Homosexuality and the Bible

From Between Two Worlds "Homosexuality and the Bible," resources about the Biblical view of homosexuality:

"Robert Gagnon is Associate Professor of New Testament at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary and is 'the leading scholarly defender of the church's historic understanding of homosexuality as revealed in the Bible.'

You can access his work online at www.robgagnon.net.

I would recommend starting with this interview, which gives an overview and defense of his position."

Toward the end of the interview, most of which is about what the Scriptures teach about homosexuality, Professor Gagnon says:

"We should love all people, regardless of whether they engage in immoral activity or not. Love is a much better, and far more scriptural, concept than tolerance.

Jesus lifted up the command to 'love one’s neighbor' in Leviticus 19:18—a command in the Holiness Code—as the second great command. We often miss the intertextual echo to Leviticus 19:17, which not only says that we should not hate, take revenge, or hold a grudge against our neighbor but also says that we should 'reprove' our neighbor 'and so not incur guilt because of him.'

If we really love somebody, we will not provide approval, let alone cultural incentives, for forms of behavior that are self-destructive and other-destructive. Jesus combined an intensification of God’s ethical demand in the areas of sex and money with an active and loving outreach to sexual sinners and economic exploiters. We should do the same: love the sinner, hate the sin.

Concretely, this means abhorring demeaning descriptions of homosexuals as 'fags,' 'queers,' and the like. It means supporting fair and equal prosecution of violence done to homosexuals. It might even mean—consistent with Jesus’ actions toward the adulterous woman—decriminalization of homosexual behavior. It certainly means making friends with homosexuals and helping AIDS sufferers. It means making a distinction between people who experience homoerotic impulses and people who act on them.

It does not mean, however, embracing 'sexual orientation' along with race and gender as a specially protected legal classification. The unfortunate effect of such legislation is: (a) to provide cultural and legal incentives for the behavior in question; (b) to send the wrong message that homosexual behavior is as morally neutral as race and gender; (c) to marginalize and intimidate legally those who adopt a critical view of homosexual practice; and (d) to establish the legal basis for indoctrinating our children and for mandating state-sponsored homosexual marriage."

"Sin is infection, not infraction."

Frederica Mathewes-Green in First Things has been inspired by recent events to reflect on sin:

"In the Eastern Orthodox Church, we speak of the impulses that move us toward any kind of sin as “passions.” You shouldn’t think of this term as related to “passionate.” It’s more like “passive” (as in “the Passion of Christ”; his passion is what he endured).

These impulses beat us up. They originate as thoughts, sometimes as thoughts that evade full consciousness. The roots are tangled with memories, shame, anger, fear—and the thoughts are also very often inaccurate.

All this mess damages our ability to see the world clearly. We go on misreading situations and other people, and venture further into confusion. The illness compounds itself, to the delight of the Evil One, who nurtures lies and has no compassion on the weak. To him, the weak are breakfast.

Eastern Christianity speaks of this as the darkening of the nous, that is, of the perceptive center of a person. (Most English bibles translate nous as mind, but that’s not quite it; the nous is not the rational intellect but a perceiving faculty. Thoughts and emotions are subsequent reactions to the nous’s perceptions.) The damaged nous is like a pair of glasses fitted with distorting lenses. It needs healing.

The Greek word represented by this kind of “passion” is pathos. It means “suffering.” It is because we are helpless in our suffering that Christ came. He took on vulnerable human form and went into the realm of death and defeated the Evil One. Now we are invited to gradually return to health by fully assimilating the truth that sets us free—by assimilating the presence and life of Christ himself. “It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me,” St. Paul said. This life fills and changes us like fire fills a piece of coal.

In the Eastern Christian understanding, sins are not “bad deeds” that must be made up in order to satisfy justice. They are instead like bad fruit, which indicates a sickness inside the tree (the analogy Jesus uses in Matthew 7:7–8). Sin is infection, not infraction. And God not only forgives freely but also sent his Son to rescue us when we were helpless.

With God’s help, we begin to heal. Like an athlete striving for the prize (I Cor. 9:24, Phil. 3:14, 2 Tim. 2:5), we resist succumbing to lying thoughts. The ancient spiritual disciplines—continual prayer, fasting, and love of others—are like the exercises in a time-tested workout routine. They make us stronger. When we fall, we get up. This is a life of continual repentance—and you can see in that word re-pent, “re-think.” Salvation is health, and health comes from knowing the truth and resisting lies. This gradually heals the nous so that it is restored to its original purpose: to perceive God’s light permeating all Creation.

St. Paul writes, “Be transformed by the renewal of your nous.” The biblical word for repentance, meta-noia, means literally the transformation of the nous. We are welcomed into God’s kingdom in an instant, as we see in the story of the Good Thief; but full healing comes slowly and will continue every day that we live.

So it is a mistake to present Christianity the way some churches do, as if it is the haven of seamlessly well-adjusted, proper people. That results in a desperate artificial sheen. It results in treating worship as a consumer product, which must deliver better intellectual or emotional gratification than the competition. And that sends suffering people home again, still lonely, in their separate metal capsules."

"Ted Haggard and the Evangelical environment"

Jesus Creed reflects on:

"...what we can learn from yet another moral collapse of an evangelical leader.

What is perhaps saddest is that this has gone on for a long time in his life. I’m not sure making more or new accountability structures for leaders is the place to start, though I’m quite sure we will all begin to think about this more.

But, what I find here is what I want to call the evangelical environment. In evangelicalism, and the charismatic stream in which Ted Haggard swims, sin is bad and sin by leaders is real bad. This leads to a complex of features that creates a serious problem:

1. Christians, and not just pastors, do not feel free to disclose sins to anyone;
2. Christians, including pastors, sin and sin all the time;
3. Christians, including pastors, in evangelicalism do not have a mechanism of confession;
4. Christians and pastors, because of the environment of condemnation of sin and the absence of a mechanism of confession, bottle up their sins, hide their sins, and create around themselves an apparent purity and a reality of unconfessed/unadmitted sin.
5. When Christians do confess, and it is often only after getting caught, they are eaten alive by fellow evangelicals — thus leading some to deeper levels of secrecy and deceit.

What we saw with Haggard is not just about leaders; it is about all of us.

Thus, a proposal, and I can only suggest it and hope that some evangelical leaders will catch the same vision — some at the national and international leadership level: evangelicals need to work hard at creating an environment of honesty. It is dishonest to the human condition to pretend that Christians don’t sin; but as long as we are afraid to confess to one another we will continue to create an unrealistic and hypocritical environment." [the whole post]

Note: the post about "Confession" below.

"Is it a sin not to vote?"

Chuck Colson responds to an idea advanced by David Kuo suggesting that Christians should "fast" from voting:

"Kuo is dead wrong to suggest that that Christians ought to enter into a time of 'fasting' from politics. These words, which I wrote in 1987, that so influenced David are true today: 'Christians need to influence politics for justice and righteousness.' But we must do so 'with eyes open, aware of the snares . . . Today Christians may find themselves suspect — I have experienced this myself — to the very people on whose side they are fighting. But that is the price they must pay to preserve their independence and not be beholden to any political ideological alignment.' That's what I wrote in 1987; that's what I mean today.

Fasting from politics is the exact opposite of what I taught David Kuo, however. Only by continuing to fight for our beliefs, regardless of the temptations, compromises, or being called 'nuts,' can we achieve the kind of moral reform and protection of human rights that Christians throughout the centuries and in every culture work for.

This is why Christians must never 'fast' from politics. And it's why Christians, of all citizens, ought to be lining up to vote on Tuesday. Do your civic duty because you'll do your duty to God in the process.

And to abandon the battle on behalf of the sick and the suffering, the prisoner and the unborn: That would be a true sin." [the entire column]

Christian leaders and sexual sin

Via Between Two Worlds:

"I ... recommend reading John Piper's paper - written years ago - on how Christian leaders should avoid sexual sin. Piper lists ten potential pitfalls and proposes ten protections against them:

1. PITFALL: Falling in love with the present world.
PROTECTION: Think long and hard about the deadly poison of world-love and ponder the never-ending delights of the mountain spring of God's approval and fellowship and beauty.

2. PITFALL: Loss of horror at offending the majesty of God's holiness through sin.
PROTECTION: Meditate on the Biblical truth that all our acts are acts toward God and not just toward man, and that God is so holy and pure that he will not countenace the slightest sin, but hates it with omnipotent hatred, and that the holiness of God is the most valuable treasure in the universe and the very deepest of delights to those whose way is pure." [the entire list]

Who is Ted Haggard?

Before the recent well-publicized events I knew little about Ted Haggard but his name. I suspect that is true of most evangelicals. At GetReligion [via RightWingBob] there is some information about the role he has played in the Evangelical community:

"Over the past few days, I have been watching the coverage of the Rev. Ted Haggard fiasco carefully to see how many journalists understand one of the most important facts in this story.

What is that fact? Haggard is not a leader of the old Religious Right. For many people, he was the charismatic face of a more moderate brand of evangelicalism that backs the traditional Christian doctrines on the hot issues linked to sex and marriage, but also carries that “Culture of Life” emphasis over into discussions of poverty, the environment, the spread of AIDS, economic justice in the Third World and other issues.

Yet, at the same time, he was one of the new “moderate” evangelicals who had not lost the trust of the old-guard evangelical alpha males symbolized by Dr. James Dobson and Charles Colson. Haggard was a bridge personality, in other words. This made him an important figure for the White House, since he was an evangelical — but not among the old faces that everyone is used to seeing on the cable TV shows (think Pat Robertson) that President Bush has avoided like the plague." [The entire posting]

Haggard resigns.

"In a letter read from the pulpit of Colorado Springs's New Life Church, former pastor Ted Haggard admitted that allegations against him are tru

"The fact is I am guilty of sexual immorality," he said. "I am a deceiver and a liar. There is a part of my life that is so repulsive and dark that I have been warring about it for my entire life. ... The accusations that have been leveled against me are not all true but enough of them are true. ... The things that I did opened the door to additional allegations."

HolyCoast comments:

"That whole thing is really sad. Now we'll find out if New Life Church was built on the message or on the man."

Witness

On a day when one "spiritual leader" has lost his authority it is good to be reminded of another who hasn't.

Via Althaus:

Marriage and the state

The Roman Catholic Archbishop of Newark, John J. Myers, very clearly lays out the case for exclusive legal recognition of traditional, heterosexual marriage, and what is at stake if that changes:

"[M]arriage is not the creation of any state. It is a natural institution - with its own characteristics and features - that is prior to any particular political or legal system. While it is true, from a Catholic perspective, that Jesus elevated this natural institution to the level of the supernatural in establishing the sacrament of matrimony, this does not make marriage the creation of any religious community—including the Catholic Church. This is why believers (from many diverse communities) and non-believers alike can understand and affirm the nature of the marital good and its centrality in a well ordered society. It is why religious groups, despite their theological disagreements, recognize the validity of the conjugal marriages of people of other faiths.

Even if marriage was a type of institution that could be redefined, it would not be up to a court to decide whether to redefine it. It is up to the people, working through the constitutionally established institutions of democratic deliberation, to settle such matters. For the people now to acquiesce in a usurpation of their rightful authority by a court would, in the words of President Lincoln, be for them to 'resign their government into the hands of that eminent tribunal.' For the sake of constitutional democracy as well as for the sake of marriage itself, this ruling must not be permitted to stand.

As many supporters of the idea of same sex "marriage" (or its equivalent, using other words such as "civil union" or "domestic partnership") admit, the logic of their position points to the abolition of marriage as a socially normative institution. Anyone who teaches - or preaches - that marriage is an exclusive union of one man and one woman will be labeled a bigot. Anyone who teaches - or preaches - that sexual relations outside of marriage are sinful will be accused of intolerance. Anyone who teaches - or preaches - that sexual relations between a man and a man or a woman and a woman are morally wrong will be charged with prejudice. Anyone who teaches - or preaches - that children need a mom and a dad, and that two moms or two dads are not the same will be marginalized as an enemy of equality.

And everyone knows what will soon follow: Christian, Jewish, Muslim, and other religious communities will come under intense political pressure and legal attack. By standing by their principled beliefs regarding marriage and sexual morality, they will be rendered vulnerable to laws prohibiting what advocates of sexual liberation and same-sex "marriage" will insist is "discrimination." We have already seen this wherever same-sex relations have been given legal standing—in Canada, in Sweden, and right here in the United States in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts where four judges imposed same-sex marriage in an opinion now cited with approval by the New Jersey court. In Canada and Sweden pastors were prosecuted for preaching from the Bible about homosexuality. In Massachusetts, Catholic Charities was forced to abandon its 100 year old program of helping to place children with adoptive parents. And this is just the beginning. As one legal scholar who advocates same-sex "marriage" bluntly put it, religious liberty and sexual freedom will clash, and religious liberty will usually have to lose." (the complete statement)

Are the New Testament Gospels reliable?

There are a great many good resources for Christians available online. One that I found recently is Mark Roberts' Are the New Testament Gospels Reliable? For the non-scholar, like me, this sort of thing is very helpful:

Volume 1
Volume 2
Volume 3

I am reminded of F.F. Bruce's The New Testament Documents: Are They Reliable?, first printed in 1942, and still in print. It continues to make a good case.

Christians are not immune from doubt, and non-Christians need to be convinced. The events which are central to the Christian faith occurred at particular places and times and the historical evidence for them is not insignificant. In fact it is quite a bit better than the evidence for many events which go unquestioned.

The arguments use the normal historical methods of examining documents, comparing accounts, utilizing the discoveries of archeology, and placing events in their historical and religious context. Roberts is especially good at working with the documents. None of the arguments will convince someone determined not to be convinced, but the probabilities begin to build up and many objections can be overcome.

"Halloween's not a pagan festival after all"

From beliefnet, by a Catholic priest who is an assistant professor at the University of Virginia. If its origins aren't pagan, where did it come from?

"It’s true that the ancient Celts of Ireland and Britain celebrated a minor festival on October 31 - as they did on the last day of most other months of the year. However, Halloween falls on the last day of October because the Feast of All Saints, or 'All Hallows,' falls on November 1. The feast in honor of all the saints in heaven used to be celebrated on May 13, but Pope Gregory III (d. 741) moved it to November 1, the dedication day of All Saints Chapel in St. Peter’s at Rome. Later, in the 840s, Pope Gregory IV commanded that All Saints be observed everywhere. And so the holy day spread to Ireland.

The day before was the feast’s evening vigil, 'All Hallows Even,' or 'Hallowe’en.' In those days Halloween didn’t have any special significance for Christians or for long-dead Celtic pagans...

...What about those in the other place? It seems Irish Catholic peasants wondered about the unfortunate souls in hell. After all, if the souls in hell are left out when we celebrate those in heaven and purgatory, they might be unhappy enough to cause trouble. So it became customary to bang pots and pans on All Hallows Even to let the damned know they were not forgotten. Thus, in Ireland at least, all the dead came to be remembered - even if the clergy were not terribly sympathetic to Halloween and never allowed All Damned Day into the church calendar." [The article, with more of the history.]

In my youth, long ago, our church held an annual Halloween party. There was a costume competition, bobbing for apples, and a good time. More often than not the costume competition was won by a senior saint. Obviously, it had nothing to do with Satanism, worship of Mother Earth, primitive feminism or any other "ism." It wasn't about remembering those in Hell or "Purgatory" either. It was a lot of fun.

Confession

If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. If we say that we have not sinned, we make him a liar, and his word is not in us. I John 1:9 KJV

My walk this bright cold morning took me past one of our large old Roman Catholic churches. As I passed the church the parochial school kids were at recess, happy and loud. I noticed an elderly man walk from the church to a waiting car. His demeanor was serious and it occurred to me that he might have just then come from confession. For much of the rest of my walk I thought about confession and how we practice it.

Faithful Catholics "make confession" to a priest on a regular basis. After confession the priest reassures them of God's forgiveness and may assign penance. Those of us who affirm the "priesthood of all believers" reject the necessity of that approach and tend to assume that it lends itself to a rote general recitation of sins and a too easily achieved clear conscience. I'm not so sure. Needless to say, every communion has its nominal followers, but failure to live up to a standard doesn't discredit the standard. If it did, there would be none.

I do not think that a Christian needs to confess to another person in order to receive God's forgiveness - in fact, I am convinced that is not so - but I do think a regular discipline of confession would compel me to reflect more often on my failings and my dependence on God's grace in Christ. If I knew that I would have to say something to someone who was physically present perhaps I would engage in more genuine introspection and, consequently, more meaningful repentance.

The more liturgical churches include a prayer of confession followed by assurance of forgiveness in every worship service. Baptists tend not to do that. Even the use of the Lord's Prayer with it's "forgive us our trespasses" seems increasingly uncommon as many of our churches turn away from any regular order of worship.

Both individual devotions and corporate worship need to include confession.

TIME: In touch with Jesus

Does the Church finally recognize that in a post-Christian society Christian students need real grounding in the faith? From TIME:

"Youth ministers have been on a long and frustrating quest of their own over the past two decades or so. Believing that a message wrapped in pop-culture packaging was the way to attract teens to their flocks, pastors watered down the religious content and boosted the entertainment. But in recent years churches have begun offering their young people a style of religious instruction grounded in Bible study and teachings about the doctrines of their denomination. Their conversion has been sparked by the recognition that sugarcoated Christianity, popular in the 1980s and early '90s, has caused growing numbers of kids to turn away not just from attending youth-fellowship activities but also from practicing their faith at all."The rest of the article.

The recovery of authentic worship

Albert Mohler posted a three-part article on worship this summer. I came across it while looking at a site called Reformed Praise. The Mohler article is well worth reading and can be found here:

Part One
Part Two
Part Three

Two excerpts:

Roger Scruton, a well-known British philosopher, has suggested that worship is the most important indicator of what persons or groups really believe about God. These are his words: "God is defined in the act of worship far more precisely than he is defined by any theology." What Scruton is saying is, in essence: "If you want to know what a people really believe about God, don't spend time reading their theologians, watch them worship. Listen to what they sing. Listen to what they say. Listen to how they pray. Then you will know what they believe about this God whom they worship."

My haunting thought concerning much evangelical worship is that the God of the Bible would never be known by watching us worship. Instead what we see in so many churches is "McWorship" of a "McDeity." But what kind of God is that superficial, that weightless, and that insignificant? Would an observer of our worship have any idea of the God of the Bible from our worship? I wonder at times if this is an accidental development, or if it is an intentional evasion.

And:

We must not be satisfied with a laissez-faire, cafeteria-style worship combination at our pleasure. There is a biblical pattern that must be followed. Will styles change? Yes. But the worship must always be God directed. Will there be a diversity of styles in worship? Yes, but there must be one glorious purpose following this clear biblical pattern: to measure everything by the norm of scripture, in which God has revealed how He wishes to be worshiped. We must learn from each other in this process that as the people of God we must get this right as we stand before God and under scripture.

We were created to worship God. The whole story of our redemption retells how we were created to worship God but by our sin became disqualified from that true and authentic worship. By God's redemption in Jesus Christ, we were created anew for the purpose of worshiping God. And every glimpse of heaven we have in Scripture indicates that worship will be our eternal occupation. It is for that purpose that we are being prepared even in the present.

November, 2006 Sabbath Recorder Online

The November, 2006, Sabbath Recorder is available online here. This month the emphasis is on Thanksgiving.

BJC intervenes

The Baptist Joint Committee has decided to involve itself in the deliberations of Seventh Day Baptists about affiliation with it. At the SDB website (but not, at least anywhere obvious, on the BJC website), a news release, letter and resolution - "BJC Resolution supports SDB participation":

"At their annual meeting October 2-3, Directors of the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty (BJC) spent considerable time discussing their relationship with the Seventh Day Baptist General Conference.

In light of the upcoming vote at Conference 2007 (for SDBs to either withdraw or remain with the BJC), the Directors of the Baptist Joint Committee unanimously approved a “Resolution of Recognition, Encouragement and Hope,” conveying their desire that Seventh Day Baptists maintain their historic relationship with the BJC."

There follows the letter and resolution adopted by the BJC Board of Directors. In the cover letter appears the following:

"In anticipation of this subject being addressed by Seventh Day Baptist churches prior to and during your Annual Conference in 2007, our BJC staff soon will be sending additional educational information to be provided through your churches as well, further amplifying our mission and highlighting our cooperative endeavors on behalf of the cause of religious freedom."

This is an interesting development. The Baptist Joint Committee and its affiliates are, of course, not members of the Seventh Day Baptist General Conference. The Conference is a member of the BJC. Shouldn't the debate be between SDB advocates and SDB opponents of affiliation? I have no problem with Seventh Day Baptist supporters of affiliation soliciting (and using) ammunition from the BJC for their cause - but should the BJC itself intervene in the debate? Should those of us opposed to affiliation invite outside groups to intervene? I won't.

Dr. Marjorie Bass: "One week's experience"

Marjorie Bass is a member of the Madison Seventh Day Baptist Church and a medical doctor. In this article, originally published in her local paper, she remembers a part of her medical training:

“A portion of your training on the gynecology service,” the chief resident told the third year medical students, “will be spent in the University of Wisconsin Hospital abortion clinic. You will be expected to work on that service for one week unless you elect to refuse to do so for conscientious considerations.”

As I had always stood for pro-life ideals, I assumed I would be one of the students who would request absentia from the abortion rotation. However, as I considered my options, I decided to work at the abortion clinic for the required week in order to benefit from behind-the-scenes experience. The students were not allowed to actually be present at the abortion procedures but we interviewed the patients and performed the admission physical exams.

There were several unwed teenage girls who came in each day, but I did not expect the number of married women who were scheduled for an abortion. In fact, I was shocked to hear some say, "We don't want the baby this year, maybe in a year or so." I thought to myself, "It won't be this baby whom you are now murdering. It will be another child whom you allow to come to birth."

One day the resident came back from performing an abortion under staff supervision. He stated that the woman who was undergoing the surgery had bled so profusely that they had been forced to perform an emergency hysterectomy. As I was a mother of five children, I empathized with that patient and was stunned to hear the resident pass the situation off lightly with the remark. "Oh well, she's already got a kid!" He certainly displayed his ignorance concerning a woman's desire for children.

This one week's experience on the abortion service taught me several lessons:

Medical students were always told to observe and learn from every patient and every procedure. The fact that we were not allowed to actually attend an abortion points out the barbaric nature of the process.

Abortion was being abused as a means of contraception.

Abortion in a university hospital clinic can be as dangerous as the proverbial coat-hanger.

Performing this inhumane procedure had the effect of causing the involved doctor to become callous to women and their pain, whether emotional or physical.

Abortion is an attack not only on the unborn child who will never get her chance for life, but is also an attack on the woman who undergoes the invasive procedure.

If you are one who believes abortion is a good or necessary woman's "right," think over the following questions:

Which is more important, a woman's right to abortion or her child's right to life? What about responsibility?

Did you know abortion is legal up until birth?

Did you know the ban on partial-birth abortion has been signed into law, but activist judges may overrule the will of the people?

Did you know partial-birth abortion is legal infanticide?

Think about your children or grandchildren. Perhaps some of them have already been aborted. Were not those lives as precious as the ones now living?

Could not the vast sums of money charged by unscrupulous doctors and clinics be better spent to help the women faced with "problem pregnancies?"

What about the millions of loving couples who could have given these babies good adoptive homes?

In the three minutes it has taken you to read this article, sixteen more babies' lives have been cruelly snuffed out, 40,000,000 since Roe v. Wade; more than four times the number murdered during the Holocaust; more than the number of soldiers killed in all the wars our country has fought. This continues to be a veritable slaughter of the innocents.

Belief and emotion

From How To Be A Christian And Still Go To Church:

"It is quite appealing in a ministry role to manipulate emotion. In my day in Young Life we were masters at it. Not only is it easy to manipulate emotion, it's really easy in adolescents. Like counting butts in pews, emotional response is another tempting, but misleading, method to measure ministry effectiveness.

In Mere Christianity C.S. Lewis says

'Now that I am a Christian I do have moods in which the whole thing looks very improbable; but when I was an atheist I had moods in which Christianity looked terribly probable. This rebellion of your moods against your real self is going to come anyway. That is why Faith is such a necessary virtue: unless you teach your moods 'where they get off,' you can never be either a sound Christian or even a sound atheist, but just a creature dithering to and fro, with its beliefs really dependent on the weather and the state of its digestion.'

In ministry we seek to help people develop genuine faith. That is terribly hard work. Frankly it is work only the Holy Spirit can do, reducing us as ministers to simply placing ourselves in that same Holy Spirit's hands to use and to produce result.

It is so tempting to control 'the weather,' by building a nice facility with all the right programs and technology, and help people have 'good digestion,' Starbucks in the Narthex - lunch after service, and achieve the emotional result we desire, an emotional result that produces the illusion of genuine faith, but a faith that disappears with the change in weather and the lousy meal.

Will faith in Christ change our emotional state? Absolutely, but our emotional state DOES NOT produce faith in Christ. We cannot afford to substitute mere emotional manipulation for genuine ministry. We cannot allow the temptations of the measurable to substitute for the reality of God's immeasurable grace."

Our faith is based on reality. Emotions come and go - but God remains.

Bonhoeffer and abortion

Richard John Neuhaus quotes Bonhoeffer on abortion after describing the historical context in which he wrote:

The Nazi doctrine of Lebensunwertes Leben (life that is not worthy of life) had the widest possible applications, from euthanasia to the elimination of the handicapped to the mass killings at Auschwitz. While the Third Reich opposed the abortion of the "genetically superior," Pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer understood that the logic of abortion was integral to a regime that presumed to exercise total power over life and death. Bonhoeffer, who was executed by the regime in April of 1945, spoke of four divine "mandates" in the ordering of human life: family, labor, government, and Church. The following passage from his Ethics occurs in a discussion of the family:

"Marriage involves acknowledgment of the right of life that is to come into being, a right which is not subject to the disposal of the married couple. Unless this right is acknowledged as a matter of principle, marriage ceases to be marriage and becomes a mere liaison. Acknowledgment of this right means making way for the free creative power of God which can cause new life to proceed from this marriage according to His will. Destruction of the embryo in the mother's womb is a violation of the right to live which God has bestowed upon this nascent life. To raise the question whether we are here concerned already with a human being or not is merely to confuse the issue. The simple fact is that God certainly intended to create a human being and that this nascent human being has been deliberately deprived of his life. And that is nothing but murder. A great many different motives may lead to an action of this kind; indeed in cases where it is an act of despair, performed in circumstances of extreme human or economic destitution and misery, the guilt may often lie rather with the community than with the individual. Precisely in this connection money may conceal many a wanton deed, while the poor man's more reluctant lapse may far more easily be disclosed. All these considerations must no doubt have a quite decisive influence on our personal and pastoral attitude towards the person concerned, but they cannot in any way alter the fact of murder."

"Nothing But the Blood"

Last May, in Christianity Today, Mark Dever's article "Nothing But the Blood" defended the doctrine of the Atonement:

"'I've just been told that I'm too Atonement-centered.'

My sister in Christ was serious, humble, and a little confused. I said, 'What do you mean 'too Atonement-centered'?' I had never heard the charge.

A Christian friend told her that she talked too much about Christ's death, which dealt with our guilt due to sin. I responded that knowing and accepting this truth was the only way to a relationship with God, and that I didn't think it was possible to be 'too Atonement-centered.'

Few other doctrines go to the heart of the Christian faith like the Atonement. Congregations sing at the top of their lungs: 'My sin, not in part but the whole, has been nailed to the cross, so I bear it no more, praise the Lord, praise the Lord, O my soul!' ('It Is Well with My Soul'). The priestly work of Christ separates Christianity from Judaism and Islam. Not surprisingly, the Cross has become the symbol for our faith.

Still, God's work on the Cross leaves us with plenty of questions. In fact, there have always been a few Christians who question whether we need the Atonement, including, in recent years, some evangelicals who have challenged the dominant understanding of Christ's death on the Cross as the substitute for our sins."

Read the rest. Even if you are already convinced, he makes the arguments with great clarity.

America's founders and religion

Christopher Levenick and Michael Novak at NRO respond to an article in the Nation by Brooke Allen which contends that the Founders were in no sense Christians:

"In her litany of statements that intend to prove that 'the Founding Fathers were not religious men,' she cites one line from a letter written by John Adams. According to Allen, 'As an old man, [Adams] observed, 'Twenty times in the course of my late reading have I been upon the point of breaking out, 'This would be the best of all possible worlds, if there were no religion in it!''' Pretty damning evidence, right? Well, no: Allen neglects to include the next two sentences from Adams: 'But in this exclamati[on] I should have been as fanatical as Bryant or Cleverly. Without Religion, this World would be Something not fit to be mentioned in polite Company, I mean Hell.'

Allen commits plenty of other errors in her argument, but we'll confine ourselves to looking at just a few.

She asserts that '[i]n the Declaration of Independence, [God] gets two brief nods.' Not true. As every schoolboy knows, the Declaration mentions God four times: 'the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God,' 'endowed by their Creator,' 'Supreme Judge of the world,' and 'divine Providence.' Equally problematic is her dismissive description of these invocations as 'brief nods.' (In fact, if you exclude the long list of grievances against George III, the Declaration on average invokes the name of God just about once every paragraph.) More important than its frequency is the indispensability of divine sovereignty to the document's overarching natural-law argument. The source of human rights, according to the Declaration, is not located in mutual human consent but rather in the creative activity of God." The rest.

They go on to enumerate errors with respect to Madison, Washington, Jefferson and Franklin.