Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne, Yet that scaffold sways the future, and, behind the dim unknown, Standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above his own.
If you were an Egyptian Christian Minister and were R2K you would have to tell your congregation that Morsi’s attempt to implement Sharia law upon all Egyptians was none of the Church’s business.
AND you’d have to tell your people that they were sinning by protesting the Morsi government.
“Traditional marriage is part of the created order that God sustains through his common grace, not a uniquely Christian institution, and society as a whole suffers when it is not honored. Christians are responsible to commend the goodness and benefits of marriage in the public square…. To call attention to that evidence in the public square is a way of communicating that marriage is not a uniquely Christian thing, but a human thing, and that all people have an interest in getting marriage policy correct.”
~ David Van Drunen
Chief of the R2K Tribe
There are several problems here before we even get to passages like Ephesians 5
1.) How do we know what “Traditional” is in “Traditional Marriage.” It simply is the case that in order to get to Traditional Marriage you need Christian categories to begin with. One can’t get to Christian categories without the Scriptures.
2.) There is an appeal here to a “Human thing.” And yet, apart from Scripture how do we know what it means to be Human? In point of fact I would contend that those who are outside of Christ are doing all they can to put off genuine humanness in favor of putting on beastliness. Man loses his manishness the further he goes in sin. So, all appeal to a “human thing” are question begging if we can only consistently determine what Human is using Christian categories.
3.) The fact that pagans embrace marriage has more to do with their being inconsistent with their own Christ hating presuppositions than it has to do with “being human.” Would Lamech have denied he was being “Human” when he took two wives? Does Justice Anthony Kennedy (he who penned the Majority opinion in the overturning of DOMA) believe that sodomites are less human for being coupled?
4.) The very fact that we are moving in the opposite direction regarding “getting marriage policy correct,” (i.e. — sodoomite marriage) is evidence that all people do not have an interest in getting marriage policy correct.
5.) It is true that Marriage is a Creational Institution but the mistake here on VD’s part is forgetting the Grace restores Nature. Creation itself has fallen and part of the effect of Redemption is to restore Creation to its original design. Redemption does so buy leaving Creational Creational while at the same time restoring Creational to what it would be minus sin.
Of course all this explains why recently well known Westminster California Seminary Professors have suggested that they could accept sodomite civil marriage. If marriage belongs to the Creational realm — a realm that is completely compartmentalized from the Redemptive realm –then why should the Church pronounce on it?
All in all what R2K is doing is what Van Til talked about long ago when he used the illustration of a child climbing up on their parents lap in order to slap them in the face. R2K assumes stable categories that couldn’t exist apart from Christian thinking and then uses those assumptions in order to deny the Christian faith in the common realm.
. . . There is a widely prevalent theory, that truth may be of the feelings as well as of the intellect; that it may not only come thus from two independent sources, but may be contradictory so that what is true to the feelings may be false to the intellect and visa versa; and that as moral character and so Christian life are rooted in the voluntary nature, of which the feelings are an expression, the Christian life may be developed and, some say, would better be developed, without reference to such intellectual conceptions as doctrinal statements.
This theory is radically false. There is no knowledge of the heart. Feeling can give knowledge no more than can excitement. As Prof. Bowen has well said, “Feeling is a staate of mind consequent on the reception of some idea.” That is, it does not give knowledge; it presupposes it. There must be knowledge by the head before there can be feeling with the heart.
Once more you see the point. The religion of the heart and the theology of the head cannot be divorced. Unless the heart be disposed toward Christ, the head cannot, because it will not, discern the truth of Christ. As our Lord said, “It is only he who wills to obey God, whose heart is right toward Him, who shall know the doctrine whether it be of Him.” On the other hand, zeal in Christ’s cause will be strong and abiding in proportion as the faith from which it springs and by which it is nourished is intelligent. Zeal without knowledge is dangerous and short-lived.
William Brenton Greene, Jr.
“Broad Churchism and the Christian Life,” Princeton Theological Review, 4 (July 1906), pp. 311-13.
… the Scriptures make no distinction between the head and the heart, as if mathematics came from the head and faith from the heart. The Old Testament frequently contrasts the heart and the lips – sincerity versus hypocrisy – but the term heart, at least seventy-five percent of the time in the Old Testament, means the mind or intellect.
Gordon Haddon Clark
What Is Saving Faith — p. 55
The whole idea that, “The heart has its reasons, of which reason knows nothing,” has been one of the most injurious wounds ever inflicted upon the Christian faith. How many times, as a Pastor, have I heard people tell me that they had to “follow their heart,” usually with the consequence that they have to break God’s standard in one area or another.
Of course to lift “the heart” up as a extra-sensory means of epistemological knowing is to denigrate and lower God’s Revelation in Scripture as our epistemological foundation. When we insist that there is a knowing which is uninformed by and even unrelated to sound Biblical doctrine we elevate, most usually, our experience or lust at the expense of God’s revelation being lowered. So, when we make “heart knowledge” a co-ordinate authority with head knowledge we end up exalting “heart-knowledge” at the expense of head-knowledge.
The advantage in heart knowledge is that the heart knower does not have to bother to study to show himself approved because what does the heart need with all that head knowledge? Also the advantage to the heart knower is that he or she can never be told they are wrong by the head knower because, after all, “the heart has its reasons, of which reason knows nothing.”
Heart knowledge is another example of unmediated personal and individual experience being used to trump God’s revelation.
Having said all this I perfectly understand that their is a distinction between passion and cold calculated logic. However, even when passion is white hot it is white hot based on what someone is thinking.
In this recent article,
http://www.thebanner.org/features/2013/05/tomorrow-s-theology
Edwin Walhout advocated his vision of “Tomorrow’s Theology.”
I don’t intend to completely deconstruct Walhout’s article. Mainly I just wanted to show that Walhout’s “Tomorrow Theology,” has been advocated as “Tomorrow’s Theology” for at least several decades. My point is to try to take the shine off the idea that there is anything innovative in what Walhout is advocating. In point of fact what Walhout is really offering is “Yesterday’s Theology.” The fact that anybody could see Walhout’s “Tomorrow Theology” as novel or futuristic is laughable. As far back as 1925 people were saying the same thing.
“The evolution of man from lower forms of life was in itself a new and startling fact, and one that broke upu the old theology. I and my contemporaries, however, accepted it as fact. The first and most obvious result of this acceptance was that we are compelled to regard the Biblical story of the Fall as not historic, as it had long been believed to be. We were compelled to regard that story as a primitive attempt to account for the presence of sin and evil in the world …. But now, in the light of the fact of evolution, the Fall, as a historic event, already questioned on other grounds, was excluded and denied by science.”
Charles E. Merriam
New Aspects of Politics, 3rd Edition — pp. 59-60
So 88 years after Merriam offered “Tomorrow’s Theology,” Walhout is still insisting that theology from 1925 remains “Tomorrow’s Theology.”
Of course what Rev. Walhout is giving us is just the archaic version of Modernism so aptly advocated for by men like Shailer Matthews in his various books. Like Matthews before him, Walhout’s Christianity is one where his god is the god of the process philosophers. Creation is a process and not an act. (Except possibly as an act that starts off the more important process.) Most commonly then this process philosophy god gives us a word of flux that is determined and regulated by humanistic historicism. Higher Criticism, in “Tomorrow’s Theology” legislated the meaning of Scripture for each “progressing” generation. Naturally, if the Modernist’s god is in process with his creation then so must any legislative word be in process with creation. Next, in the reasoning of “Tomorrow’s Theology,” — or is it “Yesterday’s Theology?” I get so confused on this point — one has to realize that as one has only an immanent god who is working in process with his creation, and who has no absolute legislative law word, therefore ethics are evolving as well. Joseph Fletcher’s “Situational Ethics,” comes to the fore and “right and wrong” are determined by whoever has the biggest and most advanced weaponry.
So, whether Walhout’s theology is “Tomorrow’s Theology” or “Yesterday’s Theology” it remains a Theology that reinterprets the faith once forever delivered to the saints through the anti-supernatural grid of humanistic process theology, where all is becoming (including god), where whirl is King, and where man loses his manishness at the same time as God loses His Godhood.
If you would like to see the consequences of Walhout’s “Tomorrow Theology,” — a theology where original sin is denied — the place to look is at the Soviet Gulags, the Cambodian Killing Fields, or the Cuban Psychiatric wards. If man has no original sin then we have no reason to think that man is basically sinful. If man is not basically sinful then man is either basically good, and only needs to discover his goodness, or man is neutral and needs to be socially engineered to achieve Utopian desires. Such has always been the reasoning of those promising to usher in the Kingdom of man. Of course, I say this fully conceding that Rev. Walhout finds all that 20th century ugliness abhorrent. Most people don’t have the capacity to trace out the consequences of their ideas.
So … beat the rush and reject “Tomorrow’s Theology” today.
“I stand before you as a 40-year-old, single, celibate, and chaste yet openly gay man . . . no longer willing to be silent,” Bowman told the hushed delegates.
Saying he had been excommunicated from another church, Bowman added, “I want to thank this denomination for being affirming of somebody like me.”
Delegates gave him a standing ovation.
Journalist Report From CRC Synod 2013
“All the crosscurrents of present-day liberation struggles are subsumed in the gay struggle. The gay moment is in some ways similar to the moment that other communities have experienced in the nation’s past, but it is also something more, because sexual identity is in crisis throughout the population, and gay people—at once the most conspicuous subjects and objects of the crisis— have been forced to invent a complete cosmology to grasp it. No one says the changes will come easily. But it’s just possible that a small and despised sexual minority will change America forever.”
1993 Cover Story from “The Nation” magazine
Some observations cross correlating the two quotes.
It should be noted that the word “cosmology” in “The Nation” quote is largely synonymous with “Worldview,” and I am using it that way as well.
1.) In a Christian cosmology the main means of identifying one’s self is by the noun “Christian.” In a Christian cosmology one finds their identity in Christ. We are baptized into Christ. We are crucified with Christ. We are raised with Christ. We are even seated in the heavenlies with Christ. The Catechism reminds us that “we are not our own but belong to our faithful savior Jesus Christ.” ST. Paul even can say that “to live is Christ, and to die is gain.” All of this is what one expects to find in both the individual and the covenant community where a Christian cosmology is in the ascendancy. In a Christian cosmology Christians identify with Christ.
However, when sodomy comes to the fore a new cosmology has to be created in order that the chief identifying mark is not “Christian,” but rather “gay.” In a sodomite cosmology one finds their identity in their homosexuality. This is so true, that the sodomy identity even for the “sanctified Christian homosexual,” is “gay” and not “Christian.”
Now in a Christian cosmology there is understanding that all Christians struggle with what the Scripture call besetting sin and Christianity is sympathetic towards those who are constantly seeking to mortify the old man in order that the new man in Christ might be vivified. As such, in a Christian cosmology there might be those who would confess that they struggle against sin and who might even admit that they have been made a “eunuch for the Kingdom,” (Mt. 19:12) but they would not identify themselves — their persons — with their sinful inclinations. St. Paul reveals this kind of mindset in his letter to the Corinthians when he, speaking of those who have been redeemed from such sinful lifestyles,
9 Do you not know that the unrighteous and the wrongdoers will not inherit or have any share in the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived (misled): neither the impure and immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor those who participate in homosexuality,
10 Nor cheats (swindlers and thieves), nor greedy graspers, nor drunkards, nor foulmouthed revilers and slanderers, nor extortioners and robbers will inherit or have any share in the kingdom of God.
11 And such some of you were [once]. But you were washed clean (purified by a complete atonement for sin and made free from the guilt of sin), and you were consecrated (set apart, hallowed), and you were justified [pronounced righteous, by trusting] in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and in the [Holy] Spirit of our God.
Note that their identity has changed. They no longer are foulmouthed revilers and slanderers or those who participate in homosexuality. They are now known simply as Christian. They once were the old man but now they are the new man.
In a Christian cosmology it is true that all the saints are sinners but it is also true that in a Christian cosmology no Christian, who is self conscious of their identity in Christ identifies themselves with that sin from which they’ve been delivered. They identify themselves with Christ because they’ve been washed.
2.) Another difference between the Christian cosmology and the sodomite cosmology, when it is played out to its fullest implication, is that in the Christian cosmology how people engage their sexuality cannot be divorced from their Christianity. In the Christian cosmology sexuality is disciplined and harnessed by the Christian faith. In the the sodomite cosmology absolute individual freedom of sexual expression is the center around which all other considerations must orbit. Note the distinction here between a Christian cosmology and a sodomite cosmology is that in the former there are sexuality prohibitions that are part and parcel of the Christian cosmology while in the sodomite cosmology, as it comes into its own, it is only sexuality prohibitions that are prohibited. In the Christian cosmology lust is sin and is to be confessed and denied. In the sodomite cosmology sexual repression is sin and is to be confessed and denied.
3.) In the historic Christian cosmology anthropology and sexuality are bound up together. Man without a helpmeet woman is incomplete (where he or she is not gifted with singleness) and man is not complete until woman is taken from him, fashioned anew, and returned to him in marital union. This historical imagery is so integral to the Christian cosmology that it is taken up in the New Testament with its testimony that the male female union relationship is a reflection of Christ’s relationship with the Church. In the Christian cosmology this male female relationship is fruitful and is to the end of glorifying God and raising faithful covenant children. Sodomy overturns all this cosmology and anthropology for a cosmology and anthropology that teaches that sexual intimacy is not unique to a male and a female and that sexual union is by definition sterile apart from technological contrivances.
4.) The cosmology of Christianity and the cosmology of sodomy are in antithesis and so are incompatible with one another. If there is an attempt to mix them together the end result will only be semantic deception. By semantic deception what is meant is that any mixing of these two antithetical cosmologies will result in the language of Christianity being retained but emptied of its historic orthodox Christian meaning in favor of meaning that is subservient to the cosmology of sodomy. The results will be a retention of Christian jargon but only as that jargon is emptied of its objective historic Christian meaning.
5.) The whole issue of sodomy is so important because it is not just about who is sleeping with whom. I really couldn’t care less about that. The whole issue of sodomy is so important because if the LGBT – sodomy agenda is to overthrow standard historic Christian cosmology then everything changes. If the cosmology of the LGBT crowd wins the day it is not merely a matter of a slight alteration in our social order. No, if the cosmology of the LGBT crowd wins historic Christianity is thrown off completely and with the embrace of the new sodomite cultus a new culture and social order is born that is opposed to Christ and His Kingdom.
At this point it appears that the sodomite cosmology might win in the short term. It has been steamrolling since the enlightenment in one form or another. However, in the long term it can not win because it is a cosmology of death.