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On June 30, 2022 By In Culture, Discipleship, Theology, Wisdom

Gaslighting

Patrick Hamilton’s 1938 stage play Gas Light, which was adapted into British and American films in the 1940s, is the origin of the term “gaslighting” that is used so much today. The story concerns a manipulative, evil man who kills a woman to steal rubies. He couldn’t find the rubies at the time of the murder, so he left and concocted a plan to come back and find them. Assuming an alias, he marries a lady who has the money to purchase this house years later. He attempts to drive his wife mad by orchestrating events and then telling his wife that she imagined things. Each night he would sneak into the attic to hunt for the rubies and light the gas lamps. This would cause the gas lamps in his wife’s room to dim. She told him about the dimming of the lamps, and he would tell her that she was imagining it. She was going crazy because he was manipulating her by re-writing history and making her think she was delusional.

As the story progresses, you feel the tension and spite for this man growing inside you. He is evil. He has, what Solomon describes in Proverbs, a perverse tongue.

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On June 25, 2022 By In Culture, Pro-Life

God’s Mercy and the Spirit of the Age

Guest Post by Samuel Parkison

As I write this, it is mid-morning in the Middle East. I am looking over a balcony at the ocean, with the Arabian Gulf just a two-minute walk across the street, getting used to the sights and smells and tastes (and heat) of my family’s new home. Some of you know that for the better part of the past year, we have been working to move here for a career transition of sorts. I have come here to be a professor of theology at the first ever evangelical seminary in the Arabian Peninsula. There will be other occasions for me to share more about this particular venture; I’m simply pointing out that this is my new home. I am, geographically speaking, about the furthest away from the United States as I can be. And yet, never have I felt more of a bond with my “kinsmen according to the flesh” (cf., Rom 9:1-2), my fellow Americans, than last night while walking around a giant mall in the UAE when I received a notification on my phone that the Supreme Court ruled to overturn Roe v. Wade.

Gratitude for God’s Mercy

The news stopped me dead in my tracks. My knees got weak, I felt woozy and had to sit down to concentrate just to keep the tears from coming out. So much gratitude. I never thought I would see this day. Of course, I have prayed for it. Hoped for it. Spoken and written about the need for it. But even when the now infamous draft-leak of Justice Alito’s opinion filled me with great hope, I confess it was difficult to keep my cynicism at bay. I have learned to brace myself for disappointment. But last night was real. So, while I am settling into my new home in the Middle East, I continue to rejoice with my countrymen.

No matter how you cut it, yesterday was a win for justice, which means it was a win for America, a people who have been incurring a mind-boggling amount of blood-guilt since 1973. We have been polluting the land with our wickedness and have been begging for the wrath of God Almighty. Think I’m exaggerating? Listen to how Psalm 106 describes child-sacrifice:

[Israel] served [pagan nations’] idols,

            which became a snare to them.

They sacrificed their sons

            and their daughters to the demons;

they poured out innocent blood,

            the blood of their sons and daughters,

whom they sacrificed to the idols of Canaan,

            and the land was polluted with blood.

Thus they became unclean by their acts,

            and played the whore in their deeds. (Psalm 106:36-39)

The blood of innocent children idolatrously sacrificed in demon-worship (which, I would remind you, does not require the conscious awareness of its worshipers for it to qualify as demon-worship, per 1 Cor. 10:20), pollutes the land. My beloved nation has been doing this very thing on a nation-wide scale since 1973, with the body count of some 67 million deaths. The blood of our innocent has been crying out from the earth, calling for the just wrath of God which makes yesterday so great a mercy I can hardly bear it. What do we deserve? We deserve for God’s holiness to be vindicated by a swift and decisive judgment. We deserve to be destroyed like Sodom and Gomorrah. We deserve to be decimated like Egypt was when God delivered Israel from captivity. We deserve for our walls to crumble like Jericho. And yet, what did we receive yesterday? Mercy. An invitation to repent.

Reactions from the Opposition

Now, as a reminder, we should keep in mind how modest of a ruling came down yesterday. This is important because I have seen a lot of curious reactions. There are two general reactions I want to call attention to here.

Reaction One: “You Aren’t Really Pro-Life Because You Don’t Care for the Vulnerable”

This reaction is represented in the memes and tweets that effectively deride pro-lifers like myself for not really caring about the babies, because if we did we would put our money where our mouths are, stop being so fiscally conservative, and get on board with big government policies that support women in need with medical care, adoption, foster care, etc. My favorite taunt along these lines is, “If you really care about the babies, would you support mandatory child-support for the fathers in every situation? Huh?” To which I reply with a hearty, “Yes! Absolutely! I am pro-expecting fathers to take responsibility for their offspring!”

To the challenge for pro-lifers to support the care of those in our society who are in desperate need of help, I simply agree. The question is, what is the best method for taking care of those in need in our society? My skepticism that big-government policies are the solution for taking care of the needy and vulnerable in our society does not come from my penny-pinching conservativism, it comes from the conviction that the government is intrinsically incompetent to do that work. I say “intrinsically” to emphasize that this is not a deficiency on the government’s part. That’s not what the government is supposed to do, and so it should not be surprising that it’s bad at it.

But even if you disagree with that position, we should point out that it is not as if pro-lifers have been neglecting care for the needy and vulnerable in our society. We have been accepting the challenge to care “holistically” with our dollars and time for decades. On every meaningful metric, it is the religious and pro-life demographics that are the most generous with their time and resources to non-profit organizations that do the work of caring for the orphan and widow without compulsion from their neighbors or government. This is the demographic overwhelmingly represented in foster care and adoption. This is the demographic that starts and funds and operates crisis pregnancy centers whose agenda are not simply to “end abortion,” but rather to care for families in general and needy and vulnerable mothers in particular. However, even if that were not the case, this reaction is a poor argument in favor of abortion. In my recent book, Thinking Christianly: Bringing Sundry Thoughts Captive to Christ, I interact briefly with this line of thinking. Here’s an excerpt from that section:

Let it be known that there is no necessary social prerequisite for getting to speak out against abortion. We should decisively put to death that foolish notion that says before objecting to murdering babies under the banner of “pro-life,” one must satisfactorily establish “pro-life” status by being on the forefront of orphan care, adoption, refugee ministries, homeless ministries, etc. These things are clearly consistent with being “pro-life,” but the increasingly common dichotomy of “pro-life” vs. “pro-birth” should be laughed out of the room. How, pray tell, is it possible to be “pro-life” without first being “pro-birth?”

This is a smokescreen, and to put the matter plainly, Christians who play along are suckers. The goal-post will always change for what constitutes as caring for enough issues to get to care about abortion. Hating “baby-hacking” requires no credentials, especially if those credentials are handed out by those who have no objection to “baby-hacking.” Frankly, I’m quite sure I do not want the approval of such individuals anyway. They can keep it.[1]

Reaction Two: “The Government Has No Right to Control the Bodies of Women“

This reaction seems to assume that what happened on June 24 is the making of a law to illegalize all abortion. But the Supreme Court did not outlaw abortion. All they did was deny that it was a “constitutional right,” which means that if a state chooses to enact legislation that prohibits abortion, that state is not being unconstitutional in doing so. States are not infringing on constitutionally recognized rights by enacting pro-life legislation.

Now, I actually do think abortion should be nationally prohibited, and not only for moral and theological reasons. There is a strong legal argument for the abolition of all abortion on the grounds of, at least, the 14th amendment (this has bearing on the “my body, my choice” argument. Abortion is not merely about a pregnant woman’s body, but also the body of her infant). But the point is that yesterday’s ruling did not force any state to stop performing abortions.

So, think about the mindset that lies behind, for example, protestors in California marching the streets with signs demanding the right to abortion. What exactly are they mad about? What are they protesting? They are mad about the fact that not every state must make abortion legal. That the citizens of a state like Oklahoma maintains the right to elect the representatives they want to reflect their values, which includes a high value for the unborn, is intolerable for these protestors. They do not want Oklahomans to have the ability to establish representatives who will establish and elect those laws. Protestors in California have lost literally nothing by way of “ability.” Their state has enshrined abortion with legislation in anticipation of the reversal of Roe v. Wade. But they are so passionate about mothers having the “right” to kill their pre-born babies that they are protesting other states having the ability to prohibit pre-born-baby-killing. Their own state protecting their ability to kill their babies isn’t enough: they demand that every state everywhere be obligated to do the same. Such a response, frankly, is madness.

Behind the Veil: What’s Really Going On

As a Christian theologian, I have to also point out that this is not only irrational, it is demonic. I’m not calling people on the other side of this issue demons, mind you. No, they are not demons or sub-humans, they are image-bearers of God himself, having more dignity and worth, and value than they themselves could possibly imagine. I am saying, rather, that the spirit that possesses a group to take to the streets in angry opposition to the verdict, “baby-killing is not a constitutional right,” is not a spirit of love and goodness and justice, but rather a spirit that arises from the domain of darkness (cf., Col 1:13). I am quite certain that most of the individuals vehemently opposed to yesterday’s ruling “do not know what spirit they are of,” but that does not make their clamor for abortion any less demonic. The crowd that boils over with rage over the prospect of mothers losing the ability to kill their children is possessed by a dark mindset indeed. What we see (and will continue to see in the coming days) with violent threats and attacks on churches and crisis pregnancy centers is the removing of the veil. The veneer of love and gentleness and justice is being peeled back and the darkness of the culture of death is showing its true colors. It is losing all motivation to be seen as loving and is perfectly content with showing its rage.

Still, I can’t help but suspect that many of the most passionate men and women clamoring for more death are driven by shame and guilt. They shout for abortion as an effort to shout down their own consciences. They have the blood of abortion on their own hands, they know it deep down, and they wish to silence that part of them that accuses. So they stop their ears and cry out that the evil they participated in is “good,” and the good that would have protected their children from execution is “evil.” Rather than applying the balm of grace to their sinful self-inflicted wound, they ignore the wound and try to convince themselves that there is no sin to repent of. They may be throwing rocks at the windows of crisis pregnancy centers, but they are aiming at that part of their souls that knows what evil they have committed. To those, I would simply say, “Give up trying to silence your conscience. It won’t work. You know what you have done. So go ahead and let your conscience speak. Let it call the sin, sin. Then, and only then, will you be in a position to hear a better word, spoken by the blood of Christ. He does not silence the accusation by pretending like it’s not there, he silences the accusation by answering it with his own blood. He does not invite you to ignore your sin. He invites you to let him deal with it in a decisive way. You are not beyond redemption and forgiveness and healing. But it is only those who know themselves to be sick who will seek out a Doctor. So, seek him out; he is not far.”

Concluding Prayers

What now? Well for starters, we should unflinchingly celebrate this surprising mercy that God has shown us. We should praise God that at least some states in this country will slow down on racking up the unfathomable debt of blood-guilt they have been incurring since 1973. We should praise God for the lives that this will save. We should thank God for the gift of sacrificial saints who have worked tirelessly for decades to see this ground made (while many of us cynically doubted that their efforts would succeed). We should thank them for their faithful endurance, and say, “You were right; God bless you and your longsuffering work!” We should thank God for the common grace of a justice system that does some good (even if it is imperfect).

And we should pray for revival. We should pray that our culture of death would disintegrate and that righteousness be established. We should pray that the hearts of those possessed by the spirit of rage and bloodthirstiness would be turned. We should pray that such individuals would have ears to hear their cries for death afresh, and that they would be shocked by the revelation of what their own voice sounds like; shocked into repentance. We should pray that they receive the cleansing blood of Christ for the forgiveness of their sins (both the sin of abortion and the sin of celebrating abortion). We should pray that God would hallow his name, and make his Kingdom come and his will be done here on earth as it is in heaven.

He could do it, you know.

Don’t forget that Nineveh was converted with a five-word sermon. I can’t think of a better invitation to pray for big things like this than the (previously) unthinkable reversal of Roe v. Wade.

[1] Samuel G. Parkison, Thinking Christianly: Bringing Sundry Thoughts Captive to Christ (H&E Publishing, 2022), 105.

*The image for this post is a depiction of Pharaoh demanding the death of Hebrew babies in Exodus 1. It seemed fitting.

Samuel Parkison received his Ph.D. in Systematic Theology from @MBTS). He is the Associate Professor of Theology (Gulf Theological Seminary in the UAE). You can find him on Twitter at https://twitter.com/samuel_parkison

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On June 16, 2022 By In Culture, Discipleship, Theology, Wisdom

Integrity

Covenants and contracts have been a part of human history since its beginning. From God’s covenant with the creation and man in particular to two men agreeing with a handshake on the sale of property, words have created bonds between God and man and men with men. Those words are only as good as the character of those speaking them. If one or both parties lack integrity, then the relationship is vapor. Integrity in character revealed through speech is the mortar that binds us together.

As Solomon instructs his king-in-waiting son, one concern is the character of his speech. Because a king’s words are powerful, holding in them the power of death and life (Pr 18.21), the son must be careful in speech. At the root of all of his speech must be integrity. “Better is a poor person who walks in his integrity than one who is crooked in speech and is a fool” (Pr 19.1) “Walking in integrity” is contrasted here with being “perverse in speech.” Just as God reveals who he is through his Word (Jn 1.1-2, 14, 18), so we also reveal our character through the way we speak. Out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaks (Mt 12.34), and the heart is command central for our total being; the heart is where our deepest affections and allegiances lie, where we reason, and where we decide what to do. Our heart is revealed in our speech along with our actions. Our hearts must be integrous. When they are, the integrity will be evident in our speech.

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On June 2, 2022 By In Culture, Theology, Worship

Holy Priest, Holy Warrior: Reflections on Psalm 110

Reading through Psalm 110, one cannot but help notice that by the end of the psalm, the dead bodies are piling up. In verse 1, Christ’s enemies are made into a footstool for his feet. In verse 2, he rules in the midst of his enemies — and has a scepter to smite them. In verse 5, he shatters kings on the day of his wrath. In verse 6, he executes nations and fills them with corpses. 

And yet right in the middle of this “messiah on the warpath” imagery, we have a reference to Christ being an eternal priest after the order of Melchizedek. It is perhaps easier for us to see how the battle imagery of the psalm fits with Jesus’ kingship. After all, we expect kings — especially Davidic kings — to be battlefield heroes. Jesus does not disappoint in that way. He strikes and smashes his enemies from the beginning to the end of this psalm. The psalm paints the portrait of an utterly victorious king.

But since the psalm also pays homage to Jesus’ priesthood, an astute reader might wonder where priestly imagery shows up in the psalm. I would contend that the battlefield imagery fits not only with the motif of Jesus as reigning king but also with him as everlasting priest. In the Bible, priests are warriors just as much as kings. Waging holy war has been a priestly calling from the beginning.

There is a lot of biblical evidence for this truth, and we will only survey a fraction of it here. Start with Adam. Adam was a priest, serving in the sanctuary of Eden. We know this because the verbs used to describe Adam’s task in Eden, “tend and keep,” or “serve and guard” (Gen. 2:15), are used later to describe the tasks of the priests at the tabernacle, e.g., Num. 3:7-8. A priestly vocabulary is used for Adam’s task from the very beginning; he is to guard and keep Eden, just as the later priests would guard and keep the tabernacle. Of course, this also came to mean that he was to guard and keep the woman (the embodiment of Eden) after she was created, just as the priests were to guard and keep the people of Israel (the living tabernacle).

When Adam was told to guard the Garden, he should have deduced that there would be an invader. And sure enough, an intruder shows up. As soon as the serpent started questioning God’s Word to the woman, Adam should have stepped between the serpent and the woman to protect her. He should have silenced the lying serpent by crushing its head. That was his priestly task, and because he failed at that priestly task, he lost both his priesthood and his sanctuary. Adam should have piled up at least one corpse in Eden; he should have made the serpent a footstool for his feet. He should have ruled in the midst of his enemy (the serpent) by shattering and executing the serpent in a show of righteous wrath. Unfortunately, he did none of those things. What should have been the day of his power became a day of weakness and failure. He failed as a priest because he failed to fight. He refused to exercise holy violence and so he lost his holy status and access to the holy place.

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On June 1, 2022 By In Culture

Criminals Laugh at Gun Control Laws

Criminals Laugh at Gun Control Laws

Guest Post by Gary Demar

The House of Representatives and Senate are considering more expansive gun control bills considering the latest school shooting in Texas. These school shootings are horrific and evil. The parents of these children are devastated as I would be. I can’t imagine the anguish they must feel.

Some Republicans joined past gun control bills and some of them are working with the Democrats to enact even more restrictions. Criminals laugh at these laws. Do members of Congress believe that such laws are going to stop criminals from purchasing and using firearms? How well has it worked with drugs? Elected officials take an oath to uphold the Constitution. How many obey that oath? They, too, laugh at the built-in restrictions of the Constitution.

Every day people kill other people with guns, knives, automobiles, and even water by drowning. These are not going to stop with new laws. Murder is already against the law. People are the problem, not guns. Recent surveys have determined that around 40% of adult Americans own a gun or live with someone who does. More than 99+ percent of all gun owners have never shot anyone. Mentally disturbed people are going to do disturbing things. Better to eliminate soft targets like schools. Why this hasn’t been done is insane. Parents need to take control of their schools. Demand physical security for your children!

To show that guns are not the problem, decades ago, many public schools had shooting clubs. According to John Lott:

Until 1969 virtually every public high school—even in New York City—had a shooting club. High school students in New York City carried their guns to school on the subways in the morning, turned them over to their homeroom teacher or the gym coach during the day, and retrieved them after school for target practice. Club members were given their rifles and ammunition by the federal government. Students regularly competed in citywide shooting contests for university scholarships.

Even today there are “more than 2,000 high-school rifle programs across the United States. In 2015, 9,245 students in 317 schools across three states participated in the USA High School Clay Target League. In 2018, participation had increased 138% with 21,917 students from 804 teams in 20 states.”

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On May 26, 2022 By In Culture

Disciplining political leaders

San Francisco’s Catholic Archbishop Salvatore J. Cordileone has barred House Speaker Nancy Pelosi from receiving the Lord’s Supper. Pelosi is an Italian-American who comes from a notable political family with long ties to the Democratic Party. Her father Thomas d’Alesandro, Jr., had served in the US House of Representatives (1939-1947) and as mayor of Baltimore (1947-1959), the latter office subsequently occupied by Pelosi’s brother Thomas d’Alesandro III (1967-1971). As a Roman Catholic, Pelosi is in principle subject to the teachings of her church, as reflected in at least some of her political stances. With respect to climate change, she attributes her own position to her faith tradition: “For me, it’s a religious thing: I believe this is God’s creation, and we have a moral obligation to be good stewards.”

However, on abortion she is at variance with her church’s teachings. According to section 2271 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church,

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On May 25, 2022 By In Books, Culture, Politics

Postmodern Times: Book Review

Postmodern Times by Gene Edward Veith, 1994

This is an important book that demystifies Postmodernism. The book is thirty years old but still accurate for today’s world. When the book was written, the postmodernist project was a small seedling which made it hard to see all the parts. Today, the postmodernist project has grown up into a forest and all the parts are clearly visible right in front of us. This book is like a user’s manual for the world we live in today.

Here are three key reasons this book is important to read.

First, this book offers helpful definitions on many of the key terms that are around us all the time: postmodernism, social construct, queer theory, and intertextuality. 

Here are some of the most important terms and definitions from the book. 

Objectivist: those who believe that truth is objective and can be known (pg. 47)

Constructivist: those who believe that human beings make up their own realities (pg. 47)

Queer Theory: culture as suppression of homosexuals (pg. 53)

Intertextuality: culture is texts interacting with other texts (pg. 52)

Deconstruction: dismantle the paradigms of the past and bring the marginal to the center (pg. 57)

Social Construct: these paradigms are useful fictions, a matter of “telling stories” (pg. 57)

The second reason this book is important is that it clearly shows how the postmodernist project is ultimately aimed at destroying the individual self. That can seem like a strange claim to make given that our culture is so obsessed with identity. Let me explain.

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On May 24, 2022 By In Culture, Politics, Pro-Life

Pelosi, Whoopi, and the Grace of Excommunication 

The Roman Catholic Archbishop of San Francisco Salvatore Cordileone announced last week the excommunication of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. The Archbishop has cited Pelosi’s refusal to back down from her public advocacy of abortion, which conflicts with the moral positions of the Church, Christian tradition, and the Holy Scripture.

Many news outlets have strangely described the event as the “denial of communion” (Washington Post) or a “communion ban” (Fox News) rather than excommunication. One criticism of the excommunication comes from Whoopi Goldberg – who once pretended to be a nun in a movie and now pretends to speak with even greater erudition than the Archbishop. Goldberg claims, “This is not your job, dude! You can’t — that is not up to you to make that decision.”

The term excommunication itself literally means “out of/from communion” and is from very simple Latin: “ex” and “communicatio.” I believe the modern American sees phrases like excommunication as harsh and as with a sense of permanence, yet this is not the historic understanding of the term. The process of removing a Christian from communion is not related to any particular sin, but rather the obstinate refusal to repent. While various sins certainly place individuals in a grave position at odds with Christian teaching in faith and morals, it is impenitence alone that leads to formal excommunication.

The historic understanding of excommunication is lost on many who would rather paint the church’s role in excommunication as harsh, judgmental, and unloving –  yet the act of excommunication is by the witness of Christ and his Apostles an act of love toward the wayward. God’s grace is fully present and offered in the pronouncement of excommunication as a final call away from sin and into the free gift of forgiveness – over even the most notorious of sins.

Did Jesus Teach Excommunication?

Just a few lines down from, “Judge not, that you be not judged.” (Matthew 7:1) our Lord Jesus also says, “Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire” (v. 19) and “‘I never knew you; depart from Me, you who practice lawlessness!'” Jesus clearly expected that there would be situations that demand separation and even destruction from those who departed from his “narrow gate” (v. 13-14) and the, “will of My Father in heaven.” (v. 21). Jesus also passes down the authority to enact this separation through his Apostles with his own words, “And I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.” (Matthew 16:19).

St. Paul explicitly continued the practice of excommunication and explains that the act might be for the benefit of those engrossed in sin, “deliver such a one to Satan for the destruction of the flesh, that his spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus.” (1 Corinthians 5:5) St. Paul saw excommunication as having the power to save, not as a malicious act to permanently destroy. The Geneva Bible includes these helpful notes, “The goal of excommunication is not to cast away the excommunicate that he should utterly perish, but that he may be saved, that is, that by this means his flesh may be tamed, that he may learn to live to the Spirit.”

Does the Church Excommunicate for Politics?

Goldberg contends that, “The archbishop of San Francisco is calling for speaker Nancy Pelosi to be denied receiving Communion because of her pro-choice stance…” While this statement is partly true, Archbishop Cordileone claims that the decision is “purely pastoral, not political.” The idea that an activist Bishop might wield the keys of the kingdom for political reasons is rightly to be feared, yet the issue of abortion is not simply political. There is a plainly spoken and unbroken witness in the Christian tradition from the first-century Didache (“you shall not abort a child or commit infanticide.”) through today in defense of the unborn. There is no doubt that ancient Christians consistently held that life in the womb was to be protected and the taking of this life was a sinful breech of the commandment to “do no murder.” Again, it should be reiterated that Cordileone has not excommunicated Pelosi for a belief about abortion or even “the grave evil she is perpetrating”, but rather for obstinately refusing to repent of her advocacy of abortion.

The Archbishop’s position to excommunicate a powerful governmental figure for their support of a grave evil is not new and has precedence in church history. In 390, Bishop Ambrose of Milan excommunicated Emperor Theodosius, claiming that the “The Emperor is in the Church, not above it.” The same could be argued today, in that Speaker Pelosi is in the Church, not above it. Emperor Theodosius’s excommunication was directly related to his role in the massacre of 7,000 men, women, and children in Thessalonica. After eight months outside the church, Theodosius kneeled his heart in penitence and was restored to communion. Through excommunication, the same grace and hope for restoration is offered to Pelosi.

The emperor himself had not driven a sword into a single individual, just as Speaker Pelosi does not herself scrape out a baby using a metal curette, yet the policies supported and advocated by Speaker Pelosi have contributed to the deaths of millions of unborn children through legal abortion in the United States. The Guttmacher Institute, Planned Parenthood’s research arm, estimates the number of annual abortions to be over 800,000. (from 2017 figures)

In response to the Archbishop, Pelosi has openly criticized the church’s positions, accused the hierarchy of hypocrisy, and went on to receive communion at a church outside of the Archdiocese. Perhaps this speaks to Pelosi’s character or perhaps to the weakness of discipline in the Roman Church, but it certainly is not representative of a spirit of humility or of respect for her claimed ecclesiastical tradition.

The Practical Prayers of Excommunication

During the formative years of my Christian walk I sat under a church that prayed each week for those who had strayed from the Christian faith. We would pray for those who are not saved, but also for those described as “under discipline” (or “excommunicated”). Each week we would recite the names of those under discipline and ask, “that our Lord would bring them to a place of repentance and restore them to the fellowship of Christ’s church.” Seeing them actually return to answer these prayers was always a powerful testimony. My own tradition speaks to excommunication in the Articles of Religion, “XXXIII. Of excommunicate Persons, how they are to be avoided.” Here again, excommunication is affirmed but with the goal that such treatment, “as a heathen and publican” (see Matthew 18:17) would result in reconciliation, penance, and received back into the full fellowship of the church.

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On May 21, 2022 By In Culture

Phil Vischer, Veggie Tales, and the Nuance of Abortion

I know I am a rebel here, but Veggie Tales was a pontification in silliness. For a series of evangelical cliches, the show provided an enormous amount of basic morality without the ethos of Jael. That show and a series of other unfortunate events in the sterilization of the evangelical mind provided the stimulation for an unobjective Christendom among young evangelicals where everything is up for debate and dogma becomes heretical.

Phil Vischer–the storyteller behind Veggie Tales–has emerged as the most vocal proponent of what I have called, “sophisticated footnoting.” He thrives in nuances and caveats and oh! the complexities of this whole darn thing of abortion.

Think about it: these last two years have been the most magnified sight into the devious and devilish devices of Democrat powers and evan-gelly leaders. They have sought to endanger our health, history, and hope. They have tortured the American conscience by putting friends against friends at the Thanksgiving table; they have filled the cup of wrath by instilling fear as a commodity and currency. Democrats–both pagans and Bud-Light evangelical varieties–offer misery and betrayal to morality and classical mores and yet, Phil, wants to find common ground.

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On May 16, 2022 By In Culture

C.S. Lewis and the Artwork of the Chronicles of Narnia

I’ve never been able to get over the artwork in the original Chronicles of Narnia, particularly this image.

Lewis learned of the illustrator, Pauline Baynes, from his friend JRR Tolkien, who himself used her to illustrate Farmer Giles of Ham. She was young, relatively inexperienced, and felt understandably insufficient for the task. When Lewis sent her the manuscript for the first volume—The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe—he included no instruction and left no clue as to any deeper meaning the stories might contain.

As she came to draw the White Witch tormenting and killing Aslan, she found herself stuck. Each time she neared completion of the drawing, she would be so grieved that her tears would stain and ruin the paper, forcing her to start over, again and again. Obviously, she was eventually able to complete the now classic illustrations and be done with the image, but the image wasn’t done with her.

For days afterwards, she found herself, like Aslan, tormented. She was haunted by this scene of evil binding and triumphing over good. Deliverance from her heavy cloud of depression came like a lightning strike, when she finally understood the words Aslan spoke after he came back to life:

“…though the Witch knew the Deep Magic, there is a magic deeper still which she did not know. Her knowledge goes back only to the dawn of Time. But if she could have looked a little further back, into the stillness and the darkness before Time dawned, she would have read there a different incantation. She would have known that when a willing victim who has committed no treachery was killed in a traitor’s stead, the Table would crack an Death itself would start working backwards.”

Aslan was the Lion of Judah, the lamb who was slain from the foundation of the world. Most of us approach the Chronicles with this typology in mind, but not Baynes. She, like the disciples on the road to Emmaus, had her heart strangely warmed when she realized that all Lewis had written, like Moses and the Prophets before him, was concerning the Messiah.

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