Busy, Busy, Busy

Sorry for the light blogging around here lately.  I have been sick (bronchitis in June) and away (to visit my brand new grandson in Alberta) and now I'm going canoeing for the next week.  When I haven't been sick or preoccupied with cute grandchildren, I've been madly trying to finish this book, The Triune God and the Acids of Modernity, before the end of sabbatical (Sept.). 

I've been knee deep in fourth century Trinitarian debates and re-reading Lewis Ayres has confirmed how utterly without foundation the popular myth is that there is a fundamental difference between the Eastern (Cappadocian) Fathers and the West (Augustine) in that the East starts from the Three and the West starts from the One.  Anyone who reads Gregory of Nyssa's, To Abladius: On Not Three Gods, could never swallow this interpretive scheme.   This narrative is used to justify modern social Trinitarianism even though the Cappadocians explicitly and firmly reject it as heresy.  It is also used as the basis for accusing Augustine of modalism even though he is just rejecting tritheism and saying exactly what the Cappadocians say: that the three persons simply are the one God and this is the mystery of the Divine Being.  So much mischief is wrought by this innocent and technical-sounding narrative.  People today think their tritheism is orthodox and grounded in the Greek Fathers when it is really closer to the theology of Eunomius the Heteroousian.  The record has been set straight by Ayres, Michel R. Barnes, R. Williams and others, but the truth must be pounded in repeatedly if it is to have the needed effect. 

Helping out in this regard is Keith E. Johnson's Rethinking the Trinity and Religious Pluralism: An Augustinian Assessement (IVP, 2011), which is a wonderful example of Ressourcement combined with polemic.  It is a sign of hope that not all Evangelicalism is being led astray by bad Trinitarian theology.  It has a great appendix refuting Gunton's attacks on Augustine and a commendation by Ayres (as does Green's book).  Wonderful to see.  This is really what Catholics and Evangelicals Together is all about - defending the orthodox doctrine of the Trinity.

Now I'm focused on Augustine and his doctrine of the Trinity.  I've just read Brad Green's book on Colin Gunton's over-the-top attacks on Augustine; Green is very kind to Gunton and gently corrects him.  Such patience! 

I'm just now reading Stuart Caldecott's Beauty for Truth's Sake: On the Re-enchantment of Education.  The first 50 pages are excellent.  Apparently I've discovered another kindred spirit.  I need to read his The Power of the Ring: The Spiritual Vision Behind the Lord of the Rings.

So many good books; so little time.  But I'm off to experience God in the beauty of nature.  Have a nice summer!

What Bad Teachers Can't Be Fired: Union Power

Margaret Wente has a column in today's Globe and Mail, which identifies the problem with the Canadian public education system as the teacher's unions, as I argued in a post the other day.  She offers no solutions: apparently the obvious cannot be said out loud in the mainstream media yet.  But the fact remains that no significant improvement to the public school system will be possible until the teacher's unions are broken. 

She writes:

Bad teachers are well defended by their unions, which makes it so hard to get rid of them that powerless school administrators generally give up. Instead, they try to get the bad eggs to move on – a process widely known as “passing the trash.” The regulators are captives of the unions, too. The OCT is dominated by former union executives who caucus together before meetings to hammer out the party line. In theory, their job is to serve the public. In reality, they serve their own.

The Star’s embarrassing revelations prompted the OCT to hire a distinguished retired judge, Patrick LeSage, to tell it how to reform itself. His sensible suggestions, released last week, are a laundry list of the obvious: Disclose the names of all teachers found guilty of misconduct, hold formal public hearings for the most serious cases and revoke the licences of teachers found guilty of sexual misconduct. He also recommended that more non-teachers should sit on the panels that hear misconduct cases.

But these measures don’t go far enough. So long as the unions are allowed to dominate the regulator, “no procedural overhaul, no matter how ingenious or rigorous, is likely to lead to increased effectiveness or public confidence,” writes Doretta Wilson of the Society for Quality Education.

 Why she cannot draw the obvious conclusion is that left-wing ideology is so powerful in this country that we cannot even talk about the necessary steps we need to take to promote educational reform.  This is a sad commentary on late modern Canada.

Cross-posted at The Bayview Review

The Orwellian "Human Rights Code" is Finally Being Amended - Though a Free People Would Abolish it Altogether

File this one under "Let's be thankful for small mercies."  The odious section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Code is finally being repealed.  It is a good day for liberty and liberalism in Canada.  The Socialists, of course, are in mourning.  Jonathan Kay of The National Post writes:

Five years ago, during testimony in the case of Warman v. Lemire, Canadian Human Rights Commission (CHRC) investigator Dean Steacy was asked “What value do you give freedom of speech when you investigate?” His response: “Freedom of speech is an American concept, so I don’t give it any value.”

Those words produced outrage. But there was a grain of truth to what Mr. Steacy said: For decades, Canadians had meekly submitted to a system of administrative law that potentially made de facto criminals out of anyone with politically incorrect views about women, gays, or racial and religious minority groups. All that was required was a complainant (often someone with professional ties to the CHRC itself) willing to sign his name to a piece of paper, claim he was offended, and then collect his cash winnings at the end of the process. The system was bogus and corrupt. But very few Canadians wanted to be seen as posturing against policies that were branded under the aegis of “human rights.”

That was then. Now, Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act, the enabling legislation that permits federal human-rights complaints regarding “the communication of hate messages by telephone or on the Internet,” is doomed. On Wednesday, the federal Conservatives voted to repeal it on a largely party-line vote — by a margin of 153 to 136 — through a private member’s bill introduced by Alberta Conservative MP Brian Storseth. Following royal assent, and a one-year phase-in period, Section 13 will be history.

Freedom of speech is an "American concept"?  I have news for Mr. Steacy: freedom of speech is a human right guaranteed by God, not the American constitution.  Mr. Steacy can take it up with God if he wishes, although it is likely he is as anti-God as he is anti-American.  People like him prefer to worship the State.

Mark Steyn adds his two cents worth and in the process has a go at a Socialist is disappointed at outbreak of freedom and who wants the government to be have the power to "educate" us:

 This twit from Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition is a good example of what we’ve been up against:

New Democrat public safety critic Randall Garrison said Wednesday that, due to the large number of hate crimes, the human rights commission needs to have the power to combat the issue online and force individuals and groups to remove websites containing hateful speech.
Removing the sections from the human rights code will effectively strip the commission of its power to educate Canadians and shut down inappropriate websites, he said.
“We do have a serious problem,” Garrison said. “If you take away the power to take (websites) down, it’s not clear they have any mandate to even to talk to people about it and educate them about it.”

Clear off, you twerp. I don’t want the state to have a “mandate” to “educate” the citizenry about their thought-crimes. Even if I did not object on principle, one thing I’ve learned during this five-year campaign is that the statist hacks Canada’s official opposition is so eager to empower are, almost to a man, woman and pre-op transsexual, either too stupid or bullying to be entrusted with the task. Mr Garrison himself would appear to be a fine example of the former, at least.

If it’s a choice between an unlovely citizenry with all its flaws or an overbearing state policing their opinions, I know which is the lesser evil. What a shame a “progressive” “liberal” “socialist” like Randall Garrison has such a low opinion of his fellow citizens.

The State is not the guarantor of our freedoms; it is the chief danger to the theft of our freedoms.  Instead of "freedom from religion," which secularists are always pushing, we need "freedom from soft totalitarianism in the country.

It is Time for Educational Reform: Don't Privatize It - Parentize It

Bill 13 passed the Ontario Legislature this week.  The bill requires all schools, even Catholic ones, to set up "Gay-Straight Alliance" clubs to propagandize for the homosexual acts as natural and good purportedly so that children and teens who experience any signs of gender confusion will be encouraged to be proud of their "sexual identity."  Of course, the real purpose is to silence opposition to the agenda of the pansexualist revolution that seeks to undermine traditional marriage and family as structures of oppression.

Last year the Ontario government implemented JK-12 sex education programs designed to teach that sex is good as long as you use contraception at various points in the curriculum so that parents cannot remove children from specific sex education classes.  The purpose here is to break down natural and normal shame and embarrassment about sex so that sex can become just another bodily function like taking a drink of water.  For 3000 years (or more) civilization as surrounded sex with taboos and mystery because it is so important to society and to the individual but all this "superstition" is now to be swept away.  The point is to talk about it endlessly so as to make it seem coarse, physical and trivial.

The government is so infiltrated by the new neo-pagan religion of secularism that is is no longer even making a pretense of recognizing the natural right of parents to raise their own children as they see fit within their own culture and religion.  This same government covers up its cultural imperialism and denial of religious liberty with the facade of "multiculturalism," which in modern-speak is just another word for moral relativism.  Make no mistake, this is not liberal democracy.  It is the totalitarianism of the progressive state with its myth of progress by the rule of experts.

Many Canadians, even Christians, have been brainwashed into accepting the nationalization of education by the government as normal.  But it is not; it is tyranny.

But there is hope and it comes from the Republican candidate for president, who is running on education reform.  See Mitt Romney's "Plan for Restoring the Promise of American Education."  It is 34 pages of common sense and it exudes the air of liberal democracy, toleration and reason.  It is not the theocratic imposition of Christianity on society as a whole; irrational Canadian prejudices against Republicans notwithstanding.  Far from it.  It reverses the top-down, bureaucratic, State controlled, union-directed nature of contemporary American education.  It is anti-totalitarian and parent-centered.  The goal is not to "privatize" education, but to "parentize" it. 

Peter Ferrara has an excellent three page summary of the plan here in American Spectator entitled "Romney's Education Choice."  He summarizes the problem as Romney sees it:

Romney's 34-page white paper explaining the reform proposals, "A Chance for Every Child," begins by explaining what is at stake: "Only 2 percent of those who graduate from high school, get a full time job, and wait until age 21 and get married before having children end up in poverty. By comparison, that figure is 76 percent for those who fail to do all three."

And it explained the problem, saying:

Across the nation, our school system is a world leader in spending yet lags on virtually every measure of results…. On the latest international PISA test, American high school students ranked 14th out of 34 developed countries in reading, 17th in science, and 25th in math. China's Shanghai province led the world in all three subjects, outperforming the United States by multiple grade levels in each."

Performance of our current public school system is so bad, it's a civil rights problem:

Our K-12 system also poses one of the foremost civil rights challenges of our time: the achievement gap facing many minority groups. The average African American or Hispanic student performs at the same level in 12th grade that the average white student achieves in 8^th grade. More than one in three African American and Hispanic students fails to graduate from high school within four years of entering…. The tragic result is that instead of providing an escape from the cycle of poverty, our educational system is reinforcing it.

Schools are failing.  That is not news.  So what is the solution?  The Teacher's unions always tell you the same old tired story: higher taxes and more spending on education is needed.  But this has been tried, both in the US and Canada for 50 years with worsening results.  Ferrara writes:

The root of the problem is not lack of resources: "The cause is not a lack of public investment: as a nation we spend over $11,000 annually on each student enrolled in K-12 education, more than almost any other country." Romney's White Paper adds:

We spend two and a half times as much per pupil today, in real terms, as in 1970, but high school achievement and graduation rates have stagnated. Higher spending rarely correlates with better results. Even the liberal Center for American Progress acknowledged in a recent study that "the literature strongly calls into question the notion that simply investing more money in schools will result in better outcomes," and reported from its own research that most states showed "no clear relationship between spending and achievement."

Romney adds further: "Despite spending more than twice as much per student as other developed countries, our degree attainment lags behind.

No, the real problem is not too little spending on education; the real problem is teacher's unions.  The system is set up for the benefit of the adults, not for the benefit of the kids.

Romney commendably did not shrink from identifying the real root of the problem -- teachers unions. The campaign White Paper says:

Unfortunately, rather than embracing reform and innovation, America remains gridlocked in an antiquated system controlled to a disturbing degree by the unions representing teachers. The teachers unions spend millions of dollars to influence the debate in favor of the entrenched interests of adults, not the students our system should serve. The efforts of teachers will be central to any successful reform, but their unions have a very different agenda: opposing innovation that might disrupt the status quo while insulating even the least effective teachers from accountability….[T]eachers unions are consistently on the front lines fighting against initiatives to attract and retain the best teachers, measure performance, provide accountability, or offer choices to parents.

Public sector employees should never have been unionized and they should not have collective bargaining privileges.  Those are fine for the private sector where there is a built-in incentive to be reasonable; if the unions demand too much the company goes bankrupt and they lose their jobs.  There workers need protection against exploitation and unions create a balance of competing interests.

But public sector unions collect large amounts of money from the rank and file (often involuntarily) and then give it to political candidates who promise to give the unions higher and higher wages and benefits.  This is a scam.  Since it is the public purse, everyone thinks there is no end to the money tree. 

So working class parents pay higher taxes so that teachers can retire early with fat pensions AND at the same time are haughtily told that they have no say in how their children are educated even to the point where the school system is teaching against their religious faith.  Unions and government bureaucracy insulate school administrators from the wishes of parents and thus doubly oppress ordinary people by exploiting them financially and denying them their human rights as parents.

How would Romney's plan work?

The federal government spends more than $25 billion a year, two-thirds of its funding for K-12 education, through Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) focused on students from low income families and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). Romney proposes to change the law to provide this funding to the schools that the low income and special needs children and their families choose, tying the dollars to each child rather than to each school. They can choose any public or charter school anywhere in the state, as they prefer, or any private school in the state if permitted by state law. States would have to adopt these choice policies to receive the federal funds.
States would also have to remove all caps on charter schools, and provide funding to charter schools under the same formula that applies to all other publicly supported schools, including access to capital funds. This ensures that low income and special needs children will have a full scope of choices available to them.

The government would provide equal funding for every child; parents would decide where this funding would be spent.  Schools would need to compete or go under.  The incentives would shift away from the priorities of adults to the priorities of educating children effectively. 

It is shocking to realize that big unions and left-wing interest groups are determined to everything in their power to prevent this from happening.  The prefer to spout noble-sounding rhetoric while exploiting poor children and parents.  They have a deep incentive to protect the status quo; but they simply must be defeated for the sake of the common good.

What would be some of the benefits of such a system? Ferrara writes:

In this new environment, the combined choices of parents, students and families would automatically work school reform. Funding would automatically and immediately flow to the schools that best satisfied parents and students with the best teaching methods, materials, and subject matter. Schools that failed to change and serve would automatically lose funding. If they persisted in failing, they would ultimately lose their students to other, better performing schools, and have to close.

This system would also promote decentralized experimentation and innovation, allowing more scope and opportunity for the demonstration of the virtue of new ideas and innovations. Experienced teachers with better ideas for instruction could more easily start their own schools to demonstrate the superiority and appeal of their innovations. The system would also allow for decentralized flexibility, with different schools striving to maximize the cultivation and flourishing of different talents and abilities, whether in math, science, music, the arts, or other disciplines. Competing schools would be tailored to the needs and skills of children, not one size fits all from a government monopoly that leaves many behind because the material is too easy or too hard.

Every child is different. Some kids have learning disabilities. Some boys need strict discipline and should not be in coed schools. Some kids have a special talent for music, talent, entrepreneurship, sports, vocational skills. Some families want religious education, others don't. Some need individualized attention. Some have severe behavior problems that can be overcome with the right stylized program. With school choice as Romney has proposed, parents and students could then each pick the school that best served their particular needs and preferences.

It is breathtaking to imagine the wonderful benefits such a system would provide.  It would strengthen families, empower parents, provide opportunities to children stuck in failing schools and it would permit appropriate diversity in the educational system.  The one-size-fits-all model of socialized education is a relic of the industrial era and needs to be abandoned.  For heaven's sake: the Berlin Wall fell 23 years ago!  It is time to let our children go! 

I pray that Mitt Romney is elected in November and that he is successful in implementing this vision.  It this happens, I predict it will be wildly successful and popular.  And that will give us, who desire educational reform here in Ontario a working model to point to as the better way.  The union dinosaurs will undoubtedly fight real progress because their perks are at stake, so it will require perseverance and determination to bring about real, democratic reform.  But the future of our country and the liberty of our people is at stake.

(See also Keith Fournier's take on the Romney plan.)

Cross-posted at The Bayview Review.

Christianity Under Attack from the Neo-Pagan Religion of Secularism

Solzhenitsyn predicted it.  In his famous 1978 Commencement Address at Harvard, A World Split Apart, he chose not to pander but to tell the truth that a secularized, left-leaning intellectual elite did not wish to hear.  He assessed the spiritual and moral health of the West and found it wanting. 

He told us that, while the Western democracies opposed the political and economic systems of tyranny that held sway in the USSR, the conditions that undermined the moral foundations of the Communist world and made it possible for governments to enslave their populations were being recklessly replicated in the West: materialism, legalism, a false view of freedom as will-to-power, and, most important of all, atheism.  For Solzhenitsyn, the tragedy of Soviet totalitarianism is not caused by misguided men choosing to implement a flawed economic or political model, as if a few tweaks could rectify the situation.  No, the source of tyranny lies deeper and on this deeper level the West is sliding toward the materialistic humanism that always trends left. 

This analysis explains why the Christian Church in Europe and North America is under attack today.  The Church, along with the Family, are obstacles to the total rule of the "progressive state."  The Church impedes the full triumph of the neo-Pagan religion of Secularism and the enshrinement of the All-Powerful Leviathan as the source of law, value and power. 

In the United States, the Obama administration is trying to force Catholic (and Evangelical) colleges, hospitals and social service agencies to dispense contraceptives, including abortion poisons, to its employees.  Is the reason a desperate lack of access to contraception in the United States?  No, hardly, it is rather an attempt to break the will of the Church hierarchy and to send the message that Caesar decides doctrinal issues, not the Bishops.  No one should doubt that if they get away with it, sometime in the near future they will be forced to pay for abortions.  They may stop at forcing bishops into abortion clinics to personally assist in late-term abortions, but in principle there is no limit on their power to do so, from their point of view.   Forty-three Catholic organizations are suing the federal government and stand a good chance of winning. 


In Ontario, Catholic schools are being forced to allow student clubs celebrating the glories of sodomizing one another in plain contravention of Church teaching.  Why?  Because the forces of secularism wish to provoke the Catholic bishops to either capitulate to the principle that the State now decides what doctrine may be taught in what context or else provoke the Church to fight back, which will provide a pretext for defunding Catholic schools and bringing all education under Caesar's control.  It is thus a win-win for secularism.

In New Brunswick, Crandall University is under attack for holding to 3000 years of Judeo-Christian moral teaching on sexuality by making it a condition of employment that faculty not engage in adultery, fornication and, oh yes, homosexual acts.  As I predicted years ago, the attack is coming from the students, who, shaped by 12 years of pro-sexual revolution, secular humanist education, expect the university to conform slavishly to its secular environment because, well, dissenting from the majority is just so inconsistent with critical thinking . . . or something like that.

In Great Britain, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Lord Carey, is warning that Christians are being "vilified" and "driven underground" by secularist forces intent on removing the right of Christians to express their long-standing, orthodox beliefs in public.   A specific list of cases can be found here, which is far from exhaustive.  As one example, a counselor was fired from her job for failing to give two homosexuals "sex advice."  Who knew that homosexuals were actually dying for sex advice from up-tight, traditionalist Victorian prudes?  You don't suppose it might have been political, do you?

If Christianity is under assault all over the Anglosphere, you can be sure that is not because people want more religious freedom.  They want the same amount of religious freedom but with Christians on the receiving end of persecution, which is to say that they want the neo-Pagan religion of Secularism to be the State religion instead of Christianity.  The shift that occurred in the fourth century under Constantine and later Theodosius is being reversed.  The pagan morality of ancient Greco-Roman civilization is making a comeback as humane, just, merciful Christian laws are reversed one by one.  Christian Pregnancy Help Centers are the contemporary equivalent of first century Christians going out to the garbage dump of Rome to rescue unwanted infants abandoned to death by pagan parents.


This suggests that liberal toleration does not work when leftist, secular, materialistic, atheistic activists are concerned.  They don't want toleration; they want to stamp out Christianity.  But Solzhenitsyn told us this was the case.  To reject God is not the same as being neutral toward God; those who reject God crave social approval to replace the Divine approval they have forfeited.  They need their false god - the State - to smile on their lifestyle choices and the emphasis is on the word "need."   This makes secularism dangerously intolerant - like a number of other threats the free peoples of the world have had to face including Islam, Communism and Fascism. 

We managed to see off Fascism in 1945 and Communism in 1989, but Islam is a perpetual external threat as it has been for 1400 years.  It is not difficult, however, to see a spiritually healthy West continuing to stand up to Islamic terror.  But the internal threat from Secularism is more serious than all the other ones combined.  This is how vibrant civilizations die: by a thousand self-inflicted wounds from within, not by external conquest.  Solzhenitsyn was prophetic about our plight; our fate, however, is still undecided.  May God, if it be His will, grant a revival of Christian faith in the West that puts atheism and secularism in the shade.   If not, God will still be God regardless of what happens to the West.

Cross-posted at The Bayview Review

The End of Evangelicalism or the Failure of Anabaptism to Take Over Evangelicalism? Part II

Is isolationism and withdrawal better?  Do the Amish have it right?

I ask because Fitch puts forward a neo-anabaptist alternative to conservative politics as the better way for Evangelicals in chapter 6.

Sometimes Catholics say that Evangelicals have no ecclesiology and by that they mean that Evangelicals do not believe that God's grace is mediated to the world via the institutional church centered in a sacramental priesthood and ruled by a hierarchy.  Fitch's neo-anabaptism amounts to a protestant version of the Catholic concept of the Church as the extension of Christ's incarnation.  He writes:

"The church, then, becomes an extension of the Trinity into the world as a participant in this sending, the missio Dei.  By articulating the evangelical belief in Scripture in the terms set forth above - our one true story of God for the whole world, infallible in and through Jesus Christ our Lord - we in essence have the basis for becoming the church Bosch speaks about.  . . . The politic of the church  is shaped by Scripture as the very real incarnational presence of Christ extended by the Spirit into the world - a politic of fulness in the world. (p. 141)

In this chapter (chapter 6) Fitch argues for replacing an inerrant Bible with a divine Church.  It is not a hierarchical church that he envisions and it has the priesthood of all believers instead of a sacramental priesthood.  But it is a view of the Church as the mode of Christ's presence in the world.  (Maybe his language is just loose here - maybe he does not really mean that the Church is a continuation of the incarnation.  That is the impression I got from one quick read and it could be wrong.  I'll argue against the idea anyway though because the idea is wrong no matter who proposes it in whatever context.)


Evangelicalism must resist this theological proposal because the role of the Church is not to be an extension of the incarnation or the presence of God in mission in the world.  The role of the Church is to be a witness to the coming kingdom by preaching salvation through the King - Jesus Christ.  The Church points away from itself to something greater and better.  The mission of the Church is to bear the message of the Gospel to a world in need of the good news of salvation.  If we were to accept (what I think I understand to be) Fitch's proposal we would be abandoning the valid insights of the Reformers of the 16th century. This presumably would not bother Fitch as a neo-anabaptist, but it ought bother Evangelicals who wish to keep faith with their heritage of Biblical doctrine.

Next, Fitch recommends N. T. Wright's challenge to the Reformation doctrine of justification as the way to avoid cheap grace.  He writes:

"Wright's reformulation in essence makes justification impossible for the believer apart from his/her wider participation in the work of God in Christ by the Spirit to set the world right.  I cannot possess this salvation as my own.  I am justified only as I am a participant 'in Christ,' in the righteousness God is working in the world.  There can be no distancing of myself from Christ in accepting God's pardon from sin made possible in Christ. . . . We enter into salvation by entering into the entire work of God in Christ by the Spirit for the mission of God in the world." (p. 144)

I find it difficult to believe that anyone could believe that Evangelical theology has never heard of the clear teaching in the book of James.  We know that justification by faith is true, but we also know that true saving faith results in good works being done by the person who is truly regenerated by the Spirit of God.  So what is Fitch driving at here with his call to move away from the Reformation doctrine of forensic justification?

It seems that he is again moving in a Catholic direction and embracing synergism instead of monergism thus turning salvation into a joint effort in which God and man cooperate.  Maybe he does not mean this.  But why advocate a New Perspective view on justification instead of using the many resources within Evangelical theology that can be deployed to fight anti-nomianism?  It is not like this is a new problem.  Monergism is fully capable of resisting anti-nomianism and has done so for five centuries.  This is why Evangelicalism needs the Gospel Coalition and more good, sound, biblical teaching.  But it is not like we had no reply to anti-nomianism until the New Perspective came along.


In the third section of chapter six, Fitch makes his Catholic theological direction clearer.  Here he makes use of the Catholic theologians De Lubac and Cavanaugh to argue for a doctrine of the visible Church as the body of Christ.  He writes:

"A politic is thus born.  Christ's reign becomes visible as we embody the infinite gifting of forgiveness, faithfulness, and love.  Yet this way of being together births the Kingdom not only among 'us.'  It enables us to resist alternatives politics of violence and isolation, to subvert them, and indeed to draw the world into the restoration of all things, i.e. the Kingdom of God." (p. 157)

Here we see an over-realized eschatology in which the Kingdom is here in the corporate life of the church and is visible for all to see.  It is Roman Catholic ecclesiology radicalized.  I remember David Burrell saying once that if he was not going to continue to be a Catholic he would become a Mennonite, which makes a lot of sense.  In place of the sacramental priesthood mediating God's grace to humankind we have the "community of character" (Hauerwas), the incipient kingdom of God made visible in the quality of moral relationships between members of the church.

What direction is Fitch pushing Evangelicalism? It is obvious to me, having read this book, why he has such a strong animus toward Reformed theology.  It embodies everything he finds distasteful: justification by faith alone, expository preaching, mission as evangelism, and personal repentance and faith as the lynch pin of salvation.  He has clearly detached himself emotionally from Evangelicalism as a tradition and from the theology that undergirds it in both its Reformed and Arminian branches. 

He wants a liberal form of Roman Catholicism: the church as divine presence in the world, salvation as synergism, and mission as moral action in and by the faith community. 

Fitch never considers the possibility that Evangelicals might have a political theology in which the mission of the church is evangelizing the lost and nurturing its members, while individual church members might be responsible to engage in politics in a fallen world as part of their own Christian discipleship rather than as part of the church's mission per se.  Christians are pilgrims in this world; our true home is heaven.  But while we are here we should be good neighbors and good citizens, recognize signs of common grace when we see them and co-operate with all those of good will in making the world a little less violent, a little less unjust and a little less disrespectful of human life, family and the weak among us.  (It might even mean voting for a Mormon as president!)


Such a politics has no grandiose goals of turning a fallen world into the kingdom of God; that is the work of Jesus and he has promised to complete it when he returns.  Such a politics has no grandiose visions of the mission of the Church; she exists to preach the Gospel, bear a witness to Jesus, enfold the lost, comfort the dying and build up the body of Christ.  The Church is not here to make America into the kingdom of God.  On this point, Fitch is right to criticize Evangelical rhetoric because the goal is not a Christian nation in the sense of a nation that is transformed into a church.  But, you know, I have actually met one or two Evangelicals who understand this and who would insist that the rhetoric of civil religion not be over-interpreted.  A Christian nation can be understood as a nation that (1) does not persecute the church, (2) upholds natural law as the basis of positive law and (3) protects the religious freedom of all religions.


Christian Smith, the Notre Dame sociologist who has studied the Religious Right in depth, came to the conclusion that the real goals of the Religious Right was to get America back to the situation of the 1950s (with the exception of the civil rights gains made since).  Now that may not be a very ambitious goal because the 1950s were far from perfect.  But that is exactly my point; conservative politics does not aim for perfection.  The Christian Right doesn't ask for much.  Stop killing babies, teach abstinence to school children, respect the flag, don't impose socialism on the nation.  Only in the fevered imaginations of over-wrought leftists (who I suspect are not sincere), does this add up to theocracy.  If you want to see a real theocracy don't look at 1950s America, look at post 1979 Iran.  Check out Saudi Arabia.  Feminists who call Jerry Falwell a theocrat should have to go live in Iran or Saudi Arabia for a while.  Did you know that women in 1950s America were allowed to drive cars?  Really.  And did you know that there is no record of any adulteresses being stoned to death in America in the 1950s? Seriously.  Maybe the America of the 1950s might not look like the Gulag after the experience of living in a real theocracy.

Politics is not the mission of the church and it is of secondary importance.  Preaching the Gospel is the mission of the Church and it is of ultimate importance.  Turning the preaching of the Gospel into a form of politics is to demean it.  On this fundamental point Fitch and Evangelicalism will remain at odds. 

For neo-anabaptism, the goal is to evolve beyond the Reformation, but the historic mission of Evangelicalism in the West is to revive the church when it falls into dead orthodoxy.  The Trinitarian and Christological dogmas of the first five centuries and the solas of the Reformation are not the problem.  Evangelicalism presupposes them.  Evangelicalism is not doctrinally innovative at its best; its real contribution to the church catholic is to call it back to the truth and power of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

Politics is a matter for Christians who must live in the world while we await a Saviour from heaven.  Politics is a matter of prudence, discernment and compromise.  It is always messy and often dirty.  It is part of living in a fallen world.  But politics is not the Gospel.  The Gospel is Christ crucified to save sinners.

The End of Evangelicalism or the Failure of Neo-Anabaptism to Take Over Evangelicalism? Part I

Note: In this post and the next I'll be reviewing David Fitch's new book, "The End of Evangelicalism: Discerning a New Faithfulness for Mission" (2011).  In this post I discuss chapters 1-5, which contain his critique of Evangelicalism.  In the next, I discuss chapter 6 and the Epilogue, which offer his alternative.  
_______________

David Fitch does not have much good to say about Evangelicalism.  The first five chapters of his six chapter book, The End of Evangelicalism: Discerning a New Faithfulness for Mission, reads like a laundry list of all the sneers and jeers Bill Maher has makes against Evangelicals (minus the profanity).   Honestly, we already knew that there is a lot wrong with Evangelicalism; only a Pelagian would be surprised by the sin, hypocrisy and inconsistencies.  You would think after reading this book that Evangelicalism is the only major segment of the Church that has problems.  After a while it ceases to be critique and descends into caricature.

There is also a disconcerting passive-aggressive flavor to his rants in which he first says: "Now I believe this teaching just like you do," after which he proceeds to rip it apart and accuse most other Evangelical of not really believing it.  He takes what he claims are three central tenets of Evangelicalism, biblical inerrancy, conversionism and the Christian nation, and claims that these are empty constructs that function as ideological markers for people who do not believe them but use them to mark off their political beliefs.  (I say "claims" because the third of these is not fully accurate.  It is just the old liberal "theocracy" boogey man being trotted out for the upteenth time.)  More on that in a moment.

Along the way he employs a lot of pseudo-intellectual, out-dated, Marxist mumbo jumbo appropriated from Slovakian atheist and Marxist, Slavoj Zizek.  Great.  Do we really need an atheist Communist to give us psychotherapy in order to recover from our false consciousness and throw over our false ideology? 

I basically have nothing to say about chapter 2, which is about Marxist jargon.  Some people are into magic crystals, others are into astrology and some just know that UFO's have already visited us.  And then there are those who believe that European Marxists know the key to understanding history and culture and politics.  "Honest," they exclaim, "I learned it in Cultural Studies - which is way easier than actually studying philosophy, history, economics and all those hard, boring subjects."  I think we can leave the Marxist jargon aside; it really contributes nothing important to the book other than making the author look "cool" to a certain kind of scraggly grad student.

In chapter 3, he argues that believing in an inerrant Bible makes us arrogant.  How does he prove this?  Well, you see, Hal Lindsay (stop laughing!) predicted the return of Christ on the basis of believing in an inerrant Bible.  So what, you ask?  Well, that means believing in an inerrant Bible is an embarrassment according to Fitch.  No, David: biblical inerrancy is not an embarrassment to Evangelicals - Hal Lindsey is an embarrassment to Evangelicals.  That whole date-setting thing was not the fault of the inerrant Bible.  If only Hal Lindsey had really believed in an inerrant Bible!  If he had taken Mark 13:35 literally and as true, he would not have gotten into date-setting in the first place.  He didn't do it because it is what you have to do if you believe in an inerrant Bible, he did it to sell books.  If you look in Mark 13:32 it says that the angels in heaven and the Son in his incarnate state don't know the time of Christ's return but only the Father.  It does not say "The Father and Hal Lindsey."  If someone wants to have a serious discussion of biblical inerrancy a good way to get one going would be to pay more attention to B. B. Warfield than to Hal Lindsey.   

Also, I am just tired of the old meme that if you believe in truth of any kind in a tough and serious way, then you are arrogant.  Here is a news flash: arrogance is a besetting sin of both those who believe in absolute truth and those who are relativists.  It is part of the sinful, fallen human condition and we all are susceptible.  But lay off the Bible; the problem lies elsewhere.

In chapter 4, he argues that the evangelical emphasis on the need for personal conversion - the decision for Jesus - means that Evangelicals have no doctrine of discipleship or sanctification.  Now does he interact with Tom Schreiner or John Piper here?  No.  Well does he discuss Calvin or Edwards or Hodge?  No.  So, who does he discuss?  Ted Haggard.  (insert ribald joke and laugh track here)  Yes, he quotes a man with very serious spiritual and psychological problems and who has been ejected from leadership in the Evangelical movement to prove that forensic justification is a doctrine that prevents Evangelicals from having an adequate theology of the Christian life.  He writes:

"Haggard finally says, 'You know Larry . . . Jesus says 'I came for the unrighteous, not for the righteous . . . '  So as soon as I became worldwide unrighteous I knew Jesus had come for me.'  Here in stunning fashion, Haggard presents the language of forensic justification as that which makes a final resolution possible.  It is the 'decision' to be forgiven and pardoned that enables him to bypass the raging duplicitous desires, make sense of the inconsistencies of his life, and come to peace. . . Does this not reveal the contradiction at its core, which says 'Go ahead and enjoy, but be guilty about it and then forgiven.  For that's where the true enjoyment lies'?  Is this not revealing of the lace behind the evangelical belief and practice of salvation: 'the decision'?

So, OK, let's try to get past the fact that treating Haggard as a theological spokesman for Evangelicalism is like judging all 16th century Anabaptists by the violent Munster rebellion.  What about the issue?  Is Fitch right to accuse Evangelicals of anti-nomianism on the basis of our belief in forensic justification?

I'd just like to point out that last week the 4000 members of the Falls Church (Episcopal) walked out of their beautiful and historic building and left it in the control of the neo-pagan pansexualists of the Episcopal Church who have rejected the Bible, sexual morality and all manner of sound doctrine.  These believers paid for the property, which was worth millions of dollars, but they left it behind because they believe that when we come to believe in Jesus Christ and are justified by faith we then, if Christ is really living in our hearts, will begin to walk in newness of life and struggle against our sin and law-breaking through the power of the grace of God given to us in the Spirit.  They believe that sexual sin of all kinds (divorce, homosexuality, fornication, adultery, etc.) needs to be repented of and confessed and that temptation needs to be resisted by the power of the Spirit.  They believe that when a Church begins to justify sexual sin in the name of "inclusion" and "tolerance of lifestyles" then that Church has seriously gone off the rails.  All over North America Evangelical Anglicans/Episcopalians have been making similar financial and emotional sacrifices in order to say that sanctification is not optional for Christians.  This is just one example that to me is far more revealing of the real heart of Evangelicalism than the twisted rantings of one drug-using, homosexual adulterer and ex-Evangelical leader.

In chapter 5, he argues that Evangelicals substitute a concern for a Christian nation for true compassion for the neighbor.  This chapter touches all the bases of typical leftist attacks on conservatism from Jerry Falwell to the Republican Party to George Bush to capitalism to Wal-Mart.  But let's just stop for a moment and ask what does he really want Evangelicals to do?  I get the feeling that he wants us to maintain our beliefs in marriage and against abortion but to do so in a way that is popular with the liberal media.  (Now, I believe in miracles, but isn't this asking a bit much?)  Again and again he quotes such biased figures as Jon Meacham and Sam Harris and at one point writes:

"I suspect that many American Christians under the age of thirty-five refuse to be called evangelical because of the presidency of George W. Bush." (p. 66)  

One has to ask oneself, "Why does the unpopularity of Evangelicalism with the Left bother Fitch so much?"  We know that the Left started the culture wars that have been raging since the 1960s and is engaged in trying to undermine the family and basic morality in the name of preparing the way for the Revolution.  When Evangelicalism came out of its separatist hibernation that followed the Fundamentalist-Modernist controversy in the early 20th century, Evangelicalism reacted defensively against the attempt by the Left to destroy the family, make killing the innocent legal and impose a European-style welfare state. This made us unpopular.  Jesus predicted that in the Upper Room Discourses.

So what should Evangelicals have done?  Should they just stand aside and let the Bill Ayers and Jeremiah Wrights and Al Sharptons and the radical feminists and the socialists change America?  Should they say, "It's no concern of ours whether the public schools teach free sex and out condoms to eighth graders?  Should they concentrate on hymn sings, Bible studies and church suppers and have nothing to do with politics?  Or should they vote for the Democratic Party like Jim Wallis wants them to because they "care about the poor"?

Once Evangelicals decided that they had to get involved in politics it was entirely predictable that it would end up messy and that there would be harsh opposition.  And to build a mass movement and a voting block you have to risk having wackos saying embarrassing things (kind of like the Democratic Party has to put up with Joe Biden putting his foot in his mouth every other day).  The Religious Right is not perfect, but if you want Evangelicals to be involved in politics you have to take the good with the bad.  Or you can, I suppose, join the other side.  Or you can withdraw. 

Tomorrow I look at the kind of theological politics Fitch proposes as an alternative to the decision of about 75% of Evangelicals to vote Republican and engage in politics as conservatives. 

Global Christianity Will Outline Western Liberalism

Mark Tooley has an excellent analysis of the situation in the United Methodist Church in this article entitled: "United Methodists Transition from Liberal to Global."

The global 12 million member United Methodist Church, now likely the world's 9th largest communion, is no longer a predominantly liberal U.S. denomination. Its quadrennial governing General Conference, which met for 10 days in Tampa ending May 4, refused to alter the church's official disapproval of homosexual practice.

Some news stories huffed disapproval and surprise. After all, the Episcopal Church, Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, Presbyterian Church (USA), and United Church of Christ have all surrendered to American culture on sexual ethics. Their membership spirals subsequently accelerated into formal schisms. But United Methodism, unlike these other historic denominations that once dominated American religion and liberalized in the early 20th century, is now a growing church and has a record number of members.

Unlike the other traditionally liberal-led Mainline denominations, United Methodism is fully global in membership. (The 2 million member Episcopal Church of the U.S. does include the small churches of Latin America, Europe and Taiwan but is still 90 percent U.S. persons.) There are 7.5 million United Methodists in the U.S. and 4.5 million overseas, almost all in Africa, mostly in the Congo. With the U.S. church losing about 100,000 members a year (down from 11 million 44 years ago) and the African church gaining over 200,000 a year, the denomination likely will become a majority non-U.S. church in about 10 years or less.

These statistics frustrate United Methodist liberals who have dominated the domination for 50 years or more. Homosexuality has been debated at the church's General Conference every four years since 1972. And the church consistently decreed that homosexual practice was "incompatible with Christian teaching." Over the years, the denomination formally prohibited clergy who were actively homosexual (as well as any clergy sexually active outside traditional marriage) and banned same-sex unions. For the last 12 years it has even supported "laws in civil society that define marriage as the union of man and woman," though normally loquacious bishops and other church elites decline to articulate this stance even as the nation debates it.

United Methodist liberals always assumed their church would follow American culture on sexual permissiveness, just as the church had followed on so much else across the 20th century, starting with divorce and contraception. They always consoled themselves, "If not this time, then next time." Sounding like deterministic Marxist Hegelians, they believed history sided with sexual inclusion.

But this year in Tampa, the church once again rejected any dilution of his disapproval of homosexual practice, despite a full court lobby campaign. Liberal caucus groups pitched a full size tent outside the Tampa Convention Center, served daily lunches to any delegates, mobilized hundreds of volunteers in rainbow stoles, and distributed a full-size daily newspaper, sometimes translated into other languages. As chronicled by the just released Forgetting How to Blush: United Methodism's Compromise with the Sexual Revolution by the Rev. Karen Booth, pro-gay caucus groups have received hundreds of thousands of dollars from non-church philanthropies.

It was largely wasted money. A record 30 percent of delegates came from Africa this time, up from 20 percent just 4 years ago (and 10 percent 8 years ago), and they voted uniformly against any liberalization of the church's sexual teaching. Combined with many Filipino and European delegates, plus U.S. evangelicals, who were themselves about 20 percent of the total, there was an insurmountable conservative majority on key issues. The final vote on homosexual practice's "incompatibility" with Christian teaching showed 61 percent supporting the current stance. 

Read the rest here.

Comment: 
 The title of this piece signifies a very important truth about the nature of the universal church today.  Living in the decadent, late-modern West it is easy to be overwhelmed by the surge of left-wing deconstruction of the pillars of Western society such as the family, marriage, respect for human life and limitations on the power of government.  The church is seduced by the line "If you don't join the left-wing revolution now, you will be left behind in the ash bin of history."  But look where God is at work: Africa, Asia and Latin America.  The universal Church is growing, vibrant and orthodox.  Global Christianity is on the upswing; it is just compromised, Western, modern, liberal Christianity that is in decline. 

If other Protestant denominations such as the Episcopal Church in the US or the Anglican Church of Canada were truly ecumenical, they would not exclude the growing majority of Christians from the Global South a voice in ecclesiastical decision-making.  But, it is clear from a look at the world-wide Anglican Communion, that if they were ecumenical they would not be accommodating themselves to the late-modern, secular, sexual revolution against civilized sexual morality.  Liberal Christianity in the West are cutting themselves off from the ecumenical (world-wide) Church.

In order to rationalize away the fact that they are on the losing side of history and really just a group of sectarians, they try to pretend that the rest of the world just hasn't caught up.  A half-century ago they thought that the secularization thesis was undoubtedly true; today it is clearly nothing more than secularist wishful thinking.  Then they were sure that Marxism would win the hearts and minds of the Global South and leave no room for non-Marxist forms of Christianity.  But Marxism is now a failed ideology and has been tossed onto the dust heap of history, which is to say that it is only alive in the late-modern Western university.

What will it take for us to come to the realization that: 1) the Christian position on sexual morality is never going to change, 2) theological liberalism is a sect that will have its day in the sun and then wither away, 3) biblical orthodoxy is never going to die out, and 4) Western secularism itself is doomed and hitching one's wagon to it is not a wise idea?

Satan Gives Commencement Addrss at St. Sincerus

In the wake of Georgetown University's decision to invite Kathleen Sibellius (best known as the persecutor of Catholic and Evangelicals, as well as other faith communities,) to speak at its Commencement Ceremony recently, the Catholic Phoenix decided that mockery would be the most appropriate response. 

So it announced that St. Sincerus University, the 84th largest Catholic university in the US, has invited Satan to be its Commencement speaker.  (Today's liberal Catholic universities do not make satire easy.)

In a move already denounced by Catholic bishops & other leading religious conservatives, St. Sincerus University, the nation’s 84^th largest Catholic university, has invited Satan to deliver its commencement speech later this month. Also known as the Prince of Darkness, Lucifer, &, more popularly, the Devil, Satan is a divisive figure among Catholics & other Christians. Several Catholic universities have upset religious conservatives in recent years by inviting controversial figures to deliver commencement speeches, as when the University of Notre Dame, the nation’s largest Catholic University, invited President Barack Obama, who supports a woman’s right to abortion, in 2009. The invitation to Satan by SSU president Fr. Thad Despereaux comes at a time when many Catholics are highly critical of the Obama administration’s attempts to reform health care, which some claim would force Catholic institutions to violate their Church’s teachings by providing contraceptives as part of their health insurance plans. Fr. Despereaux, in comments made to the Daily Sham, SSU’s student newspaper, said that having Satan on campus gives bold witness to a central Catholic principle that God can be found in all things. “The continuing politicization of the faith indicates just how important it is for us to build bridges,” Fr. Despereaux said. “Our whole mission as a university is to bring people together. Satan is badly misunderstood by many people, & we hope to show our graduates that stereotypes, & the hatred they engender, have no place on a Catholic campus. As Catholics we are to hate hate.”

On-campus reactions at SSU have been favorable, as faculty & students alike have applauded the university’s open-mindedness in issuing the invitation. Dr. Sophia Greengrass, Director of the university’s Wiccan Institute, called the invitation a brave attempt to promote the university’s academic integrity in the face of “fascist attempts by the male hierarchy to impose its limited & limiting dogmas,” . . .

 Read the rest here.

Now, Dr. Satan's speech is up.  Here is the beginning. 

Thank you. (loud applause) Thank you all very much. Thank you, Fr. Despereaux. Please, folks (continued applause), please be seated. A little restraint every now & then. . . (laughter).
Seriously, this is quite an honor for me. I can’t say an unexpected honor, as this invitation was in the cards for some time now. And this despite all the non-attention I’ve received from many of your Catholic intellectuals; wasn’t it your own Fr. Cheever in Ancient Near Eastern Studies who said in your student paper that I don’t exist? (laughter). He’s not alone in thinking that, though I take it that after we got to know each other a bit better last night he has a different take on things. Talk about an ashen countenance when I discussed my background! Suffice it to say that he knows a bit more about ancient mythology & sacrifice than he did before we spoke. It really is too bad he can’t be here today, as he’s much in my thoughts, as are all the fine academics at this institution. Much of the work you do is directly responsible for my being here today, & I am much pleased by it.

To honor the graduates of St. Sincerus, I will focus my remarks on the creative gifts God has so richly blessed you all with, as well as on your sacred responsibility to nurture those gifts, despite the heavy costs. As you know, you live in a world in which the majority of people seek to restrain, to control, & even to deny the creativity of the few. Isn’t it a sad irony that such a gift, which can help you to make & remake your world, & which is an expression of God’s image within you, so badly frightens the unimaginative? 

Read the rest here. 

God Changes His Mind on Same-sex "Marriage" - According to His Prophet Obama

Barack Obama's evolution on same-sex "marriage" took a lurch forward today as he announced to the world that he now approves of recognizing homosexuality as equivalent to marriage.  And why did he do this?  Political advantage?  To get Hollywood campaign donations?  Oh no, it was because he realized it was required by Jesus Christ.  Really.

Now that would be the same Jesus Christ, one presumes, who told him to be against same-sex "marriage" in 2008 and who told him to be for it back in 1996. It is all quite confusing, but that is liberal Protestantism, for you.  One day black is black and the next day it is white; it's just God trying to keep up with the Zeitgeist while his prophet tries to get elected.

In the transcript of "Good Morning America" we read how Obama appeals to the cross of Christ to justify his capitulation to pagan sexual deviance:

Roberts asked the president if First Lady Michelle Obama was involved in this decision. Obama said she was, and he talked specifically about his own faith in responding.“This is something that, you know, we’ve talked about over the years and she, you know, she feels the same way, she feels the same way that I do. And that is that, in the end the values that I care most deeply about and she cares most deeply about is how we treat other people and, you know, I, you know, we are both practicing Christians and obviously this position may be considered to put us at odds with the views of others but, you know, when we think about our faith, the thing at root that we think about is, not only Christ sacrificing himself on our behalf, but it’s also the Golden Rule, you know, treat others the way you would want to be treated. And I think that’s what we try to impart to our kids and that’s what motivates me as president and I figure the most consistent I can be in being true to those precepts, the better I’ll be as a as a dad and a husband and hopefully the better I’ll be as president.”

This is pretty disgusting stuff.  The least he could have done was have the decency to leave Jesus Christ out of it.  He may feel he has no choice but to support the radical base of the Democratic Party or he may be a convinced pagan himself, but to wrap himself in the cross while advocating for one of the many sins Jesus died to pay the penalty for is just sick and blasphemous.

It is time to get liberal theology out of politics.  It is demeaning to the intelligence of thinking people everywhere.  Liberals who support abortion and the rest of the sexual revolution would do so no matter what the Bible says.  They just pretend religion is important to them.  And for them to knowingly and cynically go against the Bible while pretending to be sincerely Christian is just sickening.  They have Marx as their prophet, why do they need Christ?  Other than as a cynical ploy to win a few votes from people who don't know any better, that is.  

Tim Stanley at the Daily Telegraph is not buying the "Jesus told me to do this" line:

 It’s unlikely that Obama is taking a principled stand for civil rights. In 1996, he said he was for gay marriage. In 2004, when he was running for the Senate, he said that Jesus told him it was wrong (Jesus, apparently, changes his mind almost as often as the Pres). In 2008, he repeated that gay marriage was a step too far. Then he started to “evolve” and, like the caterpillar, he turned into a beautiful pink butterfly. Now that he’s for it, his tortuous flip-flopping makes Mitt Romney look comparatively consistent. But more on that later.

The Pres probably has his eye on big campaign dollars from Hollywood, which was causing him havoc on the gay rights issue only last week. North Carolina forced his hand, but in a way that some on his team might calculate is a vote winner. I infer the game plan to be this: 1) make everyone stop talking about the economy and start debating sex instead, 2) mobilise that liberal base, 3) split the Republicans by forcing Romney to reiterate his hard-line anti-marriage position, 4) turn the election into a coalition of the young, women and well educated vs the old, religious and dumb. The bottom line: send people into that voting booth thinking about anything other than their job.

Stanley also thinks Obama has just handed a great gift to Mitt Romney and he undoubtedly has done that:

But will the gay-marriage bait-and-switch work in the fall? Maybe, maybe not. It could help Romney, who has been having trouble convincing the evangelical/Catholic base that he is one of them. Those people might have felt edgy voting for a “moderate Mormon,” but they’ll come out in big numbers to vote against Obama’s social liberalism. Also, Mitt’s reputation for flip-flopping is no longer a problem. Obama just flipped right over his head, did a 180 in the air, and landed on his backside on the other side of the political compass. Flopping is a dead issue in 2012.

Meanwhile, all the evidence suggests that “the folks” (as Bill O’Reilly calls the great middle-class) don’t like gay marriage. Anti-marriage amendments have been passed in seven out of nine of the 2012 swing states – most of them by popular referenda. Propositions have been voted on in 32 states and on every occasion gay marriage has been banned, even in Maine. Maine.

The Romney campaign must be ecstatic; they were not going to win hotbeds of liberalism like New York and California anyway.  So what if Obama ups his winning percentage in those kinds of states from 14 to 15%?  This election will be won or lost in 12 states and most are in the Midwest or the South. Wisconsin, Michigan, Indiana, Pennsylvannia, Virginia, Florida, North Carolina and Ohio are key swing states. If Obama thinks taking this stand helps him in these states, he is deluded. For example, Obama won North Carolina in 2008 by less than 1% and it just voted yesterday 61-39 to enshrine marriage in the constitution.  He is toast in North Carolina in November.  As one who prays for a Romney victory even though Romney is a far-from-perfect candidate, I have to think that things are looking up.

There is an interesting parallel between Obamacare and same-sex marriage in that Obama is rigidly sticking to his ideological agenda in the face of voter opposition and he, apparently, is willing to lose big to make (what he imagines to be) irreversible changes to the nation in a leftist direction.  I think his leftist ideology is dead wrong, but I have to admire his political courage.  Are Republicans prepared to lay electoral success on the line in order to bring the nation back in a conservative direction?

Ross Douthat in the New York Times observes that the politics behind Obama's decision illustrate the growing divide between the governing elites and the population as a whole in America:

At the popular level, the country is still divided (and perhaps more divided than polling suggests), but at the elite level and within the Democratic Party’s upper reaches, especially, what was a consensus understanding of marriage just two decades ago has become so associated with bigotry and reaction that a sitting president facing a difficult re-election campaign has been forced to abandon the politically-safer “civil unions yes, but marriage not just yet” position for the uncertain consequences of being for marriage, period. Given the landscape of the 2012 election (and the results yesterday in North Carolina), Obama’s prior attempts to finesse the issue made a lot of sense. But the moral ground had shifted underneath him — to the point where even his own cabinet wouldn’t risk the taint of bigotry in order to give him cover on the issue — and such finesse was no longer an acceptable option.

The consensus in the upper reaches of the Democratic Party is far more radically leftist than the general population of the US and this issue is just one of many that illustrate that divide.  The rulers of any nation cannot get too far out in front of the voters and hope to maintain power.  Today, the Democratic Party, by abandoning yet again any appearance of being representative of the nation as a whole, took a large step toward electoral disaster.  But that, of course, is their problem.

By the way, Billy Graham took a stand in North Carolina in favor of traditional marriage and urged people in newspaper adverts to vote to enshrine marriage in the constitution.  Who do you think is the more reliable interpreter of Scripture: Billy Graham or Barack Obama?  One of them has to be dead wrong on what the Bible teaches and I'm pretty sure it isn't Billy Graham.

Wheaton College Joins Opposition to Obama's Infringement of Religious Freedom

Wheaton College has come out against the Obama administration healthcare mandate the infringes the freedom of religious institutions.  The Daily Herald reports:

Wheaton College and other distinctively Christian institutions are faced with a near and present threat to religious liberty.

Last August, the Department of Health and Human Services issued a mandate that the insurance plans for religious institutions (except churches) must provide coverage for all government-approved contraceptives. The list of required contraceptives includes abortifacient drugs — “morning after” and “week after” pills that claim the life of a fertilized egg.

During the period for public debate, the HHS received more than 200,000 comments objecting that the contraceptive mandate would violate the First Amendment rights of anyone who believed — for religious reasons — in the sanctity of human life.

This would be true not only for Roman Catholics who oppose all forms of contraception, but also for Protestants and others who believe that the use of contraception for the purpose of abortion is immoral.

The HHS secretary has been unresponsive to these concerns, and, in fact, has testified to Congress that she did not consider legal precedents for religious liberty in formulating her mandate. In January, she announced that the HHS regulations would be enacted without amendment.

Catholic charities, Christian colleges and other religious organizations still would be compelled to cover contraception in their health insurance plans. And the coverage list still would include abortion-inducing drugs.

In February, these regulations were finalized without amendment. Subsequently, the administration has proposed to offer certain religious groups some sort of accommodation. According to the proposal (which has not yet been enacted), Christian organizations would not have to pay for contraception and abortion; instead, their insurance companies would offer these services for free.

Unfortunately, the proposed accommodation fails to address the religious liberty issues at the heart of the controversy over the HHS regulations. Even if we are not paying for it, institutions like Wheaton College still would be required to cover abortifacient drugs, in violation of our religious principles. Practically speaking, we would still be paying for them, too, as insurance companies inevitably pass along their costs to their customers.

The effect of these regulations on Wheaton College may be dramatic. We are unwilling to compromise our Christian convictions. Will we face punitive fines? Be compelled to abandon medical coverage for our employees?

It is important to understand that Wheaton College is a pervasively Christian institution. Every member of our campus — faculty, staff and student — makes a commitment to live a distinctively Christian lifestyle. Our Community Covenant, as we call it, includes embracing the sanctity of life. As Christians, all of us agree not to commit abortion, alongside other actions we regard as sinful.

Many Americans disagree with our convictions, as is their right. What should not be in dispute, however, is that colleges like Wheaton have the freedom — guaranteed by the United States Constitution — to carry out our mission in a way that is consistent with our religious principles.

It is important to understand that the Obama administration is the hardest left, anti-religious freedom in the history of the United States by a wide margin.  The problem is their working definition of religious freedom in which they substitute "freedom of worship" for "freedom of religion."  What this means is that the only activity protected by the constitution is actual worship on Sunday mornings (or Friday evenings) and not any other organized activity of religious people such as Christian colleges, Christian camps, professional organizations, or any mission agency that mixes social service with soul-winning.  It is as if they want to restrict religion to the most narrow band of life as possible and claim the widest swath of life possible for the sovereignty of the secular state. 

This distinction is critical to the work of the State Department overseas as well.  Under the Obama definition of religious freedom the old Soviet Union has freedom of religion all through its existence.  Of course this is nonsense, but it is dangerous nonsense. 

Every Christian has a duty to stand up to tyranny while the democratic freedom to do so still remains.  One witty blogger said that the dispute between the Obama administration and the churches is about contraception is exactly the same sense as the American Revolution was about tea.  That is right; both are really about restraining tyranny.  All Christians, and all people of any faith, have a compelling interest in opposing the soft totalitarian over-reach of the modern, progressive state.

Cross-posted at The Bayview Review. 

United Methodists Decide to Remain Christian

The United Methodist Church is the largest of the old, declining, liberal Protestant denominations in the United States.  Nevertheless, it still claims 8.6 million members and many of them are Evangelical.  In its General Conference, held every four years, delegates come from the mission churches planted overseas in back in the days when liberal Protestants still did missions.  The African and other overseas churches are growing rapidly and are, unsurprisingly, overwhelmingly Evangelical.  They now number about 4.4 million members.  The Evangelicals in the US plus the mission church delegates from overseas now constitute a majority of General Conference delegates. 

As Evangelical churches continue to grow in the US and especially overseas and the liberals die off, the denomination is expected to become more and more Evangelical.  So, interestingly, the UMC thus constitutes a kind of microcosm of world Protestantism today.  What does the future of world Protestantism look like?  Is is liberal? Ecumenical?  Liberation/Marxist? Feminist?  Or is it conservative, traditional and Evangelical?  General Conference is going on in Tampa this week, so let's drop in and find out. 

The Washington Post reports:

Despite emotional protests and fierce lobbying from gay rights groups, United Methodists voted on Thursday (May 2) to maintain their denomination’s stance that homosexuals acts are “incompatible with Christian teaching.”

Two “agree to disagree” proposals were soundly defeated during separate votes by the nearly 1,000 delegates gathered for the United Methodist Church’s General Conference in Tampa, Fla.

Jim Antle at American Spectator notes that the heavily biased, left-wing reporting of the New York Times is downright laughable on this one:

The vote was 61 percent to 39 percent against the change to the church’s "Book of Discipline," indicating little change to the deadlock on an issue the church has been debating for the last four decades. The delegates also defeated a compromise amendment proposed by the advocates of equality for gay members, which said that Methodists can agree to disagree on homosexuality and still live together as a church.  [my bolding]

No,  we are not laughing with you Grey Lady; we are definitely laughing at you!  I wonder if Obama won by 61-39 in November if they would refer to that as a "deadlock"? 

Antle also wonders if the denomination's pro-abortion stance can be turned around by Evangelicals in the denomination.

The votes suggest a working majority coalition between orthodox African delegates and U.S. evangelicals. This has kept Methodists from going in the same liberalizing direction on social issues as the other mainline Protestant churches. It will be interesting to see if this coalition has the votes to yank the United Methodist Church out of the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice.

 It is nice to see the advocates of the secular, sexual revolution get rejected by Christians in favor of the Christian view for a change.  Congratulations to the United Methodist Church!

Cross-posted at the Bayview Review. 

Contraception , Evangelicals and Sexual Sin

I suppose it was just a matter of time until people within Evangelicalism began to call for unmarried people to start using contraception as the "lesser of two evils," with the other evil being abortion.  This story in Christianity Today by Matthew Lee Anderson, Why Churches Shouldn't Push Contraceptives to their Singles, is at once shocking and unsurprising. 

[See Anderson's two blog posts: The Church and Contraception for its Single Members and A Hill to Die On: Evangelicals, Contraception and the Integrity of Our Witness.]

As Western Evangelicalism continues to become bigger, more worldly and more accommodated to the late modern secular society around it, its resources to resist the depraved immorality of late, modern, Western decadence continue to deteriorate.

Pope John Paul II and a growing host of intelligent Catholic writers such as Mary Eberstadt, Christopher West and Janet Smith have put forward the thesis that contraception and abortion stand or fall together and that the problem we face is not merely an issue of the sanctity of innocent life (though it certainly is that), but also a false understanding of the purpose of sexuality rooted in a false understanding of human nature itself that underlies both the recent rush to embrace both contraception and abortion.  In other words, they argue that we must understand what human beings are and what role our sexuality plays in humans fulfilling their ultimate telos as creatures made in God's image, if we are to be able properly to evaluate the morality of contraception and abortion.

The sea-change in the 1970s that saw formerly apathetic Evangelicals quite suddenly become rightfully concerned about the rise of abortion-on-demand (i.e. abortion as birth control) led to an Evangelical-Catholic coalition in support of the sanctity of human life that is most welcome.  The work of Francis Schaeffer and Harold Brown is especially notable here.  Opposition to abortion, euthanasia and infanticide by this coalition has been key to slowing down the advance of the culture of death legally, socially, theologically and politically.  It has also brought Evangelicals and John Paul II Catholics into an alliance in which each sees in the other side more congenial dialogue partners than either sees in the liberals of their own traditions.  We can be thankful for these developments.

But Evangelical opposition to abortion has been predicated almost completely on the basis of the sixth commandment, whereas their Catholic counterparts have those reasons and also other, deeper, reasons rooted in the seventh commandment, Genesis 1-2 and Jesus' teaching on sexuality for opposing the whole mentality that lies behind the drive toward social approval of contraception, promiscuity and abortion.  A few Evangelicals, notably Al Mohler, have understood that what the Catholics call "the contraceptive mentality" is a serious problem, but most have not probed into what this might mean.

Contemporary, conservative Evangelicals such as Daniel Heimbach, John Piper and Andreas Kostenberger have written good books on sexuality in which they try to hold the line against promiscuity - including both fornication and adultery - but they have seldom probed into the view of sexuality and human nature presupposed by the contraceptive mentality.  They have done good service upholding the rule against extra-marital and pre-marital sex, but seem at a loss to explain the deep theological reasons for the rule, which, of course, inevitably leads some to suppose that the rule is entirely arbitrary and possibly unimportant.

Is it possible that the reason why the left wing of Evangelicalism is weakening in its opposition to homosexuality is that it is very difficult (and perhaps impossible) to specify the moral difference between homosexual behaviour and heterosexual acts in which artificial, contraception is used?  Are not the two kinds of sexual behaviour similar in important ways?

For one thing, both are "unnatural" in that both employ the sexual organs for purposes for which they were not designed.  Our sexual organs are part of the reproductive system and on a strictly biological level they are designed for reproduction.  Marriage is also designed for reproduction; Genesis 1:27 makes it clear that there is a close connection between man being created in the image of God and as male and female.  And Genesis 1:28 makes it clear that the Divine intention in creating man as male and female is procreation.  Just as God is Triune and not unitary, so man is created in two sexes and just as God is in his nature creative with the mutual love of Father and Son issuing forth in the inevitable result of creative love in the Holy Spirit, so man as male and female is able to issue forth in fruit created through love.  So to say that the telos of sexual intercourse is procreation is not to reduce man to his biological substratum; rather it is to raise him to his highest dignity.  Although the animals reproduce sexually, they do not do so through personal love and this marks out mankind alone as being in the image of God.  Non-procreative sex is therefore unnatural for humans and a denial of the dignity of man as the one creature made in God's image.

Secondly, sexual intercourse between married persons is not recreation or entertainment, but a deep personal knowing of the other person at a level of intimacy and trust that allows the two to become one flesh.  When a man has intercourse with a woman he is saying: "I love you and desire to stay with you forever.  If a child results from this act, I will devote my life to helping you raise the child."  When a woman has intercourse with a man she is saying: "I love you and desire to stay with you.  I trust that you will devote your life to helping me raise the child that may result from this act."  That is what the act of intercourse intrinsically means, whether any individual couple know it or admit it or not.  So any frivolous or casual sexual act is essentially a lie and is detached from the relational context that makes it different from animal sex and brings it into line with God's purpose in creating us male and female. 

So, in these two ways, which can be summarized as mutual, personal, loving commitment, married sex is morally right and in harmony with the will of God for the human creature and the human creature's highest good.  The rule serves the higher good for the man, the woman and the child - all of whom are involved in the act of sexual intercourse.  When the Divine plan for human sexuality is abrogated, the following things happen:

1. Sex becomes a matter of self-focused pleasure and the satisfaction of lust rather than a drive to deep, personal, committed intimacy and oneness.

2. Sex becomes detached from its procreative intent.  Fornication and adultery are recognized as creating inappropriate contexts for bringing new human life into the world.

3. Potential children are fenced out of the act of sexual intercourse through artificial contraception.

4. Women are increasingly regarded as "sex objects" and they even internalize this degraded status. 

5. A great temptation arises to resort to abortion as a "back-up" to failed contraception or sexual behaviour so driven by lust that contraception was not used.

6. Divorce can be contemplated as an option much more easily when sex is understood as the satisfaction of physical desires, rather than as a drive to total oneness because if marriage is understood as a contract for mutually satisfying sexual relations (as for Kant), rather than as a vehicle for total unity of husband and wife into one flesh, then breaking the marriage contract does not necessarily seriously wound and even potentially destroy one's personhood.  

On this analysis, abortion does not appear suddenly out of nowhere as a sudden temptation to break the sixth commandment; rather, it has its context in the desire for non-procreative sex and the severing of the link between between the biological sex drive and the emotional and spiritual drive toward intimacy, commitment and oneness at the psychological and spiritual level with physical oneness as the sign of that greater oneness.

All this calls contraception into question on a moral level.  Is the use of artificial contraception ever compatible with the Biblical understanding of human beings and the role of sex in the make up of our human nature as created in the image of God? 

Why, apart from specific Biblical passages condemning it, is the theological basis for viewing homosexuality as morally deficient?  I suggest that even pagans operating only with general revelation can see that there is a deep and important connection between sexual intercourse and reproduction, which is to say the family, and it is the fact that homosexual behaviour violates this connection that makes it suspect even to pagans.  Of course, in an extreme state of idolatry and rebellion against the Creator, some pagans actually begin to believe that homosexuality is a good, as Paul argues in Romans 1:18-30.  But this, to Paul, is iron-clad evidence of their extreme depravity rather than a respectable argument for the goodness of homosexual acts.

The important question is not: "Can one find a Bible verse specifically condemning artificial contraception?" but rather, "can the Biblical link between sexual intercourse and oneness of the husband and wife on the deepest level of their personality be preserved when sex becomes non-procreative and merely recreational?"

If decadent, late modern Western culture is committed unconditionally to anything, it is to the proposition that sex is just a recreational activity with no significance or meaning beyond the satisfaction of the lusts of the participants.  This view of sexuality makes promiscuity seem good, marriage seem trivial, and contraception and abortion seem "necessary."  What is "the contraceptive mentality" but this attitude toward human sexuality?

It seems to me that Evangelicals do not know what sex is for and so cannot give satisfactory reasons to our single adults why contracepted sex for pleasure before marriage is contrary to human nature as created in the image of God.  The only way forward is serious theological reflection on human sexuality and contraception that goes way beyond the limits of a blog post.

Cross-posted at The Bayview Review.  

The Point is to Bully Christians

The main reason why pro-homosexual (and pro-sexual revolution) activists want same-sex marriage to be the law of the land is so that pro-homosexual behaviour propaganda can be incorporated into the school curriculum.  The point of that is to detach the next generation from their parents and their churches and convert them to the pro-sexual revolution agenda of free sex and a post-traditional marriage culture.

You think I'm crazy?  Well, I think you are naive.  Check out this example from Focus on the Family of bullying students with traditional morals.

A group of high school journalism students attending a conference called “Journalism on the Edge” in Seattle over the weekend felt they were pushed over the edge by syndicated sex advice columnist Dan Savage.

Savage, the creator of the two-year-old It Gets Better Project, which encourages teens struggling with same-sex attractions to embrace homosexuality, was invited to give a keynote address last Friday at the JEA/NSPA National High School Journalism Convention.

Students were expecting him to talk about bullying. But they also got an earful about birth control, sex, and Savage’s opinions on the Bible.

 A 17-year-old from California who was attending with half a dozen other students from her high school yearbook staff, was one of several students to walk out in the middle of Savage’s speech.

“The first thing he told the audience was, ‘I hope you’re all using birth control!’ ” she recalled. Then “he said there are people using the Bible as an excuse for gay bullying, because it says in Leviticus and Romans that being gay is wrong. Right after that, he said we can ignore all the ‘B.S.’ in the Bible.

“I was thinking, ‘This is not going a good direction at all,’ Then he started going off about the Bible. He said somehow the Bible was pro-slavery. I’m really shy. I’m not really someone to, like, stir up anything. But all of a sudden I just blurted out, ‘That’s bull!’ ”

As she and several other students walked out of the auditorium, Savage noticed them leaving and called them “pansies.”

Though recordings of the keynote speech are unavailable, Savage has made similar comments in the past, which can be found on YouTube. Among them:

“Most people that you wind up arguing with about religion and homosexuality have not ever read the Bible without their, you know, moron glasses on.”

“If you believe it is the divinely inspired word of God, if you believe in the literal truth of the Bible, I challenge you to read the first five (expletive) pages. There are two creation myths in Genesis.”

“We ignore the (expletive) in the Bible about race, about slavery, and we’re going to have to get there for homosexuality.”

The student’s father is a public school teacher. Though he said Savage’s comments were inappropriate, he thinks the organizers of the conference are ultimately responsible.
“I’m well-versed in the rules of the game, the captive-audience ethic,” he said. “You have a bunch of kids. They’re required to go to school. They don’t have the option of walking out on you as a teacher, so you guard your speech.

“If Dan Savage was a teacher, they’d suspend him without pay for this behavior,” he added. “He didn’t take account of who his audience was. If he was doing this with a bunch of college journalism kids, that would be a different story — that’s more rough and tumble. How many of the kids who didn’t walk out felt backed into a corner? To me, that’s bullying behavior. It has all the symptoms, as far as I’m concerned.”

 You can't sing a Christmas carol in a public school, but you can launch vicious attacks like this on Christians.  Do you think this kind of 180 degree shift in a culture happens by accident or without a planned and coordinated attack by fanatical activists? Note that the goal being promoted by Savage's organization is not about tolerance; it is to get teens to embrace homosexuality.  That means they are after your children and they want to convert them; that is the cold, hard fact of the matter.

Yes there is a bullying problem in public schools today and Christians who stand up for their faith are the victims.