Here is an interview with the Right Reverend N. T. Wright, Bishop of Durham, England, by TIME magazine on the issue of popular notions of life after death. As usual, Bishop Wright is not only provocative, but edifying in what he says.

I have often addressed these very issues in my own pastoral ministry. As one of my seminary professors stated, “Gnosticism is alive and well in the Church today.” We do need much more of a focus on the resurrection and our eternal purpose that we find in Christ through his resurrection rather than an attempt to escape the world the way Gnostics do. To quote the Apostles’ Creed, “I believe…in the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting, Amen.”

The problem i have with this whole scenario is not simply the fact that some crazy liberal UCCs (”Unitarians Considering Christ”) want homosexual marriage, nor simply that the same liberal UCC church wants to perform “blessing” ceremonies for homosexual and heterosexual couples in lieu of marriage ceremonies (so long as actual gay marriage is not legally in place). The problem that i have is the assumption (on both the part of Liberal and Conservative alike, it seems) that there is no such thing as “marriage” unless the government gives its sanction.

What is marriage but a Covenant enacted by God (through his lawfully ordained agent) between two people? If two people came to me and said that they want to be married, but that they were not going to have their marriage licensed by the government, i would not say to them, “Well, then, that’s not a marriage, Folks! Get that sheepskin, or you can count me out!” No, i would look at them say, “That’s fine. You need to understand that your marriage is no less valid, and it comes with no less responsibilities before God on your parts, but if you fully acknowledge that, what date do you have in mind? Let’s start the counselling next week.”

It just goes to show us all that Uncle Sugar has not only conditioned a small portion of the population to be dependent upon it for what they have and do; he has, it would seem, also conditioned all Christians to be dependent upon him (!) for something as sacred and heavenly as the Covenant of marriage. Now that is sad.

I have never had occasion to do so, but given the rise in prominence of it, i anticipate dealing with it at least once during my ministerial career. Homosexuality is one of those things that is difficult to deal with anyway, given the enigmatic nature of it, but add to that the political milieu of the discussion and the sensitivity of the subject matter in general, and it makes it all the more difficult to deal with.

Usually, there are two different ways of approaching homosexuality: either it is a bare choice that people have made, and the person is condemned for making the poor and sinful choice, or it is a natural or in-born condition that a person has no choice in. I have always had a problem with both options, to be very honest. I am Augustinian and Traducian enough to believe that, if we are all born with a nature inclined toward sin, that there certainly is some form of transmission of particular sin tendencies from parent to child, and so in-born tendencies are always factors when it comes to sin—and yet, these are not excuses that make the tendency and behavior flowing from it, therefore, not sinful. But on the other hand, i am enough of a common sense person to know that there are environmental factors that make people more susceptible to certain ways of thinking and behaviors. Both are contributing factors, and, hence, there is no such thing as bare choice—as anyone who has some kind of compulsive or addictive problem understands.

So, having those things as firm beliefs in myself, i truly appreciated this short article helping us to understand some of the contributing factors that lead to homosexuality. In fact, the whole site on which it is found (NARTH: National Association for the Research and Therapy of Homosexuality) is an excellent place that provides excellent resources if we were to come upon a homosexual person struggling with his or her sinful behavior, wanting help that is both biblical and truly scientific.

Now, i can tell the responses i am likely to get from some people, and i don’t usually go for an integrationist methodology for counseling folks, but there are real psychological problems that sin and sinful environments cause, and they need to be dealt with both biblically and scientifically (since, properly done, science and the Bible are not at all enemies, and since all things that God reveals in creation are still God’s revelation and truth). I do believe, though, that this, and not the Nouthetic model, is what will be the long-term help for homosexuals. That’s part of the difficulty i have with the Nouthetic model in general: that there is a command what to do, but no guidance in practically how to do it. That’s a recipe for more frustration and sin, not less. Helping people understand the various sources (environmental, biological, and spiritual) is the way to help them move forward with sins of a homosexual nature.

Of course, while i don’t agree with using tax-payer funding to teach some supposedly “neutral” morality to children of the state, and while it is constitutionally illegal for the Federal government to engange in something it does not have specific constitutional warrant to do (which hasn’t stopped it from exponentially piling up such illegal activities over the last century), it is still within the perview of the several States to choose to make use of such funding for those programs.

Well, my current residence is in the Commonwealth of Viriginia, and there is new evidence that the abstinence education that has been at work here for the last several years is paying off in preventing pre-marital pregnancies and increasing the number of young men and women who wait until they are married in order to engage in God’s gift of sex. And this right on the heels of our illustrious governor cutting funding for abstinence education.

Talk about an idiot politician. For purely political and idealogical reasons, he cuts funding for the thing that is proven to work, and he pledges to fund what is prove not to work.

In London, KY, a woman who “worships” in a snake-handling “church” (please note the well-placed speech marks) died from a snake-bite she received during a “worship service.”

Now, just let that sink in. There are still people in this world (i seriously doubt that they exist at all outside of the United States) who handle snakes in their so-called churches. I think that the historical connection in this regard is, once again, to one of my absolute banes, namely “revivalism.” I just this week posted a quote by John Williamson Nevin in our bulletin about the need to have set liturgy in worship, because, without that objective, set form of worship with historical roots and connections, worship becomes all about subjective fulfillment, and though it might begin as something spectacular (in the etymological sense of the word, i.e., being a “spectacle”), it soon devolves into dead and empty ritual. The ironic thing about this snake-handling is that those people who call themselves Christians and who worship this way would likely look down their noses at your average Broad Evangelical worship service with all the crazy things they do, but they are just as (if not moreso) guilty of the same kind of ridiculous me-centered practices in their worship services.

Now, in many cases, when people in those worship services do get bitten, they don’t seek medical attention, because part of the point is that God will heal and protect you (as per Mark 16). This lady, though, got almost immediate medical treatment, and she was to be med-evaced to Lexington to the University of Kentucky medical center there. Apparently, though, the nurse who was asking the family questions about the circumstances of the “accident” asked them questions beyond those necessary for treatment and did so in some sort of demeaning fashion. When her breathing got shallow (she was bitten in the cheek and her tongue, face, and neck swelled), and her blood pressure dropped, the family apparently asked the doctor to insert a breathing tube, but the doctor told them that her airway wasn’t obstructed and that her problem was elsewhere. The family is blaming those and other issues on the staff of the hospital, and so they are suing the doctor, the nurse, and the hospital for the death of their wife and mother.

Well, just call me a “meanie,” but i say that if you handle snakes, you’re bound to get bitten eventually. It’s like the African pastor who said he was going to walk on water, and so he walked out into the ocean, going deeper and deeper under the water, and he never came back up (alive, at least). When people do all these laughably nonsensical things in their supposed worship, they invite not only the ridicule of people from all spectrums (Christians and non-Christians alike), but they also invite the natural consequences that go along with their activities. Worthst of all of it, they invite God’s own wrath against their idolatry. The fact is that these things aren’t acts of worship at all (at least not worship of Jehovah); they are, to be sure, acts of worship that point to and reflect the glory of the person engaging in them—open and unabashed self worship, which is the worst kind of idolatry that there is. God doesn’t take kindly to any kind of idolatry, but as Lucifer found out, the one who puts himself out as an object of worship is dealt with most swiftly and most severly.

All i can say is that this serves this poor lady right. I feel for her and her family, and i sincerely hope that God mercifully accepted her into his presence. However, anyone with any kind of sense would have seen this one coming. It is only God’s mercy that this doesn’t happen more than it does (and to acts that are just as idolatrous and nonsensical in the worship that we see so often in Evangelical churches).

What’s what old saying? God takes care of children and idiots. I think you know which applies here.

This article from New York Magazine by Naomi Wolf is a must-read for every one in our culture, especially Christians, more especially pastors, and most absolutely especially those of us pastors who have had personal run-ins with pornography in its various forms growing up and becoming men. We have to come to grips with how that has affected us and what it implicitly taught us. Plus, we need to understand that this effect isn’t only from watching internet porn, reading Playboy, or ordering the Spice Channel, but rather it comes just as much from “softer” versions of pornographic images in our culture—from TV to movies. And more than anything, we need to be sure to become resensitized to it so that our sons and daughters don’t face the difficulties that we face because of this ever-present monster that has further perverted our minds (as if fallen sinners needed more help!).

For my part, i think Wolf is half right. Yes, as a result of pornography, we have less intimacy, and greater (unrealistic, really) expectations from women to men (and also from men to women, if we’re to be honest about it). We have, as a result, people who are lonely, and have terrible times in being intimate.

However, that is not the only effect that we see. Just as well caused by the ubiquity of pornographic images in our culture at large is the greater need to become “extreme” in order for some men and women to be sexually satisfied and gratified. This has led to a certain S&M sub-culture that takes a certain sexual gratification in physical abuse and hatefulness. This has led some men who think this way to ignore the pragmatic consideration of finding a mate who shares those predilictions, and cause them, many times, simply to seek out others upon whom to act out their violent fantasies—i.e., victims to rape and ravage in order to gratify themselves. Pornography has a tendency, just as any other additction, to cause a person to build up a certain tolerance to it, and so, after a while, it takes more and more (or more extreme forms of the same) to have anything like the same effect—borrowing from economics, this phenomenon is called the Law of Diminishing Returns.

Not only, though, has it indeed made *SOME* men more ravenous toward women (who could deny that?), it has also bred a culture that cannot be satisfied in the wife of one’s youth. We see all around us the longing to be fulfilled sexually. It isn’t *ONLY* the technologizing of relationships and the relationalizing of technology that has led to a lack of intimacy among real people, it is also the familiarity with the overt promiscuity of the porn culture and the idealism that looks for the “perfect” sexual partner that has led to a culture not even of serial monogamy but really of defacto polygamy and polyandry (it is that, even if traditional marriage has been ignored and avoided, and it must be if the Apostle Paul’s words in 1 Cor. 6 [esp. v. 16] mean anything), with young adults thinking that the only way to find what they are trained by these images to look for is to “experiment” with sex and sexual partners—whether you’re already married or not.

In other words, the porn culture has not only made people in its wake emotionally numb, physically overstimulated (and then understimulated), and intimately divided from one another, it has caused the sex drive to become monstrous in some (to the point of seeing the rape and ravaging of women as the only way to fulfill their desires), and it has also caused the rampant fornication, homosexuality, and adultery in our society today. Worst of all, it has caused a broader phenomenon in our culture that causes people to think that their every fantasy needs to be fulfilled, regardless of how outlandish or unhealthy, and regardless of whom it hurts. That general selfishness must be connected with the inherently self-centered and selfish nature of pornography (rather than seeing sex as how Scripture presents it, as the ultimately intimate act to be enjoyed and shared by husband and wife who are not their own but belong to one another in their bodies for the purpose of fulfilling one another’s healthy desires and needs).

There is alot here to this. Dissertations could be (and, i’m sure, have been) written on these issues. But we  just need to contemplate these things and allow our actions (and our teaching) to follow our thinking.

HT: Mark Horne

My very good friend and sometime mentor, the Rev. Dr. R. J. Gore, is always a very thought-provoking person. His book, Covenantal Worship is marvelously informative and challenging to conservative Presbyterians (if you’d like to hear him expound upon the principles of his book, take a gander over at Covenant Radio to an interview he did with the good folks over there). His classes in seminary (Erskine Theological Seminary) always produced hearty discussion (especially when the Methodists got mad at what he said!). I remember specifically his Christian Ethics class teaching us the famous “triangle” way of “doing ethics” and figuring out what is right and moral to do in any given situation. He always challenged us to think biblically and logically, while also seeing how the decision will affect people in the situation.

Well, that kind of thought-provoking teaching, training, and mentoring is the reason why i’m so surprised that Dr. Gore has approvingly quoted from a fellow who would say something that seems to me to violate the principles that any thoughtful Christian would see from Scripture’s plain teaching—i say “approvingly,” because on Dr. Gore’s blog entry that quotes the following is entitled “Amen.” Here’s the blog entry in its entirety:

From the August edition of the American Legion magazine, LTC Ralph Peters (Ret), says the following:
“Winning is everything. Fighting ruthlessly may not please the safe-at-home moralists, but its losing that’s immoral. Consider one of the many issues about which we’re insistently naive and hypocritical: torture. Earlier this month, our Army released the results of an internally initiated survey of soldiers and Marines in Iraq. The results showed that almost half of our troops would condone torture in specific instances if it saved their buddies’ lives. The media were, of course, appalled. I was shocked, too–surprised that so few of our troops would condone any action that kept their comrades alive. Torturing prisoners should never be our policy, both because it’s immoral and because it’s usually ineffective. But it’s madness to declare that there can never be exceptions. Forget the argument about the ‘ticking bomb’ and the terrorist who might have information that could save numerous lives. Let’s make it personal. Whether you’re left, right or in between, ask yourself this yes-or-no question: if torturing a known terrorist would save the life of the person you love most in the world, would you approve it? If your answer is ‘no,’ you’re not a moral paragon. You’re an abomination. And please make your position clear to your husband or wife, mother or father, son or daughter. Just tell ‘em, ‘Sorry, honey, but I’d rather see you dead than mistreat a terrorist. It’s a moral issue with me.’ . . . We face merciless, implacable enemies who joyously slaughter the innocent with the zeal of religious fanaticism. Yet we want to make sure we don’t hurt anyone’s feelings. We’ve tried many things in Iraq. They’ve all failed. It’s a shame we never really tried to fight.”
WHY IS THIS MAN NOT THE CHIEF OF STAFF OF THE ARMY?

Am i wrong to be perplexed by this? Am i an immoral person because i don’t necessarily think that i’d be willing myself to torture or to allow someone else to torture even an evil person just to protect the life of someone i love? To be very honest, if i told my wife that i most likely wouldn’t support torture to save her life, i’m not sure she would be very upset with me. I think she understands Christian martyrdom well enough to know that Christians shouldn’t want anyone to torture anyone else on our behalves to save their lives. Rather, our lives are Christ’s to take in order to further his Kingdom. We should lawfully seek to preserve our lives as much as possible, but we should always be willing to give them up for the sake of the Gospel of Christ, especially when God-haters would seek to destroy us for being Christians.  

Again, as i said on the comments of his blog, i understand the distinction between the government doing something and an individual doing something. God in his wisdom has granted the civil magistrate certain power and authority that individuals otherwise don’t have (i.e., the right of vengeance, the right of all types of punishment for evil-doers, including capital punishment, and the right to wage war, &c.). However, even if we’re speaking of our government, why would we advocate torture? Haven’t Christians been tortured at the hands of evil men enough to know that only those who are utter unbelievers and hate God’s children are the ones who are willing to do such heinous things? I don’t think you can separate an unbelieving heart from being engaged in the heinous behavior of torture (caveat: that’s not to speak head-for-head about people who have and can engage in these acts that they are necessarily unbelievers, nor is it to say that everyone who opposes torture is necessarily a believer). 

Beyond that, though, our Constitution says that the federal government is prevented from engaging in cruel or unusual punishment. Are we willing to violate the very standard upon which our once-great Republic was founded simply for pragmatic considerations? If our fathers before us, and even our brothers and sons today, were and are willing to give their lives to maintain the principles of the Constitution , why would we be so willing, in the effort to save a single life, abandon those principles? As a Christian, i just don’t see how to be a good citizen without also being a good Christian.

Am i the only one who sees this kind of thing as propaganda for the power-hungry American Empire? Am i *COMPLETELY* off-base on this? Please let me know what you think.

You may or may not have seen the incident yesterday at the opening of the Senate, where the illustrious Majority Leader and Senator from the only state in our Union that has legalized prostitution invited a Hindu cleric to pray to open the senate. Well, in what was reminiscent of Ian Paisley’s shouting down the Pope and being forcibly removed from the European Parliament in the 80s, a man starting praying out loud for forgiveness for our allowing an abominable prayer to be offered. If you haven’t seen the video, take a gander.

So, what do you think? I have a hard time with these kinds of things. I’d like to say that i’d do something like this if it came down to it. But, too, there’s also the point of being respectful to others. People just don’t buy into the idea that we’re a Christian nation, which makes this at least somewhat different than the case of synchretism in the Temple of Jehovah or the government of Israel.

Yet, i still agree that our government should reflect our religion. That religion has always been Christian. Did the Founders of our nation codify our Christian religion in the Constitution? Not explicitly. But my guess is that they saw Christianity as so much part of the warp and woof of our national identity that they thought everyone would understand that Congress not passing any law respecting the establishment of religion meant not creating a State Church like the Church of England (i.e., favoring one Christian denomination over another). I can’t believe that our Foudning Fathers honestly intended for our government and nation to be completely areligious. And what’s really the difference between being areligious and being atheistic? I mean, if the governmnet was supposed to be completely without any kind of religious affirmation, why does the constitutional instructions concerning the time for the certification of elections and for the presentation of bills to the president that have been passed by Congress all explicitly exclude Sunday from having any kind of work done on it or being counted in the number of days for a deadline? That’s obviously Sabbatarian practice being codified into the Constitution itself. And so, if the *FOURTH* commandment has been codified (the traditional Christian understanding of it, to boot, not the Jewish or “Seventh-day” interpretation of it) into the supreme Law of our land, why would the *FIRST* commandment be so far off?

I don’t know. How do y’all see this issue? Am i just too close to Theonomy for comfort? Or am i being wishy-washy?

I came across this article about a young girl (currently ten years old) who had been worshiped as a living goddess by both Hindus and Buddhists, yet who was “deposed” from her position of deity because she didn’t receive “permission” to come to the United States for a promotional tour.

That really struck me because of what we see so often in more liberal forms of Christianity. You know, the people who say that they are Christians, but who also say things like, “I could never worship a God who sends people to suffer in Hell for all eternity!” or “MyGod would never choose some people and not choose others!” or “God loves you just like you are, because that’s how he made you!”

There is a real similarity between what those complete pagans have done to their pre-pubescent little goddess and what some of those so-called Christians do with Jehovah: they will worship only a “god” who conforms to what they believe that God should be, but that “god” that they do worship is never Jehovah of Armies, the Great I AM, whose voice makes the cedars burst to splinters and the deer writhe in labor, who not only counts the number of hairs on our heads, but avenges all evil-doers for their sin and impudence against his holy Law. In other words, they may never be so base as to put a chisel to a block of wood or hunk of stone to make a graven image, but they create an image of God by imposing their own concocted opinions, vain theories, and autonomous standards on their own conception of “god,” thus creating a brand new deity in their own image. And, of course, just like those Hindus and Buddhists with their troglodite religiosity, they will jettison even that god they have created by their own act of fiat if he (or she!) doesn’t satisfy them and do just as they please. That’s really, i think, the most ironic thing: they got rid of Jehovah because he wouldn’t cooperate with them, but even the false gods with whom they replace him won’t cooperate with them—and those gods are their own creations!

Whenever i hear some crazy Christian say something like “I could never believe in a God who sends people to Hell for all eternity!” or “My God would never choose to save some people and not others!”, i always think about one of my college professors at North Greenville University. The Reverend Doctor Walter Johnson always would say to students who made such assinine statements, “Then get your God out of the Bible instead of a cracker-jack box!”

Now that is the epitome of answering a fool according to his folly.

According to the London Telegraph, some leading psychologists in the UK have discovered the ability for even the youngest infants to lie in various different ways. The claim of the Telegraph: “[B]abies learn to deceive from a far younger age than anyone previously suspected.” Well, if i might say so, what Christian didn’t “suspect” that? Psalm 58:3, “Even from birth the wicked go astray; from the womb they are wayward and speak lies.” 

I remember speaking to some friends of mine even before i had children (after my daughter was born, this conviction was only confirmed and reinforced) and telling them of my firm conviction that even the youngest children are capable of and actually engage in lying. It starts with fake crying to get attention, and it goes on from there. Well, now, even the secular psychologists are affirming what Christians have known since our Father, David, told us about how the root of evil is present from the very womb.

HT: Al Stout