Everybody
is angry. When you read or hear the headlines or scroll through social media,
the grievance machine is churning up anger at a head-spinning rate. Social
justice warriors find racism, sexism, and every other kind of offensive -ism
behind every comment. The #metoo movement (though seemingly losing some steam
now) stands ready to interpret every male gesture as some form of rape. The
Democrats are angry with the Republicans. The Republicans are angry with the
Democrats. The Libertarians are angry with everybody. News talk shows feed and
feed off of this anger for ratings.
Not all of the anger is illegitimate. There are serious moral injustices in our society. There are reasons to be angry with the murder of the unborn, the violence that fills certain segments of our society, the continual and doubling down on sinful stupidity in the governance of our country, unjust wars, and oppressive tax laws. The world is, in many ways, upside down and inside out. Not to be angry at immorality is, itself, immoral.
Our anger is,
at times, rooted in fear. Fear is what overwhelms us when we sense that we have
lost control, when we come into the presence of something that overwhelms us.
It is the hurricane that threatens our family, the unknown intruder that
invades our home, or the earthquake from which we cannot escape. We feel a sense
of powerlessness, that the world is coming apart, and nothing on the immediate horizon
says that we can change our future.
In the
face of all of the worlds perceived and real injustices, we fear, and that fear
begins to lash out trying to regain some control over the situation so that we
can feel at peace. We only want things to be right, and they aren’t right.
But in the
midst of this world where we can be caught up in this tidal wave of anger,
fear, and despair, we hear the angel’s word to the shepherds in Luke 2.10 that,
in the midst of a world that is racked with sin and its effects, they bring the
good news, the gospel, of great joy.
When they bring this word Herod, the Edomite, sits as king of the Jews. The scribes,
Pharisees, Sadducees, and priests as a whole are leading God’s people astray.
Caesar Augustus has brought “peace” through bloody subjugation and maintains it
through fear. What is there to be joyful about?
The gospel
is the gospel of great joy, not because everything is immediately made alright,
but because it will be. Joy is not a superficial happiness that denies the
harsh realities of life so that I can keep a smile on my face. Joy is rooted in
faith and is that deep sense of satisfaction and contentment … even happiness …
that is nurtured by the hope that we have that God is and will make all things
right. This means that I don’t have to be angry all the time. I don’t have to live
in fear of losing control because I and all that I am and have are in the hands
of the one who is complete control and is for me. He has declared unequivocally
in Christ that he loves me and, even though I go through the valley of the
shadow of death, he is with me. He is making all things right.
We
Christians, we gospel of great joy people, should be the most joyful people on
earth. Even while the world all around us seems out of control, upside down,
and inside out. The good news of God’s promises in Christ are the source of our
joy, and the joy of the Lord is our strength.
Guest post by Steve Wilkins written on December 23, 2016 & published by permission
Stretching Christmas For many people Christmas comes on December 25 and is over December 26. The tree is taken down along with the lights and the other decorations, and everyone begins setting the house in order for the new year. No more Christmas hymns. No more celebrations (well, until New Year’s Eve). Christmas comes but once a year – and thanks be to God, because we’re exhausted!
So, if I were to ask, “How’s your Christmas going?” most people would give me the blank stare. But according to our calendar (and I mean the Church calendar), Christmas is just getting started on December 25. Christmas day is just the beginning of a “season” numbering twelve days (the “twelve days of Christmas”).
During this season of celebration we remember not only our Savior’s birth (the feast of the Nativity on December 25) but our first martyrs (St. Stephen, December 26), St. John the evangelist, and the murder of the boy babies in Bethlehem by Herod (“The Feast of Holy Innocents”). Then on January 1, we commemorate the circumcision of Jesus (circumcised on the 8th day). All that before closing out our celebration of Christmas with the Feast of Epiphany on January 6!
Christmas is intended to be a “season,” not just a day.
You say, “But who can stand this? By Christmas day I’m already worn down to my last frazzle!”
Well, granted, given the way things are presently, changing our practice and getting into the new rhythm of the Church calendar is going to take some time — and realistically, it may now be impossible to turn the culture away from the present “tradition.” I’m not quite sure how to go about it or what it would look like. But somehow, I think it would be good to try to get back to the old rhythm of the Christmas season.
The fact that we have lost the rhythm of the various “seasons” has contributed, at least in part, to the fleeting joy (and often extended depression and disappointment) we have during these times — and here, I’m speaking especially about Christmas — the celebration is simply too brief to be appreciated fully. The traditional Christian calendar gives us a different rhythm for life and time — especially Christmas time.
And following the Christian calendar is not just another way to thumb our noses at secular ideas of the “Christmas season.” The twelve days are important because they give us time to reflect on what the incarnation and birth of Jesus means. We need the twelve days to celebrate the wonder of God becoming man and all that was accomplished by our Savior.
Why twelve days? No one knows for sure. Perhaps this was to be an analogy to the twelve tribes of the old Israel that have now been transformed into the new Israel. Or maybe the 12 days signify the twelve months of the year pointing to the fact that Christ is with us not just one day but year-round.
Whatever the intention, the twelve days give us an opportunity truly to rejoice and reflect on the great mercy and grace of God in giving us His Son.
We have been baptized into Jesus’ death and resurrection and have now entered the “new heavens and new earth” (though not yet perfected). Whether we are called to martyrdom, or to prophetic witness, or simply to faithful living in the joys and sorrows of our daily lives, we must live all of our days in the knowledge of our blessedness: redeemed by Jesus and in Him made acceptable and beloved in God’s sight. We are part of the society of people whose world has been turned upside down, and we are to live out this truth that overturned the old world and made all things new.
Observing Christmas as a season helps us to move beyond the sentimentalism that has become so much a part of “Christmas” and commemorate the true significance of Jesus’ birth. It enables us to see that Jesus’ coming truly transforms all things. It marked the end of the old world (under the dominion of sin and death) and the beginning of the new. And it reminds us of our new identity and purpose. We are now children of the King and are called to rejoice and give thanks and show the world the new destiny that now has come in Him. To celebrate for twelve days (as opposed to one) enables us to realize afresh the significance of what happened in Bethlehem and it declares to the world the remarkable reality that Jesus has destroyed the works of the devil and established a kingdom that shall have no end.
So, I don’t know exactly how to begin to do this, but it sure seems like a good idea to me. Stretching Christmas out over a number of days — making it a more full (and perhaps a more relaxing and refreshing) celebration — might bring far more benefits than frustrations; it just might bring us more joy than worry; more peace and less hustle and fuss. Whaddaya say? I think we should give it a shot.
“The best way that a man could test his readiness to encounter the common variety of mankind would be to climb down a chimney into any house at random, and get on as well as possible with the people inside. And that is essentially what each one of us did on the day that he was born.”
~ G.K. Chesterton, On Certain Modern Writers and the Institution of the Family
I love it when the hero arrives. I get chills when a fedora appears in shadow or when a farmboy watches two suns set. I get tickled every time someone knocks on Bilbo’s door. And although the joy of my introduction to the dear Baudelaire siblings that grey and cloudy day at Briny Beach was mingled with sadness, I still cherish the miracle of their lives.
The season of Advent, the time just before Christmas, is all about arrivals. It is a preparatory season for the celebration of the incarnation, his first coming, and it is looking forward to his second coming. The Messiah’s first arrival was both inauspicious, sleeping in a feeding trough, and universally portentous, declared by astronomical signs. His second coming is also grand and mysterious: no man knows the hour or day in which he comes. It’s a good debut. As a reader, I can get excited about this story. Anticipating the end is also great fun. I love it when stories are interrupted by better stories. (more…)
Over the past dozen years of working with high school and college students as a pastor and teacher, I’ve seen lots of people make a case for the Christian faith to young people. The rap isn’t all bad, to be clear. There is much to commend and, even in those areas of ineptitude, grace abounds, the Spirit draws straight lines with crooked sticks, etc.
However, at the risk of sounding like a young foggie, there is a manner of student ministry that is as common as it is destructive. I don’t even have to describe it in great detail for you to know what I’m talking about—it’s goofy, it’s gaudy, it encourages students to put live goldfishes in their mouths.
It has to be noted that this really did “work” for a season. In the 80’s and 90’s, there were real incentives to being a Christian, you got some social capital out of going to church—heck, you’d probably even get a spouse! There was a feeling, though, that church might not want you. It was formal, you were casual; it was serious, you yucked it up on the weekends; it was pure, you were sinful. There was an assumption that the living room of the church was essentially good, the problem was that the front door was imposing and the foyer was daunting.
In that context, the less formal, serious, or otherwise fastidious the speaker was, the more likely the listener was to feel accepted, welcomed, at home. So, I don’t want to impute bad motives to those I’m criticizing. Perhaps they too find their means unseemly, but it’s all towards a good end. Here’s the thing, though: the reasons people aren’t Christian today are different than the reasons they weren’t 30 years ago.
Maybe this story will help: several months ago, I had a conversation about faith with a very thoughtful sophomore in college. He brought up issues surrounding traditional Christian teaching on sexuality. He politely but firmly told me that he found the ethic I described—the one held by Augustine, his grandmother, and Barack Obama during his first term—regressive, oppressive, and otherwise morally bankrupt. This conversation isn’t unique at all. Indeed, even when it doesn’t happen explicitly, it’s no doubt happening implicitly every time we share our faith in the Modern West.
That episode illustrates this important but overlooked point. Today, people stay home on Sunday not because they view themselves as deficient, but because they view the church as deficient. I’d argue that seeing how many marshmallows one could stuff in their mouths never provided a compelling motive for students to stay in the church, but today it can’t even get them to come in the first place. We thus needlessly beclown ourselves in front of young people to our own peril.
There is good news: the Christian faith is inherently deep, it really does provide a credible, serious explanation for reality. Before it gave us lime green shirts that ripped off the Sprite logo to say “Spirit,” it gave us the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. We don’t need to lower the bar of formality to become welcoming. Rather, we need to raise the bar of thoughtfulness to become relevant, credible witnesses to the slain lamb who has begun his reign.
As of October 15, 2018, the New York Times is reporting “The Russian Orthodox Church on Monday moved to sever all ties with the Constantinople Patriarchate, the Orthodox mother church, to protest its moves toward creating an independent church in Ukraine.” In more ways than one this represents a real schism in the Eastern Orthodox Church and can undermine the Orthodox claim to be a faithful representative of the historic Christian faith. For the non-orthodox, this is a challenge to our understanding of institutional and denominational Christianity.
(ALEXANDER ZEMLIANICHENKO – Getty Images)
Political and Religious Schisms
It is important to note that this schism is hardly a surprise to any who have seen the political undercurrent in this ongoing feud between the Hellenic and Slavic Orthodox Churches. Certainly every church conflict can be said to have some degree of political posturing, whether it is Rome’s Imperial power grab of the Great Schism, Henry VIII in England, or even the German princes that enabled Luther’s work. But this present schism presents a greater crisis to the contemporary Orthodox church and its American diaspora.
The jurisdictional authority of Constantinople as an important patriarchate is an ancient tradition, one that can be traced back to the “pentarchy” – a term used to describe the five self-governing jurisdictions of the undivided church. Rome, Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem were to be considered chief jurisdictions with special honor, authority, and significance. The stability of this five-headed church begins to fall apart in the 7th century as the Eastern territories are brought under Muslim rule, which happened to coincide with Rome’s increasing claims for universal jurisdiction. After the Great Schism between the Eastern and Western Churches, Constantinople becomes the Ecumenical Patriarch of the East and is recognized as “first among equals” of the Eastern Churches.
The Birth of the Russian Orthodox Church
The Russian Orthodox Church is born centuries later, first as a subordinate jurisdiction of the Ecumenical Patriarchate, but then as the Byzantine Empire crumbled the Russian Church claimed its own canonical independence. It is interesting that just as Rome claimed control as the East fell to the Muslims, the Russian church claims control as Byzantium falls. It would be over a century before this movement of self-government or “autocephaly” was officially recognized by the other Orthodox Churches. Today, the Russian Church represent a large chunk of Orthodox Christians and claims canonical jurisdiction over the Slavic Orthodox churches in Azerbaijan, Belarus, China, Estonia, Japan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Russia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan as well as Orthodox Christians living in other countries who voluntarily submit to its jurisdiction.
The conflict between the Russian Church and the Ecumenical Patriarchate over the canonical status of Ukraine has reached the point of schism. The Russian church is currently disallowing any of its members from celebrating communion with Churches under the Ecumenical Patriarchate. In the United States, two-thirds of the Orthodox Christians are under the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople – what are commonly called Greek Orthodox. And over a hundred thousand Orthodox Christians in America are under Russian-origin jurisdictions like the Orthodox Church in America (autocephalous), the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia, and the Churches of the Moscow Patriarchate.
Jurisdictional Multiplicity
Many American Christians are familiar with this sort of jurisdictional multiplicity and conflict. In my own tradition as an Anglican we have jurisdictions with identical prayer books, liturgies, and vestments, but completely out of communion. Some is justified, no Christian can or should commune with a female “bishop” as she prays to God using feminine pronouns, and denies the literal resurrection. Other breaks are similar to this current Orthodox struggle in that they are historically complicated and deeply political.
But this Orthodox question of canonical jurisdiction and authority of autocephalous churches poses an issue for all Christians. Many have fled the denominational chaos of Protestantism for the greener pastures of Orthodoxy as a solid, unified church. Perhaps believing that she was the sole representative of the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church. Others frustrated with the canonical division of Orthodoxy turned to Rome, hoping the Pope to lead the church through these conflicts and the Lord gave them Pope Francis.
It is a great sadness that the Russian Church would bar an otherwise faithful Christian from its communion altar. Functionally, the schism excommunicates the majority of American Orthodox Christians, at least temporarily. Can any branch of Orthodoxy claim to represent the unbroken tradition while denying real Christians access to the Body and Blood of Christ? As an Anglican Priest ordained in the Western Apostolic Succession of Sts. Peter, James, and John, and Paul – I recognize that the seeds of these poisonous canonical divisions were planted nearly a millennium ago with the Great Schism of 1054.
Bishops and Princes
The temptation for Catholic-minded Christians is to abuse our Apostolic identity as license to become the sole institutional representatives of Christ’s Kingdom. Bishops and Archbishops, Patriarchates and Metropolitans, are tempted to leave their chief calling to be shepherds of souls for the form of princely rule and worldly control.
Should the Russian Church maintain its stand against the Ecumenical Patriarchate, what effect does this have on the Orthodox identity as the faithful representative of the undivided church?
It is likely that Orthodox Christians in both jurisdictions are troubled over this – I’m sure they want Christ’s Church to be one. But perhaps rather than attempting to maneuver the canons into the favor of one jurisdiction or another, may we seek a humbler solution. Perhaps this moment is a time for Orthodox, Catholic, and Apostolic Churches to revisit what it means to be “one church.”
A Eucharistic Ecclesiology
In evaluating the merits of Russian autocephaly or the canonical authority of the Ecumenical Patriarch, perhaps we have overlooked the basics of Christian ecclesiology. The Holy Spirit brings the risen Life of Christ to us through faithful proclamation of the Gospel and His Sacraments. Imagine what it might look like to return to the simple eucharistic unity of our Apostolic fathers like St. Ignatius of Antioch who wrote: “Let that be deemed a proper Eucharist, which is [administered] either by the bishop, or by one to whom he has entrusted it. Wherever the bishop shall appear, there let the multitude [of the people] also be; even as, wherever Jesus Christ is, there is the Catholic Church.”
The Eucharist is the symbol and the means by which the Church becomes one with Christ and thus one with each other. St. John Chrysostom declares that Christ “mixed Himself with us and dissolved His body in us so that we may constitute a wholeness, be a body united to the Head.” To extend Eucharist fellowship is to recognize another Christian (and their doctrine) as part of the body of Christ. As St. Paul teaches, “For we being many are one bread, and one body: for we are all partakers of that one bread.” Just as to deny or bar one from Eucharist fellowship is to declare them outside of the body.
Perhaps at this time, when the dangers of building entire ecclesiastical structures off the flimsy merits of institutional jurisdictions are most visible, we can seek renewal around the Eucharist. The wounds suffered at 1054 have not healed, but the institutions that emerged have limped their way through a thousand year desert. Here now, as the churches become more and more divided – may we return to the Eucharistic promises of Christ’s real presence and to the reality of a undivided church around a shared altar.
The great question for the emerging East, Asia and other awakening third world areas, for an emerging nation like China is, “what fate awaits them?” They are now emerging from an analogous paganism that the West emerged from centuries ago. Here is an amazing quotation from David Aikman, the Time Magazine religious editor. He is a quoting from “a scholar from one of China’s premier academic institutions, the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) in Beijing, in 2002.”
“One of the things we were asked to look into was what accounted for the success, in fact, the pre-eminence of the West all over the world,” he said. “We studied everything we could from the historical, political, economic, and cultural perspective. At first, we thought it was because you had more powerful guns than we had. Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. But in the past twenty years, we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity. That is why the West has been so powerful. The Christian moral foundation of social and cultural life was what made possible the emergence of capitalism and then the successful transition to democratic politics. We don’t have any doubt about this.”1
Paul contends that with the death of Christ on the Cross, there was an overcoming of the Principalities and the Powers (Col. 2:15). A great deal has been written on this subject over the last 60 years.1 What was for a long time either ignored, or regarded by liberal scholars as a mythological element in his thought, recaptured scholarly imagination after World War II when it seemed brutally and baldly clear that such entities as Paul describes had been let loose on the earth once more in civilization-destroying World Wars. Principalities and Powers are not themselves personal demonic figures, but are rather elements of the creation that in and of themselves bring order, authority, symmetry, and method to the world. Examples of Principalities and Powers would be the state, the family, the clan and tribe, and the nation. In the modern world, new examples of Principalities could be industry and the media. Each of these entities in a fallen creation cease to be subordinate to God as the creator, and attempt to establish their own hegemony and absoluteness. And, in each of these cases, the Principalities are linked to, and become subject to, personal demonic figures. Paul makes clear that in the ancient world, the Principalities were tutors and keepers of the world, and functioned often in a relatively benign way. With the coming of Christ, and with His death and resurrection, the Principalities and Powers are “disarmed and…triumphed over”, and again are called to take their rightful ruling place under the power of the now triumphant King. While the war has been decisively won, this also initiated new phases of radical rebellion on the part of the Powers, and the church now lives by constant warfare and battle against these Powers through history (Ephesians 6:10-20). There are at least three phases of the conquest of the Principalities and the Powers through history that interest me here. There are many more, but one must necessarily simplify in order to say anything.
Click HERE for part 1 of this series, and HERE for part 2.
The recurring characterization problems with such Strong Female Characters arise in no small measure from the struggle to show that men and women are interchangeable and can compete and cooperate with each other on the same terms. As I have already noted, this falsehood serves no one. It sets women up for frustration and failure as they have to justify their agency on men’s terms and it produces an embarrassment about male strengths that should be celebrated rather than stifled. It reflects a drive towards intense gender integration and de-differentiation in the wider world.
The traditional world of women—typically a different existential and intersubjective mapping of spaces that were shared with men—has been reduced through the migration of work away from the home, the expanding social role of the state and its agencies, the shrinking and contracting of families, the thinning out of neighborhoods, and the removal of much of the burden of domestic labour through technology. One’s value in society has also become increasingly contingent upon advanced educational attainment, career, wealth, and consumption. Within this new situation, women have had to forge new identities within worlds created by men and which play to male strengths. Shrunk to a sentimental reservation of domesticity, there is relatively little dignity to be found in what remains of traditional female worlds in most Western societies.
Often natural differences in tendencies and aptitudes between the sexes (as groups, there is plenty of individual variation and departure from the norm) replicate themselves in the wider economic world. Women are frustrated as their desire to have children and raise families prevents them from earning as much as their male counterparts, or enjoying the same social prominence. Women’s greater natural orientation towards relational and caring activities leads to their underrepresentation within the more lucrative and powerful professions. Women are drawn to subjects and occupations that are more personal, artistic, and relational, while men to those that are more realistic, investigative, and thing-based. Despite the expense of considerable money and effort to change male and female preferences, they are surprisingly resistant to change in many respects.
On men’s part, male dominance in realms of high achievement is frequently and often instinctively characterized as pathological. There is a zero-sum social game being played between the sexes and male privilege is a sign of a great injustice, something about which men should feel guilty. The possibility that men dominate because the realms in which they dominate play to their various strengths as a group or involve areas where they produce the most exceptional performers is not an idea that can be entertained in many quarters.
The push for ‘diversification’ and ‘inclusion’ can be a threat to many male groups because their natural rougher socializing tendencies are stigmatized, they are no longer permitted to play to their strengths, and their shared cultures and cultural products are jeopardized by a sort of gender gentrification imposed upon them. The existence of extreme misogyny in many of their reactions to such developments should not be allowed to disguise the presence of understandable concerns (and definitely vice versa too), even where the appropriate response to these concerns may not be that of wholly rejecting the diversification.
We have moved from a situation with distinct worlds of gendered activity—albeit typically deeply interwoven and involving extensively overlapping spaces—to one in which men and women are being pressed into a single intersubjective and existential world, one that was traditionally male. The result is a stifling of men, as manliness becomes a social threat and male strength a problem to be solved. Male strengths have to be discouraged to give women more scope for expression and achievement. Women, on the other hand, are caught in a world that seems rigged against them. The Strong Female Character is one way in which the anxieties, insecurities, resentments, and embarrassments produced by such a situation register in our imaginary worlds.
It is also a revelation of a failure of imagination. Fictional worlds are places in which we can explore possibilities for identity and agency. The fact that women’s stature as full agents is so consistently treated as contingent upon such things as their physical strength and combat skills, or upon the exaggerated weakness or their one-upping of the men that surround them, is a sign that, even though men may be increasingly stifled within it, women are operating in a realm that plays by men’s rules. The possibility of a world in which women are the weaker sex, yet can still attain to the stature and dignity of full agents and persons—the true counterparts and equals of men—seems to be, for the most part, beyond people’s imaginative grasp. This is a limitation of imagination with painful consequences for the real world, and is one of the causes of the high degree of ressentiment within the feminist movement.
Heroic Women and Good Story Telling
The Bechdel Test originally appeared within the comic strip, Dykes to Watch Out For. It is an informal test to determine whether or not a film passes the lowest bars for the portrayal of women: 1. Does it have at least two women in it? 2. Do the women talk to each other? 3. Do they talk about something other than a man? It is a helpful heuristic tool for alerting people to the degree to which women and their intersubjective worlds fail to appear within the frame of so many movies and works of fiction. It is far from scientific, nor is it an accurate tool for determining the existence of stunted portrayal of women more generally, but it does often provide an initial indication of limitations or problems.
Partly as a result of this everywoman heroine trend, partly in order to be more inclusive in traditionally male dominated genres, partly in order to push back against stereotypes, partly in order to legitimate eye candy for male audiences, partly in response to powerful lobby groups behind the scenes, and perhaps mostly in order to increase sales, the last couple of decades have seen a meteoric rise in the number of action heroines—Xena, Buffy Summers, Trinity, Sydney Bristow, River Tam, Lara Croft, Kara Thrace, Katniss Everdeen, Michonne, Black Widow, Daisy Johnson, Peggy Carter, Imperator Furiosa, Jessica Jones, Rey, etc., etc. Women, we are assured, can fight just like men. These characters are highly confident characters who routinely outclass men in combat, despite their typically short, thin, and conventionally attractive frames (Brienne of Tarth is a marked exception here, who approaches somewhat closer to realism). Even the modern princess can be a martial artist who can prove her strength and equality to men through violence, whether physical or magical.
There is no shortage of well-rounded characters within this category, although others are lazy ‘Mary Sue’ tropes. What is perhaps most noteworthy about most of them is how much their supposed ‘strength’ and independence and their narrative importance often depends upon their capacity to match up to men in combat, requires the foil of male incompetence, villainy, and weakness, or involves the exhibition of traits and behaviors that are far more pronounced in men. Cathartic though it may be for many women to see such female characters demonstrating their equality of agency and personhood on their screens, the ways in which they typically have to do this reveal deep problems with prevailing egalitarian visions of female identity and of relations between the sexes. (more…)
“Transgender” people have been around for quite some time. Up until recently, we haven’t really had to take them seriously as a culture. They were always on the fringe. In many ways they still are. However, now our culture is not only tolerating them, but they are being praised for their courage of breaking free from “social constructs” of male and female foisted upon them by the interpretation of their anatomy and becoming the sex (or gender) they really feel they are on the inside. The media that feed our society are pushing the rest of us to sympathize and celebrate these new heroes. Gender identity has become so fluid that the binary distinctions of male and female aren’t enough. Facebook has dozens of options and a “Custom” button for the user to choose an identity.
The question that confronts the church is one that many of us haven’t had to ask in the West for quite some time. With our Christian heritage, we have accepted the categories of male and female for centuries. But now we must give an account for why believe these are still valid categories. Some dismiss this out-of-hand as silly, requiring no argument. But as we take the gospel to our culture, this is a question we may have to answer. Does the gospel speak to this issue? Does it really matter if someone believes he’s a female even though he has a male anatomy (or vice versa)? Does this have any bearing on whether or not someone is a Christian? (more…)
There is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry, ‘Mine!’Abraham Kuyper
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