We just baptized a number of gay men in our church recently. It’s just wonderful.

But each one of them is saying, “But now, when I get baptized, I die to the old me. I rise again to the new me that is Christ-shaped, that’s eschatologically-informed and transformed. Resurrection life which is a completely different type of creature. A lot of the desires I have had, a lot of the things which I’ve wanted to do, I – like Paul did in the season in which he wrote 1 Corinthians, and like Jesus did – I put on hold sexual desires. I die to a lot of the things I want, in order to follow Christ. And I rise to new life…”

We look and say, “What does Christ-shaped new creation look like?” We’ve got gay guys in our church (and women as well) who say, “Dying to my old life and being risen again to new life in Christ means dying to all the acts of the flesh, including some of the sexual things that – yes, I wanted to do them, just like lots of people want to have sex with lots of people, some may want to have sex with two or three people simultaneously, that doesn’t mean I’m okay to do that. It means I am just like anyone else (greed or desires to slander or swindle) regarding any number of other sins. We say those things die with me. We repent and get baptized.”

To not put that in front of someone is to say, “You can have the kingdom, but if it costs too much, we’ll just lower the asking price…

Of course, the medieval church had its share of dangerous and scandalous behavior. It had gross libertines and rank heretics. It had false professors and bold opportunists. It had brutal ascetics and imbalanced tyrants. But then, there was no more of that sort of rank heterodoxy than we have today in our Evangelical and Reformed circle. As a result, medievalism was forever a paradox. It was a romantic riddle. On the one hand it was marked by the greatest virtues of morality, charity, and selflessness; on the other hand it was marred by the flaming vices of perversity, betrayal, and avarice. It was often timid, monkish, and isolated; more often still, it was bold, ostentatious, and adventurous. It was mystical; it was worldly. It was tender-hearted; it was cruel. It was ascetic; it was sensual. It was miserly; it was pretentious. It gripped men with a morbid superstition; it set them free with an untamed inquisitiveness. It exulted in pomp, circumstance, and ceremony; it cowered in poverty, tyranny, and injustice. It united men with faith, hope, and love; it divided them with war, pestilence, and prejudice. It was so unstable it could hardly have been expected to last a week; it was so stable that it actually lasted a millennium.

Darwinism is harsh and crude in its practical consequences, in a degree that sets it apart from all other respectable scientific hypotheses; not coincidentally, it had its origins in polemics against the poor, and against the irksome burden of extending charity to them—a burden laid on the back of Europe by Christianity. The Judeo-Christian ethic of charity derives from the assertion that human beings are made in the image of God, that is, that reverence is owed to human beings simply as such, and also that their misery or neglect or destruction is not, for God, a matter of indifference, or of merely compassionate interest, but is something in the nature of sacrilege. Granting that the standards of conduct implied by this assertion have rarely been acknowledged, let alone met, a standard is not diminished or discredited by the fact that it is seldom or never realized, and, especially, a religious imperative is not less powerful in its claims on any individual even if the whole world excepting him or her is of one mind in ignoring it and always has been. To be free of God the Creator is to be free of the religious ethic implied in the Genesis narrative of Creation. Charity was the shadow of a gesture toward acknowledging the obligations of human beings to one another, thus conceived. It was a burden under which people never stopped chafing—witness this unfathomably rich country now contriving new means daily to impoverish the poor among us.

Marilynne Robinson, Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, in The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought.

YES YES YES. The entire essay is available at the first link above. Click here for some interviews with Robinson.

The evidence for mankind creating our own gods through thousands of years is simply overwhelming, and there’s precisely zero evidence that our divine maker—should there turn out to be one, a concept I’m quite willing to consider, actually—is anything like us at all.

danielholter

Oh, I quite agree that man has sought to create his own gods for all of human history. But this doesn’t mean there is not a real one. If anything, your contention strengthens my point rather than weakens it. As C.S. Lewis famously argued, if I find a desire in myself that nothing in this material realm can satisfy, it must be because something immaterial exists that can fulfill it.

(Source: sds)

An argument is like a tool; you only put it down when the job is done. When atheists stop suspending their moral indignation from their invisible sky hook, then I will no longer amuse myself by pointing out their levitation trick.

The issues [of atheism] are important, but no sense getting really worked up over it. If we were all sitting in a used car lot, and one of the F-250 trucks began questioning the existence of Henry Ford, we would all think it was a serious situation, but that is not the same thing as thinking it a serious question.

Douglas Wilson in God Is: How Christianity Explains Everything

This is a very short work, making short work of Hitchens’ well-written but ultimately empty arguments. Wilson presents little new content, but his witty take down of Hitchens (et al) is great fun to read.

Transformation is not optional but mandatory for Christians. This was Lewis’s consistent position. After all, he had undergone his own transformation, discovering “depth under depth of self-love and self admiration” (as he told Arthur right at the beginning of his Christian pilgrimage) and submitting to the lifelong discipline of being purged of such sin. We must die in order to live, lose our lives in order to find them, give up what we think of as ourselves in order to gain our true selves. And this is the most difficult of tasks: as Eustace discovers, our best efforts at self-understanding and self-correction are but feeble; the revelation of who we really are must come from without, and when it does come it devastates us. Then the sin and folly of even our noblest labors and wisest words appear before us with a heartbreaking clarity. For Lewis, Christian unity begins with the recognition that we have all, like Eustace, through our pride and selfishness, made ourselves into dragons. We must then understand that we cannot undragon ourselves—we lack the strength—and after that we must accept that God is ready and willing to undragon us, if we will but allow Him to do so. For Lewis, only those who share this picture of the human predicament and its cure can join together in true unity—can really, and not just nominally, become members of one another in a single Body.

The topic of a Christian understanding of homosexuality and a Christian and pastoral response to homosexuality is related in some ways to a Christian view of singleness. There is a need particularly among Protestant Christians to revisit our view of singleness and how we communicate what it is we value in the local church. If most of our programming is geared toward marriages and families in ways that communicate a devaluing of the single state, we will (perhaps unintentionally) convey to the person who contends with same-sex attractions that they must attain heterosexuality in order to find a spiritual home in the Body of Christ.

So here is the challenge to mainline churches: go back and read the reports you did on human sexuality and the legitimacy of homosexuality, and see if there is anything there which you might be able to use to argue against incest between consenting adults. If there is nothing, then ask yourselves whether you should object to the members of your church practising the same. Indeed, switch `gay’ or `homosexual’ and their cognates for `incest’ and its variations. Does the logic now fail? Does the argument collapse? Are you comfortable with that? If not, why not? Bigotry? Insecurity? Lack of love towards those whom God made different?

As for the rest of us, be prepared to have even your love for your children or your parents sexualised. Remember Lisa Miller’s piece in Newsweek magazine (commented on in Ref21 here), with its undercurrent of accusations of sexual insecurity and bigotry against those who object to gay marriage and its insinuations about the friendship between David and Jonathan? The article works perfectly well, logically and hermeneutically, if you switch `homosexuality’ for `incest’ and replace the paragraph on David with one about Lot and his daughters. Prepare for a world where the language of love of a father for a daughter or son carries inherently sexual connotations, and where denial of the same is a sign of your insecurity.

Here is the basic problem. Why should we resist the encroachments of Sharia law based on our Western values? What is the opposite of Western values? That would be Eastern values, and can anybody give me a reason why we should prefer one position over another on the basis of geography?

Western values only have value if they are a coded way of referring to something else. And that something else cannot be another horizontal fact, like representative government, or womens’ rights, or anything like that. That just pushes the question back a step. Why should we prefer those? And if we say that Western values simply means “our values,” then why should those outrank “their values”? In the ebb and flow of Darwinian struggle, ours sometimes loses to theirs.

“Western values” as an appeal works only if it is a coded references to Christendom, and that only works if Christ is still there. Anything else is arbitrary, jingoistic, and stupid. Anything else is a couple of dogs fighting over a piece of meat.