Discernment

Last week I wrote Gay priest Sam Allberry is LivingOut... warning against the errors bound up with Rev. Sam Allberry and his LivingOut.org movement now quite popular here Stateside. Since that post, men who read the post through FB links have been quite angry. 

I understand the frustration these men feel at criticisms leveled against a pastor who is committed to foregoing sexual intimacy outside heterosexual marriage, and to speaking against such sin to his liberal synod’s bishops, most of whom are themselves full-blown homosexualists. At this point in Western culture’s normalization of sodomy,  it seems wacko to get technical about our witness against the movement. Something like the enemy of my enemy can’t be anything other than my friend, right?

Trouble is, we can witness to Biblical sexuality in a way that undercuts Biblical sexuality. Which is to say winning isn’t everything; how we fight is an integral part of our witness. Yes, I get it: we’re very weary of the battle. We see the growing marginalization of Christian sexuality and it would be very helpful right now to have...

He who receives a prophet in the name of a prophet shall receive a prophet’s reward; and he who receives a righteous man in the name of a righteous man shall receive a righteous man’s reward. (Matthew 10:41)

This past week, I exchanged several e-mails with a young man who's been reading Joe Sobran and loving it. The e-mails were because this brother is inclined to believe the trash-talk William F. Buckley unleashed against his old friend Sobran, smearing him as a Jew-hater.

I tried to defend Joe against Buckley and all his wealthy friends who lived with him on Israel's Amen Corner, but it was no use. Young men can't help underestimating the cost of discipleship, particularly when a man's apostolate is teaching, preaching, or writing. Do you remember as a young man thinking your cultural sophistication and close study of God's opponents would allow you to get rich being a truth-teller when all other men through the ages got poor and dead doing the same? Hope springs eternal from us human pests, doesn't it?

I'm guessing this was the hope Joe had when as a young man he first started writing. Maybe he could tell the truth and be published by Oxford or HarperCollins? Maybe he could write the truth and get rich doing it? Maybe he could expose Israel's abuse of these United States...

The Donald is a repulsive figure, personally. But don't blow off his supporters by supposing they vote for The Donald because of his three wives, his hair, or his seemingly conscienceless lying. There's something deeper going on here. The New Yorker gets it:

Trump also grasped what Republican élites are still struggling to fathom... The base of the Party, the middle-aged white working class, has suffered at least as much as any demographic group because of globalization, low-wage immigrant labor, and free trade. Trump sensed the rage that flared from this pain and made it the fuel of his campaign.

...When he vows to “make America great again,” he is talking about and to white America, especially the less well off. The ugliness of the pitch will drive some more moderate and perhaps more affluent Republicans to sit out the fall election...

Reformed believers are ground zero of the "more affluent" and we're not known for our sympathy for poor white trash.. They're not a popular cause among the elite. But look at Bernie Sanders:

The Democratic Party has a strange relationship with the white working class. Bernie Sanders speaks to and for it—not as being white but as being economically victimized. He kept his campaign alive last week, in Indiana, in large part by beating Clinton nearly two to one among whites without a college degree.

As I keep saying to friends and family, no matter how repulsive we find The Donald... 

How Stories Deceive is a worthwhile read. It tells the story of a con artist who claims to be a sexually exploited underage teenager. But what the article is really about is the power of stories. Of course, it would have to be in story form to prove the point, and it does a good job. First, some excerpts, then I’ll make a few comments:

“Stories bring us together. We can talk about them and bond over them. They are shared knowledge, shared legend, and shared history; often, they shape our shared future. Stories are so natural that we don’t notice how much they permeate our lives. And stories are on our side: they are meant to delight us, not deceive us—an ever-present form of entertainment.

“That’s precisely why they can be such a powerful tool of deception. When we’re immersed in a story, we let down our guard. We focus in a way we wouldn’t if someone were just trying to catch us with a random phrase or picture or interaction. (“He has a secret” makes for a far more intriguing proposition than “He has a bicycle.”) In those moments of fully immersed attention, we may absorb things, under the radar, that would normally pass us by or put us on high alert. Later, we may find ourselves thinking that some idea or concept is coming from our own brilliant, fertile minds, when, in reality, it was planted there by the story we just heard or read.

“Give me a good story, and I can no longer quite put my finger on what, if anything, should set off my alarm bells. When the psychologists Melanie Green and Timothy Brock decided to test the persuasive power of narrative, they found that the more a story transported us into its world, the more we were likely to believe it—even if some details didn’t quite mesh. The personal narrative is much more persuasive than any other form of appeal. And if a story is especially emotionally jarring—How amazing! How awful! I can’t believe that happened to her!—its perceived truthfulness increases.”

This is what allows scam artists to make a healthy living, whether they are small-time or in the big leagues. Psychologists and others have studied this, and Rob Bell seemed to grasp it intuitively. Why do we fall for lies, whether theological or otherwise, when there’s a good story?

Why bother continuing to warn souls against the betrayal of God by the profs and administrations of Evangelical colleges?

A quarter century ago, I bought a book that put some social science muscle behind what I had observed growing up in Wheaton and knowing Wheaton's profs, administrators, and their families firsthand. The book was Evangelicalism: The Coming Generation by University of Virginia sociologist James Davison Hunter. Originally published in 1987, Hunter's work was based upon a careful survey of students at Evangelical colleges and seminaries, including Wheaton College, Gordon College, Westmont College, Seattle-Pacific University, Taylor University, Messiah College, Fuller Theological Seminary, Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, Wheaton Graduate School, and Westminster Theological Seminary.

University of Chicago Press summarized Hunters' work..

There's a movement insinuating itself into the church and selling a sweet spot to stand halfway between the worldlings' love of all things gay and God's condemnation of the abomination. Led by men and women intent on clearing a path for the mainstreaming of their gay identity among the people of God, when they talk to one another the movement's architects refer to themselves as "Side B." According to their jargon, "Side A" designates gays who consummate their relationships while "Side B" designates gays who don't.

Talking with church people, though, their language gets more nuanced. They call themselves "gay," but they add the qualifier "celibate"—as in "celibate gays." The celibacy they speak of, though, is perversely truncated. Christian terms normally associated with celibacy such as 'chastity', 'purity', 'modesty', or 'virtue' become meaningless when "celibate" is simply a modifier of "gay."

Side B gays also show their sensitivity to normal church-going Christians by not speaking of their Side B relationships as "monogamous covenantal unions" or "gay marriage." Rather their new phrase is "spiritual friendship." Presented well (and gay's are pretty good at presentation), the term takes on a sort of medieval monastic or Pauline buzz that allows naive Christians to let down their guard.

The essential thing noted by Biblical Christians, though, is that these proponents of "spiritual friendship" are united in their repudiation of the sex God made them. So chatting Christians up on the subject of "spiritual friendship" doesn't quite cut it because, whether or not these "spiritual friendships" are consummated, they're nothing like the friendships found...

Just got this response by Mike Cleveland to our earlier post, Setting Captives Free repents of focus on sin and repentance...

This is the headline being run by various media rabble rousers. They're incensed that Gov. Walker won't simply accede to President Obama's religious self-definition. As they see it, a man has the freedom to choose his sex without regard to his body parts, so clearly a man has the freedom to choose his religion without regard to his denial of the religion's God.

So what's wrong with Gov. Walker? President Obama says he's a Christian and that's the end of it.

Questioned, Gov. Walker responded: 

As someone who is a believer myself, I don’t presume to know someone’s beliefs about whether they follow Christ or not, unless I’ve actually talked with him.

We can all speak to President Obama personally, or we can take him at his word...

Is he clueless to our cultural context? Honestly, although it seems incomprehensible, Covenant Theological Seminary grad and PCA pastor Scott Sauls (channelling Wesley Hills) claims David and Jonathan as Biblical support for his project to bring gay men into the mainstream of the Church—as gay men. Speaking of the tender Biblical account of love between David and Jonathan, Pastor Sauls has the audacity to hold it up as a pattern of "covenantal" and "for the rest of life" friendships of "gays" within the Church of Jesus Christ:

"I think that message cannot be missed, it cannot be forgotten when we leave here, that friendship is the answer, true friendship, covenantal like David and Jonathan, 'I commit to you for the rest of my life.' Or like Julie Rodgers, another—you know, a woman with same-sex attraction, has said that—and who has fallen where you have on the ethics of it, and the vision for what that means for her."

[This post is fifth in a series (the first, second, third, fourth, and sixth) working through Pastor Scott Sauls and Christ Presbyterian Church's "Same-Sex Attraction Forum." More will follow.]

King David was light in the loafers. He liked men better than women. Yes, in that way.

Are you surprised? You shouldn't be. Jesus was like this, too...