Evil is Not My Fault

 Two Views of Evil

If you are impertinent enough to ask whence evil originates, the first hurdle to be leaped will be the general discomfort over the topic.  Assuming the initial squeamishness can be overcome, we hazard a guess that within five seconds all options will likely point to some environmental factor or another.  Vile people come from vile environments.

The sub-texts are: firstly, people are not responsible for evil acts any more than one is responsible for the weather; and, secondly, evil can be overcome or at least attenuated by changing the external living conditions and life circumstances of people.  The discussion will likely progress upon the pathways of some additional assumptions as well.  It will be assumed, though rarely asserted, that morality and ethics are a matter of class, socio-economic class.  Decent people are, well, like us.  We don’t rape, murder, or steal because we are fortunate enough to live in decent environments–which in our materialist world refers inevitably to one’s lifestyle, wealth, and income.  As G. K. Chesterton put it, there is an “old contemptible impertinence which represents virtue to be something upper-class, like a visiting card, or a silk hat.”

A further unspoken assumption is determinism–by which we mean that whilst most of us like to tell ourselves we are free men, when it comes to evil we suddenly become iron-clad determinists.  People are evil because life circumstances determine them, or condition them, to be so.  Evil is environmental; it’s nobody’s fault. You catch it like the common cold. 

Well, not so fast.
  The next iteration is to begin to attribute the cause of evil to those who control the social environment.  The rich, the wealthy, the privileged–that is, those who are not evil because their privileged circumstances have prevented them from being brutalised–happen to have the means and wherewithal to alter the circumstances of the disadvantaged.  The fact that they fail to do so makes them evil–does it not?  Suddenly, the worm turns.  Rich, wealthy privileged people become not the moral class, but the evil class.

An irrevocable accompaniment is guilt.  The privileged classes accept the imputation of evil arising out of their privileges and strive to manifest sufficient pity to expatiate their sins.  They tell themselves that the wicked are victims, too.  Their circumstances have made them thus.

You may think we exaggerate.  In February 1999 a woman’s car in the Somerset, UK was vandalised.  The victim, Rebecca Trimble found the police unconcerned and preoccupied.  

But when she wrote to them complaining about her treatment, the local police chief in Taunton, Somerset, replied that whoever had damaged her car was a victim deserving of sympathy too.  Superintendent, John Snell wrote back: “Whilst I have every sympathy with you being the victim of crime, the position regarding victims is not limited to those who suffer as you have done.  Many of those who are responsible for the commission of minor crimes could be considered to be victims themselves.  To my knowledge some of our prolific offenders are heroin addicts who live in the very worst of housing conditions in our area in relative poverty.  It is also true many of them are from broken homes and really have miserable family backgrounds.” [Daily Mail, cited by Peter Hitchens,  The Abolition of Liberty: the Decline of Order and Justice in England (London: Atlantic Books, 2003), p. 35f.]

You could not get a more obvious enunciation of the doctrine of the environmental determinism of sin if you tried.  But then, who caused these conditions?  The privileged.  By agitating for more expropriation to bestow better health, education, and welfare upon the lower classes the privileged classes hope to assuage their guilt-feelings, and re-confirm their righteousness in their own eyes.  And so the worm turns. Deterministic doctrines work until they cannot bear the required load.  Then the privileged are overwhelmed by a paroxysm of guilt and grief since they substantially control the social environment which conditions people to evil. 

This, we suggest, is one reason the privileged elites (we use these terms consistently with the patois of our age) despise and detest Christians and Christian doctrine.  By preaching original sin and true moral guilt before a holy God we Christians are breaking the thin reed of hope to which they cling for redemption and for expiation.  Christians are a living daily insult to them, for the Gospel of Christ implies that their one shot at redemption is a load of cods-wallop.  It also explains why the guilt of the amoral quickly morphs into hatred against the Christ. 

Against such foolish bonfires of the vanities stands the indictment of the Living God: “sin is any want of conformity unto, or transgression of, the Law of God.”  Period. The social environment merely provides the occasion, and the particular forms that evil adopts.  It is never the cause of evil.

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.  

Secularism’s Messiah

Salvation by Law and the Prison

It is axiomatic in a Christian Commonwealth that a sharp distinction is drawn between sins and crimes.  All crimes, of course, are sins.  But not all sins are crimes–in fact, very few of them are.

But in the world of Unbelief no-one can draw a demarcation between sins and crimes.  All iniquities, all evil is potentially criminal.  Since, in modern secularist Unbelief there is no god or saviour apart from the state, all attempts to remove evil from society will lead inevitably to more and more sins being criminalised.  The upshot is the rise of a progressive tyranny.  The state becomes more and more authoritarian, intrusive, hectoring, demanding, ruling, and bossy.  In the end, authoritarianism risks developing into full throated totalitarianism.

In the United Kingdom (once a Christian Commonwealth, now a secularist paradise) a draft bill would have husbands face fourteen years in prison if they shout at their wives.

Men who exercise “coercive control” over their partners by restricting their personal or financial freedom, or through overt criticism could face up to 14 years in jail under new laws set to be announced by Home Secretary Theresa May this week.

Campaigners, who have been arguing for a change in the law to bring emotional abuse into line legally with physical abuse, have praised the proposals as a “major step forward”. The new law will be introduced as a series of amendments to the Serious Crime Bill, and will alter the legal definition of domestic abuse to include psychological, as well as physical damage. It is expected to pass into law in the new year.[Breitbart London]

Orthodox Christian teaching declares that sin is universal in human thoughts, words and deeds. As James puts it, “whoever observes the whole law, but slips in one point, becomes guilty in every respect.” (James 2:10)  The Heidelberg Catechism asks, “But can those converted to God obey these commandments perfectly?” and answers, “No. In this life even the holiest has only a small beginning of this obedience.” (Question 114.)

When secularist Unbelief parades as its own saviour, its final desperate attempt at redemption is to make crimes out of mundane sins like “critical words” or Scrooge-like stinginess.

Seema Malhotra, Labour’s shadow anti-domestic violence minister, suggested earlier this year that husbands criticising their wives weight or appearance may be guilty of domestic abuse. “It can be part of a pattern of controlling behaviour that leaves people feeling fearful and terrorised in their own homes,” she said, and may be an “indicator of physical abuse in the future”.

Ironically, this represents in principle a variant of Islamist  theology.  Salvation by compulsion.  By the keen edge of the sword.  Submit to righteousness, or rot in gaol.  At this point the fruits of secularist redemption are the same genus and species as Islamism, which claims, even boasts, that it saves by the sword.  What these similarities suggest is that Unbelief has far more in common with Islamism than many would care to acknowledge.

For Christians there are no surprises here.  Both secularist Unbelief and Islam are alike satanic in origin and genus.  It’s not at all surprising that redemption by authoritarian oppression will end up as the driving animus of both systems. 

What will be the outcome of such idolatrous secularist folly?  Grave damage indeed.

Firstly, this new law will need to be written in gender neutral language, despite its target being men, not women.  Since women often make up for an inability to match men in physical strength by resorting to verbal abuse (sarcasm, insults, hate speech) it is to be expected that more and more women will be criminalised and end up doing serious gaol time.  This will take “taming of the shrew” to new heights.  No doubt an entirely unexpected outcome of the secularist’s “salvation by law”. 

Secondly, whilst the gaols will be bursting at the seams, cases of actual physical assault will continue unabated.  The authorities will become so busy apprehending and prosecuting verbal assaults or fiscal stinginess, real abuse will continue cloaked in secrecy and darkness.

But not everyone is happy with the legal changes. Three years ago, when similar changes were being proposed . . . Erin Pizzey, who in the 1970s set up the network of safe houses now run by Refuge, slammed the proposals as trivialising domestic violence.

She took to the Daily Mail to offer a detailed explanation of her criticisms, saying: “When I began my refuge four decades ago, I took in victims of severe domestic violence who were literally running for their lives.  They were prepared to leave everything behind to escape the horrendous situation they found themselves in for a safe house for themselves and their children.

“Unless you have seen real, shocking abuse as I have, it is difficult to imagine some of the awful violence that people can inflict on each other in the home. And that’s why I’m convinced that bringing other, lesser, wrongs under this same legal umbrella does a great disservice to the women who really suffer.  “At this rate, we’ll all end up under arrest, and that is not a situation that’s going to help the police tackle the cases of true physical violence which must be stamped out.

“People behave badly in relationships because we have human frailties. This is not an area in which the State should meddle; leave it to relationship counsellors and divorce lawyers. They already help people escape toxic relationships.”

Every day, thousands upon thousands of domestic disputes end up being called into 999.  The vast majority of them involve not physical violence, but verbal arguments and altercations.  By making such sins to be crimes, police and courts will be overloaded by the trivial, whilst predatory gangs will continue to rape unimpeded in places like Rotherham.  Police will be too busy elsewhere.  Young girls being subjected to gang rape don’t tend to call 999.  Interdiction of the perpetrators requires dedicated, long-term investigative work.

“Women want to see real crimes punished and vulnerable children protected. But if the law changes and the definition of domestic violence is watered down, the genuine victims of abuse will suffer because the authorities will have less time and energy to devote to helping them,” [Erin Pizzey] concluded.

Turning sins into crimes is a vast overreach by secularist Unbelief.  But Unbelief is both impotent and one-dimensional.  It cannot save souls.  It cannot convert hearts.  It has no objective standard to distinguish between sin and crime.  All it has is a blunt bludgeoning sword.  It is resorting to it more and more, even to control thought and speech.

Maybe that’s why Islamism is the new normal and so attractive to many Britons.  Enforced redemption by oppression and a vast expansion of state power has been Unbelief’s gospel for over two generations now, and Islam is merely a variant of the same. 

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. 

Douglas Wilson’s Letter From Moscow

Stuff Inviolate

Douglas Wilson

Blog and Mablog

Sept 13, 2014

I have been arguing that property rights are human rights. I have been insisting that it is not possible to love your neighbor without respecting his stuff. I have been saying that the commandment thou shalt not steal presupposes the institution of private property in just the same way that the prohibition of adultery presupposes marriage. And in the same way, I cannot honor the command not to covet my neighbor’s wife if I cannot come up with a definition of “wife.”

But there has been some surprising pushback on this simple idea, so let us dig a little deeper.

So what do I mean by property? Within the boundaries of the law of God, property entails the authority to retain or dispose of material goods without the permission of another. If you are renting something, or leasing it, you do not have the right to dispose of it in the same way you would if you owned it. When you rent a car, you are answerable to someone else for the use. When you own a car, you can paint the passenger door turquoise if you wish.

This means that all property is ultimately God’s. He owns the cattle on a thousand hills (Ps. 50:10), and the earth is the Lord’s and all that it contains (Ex. 9:29; Dt. 10:14). So God is the only absolute owner of property, and in reference to Him, we are all stewards. We will all give an accounting to Him for what we have done with the goods He has entrusted to us.

So my argument does not neglect this relativization of property in the sight of God, but merely insists that no creature — especially including kings, parliaments, congresses, and presidents — may usurp and supplant God in this role.

This is why Jesus can tell the rich young ruler to give all his goods to the poor (Matt. 19:21), and if he did not do it, he was stealing in the eyes of God. At the same time, he would not be stealing in the eyes of man — any more than a lustful man could be charged with adultery in our courts, or a spiteful man with murder, despite the words of Jesus (Matt. 5:28; Matt. 5:21). We must, always and everywhere, maintain the distinction between sins and crimes.

“Will a man rob God? Yet ye have robbed me. But ye say, Wherein have we robbed thee? In tithes and offerings” (Mal. 3:8).

Tithes went, in part, to the poor. The same thing would be true of offerings. And offerings were entirely voluntary — but a man could rob God by refusing to offer them. He would be guilty before God of the sin of theft (greed, covetousness, and so on). But he would not be guilty of the crime of theft. Consider the case of Ananias and Sapphira (Acts 5:1). Peter told them that they could have sold their land, kept all the proceeds at home, sitting on top of the pile cackling like Scrooge McDuck, and they would not have bought the farm, so to speak.

“Whiles it remained, was it not thine own? and after it was sold, was it not in thine own power? why hast thou conceived this thing in thine heart? thou hast not lied unto men, but unto God” (Acts 5:4).

After he sold it, was it not within his power? Yes — as far as the authority of fellow creatures could reach. But could he do whatever he wanted with it, and not have to answer to God? No, of course not.

And this is what I am arguing. When any creaturely entity assumes the prerogatives of the Deity, assuming the power of control over the property of others, that entity has become lawless and wicked. And the Bible does not say, “Thou shalt not steal, except by majority vote.” The Bible does not countenance the notion that two coyotes and a sheep can form a rudimentary democracy, and then vote on what’s for lunch.

If I am walking down the street and encounter someone begging alms, and I have twenty bucks in my wallet, and I receive an unmistakable burden from the Lord to give him that twenty bucks, and I suppress the impulse and walk on, am I being disobedient? Yes. Am I robbing God? Yes. Am I robbing the beggar? No. For if I were, he would have the right to chase me down and take the twenty bucks.

If a woman had her purse snatched by a bicyclist, and fifteen minutes later she pulls into a drugstore parking lot, and that same bicycle is outside with her purse hanging on the handle bars — the thief having run inside to buy smokes with some of her dollars — is she stealing if she takes her purse back? Of course not.

We must learn to distinguish that which is sin in the eyes of God, and that which should be a crime in the eyes of man and God. Being a selfish pig is a sin, but must not be made a crime. If we outlaw “being a selfish pig,” I have ten dollars here that says that within two weeks this crime of selfish piggery will be vigorously policed (and fined) by tribunals made up entirely of selfish pigs.

When we make something a crime without scriptural justification, and penalize it, we invert the order of God. When we make property ownership a crime, and fine people heavily for being guilty of it, we have a society as corrupt and as mendacious and as greedy as . . . well, as our own.

If we love people, if we love our neighbors, we will consider their stuff inviolate. We will form governments that respect our neighbors’ property as much as we ourselves do. But as it is currently, we form the kind of government we now have because we the people have larceny in our hearts. We are governed by thieves who represent us well.

Douglas Wilson’s Letter From America (About The Moral Centre)

In a World Gone Crazy

Douglas Wilson

Blog and Mablog

August 20, 2014

In a world gone crazy, it is important for us to learn how to see the root causes. I use the phrase “root causes” deliberately, because it is the kind of thing that liberals love to appeal to, whether we are talking about race riots here, or barbarity in the Middle East. But when they get to talking about root causes and the “broader context” of whatever outrage it is, they invariably veer toward their programs which desperately need more funding.

The root cause is sin — high handed sin in the first instance, and a quiet and mousy enabling sin in the second. What we are talking about is basic — evil behavior in the first instance, and bewilderment about what to do about it in the other. We are now seeing on the national and international stage, over and over again, the same realities that play out when a three-year-old flips out in a restaurant because he didn’t want that kind of ice cream, and his hapless parents are completely and utterly at a loss about what to do about it.

All of these issues are matters of understanding the moral center, and the attendant issues of discipline, strength, incentives, disincentives, resolve, and leading from somewhere other than from behind.

Whether it is a micro issue or a global one, life is a power struggle. There are those with power, and there are those who want it. There are those with power, and there are those who have figured out that those with power don’t know what to do with it. There is right-handed power, Putin-like, which God hates, and there is also limp-wristed power, Obama-like, which God detests. Then there are the bad actors who decide to make the challenge. You show weakness and in about fifteen seconds the challenges come.

And of course every Christian knows that we must distinguish the weakness of the cross, which is true strength, from the weakness of timidity. Christ before His accusers was silent, and He overthrew them all. Belshazzar went weak in the knees at the written word that came to him, and he was overthrown that night. A great deal of weakness is not the hidden wisdom of God. A great deal of weakness is just the manifest folly of man.

ISIS has apparently beheaded an American journalist, James Foley, and threatens to behead another one. Aside from everything else involved in this, who does not see this as a challenge, a taunt, a “what are you going to do about it?” An appropriate response should not be medium level, moderated disapproval by a ditz at the State Department.

When the governor of Missouri calls for “vigorous prosecution” of the the police officer who shot Michael Brown, we all need to know that it is because the evidence demands an indictment. We need to know that it is not because a part of his state is burning down, he is starting to look bad, and he needs a sacrificial lamb. But that is plainly something we do not know. A thousand people in the street with their hands up in a universal sign of surrender does not mean that is what Michael Brown was doing with his hands moments before he was shot. But we do know what Pilate did with his hands — he washed them because a mob was yelling.
If Darren Wilson did an indefensible thing, he should be prosecuted for it. Absolutely. And if Michael Brown did an indefensible thing, we should find out what it was, and there put the matter to rest.

And in the meantime, we need to pray for leaders who understand the world that God made, a world of cause and effect.

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.

 

Death Valley

Can These Bones Live?

The roots of our rapid devolution from public and official Christianity in the West to radical secularism are fascinating to trace.  You can take a long bow, a short bow or a medium bow vista.  All are valid to some degree.

The “short bow” view traditionally commences with the sixties as the beginning of a time of rapid change: the Beatles, the pill, no fault divorce, secular feminism, a rapid expansion of a vast government income re-distribution system, the legalisation of killing unborn children on a mass industrial scale, the official promulgation of evolutionism as a religious certainty–to name but a few of the many devolutionary milestones–with the result that the West is now in a place which few foresaw when John Lennon and his mates boasted they were more popular than Jesus Christ.  Today the West is engaged in furious debates over whether homosexuals can legitimately be married, whether incest and pederasty should be classified as human rights, and how many genders there are.  As Theoden of Rohan once said, “How did it come to this?”  No doubt many folk today who were alive in the fifties are likewise shaking their heads in astonishment at the devastation wreaked upon the law and culture and religion which had stood unassailable for centuries. 

The causes of such a rapid and comprehensive devolution are complex to be sure.  But we suggest that one precipitous factor was the most widespread religion of the day.
  This particular religious faith is presented cogently in the following profession of faith which appeared in a Melbourne newspaper in 1959 just as the Beatles were coalescing into a “group”.  The occasion was the Billy Graham crusade in that city, and a correspondent wrote:

After hearing Dr. Billy Graham on the air, viewing him on TV, and reading reports and letters concerning him and his mission, I am heartily sick of the type of religion that insists that my soul (and everyone else’s) needs saving–whatever that means.

I have never felt that it was lost.  Nor do I feel that I daily wallow in the mire of sin, although repetitive preaching insists that I do.

Give me a practical religion that teaches gentleness and tolerance, that acknowledges no barriers of color or creed, that remembers the aged and teaches children of goodness and not sin.

If in order to save my soul I must accept such a philosophy as I have recently heard preached, I prefer to remain for ever damned.  [Anonymous, cited by Leon Morris,  The Cross in the New Testament (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1965) p.271f.]

We doubt not that such self-righteousness was typical of the heirs of English Victorianism.  “We are so good, so worthy, so holy, that even the suggestion that we might be sinful and lost without a saviour is offensive.”  The Gospel of redemption from sin is of no relevance whatsoever to someone convinced of his own moral rectitude.  But this false religion was at that time still in its early days–it still spoke of moral values such as gentleness, but in that empty platitudinous manner.  Gentleness and tolerance meant accepting every creed.  It celebrated an intrinsic goodness of all.

What can we conclude about such a portentous, prophetic statement of faith?  Many things, but chief among them is this: it is very clear that the correspondent was a person who had been passed over by the Holy Spirit of the Living God.  Whilst professing a higher, better light they remained in a deadly darkness of soul and mind.  The Messiah of God, Jesus Christ solemnly declared that He had not come to call those who were as self-righteous like the correspondent.  He came only to those who knew themselves to be sinners, lost and without hope. (Mark 2:17)

But how does one come to a certain conviction of their own sinful depravity?  It comes from an encounter with God, the Spirit.  When He comes, said Jesus, “He will convict the world concerning sin, and righteousness and judgement.” (John 16:8)  But His coming is as the wind: “Do not marvel that I said to you, ‘You must be born again.’ The wind blows where it wishes, and you hear its sound, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes.  So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit. (John 3: 7,8)

The benighted letter writer, who saw himself as upright in thought, word, and deed professed that he would rather be damned than give up on the belief in his self-righteousness.  The Spirit of God had evidently passed him by and left him in his ignorance and darkness.  He had heard the Gospel, but had not heard it at all.

We suggest that the rapid and calamitous decline into the realm of animalist secularism can be explained by the sort of religion espoused by this letter writer, archetypical of a generation.  Now, in the West, a couple of generations later, we are confronted with the fruits of this arrogant, self-righteous, hard-hearted religion.  A people who profess themselves righteous, and without sin are the most dangerous of all, for whatever their hand finds to do becomes righteous in their own eyes.

They would rather be damned than contemplate the alternative possibility: that they themselves are corrupted and all they do is tainted with poison.

Now this does not mean that all it lost for God’s Kingdom in the West.  But it does mean that we must be clear whence our help must come.  We, like the exile Ezekiel, are living in a valley of dry, dead bones.  Only God can raise dead bones to be reconstituted as living beings.  When God asked Ezekiel, “Can these bones live?” Ezekiel knew the truth, and replied, “O Lord God, you know.”  (Ezekiel 37).  So, our hope and help is the Lord.  He alone can cause the Western dead, who lie as bleached bones on every hand, to live again. 

And God, let us remember, is never held back from working, either through many or through few.  As the old saint put it, one man, with God at his side, is a majority. 

What A Difference Fifty Years Can Make

Psychology, Sin, and Bigotry

In 1960–more than half a century ago–a prominent psychologist, O. Hobart Mowrer wrote the following in the American Psychologist:

For several decades we psychologists looked upon the whole matter of sin and moral accountability as a great incubus and acclaimed our liberation from it as epoch-making.  But at length we have discovered that to be “free” in this sense, i.e., to have the excuse of being “sick” rather than sinful, is to court the danger of also becoming lost.  This danger is, I believe, betokened by the widespread interest in Existentialism which we are presently witnessing.  In becoming amoral, ethically neutral, and “free” we have cut the very roots of our being; lost our deepest sense of self-hood and identity; and with neurotics themselves, find ourselves asking: “who am I?”  O. Hobart Mowrer, “Sin, the Lesser of Two Evils,” American Psychologist, XV (1960), pp. 301-304.

Fast forward to the present decade.
  The pervasive attempt to expunge sin from human being-ness, replacing it with “sickness”, has developed still further now that we are fifty years down the track.  In the present climate “sickness” is a no-no.  The identification of another as “sick” is pilloried as pejorative discrimination.  It has been trumped by the politics of identity.  In the sixties and seventies, sin was re-categorised as sickness; now sickness has been re-categorised not an illness at all, but as one’s true identity.  “I am who I am.  Human being-ness necessarily involves the realisation and acceptance by me (and others) of who I really am.  If society maintains a primitive prejudice against my identity, society, not me, commits a great sin, and is itself evil.” 

We see it all around us.  “I am gay.  I am bi-sexual.  I am trans-sexual.  I am trans-gendered.”  This is sufficiently widespread that Facebook has had to “create” fifty gender and sexual categories to provide sufficient choices for people to proclaim their self-identity.  Those who dare criticise, let alone condemn as immoral, the self-identity of the new human being-ness represent what is the true evil. Not “sickness”, mind, but evil.

Sin initially was parsed as “sickness”; then it morphed from “sickness” into self-identity; but the concept of “sin” did not depart the lexicon.  Rather, sin was imputed to anyone who did not accept and support one’s new self-identity.  The cardinal sin has now become bigotry–if one dares maintain a critical rejection of another’s self-identity, true evil has become unmasked.  Both the bigot and his perverse “identity” require execration and rejection and judgment, and, ultimately, punishment.

What will be the consequences of all this?  More self-loathing.  More true moral guilt.  More hopelessness.  More lashing out.  More ceaseless threshing.

Mowrer again:

Recovery (constructive change, redemption) is most assuredly attained, not by helping a person reject and rise above his sins, but by helping him accept them.  This is the paradox which we have not at all understood and which is the very crux of the problem.  Just so long as a person lives under the shadow of real, unacknowledged, and unexpiated guilt, he cannot (if he has any character at all) “accept himself”; and all our efforts to reassure and accept him will avail nothing.  He will continue to hate himself and to suffer the inevitable consequences of self-hatred.  But the moment he (with or without “assistance”) begins to accept his guilt and sinfulness, the possibility of radical reformation opens up; and with this, the individual may legitimately, though not without pain and effort, pass from deep, pervasive self-rejection and self-torture to a new freedom, of self-respect and peace. [Ibid.]

The strategy of the Church need not change.  Fifty years ago when perversions were rebranded as “sicknesses” faithful Christians and churches demurred, and continued to call such things sinful and evil, using the scriptural lexicon, not pop-psychology’s inanity-du-jour.  The message was: stop sinning.  Repent.  God has promised not just to cleanse, but to forgive and make whole. 

Now pop-psychology has moved on from “sickness” to “identity”.  Now not to accept and champion the self-identity of another is to commit grave harm.  But the Christian response has not changed.  No matter what evasive labels are given to sin and its perversions, sins and perversions they remain.  The only possibility of escape is to accept the judgement of God, return to Him, and plead His loving forgiveness through Christ.  Only under the gentle yoke of Christ will the deep, pervasive self-rejection and self-torture cease, to be overtaken by a new freedom, new self-respect and wholesome peace. 

Back in the day, pop-psychology slammed Christianity as stupid fundamentalist ignorance.  Now that the diagnosis of “sickness” has been upstaged by “identity”, pop-psychology indicts Christianity not just with ignorance, but with hateful bigotry, worth punishment.  But the abiding truth has not changed one iota.  We will continue to proclaim the eternal message: stop sinning; turn to Christ; be cleansed and made whole.  Nothing less will suffice.

Lenten Meditation

Grinding Axes in the Dark

The late Christopher Hitchens liked to frighten little children with horror stories about the evils of religion.  Often times he was more narrowly referring to the religion of Islam, but he did not hold back from the “evils” of Christianity, either.  Of all the things that offended him, the offence of the Cross of Christ was the most acute.  He wrote:

The idea of a vicarious atonement, of the sort that so much troubled even C.S. Lewis, is a further refinement of the ancient superstition [of atoning sacrifice]. Once again we have a father demonstrating love by subjecting a son to death by torture, but this time the father is not trying to impress god. He is god, and he is trying to impress humans. Ask yourself the question: how moral is the following? I am told of a human sacrifice that took place two thousand years ago, without my wishing it and in circumstances so ghastly that, had I been present and in possession of any influence, I would have been duty-bound to try and stop it. In consequence of this murder, my own manifold sins are forgiven me, and I may hope to enjoy everlasting life. [Cited by Tim Challies, quoting from Hitchen’s God Is Not Great.]

Against this, the Apostle Paul provides the counterpoint:
 

For the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. . . . But we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles.  [I Corinthians 1: 18, 23.]

Hitchens, despite two millennia of human “evolution”, has not moved one iota beyond or away from the Greeks of Paul’s day.  He is stuck in their spiritual time warp.  He, like they, still finds the crucifixion of Jesus Christ to be greatly offensive–and in so doing bears testimony to the truthfulness of Scripture.  He cannot help himself.  Apparently, evolution embarrassingly stopped somewhere along the way.

But Hitchens’s animus  is useful insofar that it testifies to this abiding indictment: the crucifixion of Jesus is offensive to all but Christians.  To Christians, the Cross is our glory, our power, our hope, and our motivation to love God and His Christ with all our hearts.  It represents the very power of God Himself.  But to Unbelievers, it is the ultimate insulting offence.

Why?  Why should Unbelief find the Cross so offensive?  On its own terms, Unbelief is prepared to recognise, even celebrate, the sacrifice of one for another.  It concedes happily that Sydney Carton’s sacrifice for Darnay, Lucie, and their child in the Tale of Two Cities was a glorious act.  It acknowledges willingly that Evans’s stepping outside into the freezing Antarctic cold to die in the vain attempt to save Sir Robert Scott and his colleagues was heroic, an act of true self-sacrificing love.  

More deeply lies another animus.  The Cross of Christ is hated because of what it says about the Unbeliever.  It testifies to the evil of every man.  Worse, it declares that this human evil is not a mere failure, or childish mistake, or bumbling error, or something which will be smoothed out in the endless centuries of evolutionary development.  Rather, the Cross of Christ declares that every man is truly and thoroughly wicked.  Moreover, it declares that death and eternal damnation is the certain consequence as we, sinners all, are indicted before a holy God.  Therefore, the Cross is not just foolishness or silly or primitive or childish–it is hateful, and despicable because of what it says about us.   Since it indicts humanity so powerfully, sinful hearts–being true to their nature–attempt to deflect the guilt and the blame back to God. 

Thus for Christ’s sacrificial cross, only contempt is forthcoming.  While folk may honour sacrifice as noble, not so Christ’s cross.  The reason is not hard to find.  It lies here: Christ was dying to satisfy His heavenly Father.  Therefore, whilst Christ may be noble, God must be a tyrant.  Consider this: had Sir Robert Scott asked Evans to lay down his life for his colleagues, whilst Evans might be considered a tragic hero, Scott would be regarded in a very negative light.  In the same way, the cross of Christ represents an evil deity. It thus becomes an outrage, a thing to be loathed. 

These deeper realities and truths had an ardent witness in Christopher Hitchens.  But his rage against the Cross had a deeper, inchoate malevolence that would have been embarrassing to acknowledge.  He hated God because he could not betray his own sinfulness–to which he defiantly clung until the end.  He was a true scion of Unbelief.

When God confronted Adam after his rebellion, Adam protested that the fault was not his.  It was God’s.  “The woman you gave to be with me, she gave me the fruit and I ate.”   Adam blamed Eve as the immediate cause of his sin.  But he also blamed God as the first and ultimate cause.  He implied that if God had not given him the one who was “bone of his bones and flesh of his flesh”, he would never have fallen into sin.  Thus, Hitchens (along with all who despise or neglect the Cross as irrelevant) would indict and blame God.  If there is anything wrong with humanity, it is God’s fault. 

There have been attempts to coat the Cross with saccharin.  Unbelief can remake it into a noble sacrifice, a moral example, an heroic act by Christ.  But Hitchens could see more clearly than that.  He could see that the “problem” with the Cross lay not with Christ, but with the Father–that God would require this of His Son in order to save His people.  It is what the Cross tells us about God which offends.  But this was not all.  His fulminating against God had a deeper motive.  For Hitchens, it is what the Cross said about him that was most offensive.  When confronted with true moral guilt before an angry God, if submission in humble belief is not possible, the only response left is bitter, sarcastic mockery, which is what he gave out.

As Easter approaches, these things will play out once again around the world.  To Believers, the Cross both humbles us into the dust and lifts us to the eternal skies.  We cherish the old rugged cross and all it represents–about God the Father, and His only begotten Son, and about us.

But to Unbelievers, the word of the cross will remain as it always has–folly.  In this way, even Unbelief testifies to the truth of God and His Christ, despite itself.   

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.

Touchstones

Italian Perversions Condemn Us All

First, the story (courtesy of the Sydney Morning Herald):

Italy’s highest court has overturned the conviction of a 60-year-old man for having sex with an 11-year-old girl, because the verdict failed to take into account their “amorous relationship”.  Pietro Lamberti, a social services worker in Catanzaro in southern Italy, was convicted in February 2011 and sentenced to five years in prison for sexual acts with a minor. 

The verdict was later upheld by an appeals court.  But Italy’s supreme court ruled that the verdict did not sufficiently consider “the ‘consensus’, the existence of an amorous relationship, the absence of physical force, the girl’s feelings of love”.   The court’s October 15 decision to order a retrial was made public in December by Il Quotidiano della Calabria and slowly spread to social media networks, where it sparked heated reactions against the Italian justice system.  According to Il Quotidiano, the girl came from a poor family who had known and trusted the social worker.

From the perspective of the Christian Gospel both the original crime and the reasoning of the Italian supreme court are evil.  But our challenge to all who are not Christians is to declare where they stand on matters such as this.
  And not only where they stand, but why.  No doubt there are many, even a majority at the present time, who would condemn as evil and morally wrong a man having sex with an eleven year old girl.  But here is the rub: does this common judgement reflect the echoes of God’s image still within the soul, or does the Unbeliever’s condemnation reflect some principled position?  If the latter, by what standard? 

There will be those who would rush to assert that an eleven year old is still a child and is too immature to make reasonable decisions about whom she loves so that her consent to sex cannot be informed in any reasonable way.  Our rejoinder: by what standard do you presume to make such a judgment?  Who are you, after all, to dictate morality or anything to another human being?  Who gave you the authority?  The right? 

Recall that our society solemnly tells us that children are their own best teachers.  They must control their own curricula, discover at their own pace, experiment and learn to do by doing.  Teachers must beware of hegemonic overlordship which can do great harm to a child; they must act as facilitators and guides, not rulers of ethics, morals, or conscience.  So, if valid in the classroom, why not in the bedroom? 

Recall also that the predominant cosmology is evolutionism which makes life and existence subject to chance.  In a world subject to, and existing by means of,  brute chance upon what ground or standard can one make judgements about an eleven year old girl? 

At best such judgements can be nothing more than preferences, likes, dislikes–or conditioned prejudices.  Amorality cannot identify, let alone condemn, immorality.  It has no standards by which to do so. 

Jean-Paul Sartre pointed out that unless a data point or truth has an infinite reference point, it has no meaning at the end of the day.  To deny this is cowardice and self-deceit.  Thus, in his famous thought experiment, should the driver of the car avoid the old lady crossing the road, or run her down?  It matters not which he chooses–only that he chooses to do something. 

It is true that many Unbelievers recoil at such notions.  They insist upon meaning, truth, significance, and principles by which they are entitled to judge right and wrong, morality and immorality.  But they are utterly lost, even though their pride and vanity cannot allow them to admit it.  They buttress their moral judgements and their ethical decisions by high sounding principles which hang from nothing and are built upon ether. 

In the case of the eleven year old girl and the Italian supreme court our challenge to all who deny their God and Creator is this: either repent and return to Him, or stop fooling yourself that you have any foundation or ground whatsoever to condemn the 60 year old social worker, the Italian supreme court, or the eleven year old girl.  The fact that you do recoil from such sinfulness serves as a witness against you.  It condemns you first and foremost, for you cosset your rebellion against your Creator and Sustainer by appealing to morals and truths for which you have no foundation at all–yet you know are right. 

And if you do, indeed, recoil in horror at the aforementioned crime and the perverted decision of the Italian supreme court, then you can have but one course of integrity, truth, and honesty left open to you–repent of your rebellion and return to your God and Father, and believe upon His Son, Jesus Christ, picking up your cross and following Him.  If not, the only alternative is to embrace the degradation and the sin.

Douglas Wilson’s Letter From Moscow

On Learning to Hate Their Dog

Posted on Monday, September 2, 2013  

By Douglas Wilson 

Blog and Mablog

 

I want to thank you all for your kind invitation to address a recent dust-up in the blogosphere. It is not often that I get to discuss things like this.

Thabiti wrote a good article here, which elicited boatloads of comments, and so he followed it up with more here. Jonathan Merritt thought that the occasion was ripe for him to demonstrate that he doesn’t know what a rant is, which was amply accomplished here. And Denny Burk came in with a good wrap-up here.

But, believe it or not, there are certain things left unsaid. I want to make a few incidental comments, tossing them casually on the coffee table, and then get to the main event.

First, the incidentals. Merritt is quite right that Christians need to learn to stop trying to play the victim, but not for the reason he thinks.
The game is rigged, and they will never let us. The Supreme Court of New Mexico could have decided that evangelical wedding photographers needed to have all their houses burned down, and there would still be religion-page shills out there defending the need for such (temporarily) austere measures as we seek to build a more equitable society. So we need to save our breath for cooling our porridge. And besides, watching persecutors feeling tormented by their victims is kind of entertaining.

Second, Merritt needs to learn what Pharisaism is — which is to say, the prideful inculcation of a moralistic standard with a club. And who is it that is having “pride” parades? In his third point, he tried to turn the “gag reflex” issue into one that casts conservative believers as folks who are too fastidious to minister to people who sleep on urine-soaked mattresses. But of course, that is not the issue at all. The issue has to do with those who romanticize such behaviors, and who want to turn character defects into points of personal pride. It has happened before with the ideal of the noble poetic soul using opiates, and it is happening now with sodomy.

Deep opposition to those who want to be the booster club for any particular vice, and deep compassion for those who are trapped by that same vice, are not inconsistent depths. It is one thing for a pastor to help put a family back together, shattered by adultery. It is quite another to deal with someone who has devoured a family, wipes her mouth, and says “that was fun” (Prov. 30:20). The issue here is not the sex, but rather the pride. Pride is the besetting sin of moralistic Pharisees, and their heirs today are the crusading bigots who are tracking down evangelical bakers of wedding cakes in order to make them celebrate and applaud what God requires them to detest.

So, then, what is the main issue? What must we learn from all this? What is not yet being addressed?

The point of sodomy is transgression, and as such it is essentially parasitic. The tang of it comes from the violation of taboos. Without those taboos, the homosexual movement is a tapeworm bereft of an intestinal wall. This is why, incidentally, there is at least some strident opposition to homo-marriage from the advocates of deep queer. When you have normalized everything, where do the queer go? What do the queer do when nothing is queer anymore?

In every form of transgressive sexuality, there must be a boundary to be crossed. Some see the signs posted at that boundary and recoil in horror. Others cross that boundary with one eye on those who recoiled in horror. Among those who cross, some of them share in the horror — the self-loathing homosexual — while others are simply spewing their malice toward the sovereign God, giver of every good gift. They are the ones who in their high rebellion want to say, “evil, be thou my good.”

Anyone who has not seen people getting their essential kicks out of offending white bread suburbanites really needs to get out more. Rap artists do it with what I shall call the enword, and homos do it with the effword, but they are all junior high boys wanting to startle the cute girls into a shocked round of giggling. The rap artist wants to be a bad ass, and the catamite wants an ass that is bad, but it all amounts to the same thing.

Imagine a hipster washed up on a desert island — no scope for irony at all. Imagine Lady Gaga washed up on a desert island — how long do you think those outfits would last? Imagine Miley Cyrus washed up on a desert island — think she would be dancing up and down the beach with that foam finger? No. The whole point is to shock and insult those who don’t know that they are being played. Take that away and the whole game collapses.

You can take that away in two different ways. One is to stop being shocked through a compromised surrender, which is what they are demanding from us. If they succeed in this, they will have their own troubles down the road — what happens every time the parasite kills the host, which we can leave them to figure out.

The other is to keep that sense of shock, but to do it as biblically informed people, and not on the basis of cultural inertia from the Eisenhower era. Treating a man as though he were a woman is not described in Scripture as something that is technically erroneous. Rather, the Israelites were taught to treat it as detestable, as an abomination (Lev. 18:22). God does not simply require us to disapprove. He requires us to loathe. But going back to Merritt’s faux-point about compassion, there is no inconsistency between having compassion for the sinner and detestation for the dungeon filth he is living in.

“And have mercy on those who doubt; save others by snatching them out of the fire; to others show mercy with fear, hating even the garment stained by the flesh” (Jude 22-23).

So those enslaved by homosexuality don’t have the right to tell us “love me, love my dog.” We can love them and hate their dog. Dogs are excluded from the New Jerusalem (Rev. 22:15).

And in the meantime, remember that the “yuck factor” is essentially a shared commitment. It is something that evangelicals and queers can agree on. Is it not?

Militant Idolatry

Putting to the Question

There is ordinary idolatry, and then there is militant idolatry.  Ordinary, garden variety idolatry is everywhere.  People conceive of a deity and give it their loyalty and devotion and obeisance.  But militant idolatry is a step up the scale.  Militant idolatry is where a devotee says, “My god must meet certain requirements that are important to me, or I will not worship him.”  Either the idol first bows down to me, or I will not bow down to it.

Militant idolatry exposes the essence of all idolatry–which is self-worship.

Former archbishop Desmond Tutu has just come out of the closet, exposing himself to be a militant idolater.  Sad really, but there it is.  Out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaks.  And Desmond has spoken.

South African peace icon Desmond Tutu has said he would rather go to hell than worship a homophobic God, likening the fight against gay prejudice to the anti-apartheid struggle.  Tutu made the comments on Friday at the launch of a United Nations gay equality campaign in Cape Town.  “I would refuse to go to a homophobic heaven. No, I would say sorry, I mean I would much rather go to the other place,” the retired archbishop said.  “I would not worship a God who is homophobic and that is how deeply I feel about this,” he said, condemning the use of religious justification for anti-gay prejudice.  (Al Jazeera)

Desmond has a cherished ruler–about which he feels deeply–and God has to measure up to it.  If He does not, Desmond refuses to worship Him.  Thus Desmond Tutu shows himself to be deeply in the thrall of idolatry.

True Belief has it the other way around.  God has a ruler; He measures us.  God’s ruler is a manifestation of His own character.  He is holy, just and good.  He is infinite, eternal, and unchangeable. 

As Job found out, we answer to God, not the other way around. It’s a pity Desmond has missed that.
 

Man As Animal

 Unleashing Sin

One of the abiding lusts of Western pride is the lure of a perfect society brought into being through human ingenuity, planning, and enlightened application.  No matter what problem we face, throw enough resources at it, study it to death, put a management plan in place, and hey presto, the problem will be solved. 

Such approaches may work well when we are dealing with problems arising out of the non-human natural order.  They fail miserably when we are dealing with human beings.  Why?  Precisely because man is not a cipher.  He is not the impersonal product of impersonal natural forces.  He is altogether more wonderful and complex: he is a moral agent made in the image of God.  When sin entered the human race through Adam and spread to all mankind “descending from him by ordinary generation” the wondrous complexity and moral agency of mankind became perverted.  The sophisticated complexity of humanity became a spectacular resource for cunning, duplicity, and evil.  

But modern man has “advanced” to the point where he sees himself as a sophisticated animal, nothing more.
You can train mice to do certain things.  Similarly human beings can be conditioned to do whatever can be imagined.  If man is malfunctioning and if there are problems in society, all we need is the right plan, the application of marshalled resources, and all will be well. 

Economics has been called the “dismal science”.  For good reason.  Modern econometrics offered the prospect of unending growth and prosperity through, firstly developing a sufficiently complex model of how the modern economy works, then having applied sufficient computing and civil powers, governments could control the economic machine through adjusting inputs, prices, outputs, wages, capital availability, labour hours, and the money supply.  If we could do that well enough (that is, if the model were both accurate and comprehensive) we could have an economy which would grow at 3.256 percent real GDP endlessly.  No more crashes.  No more “Great Recessions”.  No more systemic unemployment.  No more plutocrats.  Just a well run, smooth machine-like progress to perpetual wealth and prosperity.

Go figure!  Well, the econometric modellers did.  They failed dismally.  Why?  For many reasons, but chief amongst them was this: human beings were not ciphers, and economics is always about human beings and their actions, goals, choices, preferences, fears and lusts.  Moreover, value is a subjective concept.  For one person, value lies in owning nothing.  For another, value is to own the whole world.  As soon as an econometric policy or lever were put in place, human beings (the market) cleverly adjusted to make the lever ineffectual and inoperative.  

Take for example monetary policy where a central bank (or government) manipulates the money supply, using short term interest rates.  Econometric research established that this would work.  Put up the price of short term money (the interest rate) and economic activity would slow.  It worked for a short time, until clever, resourceful human beings worked out that they too could use the same analytical tools and anticipate what the monetary authorities would do.  In gaming this system they could make money.  And they did.  As a consequence, the manipulation of the short term money supply by central banks became more and more ineffectual. 

So powerful is this phenomenon of human anticipation and adjustment it coined an economic “law”: Goodharts’s law–which reads,

“As soon as the government attempts to regulate any particular set of financial assets, these become unreliable as indicators of economic trends.” This is because investors try to anticipate what the effect of the regulation will be, and invest so as to benefit from it. 

The assumption that human beings are not moral beings but mere ciphers to be manipulated and controlled has worked through almost all societies in the West.  Take, for example, the issue of crime. 

Already at the turn of the century, Clarence Darrow, the lawyer who achieved notoriety defending Darwinism in the Scopes trial, was portraying criminals as helpless victims of their circumstances.  In 1902, in a widely published speech to the prisoners in Chicago’s Cook County Jail, he declared that “there is no such thing as a crime as the word is generally understood. . . . I do not believe that people are in jail because they deserve to be.  They are in jail simply because they cannot avoid it on account of circumstances which are entirely beyond their control and for which they are in no way responsible.” [Chuck Colson and Nancy Pearcey, How Now Shall We Live (Wheaton, Illinois: Tyndale House Publishers, 1999), p. 181.]

The implication is that if “society” were to change the circumstances of such people, crime would disappear.  A further implication is that no-one is responsible for any actions whatsoever.  We are creatures of instinct and conditioning.  We are animals and animals only.  If we do evil it is the fault of “society”–that is, of the powers that created bad conditioning in the first place. 

These false beliefs are now so disseminated through Western culture that they crop up everywhere and govern almost all social policies.  Take the punishment of crime, for example.  The man-is-a-cipher philosophy applies here as well.  Harsher and longer punishments will condition the prisoner not to do such things again. Punishment is nothing more than a calculation of incentives. There is little consideration given to the prisoner as a moral being, responsible for every action, thought, word and deed performed, firstly to the Living God, and then to his fellow man. 

Man is a glorious being–capable of highly moral actions, and of desperately wicked depravities.  Modern society ignores the possibility and reality of depravity.  Instead, modern society conducts a never-ending symphony of exoneration.  It’s always someone else’s fault.

Preposterous examples are legion.  Like the woman who entered a hot-dog-eating contest in a Houston nightclub.  In her rush to outdo the other contestants, she ate too quickly and began to choke.  Did the woman shrug off the mishap as a natural consequence of her own zany behaviour?  No, she decided she was a victim.  She sued the nightclub that sponsored the contest, arguing that the business was to blame because “they shouldn’t have contests like that.” (Ibid., p. 182).

When we deny sin as a society, when we officially regard human beings as ciphers or nothing more than animals, then we foolishly concede that all we need is more planning, more controls, more government and social programmes to resolve all human problems.  But by so doing we do not remove sin and evil, we actually unleash its destructive power on the community.  

Douglas Wilson’s Letter From America

The Cootie Contagion Radius 

Liturgy and Worship – Exhortation
Written by Douglas Wilson
Saturday, 02 March 2013

One of the things we have to learn as Christians is that, when it comes to appearances, we clean up real nice. But we also have to remember that this is also true of whited sepulchers. They clean up real nice also.

When new Christians join us, still reeling and recovering from all the problems they have had, they are presented with the same optical illusion presented to children who grow up among us. That illusion tells you that you “are the only sinner here.” If people knew what my thought life was like, they wouldn’t have anything to do with me. If people knew the state of my heart, they would shun me. If people knew my past, they would stay out of the cootie contagion radius.

But all of us are a piece of work.
Remember that your fellowship with God is not dependent upon whether or not other Christians treat you right. Rather, your fellowship with other Christians is dependent upon whether or not God has received you. And if God has received you, He has done so even though He knows all of your sins in exhaustive and excruciating detail. What could you tell Him about the state of your heart that would surprise Him, and make Him call your salvation deal off?

If God were to mark iniquities, no one in this room could stand. But if the Word says, as it does, that with Him is forgiveness of sins, it follows from this that everyone in this room can stand. It is true we must take our stand in the grace of God, but having done so, we may stand.

Socialist Theology

Original Sin and Impure Motives

Christian doctrine emphatically states that right motives are critical to right thoughts, words, and deeds.  The overriding motivation must always be love of God and love of one’s neighbour.  We are to love God with all our heart, soul, strength and mind; we are to love our neighbours as ourselves.  Without such a motivation, all human actions are sinful to one degree or other. 

The secular socialist also focuses intensively upon motives when judging human action.
  Strangely, the focus is often resoundingly negative in tone.  According to this religion, human action is never moral or acceptable when it is done for profit.  Self interest is wrong; public or corporate interest ahead of one’s own is holy, just, and good.  It is hard to find a discussion of positive motives in socialist ideology, but one presumes that it would turn around a notion of justice, where justice is viewed primarily according to notions of material equality.  True and right motivation to secular socialism would presumably be something along the lines of devotion to the collective: thus, “from each according to his ability; to each according to his means”. 

For socialism, the collective (however conceived) is substituted for God.  It is the chief idol in the socialist pantheon.  The collective is assumed to be sinless and incorruptible.  (We hasten to add that few socialists actually come out and say such nonsense, but the premise, although suppressed, is there at every turn of the page.)  Here is an example:  one of New Zealand’s leading socialist theorists, Chris Trotter has been discussing the existence of private (mercenary) armies being increasingly deployed around the world.  Towards the end of his piece, we read the following:

The actual, on-the-ground, operational conduct of PMSCs [private military security companies] over the past decade has demonstrated to the world just how dangerous it is to entrust the delivery of deadly force to individuals and corporations whose primary motivation is profit.

We do not intend to discuss the merits or otherwise of private armies, except to focus upon why they are distasteful to socialist ideology.  They are judged dangerous.  They cannot be trusted because their motivation is profit.  Now, we might be excused for thinking that what the socialist is calling for is a superior kind of army or combat group whose primary motivation is the opposite of profit, that is, loss.  But we jest.  What is really meant (although suppressed) is that a motivation for profit implies selfishness and greed.  People and institutions driven by such impure motives cannot be trusted because they are untrustworthy.  They are driven by sin, in other words.  But if the collective and its interests are to the fore, then the resulting military actions will be selfless, moral, and pure.  Yeah, right.

Consider now the motivations of soldiers in an army raised by and controlled by the collective, the state.  Let’s assume we have in mind a non-conscript, professional army.  We can safely assert that the primary motivation of most, if not all of the military personnel would be profit.  They appreciate their fortnightly paycheck, and were it to cease or diminish they would seek more profitable employment.  Does this mean that state armies are intrinsically and necessarily untrustworthy also, because they also are primarily motivated by profit? 

If the socialist logic is going to hold true to its premises, then the answer would be, of course!  But that digs down to yet another suppressed premise.  Armies of state, Trotter implies, are controlled by the collective which is selfless, disinterested, and, therefore, more reliable.  This is just naive doggerel.  Human history is replete with governments and rulers who pursued and waged war for selfish reasons, for personal profit in one form or another.  In the end, most collectives are ruled by a clique and its attendant coterie.  In almost all cases, that clique will pursue its own interests and conflate the interests of subjects into its own.  How many wars have been waged by the clique ruling the collective for reasons of personal aggrandisement, to secure trade routes, to expand an empire, to make a name for oneself?  A recent, and current, example is one Cristina Kirchner seeking popular support by menacing the Falkland Islands. 

The motives of the collective can (and usually are) corrupt and venal and selfish.  The motives of commerce are likewise suspect.  But profit per se does not imply selfishness.  The career soldier serving for profit–his paycheck–may be doing so to support his wife, his children, his parents and to lay up an inheritance for his grandchildren.  All these goals are holy, just, and good, and the motives upon which they are based are likewise pure.  The owners and employees of a business enterprise can likewise pursue profit for good and just ends.  The mere fact that they pursue profit does not make them guilty of Original Sin. 

Sin is universal in this world, holding tyranny over both the individual, the family, and the collective.  The Great Divide is not between a pure selfless state versus impure, fallen selfish private entities.  The is the diabolical version of Original Sin.  It is the version unthinkingly adopted by socialism. 

Christ alone deals (and will deal) effectively with universal sin.  He alone is able to purify the motives of both society’s collectives and all participant individuals.

Douglas Wilson’s Letter From America

And Slew the Little Childer 

Liturgy and Worship – Church Year
Written by Douglas Wilson
Saturday, 15 December 2012

Whenever you have to deal with something like the Connecticut shooting, something that simply crushes the heart, it is important to think carefully before speaking or writing. This is not the time to be debating gun control, drone attacks in the Middle East, and it is certainly not the time to be drawing ham-fisted comparisons to the abortion carnage. The reason for this is that the parents who are broken over this were parents who had chosen life, not parents who hadn’t. This does not mean that abortion is irrelevant to this tragedy, for it certainly is not, but we want to make sure we locate it as a clear point of gospel relevance.

Otherwise we just come off as opportunists who are just looking for a chance to haul the topic of conversation over to a particular hobby horse. But in the aftermath of something sick like this, we need to reconnect with the permanent things. If we don’t point to transcendental realities in a time like this—gospel truths—then we might as well sign a peace treaty with the darkness now.

I have often said that nativity sets should include a set of Herod’s soldiers—that is as much a part of the Christmas story as the shepherds, or the star, or the wise men.
These traditional figures all glorified Christ in His coming, but the reality of such bloody soldiers was the reason He came. Nothing illustrates the need for His mission to us better than that appalling loss to Ramah. An early English carol, “Unto Us is Born a Son,” has a verse that understands this juxtaposition of humility and adoration over against the haughtiness of pride and blood.

This did Herod sore affray,
And grievously bewilder
So he gave the word to slay,
And slew the little childer,
And slew the little childer.

And Rachel wept for her children, for they were no more.

Two things should stand out about this. First, while I noted that this is not the time to call out those who would use the tragedy to promote gun control—or to call them names on the Internet—we must confront those who would continue their lockdown policies of gospel control. And by gospel, I mean the whole counsel of God for a lost and sinful race—the restored order of things, repentance for sin, and true faith in the death, burial and resurrection of Jesus. If you want a society which refuses to name the name of Jesus, and yet is somehow free from these sorts of outrages, you want something that this sinful world cannot ever provide. We can have no salvation without a Savior. God sent a Savior to us, and we have no saviors of our own, just a lot of pretenders. His invitation to our generation is the same as it has been for every generation, and it is “come with me.” We cannot be saved unless we do.

It is not possible to build a culture around a denial of God-given standards, and then arbitrarily reintroduce those standards at your convenience, whenever you need a word like evil to describe what has just happened. Those words cannot just be whistled up. If we have banished them, and their definitions, and every possible support for them, we need to reckon with the fact that they are now gone. Cultural unbelief, which leads inexorably to cultural nihilism and despair, is utterly incapable of responding appropriately to things like this, while remaining fully capable of creating them. In the prophetic words of C.S. Lewis, “In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.”

This shooting was horrendous, but far worse is the fact that our blind seers have no idea what to say about it. The horror happened, and it was immediately followed by the horror of countless individuals saying wildly inappropriate things about it. We have monsters in our midst, and vapidity in our highest council chambers, not to mention the monsters there too, and all of them want to slouch toward Bethlehem. God have mercy.

And so this leads to the second point. The reason we need to have fixed and God-given standards is not so that we might climb up some moralistic ladder, rebuilding a mythical past where these sorts of things didn’t happen to us. No, these sorts of things have always happened. We live on a screwed-up planet. We must have a God-given, fixed standard so that we may know why we need forgiveness so much. God’s law is not to pat us on the back and tell us what fine fellows we are. God’s law is given to provide a proper shape for our repentance. In moments like this, we are aghast, but our “repentance” is formless and void. We need the shape of God’s holy Word so that we know how shapeless we have become. We need the Spirit of God to move on our waters.

And here is where abortion really is relevant, along with all the other awful things we do to children. We do not need to talk about these things as political issues—however appropriate and necessary that may be in its time and place. But before we can even think about that, we need to come to grips with the fact that, at the personal level, it is plain that an aching bloodguilt rests upon our nation. I am not talking about our officials, though they are included. I am talking about the millions of us who have occasioned it, paid for it, obtained it, provided it, and funded it. According to Scripture, blood is something that returns to those who shed it. It also returns to the land where it was shed. And our vast reservoir of guilt is larger and deeper than it has ever been.

The only blood that does not return with compounded guilt is the blood of Jesus. His blood comes to us for cleansing, and not for condemnation. His blood does not return with guilt, and it is the only way that all the other guilt can be prevented from returning to us. An old gospel song points the only way to our salvation—“nothing but the blood of Jesus.” Nothing.

So we must confess that while the spirit of Christ is alive in the world, the spirit of Herod is not yet gone. And the only way to expel that kind of darkness is to boldly proclaim that Jesus came into this world precisely to destroy this kind of darkness through His death and resurrection. He was born in Bethlehem from Mary, and He was born again in Jerusalem, the first born from the dead. His grave, just like Mary, was full of grace.

This is a darkness that must be confronted, and it can only be confronted by believers who are prepared to wield the gospel—not as a sectarian talking point, but as real gospel for real sin, real balm for real pain, real light for real darkness. So go find your children, hug the little childer, thank God for the life that is in them, and teach them the Christmas story. We need it so much.

Douglas Wilson’s Letter From America

Froward 

Money, Love, Desire – The Good of Affluence
Written by Douglas Wilson
Monday, 08 October 2012

I have written many times that free markets are for a free people, and that only a free people can sustain them. But slaves to sin cannot be a free people. And the only way to be liberated from slavery to sin is through the gospel that brings new life.

Another problem is that when slaves to sin spiral down into the civic slavery that is their natural civic condition, their masters will also be slaves to sin, albeit usually somewhat shrewder — at least for a short while. At some point the whole thing blows up for everybody, but the bottom line is that sin is the fundamental set of chains. You cannot hope to be enslaved by them, and yet be free in any sense that matters anywhere else.

Hayek, Friedman, and von Mises cannot keep people loving the freedom of markets any more than the wisest geologist who ever lived could have kept Cain from hitting Abel with that rock. Knowledge of the world is not the same thing as knowledge of the human heart.

Other foolish observers within the Christian tradition have seen that this is true, and concluded that the problem lies with Hayek, et al. “We need to have values other than free market values, etc.” This is to say that since sinners cannot produce the fruit of the Spirit, we need to haul out the chains of compassionate statism. Make ’em do compassionate stuff and everything. And at the top of this atrocious pile is someone with a brightly doctored O on their Froward bumper sticker. But that campaign theme just makes me think of Prov. 3:32, and I don’t know why Obama picked it.

There is no salvation without a savior, and Jesus is the only savior. And how will they hear without a preacher? What we need is the gospel, what we need is a reformation, what we need is revival.

But in the meantime, Christian statists need to stop telling us that since unbelievers cannot manifest love, joy, peace, patience, etc. in their lives, that this must mean that love, joy, peace, patience, etc. are optional. “Let’s work around not having them.” What kind of sense does that make? Preach the gospel. Free markets are a fruit of the gospel, and you cannot praise free markets without praising the work of the Holy Spirit of God.
Someone once said that real capitalism is easy to defend, but hard to praise. I understand where that sentiment comes from, but I want to lean against it, hard. Adam Smith’s invisible hand (whether he knew it or not) was and is the right hand of the Lord Jesus, and marvelous are all His works.

If we preach the gospel in power and truth, the result will be a free people. And when we have a free people, we will have free markets. Only a free people will be able to trust the hand of God in their financial affairs and market choices, which is what the free market is — people trusting God. That is the only way we can have free markets for any length of time.

What we have now, crony capitalism, or what I call crapitalism, is how sinners try to cheat the system. But you don’t blame football when someone cheats at football. You don’t blame math when people get their sums wrong. You don’t blame gravity when you trip and fall on your nose. Or at least you shouldn’t.

Every form of Christian statism, regardless of how it is packaged and sold, is a sly attempt to arrange for the cheaters to be given control of the game. And the only way we can stop that — you guessed it — is to preach Christ crucified and risen.

How Nonsense Became Received Wisdom

The Flat Earth Society Has Nothing on This

When the previous century began, optimism was in the air.  Mankind could finally control its own destiny.  Man could be progressively perfected and Paradise would break forth.  All of his problems could be solved by correcting external influences.  Evil and sin would be progressively removed by enlightened policies of social and human re-tooling.

The first change agent off the rank was Socialism.  If wealth were redistributed and the poor were given other people’s money virtually every social problem would disappear immediately.  The second cab was science.  The more technological advances made, the more disease would be conquered; the more Nature exploited, the more  resources to distribute.

These hopes proceeded on the belief that the Christian doctrines of Original Sin and human depravity were ignorant superstitions of a dark past.