faith (Pittsburg: Crown and Covenant Publications, 2012), p.21.]

We fear that in our belief in an instant, gratifying creation we expect that conversion will be a relatively quick and instant affair, like Nescafe.  The conversion of Paul fits into this paradigm.  We see him on the road to Damascus.  We see the great light.  We hear the voice of Christ from heaven.  We observe him rising from his blind bed and going straight to the synagogue to confront the Jewish people with Jesus as the Son of God.  That’s the kind of conversion we look for in our Nescafe world.  Right.  Paul is now one of us.  He is arraigned in the ranks.  Let’s go after the next convert.

But it took years to prepare Paul thoroughly for what was ahead of Him.  The Lord is never in a hurry.  His work is most often slow and gradual and far too often Christians and churches don’t have the patience to work with people slowly and gradually.  We think the real and the divine always produces instant and spectacular change: the more spectacular and the more instant the more evidently divine.  In this we are gravely and sadly mistaken.  It ultimately makes us impatient with God and frustrated with the Church and with fellow Christians. 

There are many reasons we don’t have patience, either with God or with man.  One is our own sinful hearts.  Impatience, after all, is a demanding, arrogant attitude towards God and man.  “I want it, and I want it now”, and the reason is I am important in my own eyes.

Rosaria Butterfield talks about learning to obey God one step at a time, slowly, gingerly, painfully.  When she first started attending church she felt awkward and uncomfortable–despite the warmth and welcome of the congregation.  In one sermon she heard of Jesus’ dictum that if men obey Him they would find out soon enough whether His word was from God (John 7:17).  She learned, as she puts it, that obedience comes before understanding.  Then she says:

I started to obey God in my heart one step at a time.  I broke up with my girlfriend.  My heart really wasn’t in the break-up, but I hoped that God would regard my obedience even in its double-mindedness.  I started to go to the [Presbyterian Reformed] church fully, in my heart, for the whole purpose of worshiping God.  I stopped caring if I looked like a freak there.  I started to receive the friendship that the church members offered to me.  I learned that we must obey in faith before we feel better or different.  (Ibid. p.22)

It takes time for the new person to grow out of the fatal car crash of repentance.  And, let us never forget this: in more Christian times, when the truths of the Gospel and the law of God were institutionalised and socialised into the warp and woof of the culture, many folk would become Christians and would end up doing and behaving in their new Christian life as they had been raised.  They, like the Prodigal, would return to the household culture of their youth. This is no longer generally the case.  Sin and its fruits have so perverted the West that the average person is self-identified, socialised and institutionalised  into unbelief and sin.  These generations of unbelief and rebellion has born consistent fruits.  Conversion now requires transformation, not a returning home.  Most people today have never been in the home in the first place.  It is a totally foreign place to them.

Today, as not seen in the generations of our forbears, ministry to the lost and the dying requires much care, much patience, and much faith.  Above all, we must be willing and prepared to work and serve at God’s pace, not our own.  One day with Him is as a thousand years.  This means that the little things of daily life are to be counted as vitally significant and important.  He who believes will not be in haste.  

Great Books

Book of the Month/March 2013 

Engaging the Culture – Book Review
Written by Douglas Wilson
Saturday, 02 March 2013

Gosh, what a book.

I really cannot recommend this book highly enough. This will be a relatively short review — what I want to do is give a brief summary of the set-up, mention three things about it that were simply wonderful, and then conclude with a plea for you to get it and read it.

Rosaria Champagne Butterfield was an English professor at Syracuse, a postmodern specialist in Queer Theory, and a radical lesbian. In this book she describes her “train wreck” conversion to Christ, and how the Lord has since then led her step by excruciating step to her current high calling as a Reformed pastor’s wife, a homeschooling mom, and a foster parent.

Here are the three things I found striking about this book, in no particular order. The first thing is the obvious potency of hospitality and love.
She was brought to Christ by faithful Christians who opened their homes to her, and since coming to Christ she has seen that same potency working outward — by marking what has happened in the lives of others as she has opened her home.

The second thing is how she so ably describes the work of the Spirit and how He leads His people through layers of repentance. Her story is a story of a repentance that didn’t quit at the church door. This is a book about the relationship of authority and repentance.

The third thing is that, while the book is relatively short, it is jammed with passing observations that are priceless. She is a wise woman with a good eye. Not only does she have a good eye, she has a trained outsider’s eye. She was converted out of the world, and grafted into Christ. Her description of that is glorious. But she was also converted out of one tribe, and grafted into another tribe, a reality which gave her a good perspective on which aspects of our behavior (in the conservative Reformed world) were about Jesus, and which ones were merely tribal . . . and kind of odd. Consequently, there are observational gems throughout the book, usually just a sentence or two, but which could be developed into chapters or books all on their own. Pay attention to those.

Okay, let me shoehorn in a fourth thing. She really knows how to write.

This is a book that will really bless you. Get it, and read it. Gosh, what a book.