Timothy Dalrymple has a blog worth visiting. In this post he reflects on the increase of tattooing not only in society but among the evangelical young. It is a thoughtful post with the wry comment:
‘Young people use tattoos to declare their individuality — because that’s what everyone else is doing. ‘
Read this article. It confirms all that you may suspect. Even if it comes from a suspect tabloid.
As a follow-up to Piper on previous blog read Andy Hunter’s reflections on the topic. This is a real issue in contemporary evangelicalism of virtually all shades.
Please visit Justin Taylor’s blog and watch the video clip of John Piper. It is absolutely on the money.
I thought I may invite you to undertake a task I set for our church YF recently.
List all the Christian values you can think of in a Bond movie. Now list all the anti-Christian values.
List all the Christ-like virtues of James Bond. Can you think of any contrasts?
How consistent is it to admire James Bond on a Saturday night and then worship Jesus Christ on a Sunday morning?
Watching television news over the last week threw-up (an apt expression) two examples of hypocrisy more breathtaking than usual. The first by a leading advocate of homosexuality, Peter Tatchell and the second by Islamic supporters.
Peter Tatchell takes the sexual moral high ground
Pope Benedict XVI is soon to visit Britain. Now I am no supporter of the Pope nor the Catholicism he represents. Indeed, I am astonished and not a little dismayed at the level of adulation that is already being exhibited by Catholics. To me, it seems close to worship. It is certainly hero-worship. Yet, that being said, Peter Tatchell’s moral outrage at the Pope (and Catholicism) highly publicized by a left-wing media is by any measure jaw-dropping cant. Tatchell accuses the Pope of protecting paedophile priests and embedding policies that promote the spread of AIDS (his refusal to allow condoms).
This from the man who only a few years previously advocated the reducing the age for consensual sex to 14, a move in the direction of legalising paedophilia and guaranteed to increase promiscuity and further sexual disease including AIDS.
The primary cause of AIDS is promiscuity. I do not hear Tatchell denouncing this. Moreover, as Peter Hitchens reveals, Tatchell in 1997, the same Tatchell attacking paedophilia in the Catholic Church, gave his support for a book that advocated sex between adults and children. I quote from Hitchens’ article:
For on June 26, 1997, Mr Tatchell wrote a startling letter to the Guardian newspaper.
In it, he defended an academic book about ‘Boy-Love’ against what he saw as calls for it to be censored. When I contacted him on Friday, he emphasised that he is ‘against sex between adults and children’ and that his main purpose in writing the letter had been to defend free speech.
He told me: ‘I was opposing calls for censorship generated by this book. I was not in any way condoning paedophilia.’
Personally, I think he went a bit further than that. He wrote that the book’s arguments were not shocking, but ‘courageous’.
He said the book documented ‘examples of societies where consenting inter-generational sex is considered normal’.
He gave an example of a New Guinea tribe where ‘all young boys have sex with older warriors as part of their initiation into manhood’ and allegedly grow up to be ‘happy, well-adjusted husbands and fathers’.
And he concluded: ‘The positive nature of some child-adult sexual relationships is not confined to non-Western cultures. Several of my friends – gay and straight, male and female – had sex with adults from the ages of nine to 13. None feel they were abused. All say it was their conscious choice and gave them great joy.
‘While it may be impossible to condone paedophilia, it is time society acknowledged the truth that not all sex involving children is unwanted, abusive and harmful.’
Well, it’s a free country. And I’m rather grateful that Mr Tatchell, unlike most of his allies, is honest enough to discuss openly where the sexual revolution may really be headed.
What he said in 1997 remains deeply shocking to almost all of us. But shock fades into numb acceptance, as it has over and over again. Much of what is normal now would have been deeply shocking to British people 50 years ago. We got used to it. How will we know where to stop? Or will we just carry on for ever?
As the condom-wavers and value-free sex-educators advance into our primary schools, and the pornography seeps like slurry from millions of teenage bedroom computers, it seems clear to me that shock, by itself, is no defence against this endless, sordid dismantling of moral barriers till there is nothing left at all.
Tatchell’s sanctimony is nauseating as is the left-wing media that gives him air-time.
Islam, the religion of peace attacks those who oppose it
The second example of cant is from the wider world. It concerns an American Pastor’s resolve to burn the Koran on the anniversary of 9/11. He insisted that Islam was not a religion of peace and was intent on burning the Koran as a protest. Now the Pastor was undoubtedly misguided in his resolve. Book-burning is inflammatory. Moreover, it was an act likely to endanger Christians and soldiers in Islamic countries. However, it is just here the hypocrisy arises. For around the world a surge of Islamic outrage erupted – not peacefully but violently (it seems as if the Pastor had a point).
And this aggressive and intimidating outrage against an insignificant Pastor (why did the media even pick up on such an minor person, a pastor in a church of less than fifty) threatening to burn the Koran is no isolated act of Islamic aggression. Islamic countries – ruled by the Koran, the book of peace – regularly turn a blind eye to the deliberate raping of Christian women by Islamic men, the persecution of Christian minorities within their culture, the murder of Muslims who convert to Christianity, and often the abuse of Christian missionaries who work in their country.
However wrong the American Pastor was in threatening to burn the Koran, his assessment of Islam seems to be true. The response of Islam to his threat was hardly peaceful and the record of Islamic countries in matters of basic human rights bears little scrutiny. Islamic outrage is humbug and is hollow.
A helpful blog on this topic is to be found over at ‘Contrast’. Below is a chunk from the blog. Brandon quotes from John W Robbins, someone with experience of political life in N America.
‘If you’re going to take political action that is going to compromise the gospel, then you are sealing your own doom. Over the past 50 years, conservatives have spent tens of billions of dollars lobbying, trying to elect candidates, trying to organize in various ways. When I was a kid, I was out passing out literature for Barry Goldwater, back in 1964.
And what has it gained? Are we any better off, to borrow a campaign slogan – are we better off today than we were 50 years ago? What have all those conservatives and libertarians done with those billions of dollars that has shown any improvement in the political or the moral climate of the country?
Now, if that money had been put into the preaching of the gospel – the uncompromised, unvarnished, pure gospel, perhaps there would be something completely different to show for it. But it was put into compromised political action, and there’s nothing to show for it. Absolutely nothing. Tens of billions of dollars – when you think of all the campaigns, all the organizations.
And I’ve been involved – my [PhD] degree’s in political theory, political philosophy. I’ve been interested in politics all my life and have been involved from time to time, working on Capitol Hill. And I learned a very good lesson on Capitol Hill – that what happens there is of little consequence. That if one is interested in changing society, you don’t go to Capitol Hill, you preach the gospel.
If anybody is operating under the illusion that political action is going to make a significant change in society apart from a sea change in the beliefs in the American people, then they’re condemned to futility. They will waste their lives.’
Two articles by Carl Trueman deserve a wide leadership. The first, found here, reflects on midlife crisis and our inflated sense of self-importance. The second, found here, reflects on a somewhat pathological obsession with culture in the evangelical camp. Trueman is regularly insightful, often spot on, and always wry.
It seems that more and more Christians live with the working assumption that the task of the church is to change the world. A mandate for socio-political action is becoming almost unimpeachable orthodoxy in evangelical circles. You can test how deeply this has settled into your psyche by how you react to the following questions.
Is the Christian mandate to change the world? Are we not called to rescue sinners out of the world? What did Jesus mean when he said, ‘I pray not for the world but those you have given me out of the world’? Does God intend to transform Babylon or trash it? Is God redeeming society or sinners? Is the calling of the church to keep the Titanic afloat or provide lifeboats? Is God’s plan the reformation of this world or the creation of a new world?
Now don’t misunderstand me, of course we are called to do good to all and especially those of the household of faith but there is a big difference between this and a commitment to changing the world. The first is clear, but where does the Bible call us to the latter? We are called to holiness and evangelism but cultural renewal is a different matter altogether.
The paper may be a tabloid but the article is bang on.
‘With typical fanfare, Tony Blair announced in 1999 that his government had set a target to slash in half the number of teen pregnancies by 2012.
But new figures released yesterday exposed Labour’s disastrous lack of success in meeting this goal.
A staggering 40,000 — or 40 per 1,000 — under-18s still fall pregnant in Britain each year, a pitiful improvement on 1998, when the figure was 46.6 per 1,000.
What makes these statistics most depressing, however, is the staggering amount of energy and taxpayers’ money that ministers have squandered on their teenage pregnancy programme.
More than £280million has been spent on contraception and sex education — and this has barely made a dent in the problem.
But instead of accepting its mistake and trying a different approach, the Government continues to cling to its discredited strategy of dishing out sex advice, pills and condoms.
Albert Einstein once said that the definition of insanity was ‘doing the same thing, over and over again, and expecting different results’.
They are words that could now be applied to Labour’s current sex education policy.’
Consider these two hymns: ‘This world is not my home’ and ‘This is my Father’s world’. Both apparently present a different view of the world. Which is biblically right? Are both right? Are both wrong? Is one more right than the other? Are both partially right or/and partially wrong?
Your response to these songs is not unimportant. In fact it is far-reaching. For the question these songs ask us to consider is, ‘what is our response to culture’. Or, to put the question more generally, what is the proper biblical relationship between Christ and Culture? How, in other words, should a Christian relate to the world.
If you find that question difficult to answer in a sentence or two then you are probably thinking at least roughly on the right lines. The answer, fully considered, is not trite.
Anyway, you may be interested in contributing pointers to the answer. Please do so.
The Cave promotes the Christian Gospel by interacting with Christian faith and practice from a conservative evangelical perspective.
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