Halloween '17

This year was the first year I was able to do Trick or Treating Halloween night with the girls. Last year I worked, and the girls did Trick or Treating in Blue Ash so they could visit me; the year prior to that I worked, as well, and the girls were in Lexington and Trick or Treated with their maternal grandparents. The year before that we did Trick or Treating at the Tri-County Mall (since it was cold and rainy), but because the pickings were so slim, I don’t think it counts.

Chloe used face paint to dress up like a zombie, and we wrapped Zoey in Ace bandages so she could go as a mummy. We Trick or Treated in our neighborhood, and we had fantastic luck: the girls’ bags were filled to the brim! The highlight of Trick or Treat was the House of Terror down the street. There were two scary-looking clowns wielding maces and stalking the driveway, and we had to walk up the driveway to a booth to collect the candy.

Zoey clung to me like a life-vest.

“I’m scared of the clowns, Anty, but I need the candy.”

She ended up burying her head in my neck and crying.

But she got two handfuls of candy, so I think it was worth it.

When we got home we rifled through their candy (Mom & Dad always get first pick!), and I ordered Papa John’s for dinner and we made mummy dogs (hot dogs wrapped in dough). Ashley broke out some Stella Rosa peach wine and we lit a fire in the hearth and watched Caroline on Netflix. It was, without a doubt, our best Halloween yet.

~ the Battle of Endor ~

~ the Battle of Hoth ~

 

~ the Battle of Yavin ~

[The Grace of Shame]

“Today, every Christian is being called to choose between the wide path of acceptance by the world and the narrow path of calling sexual sinners to repentance. Certainly we’ll be misunderstood, scorned, and persecuted, but this is how Jesus suffered before us. No generation of Christians has ever escaped taking up their cross in following Jesus. He bore the cross first, so shouldn’t we bear it with him? This refusal to speak God’s words to sinners, using His language He has given us in His Word, is itself sin. When we are ashamed of God’s words, we betray our duty. If we have any compassion for the effeminate, gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and transsexuals, we must return to speaking biblically about their sins and temptations.”

On Biblical Manhood. “Once we catch a vision for living out our manhood by faith as a command of God, then we begin to see that the real essence of manhood isn’t having a buff body. Rather, it’s taking initiative and responsibility for others. It’s saying no to our lusts and pleasures. It’s having faith to do things that look like they are going to absolutely destroy any future of us getting jobs or having a church. It’s calling others to follow you by faith on that same crazy path. It’s taking weight on yourself, and carrying it for other people. In a word, it’s fatherhood.”

Hard Men vs. Soft Men. “Hard men build civilizations; soft men destroy them. Hard men build families; soft men destroy them. Hard men preach; soft men wonder and suggest. Hard men are zealous in worship; soft men are passive. Hard men love discipline; soft men hate it. Hard men love soft women; soft men loved hard women. Hard men raise sons and daughters; soft men raise persons. Hard men are loud in worship; soft men are loud in whining. Hard men are in the kingdom of God. Soft men are not.”

On the ‘Gay Christian’ Movement. “The ‘gay Christian’ movement is contrary to God’s Word whether or not the particular person claiming the label is sexually active. God doesn’t create any man gay or any woman lesbian. Jesus told us that, from the beginning, God made them male and female. God made man to love and desire woman—not another man. He made woman to love and desire man—not another woman. This is as true today of our sons and daughters as it was true of God’s son and daughter, Adam and Eve. Thus it is that Scripture warns that soft men and sodomites will not inherit the kingdom of God. They are turned against who God made Adam to be—and every man since. The Word of God says these men have ‘abandoned the natural function of the woman and burned in their desire toward one another,’ and every Christian trembles to read this judgment, turning to plead with God to rescue these souls He has given over to degrading passions.”

On Reparative Therapy. “A man’s sexuality goes to the core of his being, so how can it be ‘superficial’ to talk to him about ways he can embrace his manhood in Christ? What is ‘superficial’ and why should we apologize for pleading with him and praying for him to be healed of his sins of softness, complacency, fearfulness, masturbation, and irresponsibility?... The truly superficial response of ministers to the effeminacy and sodomitic sins of the souls around them would be for them to announce they now believe in homosexual orientation and thus are opposed to reparative counseling that tries to change his sexual orientation—covering up their retreat by telling their constituents they made this change because of their deep commitment to repentance and the pure simplicity of the Gospel.”

“Repentance and faith cannot be pried loose from our personhood, which is to say our manhood and womanhood. Coming to faith and Christian discipleship are never asexual, because God made us in His own image, male and female. Thus freedom in Christ always liberates us to better love and live our God-ordained manhood or womanhood. We come to faith through repentance from our effeminacy, sodomy, or lesbianism, and the sincerity of our repentance and faith is proven by embracing heterosexuality. It can’t be otherwise. Anything less is superficial healing. If we oppose reparative therapy, we tell the watching world that the effeminate and men who lie with males can’t change, or don’t need to. Where, then, is our Christian love for these sinners? Maybe more to the point, where is our fear of God?”

But isn’t all sin the same? “If the project we’re working on is getting the sheep to embrace gay Christian pastors, success will require breaking down and removing the sheep’s biblical repugnance to sodomy passed down to them by two millennia of Christian fathers and mothers. If that’s the goal, pulling in sins like greed and pride to ‘sit on the same level’ with sodomy is perfect strategy. It’s also good strategy to rename sodomy ‘same-sex sexual activity’ and to commend it as ‘loving and monogamous.’… Not all sins are equal. Scripture says the opposite. Some sins are worse than others and one sin is the worst of all—blasphemy against the Holy Spirit. The Apostle Paul also warns that sexual sin is worse than other sin because ‘the immoral man sins against his own body.’… Yes, the Word of God declares that men who are covetous, who are drunkards, who are effeminate, and men who lie with other men will not inherit the kingdom of God, but this is not to say that none of these sins are worse than the others. Sodomy is so very wicked that—along with child sacrifice, incest, and bestiality—it polluted the land of Canaan and caused that land to spew the Canaanites out.”

On ‘Gay Christianity.’ “There have always been men serving faithfully in the diaconate, eldership, and pastorate who have committed terrible sins in the past, yet God raised them up to be shepherds of His flock. Take the Apostle Paul, for instance: he had been a persecutor of Christ and His church. The Apostle Peter denied Christ three times, and later he was rebuked by the Apostle Paul for siding with the Judaizers. Lot committed incest, Augustine shacked up with his girlfriend, John Newton was a slaver—need we go on? But this is what they had been, past tense. None of these men declared that these sins were their present identity. Augustine didn’t come out of the closet and say he was a ‘fornicator Christian.’ Lot didn’t come out of the closet and publicly identify himself as a man whose present desires ran toward incest… Kind David repented of his adultery and murder; he didn’t tell everyone ‘adulterous Christian’ was his present identity and would remain so to his dying day. He didn’t ask Desiring God to publish an article about how nasty and men church people are to adulterous Christians, going on to tell their constituents that there’s nothing wrong with adulterous Christians being pastors… Every pastor has confessed sin himself and has heard other pastors, elders, and deacons confess their sin. If we were listening to a man’s confession of sin during his examination for ordination, and he said he had been a fornicator, murderer, or adulterer, we would not tell him he was disqualified any more than we would tell a man he was disqualified who said he had been effeminate, or had had sex with a man. Rather, we would say: ‘Such were some of us; but we have been washed, we have been sanctified, we have been justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and in the Spirit of our God.’ But that’s not what’s going on here. The entire ‘gay Christian’ advocacy movement being promoted by the Gospel Coalition, Desiring God, and Living Out is not focused on reminding the church who we all used to be and how lost we were back then. These organizations are not naming men who have repented of effeminacy and sodomy, men who have been washed, sanctified, and justified in the name of Jesus by the power of the Holy Spirit. Quite the opposite: they are naming men who have not repented of effeminacy, and they are joining these men in their demand that the church stop calling them to be the men God made them to be.”

On Shame. “Christians must discern the difference between true and false shame. True shame is the result of falling short of the standards set by God in His Word, whereas false shame is connected with falling short of man-made, cultural standards which have nothing to do with the standards set by God in His Word… In Christian cultures of former times, many of their standards were aligned with God’s commands, so the shame they attached to sin was a great help to souls in their pursuit of God. Now though, Westerners have thrown out God’s big laws, replacing them with innumerable petty laws that flow from man’s prejudices and cater to his sinful desires.”

On Gay Pride. “Remember that it is God who hammers home the shame of men lying with males. He’s the One who inspired the words ‘profane, ‘abomination,’ ‘defiled,’ ‘perversion,’ and ‘detestable.’ He’s also the One who placed same-sex intercourse in sin lists alongside the most terribly degraded sins of incest, bestiality, and murder. Homosexualists were determined to remove sodomy’s shame, and their methods weren’t subtle. Since pride is the opposite of shame, they named their rebellion ‘gay pride,’ and ran their flag up the pole everywhere. They printed buttons and bumper stickers, wrote books and articles, filled the National Mall with rainbow quilts, and held ever-larger and ever-more-obscene marches down Main Streets where they paraded their shame. They have been so successful that, today, pastors and church leaders prattle on about ‘gay Christians,’ ‘spiritual friendship,’ and ‘homosexual orientation.’ Christians no longer speak of ‘sodomy,’ but merely ‘alternative lifestyles,’ and we have arrived at the point that the language of the world and the language of Christians is almost indistinguishable. It’s gotten to the point that the high point of many pastors’ Gospel witness is to make a rather hesitant suggestion that ‘alternative lifestyles may not be God’s best for human flourishing.’”

“We are to seek ways to call people who are filled with shame to trust Jesus and repent of their sin. We are to call those covered with the shame of their sin to turn from their desire to hide and despair of themselves, trusting Jesus to wash them whiter than snow… The Gospel of Jesus Christ never minimizes shame. Rather, the Gospel removes shame through the justification of the lost, the sanctification of the believer, and the glorification of all those who belong to Christ when we pass from this world to the next. Through the work of the Holy Spirit, all who believe on the name of Jesus will ‘lay aside the old self, which is being corrupted in accordance with the lusts of deceit’ and ‘put on the new self, which in the likeness of God has been created in righteousness and holiness of the truth.’ There’s an old saying: ‘There are three things which the true Christian desires with respect to sin: justification, that it may not condemn; sanctification, that it may not reign; and glorification that it may not be.’”

On Total Depravity. “Total depravity is a terribly heavy biblical doctrine even when it isn’t misunderstood to mean we are always as bad as we could be. It’s hard to look in the face of the Fall and see the corruption our father Adam brought on us all for what it really is… [What] else [besides Total Depravity] could explain our unlimited capacity to desire evil and give ourselves to sin? Only the Fall and corruption of original sin explains us to ourselves. Only the man who understands original sin also understands Scripture’s statement that Christ reconciled us to God when we were His ‘enemies,’ and that, outside Christ, every man is a ‘slave’ of ‘sin,’ ‘lawlessness,’ and ‘corruption.’ That those who don’t have God as their Father have the devil as their father.”

Political Correctness in the Church. “Today’s political correctness gags God’s truth everywhere. No one says it (because it’s embarrassing to admit), but political correctness is almost as oppressive inside the church as it is in the public square. In our online age, political correctness stultifies Christian writing, teaching, and preaching. There is no privacy. Everything goes online and is judged by the horridly intolerant homogenization of what the most insecure and unprincipled citizens of our nation judge to be either ‘nice’ or ‘mean.’… [St. Paul] never stopped suffering for his faithfulness to God, and much of that suffering is chronicled in his New Testament epistles, which record the constant attacks upon God’s truth—not outside—but inside the church… [The] most important battles the Apostle Paul fought for the Gospel were against those who infiltrated the church, promoted themselves as wise men and leaders, and flattered the members of the church with false doctrine in order to gain those members as their supporters.”

Imperfect Evangelism. “There is no such thing as perfection in our witness to the Gospel today. Each of us has our own sins and temptations and we will see those sins and temptations in everything we do and say, including our Gospel witness. We all know the routine: Satan tempts us to be quiet until we’re perfect, and then he makes sure we’re never perfect so we’re always silent. Perfectionism is the perfect gag for Christians. But if we wait until we’re perfect to witness to the world of sin and righteousness and judgment, we’ll never do it at all.”

[Empires of Dirt]

Defining the terms. “Secularism refers to the idea, popular for the last few centuries, that it is in fact possible for nations to be religiously neutral. This impressive trick is managed by having everyone pretend that secularism does not bring with it its very own set of ultimate commitments. But it does bring them, and so secularism has presented us with its very own salvation narrative, in which story the Enlightened One arose to deliver us from that sectarian strife and violence. The horse and rider were thrown into the sea, and this is why you can’t put that Christmas tree up in the county courthouse. American Exceptionalism is the idea that America is more of a creed than a nation. This kind of American exceptionalism makes a certain kind of civic religion possible, a quasi-sacramental approach which all consistent Christians reject as, in equal turns, blasphemous and silly. American exceptionalism in this sense is currently the high church form of secularism. American exceptionalism should not be defined as the grateful recognition that we live in a nation that has been enormously blessed in many ways. What might be called normal patriotism is not idolatrous, but is simply natural affection. Radical Islam is a Christian heresy, but one of the features that it retained in its departure from the truth was the idea that religious claims are total and absolute. Islam functioned in this way for many centuries, competing head to head with the Christians, before the Enlightenment arrived in order to demote all forms of religious totalism (except for its own). Muslims who have accepted the claims of this secularism are now called ‘moderate’ Muslims, while Muslims who are faithful to the older, all-encompassing claims of Islam are called radical Muslims. The word radical comes from the Latin radix, which means root. Radical Muslims have gone to the root of the matter, and they are the ones who at least understand the nature of the conflict. If Allah is God, then follow him. If he isn’t, then we shouldn’t,”

On Idolatry. “Idolatry is an account of the world. It is not stand-alone worship of some god who is not God, who is being worshipped for its own sake. No, the idol is connected to an account of the world. This means that when we reject the idolatry, as we must do, we are still not in a position to reject the thing of which that idol is erroneously thought to be lord. We reject Aphrodite, not sexuality. We reject Mammon, not money. We reject Ceres, not wheat farming. We reject Poseidon, not joining the Navy.”

On Liberty. “Individual liberty is a good thing, a blessed thing. It is a gift of God and can only be sustained over time when a people extend gratitude to the one who gives it to us. Secularism, in all its forms, is therefore the enemy of liberty. Some forms of secularism set themselves against liberty overtly—the idols of the collective, for example. We oppose them, too, because we are anti-Communist, and we are anti-Communist because we love Jesus. Other forms of secularism set up a goddess of liberty over against the collective, and we reject that form of idolatry also. We reject the god of chains, because he will put is in chains, and we reject the goddess of untrammeled liberty and autonomous individual freedom… because she will put us in chains.”

“[The] biblical Christian has a natural point of appeal above every human institution—whether that institution be popular elections, that fortress of fraud we call the Congress, the faux-imperial White House, or the black-robed SCOTUS Nazgul who ghoulishly prey on the unborn. One of them singly, or all of them together, can be withstood by one courageous man with an open Bible. ‘You mat not, as Yahweh reigns, do this thing.’ To take such a stand would require courage, as John the Baptist had to have in order to rebuke Herod, but to take such a stand cannot depend on a convoluted set of political contradictions. Life is simple. God outranks the king. The king is to do what God says, not the other way around.”

On Moral Relativism. “One of the central characteristics of our cultural disease is our societal relativism. This is the end result of what C.S. Lewis called the poison of subjectivism, and it results in the abolition of man. ‘Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter!’ (Is. 5:20) But this moral inversion is not something that can be achieved in a day. Before you reverse good and evil, you must flatten good and evil, and before you flatten good and evil, you must flatten greater evil and lesser evil and greater good and lesser good. Moral egalitarianism is a rot that proceeds slowly. Woe unto them that call lesser evil greater evil, and greater evil lesser evil; that put darkness for twilight, and twilight for darkness; that put white for off-white, and off-white for white!”

Three Views on Christ’s Relation to Culture. “What are the possible relations that this risen Christ could possibly have to the secular city? And which is the right one? 1. Christ the isolationist. In this view, the world is going to Hell, and we are called to live in the lifeboat commune populated by those who know the ship is going down. The mentality that drives this is radically sectarian, which is why the lifeboats are usually pretty small, and getting smaller. Not infrequently, it ends with pure churches of one member each bobbing around on their individual inner tubes. 2. Christ the conference grounds organizer. Here the world is also going to Hell, but it will be a while yet, and we have to live the bulk of our lives out ‘there.’ So arrangements have been made for our restorative ‘getaways,’ and we periodically retreat to these conference grounds for talks that cheer us up before we have to go back out into the world, in order to live in the way that our masters out there tell us to. 3. Christ the figurehead. In this setup, Christ is given the preeminent place of honor, religiously speaking, but the fundamental rules by which the affairs of state are governed are the ancient ways of death… 4. Christ the imperial slave. Empires are pragmatic and pretty easygoing. Any religious group numerous enough to constitute a constituency will be invited to participate in International Religious Awareness Week. Their amusement park ride ‘of faith’ will be commended along with all the other rides, and the one rule is that the pluralistic state gets to set the ticket price, organize everything, print the brochures, and take in the receipts. 5. Christ the Lord. This is the view set forth in the pages of the Scriptures. All authority has been given to Him, and we, the children of men, have to do what He says. For starters, we begin with ‘repent and be baptized.’ We then move on to learning to do ‘everything He has commanded.’”

On Sharia Law. “Why should we resist the encroachment of Sharia law based on our Western values? What is the opposite of Western values? That would be Eastern values, and can anybody give me a good reason why we should prefer one position over another on the basis of geography? Western values have value only if they are a coded way of referring to something else. And that something else cannot be another horizontal fact, like representative government, or women’s rights, or anything like that. That just pushes the question back a step. Why should we prefer those? And if we sat that Western values simply means ‘our values,’ then why should those outrank ‘their values’? In the ebb and flow of Darwinian struggle, ours sometimes loses to theirs. ‘Western values’ as an appeal works only if it is a coded reference to Christendom, and that only works if Christ is still there. Anything else is arbitrary, jingoistic, and stupid. Anything else is a couple of dogs fighting over a piece of meat. Right now, we are the bigger dog—but we are also a bigger dog in the middle of some kind of existential crisis… Western values are to be preferred in a conflict like this only if they are grounded in some way in the will of God. If they are not, then they will go down before the will of Allah like dry grass before the scythe. Islamism will go through deracinated Western values like a hot knife through butter. It goes back to Chesterton’s adage—if you don’t stand for something you will fall for anything.”

“Some secularists want to laugh off the Muslims—pointing at the state of plumbing in places like Somalia. But contests like this are not determined by counting the guns. You cannot decide a war by comparing the relative size of the GDP. Who was stronger, the Roman Empire or the barbarians who overran it? Wars are not tautological—the stronger force is not whichever wins by definition… History is littered with examples of empires, nations, and cities that fell to inferior forces when by all rights they should not have… And Muslims generally know what they are doing—in the Ground Zero battle [to build a mosque] and ongoing efforts like it. What is that exactly? They are exposing the intellectual, theological, and ethical bankruptcy of secularism, and they are doing it on purpose. To answer their challenge, [intelligent persons] are reduced to saying that sacrilege is defined by what lots of people think, true or false doesn’t matter, or where lots of people died, right or wrong doesn’t matter either. Someone really does need to tell secularist America that her gods are genuinely pathetic. And currently, the Muslims are doing this because the Christians won’t. And the Christians who won’t do this are not so much in need of a different kind of theology as they are in need of a different kind of spine.”

The World as the Church’s Parish. “The Church should think of the entire world as her parish. It is out in the parish that people grow barley, repair automobile engines, cut flowers, make love, and, despite the late sixties, make war. The Church is the ministry of Word and sacrament… When the parishioners come to church, they are taught and instructed in their duties of discipleship, and they are fed and nourished so that they might have the strength to meet these duties… The bottom line is this. If the Church is not transforming the culture around her, then the culture around her is transforming the Church. There is no static equilibrium point. That means that the Church will either be prophetically addressing the problem of gay mirage, or it will be in the process of adoption gay mirage herself. Either the Church will speak about the carnage of abortion and God’s hatred of it, or the Church will be in the process of bringing that hated object into the sanctuary.”

Heavenly vs. Earthly Citizenship. “[Our] heavenly citizenship should eclipse our earthly citizenship all the time. I am not an American for six days and a Christian for one. Rather, I am a baptized Christian all the time, a husband all the time, a father all the time, a neighbor all the time, and a citizen all the time. And I have to figure out the hierarchical layers of these responsibilities, according to Scripture, and, you guessed it, I have to do this all the time.”

Problems in Faithfulness. “When you enroll in a math class, you will have math problems. Those math problems are not an argument for staying out of the class. When you resolve to follow Jesus Christ, you will have ‘following Jesus Christ’ problems. If He gives you victory, you will have victory temptations, like Gideon. If he gives you the opportunity to doubt Him wile in prison awaiting execution, like John the Baptist, you will have those kind of problems. We can fail at being well-fed. We can fail at being hungry. Or we can learn from the apostle Paul in both conditions. It is not the case that temptations engage us if we seek to engage in the culture wars, but not if we disengage. And the possibility of spiritual failure in both directions is not an argument for not taking up the cross that the Lords assigns to us. God wants some men to be Jeremiah and others to be Moses. He wants some to be King Alfred and others Bonhoeffer. Some godly men head up armies that lose and others head up armies that win. Both are called to do what they do in the world in the name of Jesus Christ, and with true evangelical faith. The kingdom of God is not a ‘one size fits all’ operation. This is not affected by whether the kingdom of God as a whole enjoys temporal and historical success in the world.”

“The fact that Jesus wants all His children involved in a bunch of different pursuits is a Trinitarian thing and not an example of confusion. The hierarchies are ranked differently—they are not all the same. The Lord wants about half of His children to be husbands and the other half to be wives. He wants some to love classical music and others to love music from the Delta. He wants them all to hate abortion and child porn. He wants some to love the Palouse country of Idaho and others to love the pine forests of the South. And we should do what He calls us to do.”

On Postmillennialism. “Progress is a biblical concept. Things have gotten better, they are better now, and they will continue to get better. Better than what? Well, better than they were. God is telling a story, and we are that many more chapters closer to the eucatastrophic denouement of His story. As we progress through His narrative, we should be able to tell what is going on. We should be reading with excitement, looking ahead at what is coming… P.J. O’Rourke once quipped that he could refute those who didn’t believe in progress in one word, that one word being dentistry. Let’s add some other areas in which, taking an average, things are improving. Whether it is in standards of living or literacy or health, the last century has seen remarkable improvements. We can do this even while taking into account those portions of the globe run by homicidal lunatics as well as the cozy places of American academia that were dedicated to the defense of said lunatics. Remember that we are not comparing things to an ideal Platonic state, but rather comparing them to [the] way they were before. And we are not looking at history in five-year increments, but rather in five-hundred-year increments. I would rather be alive now than in 1512, and I would have preferred 1512 to 1012. After all, in 1512, I would have had the opportunity to buddy up with Luther, and in 1012, I would have been stuck as an advisor to Harold the Not Conqueror… [If] I say something like this in Christian circles, the response will come back that I am pointing to ‘earthly’ improvements, not spiritual ones. Is this not a case of setting my mind on things below, clean contrary to Paul’s admonition to the Colossians? Not really. As Yogi Berra once put it, you can observe a lot by just watching. You want spiritual things? How about the astonishing rate at which Africa, China, and South America are being brought to Christ?... But [this] is only surprising to those who have adopted the non-Christian and unbelieving idea of decline… I believe that things are getting better over the long haul because of the prophet Isaiah and the Psalms of David, and not because Christianity Today, InterVarsity Press, and the Presbyterian Church in America have inspired me by a rock-ribbed Biblicism that grows stauncher by the year.”

“To say that Christ has conquered sin and the devil does not require us to maintain that the sin was trivial and the devil a midget in order for us to keep our gospel ‘believable’ to skeptical outsiders. Great views of sin should lead us to great views of salvation. Great but fearful views of sin can lead to the additional sin of hanging back, hesitant in unbelief. And because we do not label that unbelief as part of this sin, our views of sin are clearly not enough. Jesus Christ, Lord of the next Christendom, won a great victory before He was enthroned where He is currently enthroned, at the right hand of the Father. We do not honor that victory by acting as though it passed through history the same way Jesus passed through the wall of the upper room, without leaving a hole. No, He left a hole, all right. History has never been the same and can never be the same. Your great-great-grandchildren will live in a world that will be that much closer to the time when the leaves for the healing of the nations will be in the actual possession of every nation.”

On Christian Nations. “Christian republics and commonwealths are formed by preaching, baptizing, and discipleship and not by campaigning, legislating, pundit-blogging, and so on… [Here] are the options [for Jesus’ relationship to nations]: 1. Jesus doesn’t care whether or not nations are explicitly Christian. 2. Jesus is opposed to nations being explicitly Christian. 3. Jesus wants nations to be explicitly Christian. And here should be our response to these possibilities: 1. Well, if Jesus doesn’t care, that means we have the right to care. So let’s make this a Christian nation, shall we? 2. Let’s have a Bible study and find out why ‘disciple the nations’ really means ‘don’t disciple the nations, whatever you do.’ 3. Yes, Lord.”

The Church vs. the Kingdom. “The Church is at the center, Word and sacrament, and only sacred things are sacred. Because what the Church does is potent, this transforms the entire world—but it doesn’t turn the world into Church. That’s not the transformation. The Church turns the world into what the world ought to be. The Church doesn’t bring auto mechanics into the sanctuary. The Church teaches in such a way that auto mechanics grows and matures into what auto mechanics really should be like… So I don’t want the Church to be everything, and I don’t want the reformation of the Church to be the only item on the agenda—just the first and most important item on the agenda. When the reformation begins to take shape and numerous Christians are worshipping in the way Christians ought to be worshipping, those Christians—who happen to be politicians, auto mechanics, teachers, film directors, news anchors, poets, and cafeteria workers—will begin to live out the kind of Christian life they learned about the previous Sunday. That will effect the transformation of society, but not by turning that society into a giant worship service.”

The Gospel & World Conquest. “Two great Christian heresies—Marxism and Islam—borrowed something from the Christian faith which Christians should ask to have returned. They borrowed it and used it to great effect, and Christians, for some reason, allowed them to, neglecting it ourselves. That ‘thing’ they borrowed was a sense of inevitable victory for their cause. But they do not have the promises of such victory, and we do. Mainland China and Saudi Arabia will be as full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea… How much more potent will it be when Christians understand that the gospel is all about world conquest and when they will be content with nothing less than world conquest?... This conquest will be accomplished by means of God’s weakness, not man’s strength, for our weapons are not carnal. This thing will be done—and it will be done—in the power of the Spirit by means of words and water, bread and wine. What are we doing? We are besieging strongholds, and the citadels of unbelief will fall. Every sermon is another swing of the battering ram, every baptism is an engine deployed to overthrow the devil, and every administration of the Supper is an inexorable offer of wine for the forgiveness of the world and bread for the life of the world. And the day is coming when they will receive it.”

Conservatives & Compromise. “One of the myths that has been spread about religious conservatives is that they don’t know how to bend or compromise (this being the supposed source of their propensity to violence), and the corresponding myth on the other side is that secularists are calm, cool, and collected, and ever ready to make adjustments as the demands of the present reality dictate. But our secularists are actually hard-line sectarians. They will brook no compromise on these issues. We do not have a parliamentary system where a secularist party can form a coalition with ultra-conservatives with funny hats. We have a winner-take-all system, and the absolute demand that secularists place on religious conservatives is avowed allegiance to the secularist arrangement. They make us take these oaths so many times and in so many ways that we scarcely notice them anymore.”

On Free Societies. “[Free] societies arose and grew out of Christian societies. I am arguing that there is a connection and that this is not mere coincidence. I am arguing for a return to the preconditions of civic freedom, and am not arguing for an abandonment of them. Unbelief does not guarantee free societies. Out of all the explicitly atheistic societies that formed over the course of the last century, how many of them were open and free societies? Ah…”

A Postmillenial Postscript. “The biblical story shows us [a certain] pattern again and again. This is God training us to think about history. God delivers His people, God’s people rejoice, God’s people forget Him and worship idols, God chastises them by bringing them into affliction, the people cry out to God, and God delivers His people. Rinse and repeat. Now there is an important qualification that has to be made about this pattern. There is a linear aspect to history, and there is a cyclical aspect to it. The linear aspect is fundamental, and the cycles are subordinate to that line. The line, overall, is going up, which means that each repeated cycle represents a new advance—we are better off at the end of the tenth cycle than we were at the end of the third one. To put it in tangible terms, we were far better off at the conclusion of Whitefield’s awakening than we were at the end of King Josiah’s reformation. Postmillenial thinking does not require us to believe that the kingdom improves every day in every way, or that the whole thing takes off like the space shuttle. It is more like five steps forward, three steps back, seven steps forward, six back, three steps forward, one step forward, and then two steps back.”

“[We] in the Church should defend against the world’s encroachments because we are involved in a spiritual war. In this war, I believe also that we are to show the relevance of living in the way we do so that more and more non-Christians will hear the gospel, lay down their arms, and surrender to Jesus Christ. In order to do this in a way that is not compromised, it is necessary to stay separate from the standards of the world. We are commanded not to love the world or the baubles found in the world.”

“Practical teaching from the Scriptures is teaching that is grounded in the text of Scripture, and is therefore protected from becoming a false gospel to the extent that the last three chapters of Ephesians—do this and do not do that—are grounded in the first three chapters. The most important word in that book is therefore, right at the beginning of chapter 4. Therefore, do these things. People who do them or preach doing them, but who don’t therefore do them, are disobeying the gospel. And those who luxuriate in the redemptive historical sweep of the first three chapters, but don’t let the sermon get into labor relations, Christian marriage, Christian education, church government, and so forth, are also disobeying the gospel.”

“Sinners always want salvation. The damned don’t want salvation—that is what it means to be damned. But sinners aren’t there yet, and so they are always casting about in search of a savior. Of course it has to be a flattering savior, one who will be whispering soothing words on the way to the bad place. This is because sinners want to be damned, sort of, eventually. At least they prefer approaching damnation to the only alternative, which is a real Savior, that is to say, Jesus. And their preference stays this way unless a real Savior intervenes.”

“We are warned in Scripture against that which we are in danger of committing. When John tells his dear children to keep themselves from idols, he tells them this because they might not keep themselves from doing that. We are told to love our wives because there will be temptations to love ourselves instead. And, coming back to the point just made, we are cautioned against the sin of being ashamed of Jesus and His words. What are these words? They are the words He gave us to teach to all the nations after we had baptized them. Why are we cautioned this way? Because there will be a temptation for Christians to be ashamed of Jesus, that’s why.”

[The Real Face of Atheism]

~ Chapter One ~

“Nothing, absolutely nothing, has a more direct bearing on the moral choices made by individuals or the purposes pursued by societies than belief or disbelief in God. Personal and national destinies are inextricably bound to this issue. It is not accidental that the key issues of the day that are felt with deep emotion and conviction, whether it be the issue of sexual orientation and practice, or life in the fetal stage, sooner or later filter down to whether there is a God, and if so, has he spoken?”

“Bertrand Russell’s assertion, in his conceptual critique of Christianity, that all religion is born out of fear, is a weak and unthinking criticism of the subject. It is no more true than if one were to say that all irreligion is born out of fearlessness.”

“Nietzsche [said that] because God had died in the nineteenth century, there would be two direct results in the twentieth century. First, he prognosticated that the twentieth century would become the bloodiest century in history and, second, that a universal madness would break out. He has been right on both accounts. More people have been killed because of ideological differences, and destroyed on the battlefields of geopolitical maneuvering, in the twentieth century than in any other century in history, and by some calculations, more than in the previous nineteen centuries put together.”

“[The] late English journalist Malcolm Muggeridge [said], ‘If God is dead, somebody is going to have to take his place. It will be megalomania or erotomania, the drive for power or the drive for pleasure, the clenched fist or the phallus, Hitler or Hugh Heffner.’ Muggeridge’s conclusion that either a power-monger or a sex peddler would take the reigns in the place of God is very much in keeping with the disarray of society today. Hitler unleashed on the world one of the most mindless, blood-letting orgies of hatred and sadism—the superman solving the problem by getting rid of what he saw as inferior. The Heffnerian credo has explicitly degraded the dignity of women, while implicitly asserting pleasure and sensuality to be the supreme pursuit of life.”

~ Chapter Two ~

“Theoretical physicist John Polkinghorne, a colleague of Stephen Hawking and the former president of Queen’s College, Cambridge, is eminently known for his scholarship and brilliance in his field. He has been at the forefront of high energy physics for over thirty years. Physics Bulletin described his book The Quantum World as one of the best books of the genre. Dr. Polkinghorne does a masterful job of refuting those who think science has done away with a theistic world… [He] argues against the mindlessness of the position that amino acids just randomly strung themselves together to form the protein chain, and strongly asserts that a tightly-knit and intelligible universe such as ours is not sufficiently explained by a random chance process. The exactness of our universe argues for the anthropic principle, which basically states that the existence and sustenance of man is not brought about by a random universe but is dependent on a universe with a very particular character in its basic laws and circumstances. It is like an acute Copernican revolution, not restoring the earth to the center of the cosmos, but linking the nature of the universe with its potential for the existence of man. So delicate is the balance, and so tightly knit, wrote Polkinghorne, that, ‘scientists have felt particularly uneasy about the delicate balance required by the anthropic principle. To alleviate their anxiety some of them have suggested that there might be a portfolio of many different universes… arising from an infinite series of oscillations of one universe, ever expanding and contracting, and each time having its basic structure dissolved in the melting pot of the big crunch, thence, re-emerging in a different form in the subsequent expansion of the big band.’ Then Polkinghorne added, ‘Let us recognize these speculations for what they are. They are not physics, but, in the strictest sense, metaphysics. There is no purely scientific reason to believe in an ensemble of universes… A possible explanation of equal intellectual respectability—and to my mind, greater elegance—would be that this one world is the way it is because it is the creation of the will of a Creator who purposes that it should be so.’”

~ Chapter Three ~

“[In] every society, no matter what its cultural underpinnings, there is a code of ‘oughtness.’ While the specifics may very from culture to culture, in each case, those specifics are rooted in a prior set of beliefs as to what ought to be. These, in turn, are related to what they consider to be a person’s essential nature and purpose. It is, therefore, inappropriate to say that we cannot challenge one’s morality, for the beliefs on which that challenge stands are open to defense or refutation. One common agreement emerges: That wherever one finds an ‘oughtness,’ it is always linked together with a believed purpose in life. Purpose and oughtness are inextricably bound, and any effort to sever them meets with individual discord and societal disruption. The result is anarchy.”

“The present abandonment of a moral law is really quite a unique experiment in civilization. This is not to deny the moral struggles of the past. But those past societies, at least theoretically, espoused a norm for determining what was right and what was wrong, some foundation on which to erect the structures of moral rectitude. In our day, there are no foundations, and we are well on our way to becoming moral eunuchs. Of the twenty-one civilizations that English historian Arnold Toynbee mentioned in his history, ours is the first that does not enjoin a moral law or educate our young in moral instruction.”

“The logic of chance origins has driven our society into rewriting the rules, so that utility has replaced duty, self-expression has unseated authority, and being good has become feeling good. These new rules plunge the moral philosopher into a veritable vortex of relativizing. All absolutes die the death of a thousand qualifications. Life becomes a pinball game, whose rules, though they be few, are all instrumental and not meaningful in themselves, except as a means to the player’s enjoyment.”

“As these opinion-makers [intellectuals and trend-setters in society] jumped on the bandwagon of a world now in high gear without God, they held out their philosophical swords to slice up anything in their way. Their proclaimed creed became ‘knowledge at any price,’ and this knowledge-for-the-sake-of-knowledge mentality has been categorized as ‘a lust for knowledge.’ (‘Always learning but never able to acknowledge the truth’ [2 Tim. 3:7] is an apt biblical description of such individuals.) These intellectuals have wanted every curtain and veil removed—right down to tinkering with unborn fetuses. All proverbial and parabolic instruction from the past that enjoined reverence and humility has been cast to the winds. The conclusions of the past have been dismissed as primitive belief, and described as a system of thought concocted by a few to control the masses through guilt.”

“Not all atheists are immoral, but morality as goodness cannot be justified with atheistic presuppositions. An atheist may be morally minded, but he just happens to be living better than his belief about what the nature of man warrants. He may have personal moral values, but he cannot have any sense of compelling and universal moral obligation. Moral duty cannot logically operate without a moral law; and there is no moral law in an amoral world.”

“Those who, in the name of Christ, have sought to kill in order to propagate their belief, were acting in serious contradiction to both the message and the method of the gospel. By contrast, the demagogues of the Nietzschean and Sartrean stripe were operating in total harmony with, and in some cases the direct injunction of, the ideology behind their actions.”

~ Chapters Four through Six ~

“With all of our access to everything that is supposed to make life easier and more satisfying, humans, intoxicated with the abundance of options, find some chains unbreakable. It is not surprising that boredom is a very modern word, with no counterpart in the ancient or medieval languages.”

“G.K. Chesterton summarized this malady in one epigram—‘Despair does not lie in being weary of suffering, but in being weary of joy.’ I would change just one word in that statement, so that it would reflect our present word usage more accurately—‘Despair does not lie in being weary of suffering, but in being weary of pleasure.’… When the pleasure button is repeatedly pressed and can no longer deliver or sustain, the emptiness that results is terrifying. Surely, the loneliest moment in life is when you have just experienced what you thought would deliver the ultimate, and it has let you down.”

“Even life’s pleasures bring the feeling of pointlessness; they are here for a moment and then gone. At best they have ‘liftoff’ power, but no ‘staying’ power, or, to use a different analogy, they are like the periodic flashes of lightning on a dark road, with no guiding power.”

“The Christian contention is that God has spoken, and until he has his rightful place in our lives, neither the squandered, immoral life of a harlot, nor the rigorous, self-motivated, ritualistic life of a recluse will have purpose and meaning. The words of Saint Augustine of Hippo (354-430) are most appropriate: ‘You have made us for yourself and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in Thee.’ Or, as French mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal was known to have put it, ‘There is a god-shaped vacuum in the heart of every man, and only God can fill it.’ Atheism walks with its head down, earthbound, which is why it grasps nothing of eternal value. It must admit its predicament: without God, there is no meaning to life.”

“There is a complete sense of alienation in the world one hundred years after Nietzsche. It is this utterly morbid and hopeless philosophy that has sent many of our youth into a search for other realities. Those who do not have hope, in an effort to drown their despair, turn to drugs or alcohol or other experiments that they think will break this stranglehold of futility. The farcical and the absurd are hallmarks of a trapped society, devoid of all hope. Why have our young people turned to drugs in such large numbers, and why are they opting for other states of consciousness? It is because of the unbearable emptiness they face with a philosophy of life that offers no hope and no answers.”

~ Chapter Seven ~

“Nobody in his right mind would ever believe that a dictionary developed because of an explosion in a printing press. Every designed product in the human experience points to a designer. The argument is literally and figuratively as old as the hills. That is why it does not matter how loudly the intellectual community shouts ‘Chance!’ They have not been able to conquer the dreadful void of determinism and end up giving designed arguments to argue against design. Science is unconvincing when trying to establish how personality can come from non-personality. It does not know how to cope with the diversity of effect if there is a unity of the first cause. Human sexuality is not satisfactorily or sensibly explained by mindless evolution. The intricacies and fulfillment of human affections makes randomness a senseless argument.”

“Robert Jastrow… a scientist with extraordinary credentials and a one-time director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, said: ‘The details differ, but the essential elements in the astronomical and biblical accounts of Genesis are the same… This is an exceedingly strange development, unexpected by all but the theologians. They have always believed the word of the Bible. But we scientists did not expect to find evidence for an abrupt beginning because we have had, until recently, such extraordinary success in tracing the chain of cause and effect backward in time… At this moment it seems as though science will never be able to raise the curtain on the mystery of creation. For the scientists who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.’”

“The Bible makes it specific that God, in his love, created us. Thus, it is not life that precedes love, but love that precedes life. It is the love of God that gave us life in creation, just as it is the love of a mother that enables a child to live in procreation. Any attempt to thwart the love of God thwarts his design and brings discord in life because it rejects the very motivation in the creation of life. One can readily see how the failure to implement the role of love has resulted in modern society becoming the most abortive of life in all of history. The opposite of love is selfishness, and the rights of the one bearing the baby have now eradicated the love needed to give life. From ‘live and let live,’ we have moved to ‘live and let die.’”

“If love is creation’s first law, it is consistent within that framework to delineate love’s boundaries—this is the moral law. A failure to understand the nature of love has resulted in our inability to appreciate a moral framework. We find ourselves bewildered by love’s entailments and we wallow in the muddy waters of sensual indulgence. A foundational fallacy about love doubly jeopardizes one’s experience, for in squandering the purity of love, one also forfeits true liberty. In its stead, one grasps a poor substitute that leave one enslaved by insatiable cravings. In resisting the legitimate terms of endearment, one is left encrusted by a hardening layer that morality cannot penetrate.”

“Without [virtue, trust, and commitment], no human intercourse of any value is possible. But somehow, in our day, we have come to the conclusion that unaided reason can fashion a moral law. This has clearly proven to be wrong, and we are the hapless citizens of cities that are self-destructing and homes that are breaking apart in epidemic proportions. In the name of freedom, we have been handcuffed by fear and immoral enslavements.”

“None of us likes authority. It all began in the first days of creation, when the first man and woman refused to allow God to be God, and wanted to be as God themselves. Thus, sin entered the world through the rejection of God and the choice for autonomy and self-will. Men and women became the authors of their own moral law, and murder showed itself in the first family, followed by the question, ‘Am I my brother’s keeper?’ The fall was a fact, and is a fact.”

“[Every] act of wrong, public or private, does victimize. It victimizes the one performing it and reshapes the person.”

“The most deceptive aspect of our sinfulness is the pervasive tendency to self-justification by comparison to some other person. An arbitrary hierarchy of vices is set up, and we exonerate ourselves by how far up the scale we are from the bottom. Those who recognize the nature of sin understand that what renders someone a sinner is not the scale of human wickedness but the very nature and character of God. It is God’s purity that we stand before, not a fluctuating moral code that varies from one society to another. When sin is understood, a moral discussion can begin—for each of us stands accountable before God. An accountability that high makes the moral law of any land secondary to the moral law of God. Honesty and virtue are embraced because our motivation is to honor God and not merely to appear right before others.”

“Reinhold Niebuhr in Moral Man and Immoral Society [writes]: ‘Pure religious idealism does not concern itself with the social problem. It does not give itself the illusion that material and mundane advantages can be gained by the refusal to assert your claims to them… Jesus did not counsel his disciples to forgive seventy times seven in order that they might convert their enemies, or make them more favorably disposed. He counseled it is an effort to approximate complete moral perfection, the perfection of God. He did not ask his followers to go the second mile in the hope that those who had impressed them into service would relent and give them freedom. He did not say that the enemy ought to be loved so that he would cease to be an enemy. He did not dwell upon the consequences of these moral actions, because he viewed them from an inner and transcendent perspective… The paradox of the moral life consists in this: that the highest mutuality is achieved where mutual advantages are not consciously sought as the fruit of love. For love is purest where it desires no returns for itself; and it is most potent where it is purest. Complete mutuality, with its advantages to each party to the relationship, is therefore most perfectly realized where it is not intended, but love is poured out without seeking returns. That is how the madness of religious morality, with its trans-social ideal, becomes the wisdom which achieves wholesome social consequences. For the same reason, a purely prudential morality must be satisfied with something less than the best.’”

“The Christian does not capitulate to one faculty exclusively. He or she does not see a human life as all brain or all emotion. Rather, one sees oneself endowed with the image of God and an integration of different capacities. This means that one’s individuality, when lived out within the moral boundaries of a loving relationship with God, brings a total fulfillment through a diversity of expressions, converging in the purpose of one’s creation. The rational, the aesthetic, the emotional, the pragmatic—all work together for good. The examined life truly becomes worth living. One’s conscience responds to the holiness of God; one’s mind is nurtured and nourished by the truth of God; one’s imagination is enlarged and purified by the beauty of God; one’s heart, or impulses, responds to the love of God; one’s will surrenders to the purpose of God… A Christian is not a slave to momentary values that are selectively applied, but obedient to a law, the validity of which he recognizes as the law of one’s own being. He is rescued from both pragmatism and alienation—the former being shortsighted and the latter leading to despair. Life is viewed not just in its constituent and isolated parts, but in its cohesive and purposive whole. The internal cohesion that God brings makes for psychological well-being. Contrary to Sigmund Freud, true spirituality, properly understood, is not an obsession or escape; rather, it rescues us from obsessions that do not satisfy and which, in turn, force us to escape via drugs or otherwise.”

“[Either] a person yields his heart and will to the rulership of God or he chooses to retain complete autonomy, irrespective of the consequences. God has revealed himself in this world and in his Word. We see within ourselves a battlefield: there is that within us that tugs toward autonomy and manifests our depravity and that within us that points us to God, in whose image we were made. Each must choose, for to live with the contradiction tears one apart. The words of Pascal are graphic: ‘What a chimera then is man! what a novelty, what a monster, what a chaos, what a subject of contradiction, what a prodigy! A judge of all things, feeble worm of the earth, depository of the truth; cloaca of uncertainty and error, the glory and the shame of the universe.’”