Family life – Page 8

The Hypotheticals of Littlejohn and McAtee

Over here

http://www.reformation21.org/blog/2015/09/thinking-thrice-before-support.php

Dr. Brad Littlejohn gives a series of hypothetical examples that might prove that Christians should re-think supporting Kim Davis’ resistance to issuing sodomite marriage licenses. His examples are as follows,

In the year 2006, Captain Joseph Rodriguez of Aurora, CO, a Christian, was dishonorably discharged from the Army after refusing to follow orders to deploy his company to Iraq, on the grounds that it was a Biblically unjust war.

In 2007, Amy White of Evansville, IN, a Christian, was fired from her job as a grocery sales clerk for refusing to process any purchases of pornographic magazines.

In 2008, Judge William Clark of Macon, GA, a Christian, was forced into early retirement for refusing to hear the majority of divorce cases in his court, on the grounds that none of them met biblical grounds for divorce.

In 2009, Molly Thompson of Billings, MT, a Christian, was fired from her job as a hotel clerk for refusing to allow gay couples, or obviously unwed couples, to check into the same hotel room.

In 2010, John Barlow of Rochester, MN, a Christian, lost his job as a loan officer at a payday loan company for actively advising his customers not to take out loans from the company, and to go elsewhere where they would not be usuriously exploited,

In 2011, Michael Jones, a policeman of St. Petersburg, FL, and a Christian, was jailed and suspended from the force after conspiring to shelter an undocumented immigrant mother and her son, rather than arresting them to get them deported, as he was ordered.

From these examples Dr. Littlejohn asks rhetorically,

Here is my question: if Christians are going to hold up Kim Davis as a paragon of Christ-like refusal to compromise with injustice, then how soon are we going to hold up the hypothetical John Barlow or Joseph Rodriguez or William Black as well? Are we all prepared to examine our own vocations with the same rigor, and leave all to follow Christ? And if not, then is our admiration of Kim Davis simply proof of what progressives accuse us of–namely, a highly selective Pharisaism that takes sexual sins with profound seriousness, and everything else as relatively negotiable?

But this is a case where sauce for the good is sauce for the gander.

** In 2006 Mary Lewiston worked as a organ procurement agent for Planned Parenthood. Everything that Mary does is in keeping with the law. Mary is asked to cut a baby’s head open to secure it’s brains for delivery to the buyer. Mary does so because she follows Dr. Littlejohn’s advice and decides this is “prudent.”

** In 2007 John Sanchez worked as a Pharmaceutical salesman. He knows that his task is really to get people hooked on prescription drugs. His job is perfectly consistent with the laws. John decides to continue being a drug pusher because to raise a Christian objection would ruin his testimony with his coworkers who desperately need Christ.

** In 2008 Alex Cho worked for Pepsi. His wife Donna Cho worked of Lays. Both of them realize that fetal cells are used to enhance the taste of the products of the companies they work for. Everything they do is consistent with the laws of the land. The do not raise a protest as Christians because they learned from Dr. Littlejohn that, Christians, like their Savior, are never supposed to be quarrelsome.

** In 2010 Dr. John Little worked as the head of research at Monsanto. He is responsible for genetically engineering food that he knows increases the likelihood of tumors in people as well as demonstrating a pattern of reproductive problems in those who consume the food. He knows his food is modifying human DNA. However, Dr. John Little reasons that the vastly increased yields of his crops can feed the world. Dr. John Little operates perfectly within the bounds of the law. Dr. John Little keeps poisoning the food source for the glory of Jesus.

** In 2011 Dr. Thabiti Smith worked as the head of vaccine development for Merck Industries. Dr. Thabiti Smith knows that deadly agents are put into the vaccines but reasons that the good outweighs the bad. Dr. Thabiti Smith decides that this passes Dr. Littlejohn’s “Prudence test.”

Here is my question: Where would Dr. Littlejohn have us draw the line for Christian resistance? If we don’t draw it at the point where the enemy is seeking to protect the institution of Marriage and family won’t it make it easier to not draw the line in other places? If we will not draw the line at the point where Marriage is being redefined how are we not complicit in social order libertinism? If we will not draw the line here will it not prove what the progressives accuse us of — namely that at the end of the day we are not really any different from them.

The Christian Faith and Marriage — A Brief Distillation

Human history begins with a wedding in the garden (Gen. 2:22-24). In the Fall, the first place where one finds Alienation, after alienation from God, is alienation between the husband and wife (Gen. 3:12). The re-creation, which restores man to God’s Kingdom garden, begins with Christ’s miracle at a Wedding in Cana of Galilee (John 2:1-11). The relation between between Christ and the Church is analogized as a marriage (Eph. 5:22-33). Finally history is consummated with the Marriage feast of the lamb (Rev. 19:6-9). Scripture thus forms an inclusio around the theme of marriage broken, marriage restored and marriage consummated. Beyond this redemptive thrust we learn that God hates divorce ( Malachi 2:16), designates that marriage should be honored by all (Hebrews 13:4-7), and teaches that marriage provides a covenantal set apart-ness (has a sanctifying effect) even for a unbelieving spouse (I Cor. 7:14f).

Covenant theology finds much of its substance in God’s faithfulness to the seed of the generations who are the fruit of godly Marriage (Malachi 2:15). Covenant theology, which bespeaks God’s covenant faithfulness to familial generations, could not exist if there were not covenant families as formed by covenant marriages. The whole covenantal structure of Scripture presupposes Marriage and family. The Church is even spoken of as “the Household of God” ( (Ephesians 2:19).

When we, as a people, as a church, or as a culture get marriage and family wrong we twist the very foundations of our Christian theology and yet we would never get marriage and family wrong without first having twisted our Christian theology.

Sexuality and Man & Woman as Image Bearers of God

In the embrace of homosexuality there is the attempt to strip off the imago dei by the Lesbian or sodomite in question. Sexuality is so closely tied up with the Image of God in men and women that when one defiles and reverses their sexuality they at the same time are seeking to rip the image of God out of themselves.

The reason this can be advanced is that male and female together comprise the image of God.

Genesis 1:27 So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.

When a man or a woman seek to strip themselves of their God ordained sexuality they are therefore seeking to undress themselves of the Image of God appointed to them in their composite role as image bearers.

There is also the reality that in man and woman together reflecting the character of God, in all their glorious God appointed sexuality, the fact that, together as image bearers, they reflect the one and the many found in the Unity and plurality of the Godhead. In seeking to strip off their God ordained masculine or feminine sexuality there is the attempt to turn God into a monad absent of His plurality.

The embrace then of Lesbianism and / or Sodomy then is, at its foundational level, an attack on God via the means of the attempt to erase God’s Image by erasing God’s ordained sexuality placed upon the man and the woman as God’s creaturely image bearers.

This explains why this particular sin is so dangerous and why St. Paul can write,

I Corinthians 6:17 — Flee immorality. Every other sin that a man commits is outside the body, but the immoral man sins against his own body.

The lesbian and / or the sodomite is sinning against their own body because by illicit coupling they seek to disembody themselves of the image of God contained in their physical bodies as given in their sexuality.

Sexual sin is particularly primal. It goes to the core of our identity as image bearers of God. While one can never successfully sanitize themselves of the fact that they are the Imago Dei, one can so twist their self understanding of the reality that they are image bearers that the twisting begins to approach a searing of the conscience so severe that few recover.

Alienism & Christianity

Breathes there the man, with soul so dead,
Who never to himself hath said,
This is my own, my native land!
Whose heart hath ne’er within him burn’d,
As home his footsteps he hath turn’d,
From wandering on a foreign strand!
If such there breathe, go, mark him well;
For him no Minstrel raptures swell;
High though his titles, proud his name,
Boundless his wealth as wish can claim;
Despite those titles, power, and pelf,
The wretch, concentred all in self,
Living, shall forfeit fair renown,
And, doubly dying, shall go down
To the vile dust, from whence he sprung,
Unwept, unhonour’d, and unsung.

– Sir Walter Scott

Civility is a kind of relation that recognizes the moral priority of more intimate relations. We don’t owe fellow citizens the same sort of obligations we owe family, friends, and co-religionists. Civic relations respect this order of duties and affections, as when a wife is excused from testifying against her husband. (Nomocratic rule supports this moral priority). But in teleocratic regimes, everything may be collapsed into political membership, and children may be ordered to inform on their parents, or taken away from parents who subvert their loyalty to the state, as by teaching them religion….

What is plain, at any rate, is that Alienism is far from a marginal force. It offers malcontents of all sorts an ideology or gnosis that enables them to interpret normal life maliciously as a crude though somewhat disguised struggle between oppressors and victims. If the oppression isn’t obvious, that is because the oppressors are so cunning and their victims so totally subjugated that even their perceptual powers are in thrall. Acquiring the liberating gnosis is called “consciousness-raising.” The process enables the initiate to strip off the mask of oppressive structures and see capitalism as exploitation, freedom as “repressive tolerance,” and prosperity as “invisible poverty.”

Joe Sobran

Pensees

When Christianity embraces Alienism the result is that God favors eliminating the natural priority of family in favor of prioritizing the stranger and the alien so that the stranger and alien, in essence, are now the benefactors of the priority that was once bent towards family. Alienism, run amok, thus prefers the alien and the stranger above and over members of one’s own household. When Christianity embraces Alienism the result is that the proverb “Charity begins at home,” is seen as demonically sourced. When Christianity embraces Alienism the result is the owning of the sulfur doctrines of the “Fatherhood of God of all men,” and the “Brotherhood of men with all men,” with the consequence that the Universal affection those doctrine require stamp out all the particular affections of family, people, and nation. Christianity, does indeed teach the necessity of the Universal when it teaches to, “do good to all men,” but not without adding, “especially to those who are of the household of faith,” thus demonstrating that the Particular still remains. Christianity insists upon the Particular when it teaches, “But if anyone does not provide for his relatives, and especially for members of his household, he has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever,” and this without denying the noble character of the Good Samaritan.

Alienism is the faith of the Unitarian. It believes in and actively seeks to build a world where “all colors bleed into one,” so that mankind is as undifferentiated as the Unitarian God it serves. Alienism is the faith that hates all God ordained distinctions in favor of an equality of the garbage scow where distinctions likewise are non-existent. Alienism denies the God ordained distinctions of mankind just as Unitarianism denies the Trinitarian distinctions in the Godhead. As the Alienist worships a Unitarian God, mankind must be made in that god’s Unitarian image. As such, distinctions melt away in the name of equality (sameness) as equality is pursued in the name of practical Unitarianism. Women are men. Children are purple penguins. Marriage is distinction-less. Bathrooms are gender-less. Ethnicity is a social construct. Pronouns must become gender neutral. All roads lead to god. Why can’t you “Co-exist”?

Alienism, as it comes into the Christian faith, trades in the Revolutionary language of “Citizen,” or “Comrade,” — that language that flattens out all distinctions in favor of a grand oneness — for the Anabaptist “Brother,” which does the same thing but with a Christian patina. Alienism, as it comes into the Christian faith, posits a eschatological vision of a Unitarian border-less world where, because Jesus has triumphed, therefore the particularity of Nations cease to exist. Where such a eschatological vision exists any pointing to passages in the Scriptures that speak about Nations remaining in the New Jerusalem is shouted down as “heresy,” and “hateful.”

Alienism will settle for nothing less than the complete inversion of orthodox Christianity. According to Alienism it is a positive good when thy sons and thy daughters shall be given unto another people, and thine eyes shall look, and fail with longing for them all the day long; and there shall be no might in thine hand. According to Alienism it is a sure sign of Christian maturity when, the stranger that is within thee shall get up above thee very high; and thou shalt come down very low. He shall lend to thee, and thou shalt not lend to him: he shall be the head, and thou shalt be the tail. This is all acceptable to Christian Alienism just as long as we so reduce the meaning of Christianity so that everyone can be considered Christian. The definitional distinctions that a robust Christianity demands are as offensive as every other distinction to the Christian Alienist. In such a way the rank and file Christian can be brow beat about his insensitivity and lack of love for Jesus if he even begins to object to the Alienist vision and worldview.

Usually, Christian Alienism, is not quite as cutting edge as “secular” Alienism. For some reason Christians think that they honor Jesus if they stay 10-15 years off the cutting edge. Because this is so Christian Alienists will allow for Homosexual Christians as long as those Homosexual Christians are not practicing Homosexual Christians. “See,” thinks the Alienist Christian, “we are sensitive to the need to blur distinctions also.” Alienist Christians can be found who will even speak about their “Brother Muslims.” Alienist Christians prove their mettle most obviously when they insist that Jesus is especially pleased when the worship of the WASP takes place in multicultural settings. This despite the fact that these same people take great pleasure in the existence of uniquely Korean congregations in their denominations.

In the end, Alienism as Christianity, is just another disguised version of the Marxist vision to eliminate all distinctions.
The aim of socialism is not only to abolish the present division of mankind into small states and end all national isolation; not only to bring the nations closer together, but to merge them….”

Vladimir Lenin
The Rights of Nations to Self Determination — pg. 76

“Princes and nations will disappear without violence from the earth, the human race will become one family and the world the abode of reasonable men.”

-Adam Weishaupt, quoted in Paul Johnson, Intellectuals (London: Orion Books Limited, 1993), p. 32.

Capitalism developed the ever more inhuman polarization of the sexes. The cult of making distinctions, which serves only for oppression, is now being swept away by awareness of resemblance and identity.

M. Walser
Uber die neusten Stimmungen im Westen
In: Kursbuch, Bd. 20, 1970, S. 19-41.

”What will be the attitude of communism to existing nationalities?

The nationalities of the peoples associating themselves in accordance with the principle of community will be compelled to mingle with each other as a result of this association and hereby to dissolve themselves, just as the various estate and class distinctions must disappear through the abolition of their basis, private property.”

~ Frederick Engels in “The Principles of Communism”, 1847

“The equality of races and nations is one of the most important elements of the moral strength and might of the Soviet state. Soviet anthropology develops the one correct concept, that all the races of mankind are biologically equal. The genuinely materialist conception of the origin of man and of races serves the struggle against racism, against all idealist, mystic conceptions of man, his past, present and future.”

—Mikhail Nesturkh, Soviet anthropologist, 1959
“The Origin of Man” (Moscow)Mikhail Nesturkh, Soviet anthropologist, 1959

Alienism is very likely the greatest threat to orthodox Christianity today and so of course the Church has embraced it.

Requiescat in pace Miss Ethel Smith

Almost 27 years ago, I was called to my first charge as Minister to a Church in Longtown, South Carolina. Longtown was and remains a sign on Longtown road, announcing “Longtown,” Longtown Presbyterian Church, a small restaurant (the Windmill), a gas station-mom & pop convenience store, and a children’s park. That is the town of Longtown. It was and is so small that they don’t even give it a zip code, instead sharing a zip code with the metropolis of Ridgeway (population — 500) up the road. I served as the Pastor of the small rural Longtown Presbyterian church for 76 months.

The membership of the church was small and so there was little problem in getting to know those I would be serving. One of the fixtures of the congregation was Mrs. Ethel Smith. Miss Ethel, as my children came to affectionately know her, was a grandmotherly type for not only our children but for Jane and I as well.

Miss Ethel was 63 when we showed up in Longtown and had seen a good deal of life already. She grew up a Boulware in South Carolina during times that were so lean that “hardscrabble” hardly seems to do those times justice. The hardness of those times and the simplicity of living they required was testified to by Miss Ethel’s residence. Ethel had the gift of hospitality and many were the times we would visit together in what most moderns would consider “a hovel” but what she found to be home and I found to be a glorious museum of a time I had only read about. In our visits, there by the old stove, she would bring out her knick knacks that reflected a different era and tell me a little of the history behind each knick knack. There in our times of mutual encouragement — times where I’m sure I learned more from her concerning the Christian faith than she learned from “Pastor Bret,” — she would show me her artistic endeavors with her ceramic doll making and adorning. Miss Ethel had artistic blood in her as seen by those ceramic dolls, sewing projects, crocheting ability and by the hand puppets she made upon my request to be used for children’s church — hand puppets that I still own today. Her concern was so great for us that after we left Longtown she crocheted several afghans to make sure the cold northern climate wouldn’t overwhelm us.

Miss Ethel, of course, had all the domestic skills and abilities that one would expect to find in a lady from the Southern yeoman class. She could cook “Southern” with the best of them and was one of the folks of Longtown who introduced Jane and I and the children to scrambled eggs, tomatoes and grits, as prepared for our Sunday Morning Breakfasts, which took place once a month in the fellowship hall prior to church. Those domestic skills including canning. Jane tells the story of how Ethel and her sister Allie May would come over and help Jane can tomatoes from a garden that violated the Southern principle that “a man shall not plant more than a woman is able to can.” Ethel, along with her sister Allie May would periodically babysit for Jane and I as we would get away for a “date night.” She loved our children and our children loved her.

The hardscrabble times that Miss. Ethel grew up in wrought in her a wonderful Christian character marked by charity and humility. Her charity and humility were seen in a host of way but not least in her “doing” for her family. One of Ethel’s daughters (Francis) lived right across the street and as Francis was a teacher up the road Ethel would help keep house for Francis and John David. Ethel’s disabled brother M. L. lived in a trailer on Ethel’s property and Ethel was constant in looking in on and doing for M. L. him. Ethel’s sister “Allie May,” were constant companions and her affection for Francis, Lois, Susie, Ginger, Summer, and April and all her family was constant.

Miss Ethel, had not only a joyful disposition, she had the ability to be painfully direct in her speech when needs be. In conversing about matters important one was not required to have to read between the lines when speaking with Miss Ethel. She had no trouble making her mind known when that was required. This “plain speaking” was not overbearing but was characteristic when the nub of the matter needed addressed.

Miss Ethel delighted in attending Church and Bible study during our years in Longtown. Being the only one who could drive, she would often gather up Miss Allie May and Miss Nellie and Miss Rachel Gove from up the road and bring them to mid-week study. She had the ability to make a very young minister believe that he really was dispensing pearls of wisdom. I can still hear Buster pounding out “Beulah Land” on the piano in the Fellowship Hall and Miss Ethel singing at full voice. I can’t wait to hear that again.

I often describe the Longtown years to others as years of living in a land time forgot. The people of Longtown were comparatively untouched by what afflicts us as moderns. It remained a place where one could still hear a real southern accent, could experience genuine southern hospitality, could still attend a Southern turkey shoot or a pig roast or a community pig butchering. You could still meet people that actually still ate Possum and who would take you on a all night coon hunt. My elderly friends and flock from that time are almost all gone now. Gone are Miss Ethel, Miss Allie May, Miss Nellie, Miss Mary, Miss Janie May, Miss Betty, Miss Louise, Miss Rachel and Ted & Janet Goodwin and Ralph and Jean Evans and Hoy and Dot Bundrick. Gone is Mister Buster and Mister Fisher. They taught me about the ministry and about life. They were the ones who first put flesh on the idea of the importance of kin with their forever talking about “their people” and asking me about “my people” — phrases I had never heard before that time. They taught me the helpful but then curious phrase of “I’ve been knowing him” instead of “I know him.” A phrase I’ve used many times as a sermon illustration for “knowing God.” Gone is the gloriously high pitched laughter of Miss Ethel and the sound elderly counsel of Buster and Hoy. Gone is the table fellowship with the McFaddens and Miss Mary and the Bundricks and Miss Louise. Each of them and all of them will ever remain my small rural “Jayber Crow” congregation.

And so with Miss Ethel’s death the circle is once again broken but we are reminded of a day coming when we will all join at the table of the great King where the circle will then be unbroken in that eternal land that time will have mercifully eternally forgotten.