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A real test of character - 22 February 2010

The time is coming – indeed, in some quarters it has already come – when evangelicals, especially evangelical leaders, will need to take a stand against unbiblical attitudes in the public square. This will require courage, since proclaiming the gospel to people who don’t want to hear it seldom results in increased popularity, and no one enjoys being despised.

At the same time, we should remember that the true test of Christian integrity comes not when we need to stand against those who hate us, but when we need to challenge our friends. It’s one thing to confront the unbelieving world, whose opinion of us we have rightly learned to disregard. It’s another matter to expose deceit and ungodliness among those close to us, whose good opinion we may be tempted to covet just a little too much.

After all, generations of wicked Israelites managed to summon up contempt for the Pagan nations of the world. But Phinehas received a covenant of eternal priesthood when he slayed the fornicator within the camp (Numbers 25), and the Levites were set apart for Temple service because they put to death their idolatrous brothers (Exodus 32).

The true test of character for an evangelical leader is not public, but private. Frankly, if doesn’t take much to stand up to the predictable and yawn-inducing hostility of the mainstream press, since at this point his Christian friends (his real audience?) can be relied upon to cheer from the sidelines. But will he have the courage to expose the hidden deceit of behind-the-scenes church politics, when to do so may cost him friends (and preferment) he really values?

Children are being nationalised - 2 February 2010

Gerald Warner has some sharp observations about the decision of the US authorities to grant political asylum to a German family who were (to quote Judge Lawrence O. Burman, who made the decision) facing ‘a well-founded fear of persecution’ because of their decision to homeschool their children.

This is something we in the UK should be worried about, says Warner. For ‘our rulers subscribe to the same tyrannical statist philosophy’ that underlies state opposition to homeschooling in Germany. Whether or not we happen to be homeschoolers – or for that matter, whether or not we even have children – all of us ought to be share the Americans’ concern about ‘the creeping totalitarianism that has engulfed Europe.’

‘Children are being nationalised,’ claims Warner. The British government’s most recent attempt came in the shape of the Badman Report. After that, they might try just about anything.

If this blog had a category called ‘Shameless Appeals,’ I might just think to mention this…

One and a half cheers - 2 February 2010

Pope Benedict has drawn howls of protest from the secularists again, this time by attacking the UK government’s proposed Equality Bill. The Pope said that the UK ‘is well-known for its firm commitment to equality of opportunity for all members of society,’ yet warns that ‘the effect of some of the legislation designed to achieve this goal has been to impose unjust limitations on the freedom of religious communities to act in accordance with their beliefs.’

Well, one and a half cheers.

The problem with the Pope’s statement is the reasoning on which it is based. In his view, the bill is bad because it violates ‘natural law’ and therefore compromises the freedoms of ‘religious communities.’ But the real problem with the the bill is that it violates the word of God and compromises the right of Jesus Christ to be proclaimed as the King of the whole earth.

Ironically, the Pope’s reasoning places him squarely in the camp of the liberals he is attempting to oppose. When he says that the proposed legislation ‘violates the natural law upon which the equality of all human beings is grounded,’ he sounds indistinguishable from the Government Equalities Office spokesman who declared, ‘everyone should have a fair chance in life and not be discriminated against.’

So at first glance the Pope looks like he’s standing against the government by defending the gospel; while in fact he’s standing alongside them by defending ‘equality’, and merely claiming that he’s got a better idea of how to achieve it. This was spotted by a sharp-eyed British official, who pointed out that ‘the Pope acknowledges our country’s firm commitment to equality for all members of society.’ So there we are – we all agree really, and the Pope should just be reasonable and stop complaining.

To defend the gospel on the ground that it secures other values (such as ‘equality’ defined in terms upon which we’re all supposed to be able to agree) in effect turns those values into our gospel, transforming the Lordship of Jesus Christ into a means designed to secure some other end. We should defend the gospel on the grounds that it is true (since Jesus is, in fact, Lord), not because a consistent liberal ought to like it.

A doomed experiment - 10 December 2009

Is it too cynical to believe that the western world, with its increasingly hostile attitude to all things distinctively Christian, really is headed for a whole lot of trouble?

T. S. Eliot thought not:

The World is trying to experiment with attempting to form a civilised but non-Christian mentality. The experiment will fail; but we must be very patient in awaiting its collapse; meanwhile redeeming the time: so that the Faith may be preserved alive through the dark ages before us; to renew and rebuild civilisation, and save the world from suicide. (Quoted in P. J. Leithart, The Kingdom and the Power, p. 217)

Breeding licenses - 6 December 2009

The government has recently been getting excited about the Badman Report (yup – that’s the author’s real name) on Elective Home Education. That’s a fancy name for the decision some families make to educate their kids at home. You can read the full (84-page) report here, and see the responses from the Christian Institute here.

Despite the government’s recent reassurances, I’m still troubled – and for several reasons. Here are just a couple of them.

First, the Badman proposals represent an inversion of the proper relationship between parents and the state. At present, parents have the right to bring up their children in accordance with their own religious and ideological convictions. Parents can, if they choose, delegate some aspects of this (formal education, for example) to the state, but the state has no a priori rights in this area. The state only becomes involved if the parents give them the authority to do so. The Badman proposals imply a reversal of this: parents would need the state’s approval to educate their own children, not vice versa.

Second, the Badman proposals will, if adopted, establish principles that will extend to every other area of family life, not just formal education. All the arguments by which Badman seeks to justify his proposals in the area of education (the ‘welfare’ argument; the ‘quality’ argument; and so on) would apply no less to the less formal aspects of childrearing. In other words, it’s not just home-educating families that should be worried.

I’m not in the habit of making predictions, but on this occasion I’ll make an exception. I predict that if Badman’s proposals are adopted then within 10 years someone will propose that all families should be subject to ’safeguards’ similar to those that are currently being proposed only in respect of home-educating families. After all, children who attend state school are in danger of ‘poor quality parenting’ in the evenings, right? And shouldn’t the government ‘protect’ all children?

Maybe the Right Hon. James Hacker spoke better than he knew… beginning at about 6 minutes, 4 seconds.

Cheating - 1 December 2009

OK, I cheated. I just mocked the British Humanist Association.

Sorry.

Let me just tidy up the loose ends. Shouldn’t take a moment. Here goes.

The fact that the BHA accidentally picked two Christian kids to front their latest advertising campaign does not, strictly speaking, undermine the logical coherence of the BHA’s stance. To address that question, you’d have to point out a bunch of other obvious things. Like this:

1. Atheism is plainly a religious position, since it makes substantive claims about facts materially significant for religious people, such as the affirmation, ‘There is (probably?) no God’.

2. As a religious commitment, therefore, atheism falls by its own attempted critique of religious one-sidedness, since atheism, no less that Christianity, is one-sided on the question of religion.

3. Another way of saying the same thing: there is no such thing as ‘legitimate neutrality’ on any morally significant question. If you don’t believe me, imagine what might happen to a historian who claimed to be ‘neutral’ on the question of whether the Holocaust took place. People (and, amazingly, there have been some) who attempt such ludicrous equivocation soon discover that this is one knife-edge on which it’s pretty hard to remain balanced.

Perfectly happy - 1 December 2009

The British Humanist Association has been proclaiming its gospel in a series of adverts on the side of buses. One poster boldly assures us, ‘There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.’

However, their most recent campaign has committed something of an own-goal. It’s one that just goes to show (to the eyes of faith) that the Lord is both (a) utterly sovereign; and (b) blessed (if that’s the right word) with a great sense of humour.

The poster in question pictures two happy, bouncy kids, and declares, ‘Please don’t label me. Let me grow up and choose for myself.’ Presumably this is intended as a blow against the tendency of Christian parents to bring their kids up to worship the one living and true God rather than to bow before the idolatrous false deity of humanism.

Unfortunately (for the BHA), the two (happy, bouncy, smiling) kids they picked ‘just happened’ to be the children of Brad Mason, a Christian who plays drums for the well-known Christian rock musician Noel Richards.

Oops.

It’s like this: Ruth ‘just happened’ to find herself in Boaz’s field (Ruth 2:3); David ‘just happened’ to see a woman bathing (1 Samuel 11:2); an arrow fired at random ‘just happened’ to find the chink in the armour of the King of Israel (1 Kings 22:34); and the two kids chosen by the BHA to demonstrate how happy we can all be without God ‘just happened’ to be perfectly happy with him.

U-turn - 2 June 2009

The San Diego County authorities have backed down – well, a bit. Having initially threatened to require a Pastor and his wife to apply for an expensive permit to allow them to hold Bible studies in their home, they’ve now apparently decided to hold fire until they can ‘[find] a solution to the matter’.

Was I being a bit harsh on San Diego County? After all, even if the State has no right to interfere in this case, there are of course some actions that Caesar ought to prohibit. And, moreover, merely attaching the slogan ‘religious’ to an action is not enough the establish that the State should keep its nose out. The ritual killings of young children that have been uncovered sporadically in the UK in recent years are murder, pure and simple; invoking ‘religion’ as an excuse, and then insisting that the State should not regulate religious expression, doesn’t get the murderers off the hook.

But this exposes the crucial underlying issue. At some point we have to decide what behaviours the State does have the right (and therefore the responsibility and authority) to prohibit, and what behaviours it does not. This in turn requires them to outline and justify the basis for the decision so made.

For more on that, you could do far worse than to look here.

Caesar just overstepped the mark - 31 May 2009

An American couple have been ordered to stop holding Bible studies at home without a permit.

Isn’t there a song about this somewhere? Land of the free and home of the brave, or something?

This one could run and run. Some initial thoughts:

Tyrany of this kind is inevitable as soon as the State starts thinking that freedom of religion is something that it needs to establish rather than something that is simply beyond its remit. For once the State takes it into its head proactively to ‘establish’ religious freedoms (rather than to simply keep its nose out), it always needs to place definitional boundaries around the freedoms so established (after all, we don’t want people to just do anything, right?). You can do this, but you can’t do that. This in turn means that we citizens now have to pass ‘tests’ or apply for ‘permission’ to obtain freedoms we once took from granted.

Furthermore, since administering this kind of system obviously takes time and costs money, these ‘freedoms’ tend to be given in the form of ‘licences’ for which citizens must pay. As in the above case, where San Diego County (yup, you heard right) want to charge this couple tens of thousands of dollars for a ‘Major Use Permit’ so that they can read the Bible with some friends in the comfort of their own home.

By objecting to this kind of nonsense, we’re not undermining the biblical insistence that certain acts of religious worship are right and others wrong. But the mistake of many modern States is to assume that (a) they, and not someone else, get to set the rules; and (b) they have the right to administer sanctions for disobedience. God will impose sanctions for misuse of religious freedom on the Last Day. Perhaps the church should do so ahead of time. But whatever gave Caesar the idea that the church needs his permission to worship her Head?

Stop trying to save the world - 28 April 2009

Someone asked me the other day what ‘political’ stuff like this is doing on a blog by a Christian Minister.

Good question.

There’s a lot that could be said (and, indeed, has been written) on this subject. See for example John Owen, Sermons to the Nation (Works, vol. 8). But here’s one (brief, cursory, incomplete) way of looking at it.

The Bible teaches that God delegates authority to certain categories of people (civil rulers, fathers, husbands, ministers) which is to be exercised prayerfully, in love and in accordance with his word over other groups of people (citizens, children, wives, believers).

Sadly, most of the time this authority is exercised in a manner contrary to the word of God. Either responsibility is abrogated, which leads to anarchy; or it is over-extended, exercised in areas beyond the remit God has given, which is tyranny.

Examples of the former would include a father failing to teach his children about Christ from the Scriptures, a husband too lazy to work to provide for his wife, and a minister too preoccupied with golf and cream teas to devote himself to the ministry of the word and prayer.

Examples of the latter would include a father demanding that his children get up at 4am to clean the house while he lounges around in bed until midday, a husband beating his wife for burning his toast, and a minister threatening to excommunicate church members who failed to attend church every day of the week.

The latter failure (i.e. tyranny) is also exhibited when a government places on its citizens requirements which the Bible gives it no right to impose. That, I’m afraid, is where most modern governments go wrong. They try to do too much – for example, creating a database of all citizens’ emails and phone calls.

Now, here’s the key thing (for our present purposes, at least). Since God has not authorised governments to do this (and lots of other things they try to do as well), he will not equip them to it competently. The inefficiencies and failures of many modern government projects are thus signs from God that they’re trying to do stuff they have neither the right nor (therefore) the ability to pull off. They should concentrate on doing what the Bible tells them to do (see for example Romans 13) and leave saving the world to The Expert.

‘Before me no god was formed, nor shall there be any after me. I, I am the LORD, and besides me there is no saviour,’ … declares the LORD. (Isaiah 43:10-12)