Christ is King!

If Christ is proclaimed as raised from the dead, how can some of you say that there is no resurrection of the dead? But if there is no resurrection of the dead, then not even Christ has been raised. And if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain. We are even found to be misrepresenting God, because we testified about God that he raised Christ, whom he did not raise if it is true that the dead are not raised. For if the dead are not raised, not even Christ has been raised. And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins. Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished. If in Christ we have hope in this life only, we are of all people most to be pitied.

But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep. For as by a man came death, by a man has come also the resurrection of the dead. For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive. But each in his own order: Christ the firstfruits, then at his coming those who belong to Christ. Then comes the end, when he delivers the kingdom to God the Father after destroying every rule and every authority and power. For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet. The last enemy to be destroyed is death. For "God has put all things in subjection under his feet." But when it says, "all things are put in subjection," it is plain that he is excepted who put all things in subjection under him. When all things are subjected to him, then the Son himself will also be subjected to him who put all things in subjection under him, that God may be all in all. (1 Corinthians 15:12–28)

Today is Easter, the holiest Sunday of the year, celebrating the fact of the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.

In dying on the cross, Jesus acted as our infallible high priest: unlike mere human priests, who had to offer sacrifices over and over, for their own sins as well as the people's, he had no sins of his own, and hence his atoning death was able to appease his Father's wrath against sinners once and for all and to "save to the uttermost" (Hebrews 7:25–;27). And when he rose from the dead, he showed that the Father was satisfied with his sacrifice. Because Jesus rose from the dead, we too can have hope that there is life beyond the grave.

On that first Easter weekend, Christ conquered our two greatest enemies: sin on Good Friday, and death on Easter Sunday.

Everything has been put into subjection to him. Christ is King!

I Begg your pardon?

Recently, in an interview, radio pastor Alistair Begg (host of the Truth for Life program) recounted a conversation he had had with a Christian lady, whose grandson was going to marry a transgender woman. She didn't know whether she ought to attend the wedding. Begg counseled her to attend the wedding and provide a wedding gift.¹ Social media blew up, as social media is wont to do, with Christians roundly condemning this advice. The American Family Radio network also announced that it was dropping his program.

Friday in the Wild: December 22, 2023

Happy Friday! After a couple of dry weeks, and now being away from home for the Christmas season, I wasn’t sure that there’d be a Friday in the Wild this week, either. Nonetheless, the Internet came through.

In today’s A la Carte post, Tim Challies linked to his 2014 post about the two kinds of blog—content creation and content curation—and why he started doing both. He writes, “I am a pretty normal person and have pretty normal tastes. If I find it interesting and worthy of a few minutes of time and attention, I suppose other people are likely to as well.” I highlight this because that’s basically my philosophy, also. If I find something interesting or helpful or funny, probably someone else will, too.

On plant confessions and "non-human persons"

Rod Dreher is my favourite apostate. And, if he happened to lift my title for a recent blog post about Union Seminary holding a plant confession in chapel, then I'm also flattered. (It also could very well be that in my quest to write original post titles, what I find terribly witty is really just blindingly obvious.)

The "cockamamie piece" in Sojourners that Dreher is reviewing, by Cláudio Carvalhaes, raises a good question:

When we confess to plants, to forests, to each tree, every meadow, to birds, fish, rocks, animals, rivers, and mountains, we repent, mourn and reconnect ourselves to a much larger web of life, made of people, animals, creatures, and ecosystems that we have lost, taken away from our common home.

This understanding demands a reinterpretation of democracy. When are we going to consider the seeds and the panther and the zebras and the cows and horses as part of our democracy?

[Why I Created a Chapel Service Where People Confess to Plants]

By "good question," I mean apropos. In fact, it's kind of a stupid question. Seeds and cows are not capable of participating in democracy; everybody knows that. At best, we would have a sort of benevolent hegemony where we humans decide what's best for the ficus plants and wombats, and lord it over them with or without their consent.

I say the question is apropos because not long before I ran into Dreher's post, my roommate and I were perusing the list of registered political parties in Canada, in anticipation of the upcoming national election. At the top of the (alphabetical) list was the Animal Protection Party of Canada. The APPC claims to be "Canada’s only true multi-issue party because we are inclusive of all species. We cannot talk about any societal structure without including all affected by public policy." Their platform includes amending the Criminal Code to recognize animals as "non-human persons." What the author of the Sojourners article wants to do in church, the APPC wants to do in government. Fortunately, with (by my count) only 17 candidates running, the APPC is as unelectable as any other single-issue fringe party.

None of which is to say I don't care for the earth or its animals. Care for creation is perhaps the one place in my politics where I would tend to the left rather than the right. I think climate change due to the combustion of fossil fuels is a real thing. I regard it as a problem that should be solved, though, rather than a portent of impending doom. The Chicken Little-ism that says we have only 10 years before irreversible damage is done, on the other hand, is laughable. (It's always 10 years until Climate Armageddon, and has been for decades.) We should be listening to climate scientists, not pundits, politicians, and adolescents, even though they don't look as cute berating the United Nations.

I didn't come by my views by listening to Al Gore, Alexandria Occasio-Cortez, or Greta Thunberg; I got them from Francis Schaeffer, whose book Pollution and the Death of Man¹ rightly says the things in the natural world have intrinsic value and are worthy of our respect, because God made them and put them there. Our relationship to the world is expressed in the creation mandate: "The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it" (Genesis 2:15). We are not merely one species amongst the many that populate this planet, nor are we its masters, having the right to "conquer" and exploit nature's resources as we please. God is the earth's master; we are his caretakers, entrusted to cultivate the earth. If our lax environmental policies cause the extinction of, say, the rhinoceros, then to that extent we have failed as caretakers. On the other hand, if the radical policies of groups like the APPC are put into effect and cause the rhinoceroses to flourish but humanity to go extinct, we have also failed. If I ever have children, I want to leave them a world in better condition than I found it. If we have environmental sins to confess, it is to God, who entrusted us with his creation to care for it. We won't get absolution from the plants.

Footnotes

¹ Francis A. Schaeffer, Pollution and the Death of Man: The Christian View of Ecology (Wheaton, IL: Tyndale House, 1970). I own the 1992 Crossway edition, with an added concluding chapter by Udo Middelmann.

The glory of the LORD shall be revealèd

Every Christmas, I make a point of listening to George Frideric Handel's great oratorio, Messiah. So do many people. If you live in a large enough city, you could potentially attend a performance several times each December. And because of Messiah's lengthy performance history (and Handel's habit of modifying the score to suit his performers), the variations are endless: modern or period instruments, professional or amateur soloists, mass choirs or small ensembles—to say nothing of the extensive catalogue of recordings! A more recent tradition is the "sing-along Messiah," in which the choir invites the audience to bring their own scores and sing with them. Paradoxically, this makes the oratorio one of Western art's highest achievements, as well as one of its most accessible.

Messiah is a Christmas institution. So it may come as a surprise to many that its first performance—a benefit in Dublin, Ireland, for the relief of prisoners' debt—took place in April, 1742. (The performance was a success, raising enough money to release 142 debtors from prison.) Its official debut in London took place the following March. Handel himself never had Messiah performed at Christmas; it was for the Easter season. Only the first of Messiah's three parts deals with the birth and ministry of Jesus, telling of the promise of judgment, redemption, and salvation through selected Old Testament passages as well as the birth narrative from the Gospel of Luke. Most of the best-known selections come from Part 1, likely because of its association with Christmas.

However, Part 2 tells of Christ's passion, his death and resurrection, his ascension into heaven, and his glorification. It continues by speaking of the beginning of the spread of the Gospel, and its rejection by the world. It culminates in the "Hallelujah" chorus, which declares the absolute sovereignty of God:

Alleluia: for the Lord God omnipotent reigneth. (Revelation 16:9)

The kingdoms of this world are become the kingdoms of our Lord, and of his Christ; and he shall reign for ever and ever. (Revelation 11:15)

The words are so closely associated with the "Hallelujah" chorus that you probably think of the music while you're reading them. We hear this chorus every Christmas, but it rightly belongs to Easter! The meaning of Messiah is not "for unto us a child is born"; it's that He is "King of kings and Lord of lords." Hallelujah!

Finally, Part 3 promises eternal life, the Day of Judgment, and the final destruction of sin and death. The oratorio concludes with the exaltation of the Messiah:

Worthy is the Lamb that was slain, and hath redeemed us to God by his blood, to receive power, andriches, and wisdom, and strength, and honour, and glory, and blessing.

Blessing and honour, glory and power, be unto him that sitteth upon the throne, and unto the Lamb, for ever and ever.

Amen. (cf. Revelation 5:9,12-14)

Even less commonly known, perhaps, is that Messiah is as much an apologetic work as it is an artistic one. The libretto (text) was composed by Charles Jennens, Handel's friend and frequent collaborator. Jennens was a devout Christian who was concerned about the rise in popularity of Deism amongst England's intelligentsia. Deism is a philosophical theism that rejects divine revelation as a source of knowledge, concluding that human reason alone is sufficient to establish the existence of a deity. When God created the universe, He established natural laws for its running, but He does not involve himself in its activity. Jennens' brother had lost his faith and committed suicide after corresponding with a Deist. Grieving for his brother, Jennens composed the libretto to Messiah as a response to Deism, compiling Scripture after Scripture from the King James Version of the Bible (paraphrasing here and there) to show that Christ was the promised Messiah and that God took an active interest in the redemption of the world. Jennens was reportedly less than satisfied with Handel's score (which he composed in less than a month), complaining that some parts were "far unworthy of Handel, but much more unworthy of the Messiah." The judgment of history has, perhaps, been more favourable.

My favourite selection from Messiah takes its text from Isaiah 40:5:

And the glory of the LORD shall be revealed; and all flesh shall see it together: for the mouth of the LORD hath spoken it.

The last phrase is drawn out in long, solemn notes that underscore its significance. It is immediately followed by a bass solo that thunders out: "Thus saith the LORD of hosts" (Haggai 2:6). Jennens draws out the story of Jesus almost entirely from the Old Testament, primarily the prophet Isaiah, drawing from the Gospels only for the annunciation of Jesus' birth to the shepherds by the angles (Luke 2:8-14). The Creator is no mere spectator, and this birth is no mere accident of history. The mouth of the Lord has spoken it; therefore, it has come to pass.

There is a strong relationship between good art and a good message. I have met many Christians who can appreciate many kinds of mediocre art as long as they mention Jesus enough times and are helpful for sharing the Gospel. Yet, in Messiah, a devout Lutheran composer has created one of the acknowledged masterpieces of the Western musical canon, listened to by millions every Christmas. Thanks to his friend, a devout Anglican with a concern for the spiritual state of England, those millions flock into auditoriums and churches willingly to hear the Gospel sung to them.

I wrote last Christmas about why the Incarnation is important. Only God, taking on true humanity, could atone for the sins of, and intercede for, the human race. Without that first Christmas, when "God sent forth his son, born of a woman, born under the law" (Galatians 4:4), there would be no Easter—no cross to free us from the penalty of the law. But Charles Jennens and George Handel were right to focus on the work of Christ on the cross, and the blessings that result from it. Without the hope of Easter, there would be no joy at Christmas.

On SCOTUS and same-sex "marriage"

I was contemplating what I could say in response to today's travesty of a ruling by the Supreme Court of the United States, which legalizes same-sex "marriage" in all 50 states. I decided two things: there's nothing 1) I can add to the conversation that hasn't already been said by better commentators, and 2) given that I'm sitting comfortably in a country that has had legal same-sex "marriage" for the past decade, I'm really not in a position to be offering critiques to the U.S.

So, instead, I'll just refer back to a post I made almost two years ago on the topic. God himself established the institution of marriage along with its attendant social and theological significance. Five judges, or even nine, have no authority to alter its parameters.

Tossed to and fro

Michael Coren has crossed the Tiber. Again. He first converted to Roman Catholicism as a young adult in 1985, then converted to evangelical Christianity in the early 1990s, then returned to Rome in 2004. Now, he has announced that a year ago he left the Roman church again and began worshipping with the Anglicans. (If this trend continues, he is due to re-convert to Catholicism in approximately 2024, by which point his personal swimming lane in the Tiber River will be marked off with pool ropes.)

The reason for Coren's departure from Rome is all too predicatable these days, as he notes in an op-ed published Saturday in the Toronto Star:

I gradually came to embrace the cause of same-sex marriage, more liberal politics and a rejection of the conservative Christianity that had characterized my opinions and persona for more than a decade. . . .

The change was to a large extent triggered by the gay issue. I couldn’t accept that homosexual relationships were, as the Roman Catholic Church insists on proclaiming, disordered and sinful. Once a single brick in the wall was removed the entire structure began to fall.

In other words, like so many, he's capitulated to the spirit of the age, and it looks like he's found a church that won't challenge his assumptions: "I quietly and privately drifted over to an Anglican Church that while still working out its own position on many social issues, is far more progressive, open, relevant and willing to admit reality."

Not that it's difficult. The Anglican Church of Canada has been drifting toward the left on this issue for years. Currently ten dioceses are authorized to "bless" same-sex unions, including the Diocese of Ottawa where I live. The 2016 General Synod will vote on whether to authorize same-sex "marriages." Meanwhile, Canon XXI of Anglican church law, as well as the marriage ceremony in the Book of Common Prayer, still presuppose that a marriage consists of a man and a woman.

If you go to a wedding ceremony, you are likely to hear such biblical passages as Genesis 1:26-28, Genesis 2:15-24, or Ephesians 5:21-33 read. Marriage is not merely a license for guilt-free sex. It is a powerful symbol of the relationship of Jesus Christ and his church. That's why, notwithstanding whoever the world says can be married, within the church a same-sex "marriage" is a theological absurdity. It would be interesting to know what Bible verses about marriage are going to be read at Anglican same-sex ceremonies.

I viewed Coren's TV show from time to time and have read some of his books, and found them worthwhile. But this bouncing back and forth from Roman Catholicism to Protestantism and back again every decade is symptomatic of a deep spiritual immaturity. His denominational affiliation is driven by his current likes and dislikes; he is the very definition of one "tossed to and fro by the waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by human cunning, by craftiness in deceitful schemes" (Ephesians 4:14).

Pray for Michael Coren that he finally grows up in his faith and stops swimming.

Scrubbing the Sin List

My latest post for Faith Beyond Belief is up.

In the aftermath of Indiana's RFRA law, while no one is calling for the lions, some secular thinkers are calling for Christian silence: for example, NYT columnist and gay activist Frank Bruni recently wrote that Christians need to take homosexuality off the "sin list."

(Read "Scrubbing the Sin List.")

Unto us a Son is given

Every Christmas, we commemorate the birth of Christ. Often this means that sentimental visions of nativity scenes, and songs about silent nights and the little Lord Jesus in his manger, dance in our heads. But the birth of Jesus was just the starting point in his earthly ministry. At Christmas, we celebrate not merely his birth, but his Incarnation: as the apostle John wrote, "the Word became flesh and dwelt among us" (John 1:14). The Incarnation—God becoming a man—is the basis of the theology of the New Testament.

The Incarnation brings God close to us

Matthew wrote that the virgin birth was to "fulfill what the Lord had spoken by the prophet: 'Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall call his name Immanuel' (which means, God with us)" (Matt. 1:22-23). What the prophet Isaiah wrote symbolically, eight centuries earlier, actually happened at the dawn of the first century: Jesus Christ is, literally, "God with us."

God being made flesh in the person of Jesus means that he is not a disinterested spectator viewing human suffering from afar. The Creator actually entered into his own creation and participated in humanity along with the rest of us, along with our sufferings and temptations. The author of Hebrews writes, "Since therefore the children share in flesh and blood, he himself likewise partook of the same things. . . . For because he himself has suffered when tempted, He is able to help those who are being tempted" (Heb. 2:14). Jesus was baptized by John, not because he needed ritual purification, as he was sinless, but to "fulfill all righteousness" (Matt. 3:15). He did it to identify with us, because we do need to be purified.

The Incarnation shows us God's character

In Jesus' teaching, we see God's teaching. In his miracles, we see God's power. Jesus said that he never did anything of his own initiative; it was his Father doing his own work through him. If you want to see God&'s compassion, see Jesus' healing miracles. If you want to see God's judgment, see Jesus' rebuke of the hypocritical Pharisees. If you want to see divine love, see the way Jesus loved sinners. To see what God is like, just look at Jesus.

The Incarnation shows Jesus' true humanity

As evangelical Christians, we do not compromise on the doctrine of the deity of Christ. He was no mere philosopher or great teacher; he was God in human form. The miracle of the virgin birth shows his divinity: he was not born of ordinary human parents.

Unfortunately, we often over-emphasize Jesus' divinity at the expense of his humanity. There is a surprising and unsettling tendency in some conservative churches to downplay or deny that Mary was the mother of Jesus in a meaningful sense. (I've actually heard some people claim that Mary was merely an "incubator" for his human body.) Likely, they are reacting against Roman Catholic claims concerning Mary as the "mother of God"—which, properly understood, is an affirmation of Christ's deity, not of Mary's exalted status. In rightly rejecting one extreme, some evangelicals have gone too far and embraced another.

The virgin birth shows Jesus' humanity as well as his deity. The New Testament gives us two genealogies of Jesus (Matt. 1:1-17; Luke 3:23-38). It is generally assumed that one of them traces his line through Mary. If so, then Jesus is not merely an avatar of God come to earth in a human body. He is truly a Son of Adam, and a genuine member of the human race.

The Incarnation makes Jesus a perfect priest

A priest is a person who is appointed to mediate for his people in religious services. In the Mosaic covenant, the priestly functions were carried out by the descendants of Moses' brother Aaron. They carried out the animal sacrifices in the temple of Yahweh, which were intended to forgive the sins of the Israelites. The high priest alone was permitted to enter into the Holiest of Holies, the innermost sanctuary of the temple that originally housed the Ark of the Covenant, which was associated with the presence of God. The priest would sprinkle sacrificial blood on the mercy seat that covered the Ark once a year, on the Day of Atonement.

Jesus was not a Levite or a descendant of Aaron, so he was not qualified to be an Aaronic priest. The author of Hebrews describes him instead as a priest "after the order of Melchizedek." Melchizedek is a rather obscure figure from the Old Testament, described as the "king of Salem" and a "priest of God Most High" (Genesis 14:18). Following a battle in which Abraham rescued his nephew Lot who had been abducted, Melchizedek brought Abraham bread and wine and also received a tenth of the spoils as tribute.

The reasoning of Hebrews goes like this: Since Abraham paid tribute to Melchizedek and received a blessing from him, Melchizedek is superior to Abraham, and also Abraham's descendants, the Levitical priests (Heb. 7:4-10). The author also notes that Melchizedek has no recorded genealogy: "neither beginning of days nor end of life" (Heb. 7:3). He resembles Christ, who, being God, has existed from all eternity and lives forever.

Therefore, Christ is a far greater priest than Aaron and his children: not because of his family line, but because he has always been. And because he is tied to Melchizedek and not to Aaron, he is not a Jewish priest for the Jewish people, but one who can intercede before God for all of humanity. Unlike the Aaronic priests, he does not die and need to be replaced, and has no need to offer sacrifices for his own sins first. "Consequently, he is able to save to the uttermost those who draw near to God through him, since he always lives to make intercession for them" (Heb. 7:25).

The Incarnation makes Jesus a perfect Saviour

The sacrificial system of the Mosaic law taught two important lessons. First, forgiveness was available for sin. Second, to receive forgiveness, something had to die. The flaw in the Mosaic system was that the blood shed by an animal could never take away sins completely, so the rituals had to be repeated, time after time, year after year.

But this flaw was by design. The sacrificial system was a foreshadowing of the coming of the Messiah. It was never meant to be an end in itself. As a true man, Jesus Christ is the substitute for humanity that no animal could ever be. As the sinless and perfectly obedient God-man, he had no guilt of his own to make him worthy of execution on the cross. The sin of guilty people was imputed to him, and his righteousness is imputed to them in return. As a perfect priest, he is able to approach God his Father with the perfect sacrifice of his own blood, and through his intercession obtains forgiveness for his people, the church. "For by a single offering he has perfected for all time those who are being sanctified" (Heb. 10:14).

When we grasp the importance of the Incarnation, we can truly appreciate the full weight of the meaning of the words announced by angels to the shepherds on that first Christmas night: "Unto you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is Christ the Lord" (Luke 2:11).

The Vegan Monologues, at a dinner theatre near you

And now, this: California-style, weapons-grade moonbattery courtesy of one Kelly Atlas, under the auspices of an animal-rights group calling itself "Direct Action Everywhere".

This utter loon walks into a restaurant, where coincidentally the PA system is playing "My Girl," and delivers a monologue about her girl: "I have a little girl. She was very abused for her entire life. She was terrified. . . . And she was hurt and abused her entire life because of this establishment and because of establishments like it." And so forth.

Of course, as the weepy, blonde monologue progresses, it is eventually revealed that her "little girl" is actually a chicken named "Snow" whom Kelly apparently "rescued" (read: stole) from a commercial farm or some such place. Kelly's lachrymose jeremiad continues, bemoaning the fate of Snow's "sisters": "And right now their eggs and their milk and their bodies are on plates inside this restaurant, and that is so unfair to them!" she wails.

Behold the certifiable delirium that is the modern animal-rights movement:

Direct Action Everywhere writes, on their Web site, explaining why they engage in "direct action":

The passion of the movement for animal liberation is unmatched. Many of us have cried countless tears of pain, as we have heard, seen, and even felt the oppression and violence imparted on our non-human sisters and brothers.

Of course, they don't really believe this, and they say so: the hashtag in the YouTube video title is #DisruptSpeciesism. If a chicken truly is my brother or sister, then eating him might be racism or sexism, but it isn't speciesism. Direct Action Everywhere doesn't want to stop animals from eating other animals. If they really believed humans and animals were brethren, they'd try to stop animals from eating meat, or they wouldn't try to make humans stop eating meat, against their nature. Their aims contradict their presuppositions, and so their message is incoherent as well as risible.

As I wrote a few months ago, "there is a significant categorical and moral difference between human beings and animals. One is made in the image of God, and the rest are a gift of God for our use (Genesis 9:3)." Snow isn't made in the image of God, and it's going to take a lot more than a crocodile-tear-jerking homily from a flaky Californian to convince me I can't turn her into delicious chicken tenders.

Friday in the wild: October 3, 2014

I haven't done a Friday in the Wild for a few weeks, so while it might look like I'm playing catch-up, it is in fact a doozy of a week. Lots of interesting stuff to share. So, without further ado:

Come Reason posted this about the rise in relativism in Christian youth:

This kind of thinking is how tyranny is born. If one cannot tell another his actions are evil, then they will continue until those that would dare to oppose immorality are themselves labelled as immoral. . . . And now, the kids we send to college hold not the belief that they cannot stand their moral ground, but that they should not stand their moral ground, because to do so is itself an immoral act!

[Read The Epidemic of Relativism Among Christian Youth]

Woe unto anyone who declares woe unto anyone.

Friday in the wild: August 8, 2014

In this week's edition of Friday in the Wild, our focus is on the ongoing ebola outbreak in Africa&mdash: particularly, the response to Ann Coulter's column this week, titled "Ebola Doc's Condition Downgraded to 'Idiotic'," in which she writes, in part:

Whatever good Dr. Kent Brantly did in Liberia has now been overwhelmed by the more than $2 million already paid by the Christian charities Samaritan's Purse and SIM USA just to fly him and his nurse home in separate Gulfstream jets, specially equipped with medical tents, and to care for them at one of America's premier hospitals. . . .

If Dr. Brantly had practiced at Cedars-Sinai hospital in Los Angeles and turned one single Hollywood power-broker to Christ, he would have done more good for the entire world than anything he could accomplish in a century spent in Liberia. Ebola kills only the body; the virus of spiritual bankruptcy and moral decadence spread by so many Hollywood movies infects the world.

Coulter's argument is a utilitarian one: the right thing to do is the one that maximizes the good done to the greatest number of people. Dr. Brantly's time and effort (and Samaritan's Purse's dollars) are, supposedly, better spent on home soil where they will bring a better return on investment. But Christian missions are not founded on a utilitarian worldview, but on a Christian one: the glory of God and his Son, Jesus Christ, through obedience to his great commission: "Go therefore and make disciples of all nations" (Matthew 28:19)—not just movie moguls in the United States. Coulter's column is not only utilitarian and cynical, but it smacks of xenophobia as well.

Blurred lines, part 2: You and me, baby, we ain't nothing but mammals

(Two weeks ago, I posted an article titled "Blurred Lines," about the eroding of the male-female "binary" and the clash of biblical and secular worldviews. That article was originally posted at Faith Beyond Belief, and contained two parallel arguments. I removed the second argument for brevity and relevance. Had I known what last week would bring, I could have kept the whole article intact and just changed the news stories at the beginning.)

Last week, Texas teenager Kendall Jones was the target of an Internet lynching after photos of herself with African big-game animals, which she had shot, went viral. For her part, Ms. Jones claims that some of the animals were tranquilized for the purposes of research or veterinary treatment, and that the ones she killed either provided food for the locals or aided conservation. For my part, I believe her (on that last point, specifically—as far as I'm concerned, the others require no defense): coming from Northern Ontario where hunting and fishing are popular pastimes, in my experience the most devoted conservationists are hunters. Ducks Unlimited, for example, is dedicated to preserving waterfowl habitats. It was founded by, and primarily supported by, hunters: not merely because they want to preserve their hobby, but they also love nature and want to protect it. Conserving wetlands ensures not only a good supply of ducks to shoot, but has the side benefit of protecting other species that live there as well.

Nonetheless, hordes of easily angered Internet slacktivists descended upon Ms. Jones, demanding (successfully) that Facebook remove the pictures from her page—though a "Kill Kendall Jones" fan page was allowed to exist for a few days longer. Some folks have started online petitions to have her banned from hunting in South Africa or Tanzania, even though her kind of hunting is legal and generates revenue. The usual death threats were issued via Twitter, and one liberal douchebag is even offering $100,000 for nude pictures of her. Mike Dickinson's apparent rationale is that "hunting" nudie pics of Ms. Jones is the moral equivalent of her hunting animals. (The Web site of this alleged, self-proclaimed Congressional candidate is currently disabled. I wonder why?)

Friday in the Wild: June 27, 2014

It's been a few weeks since the last Friday in the Wild, so why don't we save some time and get right to the links?

Apropos to my previous post, Amy at Stand to Reason also chimed in on that idiotic Slate piece:

Remember when I said that we should expect more attempts to erase the differences between men and women, and that the conflict in our culture over sexuality is, at root, a disagreement over "whether human nature is something in particular or a sea of possibilities bound only by what we can imagine for ourselves"?

Well, Slate has kindly illustrated that for me. . . .

[Read Slate: Don't Let the Doctor Assign a Gender to Your Newborn]

Blurred lines

The cover story of the June 9, 2014 issue of Time was titled "The Transgender Tipping Point," arguing that transgenderism is the next social movement, after same-sex marriage, that will push for full social legitimacy. Certainly the media (in addition to Time) has been working overtime in recent months to normalize "transgendered" persons of every stripe.

A handful of articles have caught my attention in recent days reflecting this trend.

In Vancouver last week, the school board approved a policy change intended to protect students from being singled out and bullied on the basis of their sexuality or gender identity. In addition to the usual confusion about who gets to use what bathroom, this new policy mandates the made-up pronouns xe, xem, and xyr for those students whose self-identification doesn't fit into the usual categories of, presumably, he/him, she/her, or them.

Similarly, last fall, at Mills College, a woman's college in California, the all-woman student body began to abandon "binary" gender identity (male and female) in favour of choosing their own preferred personal gender pronouns: in addition to the conventional she, these include he or they, or even a slew of custom PGPs like ze, sie e, ou, or ve. (I imagine that professors, frustrated by the laborious task of keeping this word salad straight from one student to the next, may ultimately put the kibosh on this inhumane torture of the English language.)

However, the most serious offender is an opinion piece published yesterday on Slate, titled "Don't Let the Doctor Do This to Your Newborn." It begins,

Imagine you are in recovery from labor, lying in bed, holding your infant. In your arms you cradle a stunningly beautiful, perfect little being. Completely innocent and totally vulnerable, your baby is entirely dependent on you to make all the choices that will define their life for many years to come. . . .

Suddenly, the doctor comes in. He looks at you sternly, gloved hands reaching for your baby insistently. "It's time for your child's treatment," he explains from beneath a white breathing mask, shattering your calm. Clutching your baby protectively, you eye the doctor with suspicion.

You ask him what it's for.

"Oh, just standard practice. It will help him or her be recognized and get along more easily with others who've already received the same treatment. The chance of side effects is extremely small." This raises the hairs on the back of your neck, and your protective instinct kicks your alarm response up a notch.

After several more paragraphs of this melodrama, the author asks, "Would you consent to this treatment for your child? . . . Or would the stakes be too high: Russian roulette with your baby's life?" By now I, a typical reader, am wondering: What is this highly risky medical procedure? Is this an anti-vaccination article? Anti circumcision, perhaps?

Alas, no.

It's called infant gender assignment: When the doctor holds your child up to the harsh light of the delivery room, looks between its legs, and declares his opinion: It's a boy or a girl, based on nothing more than a cursory assessment of your offspring's genitals.

If you like playing spot-the-sophistry, you might have noticed that our trans-activist author commits a categorical blunder: identifying the sex of a newborn isn't a treatment, it's an observation (and one that even the most ardent of LGBTUVWXYZ-rights activists would have to concede is accurate in the overwhelming majority of instances). Fortunately, sanity prevails: even most Slate commenters thought this op-ed was asinine.

These kinds of stories—I could point to many similar ones—blur the distinction between man and woman or attempt to destroy it outright. This confusion repudiates biblical categories established at creation.

When God created humanity in the beginning, "male and female he created them" (Genesis 1:27). God created a woman for Adam because nothing else was a suitable mate (Gen. 2:20). Man and woman coming together in marriage to produce offspring was the design from the beginning. "[A] man shall . . . hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh" (Gen. 2:24). Male and female—not male and male nor female and female—are natural counterparts. Jesus Christ's teaching on divorce (Matthew 9:1-12) appeals to these same two passages (Gen. 1:27, 2:24) to reaffirm that God's original intent was a lifelong, exclusive bond between husband and wife. We are often informed that Jesus had nothing to say about homosexuality, but really he did—because his strong affirmation of heterosexual marital fidelity excludes the lawfulness of same-sex unions. He affirms the male/female "binary" as natural and right.

Of course, we Christians also affirm traditional marriage because it pictures the relationship between Christ and the church. "Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, so that he might present the church to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish" (Ephesians 5:25-26). Paul does not confuse his categories. Christ is represented by a husband, and the church by a wife. They are not interchangeable. (I wrote about same-sex marriage and the church in more depth last June.)

Nor did God blur the male-female categories by creating a wide spectrum of sexualities in between, like the 50-odd gender identifications recently offered by Facebook for user profiles. Social-science academics often draw a distinction between sex (determined by biology) and gender (a social construct). This theory was popularized in the 1950s by a sexologist named John Money. It was tested in the 1960s, after a baby boy named Bruce Reimer had his genitals mutilated in a botched surgery. Money recommended that Bruce be surgically reassigned as female and raised by his parents as a girl, saying that if they did so, he would accept his gender identity. So they did, and renamed Bruce "Brenda." Money declared the sex reassignment a success, and it became the standard procedure for similar cases.

However, Money had covered up the truth. Even though Brenda Reimer hadn't know she was born a boy, she never accepted being a girl. At 15, Brenda took the name David and became male again. Sadly, after a short life that included depression, bullying, and a failed marriage, David Reimer committed suicide in his 30s. The line between male and female just isn't as blurred as the gender-studies mavens want to believe. Nonetheless, the nature-vs.-nurture debate continues even though Money's gender theories were discredited.

Original sin is responsible for these blurred lines. Paul describes the universal human condition in Romans 1. Idolatry is one symptom of mankind's rebellion against the authority of God: they "exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things" (Rom. 1:23). A sculpted beast cannot adequately represent the living God. Mankind alone bears God's image. Trying to represent God with an animal erodes the distinction between the Creator and the created—not to mention man and animal.

Paul also writes, "their women exchanged natural relations for those that are contrary to nature; and the men likewise gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another, men committing shameless acts with men" (Rom. 1:26-27). Humanity has rebelled against God again by overthrowing natural sexual relations for unnatural. Men and women become interchangeable objects of desire.

A clash of worldviews is at work here. Our supposedly secular culture now idolizes unlawful sexuality, without shame. It blurs the lines that God established in the beginning, calling them antiquated and hateful. However, the Bible affirms that what God made was very good (Gen. 1:31). As Albert Mohler has said:

The reality is that Scripture reveals that binary pattern to be built into creation, and to have been established by the Creator. The categories of male and female, and more importantly of man and woman, are not merely social constructions that human beings have come to know. . . .

The Bible says that we are not who we think ourselves to be, but who our Creator made us to be. And that means that no matter how we say we know ourselves, or what we claim about ourselves, the key issue for eternity is what our Creator thinks of us, because he knows us better than we know ourselves, because he made us. . . . [T]he only way we can come to terms with that is by reading the Scripture and hearing what God says in his word about who we are. And once we know that, we're stuck in the same position as we are in every other reading of the Scripture. The question really isn't "who am I," but rather, "will I obey or disobey the Scripture?" Will I come to terms with who God says I really am?¹

When we declare the whole counsel of God against its secular critics and social engineers, we need also to reaffirm the good "binaries" that exist between man and woman.

(This article has been edited from its original form as published on Faith Beyond Belief.)

Footnote

¹ Albert Mohler, "The Briefing 02-28-14," AlbertMohler.com, MP3 audio file, <http://albertmohler.com/>, accessed 1 April 2014.

Friday in the wild: May 16, 2014

Another Friday means another great opportunity to share all sorts of goodness from the Web and blogosphere. Out there, they do FridayFollow; here, we do Friday in the Wild. This week, three articles caught my attention.

Yesterday, May 15, was the 30th anniversary of the death of my personal favourite Christian apologist, Francis A. Schaeffer. (As I write this, I have two of his books, The God Who Is There and The Church at the End of the 20th Century, on loan from the library.) I first read Schaeffer in my university years; he was the first step toward my trying to adopt a comprehensive Christian worldview. Over the years I've adopted a certain number of his frequent catchphrases, including "true truth" and "brute fact." Ray Ortlund at The Gospel Coalition expressed his gratitude for Schaeffer's ministry:

All my life I’d been exposed to conventional people using conventional methods, and I don’t mean that in a condescending way. I had the privilege of knowing men of true greatness, like my dad. But Schaeffer was just different. He located the gospel within a total Christian worldview. He talked about modern art and films and books. He spoke with prophetic insight about cultural trends. He worked out fresh ways to articulate old truths, even coining new expressions like "true truth." He had a beard and long hair and dressed like a European. He had Christian radicalism all over him, called for by those radical times. I found him non-ignorable. To this day, I dislike conventionality, partly because I saw in Francis Schaeffer a man who made an impact not by conforming and fitting in but by standing out as the man God made him to be, the man the world needed him to be.

[Read Gratitude for Francis Schaeffer]

Thank you for calling and sharing, and shall we take our next false prophet, please? (Harold Camping, 1921-2013)

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
- T. S. Eliot, "The Hollow Men"

Harold Camping, the discredited former radio preacher who doubled down on a false end-of-the-world prediction and lost, is dead.

[T]he California preacher who used his evangelical radio ministry and thousands of billboards to broadcast the end of the world and then gave up public prophecy when his date-specific doomsdays did not come to pass, has died at age 92.

Family Radio Network marketing manager Nina Romero said Harold Camping, a retired civil engineer who built a worldwide following for the nonprofit, Oakland-based ministry he founded in 1958, died at his home on Sunday. She said he had been hospitalized after falling.

[Full Story]

Most people's knowledge of Harold Camping and his nonsense probably doesn't go back much farther than 2010 or 2011, when his infamous prediction of the end of the world on May 21, 2011 became international news. As many date-setters are wont to do, when that prediction failed, he "discovered" an error in his calculations, and revised his prognostication for October 21 the same year. And yet, here we all still are.

I first became aware of Camping when I chanced to tune in Family Radio on my shortwave in 1992 or 1993. I listened to his "Open Forum" call-in show every now and then. Apart from hyper-Calvinist leanings and a tendency to prefer "spiritual" interpretations of the Bible to straighter literal ones, he was a voice of relative sanity on the madness that is Christian shortwave radio. However, he had recently published two books, Are You Ready? and 1994? in which he predicted the end of the world on or about September 6, 1994. This subject began to dominate his airtime. When the 1994 prediction also failed, declared an error in his calculations and revised it for one year later. (Two years later, I was still finding the odd copy of 1994? on Christian bookstore shelves!)

Camping's tendency toward allegorical theology and date-setting went back years earlier, though. In his 1970 book The Biblical Calendar of History, Camping asserted that the world was created in 11,013 BC, based on an unorthodox reading of the genealogy of Noah (which I discussed here). Camping subsequently claimed that exactly 13,000 years later, on May 21, 1988, the Church age came to an end. The Holy Spirit had departed all organized Christian churches, which were thereafter under God's wrath. Coincidentally—or perhaps not—this was about the same time that Camping was removed from teaching Sunday school at his Christian Reformed church because of his increasingly eccentric theology. He left that church altogether a few months later. Camping encouraged his listeners to leave their churches and form loose fellowships in which they listen to Family Radio instead (from which he also expelled all programming that supported the continuation of the church). In the early 2000s, between failed Rapture predictions, this was the teaching that Camping was most notorious for.

And then, some time in 2009, it came out that Camping was doing it again: he had announced that the end of the world would occur on May 21, 2011. This date is very significant because it comes exactly 23 years after May 21, 1988, as well as exactly 722,500 days after the Crucifixion on April 1, AD 33. 722,500 is the square of 5 × 10 × 17, which are (according to Camping) "enormously significant spiritual numbers." No, I don't get it either.

Predictably, as was the case in 1995, 1994, and 1988 (which, I have come to understand, was yet another possible date for the Rapture, if only Camping hadn't discovered it years after the fact), nothing happened. Camping had unambiguously left himself no way to weasel out of this prediction when it failed again, and so he became a laughingstock, both in the church and out. It didn't make matters much better when he tried to weasel out of it anyway, claiming that the May 21 event was "spiritual" and that the really-and-for-true end of the world was on October 21. Well, that wasn't true either. In the meantime, he also suffered a stroke that effectively ended his public ministry.

After October 21, 2011, Camping finally clued in that something was fundamentally wrong with his methods, and issued an apology before disappearing into a well-deserved obscurity. On the occasion of his death, however, Family Radio's note whitewashes the fact that he (and they) swindled his followers out of millions of dollars used to promote the apocalypse that never was. Many of these people sold possessions, quit their jobs, or went on the road for the sake of promoting Camping's message. I wonder where they ended up?

There's a reason that James said teachers needed to be careful about their teaching because they would incur a stricter judgment (Jas. 3:1). Harold Camping did not fight the good fight, and he abandoned the faith years ago for all manner of apostasy: for example, annihilationism, modalism, adoptionism, and hyper-Calvinism. His doctrine and date-setting led many Christians to follow him into the ditch, and drove Family Radio, a once-legitimate Christian ministry, into the ground. They still want to eulogize him. I think I'll take the advice of the Who, instead: let's forget him, better still.

Evil, therefore no God?

The next post in the Canadian Apologetics Coalition's "Contending for God" series is up.

Today, Colleen Hinkkala argues that God exists because objective morality does. This is the classic "argument from morality":

When we concede to [the] fact that true evil does exist, we are saying that evil is not just an idea, preference or type of event, but rather a real, objective phenomenon that is not based on emotion or choice. Something is evil (for example, pedophilia) whether Bob believes it to be so or not, and should therefore "ought not be." It is at this point that we give up our position when arguing against Gods existence in light of the obvious and present evil in the world, for you cannot have anything objective in a purely relative world.

What do I mean by relative world? If evolutionary theory is correct, morality is left up to each of us, and because we have markedly different thoughts and feelings about right and wrong, morality can change and become relative to the person, situation and context. The problem is, Bob and I do not agree on the rightness or wrongness of pedophilia. So who decides if it is right or wrong? Can it be both right and wrong at the same time? To a logical person, this makes no sense . . . of course something cannot be truly good and evil and the same time, but this is exactly what moral relativism (and consequently atheism) requires.

[Read Evil Exists, Therefore God Doesn't?]

Two more to go!

Friday in the wild (Contending for God remix): September 27, 2013

Howdy. This is a sort of "special edition" of Friday in the Wild—with a theme.

I recently became part of the blogging team of Canadian apologetics ministry Faith Beyond Belief. My contribution so far: a discussion of absolutist and incremental approaches to abortion legislation. New material is in the pipe, I promise! And some of it may be slightly reworked and reposted here if it is apropos.

FBB is part of the Canadian Apologetics Coalition of blogs, which is currently in the midst of a series titled "Contending for God." As David Haines puts it in his introduction to the series:

We will be looking at the question of whether or not God exists, and if God does exist, what are the implications for us humans?

Although I'm not taking part in the series personally, I can at least do my own small part to promote the series, by linking to and aggregating them. So, without further ado . . .

Same-sex marriage and the church

One of the fundamental themes in the apologetics of Francis A. Schaeffer is the way that radical new ideas influence society. In his earliest books, such as Escape from Reason, he argues that as a general rule, ideas begin in the academy (particularly in the humanities, such as philosophy), then work their way out into the arts and music, and spread into the general public. Finally, they come into the church.

This is the stage that has now been reached on the gay-rights front, particularly on the issue of same-sex marriage and benefits. Even 20 years ago, the idea of two men or two women actually marrying would have been practically unthinkable. Now, it is generally accepted by nearly everyone that same-sex marriage is a Good Thing, while opposing it is "homophobic." Last week's U.S. Supreme Court decisions concerning the Defense of Marriage Act and California's Proposition 8 essentially repudiated the traditional view of marriage as backwards and bigoted. By contrast, the time between the Emancipation Proclamation and the passing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (which prohibited discrimination based upon skin colour) was just over a century. And that is for a cause that virtually all rational people today accept as a great good! The rapidity with which same-sex rights have been accepted is almost preternatural. (In my opinion, this is primarily due to a full-court press by the primary agenda-setters in the public mind—the media and the entertainment industry, who speak with a nearly unanimous voice in favour of gay rights, something that would not necessarily have been true for previous generations.)

Now, advocacy for same-sex marriages is finding its way into the churches. I don't mean merely the liberal churches, such as the United Church of Canada or the Episcopal Church, where no leftist cause célèbre ever went uncelebrated. We would expect that kind of thing from institutions who abandoned the faith for social activism ages ago. I mean evangelical churches, where the authority of God's word is still supposedly held in high regard. The official position of my own church, for example, is that marriage is an exclusive covenant relationship between one man and one woman. It is enshrined in the statement of faith. Nonetheless, I know of a handful of people within the church who are no longer convinced that the bible teaches this. Maybe some of them never were truly convinced.

For anyone who claims to believe in the authority of Scripture, this is simply untenable.