Did Jesus Destigmatize Sin?

Posted on September 23, 2015 by Matt

Last week, I had a piece on The Federalist about the destigmatization of racism. In it, I argued that despite the way we have been raised to think of racism as the ultimate evil—the closest thing to a moral absolute that most progressives will admit to—that term is losing its rhetorical force. The blatantly self-serving way in which the left uses the word actually removes it from the moral arena altogether. They redefine it so that it can only be applied to whites, try to make it a matter of privilege, and constantly cry about it as though they were some kind of Frankenstein hybrid of Chicken Little and the Boy who cried Wolf.

Well, this post you’re reading now is only loosely related to that piece, but I bring it up because there was a tangential response in the comments section that caught my eye. Though his tone suggested that the commenter is a troll (which is why I didn’t respond there,) I did think the question he raised was ethically interesting.

One element of my argument was the effect that our current morass of microaggressions has on how seriously we perceive racism. I wrote, “When ‘racism’ primarily describes the trivial and the innocuous it becomes absurd to consider racism consequential and injurious.” The commenter applied that analysis to some of Jesus’ teachings—specifically, those places in the Sermon on the Mount where He tells us the extent of the Law:

You have heard that it was said to those of old, ‘You shall not murder; and whoever murders will be liable to judgment.’ But I say to you that everyone who is angry with his brother will be liable to judgment… You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart.

In saying such things, did Jesus make “sin” as mushy and irrelevant a term as “racism” has become? Did he turn it into a shallow excuse for a guilt trip rather than a serious issue? The answer, of course, is “no,” but the difference lies in a very important distinction that those of us in the Lutheran tradition would call the Two Kinds of Righteousness.

One of these kinds is righteousness coram mundo—before the world—which refers to being a good person in the sight of others. This is just the basic, practical kind of judgment required for having a healthy civilization on Earth—recognizing the helpful neighbor, the good father, the upstanding citizen, and so forth. When we’re talking about righteousness coram mundo, there are good guys and bad guys, and if most of us are to live in relative peace and prosperity, it means that the bad guys need to lose and the good guys win on a fairly regular basis. As is the case with most social commentary, my article was written entirely in terms of righteousness coram mundo—intended to explore the way that anti-racism has become a farce which does not serve the public welfare. Indeed, I believe that it has become more dangerous than racism is.

The other kind is righteousness coram deo—before God—which refers to being a good person in the sight of the Creator Himself. It is in terms of this kind of righteousness that Jesus spoke in the Sermon on the Mount. He does not suggest that we try and forge a society in which all micro-lusts and micro-murders are purged away. Even a cursory glance at human history will reveal what an astoundingly bad idea that kind of Utopian vision would be. What Jesus is saying, however, is that righteousness coram mundo does us no good coram deo. It should not be terribly controversial to suggest that God has higher standards than we do. This is not to say that He has an entirely different Law to which we are bound but not privy, but rather that God’s idea of being a good person goes far deeper than ours does. So deep, in fact, that coram deo, there are no good guys at all.

And why shouldn’t God’s standard be higher than ours? I am well within my rights to expect that my neighbor refrain from sleeping with my wife. However, being what I am, how can I expect him to refrain from having a lustful thought about her? It would be the height of hypocrisy to demand that from him because I could never live up to it myself. Nevertheless, God, being who He is, has no such restriction. He is not “pretty good for a 20th century American,” but Goodness Himself in person. And Goodness wants what is good for those He loves—something that is better than being a decent fellow.

Because there is still something seriously wrong with merely being a decent fellow.

After all, most people I know would consider me to be one, and yet… When I first moved to Iowa, I had a terrible time trying to get my internet working—a pretty big deal to me because I work from home. Every time it went out (and it was common), it took a week before the would send a technician to look at the problem. Sometimes they could identify the problem and not fix it because they had fewer tools than technicians, and they had to share. Sometimes they came by, fixed it, then accidentally broke it again before they left without checking, at which point I had to wait another full week before I could get a technician back out. Even though this happened literally ever time, their managers and technicians said those kinds of waits were so rare that it would be statistically impossible for me to have experienced it so much. If it weren’t for my wife’s grandparents who allowed me to borrow their internet during the days, I would have been out of a job. I ultimately had to upgrade to their business service and pay more money for less speed just so that I could get adequate support.

All this made me angry—very angry. There were times when I wanted to reach through the phone and strangle the people who were lying to me, downplaying my concerns, and yet somehow satisfied with their own ridiculous behavior. From what I hear, that does not seem to be a terribly uncommon feeling when dealing with cable companies, and so coram mundo, it’s not a big deal. But one troubling fact remains: I seriously wanted to hurt people simply because my internet was out. I didn’t act on that desire, of course. I never even considered acting on it. But I wanted to. I really wanted to. Sometimes, thinking back on what incompetent wretches they are, I still want to.

What does that mean in terms of righteousness coram mundo? Not much. It means that civilization has done its job of restraining my baser impulses. I did not hurt my neighbors or my community, and while I was upset, in the grand scheme of things, it passed fairly quickly. No harm, no foul, so I’m still basically good.

But there’s a lot more to it that my neighbors simply have no right to comment on. Consider how often all of us treat our spouses poorly, or disobeyed our parents growing up, or are rude to cashiers for no fault of their own, or tell tiny lies to make ourselves look better (or to make someone we don’t like look bad,) or fail to help the needy around us, etc, etc etc. The list of peccadilloes goes on and on, and while my neighbors have no right to call me out about it, God does. Indeed, how can He not when the sheer prevalence of these peccadilloes suggests that there is something deeper that’s wrong with me—with all of us? Is being pretty good because civilization usually buries our worst impulses really what humans are supposed to be?

And yet, as I’ve already mentioned, we cannot root our all the micro-lusts, micro-murders, micro-lies, and every other micro-sin. When we try, we just make things worse by sacrificing greater goods like freedom, love, and justice to root out the lesser evils. In this way, these two kinds of righteousness are central to the Christian religion. There are all sorts of philosophies, traditions, and systems that can make civilization better, but there’s nothing we can do to make ourselves genuinely good. For that, we need God. And He delivered by becoming one of us—paying humanity’s debt and being truly good in our stead—so that by dying and rising with Him, we can be made truly good as well.

So no, Jesus is not reducing sin to an absurdity by what he says about lust and wrath. He is merely reminding us of the whole picture when we are so prone to judge ourselves merely in terms of each other.

Posted in Culture, Law, Lutheranism | Leave a comment

Theological Liberalism is not Christianity (Reason #125)

Posted on September 7, 2015 by Matt

Clearly the best way of reading that passage.

A public service announcement because for some reason, people are still confused about the obvious.

On their Facebook page, the author of the “sermon” clarified by reiterating how Jesus had a really bad idea, but it’s ok because he let himself get talked out of it.   Sure, one could read the passage in the usual, mundane, orthodox way–that Jesus deliberately gave her a hard response as an opportunity for her to make her wonderful confession of faith that even being a dog at this Master’s table is a great blessing.  But where’s the fun in that?  It’s so much more avant garde to teach that Jesus was really being a huge bag of d**ks, but had a change of heart and said he was sorry.

Well, it might be more avant garde, but it’s not Christian.

Posted in Theological Liberalism | Leave a comment

40 Shades of Sentimentalism

Posted on August 30, 2015 by Matt

Despite the wishful thinking of social justice warriors, the fight continues over marriage equality whether some Americans can force others to pretend that two men are married to each other. The quest to dominate hearts and minds goes on regardless of the Supreme Court’s recent decision. As Christians have been at the forefront of the opposition, this quest naturally includes attempts by theological liberals to persuade those Christians who believe their religion is actually true. One recent example of this push is Matthew Vines’ 40 Questions for Christians who Oppose Marriage Equality

Like most activists who target the Church’s theology of sex, Vines cannot appeal primarily to what God has actually taught us in Scripture—after all, God’s written record of addressing same-sex liaisons is uniformly negative. Instead, he must hit us in what is unfortunately the modern church’s softest spot—right in the feels. In other words, having no dialectical leg on which to stand, he must resort to mere rhetoric. None of the forty questions provide any genuine challenge to the content of what God has taught the Church. Instead, all forty of them are geared towards provoking us into declaring that we just don’t feel like following it anymore. From first to last, the questions are not about theology or morality, but mere sentimentalism.

The list is front loaded with questions designed to evaluate one’s social proximity to homosexuals: 3,4,5,8,9,10,11, and 32. These revolve around how many gay friends you have, how much you share their struggles, how often you go out to coffee with them, and so forth. And yet, one’s list of friends and family is not really relevant to the theological question at hand. It’s not as though one has to spend an adequate amount of time socializing with, say, adulterers to ascertain whether or not God has really said that thou shalt not commit adultery. Nevertheless, though they are not germane theologically or morally, these questions are relevant to the depth of one’s ability to empathize. Though deep personal and emotional investment in a situation has long been reason for judges, jurors, and other decision-makers to remove themselves from important deliberations, gay activists tellingly want the debate to include only those whose personal feelings are likely to compromise their judgment.

Of course, rhetorically establishing the place for empathy is not enough; it must be invoked as well. And so, scattered throughout the list are questions (1,2,6,7,22,23,24,36,39) meant to get the reader pondering just how hard chastity is for homosexuals. I certainly don’t doubt that it is a struggle. Virtues are like that: some of them come easily, some come with great difficulty, and which is which depends heavily on the individual and circumstance. However, I do doubt that struggle’s authority to overturn what God has taught the Church. If Christianity were all about living our best lives now, as some popular preachers of fluff gently and positively contend, then I suppose difficulty might be a relevant excuse to set aside those parts of God’s Word that make life hard. But it’s not. Given the centrality of the Cross and God’s repeated promises that we will all be bearing our own crosses, difficulty is not a sound reason to ask the Serpent’s question of “did God really say…” After all, there are straight Christians whose adherence to chastity also means practical celibacy for an indefinite amount of time—sometimes their entire lives. The difficulty of chastely navigating America’s sexual landscape is not trivial even for those without sexual issues, and it’s not as though homosexual desires are the only sexual issue out there.

The next set of questions are designed to provoke another set of feelings: doubt and embarrassment about actually believing what the Bible teaches. Questions 14-21 all address positions that the Church has held at times over the past 2000 years that modernists would find awkward: issues such as the toleration of slavery and geocentricity. However, in addition to betraying an historical ignorance that should be embarrassing, none of these questions have anything to do with what God actually says on the subject of homosexuality. They are merely insinuations that because the Church has been embarrassed before due to its opinions, it might be again—maybe even on this issue. In other words, they are meant to encourage us to ignore Scripture in favor of fashion lest we feel ashamed—not to actually evaluate what Scripture says.

The remainder of Vines’ questions can really be summed up in a single one: “You’re not… mean… are you?” Would you really compare homosexuality to pedophilia—as though the arguments to justify the former wouldn’t also justify the latter if they were actually valid? Would you tell barren couples about the centrality of procreation to marriage—as though they weren’t already acutely aware of it? Would you tell loving homosexuals that they’re really lusting—as though lust were determined by how one’s desire feels rather than whether one desires something illicit? A man can feel exactly the same way about his wife and about his neighbor’s wife, but one is lust and the other is not; it’s not the character of a desire that makes it lust, but rather the object of a desire. Once again, the focus of these questions is not the text of Scripture nor the teachings of the Church (even when they occasionally glance against them), but an attempt to provoke a specific sentiment: the discomfort that always comes with voicing truths that are hard to hear.

Whatever took Vines down this path of sentimentalism, the sleight of hand that theological liberals typically use to replace God’s instruction with their own (modern, progressive, evolved, etc) feelings on political and moral controversies is to frame Christ’s instructions to love God and neighbor as though they were somehow opposed to his other teachings. They believe they can love better if only they’re not stifled by those parts of the moral landscape that fail to resonate with them. It works as a camouflage because Christ did talk so often about love, but it fails as truth because in their minds they have (in true sentimentalist fashion) already reduced love to a mere feeling—as thought Christ was primarily instructing us to feel a particular way about our neighbors rather than act a particular way towards them.

Morality may indeed make it harder for the theological liberal to feel the feelings he wants to feel, but it certainly did not hinder Christ in teaching us how to act. On the contrary, Jesus regularly equates following the moral law with loving God and loving one’s neighbor as himself. Morality fleshes out love rather than obscuring it. Likewise, he repeatedly tells his disciples that loving him means keeping his instructions. Whereas sentimentalists take the modern romantic impulse to follow your heart above all else and project that back onto the text until feelings of affection abolish the written law, the sensible way of understanding a man who specifically said he did not come to abolish the written law is that Jesus is saying that love and following the moral law are the same thing. After all, one can hardly love his neighbor by murdering him, sleeping with his wife, stealing his property, and so forth. Neither can one love his neighbor by sodomy.

At this point, some would no doubt contend that because I affirm that our feelings are neither God nor his Word and that Biblical love is more action than feeling that I’m therefore trying to cut empathy out of the Christian life altogether. Isn’t empathy a necessity for loving our neighbors, and so shouldn’t the church have empathy for homosexuals who are indeed our neighbors? Of course; we’re not aiming at sociopathy, after all. Being able to put oneself in another’s shoes and understand how they feel is an important part of turning ideas about morality into practical action on that person’s behalf.

Nevertheless, we must not put the cart before the horse, as some leftists do, by making morality a matter of empathy apart from rules. Like shame and most other facets of our emotional lives, empathy is something that must be cultivated by moral laws before it is of any use to ourselves or to our neighbors. A normal human being does not live in a constant fog of gray pity triggered equally by everything he encounters. We should not feel pity for everything, but for pitiable things. We should not feel sympathy for everyone, but for those who are sympathetic. Moral instruction, life experience, family, and so forth are all necessary to civilize our empathy so that we can make such distinctions well.

Examples of an overgrown and feral empathy are not too difficult to find these days. On the more trivial end of things, last year a New York woman who was mugged for her cell phone and managed to catch one of the young thieves. She was quickly condemned for her actions by one writer. Uncultivated by even basic morality (i.e. stealing is wrong), Joseph Sargent’s empathy landed solely with the thief. He went so far as to blame the victim (although “not entirely”) for all the terrible things that will happen to her mugger because she had the audacity to catch him while she was being robbed and turn him over to the police. After all, the 13-year-old perpetrator was a minority and therefore worthy of empathy whereas the privileged victim was white (a fact he repeatedly notes as though it were an accusation.) In Sargents words:

Vondrich says that she “felt sorry” for the kid, but not enough to not have him arrested and charged with grand larceny. The boy will now enter New York’s vaunted juvenile justice system, which will likely [****] up his life even further, simply because he snatched a white lady’s iPhone in Williamsburg.

If only everyone could feel sorry for people as adeptly as Sargent can.

Unfortunately, these examples aren’t always so trivial. Consider the scandal that came to light in Rotherham last year: A massive sex-trafficking ring was being run in this town in north England which forced over 1400 young women into rape and prostitution. For years, officials knew that this was going on, but they deliberately chose to do nothing—even to the point of disciplining would-be whistle blowers. Why would they do such a thing? Out of empathy, of course.

This might be mystifying at first. Given how I framed the situation, you probably empathize with the poor young women who were being abused—wouldn’t those officials do the same? Well, there’s another wrinkle: this ring was being run almost entirely by Pakistani immigrants. Those officials knew just how privileged the young white rape victims were compared to their oppressed rapists. They were afraid of a racist anti-immigrant backlash if any of this reached the light of day. So who were they supposed to feel sorry for: the girls because they were being raped or the men because they were minorities? Their empathy, uncultivated by any sensible moral standards, could not adequately answer that question, but they followed their bleeding hearts anyway—much to the detriment of a great many victims. After all, empathy without moral rules cannot consistently tell victim from victimizer.

We don’t always notice because the effects on society are so slow, but sentimentalism is fundamentally barbaric. Narrowly basing morality entirely on how sorry you feel for someone else altogether expels higher ethical concepts like justice and mercy. Because its easier to empathize with an unprepared mother than with an unborn child, the sentimentalist fights for the gruesome deaths of tens of millions of the latter. Because it is easier to empathize with rape victims than with men who are falsely accused, the sentimentalist embraces hoax after hoax in order to eliminate every facet due process that protects against false accusations. Because it is easier to empathize with perceived cultural underdogs, the sentimentalist brings up past atrocities like the Spanish Inquisition (responsible for the executions of around 1250 people total over three and a half centuries) in order to minimize the ongoing murders of tens of thousands every year at the hands of Muslim terrorists. If empathy is civilization’s only guide, we will quickly find out how blind it really is on its own.

Of course the Church’s cause for empathy is broader than civilization’s because it is the custodian of different concerns—eternal rather than temporal. Any given situation in society might have legitimate victims, villains, or both—sometimes there really are good guys and bad guys, and civilization’s empathy needs to be able to see the difference. However, before God, when all is said and done, we are all of us villains no matter what else we might be. “All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.” And so, God’s compassion is specifically (and necessarily) towards those of us who do not warrant it, and the Church declares that Gospel accordingly. We empathize with the murderers, the adulterers, and so forth because we realize that before God, we ourselves are included in their number. We don’t just put ourselves in their shoes, we are in their shoes. We therefore love because He loved and forgive because he forgave.

Nevertheless, the Church’s compassion is not our own invention springing from our own feelings, but a specific gift from God: the forgiveness of our sins on account of the atoning death of Jesus Christ. Theological liberals seem to find this inadequate, but we cannot, through our own empathy, make God more compassionate by calling evil good and good evil. The Church’s empathy is therefore also cultivated by God’s instructions to her in Scripture. The only reason to value the forgiveness of sins at all is if we do not want to continue in sin. Once we go down the road of embracing those sins that we think will make us happy, we abandon God’s compassion. A barbaric empathy uncultivated by proper theology focuses on making people affirmed in their feelings rather than being forgiven in truth. And so, because the Church’s source of empathy is something higher than that of civilization, feral empathy takes an even higher toll. It destroys not only our moral sensibilities, but our grasp on the Gospel itself.

Whether in the Church or in broader American society, the controversy over homosexuality has been dominated by a sentimentalism that drives out meaningful debate. In either case, however, we would all be better served in the long run if cooler heads were allowed to prevail and perceive more than just the heart, for our empathy does not self-civilize. If we continue to act as though it does, we will quickly find ourselves to be nothing more than the most compassionate of tyrants and heretics

Posted in Chastity, The Modern Church, Theological Liberalism | 1 Comment

Sermon: “A Hard Saying” – John 6:51-69

Posted on August 16, 2015 by Matt

My pastor required a substitute this weekend, and I was honored to be asked to preach on John 6:51-69:

Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Father, and our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.

“This is a hard saying; who can listen to it?” That is how many of Jesus’ disciples reacted to his words in this morning’s Gospel lesson. They were offended by it. They grumbled about it and disputed among themselves. And his message has grown no less offensive in the past 2000 years.

For the past few Sundays, our Gospel readings have been going over the circumstances of this discourse of Jesus. It began when large crowds started following Jesus to hear him teach. And when that crowd of over 5000 found themselves too far out of town to feed themselves, Jesus had compassion on them and miraculously fed them all from a handful of loaves and fish. Naturally, they were very impressed, but they chose to take away the wrong lesson. So impressed were they with what he did, that they sought to make him a king—turn him into a leader like Moses. What they did not do was give any thought to who he is.

They had their priorities all wrong, but Jesus had compassion on them again and gave them the truth—hard though that truth may been to hear. He told them, “you are seeking me not because you saw signs, but because you ate your fill of the loaves. Do not labor for food that perishes, but for the food that endures to eternal life.” And then Jesus turns their attention to what is truly important—to Jesus Himself. “This is the work of God,” he says, “to believe in him whom he has sent.” “I am the bread of life; whoever comes to me shall not hunger and whoever believes in me shall never thirst.” And from our lesson today: “I am the living bread that came down from heaven. If anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever. And the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.” The Greek word for flesh that’s used here, by the way, is not a pleasant word. As the crowd becomes more obstinate, Jesus does not become more mollifying to appease them—he intentionally becomes more brazen in his instruction. Jesus tells them and us point-blank that like the multiplied loaves, we are perishing, and that what we truly need is Jesus Himself.

“This is a hard saying,” his own followers responded. “Who can listen to it?”

They were offended because this man—whose parents they knew—claimed to be from Heaven. They were offended because he claimed that he himself would raise the dead to life on the Last Day. They were offended because he told them that believing in him—this one man over and against anyone or anything else—was more important than both their bellies and their dreams of another leader like Moses. Indeed, in the verses that precede today’s reading, he blatantly told them that he was superior to Moses: Jesus said, “Your fathers ate the manna in the wilderness, and they died. This is the bread that comes down from heaven so that one may eat of it and not die.” Ironically, when they sought to make Jesus a king, they sought to make him less than he is.

Little has changed since these words were first spoken. The same words offend our own ears today. Our own crowds are also fine with Jesus being a great teacher. Everyone wants him on their side when it comes to their causes, their politics, their opinions… Everyone likes to pick out a few favorite sayings of his here and there and go merrily on their way refusing to listen to what he said about himself.

But what kind of great teacher says that he came down from Heaven, and that he’ll resurrect the dead at the end of the world? What kind of great teacher doesn’t claim to merely know the way to eternal life but to actually be the way to eternal life? What kind of great teacher teaches that the most essential thing is believing in that teacher? What kind of teacher repeatedly claims God’s prerogatives for himself and indeed claims to actually be God?

The great Christian apologist C.S. Lewis put it well. He wrote, “A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic—on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg—or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a mad man or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come up with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.” Jesus’ crowds knew this, and so many of them left because they would not fall at his feet.

But it’s not just “those people” who are offended by Christ. We Christians often are as well, and you can see it in the way we try to clean him up or make him presentable before sharing him with others—or even before we’ll deign to believe in him ourselves. So we try in various ways to cover up the offense in attempts to make him more palatable to ourselves and others.

Some try cover it up with spectacle. A few months ago, I read about a pastor in Ohio who decided to start riding bulls in the middle of his Sunday services to entertain visitors. He thought that if he milked this idea enough, he could steer the crowds into his building where they would be moo-ved by the Spirit. And the crowds really love it, from what I read—at least until the novelty starts wearing off. This is an extreme case, to be sure, but that same impulse is always there—to think that everyone will more readily accept Jesus if only we can surround him with the right entertainment, the right music, the right coffee, the right community…

…or the right teachings. Sometimes we try to reduce the offense by actively shaving off Jesus’ rough edges. We try to forget that Jesus taught that the Bible is true down to the smallest detail—especially that he affirmed what modernists consider the really embarrassing parts like Noah’s flood and Jonah’s fish. We pretend that he had nothing to say about the really popular or fashionable sins today—try to make Him unoffensive by teaching the affirmation of whichever sins we can pass off as lifestyles. We think we can make him more compassionate or inclusive by teaching that he wasn’t really claiming to be the only way to salvation all those times he claimed to be the only way to salvation.

Still other times, we try to pad those rough edges with warm and fuzzy sentiments by teaching things that Jesus never taught. Sometimes we say that Christianity is a relationship rather than a religion—as though we’re supposed to be ashamed of being openly religious. We talk a great deal about having intimate personal encounters with God in our own feelings rather than talking about those things that God actually said to us 2000 years ago in Palestine when he became one of us. And instead of listening to those words, we frequently take the inclinations of our own sinful hearts and pretend they come from him.

There’s really no end to our ability to try and make a better Jesus—one who is more evolved, or relevant, or exciting, or whatever happens to be appealing to the crowds this week. Whereas Jesus was content to offend the crowd and let them walk away rather than giving them any less than what they need, we often prefer pandering.

But whether we pander or are pandered to, it will never be enough. Miraculously feeding thousands of people was impressive enough that they wanted to make Jesus their king by force, but many of Jesus’ disciples still turned back when faced with the scandal of the Cross. As Jesus said, “Do you take offense at this? Then what if you were to see the Son of Man ascending to where he was before?” referring to his death, Resurrection, and Ascension. And if we do not proclaim those things—proclaim that Cross—then the Church wastes her time, no matter how big our crowds become. We think we can save their souls, but they don’t need us; they need Jesus! The same Jesus that we need.

And we do not need a Jesus that meets our specifications—one who has been adjusted according to our own exacting standards. We need the real Jesus—the one who drove the crowds away because he would not give them anything less than Himself. We need the Jesus who is God Himself in the flesh. We need the Jesus who said he was the only way to salvation because he is the only way to salvation. We need the Jesus who, rather than becoming a great social reformer, died as an eternal ransom for our sins. We need the Jesus who doesn’t tiptoe around our own helplessness—believing in Him is the only work we do for God, and as He says in today’s reading, even that is out of our league unless granted by the Father. Our faith doesn’t come from ourselves, it is a gift of God.

And so when the world tempts us to ponder whether we want to go away from the one with such a hard teaching, we respond as Peter did: “To whom shall we go?” We don’t go wherever the crowds happen to be or to whatever’s fashionable at the moment—both crowds & their demagogues need saving themselves, and passing fads can never offer anything eternal. We don’t go to great moral teachers, for they can never make us moral enough for God. We certainly don’t go to ourselves, as though our own shallow understandings can somehow improve upon the words of the Bread of Life.

No, Jesus alone has the words of eternal life, and so we go to where he himself promised to be: We go to where we can hear those words proclaimed and to where the actual flesh and blood given for the life of the world are offered to us to eat and drink.

We have nowhere else to go. In this morning’s epistle, Paul writes, “Let no one deceive you with empty words, for because of these things” (referring the sexual immorality, impurity, covetousness, and idolatry he just finished writing about before today’s reading began) “because of these things the wrath of God comes upon the sons of disobedience. Therefore do not become partners with them; for at one time you were darkness, but now you are light in the Lord.” Apart from Christ, darkness is where all of us are, and those who love their sin too much to be forgiven of it—those who find forgiveness too confining, restrictive, or offensive—that’s where they remain. And so, Paul also says, “look carefully then how you walk, not as unwise but as wise, making the best use of the time because the days are evil.” There is only one thing that is needful, so let us be sure we aren’t walking away from Him.

We have nowhere else to go, but we need nowhere else to go because Jesus doesn’t need to be cleaned up. God is already more loving and compassionate than we could ever make him; he took on the wrath we deserve in our stead, giving his only Son to die for us. Christ is already closer to us that we can ever make him—he took on humanity and became one of us, and in Baptism, we became one with him. His death became our death and his Resurrection becomes our resurrection so that the eternal life of God becomes our own eternal life. And this Gospel message of Christ’s is already more inclusive than we can ever make it. For inasmuch as the Law is universal—for we have all sinned and fallen short—the Gospel is just as universal. That means every last sin is paid for by the blood of Christ. And that means every last one of our sins is paid for by the blood of Christ.

May this peace of God which passes all understanding keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus unto life everlasting. Amen.

Posted in Apologetics, Gospel, Theology | 1 Comment

The Forgotten Use of the Law

Posted on July 27, 2015 by Matt

It’s old news that the famous “three uses” to which God puts the law (a curb that restrains sin, a mirror that reveals the depth of our guilt, and a guide by which Christians live) have become very controversial among contemporary Lutherans. This oddity is despite the fact that these uses are included in the explanation of the Small Catechism and thus part of how every Lutheran is taught the Faith.

One side of it focuses almost exclusively on Second Use. They drive home how the law reveals our sin and therefore our need for the Gospel. At the same time, they tend to be highly dubious of any preacher who might proclaim the law in a way that implies any expectation that a Christian might actually change their behavior and follow it. In practice, they really only acknowledge one use of the law. The other side, in contrast, argues that Third Use really needs to be recognized alongside Second. Christians need to be and want to be instructed on how to live God-pleasing lives. After all, though each of us is simultaneously a saint who does not sin and a sinner who does nothing but sin, the saint is still human and is therefore still the kind of being that needs instruction—we must not be Saint/Sinner Nestorians. Adam was perfect, but God still told him what to do and what not to do.

This leads us to the second oddity of this debate: there’s a fight over the three uses of the law between a side that only talks about one use and a side that only talks about two. Whatever happened to the First Use of the law—outwardly restraining our wicked deeds? When God uses the law in this fashion, it does not make us better people, but it does limit our capacities and restrain our tendencies to blatantly harm our neighbors in overt ways. While it may not lead to the Gospel or even proceed from the Gospel, this is still nothing to sneeze at. God calls many of us to live on this Earth for a good many years; all other things being equal, this is a better experience when we’re not being constantly raped, beaten, and robbed by everyone we meet.

Perhaps First Use gets overlooked by Christians because it is often called the “civil use” of the Law. We see the government punish murderers, penalize thieves, & so forth, and we think that this is the essence of restraining sin. Because of this, its treated as a concern for government officials, but not for Christians unless they also happen to be government officials. We think it’s simply not our problem, and so we leave it by the wayside for police, judges, and maybe public schools to pick up. It’s their job to stop people from blatantly hurting each other.

Perhaps the most obvious problem with our nonchalance is this: Where exactly are all these civil authorities going to learn what the word “harm” means? It’s an odd question, but a very pertinent one. After all, it wasn’t too long ago that we knew entrusting children to sexual deviants would harm them. Now, refusing to do so is deemed “harmful” to the deviants. Does abortion harm the children that it kills or does acting like the mothers they are harm those children’s would-be killers? Does letting children walk to the local park on their own harm them more than taking away their parents? These are not difficult questions, and yet American civil authorities get them wrong with an ever-increasing consistency.

And so, we must seriously ponder how our civil authorities will learn the difference between good and evil—between helping and hurting. From America’s longstanding civil traditions and cultural roots? Unfortunately, we’ve been throwing those under the bus for quite some time now—we thought they were just too darn restrictive. Most of our culture has simply latched onto some version of “follow your heart,” even as we cluck our tongues about all the increasingly nasty things everyone’s hearts are telling them to do.

Well, if our traditions are a bust, then perhaps the law written on our heart can shed some light on the situation. It can, but as J. Budziszewski has repeatedly shown, natural law doesn’t just do that by virtue of its mere existence. Those who are unwilling to look at it or unable to mentally process it can just as easily be driven by their consciences to greater depravity. Appealing to natural law in a culture who no longer admits its existence takes a certain level of skill and expertise, and the most applicable developments in that area of philosophy are being undertaken specifically by Christians whose natural knowledge is reinforced by special revelation. Our nation simply needs well-catechized Christians to rebuild its moral sensibility.

The other problem with our relegation of First Use to the civil authorities is that it overlooks the fact that almost every adult Christian is a civil authority in one way or another. It’s particularly sad that Lutherans would arrive at such a mistaken conclusion given how it ignores our rather helpful theology of vocation. Most obviously, fathers and mothers have a responsibility to civilize their own children by deliberately restraining their wickedness. In addition, America spreads some of her civil authority among the population—Christians are usually voters and so must have sufficient understanding of right and wrong to vote well. There is also a fact of polity that we tend to forget—peer pressure is very real and by design. When we share our views on morality, when we react with disgust to disgusting things or embarrassment to shameful things, when we openly disapprove of inappropriate behavior… in all these cases we are subtly restraining the wickedness of our neighbors.

The ways in Christians participate in the restraint of open wickedness are manifold. When Christians are inadequately catechized in the moral law—when First Use fails to even show up on our radar—we become unable to carry out those roles well and our neighbors suffer as a result.

And yes, as I’ve written before, the three uses of the law are God’s uses, not ours. Preachers and teachers do not get to choose whether someone is restrained, convicted, or instructed when they proclaim the law. Nevertheless, one who understands the law too narrowly cannot preach that same law very well. Pastors who only accept Second Use tend to gloss over any part of the law which they don’t think serves that purpose terribly well. They do not, for example, spend much time on specifics, but keep everything vague and generic so that all will be equally convicted. Furthermore, they tend to spin those parts of the law that they do teach instead of teaching them straightforwardly. For example, if they ever mention adultery at all, it is to remind their hearers that all have broken the Sixth Commandment by lusting in our hearts, and never to pass on the Apostles’ frequent practical warnings to stay as far away from all sexual sin as possible. In other words, their narrow view of law ends up obscuring parts of God’s word rather than shining all of it forth brightly.

In the same way, teachers who never consider First Use are going to be deficient in their instruction. They might bring up adultery as a reminder of our own sins, and avoiding sexual sin as a path to personal piety, but never portray chastity as an expectation that parents should have of their children, that the unmarried should have of prospective spouses, that Christians should have of each other, and so forth. When those expectations are never cultivated, then the customs and lifestyles that ultimately fulfill those expectations are never considered or developed. To continue using chastity as an example, if parents never expect chastity from their children, then they will never question participating in our culture’s coupling practices—the ones that are essentially designed to promote fornication. As Americans, we are already hyper-individualists, and forgetting first use is another hurdle that impedes the moral law from being understood corporately and not just personally.

It is well that Lutherans are beginning to once again admit the existence of Third Use. Nevertheless, for the sake of our neighbors, we cannot stop there. If we are to understand the law well, then we must be cognizant of all three uses—not just of our favorites. Though we are not of the world and our hope does not lie here, the Church does have a role to play in civilization, and we need to step back into it. It is the work of the Church to proclaim the law in its fullest; it is the work of God to bring blessings out of that work. We cannot carry out our work well as long as we study the law through too narrow of a lens and proclaim it through a man-made filter.

Posted in Culture, Ethics, Law, Lutheranism, Natural Law, Politics | Leave a comment

Not Like This

Posted on July 1, 2015 by Matt

As someone who lives on a somewhat wooded acreage out in the country, I’ve become accustomed to burning yard waste from time to time. From the perspective of one who was raised in the Chicago suburbs, there are an astonishing amount of dead branches that fall every year. Nor is it anything other than routine for us to have limbs and even entire trees downed in inclement weather. That’s to say nothing of the time a couple years ago when our creek flooded and every piece of waste that the original owner had been dumping over the fence for decades was washed back out onto the lawn. As I write this, there’s already a pile started that I’ll probably light later this summer.

And yet, if my home were in the path of a raging fire, and I feared that it might be consumed if that fire were not put out, then I would not simply take the opportunity to dump my burn pile into it. I have no desire to keep my rubbish, but I’m not so desperate to get rid of it that I would fuel a dangerous inferno that could destroy far more than my rubbish.

America now faces a similar situation when it comes to some of her own rubbish: the Confederate flag. I have no love for it as a symbol, for it is deeply connected to an abominable practice. Though there are those who perceive its connections to other, better things, I have not been taught to make those connections, nor do I think the better washes away the abominable in any case.

Nevertheless, the sudden impulse to scrub that flag from every dusty corner of the nation is far more dangerous than the flag itself. While removing the Stars and Bars from public flagpoles is an entirely reasonable proposition, the mob that’s slathering for it is not primarily comprised of reasonable people.

You can see the irrationality in how quickly the destruction is extending to films like Gone with the Wind and innocuous pieces of pop-culture like The Dukes of Hazzard. You can smell the delirium in Apple’s decision to ax any uncensored Civil War game in their app store. You can perceive the incoherence in Amazon and eBay nixing all Confederate memorabilia whilst ignoring all the Nazi and Communist merchandise they sell, or in Walmart’s refusal to decorate a cake with a Confederate flag while happily depicting ISIS’ flag in icing. The way they froth at the mouth when they see the Stars and Bars it is not indicative of moral zeal but of fanaticism. Reflexively ejaculating “kill it with fire” whenever they encounter something offensive is not an admirable trait in people who live in a world they believe to be comprised entirely of mircroaggressions.

This is not a controlled burn, and the fire will not even be bounded by the issue of American racism, for that is not the only political issue on which the fascist left has lost all sense. Take, for example, BuzzFeed’s new journalism standards (yes, apparently BuzzFeed does journalism; I think their story on the Obergefell ruling was titled “You Won’t Believe What These Four Judges Said About Gay Marriage!”) You might think that reporting on both (or all) sides of a story is inherent to good journalism, but BuzzFeed does not agree: “We firmly believe that for a number of issues, including civil rights, women’s rights, anti-racism, and LGBT equality, there are not two sides.” It is amazing how quickly the left moved from “This needs to be debated.” to “The debate is over and we won; didn’t you notice?” to “There’s nothing to debate because there’s only one side.”

These are not the beliefs of somebody who is willing to have a discussion. These are the beliefs of an unthinking dogmatist. Yes, racism is bad, but this is an age where people think the word “niggardly” is racist. Sure, misogyny is wrong, but this is an age where “women’s rights” include murdering their own children and unilaterally taking away a man’s home and family for any reason or no reason at all. Of course, civil rights are important, but this is an age where such “rights” include forcing florists and bakers to pretend two men are married but do not cover conscience or religion. These are the issues where there’s supposedly only one side? These are the issue on which sane people cannot have differing opinions?

Nevertheless, while the book-burners and thought-police rage, plenty of conservatives are suggesting to simply go along with them because the Confederate flag does represent an abominable practice. They advise that we don’t want to get caught defending it because it might make us look bad. I offer this counter-advice: take a good long look at the Social Justice Warrior fanatics on the other side and thoughtfully consider whether you will ever look anything other than bad in their eyes and whether it would even be meaningful if they did like you. Too many conservatives would have us engage in an unwinnable popularity contest instead of actually leading those who will inevitably come under assault. That flag might be odious, but it’s also tolerable; giving a mob free reign is not.

Ever since the left co-opted the term, even conservatives have forgotten what tolerance really means. It is not the act of indiscriminate toleration that they promote—the kind that forces them into all sorts of incoherence as they refuse to tolerate anything that gives them even a whiff of intolerance. Rather, it is the ability to see an evil and leave it alone because your efforts to stamp it out would inevitably cause greater evil. An old proverb quoted by Martin Luther in Temporal Authority sums it up well: “’He cannot govern who cannot wink at faults.’ Let this be his rule: Where wrong cannot be punished without greater wrong, there let him waive his rights, however just they may be.”

Whatever else it might accomplish, stamping out the Confederate flag now also whets the appetite of those fanatics who will consume America whole. It gets rid of an irritant at the cost of empowering a great evil. The day may come when the Stars and Bars can be put to rest without causing even greater wrong, but it is not this day. That symbol should go away, but not like this.

Posted in Culture, Politics | 2 Comments

Transgenderism Eats Its own Tail: If boys can be girls, then what does “girl” actually mean?

Posted on June 1, 2015 by Matt

Like Minnesota before her, Virginia has recently chosen to impose radical gender theory on its schools. The motivation behind this push is supposedly compassion for a select group of boys and girls—specifically the boys who think they are really girls and the girls who think they are really boys. We are thus told that this is a mission of mercy to prevent discrimination against such individuals and to promote their inclusion. It is undoubtedly true that those who have difficulty making peace with their own gender face some unique challenges in life, but leftist social engineers are using them as an excuse to bully schools and institutions into adopting policies that enforce an ideology they already possessed—one that considers gender as something ephemeral and (above all) non-binding.

Nevertheless, despite the pretension of greater respect for and acceptance of the boys who think they are girls, the claims of our social engineers (when taken seriously) amount to a level of disrespect that cannot accept or respect the ones they use. The National Federation of State High School Associations, for example, is fairly typical of our social engineers on this subject when pushing their ideology. In response to the common “concern” among parents that transgender “girls” are actually boys, the NFHS tells us:

It is important for policy-makers to understand that transgender girls (who were assigned a male gender at birth) are not boys. Their consistent and affirmed gender identity as girls is as deep-seated as the gender identity of non-transgender girls.

It would be an altogether outlandish claim in any sane culture, but America is quickly leaving behind outdated notions of sanity. Because it is outlandish, the proponents of common sense don’t often engage in the thought-experiment of treating these claims seriously. Because it seems accommodating at first glance, the boys who think they are girls don’t take it too seriously either. Nevertheless, doing so raises a very telling question: if a boy can identify as a girl, than what does this word “girl” actually mean?

The entire point of the transgender endeavor hinges on the claim that biology is irrelevant to gender. The aforementioned NFHS document affirms that a boy who thinks he’s a girl is unequivocally a girl no matter what our lying eyes might tell us. The same would no doubt be true for the girl who thinks she’s a boy. They think this lifts restrictions, but at the same time it imposes a different one: The word “girl” cannot possibly have anything to do with biology. Even as the boy who thinks he’s a girl seeks out drugs and genital mutilation, he claims to have been a girl all along no matter what gender he was “assigned” at birth. So while such mutilation might involve a personal sense of aesthetics, it cannot be matched up to any over-arching biological reality of girlhood. Transgenderism jettisons such realities simply by embracing the idea of girls with penises and boys with vaginas.

So if the word “girl” has no biological meaning in this context, then what else could it mean? Perhaps the boy thinks he’s a girl more in social terms. In other words, perhaps he sees his personality, preferences, behaviors, and so forth as feminine rather than masculine. Unfortunately for him, this too is out-of-bounds for our social engineers. The same ideologues who bully schools into adopting transgender policies unwaveringly inform us that none of these factors are distinctive between boys and girls either. To say that boys act “this way” while girls act “that way” or that boys have “these traits” while girls have “those traits” is nothing more than a stereotype—a kind of illusion or prejudice about one group or another that is not founded in anything real. At best, these are simply social constructs that are sure to be deconstructed any day now (and good riddance!) Accordingly, the boy who thinks he’s a girl is not allowed to mean that in any social sense either. The hunt for the meaning of “girl” continues.

Well, perhaps the boy who thinks he’s a girl does so in some spiritual sense—he thinks that he has a feminine soul. I’ve never heard our social engineers go this route, and with good reason. They routinely tell us that this is a matter of science over and against any spiritual concerns in order to disqualify religious opinions from influencing the matter in any way. Opening this can of worms would undeniably make this a matter of forcing a tiny minority religion on everyone else. If even being seen to pray or voicing a religious thought where others might hear is out-of-bounds in public schools, how much more so is forcing everyone in the school district to adopt another’s religious beliefs about gendered souls? Even apart from the politics of the matter, outside the scope of and language provided by an established religion in which these words find their meanings in history, theology and narrative, these kinds of metaphysical claims about masculine and feminine souls are rather murky. Our social engineers therefore forbid the word “girl” from having any spiritual or metaphysical meaning in our current conversion as well.

Here we have finally reached the end of the line. If, for the sake of a thought experiment, we take all this transgender insanity seriously, then nothing is actually left when we come full circle to the boy who thinks he is a girl—the person who is supposedly being helped by the leftist ideologues. If there is no male or female, then “boy” and “girl” are nothing more than synonyms for “person” or “human” or the like. He is only a person who thinks he is a person. However, a person who identifies as a person is, for all practical purposes, being tautological. He cannot seek any change at all for he is already at his destination. And yet, he is seeking a change—he does use the word “girl” as though it meant something different than “boy.” However, the social engineers have cut off all possibility of such a difference. If one takes their reckoning seriously, the boy’s claim might as well be a grunt or a snort—a meaningless sound masquerading as a word, as logical positivists once deemed ethical and theological terms. In the end, the leftist social engineers have reduced their supposed beneficiaries to those whose sounds are neither request, nor statement, but simply noise. Such is neither mercy nor compassion.

Transgenderism tries to make the genders fluid so that they are easier to escape from. Nevertheless, such fluidity does not only destroy the gender “assigned” at birth, but also the gender one wants to identify as. For the boy who thinks he’s a girl, transgender ideology destroys both his reality and his fantasy. In Orthodoxy, G.K. Chesterton wrote:

You can free things from alien or accidental laws, but not from the laws of their own nature… Do not go about as a demagogue, encouraging triangles to break out of the prison of their three sides. If a triangle breaks out of its three sides, its life comes to a lamentable end. Somebody wrote a work called The Loves of the Triangles; I never read it, but I am sure that if triangles were ever loved, they were loved for being triangular.

Likewise, if a boy ever wanted to be a girl, it’s because there’s something distinctive about girls that he feels affinity with. But the moment one admits to the natural distinctiveness of girls, then one must also acknowledge that some are girls and some are not. Reason therefore leaves us with only two options: either dehumanize the boys who think they are girls by reducing their self-assertions to gibberish, or acknowledge that “boy” and “girl” are both meaningful words and that the boys who think they are girls are simply wrong—and allow society to act accordingly.

Perversely, leftists have chosen the path of dehumanization because our culture has deemed it disrespectful to tell a boy who thinks he is a girl that he is wrong. This error flies only because so many have forgotten what respect means. We think it is simply a matter of engendering pleasant feelings and not causing distress, but respect goes deeper than mere niceness. To respect something is to treat it as though it is what it is. One respects a boundary, for example, by not crossing it; that is what a boundary is. One respects a parent by honoring him, or an authority by obeying it. Likewise, one disrespects something by treating it as though it were something other than what it is. An oncologist might engender pleasant feelings and avoid distress by telling her cancer-stricken patient that he is perfectly healthy. Nevertheless, doing so would be horribly disrespectful because she would be treating him as something other than a patient—as someone whose health is not her concern.

In the same way, we ought not be disrespectful to boys who think they are girls—neither by playing along with either their own misidentified gender nor with the social engineers using them as pawns. Neither must we enlist school districts and society as a whole to try and make their misidentification more believable. In such a context, discrimination (i.e. the ability to tell the difference between boys and girls) is not an imposition or an injustice at all. Wrong they may be, but the boys who think they are girls are still confused and hurting and we owe them better than some elaborate fantasy role-playing exercise. No likes hearing that he is wrong or being treated as though he were wrong, but there are worse ways to be treated. It is far better that we deem the boys who think they are girls to be wrong than that we deem them to be uttering mere noises that cannot ever rise to the level of being wrong.

Posted in Culture, Ethics, Feminism, Politics | 3 Comments

America’s Most Hated Bible Verses

Posted on May 15, 2015 by Matt

lghcyI’m referring to Ephesians 5 and 1 Peter 3, of course—well, half of them, anyway.  Is the apostolic instruction that wives submit to their husbands inherently abusive? Does a refusal to redact that part of the whole counsel of God enable domestic violence? That’s what John Shore alleges by anecdote in a recent blog post.

He gets himself into trouble them moment he conflates obedience with inferiority—a peculiar injection into a religion centered on a God who we glorify first and foremost because he became obedient unto death on a cross. Regardless, the author’s game is given away in the first paragraph:

My alarm bells went off the moment he identified himself as a “Bible-believing Christian.” That’s code for the kind of anti-gay, anti-science, anti-women, anti-thinking Christian who ruins Christianity.

Suffice to say, Shore’s analysis is not a work of Christian theology, but of the heresy of theological liberalism in which, in true Hegelian fashion, the Spirit of the Age is confused with the Holy Spirit. Despite Scripture’s myriad warnings against it, worldliness is embraced as the highest theological virtue and so Christianity must be conformed to our culture’s leftist mores. Actually believing what Christ says in contradistinction to popular culture ironically ruins Christianity. In other words, it’s just the same old song and dance the Church has had to deal with since Schleiermacher.

But Shore’s post itself isn’t really why I’m writing this. Despite the dubious theology behind it, I saw the article’s central question taken up by a fellow Lutheran on Facebook:

How does a church body (or an individual, for that matter) who believes in traditional gender roles avoid priming women—psychologically conditioning them—to become emotionally and spiritually trapped in an abusive marriage?

People will tell you that there are no bad questions, but that is not true. This… is not a good question. You might as well ask how someone can teach the Fourth Commandment without priming boys and girls to become victims of child abuse. It’s simply a rhetorical device that poisons the well by presenting God’s design of humanity as a dangerous curse rather than a blessing—as though pastors and teachers need to make God’s Word safe before we stoop to teaching it. The truth, however, is that abuse is not any more inherent in a husband’s authority over his wife than it is in parents’ authority over their children. Modern Americans tend to view all authority with suspicion, but that reflects a problem with us rather than a problem with authority.

To be sure, those who were actually abused as children do have a hard time trusting either parents or a God who exhorts them to honor such parents. This is a true spiritual injury and therefore needs to be treated with sensitivity by teachers. However, the practical fact remains that abuse is not the only reason someone might have trouble with the command to honor one’s parents. Spoiled kids rebelling against their parents find it just as difficult—maybe more so. What’s more, spoiled kids are a more common occurrence than abused kids. Accordingly, a teacher cannot simply act as though all his pupils were abused and teach with what would be to most people an exaggerated and obsequious kind of sensitivity.

Neither can a teacher blindly accept his pupils’ opinion of their own parents and curtail his instruction on demand. After all, the spoiled teenager genuinely thinks he’s being abused when his parents impose a curfew, refuse to countenance his fornication, and tell him to stay sober. The spoiled are simply not capable of distinguishing between abuse and parental authority. No, the teacher’s only real choice to to boldly teach the Fourth Commandment to everyone and keep an eye out for victims who need special instruction on top of that. And indeed, that is what the Church typically does; it doesn’t often occur to pastors and teachers to do otherwise. When it comes to Christians who believe their religion is actually true, the well is not yet poisoned on the issue of parental authority.

Unfortunately, the same can not be said on the issue of husbands’ authority. The sad truth is that feminist America has infected the church with the false but ubiquitous belief that a husband’s authority is more danger than blessing. Once again, this is entirely understandable for victims of abuse; they need special help and attention because of their special circumstances. At the same time, however, the far more common cause of distrust for God’s instruction is a rebelliousness among spoiled adult women.

You can can see it in the way complaints of abuse increasingly mirror those of the rebellious teenager. Real abuse is obvious, but as I’ve written before, the victims of real abuse are very often being cast aside through absurd expansions of the concept of abuse. Blaming (e.g. “I can’t believe you forgot to pay the credit card bill.”) is considered abuse by many rubrics. Yelling (e.g. “I can’t believe you forgot to pay the credit card bill!”) is considered emotional abuse. Controlling behavior (e.g. “you can’t keep running up the credit card bill.”) is considered economic abuse as are both sharing and not sharing money (good luck avoiding both of those at once). While real abuse is a tragedy, criteria like these comprise a farce that does nothing but stoke resentment among the spoiled. Defining abuse in a way that effectively makes all long-lasting relationships abusive creates the illusion that abuse is the norm in marriage and that the institution therefore needs to be modified away from God’s design in order to make it safe.

When this illusion makes it into the Church, it brings the temptation to be ashamed of the responsibilities that God gives husbands and wives—particularly the latter. This shame leads teachers to modify God’s word until it is more to our culture’s liking. Without exception, whether in Sunday Bible study or at seminary, every time I have heard Ephesians 5 taught, verse 25 is laid out straightforwardly with a healthy dose of shaming for those men who do not aspire to love their wives as Christ loves the church—even sacrificing himself for her. This is as it should be. And yet, every time those same teachers teach verse 22, which instructs wives to submit to their husbands as unto Christ, they spend the entire time hedging—explaining nothing but instead piling up (often dubious) exceptions until submission has no tangible meaning at all. And that’s if they don’t just gloss over it entirely to spend their entire time instructing husbands on how leading their wives really means doing whatever they want (reality check: that is not at all how Christ serves the Church.) This is poor instruction—particularly when it is verse 22 that our culture is most apt to rebel against.

As with the Fourth Commandment, the only real solution is to boldly teach it all. I don’t mean what most Americans mean by this—to nuance submission until it becomes comfortable for feminists. Once it becomes that comfortable, it ceases to be submission at all. Headship and submission are not mere mutual respect, for mutual respect does not adequately describe the Church’s submission to Christ. Nor is a husband’s headship mere spiritual headship, for Christ is not merely the spiritual head of the Church. Neither is the submission best described as mutual, for though Christ sacrifices himself for the Church, he does not submit to us as we submit to him.

Likewise, boldly teaching does not entail adding all sorts of worldly exceptions to God’s word. A wife does not submit merely inasmuch as her husband is being Christlike—Peter explicitly instructs the opposite in his first epistle. Neither does a wife submit merely inasmuch as she agrees with her husband, for that is not submission at all. The only mitigation of a wife’s responsibility to submit is to serve God rather than man—she must not obey her husband when he forbids what God commands or commands what God forbids. Nevertheless, the normal circumstance is that submitting to her husband is serving God because that’s what God has specifically asked of her. Even in abnormal circumstances, one should always remember Luther’s admonition: if you say that God is telling you to do something against the secular authorities he instituted, then you’d better be able to show it in writing.

What boldly teaching headship and submission does entail is that we give the whole picture. The husband’s authority is to be used for his wife’s benefit—even to the point of his own death. He is not to abuse it for his own benefit. Doing so is blasphemous, for this whole thing was meant to be an image of Christ and the Church. Likewise, the wife is to submit to her husband as unto Christ in everything. This means exactly what it sounds like, no matter how much it grates the ears of those who have absorbed feminist principles—that’s why Paul repeats the comparison three times back-to-back in two verses.

This is the highest privilege of spouses, for this is precisely the manner in which humanity as a whole is made in the image of the Triune God. The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit love each other—give themselves to one another—so completely that these three persons are only one substance. This self-giving love is carried out according to their unique relationships—the Father unbegotten, the Son begotten, and the Spirit proceeding. There is no concern whatsoever over whether the difference between begotten and proceeding disadvantages one person or the other for they are united in love. Likewise, for humans, husband and wife (and children, for that matter, but that’s another topic) give themselves to each other completely according to their own unique relationships—the husband by love and self-sacrifice and the wife by submission and obedience in all things. By giving themselves to each other in this way, they each receive back everything they give and more besides. They lose nothing and gain everything. At the same time, we are also living, breathing artwork depicting the relationship between Christ and his own bride, the Church. Shame on us for despising such a gift!

However, the whole picture also includes the fact that God puts no conditions on these roles. The husband is to sacrifice himself for his wife even if she abuses that sacrifice, for Christ also died for the Pharisees and Scribes who murdered him and for the hordes of unbelievers who reject him. Likewise, the wife is to submit even to a husband who does not obey the word, for to suffer as a Christian is to share in Christ’s sufferings. Without a doubt, when sin enters the picture, these offices become genuinely daunting, but how is that different from any other aspect of living in a fallen world? God has not given us a spirit of fear, for Christ has overcome the world. Our victory is not based in worldly success, but in Christ’s new creation. Giving of ourselves to others is part-and-parcel of Christianity.

Christianity describes itself as both an offense and a stumbling block. Such a religion will always be in friction with the surrounding culture in some way or another. The contemporary friction over issues of sexuality are simply the offenses peculiar to the time and place we’ve been given. We must rise to our own challenge just as our ancestors in the faith did to theirs. We will never do so through a worldliness that trades doctrine for trends or through a fear that keeps us silent until we figure out a way to hide or nerf the offensive parts. We will only do so through boldness and conviction in teaching what Christ has given us to teach.

Posted in Feminism, The Modern Church, Theological Liberalism | 8 Comments

Good Parenting is so Unfair

Posted on May 5, 2015 by Matt

It looks my wife and I had better be a little more judicious about our son’s bedtime stories. We wouldn’t want to confer disadvantage on every other child in the world.

A recent episode of The Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s program The Philosopher’s Zone featured would-be philosopher kings Adam Swift and Harry Brighouse. Under the guise of “rescuing” the family from what they deem the very sensible view that it must be abolished for the sake of human equality, Swift and Brighouse perform an abstract vivisection of the institution.

The power of the family to tilt equality hasn’t gone unnoticed, and academics and public commentators have been blowing the whistle for some time. Now, philosophers Adam Swift and Harry Brighouse have felt compelled to conduct a cool reassessment.

Swift in particular has been conflicted for some time over the curious situation that arises when a parent wants to do the best for her child but in the process makes the playing field for others even more lopsided.

The “problem” is that good parents actually raise their children well—better than bad parents. This gives the well-raised children certain advantages in life, and the two myopic philosophers cannot distinguish delivering such advantages to one’s own children from disadvantaging everyone else. And it’s not just a matter of one family having wealth and resources that the other doesn’t.

Swift could see that the issue stretches well beyond the fact that some families can afford private schooling, nannies, tutors, and houses in good suburbs. Functional family interactions—from going to the cricket to reading bedtime stories—form a largely unseen but palpable fault line between families. The consequence is a gap in social mobility and equality that can last for generations.

While the obvious answer would be to forcibly abolish the family, they think that might be just a little too drastic. After all, they’ve found that allowing families to raise children does provide certain goods that cannot be provided any other way. While this in no way absolves the family of its inherent inequality in their view, it does indicate another factor that must be balanced against it, and so tolerating some aspects of the family might become a possibility.

Naturally, Swift and Brighouse have developed a systematic solution to this balancing act.

‘What we realised we needed was a way of thinking about what it was we wanted to allow parents to do for their children, and what it was that we didn’t need to allow parents to do for their children, if allowing those activities would create unfairnesses for other people’s children’.

So how does this parse out when it comes to the actual decisions that parents are “allowed” to make for their children? Some practices are right out. Private schooling is apparently unconscionable as it creates inequality without providing any of the “intimate, loving, authoritative, affectionate, love-based relationships” that justify tolerating the family. (They don’t mention homeschooling, but I suspect they might require the fainting couch if anyone brought it up.) Other practices, such as reading bedtime stories to your child, are a little grayer and more difficult to evaluate.

The evidence shows that the difference between those who get bedtime stories and those who don’t—the difference in their life chances—is bigger than the difference between those who get elite private schooling and those that don’t,’ he says.

This devilish twist of evidence surely leads to a further conclusion—that perhaps in the interests of levelling the playing field, bedtime stories should also be restricted. In Swift’s mind this is where the evaluation of familial relationship goods goes up a notch.

Bedtime stories do create that special intimate bond despite the gross inequalities they inflict. So Swift would graciously permit parents to continue the practice, as long as they don’t go overboard.

‘I don’t think parents reading their children bedtime stories should constantly have in their minds the way that they are unfairly disadvantaging other people’s children, but I think they should have that thought occasionally,’ quips Swift.

Now, I know what you’re all thinking. Wouldn’t affirming these kinds of archaically wholesome activities chain people to the benighted past we’ve left behind? Fear not:

‘When we talk about parents’ rights, we’re talking about the person who is parenting the child. How you got to be parenting the child is another issue. One implication of our theory is that it’s not one’s biological relation that does much work in justifying your rights with respect to how the child is parented.’

For Swift and Brighouse, our society is curiously stuck in a time warp of proprietorial rights: if you biologically produce a child you own it.

Biology is just so arbitrary, after all. When parents bring their child home from the maternity ward, why must society be condemned to the outdated notion that they leave with the one they brought in? Surely philosophers can do better than random biology:

‘Nothing in our theory assumes two parents: there might be two, there might be three, and there might be four,’ says Swift.

But they do throw one bone to the traditionalists:

‘We do want to defend the family against complete fragmentation and dissolution,’ he says. ‘If you start to think about a child having 10 parents, then that’s looking like a committee rearing a child; there aren’t any parents there at all.’

Ten parents? Ha! Let’s not go there; that would just be crazy.

I’ve written several times before that the West needs to rethink its slavish devotion to equality. If you’re looking for a reason why, I think Swift and Brighouse have just provided the platonic ideal. We have no need of their rationale for tolerating the family because the modernistic indictment they choke down can be utterly rejected.

Excellence in parenting does not disadvantage anyone. On the contrary, raising virtuous kids is a boon to society as a whole. Young men and women who have been raised well will prove a blessing to their friends, to their neighbors, to their employers, to their nation, and one day, to their own families who will multiply that love still further. Hobbling them by taking away their advantages will never redistribute those advantages to those who are not raised so well. It will merely reduce the inclination and ability of those who might have helped them.

There is a word that describes one person looking at the advantages of another and considering them a disadvantage to himself: envy. This vice goes to war against every human excellence and ultimately erodes every beneficence that a society might provide. To enshrine envy in our philosophies and social structures is merely to institutionalize vice. Accordingly, the fact that the family is inherently unequal is not a drawback, but an asset.

The radicalism framed as moderation of poor philosophers like Swift and Brighouse serves only one useful purpose: giving us all a preview of what we can expect from social justice warriors and equalitarians if we do not reverse course and regain our sanity. We can’t say we weren’t warned.

Posted in Culture, Ethics | 2 Comments

In Defense of Offense

Posted on April 23, 2015 by Matt

I had another article up at The Federalist the other day—this time about the threat to religious liberty posed by a rainbow mob and the foolish attempts by moderates to try and make peace with that mob by accommodating it. If you haven’t read it yet, you can do so now. I’ll wait.

…

So you might have noticed some provocative language in there. I bring it up because of a comment the article received. It was suggested that the provocative language actually hurts the cause of religious liberty because it offends. How can the faithful prove that they aren’t bigots to the opposition if they openly offend them?

I’m sympathetic to the comment because a few years ago, I would have told myself exactly the same thing. But that was because I didn’t really understand the situation. That lack of understanding is precisely why I wrote the piece and precisely why I chose to use offensive language in it.

When you’re in grade school, and a bully comes up to you and calls you a loser, simply explaining to him logically why you’re not technically a loser does not stop the bullying; it makes it worse. This is because the bully isn’t making an argument or an assertion when he calls you a loser, he is just trying to provoke an emotional response—both in you and the other kids. Getting defensive merely plays into that. And yet, this is precisely how conservatives have been responding to bullying from the left for years—and the results are rather dismal.

To put it in adult terms, one does not answer rhetoric with pure dialectic. Conservatives usually realize that dialectic is superior, which is why we respond this way—we think that we’re bringing a gun to a knife fight. Unfortunately, the reality is that we’re now bringing a gun to a cooking competition. While there are a few reasonable leftists out there with whom we can actually debate, the mob and their sycophants in the middle that are driving recent changes aren’t interested in debating whether or not we are bigots. When they call us bigots, they aren’t making an argument or an assertion; they’re trying to provoke an emotional response—both in us and in the wider audience.

If you are religious and your goal is to disprove the mob’s charge that religious people are bigots, then I have bad news for you: They will call you a bigot if you disagree with them nicely. They will call you a bigot if you disagree with them intelligently. They will call you a bigot if you disagree with them lovingly. They will call you a bigot if you disagree with them reasonably. They will call you a bigot even if you seek to compromise with them. Your only way out of being called a bigot by them is through a brief stint doing penance as a reformed bigot once you finally relent and stop disagreeing.

But if all it means when they call you a bigot is that you disagree with them and are therefore double-plus-ungood… why should any of us care whether they call us bigots or not? And if the right can openly provoke that and shrug it off, then some of that attitude might rub off on the cowards in the middle who know we’re right but are more worried about hurt feelings than persecution.

When then of dialectic? Did I simply sinking to the mob’s level out of rank pragmatism—giving up reasonable arguments for cheap rhetorical points? Not at all. Even the offensive rhetoric is there to reframe the actual arguments of the debate. Every offensive phrase in the original piece was simply a reframing of the terms of the issue to make them more accurate.

For example, when conservatives engage in a fight over whether homosexuals are allowed to marry, they’ve already given up their footing. The reality is that “homosexual marriage” is a contradiction in terms, like “a married bachelor.” We believe that marriage has a natural form—not just a legal one. It precedes the government, and so government does not make it (even if it does regulate it in various ways.) If marriage is written into the law, it is only so that our government can legally recognize a marriage when it sees one. Accordingly, whatever its laws say, the government cannot make two men married to each other any more than it can make a square circle. “Legalizing gay marriage” has always and only been about forcing somebody—whether government officials, businesses, or private citizens—to act as though this contradiction is real. In other words, its all about forcing people to pretend two men or two women are married to each other, as I (offensively) wrote in the article.

The same is true of the bit about patting lovers on the head and telling them how wonderful they are. Homosexuals who are actually interested in lifelong fidelity don’t need the government’s permission, and the legal benefits to marriage are rather trivial when it comes to sterile relationships. They seek the label of marriage purely because it is a mark of social esteem—a way of affirming their own relationships as being just as morally and socially acceptable as a marital relationship. To put it in old-fashioned language, it means their partners can appear to finally make an honest man/woman out of them. But even if they can finagle the a government seal of approval, that’s not enough because on some level, even they realize that government does not make marriages. They need social approval to help maintain their illusion, and so those who refuse to play along must be made to play along.

One does not simply make such arguments in an inoffensive manner. No amount of sugar is going to cover up what a bitter pill that is to swallow for someone to whom this is personally important, and it would be patronizing to try. But what of the moderates? Won’t pleasant and inoffensive language win over the middle? It is instructive that the moderate who made that original comment eventually went on to comment that the very term “sinner” is inherently derogatory—even in the context of “God loves sinners.” With standards like that, by the time the content of our arguments cease to be offensive, we will no longer have any. If someone won’t stand up for freedom of offensive religion, they won’t stand up for freedom of religion at all.

There is therefore no reason to walk on eggshells, and no reason to cast pearls before swine. There is every reason for boldness. By-and-large, American moderates are not in the middle because of their principles or strong beliefs. They are there because they don’t want to be bothered. Accordingly, one does not gain their support by being nice and not bothering them—it’s the squeaky wheel that gets the grease because that’s the one whose noise they want to stop. One gains their support by standing up and confidently leading them. The left has been doing that very effectively for decades. It’s time for the right to stop chasing the middle ever further leftward and start forging our own path.

Posted in Culture, Natural Law, Politics | 1 Comment