I’m in a kind of a mood today.



In the last couple days the Minnesota House and the Senate, both with Democrat majorities, have passed a bill legalizing homosexual marriage, and about an hour and a half ago the governor signed it. August 1 it becomes law.

The prospect of being hanged in a fortnight, as Dr. Johnson noted, concentrates the mind wonderfully. And the prospect of my own eventual imprisonment for a hate crime also has the effect of focusing my own thoughts. A Christian ought to be dead to the world, prepared at all times to suffer for his faith. And it looks very much (at least to me) that such a time is coming.

If I’m being paranoid, I’m not the only one. My friend Mitch Berg of Shot In the Dark blog, a libertarian and no Bible thumper, addresses (among other points) the abysmal record of “freedom to marry” advocates in terms of spreading the freedom around in this post.

Chanting “The First Amendment protects religious expression!” is about like saying “the Second Amendment protects your right to keep and bear arms!” or “the Fourth Amendment protects you from unreasonable searches and seizures!” or “The Tenth Amendment reserves unenumerated rights to the States and People!”. All are true – provided you take them seriously enough to beat back ill-advised legal attacks on them.

So I’m contemplating how to prepare for persecution to come – not the metaphorical kind where we complain about people talking to us mean, but the kind where we actually get sent to prison for expressing our beliefs. Do I compose my soul to accept arrest and incarceration? Do I squirrel away portable wealth for a quick run for the border (I understand diamonds aren’t as useful as they once were)?

Or should I take the Lord literally when He says “Cast no thought upon the morrow?”

Must ponder.

Neanderthal Man



Things Learned While Looking for Something Else Dept.:

If you belong to one of those increasingly rare churches that still sings hymns occasionally, you’ve probably sung the hymn, “Praise to the Lord, the Almighty.”

If you look at the bottom of the page, you’ll note that it was written by Joachim Neander (1650-1680), and translated by Catherine Winkworth.

Neander, though born in Germany, somehow managed to be neither Lutheran nor Catholic, but Reformed. He experienced a Christian conversion while studying theology, and became a Latin teacher in Dusseldorf. A lover of nature, he used to preach to large open air meetings in the Dussel river valley. He also wrote more than 60 hymns.

Long after his death, in the early 19th Century, the valley where he used to preach was renamed the Neander Valley in his honor. Or, in German, Neanderthal.

And it was in the Neander Valley, of course, that scientists found the bones of the prehistoric humanoid who became known as Neanderthal Man.

So even when they look back at their evolutionary family tree, biologists must pay tribute to a Christian hymn writer.

Mwa-ha-ha-ha! You cannot escape us! We’re everywhere!

Photo ©2006 Wikimedia Commons user Trounce. Licensed under CC-BY-SA

Today I got personally insulted (by insinuation) on Facebook. And it pleased me no end. Because the insult was based on the kind of prejudice that proves my point better than any argument I could make.

I got enticed, against my inclinations, into a discussion about homosexuality. A woman asked me how I knew that homosexuality was a sin. (An inexact description of my position, as I consider only homosexual actions sinful; the orientation itself is neither here nor there, except as an aspect of the Original Sin we all share).

I told her that I’d read the Bible, rather than just hearing it talked about.

She admitted she hadn’t read the Bible, but said that she was pretty sure I hadn’t either.

Well, I have. More than a dozen times. But I found her assumption fascinating and revelatory.

We Protestants are prone to seeing Biblical ignorance as an aspect of the Dark Ages. Illiterate Christians of those times viewed the book with superstitious awe, even fear. Only the priest, enjoying magical protections, was able to unpuzzle its mysterious symbols and mediate its meaning to the common folk.

We have entered a new Dark Age, in terms Biblical knowledge. Once again the average church member sees the Bible, not as a book to read, study, and discuss, but as a fearsome talisman. It’s so long, and so full of riddles. We dare not approach it. Open that cover, peruse those mysterious words, and a madness is likely to seize us. Soon we may be changed out of recognition. We may no longer be able to live our lives as we are accustomed to.

Which, of course, is true.

Gustav Dore, “Nehemiah Views the Ruins of Jerusalem’s Walls” (1866)



I started reading the Book of Nehemiah again the other day, and I got to thinking about walls.

Walls are unfashionable in our time. “Open plan” homes are trendy (or maybe that trend has passed. I’m not exactly up on architectural fashions). For years, businesses have believed – in the absence of any evidence whatever – that productivity and morale can be improved by putting employees in big bullpens instead of giving them offices (management, of course, gets to have offices). When people talk about “tearing down walls,” they generally mean walls of prejudice and misunderstanding. This trend of thought goes back a long way, at least to Robert Frost’s poem “Mending Wall”: “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall, That wants it down!”

I myself, on a far lower level, wrote a song with the same sort of theme back in my college/musical group days. And no, I won’t tell you the words. You’ll never hear it, and I’m fine with that.

There’s an assumption in a lot of Christianity, too, that walls are uniformly bad. All walls need to go. Joshua knocked down the walls of Jericho. Christ, as we are told in Ephesians 2:14, destroyed “the dividing wall of hostility.” So the reflexive assumption is that Christians are against all walls, at least in the moral and cultural sense.

But it’s not at all that simple in reality. If you actually read the Bible (and one of the problems I’ve faced increasingly, on the rare occasions when I can be lured into an argument, is that I’ve found myself arguing a book I’ve actually read with people who only know it by hearsay) you’ll see that walls in Scripture are just like any other temporal thing. They’re good in the right place, and bad in the wrong place. The whole Book of Nehemiah is about restoring a wall that’s been torn down. The wall itself is a symbol of the religious law that stands between the Jews and their pagan neighbors. This wall is a necessity if the nation is to survive; it has God’s blessing. In the parable of the vineyard in Matthew 21:33-41, Jesus tells of a man who plants a vineyard and builds a wall around it. This land owner represents God, and his wall is a perfectly reasonable barrier to keep unwanted pests, human and animal, out.

There’s a perception about in the world today that Christians have no sense of nuance. Everything is black and white for us. We can’t see shades of gray.

But that’s only true if you’re selective in your observations. In the matter of walls, for instance, Christians see them as either good or bad, depending on who builds them, where, and for what purpose.

Or, as G. K. Chesterton said in Why I Am a Catholic, “There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.”

Amanda Thatcher, former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s granddaughter, sent many media voices chattering by her reading of Ephesians 6:10-18 at her grandmother’s funeral yesterday.

Our thoughts and prayers go out to all those affected by the appalling violence at the Boston Marathon today.

Let us turn now to our Hubris Corner. I’ve decided to make another of my legendary long-term predictions.

As you may recall, I have (or believe I have) a kind of knack for spotting long-term social trends. I’m no good at picking lottery numbers (actually I’ve never tried), and I generally get elections wrong. But over the long haul I seem to be able to sight along the lines of current events and predict what’s coming in a decade or two. I have a good record with that sort of thing. Or so I believe.

So here’s what happened. I woke up from a dream early Saturday morning filled with a sense of conviction about the future of the liberal churches and their seminaries.

I speculated a while back about why liberal churches even exist anymore, since their theology makes piety unnecessary and their social views turn charity over to the government. I read an article recently – wish I remembered where – which pointed out another aspect of the same situation. That was that, while conservative churches seem to be winning what might be called the “church wars” (in that conservative churches are experiencing growth, at least in some areas, while liberal churches are steadily declining everywhere), the liberal churches are winning – or have won – the culture war. That means that while a majority of the people in churches may believe what conservatives believe, the majority of people not in churches believe what the liberals believe. And there are more people not in churches than in churches.

So will the liberal churches just die, like a salmon that spawns and expires? Continue reading Looking down the road →

Thabiti Anyabwile, Senior Pastor of First Baptist Church of Grand Cayman, has been blogging his critique of Douglas Wilson’s 2005 book, Black and Tan: A Collection of Essays and Excursions on Slavery, Culture War, and Scripture in America. Wilson has joined in freely, and the two have charitably and thoroughly argued on the important issues of slavery in the American South, the authority of Scripture, and how the issues of 1860 were handled in relation to issues today.

Anyabwile posted a round-up of links to the whole discussion here. It isn’t a simple argument, so I don’t think I can adequately summarize it here.