Author: Matt Powell

Confronting Our Own Sin When We are Sinned Against

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“For whom He foreknew, He also predestined to be conformed to the image of His Son, that He might be the firstborn among many brethren.”  Romans 8:29

The goal of our salvation must always be kept in mind.  The goal of our salvation is perfection, to be like Christ.  This is why He died for us.  This is why He forgives us our sins.  Forgiveness of sins serves the cause of perfection by clearing away the obstacle to fellowship with God, so that the life-giving power of God can have free rein in our hearts.

I am thinking of this in the context of infidelity, which is in the news these days, though infidelity is one of the staples of human existence.  If you haven’t heard the particular nonsense our culture is currently experiencing, it is that there is a web site, Ashley Madison dot com, whose whole reason for existence is to facilitate affairs for married people.  Ashley Madison got hacked and their membership lists got posted online, though not yet in a form easily searchable by the masses (though that is certainly coming, no doubt).  That may be the reason for the occasion of this very articulate post which is addressed to women who just found out their husbands had an affair.  The post is good, but… leaves me uneasy.  I’m not doing any kind of rebuttal to that post, because it is a good post.  But it spurred some thoughts.

The goal of our salvation, as I said, is perfection, being like Christ.  It is not for me to feel good about myself.  Feeling good about myself is very often a positive detriment to the actual goal, because what is necessary for me to be like Christ is repentance.  A lot of repentance, every day, throughout my life.  Repentance is never fun, but it’s like going to the dentist when my tooth hurts- painful, but ultimately far better than the alternative.

The old Reformed, back in the days when precision was really valued, would talk about sinning in excess or in defect.  This issue is a great example.  There are realms of Christianity that tend to blame women for all kinds of things that men do, that women cause men’s lust by not dressing modestly or cause men’s infidelity by not keeping themselves up, or being submissive enough, or not being sexually available enough.  Hannah Anderson’s article linked above is partly addressing that sort of thing, and does a good job of it.  Everybody is always responsible for their own sin.  Nobody else causes it.

Nonetheless, there is another side to it.  A man and a woman become “one flesh” when they marry, and therefore it is always the case that what one does affects the other.  Women are tremendously powerful creatures.  Our modern feminist movement totally fails to understand the real power of women because they have rejected God’s design for the genders, and is driven by a materialist worldview which sees power only in material and physical world (since to a materialist this is all that’s real) and because women often lack the power that men have (physical, financial) they neglect to understand the very real power they do have.  Humans are spiritual creatures.  We are creatures called into existence by a Word, and truths, ideas, concepts lie right at the center of our existence.  Man does not live by bread alone, but by words.  Words can help, and words can also hurt, a great deal.  Words can change our very identity.  In counseling I often ask people to think about some of the most painful memories they have, and suggest that it was something someone said to them, and they always agree.  On the other hand, some of the most positive memories that people have will likewise be something someone said to them.  And women tend to be very good at words.  Women are often very good at relationships and how they work.

We are not Gnostics.  We do not exist in little bubbles unaffected by the things that people do around us.  It is not possible to be so.  So while a man’s sin is never the fault of the woman in his life, nonetheless women need to think carefully about the way they are affecting the men in their lives with their words.  No, your immodest dress is not to blame for the sin of the man.  But of course that immodest dress affects men.  That’s why women dress like that, to exert power over men.

And no, a woman’s hurtful and abusive words are not to blame for a man’s affair.  But of course her hurtful and abusive words affected him, for those words contain great power, and she used them that way precisely to affect him, to tear him down and make him feel like nothing.  Because we are spiritual creatures, and not just physical creatures, attacks against our spirit are every bit as real as attacks against our bodies.  So a man must control himself and refrain from using his often superior physical strength to abuse his wife, and a woman must control herself and refrain from using her often superior verbal power to abuse her husband.

Again, our goal is perfection, to be Christlike.  He always used His power, all His power, for the good of those around Him.  So when a husband cheats on his wife, he is fully to blame for that.  But to say that nothing his wife has done has affected that decision is not necessarily the case.  It is to pretend that our souls exist in little bubbles of Gnostic perfection unaffected by those around us, and that is unbiblical nonsense.  Sometimes the wife has been as good a wife as anyone could expect.  But sometimes not.  If her desire is to be like Christ, then this is an opportunity to take stock, to see how she has sinned as well, to pursue her own goal of repentance and perfection.  Though she has not caused his sin, she may come to realize through self-examination and prayer that she has sinned against him every bit as much as he has sinned against her.  It is a terrible thing to do to avoid this opportunity for repentance and growth, as painful as it is.  This is an opportunity for her to learn to use her power for good toward others, as Christ did.  Women are tremendously powerful creatures, made by God in His image, and need to learn to use their power in a God-honoring way.

The sin in excess is to blame her, to say she forced him somehow to do what he did, that she is responsible for his sin.  The sin in defect is to say that she bears no responsibility for her own sin, or that her own sin has no effect on him at all.

Sin is horrible.  All sin is.  It destroys everything good in our lives.  The greatest gifts God gives us are these opportunities to confront that sin, to repent, to grow.  It’s always incredibly painful.  But the worst thing we can do is to deprive people of these opportunities to confront our sin, learn from it and grow.  When Hannah Anderson focuses entirely on the fact that the husband’s adultery is not the fault of the wife (which is true), it feels very much to me like doing just this, of depriving her of a very real opportunity to confront her own sin and become more like Christ in the process.

Becoming more like Christ, as painful as that always is, is a far better thing than not feeling bad about yourself.

 

No Nationalities in the Eternal Kingdom

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There will not be nations in eternity.

The Lamb, according to Revelation 19:15, will destroy the nations.  He strikes them down with the sword and rules over them with a rod of iron.  The “rod of iron” quote is from Psalm 2, and there, the consequences of being ruled with a rod of iron is being smashed into pieces like a piece of crockery. The people of God are redeemed out of every tribe and nation.  That “out of” is important.  All ethnicities are represented, but their ethnicities are no longer their primary identity.  They are part of the one family of God now, the one human race.

This should inform us as we consider our loyalties to ethnicities and nations in the present age.  Taking care of one’s family is important, and this can extend to the broader family as well without damage to Biblical principle.  We can also look at how God has blessed particular groups over the years, especially through their training in Christianity, that has had such profound effects on the history of Europe, for example.  But we must always recognize that these benefits come from God and from Christianity, and never from the racial / ethnic identity per se.

I believe racism is making a comeback, and I think it’s a direct consequence of the racially inflammatory propaganda of the progressive movement, especially of the current president and his administration.  Rush Limbaugh called it just right; he said electing Obama would make race relations much worse, not better, and they certainly have.

It is no accident that those pushing race conflict are also statists; by breaking down all other allegiances and sources of identity, they can bind everyone to the state.  Further, by stirring up conflict they have a handy club to beat any opponent with.  Statists always push conflict with others, because they always thrive in environments where people are angry and fearful.  But the more they beat people with the club of racism, the less effect that club has.  The sad (and I fear intended) result is actually to drive more whites into their whiteness as a source of identity, for that just increases the conflict.  People are just not going to believe that they are evil monsters because they are white; their response instead will be to say, what’s so bad about being white?  Some are going to believe the arguments that white people are uniquely horrible, and blame their own identity for the ills of the world, but a lot more just won’t.  Kinism, white nationalism, aspects of neoreaction- I’ve seen a real rise in discussion of these ideas, though it’s difficult to discern how much internet discussions represent the broader population.  But knowing people, and knowing the sad history of the human race gives me concern that these represents wide trends in the population.

The response of Christian people must be to not take this bait, to not fall into the trap of the statists, to remember that our identity is in Christ, not in whiteness our American-ness, or western European-ness (if that happens to be our identity).  It is absolutely true that the peoples of western Europe and America have been greatly blessed by our long training in Christianity.  But this fact should amplify our identity as Christians, not as white people.  We will see what happens to these peoples as they reject Christianity, and what happens to other peoples and nations as they embrace it all the more, as is happening in Africa and Asia, for example. There are no nations in the eternal kingdom.  There is one people, called out of the nations, which at the coming of Christ are destroyed by His wrath.

The necessity of being saved in being and in knowledge

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In Sacred history redemption occupies a prominent place, and to deal with redemption without drawing in revelation is not feasible, for as shown above, certain acts are both redemptive and revelatory at the same time.  But the same is true vice versa.  Revelation is so interwoven with redemption that, unless allowed to consider the latter, it would be suspended in the air.  In both cases, therefore, the one must trespass upon the other.  Still logically, although not practically, we are able to draw a distinction as follows:  in reclaiming the world from its state of sin God has to act along two lines of procedure, corresponding to the two spheres in which the destructive influence of sin asserts itself.  These two spheres are the spheres of being and of knowing.  To set the world right in the former, the procedure of redemption is employed; to set it right in the sphere of knowing, the procedure of revelation is used.

-Geerhardus Vos, Biblical Theology, p.15

I love this quote- it shows the necessity of both the acts of Biblical history and how God saved us in our being by that redemptive history, but also the necessity of revelation in order to restore our knowledge.  The two are intimately bound up together, as the revelation shows us the meaning of the redemptive acts, and the redemptive acts are themselves revelatory.

Modern Christian Heresy

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One good indication of just how influential Christianity has been on the world is in how many of the competing ideologies are just distortions of truths that Christianity first introduced.  Christianity taught first the equality and dignity of women.  Modern feminism distorts it by overthrowing any distinction between men and women and rejecting all gender roles.  Christianity teaches the equal worth of people regardless of class or wealth, and a duty to help the poor.  Marxism distorts that by saying that all property is theft and rejecting any right to private property, and that the state will equalize all wealth.  Christianity teaches that we are stewards of the earth and should care for it; modern environmentalism distorts it by teaching that we should aim for as little impact on the earth as possible, that all development of the earth is at best a necessary evil.

If hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue, heresy is the tribute that lies pay to truth.

The Nature of Church Authority

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To put it another way, we often say that the authority of the elders is ministerial and declarative.  It is ministerial because it is service-oriented.  The elders are representatives of the Lord Jesus Christ and it is their job to serve him above all else.  The authority of elders is also declarative, which defines how they serve.  They serve Christ by declaring and enforcing His Word through the sovereign power of His Spirit.  Their role is to set Jesus Christ before the people as their only true Shepherd (John 10:11; i Pet. 2:25; 5:4).  Properly speaking, then, the government of the church is by the ministry of the Word, not by the ministes of the Word.  The elders of the church are stewards of the “keys of the kingdom.”

-Frank Walker, Biblical Church Government, p. 25

I love this description of the nature of church authority- “ministerial and declarative.”  “Ministerial” authority teaches that all authority, including that of the church, is servant-authority- there for the good and welfare of the people, not the right or aggrandizement of the office-holder.  That part is easy to understand, though harder to implement.  But the idea of “declarative” authority is a little harder to understand, and is even less practiced.

It makes it clear that the authority of the church is real, and yet puts sharp limits on it.  It is not absolute.  The church cannot exercise arbitrary authority any way it likes; it is limited to declaring what the word of God says.  When the church excommunicates someone, the church is not determining anything about that person’s status, but rather making a declaration about what the Word of God says about their status.  The distinction may seem fine to some, and in dishonest church officers the distinction will not matter.  But in churches that take the distinction seriously, it is a huge difference.  No church can rightly kick someone out of its fellowship over matters that are not Biblically determined; they cannot excommunicate someone because they are a Democrat or Republican, for example.  They can, however, bring someone under the discipline of the church for advocating political policies which are clearly against the Scriptures, such as abortion or gay marriage.  Church officers have no right to legislate where the Scriptures do not; the prohibition of alcoholic beverages, for example, is an abuse of church authority since the Scriptures do not themselves prohibit such beverages.  The Scriptures prohibit drunkenness, so the elders would need to determine in particular cases whether behavior rises to that level or not.  But they could not simply forbid all alcohol, because the Scriptures do not.

So the officers of the church have no independent authority over people at all; they merely have the authority to apply the Scriptural teachings to particular cases in the church.  That’s what it means that their authority is “declarative”- their authority is to declare (and by doing so, implement) the principles of Scripture.  This is an important aspect of the doctrine of Christian liberty.  The church has no right to bind the consciences of Christian people, and whenever the church invents rules for people, even if they believe that by doing so they will advance Christian principles (like the aforementioned banning of alcoholic beverages), they are guilty of tyranny.

On the contrary, whenever the church refuses to declare the truth of Scripture, including the declaration that those who reject the gospel or rebel against Scriptural principles for the thankful Christian life are outside the kingdom of God and therefore must be excluded from the church, they are failing to be faithful to their calling and are guilty of truancy, the neglect of God-given responsibility.  Both tyranny and truancy are major problems in the church today and throughout its history, as churches have failed to implement Biblical requirements for the church and its discipline, and at the same time have invented their own rules and regulations which they have enforced on people.

Walker’s book is a solid one that calls the church to be faithful to the obligations Christ gave us.

Progressives Hate Humanity

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Again, we see in the Planned Parenthood videos proof of the thesis that progressives hate humanity, and the whole program of progressivism is very simply the rejection of human nature, the rejection of nature itself.  This is because they hate God, and therefore hate what God has created.  They want to be God, and recreate nature according to their own desires.

So, a man (with a Y chromosome) can be a woman just by putting on a dress and makeup, because the ability to reproduce is not an important part of what a woman is.  Here we see their profound contempt for God’s design of gender.

Likewise, sex must be pursued without limits, because all natural consequences of promiscuity are rejected.  The progressive believes that he should decide how sex should be used, not God who made it.  So, diseases will be treated with taxpayer funds, babies that result will be killed with taxpayer funds, and anyone who disapproves of their behavior will be destroyed with taxpayer funds.  Any talk of abstinence or sexual self-control is angrily rejected.

Economic reality will be remade by passing laws.  Supply and demand will be overthrown by government management of the economy and the natural consequences of laziness and wastefulness will be counteracted by welfare.  The laws of nature will be remade through regulation and government programs.  Family will be discarded as unnecessary, churches attacked as harmful.  Nothing must impede the march of the all-powerful state, the collected power of Man, to reshape reality as they see fit, where they, the elites, enjoy no restriction on their behavior.

If you, African American, think that the progressives care about you and think so highly of you, why do they kill your babies at such a high rate?  Why do they continually tell you that you can’t succeed without their help?  Why do they continue to pursue policies that have made an absolute wreck of your communities and families?  Why are they hell-bent on importing huge amounts of cheap labor who will undercut your kids’ chances for scarce jobs?  Do you think it’s an accident that the party pursuing all these things was the same party that defended slavery, the same party that defended Jim Crow?  Do you think it’s an accident that Democratic rule has absolutely destroyed several of the formerly finest and wealthiest cities in America, like Baltimore, Detroit and Chicago?

Hispanics, why do you think the elites in this country want to import so many of you to this country?  Do you really think it’s because they have such deep and abiding love of your culture?  Why do you think they are so anxious to encourage your children to make a trip where they know full well that they will almost certainly be raped and robbed and many will even be murdered?  Does it give you any pause about these people that they are willing to do that to your children just so they can have cheap nannies and gardeners?

Poor whites, do you think that the elites care about you, with their utter contempt for “hillbillies” and “trailer trash” and Walmart?  Why do they import cheap labor to undercut your jobs?  Why do they pass minimum wage laws that make it harder for your children to find work?  Why do they support unions that systematically exclude competition from the marketplace?  Why do they pursue policies that reward laziness and poor decision making, when we know just how dignifying and elevating work is?  Why do they push more and more regulation which favors big businesses that can easily pay for the lawyers needed to navigate all the laws, while making it more and more difficult for a man to start a small business of his own?  Is it an accident that progressive policies destroy the working class everywhere they are pursued?

Women, if you think the elites care about you, why do they continue pushing abortion, despite knowing perfectly well just how much damage an abortion does to a woman?  Why do they have such contempt for you that they think a shameless pervert in a dress with fake boobs is the same as you are?  Knowing full well that most women want to stay home and have children, that most women are happiest in that environment, why have progressives told you for fifty years that you were stupid and worthless for wanting that, and pursuing policies that make it harder and harder for you to do so?  Why have they spent billions on policies encouraging you to leave your kids with strangers where they can be badly educated and alienated from you, just so you can go be a secretary or a waitress for some man who doesn’t care about you?  Is this a “pro-woman” policy?

Is the environmentalist movement really about love of nature?  If so, why do they want to prevent as many people as possible from enjoying it?  Why pursue policies that they know full well leads to massive beetle plagues and the wildfires that follow?  Why pursue policies that wreck economies and destroy people’s livelihoods over the slightest risk to some owl or mouse?  And to those in the lower classes, do you understand that these environmental policies destroy your ability to get a job, let alone have the wealth to go and enjoy the nature they say they love so much?  You can’t eat scenery, as they say.

Anti-war?  Really?  Where are the protests against Obama’s drone strikes?  These are the people who defended Mao and Stalin, who murdered by the millions.  These are the fans of Chavez and Castro, the butchers, torturers and jailers of Latin America.  These are the people with posters and t-shirts of Che Guevara who ran Castro’s torture chambers.  They’re not anti-war.  They’re just against anyone who stands in their way, and will use any rhetoric at hand to undercut their enemies.

They hate God and they hate what God has made.  They hate God’s image most of all.  All of their policies are anti-human, and lead to misery and death.  This is by design.  Their great desire is to be God, to have no restrictions on their behavior, and keeping people poor and subservient is a great way to do this.  This video shows it clearly.  The patients get nothing.  They pay for the privilege of having the fruit of their bodies ripped from them, dismembered and sold to labs.  They don’t care about those poor women.  They care only about their own wealth, their own lifestyle, their own privileges.

The poor and weak that the progressives claim to champion are just being exploited, just being used, to further the agenda of the progressives.  The progressive movement was born out of racism and contempt for anyone not like them, and it is still that today, though they claim to care so much.  Blacks, Hispanics, gays, women- you exist to serve the elites.  They don’t care about you.  They care about themselves.  They’re the scumbag in the bar telling you how beautiful you and buying you drinks so they can get you home and use you for their pleasure.  It was progressives who threw Japanese in internment camps, progressives who lynched blacks, progressives who advocated the sterilization of the unfit, progressives who formed the KKK, progressives who make it impossible today for poor people to make an honest living, progressives who fight every way they can to ensure as many babies as possible are born into single-parent homes where they’ll be all but guaranteed a life of poverty.  It’s progressives who are doing everything they can to keep a steady flood of illegal immigrants pouring into this country so they can be exploited and oppressed by the rich, and so the poor people in this country who might have  a better sense of their rights can never get the boot off their necks.  This is what progressives are, what they always have been, what they always will be.  They’re elitists, who view the world as existing for their own benefit and pleasure, and they don’t care who they hurt or kill to do it.  They hate humanity, because they hate God, and they hate what God has made, and the humanity which most clearly bears his image is that which they hate the most.

“He that hates Me loves death.”

 

Science is Ruined by Worshiping It

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Science was a lot better before people believed in it.

An example:  William M. Briggs reports from a conference of people who do not believe in global warming alarmism, at which he was speaking, and the reaction to that conference of one reporter who clearly worships science for the results he thinks it will give him.

Science, properly understood, is a tool one uses to achieve certain ends.  It is a fantastically effective tool for the purposes for which it is suited.  But as the old saying goes, when the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

You don’t “believe” in a hammer.  You use the hammer.  You use the hammer to pound nails.  You use science to observe and understand things about the natural world.  When you believe the natural world is the only thing there is (materialism), then you will think that science is suited to answering all the questions that there are to ask.

I know a large number of people who profess giddy excitement over the New Horizons spacecraft taking pictures of Pluto.  Many of the people who act this way have only a basic instruction in actual science, if they have any at all. Now I think it’s a cool thing that is happening WRT Pluto, and I find myself amazed at the technical prowess needed to do it.  But it doesn’t impact my life or make it better in any way.  I know people who talk about an event like this the way Catholics talk about the upcoming Papal visit.  I had to use Catholics as an example because we Protestants don’t believe in holy days or the like- perhaps I could have compared it to the way Protestants, or any Christian, thinks about the Second Coming.

It’s not a ludicrous example, in fact, because Science, to the materialist, is the agent of progress.  Nature is all there is, and therefore as I come to understand nature better and better, I will achieve dominance over the cosmos.  Science is the way that humanity is deified, and gains absolute power over the universe.

But this is purely a matter of faith.  Why do we have any expectation at all that science will lead to this outcome?  That is a belief about something that may or may not happen in the future.  Now you might say, “We see all the progress that Science has given us in the past, and if we just project that out to the future, things will just get better and better in the future.”  But there is no reason at all to suspect this.  It is a huge logical fallacy to think that because something has happened in the past, therefore it will happen in the future.  To this I can imagine someone responding, “Well, that may be true, but it can’t hurt to try.”  In fact, it can hurt to try.  Think of the amount of money that is spent on sending a spacecraft to Pluto.  Why was that money not spent on cancer research, or for that matter, something with an even more solidly proven ability to increase happiness like nachos and margaritas?  We have foregone a lot of nachos and margaritas by sending a spacecraft to Pluto.

And.. the excitement.  The giddiness.  “I’m so excited about the Higgs Boson!”  Why?

It’s because it’s an act of faith, an act of religion.  The materialist holds to science as a matter of religious faith, a pure example of what Paul calls worshiping the creature rather than the creator.  The professor of this religious faith believes that the advancement of knowledge will cure the world’s ills, and that this advancement is possible, if we just spend enough money.

Now I am truly thankful for science.  It’s a brilliant tool.  But being thankful for something doesn’t just mean being happy that it exists.  If I give my child a gift, and the child loves it and says, look at this wonderful toy that I found!  Look at this great thing that I bought at the store!  Are they thankful?  No, even though they are happy.

Thankfulness is key because only in recognizing that something comes from God can I give it its rightful place, and use it rightly.  That’s because God’s wisdom is key to understanding the universe.

Science is a great example of this principle.  It was God’s wisdom that gave us science in the first place, and I mean this not in a general way, like He gave us mountains and fire and things, but very specifically; it was greater knowledge of the Bible that came about through the slow and gradual Christianization of western Europe, and in particularly in the Protestant Reformation, that gave us the scientific revolution.  The vast majority of the early figures in the scientific revolution, like Kepler, Brahe, Galileo, and especially Francis Bacon, the one who systematized the scientific method and introduced it to the world, were Christians, and not just culturally, but passionate Christians who specifically cited their Christianity as the inspiration for their work, as well as giving them the intellectual framework to do it. They gave thanks for the minds that God gave them, and because they knew their minds came from God, they knew what they were capable of.  Many secularists point to Aristotle, but the medievals had been studying Aristotle for centuries before the scientific revolution happened, and in many ways, though medieval scholasticism got the ball rolling, it was the rejection of Aristotle’s methods that really enabled the big breakthroughs in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.  The struggle over science was not between the Bible and science, it was between science and Aristotle, whose teachings were dogma in the Roman Catholic Church.

But once man starts worshiping science, excluding God, he stops being thankful for science.  The result is that science now exists to serve his ends.  So it inevitably becomes politicized, as is most obviously demonstrated in the whole global warming debate, but as one of Briggs’ commenters says, actually started much earlier: 

Today the ability to obtain grant funding (primarily from the fed) has become a prerequisite for employment in academia in my field.

Science today is about the pursuit of ideological agendas, rather than the pursuit of truth. So it is completely politicized, and the political agendas of those paying the bills rules the day. This is an inevitable consequence of materialism.  So ironically, the worship of science not only wrecks your soul, it also wrecks science.  When science must carry the weight of your ideological hopes and dreams, then that ideology will become a filter that will govern what you can and can’t accept as true.  When science becomes the means by which heaven on earth will be achieved, then only those scientific conclusions that advance the version of heaven that you’re particularly hoping in will be permitted to receive funding.  And that leads to the ridiculous conclusions that sexual desires (a matter of choice and behavior) are set in stone and cannot be changed, but the perception of one’s gender (a matter one’s unalterable chromosomes) is fluid.

It also gives us the ridiculous conclusions of global warming, which are plainly refuted by the actual record.

It’s just another example of a fundamental irony of the Christian life- He who loves his life will lose it, but he who loses his life for my sake will find it.  If you worship science, your science will inevitably be bad, distorted as it is by the burden of your idolatry.  But if you worship God, then you can do science properly.

What Will We Be Driven By?

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Jim Geraghty described this as a must-read, and he is right.  David French of the National Review writes an open letter to his seven-year-old black daughter, in response to Ta-Neshi Coates’ book, Between the World and Me.

But not everyone. Not all the time. And these small moments — like the elderly woman who demanded to know what you were doing in the neighborhood pool, or the little boy who told you that his daddy won’t let him go to neighborhoods where black people live — are bringing me, inevitably, to tell you about the big things: about things like the Middle Passage, the overseer’s lash, the Klan (founded not too many miles from your own home), Jim Crow, redlining, and the progressive “science” of eugenics.

These are things that happened — painful things that you’ll find so difficult to believe, especially as you prepare for a future where anything is possible, where college and careers open before you, where your private education gave you advantages you won’t understand until much later, and where your intact, loving family brought you a sense of peace and stability that sadly too few kids understand. Your life is a place of possibility. The past looks like a place of pain. So that’s why we’ll ease you into an understanding of the truth. That’s why we’re not going to dump all of life on you all at once. As we tell you the truth, we will never forget to tell you the larger Truth — that man is fallen, prone to evil. Yet God is holy, prone to redeem. And you can never forget both realities. This is the Bad News and the Good News that represent the past, the present, and the eternal future.

There are ideologies driven by rage and anger, for sure, on the left and on the right.  It is so easy to fall into Us vs. Them mode, especially with the horrific and infuriating news we get every day.  But when we remember, as French so beautifully says here, that this world is not our home and the construction of the ideal society or the good life now is not our goal, but rather the hope of eternal life in Christ, that permits us to disengage from the hatred that so easily comes from a focus on the evils of the day, and simply show others the love that Christ showed us.  Thank you, David French.

Read the whole thing, please.

No Reason to be Ashamed

Matt Powell1 Comment

When someone expresses contempt for Christianity, ridicules people who believe in Christ, I just want to shake them sometimes.  Even from a purely human perspective, this is the faith that prompted Michelangelo* to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.  It’s the faith that motivated all of Bach’s incredible music.  It’s the faith that drove Kepler to try to understand the movement of planets.  And I am foolish for following this faith?

What has materialism given us?  What great accomplishments have been motivated by a belief that nothing more than matter and energy exist, that the supernatural is all just delusion, that we all just turn into worm food when we die?  What great legacy has that belief left to the world?  I know there are plenty of atheist musicians and artists, and plenty of atheist scientists.  But are they specifically motivated by their philosophical beliefs to do what they do?  Maybe John Lennon was when he wrote “Imagine”.  Then of course there’s all the totalitarianism and murder which was specifically motivated by materialistic naturalism.  I just learned about the charmingly named “Road of Bones” recently.  So there’s that.

My point is, we have nothing to be ashamed of.  It’s very fashionable to denigrate Western civilization these days, but when someone stops being a child and starts being a man, he will immediately recognize that Western European civilization, built on the deep influence of Christianity, was the finest civilization the world has ever produced, and as Christianity fades in Western Europe, I don’t see the cultural output of Europe and the United States exactly improving as a result.  We’ve got better gadgets, sure.  But where are our Michelangelos?  Where are our Bachs or Keplers?

This is all just supportive, of course.  The only reason anyone ever believes in Jesus is because they heard His voice and recognized their Shepherd.  That’s the only reason anyone needs.  But it shows the blindness and foolishness of those who reject Him that they think of Christianity as some hillbilly backward faith and themselves as the great sophisticates.

*corrected.  It was of course Michelangelo, not Da Vinci, that painted the Sistine Chapel.  Thanks, alert readers.