Category: Biblical Theology

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The Deepening Crisis in The West: Rebellion Against Reality

If you could only read one essay about our current crisis and our potential future realignment, this is the one.

First Things – That Haunting Nihilism

Rusty Reno, editor of First Things explains our potential future. And nutshells the overall concern I’ve been expressing on this blog for more than two years now.

Pull quote from Reno’s essay.

I’m becoming an N. S. Lyons fan. “A Prophecy of Evil: Tolkien, Lewis, and Technocratic Nihilism” is the latest installment in The Upheaval, the mysterious author’s Substack. (He writes under a pseudonym.) This extended essay provides an arresting account of the deepening crisis in the West. By Lyons’s reckoning, Lewis and Tolkien were right. We are in the grip of a grim, despairing rebellion against reality that imagines itself to be the engine of moral progress.

Reno agrees with Lyons that the Western culture is influenced by a rationalist worldview that rejects any objective value or meaning in reality, and instead relies on subjective feelings and desires to guide its actions. According to Reno this worldview leads to a loss of human dignity, a disregard for nature, and a dangerous tendency to manipulate and control everything, including human life itself.

He uses the examples of C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien, two famous Christian writers who warned about the nihilistic consequences of modern rationalism in their novels. And explains how Lewis’s That Hideous Strength depicts a dystopian scenario where a scientific elite tries to overthrow the natural order and create a new humanity according to their own whims. Reno also refers to Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, where the evil Sauron seeks to dominate Middle-earth with his dark magic and his One Ring of power.

Reno concludes that the only way to resist nihilism is to appreciate and respect reality as God’s creation, and to cultivate a sense of gratitude and awe for its beauty and mystery.

We must reject the false promises of rationalism and technology, and embrace the truth and goodness of God’s revelation in Christ. That “reveal’ must be understood, at a minimum, as Jesus’s embodied life (incarnation), bodily death, bodily resurrection, bodily ascension, and bodily return when he will finally put the world right. For us personally, that means, among other things, changed, imperishable New Creation bodies!

Blog take away?

We were given bodies by God, because we were meant to have them. Our bodies are not accessory items to be disregarded simply because we wish they were otherwise than male or female.

Read the whole thing! (The essay has ended when you see the heading “Saint Constantine School”)

Companion Posts

Disregarding The Body – Podcast
My Truth, Your Truth – Podcast

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Happy New Creation Day!

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Transgender Lutheran Pastor Compares Nashville Shooter To Jesus Crucified

A sermon delivered this Palm Sunday by the Transgender Pastor of St. Marks Lutheran Church in Fargo, North Dakota compares Nashville shooter to Jesus crucified.

FULL STORY HERE

Churches with leaders like this appear destined to become empty houses of worship.

I Refuse To Affirm
The Tortured Analogies of That Sermon!

“Some folks have tried to focus on eradicating trans people as a solution, because they have been waiting, just waiting for an opportunity such as this. They’ve been waiting for a reason, any reason to stoke their hatred,” Pastor Micah Louwagie said.

“Marginalized folks, those of us with the least amount of privilege and power, they need those who have more privilege and power than they do to physically place their bodies between them and the people, powers and institutions that are literally killing them,” Louwagie urges.

“Those leaders were looking for any excuse, valid or not, to crucify Jesus and they found that reason…It’s baffling to me that someone’s existence can be so threatening, that people decide they need to be controlled, that they need laws made against them, or even worse, that the people that they find so threatening should die,” Louwagie remarked.

It is not hatred to disagree with someone’s fiction about who they are.

We don’t want to eradicate the existence of any human. We just want them to be delivered from a harmful fantasy. For their sake and for the sake of our Civilization, AND the cause of Christ our Creator1He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. For by him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities–all things were created through him and for him. (Col 1:15-16 ESV)

It is impossible that anyone born with a healthy body has also been born in the wrong body. Both Orthodox Christians and rational non-Christians the world over refuse to believe that fiction.

And we cannot be bullied into saying otherwise. We affirm Jesus’s view on the matter.

"Have you not read that the one who made them at the beginning 'made them male and female.'" [Matt 19:4]

This is yet another example of Radical Ideology capturing our institutions. In this case, the Lutheran Church of North Dakota and beyond…..

Companion Posts

Embrace, Don’t Affirm
Lying To Ourselves & Virtues ‘Let Loose’

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Celebrate God’s Good Creation

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Body Shame & Playing God

I’m confident that Therapist Stephanie Winn captures something which is at the root of Gender Ideology and its current affirming practices: shame of our created bodies.

[And, I might add, a desire of those pushing this ideology for humans to be their own creators.]

“….it’s the idea that the body is wrong and the mind is fine. That seems like an interesting way of defending against shame. If you look at the facts that so many of the vulnerable young people who are presenting with gender dysphoria are autistic. Many of them have trauma history. They’ve been bullied they’ve been abandoned.

We know these kids are over represented in Foster Care and Adoption, right? So often times there’s a deep attachment wounds, deep issues with having a loving stable connection with one’s family. So the natural responses to that is shame and inadequacy, right? And that shame can be so painful and so overwhelming. It really takes a lot of maturity to learn how to integrate our shame and tolerate it.

So this idea that there is nothing wrong with me, my identity, my mind, my psyche, it’s my BODY THAT’S WRONG. That’s why I’m different. It’s a really convenient explanation for defending against the shame of…the ones who’ve been bullied because they are autistic…they don’t understand how to process that. They don’t know why they’ve been moved and made fun of but they sure feel badly about themselves. So there’s already enough shame there. So it’s very tempting to have something that says: ‘oh, this why I’m different, this is why I’ve been made fun of, then I don’t have to feel that shame.’

The idea of therapy though, proper exploratory therapy, our watchful waiting, feels intrusive because if you’re walking around with this intolerable level of unprocessed shame that ‘there’s something fundamentally wrong with me, there’s something corrupt about me that people just don’t like and I don’t know what it is and I don’t know how to control this.’

Full Interview. [Standard link disclaimer1Links from this blog to online resources don’t necessarily mean I support everything found there. But as adults we should embrace viewpoint diversity. And make alliances where we can.]

These confused kids seek healing. They don’t need the easy answer that “something is wrong with your body. So let’s ‘fix’ that.” The harder answer is to process that pain and shame with the goal of accepting the whole self, body and soul. And, from a Christian point of view, help them understand the entire Christian restorative process. We were given bodies as humans because God meant us to have them. And God intends to restore body and soul, visible and invisible, earth and heaven, completely. That’s what the Church should teach those within, and those without.

We are fully accepted by God as we were created.

Companion Post & Podcast

Trans-Industry Sterilizing A Generation & Creating Med-Patients For Life
Disregarding The Body – Podcast

I’m a Classic Christian and think Gender Ideology is anti-creational to the core. This blog is about “God’s Good Creation.” That’s why I’m writing about Gender Ideology. And “speaking up” as I’m confident Jesus would.

"Have you not read that the one who made them at the beginning 'made them male and female.'" [Matt 19:4]
This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is image-1-3884x3024.jpeg
The Natchez by Delacroix – 1835
Oil on Canvas
Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art

Love Refuses To Affirm Confusion.

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