Gender Issues: Where the Battle Is Raging

Was it Martin Luther who said that if we as Christians are not responding at the very points where the Devil is attacking, then we are failing in our duty? If I understand this thought aright, it is emphasizing that we may be correct and orthodox and say much that is good, but if we fail to emphasize the very areas where the Christian gospel and worldview is under attack in our day, then we are failing as Christians. There are definitely a number of areas where biblical Christianity is being assailed in our day, but prominent among them are gender issues. While I agree fully with James Spurgeon that we Evangelicals are to be known most of all for our commitment to the Gospel (see his Known for the gospel?), yet surely one reason why many Evangelicals are emphasizing family values and heterosexual marriage is that these areas are under heavy attack in our day. This was simply not the case fifty years ago. We need to achieve that elusive balance of the Christian life: keep our eye on the central things of the gospel—but at the same time reply in strength to where the enemy is attacking.

In this regard, here are two thoughtful reflections on marriage and patriarchy respectively: see this quote and article on Canadian Liberal thought about marriage, Paul Martin’s posting: Stanley Kurtz on Marriage in Canada; and this insightful one on the battle in our culture between two forms of patriarchy: Russ Moore’s Vanity Fair Celebrates Patriarchy.

An addendum: in standing firm for the gospel and all of its ancillaries, we must be careful to do so with a right spirit. This blog by Sean Michael Lucas is helpful here: The Calvary Contender.

Oprah Winfrey–A Witness to the Importance of Truth!

There is an important lesson in the shock and disgust of Oprah Winfrey about the revelation that James Frey’s book A Million Little Pieces (Doubleday, 2003), a memoir of addiction and recovery and which she had previously endorsed, contains fabrications and lies. Even in our supposed postmodern world, where all is held to be relative, this incident is a good reminder that when it really comes down to it, truth-telling is held to be vital and lying worthy of censure.

A Litany for the Aborted Innocents, on the Eve of an Election

One more reason to vote against keeping the Liberal party in power is that the power elite at the core of their party are people whose hands are soaked in innocent blood. Oh no, they are not liable to be prosecuted in a court of law, for the murders they have done have been judicially approved. I am talking about the slaughter of the innocents in arbortuaries across this land, fueled, funded and approved by Liberal politicians. Enough is enough—the slaughter must end. What hypocrites we Canadians are if we look overseas at the killing fields in Cambodia and Bosnia and Rwanda and the Sudan and speak of the inhumanity we see there, and we do not see the killing that is taking place within this land. Surely if those woe-sayers of old, the Old Testament prophets and even our Lord Jesus, were walking this earth today they would not keep silence. Woe to us, then, we who dare to call ourselves the people of God, if we keep silence and forget the slain, whose numbers mount every day.

God give your people, who call on your name, strength and wisdom to use all of the peaceful mechanisms of democracy to bring justice to bear on this matter and end the slaughter of the innocent.

Lord, on this day, when your name is worshipped and honoured by your people, please have mercy on us Canadian Christians for our wimpishness and silence.

Have mercy, O Lord, on those mothers who have consented to the slaying of the fruit of their wombs, and forgive their sins, for many know not what they do.

O God, have mercy on the so-called doctors who have killed our children in the name of freedom, fill them with horror at what they have done and give them true repentance.

Lord, you who are the God of William Wilberforce, raise up politicians whose spirit is akin to that of that man, and may they know no rest till the borders of our fair land be rid of this culture of death.

The Liberal Party’s Scare Tactics Evaluated

It does not bode well when a politician has to resort to scare tactics to get people to vote for him. I am referring to some literature that was placed in my mailbox this afternoon by those involved in seeking the re-election of Mr Russ Powers, the liberal candidate for my riding in Hamilton-Wentworth. I have purposely resisted blogging on this upcoming election, but I found this piece of literature so utterly typical of Liberal tactics just before Canadian voters go to the polls on Monday that I became convinced I had to say something.

In one of the four panels of the literature the NDP were slammed by saying that their popular support in one national poll stands at “17.65%” and that the reader of the literature ought to “Be smart Vote strategic.” Has our democratic privilege come down to this—that we vote the way everyone else does? Surely that is a travesty of democracy and an appeal to the herd mentality that has marked Canadian politics for much of the past forty years in which the Liberals have been in power! The NDP have certain convictions that I do not share, but if that is where people’s convictions lie, then to encourage such people to vote against those convictions in order to “be smart” is to encourage sheer hypocrisy!

Another entire panel of the pamphlet was devoted to slamming Stephen Harper, in which he was accused of, among other things:

  • Supporting “the privatization of our healthcare”
  • Wanting “to help Americans invade foreign countries”
  • Wanting “Canada to join the US missile defence and Star Wars program”
  • Wanting “to reverse minority guarantees in our Charter of Rights and Freedoms”

At the end of this list of accusations was the “bear-baiting” question: “Do you really want Stephen Harper to be your Prime Minister?”

Well, I for one do want Stephen Harper to be my Prime Minister. Why? Well, we have had the Liberals in power for most of the past forty years and they have gutted our military and made it a laughing-stock in our own nation, opened the door to a floodgate of immorality, and have generally shown that they are not interested in the rights of all of the Canadian people.

In the accusations listed above, one wonders if the Liberal Party has any idea of the world in which we are now living. It is a world in which a group of Muslim terrorists, with strong popular support in certain countries, have vowed to bury the West under the rubble of our cities—witness not only the attacks on the World Trade Centre, but also the attacks in Bali on Australians, in Spain and the London underground. Does the Liberal party think that a triumph of these terrorists in this struggle would leave Canada unscathed? As the saying has it, they are whistling Dixie if they do. And if it came to violent attacks here in Canada, we would be all too eager to have American help. What hypocrisy then to refuse our neighbours to the south our aid in their time of crisis?

Then, it is unlikely that a Conservative government would enforce a “privatization of our healthcare.” The outcry would simply be too great and the popular backlash enormous and a Conservative government that sought to do so would be out in the very next election. No, this is simply scare tactics!

Finally, as for the “minority” freedoms threatened by a Conservative government, which ones are the Liberals talking about exactly? Time will tell if they are really serious about guaranteeing the rights of all Canadians. For example, will the Liberals go to bat for Christian pastors who may be accused in courts of law of hate-mongering when they preach on texts in the Bible that speak negatively about homosexual behaviour? Granted this has not happened yet, but it is not an impossible future scenario. For example, where was the Liberal party when Scott Brockie was find $5,000 for exercising his democratic privilege and refusing to print literature for homosexual activists and then has to pay a further $40,000 with regard to court costs? See Scott Brockie Loses Decision at Court of Appeals, On the Hook for $40 ...

No, I for one will not be fooled by such scare tactics and intend to vote Conservative on Monday, since I am convinced that Stephen Harper is a politician who takes seriously the democratic freedoms of all Canadians and that he and his party understand our global situation much better than their Liberal counterparts.

Why Laughter Is an Appropriate Response to Barna & His Ecclesiological Proposal

To be a Christian is to be faithful to the teaching of the New Testament. That is a given. A second given is this: the New Testament is an ecclesial document. It is written from within the context of believing communities for believing communities. In fact, the idea of trying to be a Christian without the Church is anathema for the writers of the New Testament (see, for example, Hebrews 10:24-25).

And when you move out into the early patristic period up to the time of Constantine, say, the ecclesial focus is just as strong. How can one hope to have any idea of what Ignatius of Antioch (martyred c.110) is talking about, if one does not see his very heavy emphasis on the Christian community? Irenaeus (c.130-c.200) is the same. Where did Ignatius and Irenaeus get this ecclesial emphasis from? From the New Testament, of course! By stating that, I am not saying that these two early Fathers got their picture of the church entirely right. But there is a continuity between their ecclesial interests and those of the New Testament.

And it does not help to say that after the New Testament there was a calamitous falling away in which all of the key New Testament emphases were misplaced by the Ancient Church. That utterly fails to see how important the Scriptures were to those early Christian communities. Nor can this emphasis be written off with post-modern hermeneutical verve by claiming that this focus on the church is all about power. That too misses the point that the church was the context in which faith was nourished.

Then there are the third-century fathers like Tertullian and Cyprian. Both North Africans and both committed churchmen—and I say this despite Tertullian’s schismatic proclivities. Was it not Cyprian who argued that the person who has God for his Father must also have the Church for his mother? Again, the question is moot whether or not Cyprian got it all right when it came to ecclesiology—I personally think not. But his ecclesial interests are rooted in an ideological context that stretches back to the New Testament. And there would have been no Christian story if these men had not devoted their cares and toils to the communal expression of God’s people.

All of this to say this: George Barna’s Revolution: Finding Vibrant Faith Beyond the Walls of the Sanctuary [see previous post, Barna, Bonhoeffer and true revolution] is so out of sync with the the New Testament and the realities of the Patristic era to be utterly laughed out of court, where it not for the dreadful ignorance about the Scriptures and the Patristic era that is increasingly apparent in North American Evangelical circles.

There will be some, I am sure, picturing themselves as brave souls going where few in our day have gone before—and so experiencing the adventure of the Christian life in all of its white-water intensity—who take up Barna’s suggestions and try to do Christianity without Church. In so doing, they will be sculpting their Christianity into the shape of our culture or sitting down to supper with the devil with a short spoon—either metaphor is frightening—and abandoning one of the key verities of the Faith.

Barna, Bonhoeffer and True Revolution

George Barna, that evangelical weathercock, has a new book entitled Revolution: Finding Vibrant Faith Beyond the Walls of the Sanctuary. The title is typical for anyone who is a boomer and who cut their ideological teeth in the sixties. This one calls for a spiritual revolution that presents pristine first-century Christianity to a spiritually dessicated world, but does without the medium of the church, hence the subtitle. I appreciate aspects of Kevin Miller’s critical review of the Barna volume in Christianity Today—“No Church? No Problem”. Miller rightly observes that Barna’s “book merely reveals every thin spot in evangelical ecclesiology. We flamingly disregard 2,000 years of guidance under the Holy Spirit. We elevate private judgment above the collective wisdom of apostles, martyrs, reformers, and saints.” Here is Evangelicalism throwing the past and its caution to the winds and eloping with the fervently anti-institutional spirit of the age—a nymph with oh so many paramours. Nothing really revolutionary here. Just utter silliness and the giddiness of childish infatuation.

But as Miller rightly goes on to say, “Do you want to become a Revolutionary? First, trade your copy of [Barna’s] Revolution for Life Together, the manifesto written by Dietrich Bonhoeffer during the dark days of Nazi Germany. Then, if you want to do heroic and revolutionary exploits, go back to your local church.”

Wise advice. I do not agree with all of Bonhoeffer’s views, but his Life Together is a classic about Christian community. And it is in the Church that the Father will be glorified (Ephesians 3:21).