Shame on America
The Turning of the Tide
Listen to it here.
So, the news is out: the Supreme Court of the United States refused to stop Texas Senate Bill 8. For those keeping score at home, that means that in Texas, the murder of babies is effectively banned.
Praise God from Whom All Blessings Flow! Yesterday, when I heard the news, all I could do was smile and sing the doxology!
Now, I don’t want anyone to get ahead of themselves. The battle is not done. The war isn’t over. We haven’t seen or heard the last from the ghoulish in-utero baby-murder industry. But, I hope and I pray that the tide is turning.
For decades since Roe v Wade people have been praying and marching and counselling and picketing and now, for the first time since 1973, after 60 million legal murders, there is finally a step in the other direction. Despite the caterwauling histrionics of the demonic child sacrificers and their advocates and those who simply want to have the legal right to murder and dismember their own children (or someone else’s), despite their fanatical wailing, SCOTUS refused to stop the bill.
This is a win. This is a major win. And it should be followed up in EVERY STATE IN THE UNION! This is, potentially, a sea change, we could be watching an epochal event in American history…along with all the other really, really…really bad epochal events! This is a sign that the tiny-human killers are losing. Does this mean that America is undergoing a revival?
No.
But it does mean that because God has given common grace to humanity, even the depraved can see that the Secular Death Cult is wicked and evil and Satanic and should be stopped. Even the godless can see that abortion is bad. And everyone who was paying close attention to the polls and to pop-culture could see that there was something a-brewing.
Watch a Netflix produced show – well, maybe you shouldn’t, but SUPPOSING you watched a show produced by Netflix – and you’ll almost certainly see the heroine of the story consider and or commit an abortion. The baby-murder lobbyists have been haranguing everyone for years. Why? Not because they are coming from a position of strength, that’s for sure. The Dogmatic chanting of their secular dogmata are not ubiquitous because they are just mirroring culture, but because they want life to imitate art. Those in-the-know know that abortion is becoming more and more unpopular, especially as the abortionists become more and more blood-thirsty, demanding that even children born alive be murdered!
They’re getting louder because they’re losing. And they know they’re losing. They know that more and more people are seeing abortion for what it is: infanticide.
There’s a lot I want to say on this topic. There’re a lot of things that are worth saying and considering, but those things can wait. We can talk next-steps later. Right now, we need to praise God, and pray that every other state will pass the exact same law and that SCOTUS will refuse to hear those cases as well! The war is not won. The battle is not done. But it may be, just maybe, that the tide has turned!
Stupid or Lying
Stupid or Lying:
or Why We Need Theological Education as Part of a Broader Liberal Arts Education and
Why Such Instruction is Necessary for Citizens in the Political and Technical Spheres to Foster a Secure Republic That Ensures Liberty and
Why the Current STEM/ Technically Obsessed Pedagogical Model and Trends are Undermining the Republic
OK, America we need to have a sit-down convo about something that SHOULD be simple. It isn’t. But It should be. I’m talking about the difference between “technical” and “political”. Now, most people, if you asked them, would SAY that they understand the difference…but I have my doubts. Political comes from the Greek word πολιτικός (politikos) from the root word πολίς (polis) meaning “city”. Thus, political things are things that pertain to the city, or civic life. Politics is the discipline of seeking what is best for the polis – it is fundamentally and inherently and undeniably a moral/ ethical discipline. In fact, you cannot have politics without morality, and you cannot have a moral system that is not, in some sense political. Politics and morality aren’t the same, but they move together. Politics is shaped by morality, and morality is shaped by politics. They have a direct and causal relationship – again, morality and politics aren’t the same, but you can’t have one without the other. Technical, on the other hand, comes from the Greek word τεχνικός (technikos), from the root τεχνή (technay), meaning “a skill or trade”. Thus, technical things are things that pertain to learned skills to be employed. Classically, however, technical issues have been seen as being fundamentally amoral. Carpentry is neither good nor bad, it’s simply skill with wood. Computer Engineering is neither good nor bad, it’s simply skill with electronics and logical systems. Thus, the political and the technical are divergent in their spheres. The political guides and shapes public life by promoting and enforcing a specific moral vision on society that is crafted through the discipline’s search for knowing, implementing, and creating the good. The technical, however, exists to expand knowledge of the trade itself, regardless of the moral implications. Computer technology doesn’t care if people are addicted to the internet; virology qua virology doesn’t care about liberty; technology doesn’t care about morality. And it is a monumental category error to confuse the technical and the political.
And yet, that’s what all kinds of public health officials are doing, right now, in this country. The current mantra from public health when advocating mandates is that “it’s medical not political”. Except that’s either a lie, or the person expressing that statement is an idiot who doesn’t understand the difference between the technical and political.
Because, here’s the thing. Mask/ Vax mandates MAY be the best thing for public health, and weighing all the costs and benefits and the moral and political consequences, weighing out what this means for the constitution and personal liberties and AFTER, and ONLY AFTER we weigh all the implications of a political decision based on technical advice we may determine that Mask/ Vax mandates are the best POLITICAL decision. I don’t think that’s the case at all. And I’m not simply making that case based upon political preferences, which, incidentally, is an entirely legitimate way to make political decisions, indeed, it’s the ONLY way to make political decisions. But I’m not ONLY influenced by politics, I’m also influenced by what I feel is a real lack of evidence, technical evidence, that mask and vaccine mandates will have an appreciable impact on the death rate of Covid.
Now, you say, “Luke, you mean you don’t think the vaccines work?” I didn’t say that. I said, I don’t think that there was good evidence that the mandates would significantly reduce the death rate. We know that masking is not a real-world effective solution. We know this. Anyone who tells you otherwise is lying. We know it isn’t because in places where masking is mandated the disease still spread to people who wear masks. We know that surgical masks contain about 10% of aerosolized droplets and KN95 masks contain about 50%. Is that enough to prevent the spread of the virus? Real world evidence says, “no”. And the fact that this evidence is continually poopooed by people who claim to “believe science” is disheartening and weakens trust in public health institutions.
Personally, my level of trust is approaching zero. When people lie to my face repeatedly over a nearly 2 year period, I stop trusting anything they say. When the same public health institutions who claim to “believe the science” about masks also can’t tell the difference between a boy and a girl – I no longer trust that institution (talking about you American Academy of Pediatrics).
Are the vaccines effective at preventing death and hospitalization? – yeah, they seem to be. And the side effects, currently, seem to be relatively acceptable for most people, in most age cohorts and subpopulations. But the question is not whether the vaccines “work” it’s whether mandating them will significantly reduce the number of deaths. And the logical answer seems to be “no”. And moreover, part of that question that ought to be proposed to the progressive left is: why do you care? But that’s a whole ‘nother essay!
Mandates will only be effective if they force people who don’t want the vaccine to get the vaccine. But reason and logic suggest that people who refuse to get the vaccine, most likely, are in age and health cohorts that are least susceptible to the virus (statistically speaking) or who live in sparsely populated areas. People at highest risk of death or serious illness from Covid are, statistically speaking, the most likely to get the vaccine. So, who is helped? Cui Bono? Either people who are at high risk and are afraid of the virus, but are unwilling to get vaccinated; or people at low to moderate risk, who don’t care and aren’t afraid and are unwilling to get vaccinated. Statistically speaking, the only people that vaxdates will appreciably help are people who are at high risk who are currently unwilling to get vaccinated.
But how many people like that are there? Dozens? A few thousand? It can’t be many. And in a country where nearly 80% have already gotten jabbed, the effectiveness of the mandates, medically speaking, is suspect at best. Not to mention the fact that there are, indeed, questions about the vaccine durability and vaccine effectiveness in contrast to T-Cell memory/ immunity that comes naturally from getting the virus.
But that’s the medical side. That’s all technical info. And the technical case for getting the vaccine if your risk factors are high is very strong. The technical case for vax mandates is weak. The technical case for masking is very weak. And the technical case for mask mandates is non-existent – there is no case because real world data show mask mandates to have no statistical significance.
And here’s the thing. Politics needs technology. The political needs the technical to inform it.
But public health experts and officials who think that their medical training automatically gives them the right to speak authoritatively and authoritarianly on public policy means that they either don’t understand what politics is, or they think that everyone is dumb but them. And the fact that they keep saying that this is “not political” makes me strongly suspect that they’re just massively ignorant.
Any policy is inherently political. Notice the root word “polis”? Whenever you create, advocate, or enforce a policy, you are no longer speaking as a technician but as a politician. And you can no longer run and hide behind “the science”. You’re entering into a conversation that is moral. Yes, the political is informed by the technical, but it is a separate category, because the political is fundamentally concerned with the moral, not the technical. These MDs and PhDs who think that THEIR technical expertise outweighs the technical expertise in any other field are arrogant and ignorant – or arrogant and…well arrogant.
You can’t craft public health policy without considering the moral implications, because the political is the moral. Somewhere along the line these people went to post-secondary education for like 8 years and never seriously considered ethics and morality and philosophy in a way that would allow them to rigorously engage with it in the public sphere – or they did and they’re cynical gaslighters. Prolly a l’il a both, amiright?!
But America is on, and has been on, a trend in education that is moving further and further from a liberal arts education – you know the study that was fit for preparing a “liberal” or “free” citizen to take an active and beneficial part in public life. For decades people have been sounding the alarm that we’re turning out little robots. And that’s bad enough. Educating a citizenry who do not understand morality, ethics, history, theology, and philosophy doesn’t just make bad citizens it makes a bad civis – a bad civilization. And what’s worse is not just creating generations of technophiles but an entrenched political class of technocrats.
For many years I worked with teens, and the complaint I heard more than any about school was “why do we have to study” and then fill in the blank. Why? Why study history? Why study philosophy? Ethics? Theology? Why study them?
Because a society that lets people make political decisions who don’t understand human nature, good and evil, logic and reason, and the patterns of societal and individual behavior is a society that is going to devolve into a factious, ignorant, self-centered, immoral mob clamoring for panem et circensis.
We need the liberal arts. We need them to guide people’s understanding of what it means to be human in a society with other humans. We cannot create fit citizens without them.
Most of all we need theology. We cannot guide people’s understanding of what it means to be human in human society without understanding God, as revealed in Christ, who is the image of God, whose image we bear.
Public health is not just medical – it’s political. And because it’s political it’s moral. Because it’s moral it’s theological. And I don’t want to hear about public health policies from people who are unable or unwilling to recognize those realities: their technical competencies are irrelevant to the political category. They’re either stupid or lying. I don’t much care which. Such people are unfit to lead a republic.
Depravity, Afghanistan, and God's Judgment
The CDC Only Controversy
Listen to it here:
KJVO. Those letters, in that order, have a lot of power. They communicate a message. They tell people who read them that, “at this church, we read the REAL Bible.” People who are KJVO are the kinds of people who have found absolute certainty on an issue that everyone else struggles with. They’re right with a kind of absolutist rightness that, like Donald McGillavry, “brooks nae tangleness…prigging and a'newfangleness”[1]! Many Christians, especially, Christians who have spent considerable amounts of time learning, studying, and working with the original languages and seeking how to best understand the textual history of the Bible, these people are invariably frustrated with the simplistic and often absurd reasoning for using the King James Version ONLY! If you’re curious just how ludicrous the arguments of King James Onlyists are, check out the John Ankerberg debate; it’s probably the best entre into the subject there is.
The impulse of KJV Onlyists is to have certainty where there cannot be certainty. Let me clarify. The Bible you have is the Word of God. I believe that with every fiber of my being. Your English Bible is the Word of God; the differences in the ancient manuscripts have no bearing on any essential doctrine of the Christian faith whatsoever. Permit me to repeat, the differences in the ancient manuscripts do not affect any key doctrine of the faith! And that’s not just according to some crackpot fundie like me saying that; that’s the position of Dr. Bart Ehrman, the de rigueur guest whenever secular TV talks about the early texts of the Bible. The English Bible you have, regardless of whether it’s an NIV, ESV, NET, NRSV, HCSB, or whatever, it IS the Word of God. Yes, there are textual variants. No, we do not possess the original manuscripts. But we can have confidence that we know what the original said 99.9% of the time – and most of the time when we don’t know, it makes no theological difference at all…end even when it does matter, it does not affect any crucial doctrine of the faith.
The reality is that we have to live in that tension, the tension of knowing that what we have is both the God-breathed Word of God and that it also there are a lot of unanswered questions about what the underlying Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek texts were.
And beyond that there is the tension of knowing what the “right” translation is of those words. Having the right words is only the first step in creating a good translation. I say “good” translation and not “right” translation on purpose. Serious people who have dedicated their lives to translation humbly admit that there is no “right” translation. There is not and cannot be a perfect translation – language doesn’t work that way, there is always something lost in translation, and as the receptor language and receptor culture drift further from the transmitter language and culture the bigger a gap which must be bridged by a translator. It is a never-ending battle trying to balance all the needs of readers and the integrity of the A(a)uthors’ message. It’s hard work and the people engaged in it deserve our respect and our gratitude and our prayers.
But the problem with what I’ve described in the previous 3 ¶s is that there is no certainty other than the certainty that comes through faith that the Holy Spirit can use the Word of God. And for many people that’s no certainty at all – that’s worse than uncertainty; it’s an attack on the Bible. So, what do you do when you need certainty but certitude is lacking? You fashion an idol!
The King James Version of the Bible has a lot going for it. It’s beautiful. It’s traditional. It’s universal to the Anglophone world. It’s also at least a century out of date language-wise, and it is increasingly found to have an inferior textual tradition. That doesn’t mean it isn’t still a useful text that can be appreciated. It does mean that there are more up-to-date versions that take advantage of the ocean of learning that has happened in the worlds of translation and textual criticism and the availability of ancient manuscripts. But KJVO people are authority-seekers to their cores – which incidentally is not the same thing as authority-obeyers, but that’s another essay for another day. KJV Onlyists want certainty and this worldview arose in times of social and political upheaval. The KJV (rarely, if ever, the actual 1611, btw, typically the 1769) provided a litmus test against Modernism and Liberalism. It was something that a branch of Fundamentalists could use to discern the innies from the outies.
Unfortunately, when you build on sinking sand you’re gonna have a collapse sooner-or-later. Eventually bad theology, such as KJV Onlyism, is going to be pushed to its logical conclusions and it will be made ridiculous. And, sadly, those who hold to KJVO rarely see the ridicule as a reason to change their minds. They just entrench themselves, ever more embittered against the brethren, ever more certain that they and they alone are wise, have the Spirit, and the REAL Word of God.
The CDC, and other Government Health and Safety bureaucracies have consistently been inconsistent throughout the “pandemic”. First you’re a dummy if you wear a mask, then you should, then cloth masks don’t do much at all, and you know because you can smell smoke through them! Also, lab-leak in Wuhan? How dare you! No public square for you! You are exiled from the body politic and…well, ya know, nvm, it prolly DID come from a lab, but those in America who were funding gain-of-function research carried out in China aren’t to blame…shut up and stop asking questions! Also, the vaccine can’t come out before the electi…OK, the vaccine will let you get back to life as norma…nevermind, you need to double mask, cause Delta…and the vaccine isn’t as good as natural immunity…and stop asking questions about side effects, why are you asking questions? Just do as you’re told!
And here’s the thing. Every sensible person knows that science changes. Everyone knows that. And because every sensible person knows that science changes, sensible people are unwilling to put all their eggs in the “science” basket – for a host of reasons. Shall I enumerate? I shall.
First, science changes and so blindly following guidance based on limited or non-existent peer reviewed, controlled, and tested, retested, and replicated research is not wise.
Second, scientists who go into the public sphere are, by definition, politicians. Any scientist who takes on the role of creating public health mandates is, necessarily, a politician. And they may be good politicians or bad politicians, just as they may be good or bad scientists. But they ARE politicians. And, because they are, that means that they make political decisions based upon their political preferences. And you may agree or disagree with their political preferences. But there is NO SUCH THING as a public health official who is not political. They are tasked with using their scientific expertise to craft laws and mandates that will help the polis flourish. That is political. And in America, at least putatively, we have the right to disagree with our politicians. We have a right to redress grievances. We are not supposed to be dictated to and bullied by politicians against whose governance we have no recourse. This is a fundamental danger both to politics and science.
Third, many who go into public health do so primarily because of their Progressive political views, not because of some altruistic love of the public good. This makes following “the science” a suspect bet when the only science permitted in the public square is the science that comes from the public actors because the public health officials are predominantly political Progressives.
Fourth, scientific hypotheses and theories are constantly being revised and rethought. One of the most philosophically incoherent terms is “settled science”. Anyone who tells you that “the science” is settled either doesn’t understand what “science” means or what “settled” means. Or they’re liars. Or all three. Nothing that comes from Inductive Reasoning (as the Modern Scientific Method utilizes) can ever be settled. We have hypotheses that are useful for making predictions and those that are un-useful or less useful. People who are claiming certainty in the realm of science are overstating their case.
Fifth, never trust anyone who tells you to stop asking questions and just obey. In any other area of life, we’d recognize such posturing as abuse! so why do we let these petty public health tyrants get away with it?
Well, we let them get away with it for the same reason the KJV Onlyist will tell me that the NIV is a Satanic/ Papal invention to lead people to Hell. We let them get away with it because we live in uncertain times and people would rather live in denial, and the hope and security that comes through that denial, than live in the uncertain fear of thinking for yourself.
I’m not a scientist. But I am a person with a functioning brain. And I know that Covid lock-downs, public and private masking orders, and vax-mandating measures are scientifically dubious, politically onerous, and constitutionally obnoxious. Politics is the discipline of seeking the good of the polis. There is never a single-variant factor that rules out all others in the search for the public good. It requires sacrifices and giving up some things to get other things – politics is compromising good for better. And there is no certain path to flourishing.
Perhaps, and I would argue vociferously against this position, but perhaps the CDC and other public health officials are telling us the right things right now. I think they aren’t, but maybe they are. Maybe what they are recommending is truly for the public good. Why then are these decisions being made by unelected, unaccountable, political hacks? Why are governors refusing to surrender emergency powers? Why is a robust public debate about the pros and cons not happening? Why is my government suggesting that I’m a terrorist for bringing this up?
People who say, “shut up” and “you’re a terrorist if you disagree” are rarely coming from a position of philosophical rigor or intellectual strength. But the impulse that causes KJV Onlyism is the same impulse that leads to CDC Onlyism. It’s the incoherent, and self-destructive reliance upon a demonstrably unreliable authority, in exchange for security and ideological certainty. “I have the KJV so I have God’s word” is the same kind of dogmatism that’s behind “I trust the science”.
Moreover, it comes with a certain kind of hubristic condescension towards others that makes one feel virtuous about being closed-minded and smug. KJV and CDC Onlyism both thrive on insulting and mocking anyone who doesn’t share your fundamentalistical obedience to “the authorities”.
Should there be mask mandates, mandatory vaxxing, and lock-downs? No matter what I believe about these issues, I will responsively reject them when they come from people telling me that sweeping political decisions aren’t political and that the experts and the experts alone, these unaccountable (probably unconstitutional) authorities, know best and we need to simply obey.
No.
Just no.
Even if they’re right, no.
Because KJV and CDC Onlyism are the same song in a different key. It’s one we’ve heard before. CDC Onlyism is KJV Onlyism.
Second verse,
Same as the first,
A little bit louder
And a whole lot worse!
A Footnote:
[1] “Will not tolerate scheming…pretension or destructive new ideas”.
Fear of Commitment
It doesn’t matter if you think the Global War on Terror was foolish. It doesn’t matter if you think nation-building is none of our business. It makes no difference if you think that American military adventurism is just neo-colonialism. It doesn’t matter if you think that trying to turn Afghani Muslims into Western Secularists who support democracy is stillborn at conception. It doesn’t matter if you think that America needed to get out of Afghanistan sooner or later. It doesn’t matter if you thought that the Afghanis are cowards who didn’t make any effort to save their country from the Taliban. None of that matters.
Because even if you believe any or all of those things, that wouldn’t change the fact that from the point of view of anyone with a modicum of integrity, compassion, or commitment, the way this country withdrew from Afghanistan was shameful. It was shameful to abandon a country we conquered to terrorist despotism. It was shameful for President Trump to negotiate with those terrorists. It was shameful for President Biden to just up-stakes and leave our allies and friends to the tender mercies of Al Qaida, ISIL, and any other Islamic terror-groups who want to set up bases of operation in the fortress mountains of the Northern Tier.
What is immediately apparent to anyone who has paid any attention to American Foreign policy since Korea is that America is a very, very…very bad friend. America is a lot like the handsome rich kid in who starts going out with the so-and-so, what’s-her-face, unpopular girl. The girl feels like a fairy-tale princess until she gets preggers and he gets bored. He takes no responsibility for the conditions he’s created. He fulfills no commitment to people who, because of his actions, now depend on him. He’s bored. Commitment is hard, and expensive, and tedious. Commitment is for poor people…commitment if for ugly people.
And it’s shameful and depressing to think that this is our country – but ask the Vietnamese who fought the Communists, ask the Cubans at the Bay of Pigs, ask the Kurds, ask any of our erstwhile super-best-friends and they’ll tell you that America is worse than the 80s teen-movie-villain described above. Whether we SHOULD have been in Afghanistan is irrelevant. Some choices, good or bad, limit your future choices. When you conquer a country and ask people to defy powerful violent people and then you abandon your friends to those violent powerful people you asked your friends to defy, you’ve failed in your commitment.
And it shouldn’t surprise us. We’re a nation that loves to let people to whom we owe obligations and have commitments die – or we just kill ‘em. Is it any wonder that a nation that’s murdered dozens of millions of babies because they were inconvenient and a burdensome commitment would abandon people who aren’t our own flesh and blood children? If you think that our withdrawal from Afghanistan was shameful: you’re right – but it’s no different from our culture and society’s sinful and evil habit of killing people when they become tedious, burdensome, or boring.
Christian Communism? Part 4
Christian Communism? Part 3
Christian Communism?Part 2
Christian Communism? Part 1
A Tale of Two Jans
One of the perennial problems that thoughtful people face is how to assess their own positions when they are in opposition to the majority. Or, to put it another way, wise people struggle to know whether they are right, or in the right, when they are standing alone on a subject, especially a controversial subject.
I’ve attempted, over the years, to be quite clear that being in the minority and being disliked is not a guaranteed sign that one is standing for God. Christians who are generally objectionable will find that people generally object to them. Unfortunately, foolish Christians, particularly foolish Christians with a martyr-complex, seek to validate themselves by interpreting other people’s dislike as persecution.
I think we’ve all met people like this. People who claim to be Christians who are rude, unkind, and obnoxious and who justify and validate their obnoxiousness by claiming that they’re persecuted. They are not. Jesus makes it clear that it’s good to be persecuted “for righteousness’ sake” (ἕνεκεν δικαιοσύνης). And this is obviously not a new phenomenon in Christianity. Peter addresses this very issue in I Peter 2:19,20:
For it is commendable if someone bears up under the pain of unjust suffering because they are conscious of God. But how is it to your credit if you receive a beating for doing wrong and endure it? But if you suffer for doing good and you endure it, this is commendable before God.
And thus, the Christian, at least thoughtful Christians, cannot simply see that there is suffering or opposition and presume that they’re right. Being ill-treated by others does not, ipso facto, mean that you’re on God’s side. Maybe you’re just a jerk. Similarly, standing firm on a theological conviction and being in the minority – even standing alone – does not mean that you’re right. Sometimes you stand alone and it’s you and God; sometimes you stand alone and you’re in opposition to God. I think a comparison of two Medieval Jans might shed some light on the subject.
Let’s consider Jan Hus and Jan van Leiden.
Both were Jans. Both were European. Both lived in the Holy Roman Empire. Both were from weaker principalities. Both faced major Imperial Opposition. Both were the catalyst of military rebellions. Both differed from the practice and theology of the Roman Catholic Church. Both died young. Although their influential years are separated by 12 decades, they have a lot in common. Certainly both would have viewed themselves as Athanasius contra mundum…which, as I alluded to earlier, is a rather precarious presupposition.
It’s dangerous to presuppose you’re Athanasius reborn because Anathanasii don’t come very often. A couple every few centuries…maybe? It’s especially dangerous if you’re going to lead lives like these men led, lives that lead men to live lives and lose lives for a cause that’s in total opposition to the prevailing order. If you’re going to lead people to risk their lives and their eternal salvation, then you’ve got to be sure of what you’re doing. Because not every rebel is right.
Let’s consider Jan Hus, first. Born in 1360s he was a theologian who led a major, though premature, movement against the contemporary Catholic doctrine, which was viewed as a movement against the Emperor and the Empire. He was branded a heretic. And he was eventually martyred.
But what did he teach that was so radical? Well, Hus was heavily, though not totally, influenced by Wycliffe and he was primarily a reformer. In fact, most of the issues that were major for Hus would seem odd and nit-picky to us, but at that point in history the Roman Church was in serious trouble. The theological divergence that had been tolerated in the past was being weeded out and Catholicism was (insert your participle here depending on your theological preference) calcifying/ clarifying/ dogmatizing. Men like Abelard who questioned major issues of the faith were tolerated and even celebrated in the 1100s, but in the 1300s the law was being laid down. Ecclesiastical divergence was fine, so long as it didn’t make any calls to question the prevailing order, particularly the Imperial or Papal order. Hus, however, being a Czech Bohemian, when he began to question the use of Papal authority and the actual make-up of the Church was presumed to be a radical and one who would undermine the Imperial order. As de La Fontaine quipped, “On rencontre sa destinée souvent par des chemins qu'on prend pour l'éviter” “one often meets his destiny on the road he took to avoid it”.
Of course, it’s easy to oversimplify the issues. But suffice to say, the Catholic Church was corrupt and the Holy Roman Empire was cruel. Even men who never left Rome decried the extreme corruption! Erasmus of Rotterdam wrote scathingly about the Church in his satire about Pope Julius being excluded from Heaven: Iulius exclusus e coelis.
Unfortunately, Hus was calling for theological divergence where Rome and the Empire would not tolerate it. And so Hus was eventually killed. But his influence postmortem was even greater. The Hussite Wars likely would not have happened without Hus, and Luther famously assented, “Ja, Ich bin ein Hussite.” Hus was part of a long tradition that began as a reform movement and eventually led to the Reformation. Hus was living, and dying, proof that right is right and wrong is wrong and a Church that cannot or will not reform itself is doomed to die or fracture or become oppressive and authoritarian, but that by standing on the Scriptures we can, indeed, reform the Church.
Now, let’s consider our other Jan, Jan van Leiden (aka: Jan Bockelson or Beukeszoon/ Johannes Bucholdi/ Jan van Leyden/ Jan of Leiden or Leyden/ Iohan von Leiden). Jan was Dutch, an illegitimate Mayor’s son who worked as a taylor’s apprentice and amateur playwright. He was influenced by Anabaptist preaching and became an Anabaptist…but the bad kind of Anabaptist. He wasn’t so much into the “forsake the sword and love your neighbor and believe in salvation by grace through faith apart from works…oh and also don’t baptize babies” kind of Anabaptism. Oh no, not Johnny B…he was the “I’m the Messiah and now it’s orgy-time” kind of Anabaptist. Which, as an Anabaptist I stress to say is not the normative form of Anabaptism.
Jan got a movement to follow him and he moved to Münster where Jan was declared King and there was a peasants revolt, and the Imperial Army showed up, and you know the rest of the story: siege; battle; rape; pillage; murder; also, try to blame Menno Simons…look if you’re going to try to hold the Holy Roman Empire together remember to never not blame Menno Simons for stuff – that guy!
But here’s the thing: Jan of Leiden, or King John if you prefer, was opposed by all kinds of people, ESPECIALLY people who were sympathetic to Anabaptism. Menno Simons wrote The Blasphemy of Jan of Leiden. Others openly rejected his teachings and tried to steer people away from Jan’s heresies and delusions of Millenarian grandeur.
You see, Jan of Leiden made a very crucial mistake. He was right, and knew he was right, about baptism. But he presumed that because he was right, and persecuted for being right, on one issue that he was right on all issues. He wasn’t able to differentiate different issues so as to assess each belief on its own. He presumed that because he was hated for Anabaptism that therefore those hating him for claiming to be the Messiah were wrong about that too.
And we see this A LOT in theology (and I presume we see it in all disciplines, but we’ll constrain ourselves)! All too often we see pastors, preachers, and theologians fail to be able to throw out bathwater and keep babies. Theologians, despite some hefty education, seem to be all-or-nothing people. That’s because human nature is an all-or-nothing affair. Humans tend to be very bad at nuance and context because nuance and context are complex and hard to make sense of. Simple answers are preferable! Lex Parsimoniae cries Occam! And so cry his adherents, but they forget that his Razor is only appropriate when ALL OTHER THINGS ARE EQUAL! All things being equal the Law of Parsimony suggests that the simplest answer is the best. But it doesn’t necessitate or require it. And determining when all things are equal is not exactly a simple task. Humans are bad at this, and even graduate-level education does not seem particularly adept at disabusing people of their preference for simplistic and predictable answers to complex, multivariant, system-level, problems. It seems that the ability to take each part of a complex issue and address and assess it both individually and as part of the whole is one that belongs to the wise and not the smart. That’s why men with grade-school educations can troubleshoot complex automotive and electronic problems with limited information while men with PhDs make simplistic and embarrassing errors by ignoring crucial facts and data.
The heretic who gains a following is a heretic because he gives a bad answer to a good question. The heretic who stands alone gives a bad answer to a bad question. And frankly, the heretic and the hero can look awfully similar. It can be hard to tell the Jans apart. But good theologians, good churchmen know that howsoever similar they may appear, they are not the same. Indeed, they aren’t even similar. Their similarities are accidents of history, not native to the essences of heretics and heros. The heretics, the Jan van Leidens, they are fools. They see things only one way. They cannot and will not consider all the data. The heros, the Jan Huses, they are able to see other points of view and critically assess their own arguments. They don’t have the cocksure arrogance of the heretic. The true heretic never doubts, because they never doubt themselves – heretics, the truly deadly ones, are always monomaniacs. The heros, they doubt, they suffer, they second-guess, they see the opposition and ask themselves if they’re wrong. But after looking at as many angles and perspectives as possible and wrestling with their doubts and fears, the heros stand on unshakeable truths. In short, the hero is wise and the heretic is a fool.
Theological education would do itself a serious favor if seminarians and theologues were assessed on their wisdom as rigorously as on their academic work. It seems to me that Academic work has always simply been a proxy and an adjunct to wisdom anyways. Perhaps a wisdom exam can’t be conducted in a University setting. Indeed, I think it can’t. But there are ways to assess wisdom and folly. And if theological pedagogy wants to improve it ought to find a way to differentiate the Jans before they get behind a pulpit.
Lady Gaga, Lord Grantham, and Gonzo
When Lady Gaga wrote Born This Way several years ago, it was clear that the pop-music Zeitgeist was now fully on board with sexual preference (or is that an illegal expression nowadays…who can keep track?!) being immutable. Which wasn’t entirely unexpected and neither was it a shock that Lady Gaga held such views. What was also unexpected was that people quickly accepted the “immutability” argument as having moral weight, even though there is nothing about that argument that bears any relevance on ethical issues, whatsoever – but I’m getting ahead of myself.
The fact is that there has been a broad push in media to get people to accept that sexuality is “immutable”…and coincidentally, there has also been a push for people to accept “gender” as fluid. So, society at large is supposed to accept Lady Gaga’s thesis that you’re “Born This Way” and that gender is fluid. But if Gender is fluid, then sexuality is not immutable. Both cannot be true. Certainly, both cannot be true as absolute statements. If Gender is purely a social construct, then homosexuality and heterosexuality are also social constructs – they can’t not be.
Now, many people would naturally want to default back to the “sexuality is immutable” argument and let the trannies fight their own battles on other bases. But that’s not what’s happening. Because the same form of argumentation that was used to push “gay rights” are now being used to push “trans rights”. I put “rights” in quotations because one must wonder in a purely Materialist society whence rights come. But then again, it’s questionable whether many of these people are Materialists at all. Certainly, the Progressive political elites are fundamentally, if not theoretically, Materialist in their orientation. But the fact is that these people believe that rights come from Government. They can’t come from anything else. Or, they believe that “rights” are biologically essential and just exist. Which is a ludicrous argument. And this is not an irrelevant side-point, in fact, the question of “rights” is parallel to the whole conversation about sexuality, gender, and social-engineering.
Materialists, which includes the vast majority of political and social Progressives, accept Darwinism, not only as the explanation of the Origin of Species, but as the Hermeneutical Lens which interprets all data. Darwinism, or Evolutionism may be more appropriate, posits order from chaos, life from non-life, matter from nothing. This hermeneutic then becomes a heuristic to solve all problems in the sciences and humanities, even in theology! Ask a Progressive where Monotheism came from: it evolved. Ask a progressive where Democracy came from: it evolved! Evolution is the solution to literally every problem, which creates a fundamental optimism and a narcissistic level of self-confidence amongst the Technocracy that they can, should, will, and MUST bring in the Utopia. None of them have ever seriously considered David Hume, obvi…cause they’re trying to derive an “ought” from an “is” – or at least an “ought” from a “I-think-it-is”.
Thus, they see “human rights” as a product of Evolution. Don’t ask if there is any moral Truth to these rights. Truth as normal people use the word, to mean something that is objectively correct is not a category that Progressive Social Engineers (Technocrats) even consider. The imperative, the moral imperative, is to be an agent of Progress. It doesn’t matter if that leads to incoherenceis like Ethics divorced from Truth, or the repudiation of Entropy (one of the more well-established theories in Physics), or the positing of Abiogenesis (which Louis Pasteur thought he’d refuted a few centuries back and nobody has been able to demonstrate with experimental evidence that he’s wrong). It simply doesn’t matter. Progressives want Progress and that means a “moral” vision of “rights” that come from nowhere and lead to we know not where, but are crucial and you’re a bigot if you disagree. For a long time Lady Gaga’s mantra was sufficient. Arguing that someone was “Born This Way” was sufficient ground to guarantee that person protections, because, the argument went, if it’s immutable it’s involuntary (not true), and if it’s involuntary it can’t be immoral (not true), and therefore it is irregulable (also not true). This is clearly not true because people are “born with” all manner of desires and impulses that society forces us to suppress so we can conform to society. For instance, anyone who’s been around a small child knows that small children sometimes go into terrifying rages where they scream, hit, threaten, and wish to do major harm to themselves or others. Kids are born that way. It certainly doesn’t make it OK, good, or moral.
Christians recognize that immoral behavior is inherent – Gaga’s right, we ARE born this way, but that doesn’t make it OK. It means that we have to train people to not submit to our natural impulses. Child-rearing is essentially one long exercise in training another person to conquer their impulses and do what is right. It is society telling people to not act how they were born to act. And this is good! But that brings us to my next point.
Downton Abbey is a good show. It’s enjoyable, the characters are well written, it takes place in a fascinating period in World History and, I mean, C’mon, Edwardian clothing was the bomb.com. But the show plays with themes that are at once relevant and poorly framed. In the show several issues are put forth: socialism; women’s lib; homosexuality. In some of these issues, we see a relatively even hand in the portrayal of the conservative and progressive elements of British society (if we can use those terms.) However, when conflict arises over Thomas Barrow’s homosexuality, it’s clear that Thomas was Born This Way and that Society was unkind and unjust – this theme is developed more and more as the show continues. Homosexuality was actively outlawed and prosecuted in England until relatively late. Unlike in other issues where there is an attempt at making sense of the social-order of Edwardian England, we’re simply led to believe that society was wrong (incidentally I wonder how multiculturally appropriate it is to say a culture is wrong…but I digress).
And Tom’s homosexuality isn’t the only issue that receives the ham-fisted preachy treatment. Women’s lib, particularly that status of “fallen women” is of major concern to the show. And that’s fair enough as it stands. Fallen women were objects of pity and derision and unwed-mothers were considered a serious problem. Dafoe’s Moll Flanders acts as a cautionary tale for women who are thinking about fornicating. Dafoe and British Society’s point is: put your love upon a shelf; don’t accept any lines; and keep your hands to yourself.
And we’re supposed to accept that this was a negative aspect of the Patriarchy and that after abortion was legalized and reliable birth-control methods were invented, then unwanted pregnancy went away, and the bigoted and narrow-minded social vision went away.
But this is failing to accept the Edwardian view for what it was. Bastard children were not the CAUSE of the social ostracism that “fallen women” faced. Rather, fallen women faced social isolation because they acted immorally and attempted to break the rules and subvert society. The child was the result to the offensive behavior, not the cause of the reaction. Why were the Brits so keen on keeping girls’ knees together? The same reason that they had strong antisodomy laws, and the same reason that divorces were so hard to obtain. The Edwardian British mindset cared more about social stability and cohesion than personal happiness. In one episode of Downton, one of the characters speaks about how, back in the old days, people just stayed married and were unhappy, and that perhaps this new liberalizing order, by being lax about divorce, would let people be happier.
Except we know that’s not true. Divorces don’t make people happier – they certainly don’t make kids happier! The social and economic cost of no-fault divorce is staggering, not to mention psychospiritual cost which is incalculable! Homosexuality, fornication, adultery, divorce, these things upset the social order because they undermine the family. Edwardian England had not accepted the atomistic individual view of human rights and obligations. They continued to see threats to the family as threats to society…and they were right…unless of course Progressive social theories just haven’t had long enough to bring in the Utopia, yet.
But, by now, even the Progressives have to have learned that their antifamily, antinatal, and antisocial policies have come at a price that’s already too high and only getting dearer! Philip Jeffrey says this in a review of a critique of the critiques of Capitalism, by Eugene McCarraher:
The best of the Romantic critics in the book are those who were unafraid of coming off as reactionary. None wanted simply to “turn back the clock,” but they also didn’t think everything modernity rejected should remain buried. They freed themselves to question whether the blessings of liberty and progress were really blessings or just shabby replacements for genuine human goods. Take, for instance, one critic who successfully stood apart from “the final incorporation of Romanticism.” Unlike his contemporary Herbert Marcuse, Lewis Mumford doubted that technological and economic progress was on the verge of abolishing material scarcity and enabling the limitless triumph of erotic desire. He anticipated that automated technological systems would come to govern ever more fundamentally human activities—even thinking—because of the centuries-old Baconian goal of mastering nature through mechanism. He wanted to reclaim the pre-modern sense of the sacred. The left, ignoring Mumford, followed Marcuse into sexual revolution and blind faith in technocracy.
Today’s critics of capitalism are gelded by their fear of appearing reactionary. Even McCarraher, who draws heavily on Ruskin and Carlyle, finds it necessary to apologize for their commitment to “reaction” and “hierarchy.” But if the left is to regain the glory McCarraher sees in its past, it will have to admit it took a wrong turn and that it cannot sustainably criticize our throwaway culture for damaging the environment while praising it for damaging families. Pope Francis—whom McCarraher cites as a contemporary example of the Romantic tradition—has made this point. American leftists dare not. Anywhere criticism of capitalism might tread on the toes of sexual liberation, our radicals dare not step. But that may be the only path back to interesting criticism of capitalism at a time when something as fundamental as sex is seen in terms of commodity and consumption.
Lord Grantham’s Downton is portrayed as a place caught in the crossfire of social change, but it’s portrayal, in its more currently-relevant issues, doesn’t give a coherent defense of Edwardian conservative values. The show seems to suggest that simple patriarchal bigotry is the sole justification conservatives had for social policies that led to women and children being left out in the cold. And because it fails to recognize the conservative impulse to preserve a stable society it fails to adequately deal with the issues in any way that isn’t pandering or preaching…or propagandizing.
And that brings us back to Gonzo. Yes, the muppet. Gonzo the muppet baby recently revealed that he’s a tranny and impressed all the other muppets, initially transphobes all of them, when he revealed that he, in fact, was the beautiful Gonzorella! Gonzo explains that he doesn’t want to act how society expects him to act because he wants “to be me”. Gonzo’s quest for authenticity trumps society’s quest for stability and reality. Ms. Piggy apologizes to Gonzo because it wasn’t nice of them to tell him how to dress for the ball. And all the little kids are supposed to learn that it’s OK for boys to wear dresses.
Except it isn’t. It’s wrong, and also it’s antifeminist. And also, it’s incoherent.
If Gender is fluid, then how does Gonzo know how the “real” Gonzo is? There is no “real Gonzo” because it’s fluid. Gonzo’s quest for authenticity is inevitably going to be Quixotic because if you’re looking for solid ground in something that’s shifting you will not find it. You can’t find the “real” you in anything fluid…especially something as fluid and mutable as a “social construct”!
And the problem is that for the trans-rightsers gender can’t be ENTIRELY a social construct – otherwise why have the surgeries? Why have the clothes? If having a penis or a vagina doesn’t make you a man, or woman, respectively, then how does getting one cut-off or sewn-on make you a man or a woman? What’s the point of the surgery if the surgery doesn’t matter because they possession of genitalia is irrelevant anyways? Saying that you want your “insides to match your outsides” simply reinforces the anti-genital-mutliation argument. Why? Because if you way you want the surgery then you are admitting, necessarily admitting, that you’re not the sex you say you are. But if that’s the case then why have the surgery at all?! If this is confusing and seems incoherent: it is. It’s incoherent because it’s a position posited by people suffering from a mental illness. Don’t argue with crazy-people! Help them. Pity them. Pray for them. But don’t expect logic from them!
And the same argument follows for transvestism. If wearing a dress shows that you’re a girl then either wearing a dress is inherently feminine and NOT a social construct, or it is, and you’re reinforcing the social constructs that you’re rebelling against. Which, by the way, doesn’t sound very Feminist, to say that girls wear dresses!
But the height of irony is that this happens at a ball! Now, I’ve been to a gala or two in my life, but never anything as grand as a royal ball. But here’s the thing – royal ball’s are ENTIRELY AND ONLY ABOUT social expectations. Trying to enjoy the royal ball while flouting the social conventions of boys dressing like boys is hypocritical and incoherent. It’s eating your cake and having it too!
But the rainbow thread that gilds this tapestry is that in every case, in Lady Gaga’s song, in Lord Grantham’s Downton, and at Gonzo’s ball, the fundamental moral imperative is that society doesn’t have the right to tell me what to do. Which is an utterly ludicrous argument. And it’s hypocritical since you’re trying to tell society to tell people that society doesn’t get to tell people what to do! It’s lunacy! We could refine it and say “society cannot tell me to do things contrary to how I feel”, but again, that’s simply anarchy. Society socializes people for the good of society. And societies are complex, functioning as Organisms more than Mechanisms.
However, our Progressive, Materialist, Social-Engineer-Technocrats view society as a Mechanism: a Mechanism that they, and they alone, incidentally, are smart enough to manage. They can reorder society according to their vision and bring about human flourishing. Needless to say the Materialist Utopia is yet to materialize. But, they don’t care; they are entirely unperturbed, to quote Boramir, “they care not”, because, to quote Maria Von Trapp “they have confidence in confidence alone; they have confidence in themselves.” Just give them time; somewhere over the rainbow they’ll figure out (if they haven’t already) which levers to pull and which toggles to switch and which buttons to push and then we’ll all be happy, flourishing people. Their confidence is unearned. They’ve not demonstrated that any of their agenda brings both human flourishing and social cohesion. All their alleged victories are victories of technology and Enlightenment theories, motifs, and praxis. Any good ideas are plagiarized from Theism. They rob from Liberalism to give to Statism. They insist that the recalcitrant who have the audacity to oppose gay-marriage and transnormativity be silenced and that society change, while, trying to create their own new social vision. They reject the normative to renormalize, not to erase norms. It’s one big bad-faith string of gaslightings, motte-and-baileys, and out-and-out lies.
The Progressive vision wants to cut RECOGNIZED ties with Theism and the broad Western tradition. It doesn’t really want to scrap the Western Tradition or Theism because it needs the Christian moral ethic and the language of human rights and the principle of the sovereignty of the individual. But it wants to claim them for its own, as if Progressivism came up with these ideas, like they just EVOLVED! Like the Communists of post-war Germany they cry: “Ohne Gott und Sonnen schein Holen Wir Die Ernte ein!” Without God or sunshine, we will bring the harvest in. But this confidence in the human ability to create morality, ethics, rights, or political, economic, and social cohesion ex nihilo is as ludicrous as the USSR’s confidence they could feed people without God or sunshine.
I cannot say strongly enough that the Progressivist Project has failed and is failing. But our Technocratic leaders are doubling down. Media, Education, even the Military are getting in on the act as it’s all-hands-on-deck to try to save the good ship Progressivism. And they might just weather this storm. But that ship ain’t seaworthy. It will either be swamped by the winds and waves of the sea of economic reality or dashed on the rocks of social and psychological disintegration.
And when the Progressive Project fails, as it must, I pray that the Church will finally wake up to our need to present a Christ-like social vision, built upon the twin principles of individual worth and individual sacrifice.
Hesitation and Purification
The reception of the Gospel by Cornelius is one of several major turning points in the Acts of the Apostles. More than that, it’s a major turning point in the history of the Church. The events surrounding and depending upon the Spirit being poured out on that God-Fearing Centurian and his family and friends marks an indisputable change in Peter’s perception and the understanding of the Church as a whole. Peter’s entire argument – and the argument that wins the day at the great Jerusalem Council (Acts 15) – is built on the fact that God poured out his Spirit on gentiles who had not been circumcised nor were the careful followers of he Law; Cornelius wasn’t even a Proselyte, but was only a God-Fearer! And Acts 10 and 11 make a definitive contrast between the Gentiles who received the Holy Spirit and the ones “out of the Circumcision”. Luke is drawing on the events of that day to help us see the conflict that was building. Jews were OK with Gentiles (mostly) so long as they got circumcised, obeyed the Mosaic Law, and acted like Jews. But here are Gentiles who are very much not attempting to be Jewish, and yet the Holy Spirit came upon them in the same way that He came upon the Apostles in the upper room on Pentecost.
And as Luke develops this theme he uses a fun bit of wordplay that is impossible to catch in English.
Acts 10:20
“But get up, go down, and accompany them without hesitation, because I have sent them.”
ἀλλʼ ἀναστὰς κατάβηθι καὶ πορεύου σὺν αὐτοῖς μηδὲν διακρινόμενος ὅτι ἐγὼ ἀπέσταλκα αὐτούς.
Acts 11:2
So when Peter went up to Jerusalem, the circumcised believers took issue with him,
Ὅτε δὲ ἀνέβη Πέτρος εἰς Ἰερουσαλήμ, διεκρίνοντο πρὸς αὐτὸν οἱ ἐκ περιτομῆς
Acts 11:12
The Spirit told me to accompany them without hesitation. These six brothers also went with me, and we entered the man’s house.
εἶπεν δὲ τὸ πνεῦμά μοι συνελθεῖν αὐτοῖς μηδὲν διακρίναντα. ἦλθον δὲ σὺν ἐμοὶ καὶ οἱ ἓξ ἀδελφοὶ οὗτοι καὶ εἰσήλθομεν εἰς τὸν οἶκον τοῦ ἀνδρός.
Acts 15:9
and he made no distinction between them and us, cleansing their hearts by faith.
καὶ οὐθὲν διέκρινεν μεταξὺ ἡμῶν τε καὶ αὐτῶν τῇ πίστει καθαρίσας τὰς καρδίας αὐτῶν.
So, a couple things out to be clear. First, the same Greek word can be translated a whole bunch of ways. The word we’re looking at specifically is διακρίνω (diakrino), which is a compound word of the preposition “δια” (dia) meaning “through” and the verb “κρίνω” (krino) meaning “I judge”. The idea is that you come to come kind of conclusion by careful discriminating thought – through judgment. And it has a lot of nuances, it can mean to: separate; arrange; make a distinction; differentiate; evaluate; judge; judge or decide in a legal sense; to disagree (in the aorist passive); and to waver; hesitate; be at odds with oneself.
As you can see, this very simple verb has a lot of possible nuances. And its wide lexical range means that nailing it down with one single English word is going to be impossible. But Luke, when he recorded the Acts of the Apostles, wasn’t thinking about English. He was thinking about how to help us understand what Christ was doing through the Holy Spirit in His Body, the Church. And so Luke gives us this cluster of uses of the verb διακρίνω (diakrino). And interestingly, these 4 are the only 4 places this verb is used in Acts, and Luke doesn’t use it in his entire Gospel, even though Matthew and Mark both did. What’s more, Matthew and Mark used this verb in the same place in the Gospel narrative, at the Cursing of the Fig Tree, during the Passion Week, which Luke omits.
Thus, the relative rarity of this verb: <20x, and the clustering of it in one book of one author, around one subject, ought to suggest to us that Luke’s making a point with this verb usage.
So, what’s the point?
The point is that Luke is trying to contrast the command of the Holy Spirit with the concerns of the Circumcision group. And we’re also not to think ill of the “Circumcision” group. They are called brothers, and possibly even some of the apostles were among those who had questions and concerns about Gentiles being given the Gospel.
Remember that this all started with Peter being told not to call anything “common” or “unclean” when God had cleansed it. And then he’s told not to διακρίνω (diakrino) about going with the men sent by Cornelius. Peter is instructed not to diakrino but the brothers of the Circumcision do, indeed, diakrino. And Peter clarifies the issue when he tells them, look guys, you’re diakrino-ing about Gentiles, but God the Holy Spirit commanded me not to diakrino. Then when the issue finally comes to a head and the whole Church needs to decide how to handle the Gentiles, Peter tells the brothers that God did not diakrino, between Jews and Gentiles.
And, what’s amazing is that the believers in Acts 11 accepted this with joy, as did the Jerusalem Council. And while there are many ways we could abuse this text and try to make the argument that the church needs to accept sinful behaviors, by accepting the people, that’s not really what this is about. This, I believe, is all leading up to the Jerusalem Council where Gentiles are given full admission into the Church and full acceptance from the Jewish Brethren based solely upon their faith in Christ and not on their adherence to the Mosaic Law or the Jewish nation. The Church is a new community – yes it is a continuation of the people of God, but it’s distinct from Israel, and it will be distinct from Tribulation saints as Revelation 20:4 makes logically necessary. The Church is a new community and entry into that community does not mean entry into national Israel, but rather entry into Christ. And the basis of that entry into Christ is faith.
After there had been much debate, Peter stood up and said to them, “Brothers, you know that some time ago God chose me to preach to the Gentiles so they would hear the message of the gospel and believe. And God, who knows the heart, has testified to them by giving them the Holy Spirit just as he did to us, and he made no distinction between them and us, cleansing their hearts by faith. So now why are you putting God to the test by placing on the neck of the disciples a yoke that neither our ancestors nor we have been able to bear? On the contrary, we believe that we are saved through the grace of the Lord Jesus, in the same way as they are.” Acts 15:7-11 (NET)
Peter’s point is this: forcing the Gentiles to obey the Law of Moses will not add to their salvation, or secure it, or produce it, but will only become burdensome to them. Peter recognizes that none of the Jews (except Jesus) have ever been able to bear the burden of the Law, and therefore Jesus came and made salvation by faith possible. Thus, Peter reasons, if we can’t be saved or secured by the Law why would we require the Gentiles to obey it when we have demonstrable and irrefutable proof that they are saved without obeying the Law?! What will it add? And not only this, but Peter makes the way for the Jews to let go of the Law, as well, by saying that God made no diakrino between Jew and Gentile, but rather God gives His Holy Spirit to those whose hearts He has cleansed by faith!
And that word “cleansed” is the high-water mark. Because cleanness was where this whole drama began! Remember that God told Peter to get up and “sacrifice”! The Greek word we translate as “kill” in Acts 10:13, typically means “sacrifice”. Peter is commanded to sacrifice and eat unclean animals and Peter says, “No! I’ve never eaten anything common or unclean!” But God tells him not to call anything common (or unclean) that God has cleansed.
The whole theme of hesitation about accepting Gentiles without them accepting Circumcision and the Law comes full circle (pun totes intended), and brings us back to the beginning where Peter is told not to declare things unclean that God has cleansed, Peter recognizes that through faith God has cleansed the hearts of Gentiles, as well as Jews, therefore believers are declared clean. All believers. The Law, and especially the rituals and regulations about cleanness are no longer relevant because God has made total and final cleansing by faith. Christians should not hesitate about whether we’re bound by the Law of Moses because we’ve been made clean.
And while this is a complex and subtle argument to make from the Acts of the Apostles, Paul makes it abundantly clear, when he declares that we are no longer under the Law of Moses – rather we are under the Law of Christ. And in the Law of Christ, the ethic is not about purity and cleanness, but rather it is about love. Certainly, the Law of Moses and the Law of Christ lead to a lot of the same behaviors, but the motivations are inverted. Moses commands us to love God by not harming our neighbor and not becoming impure. Christ commands us to love God by doing active, self-sacrificial good for our neighbor and that we can do this because we’ve already been declared pure.
Lilith Fair
Charles Williams wrote some weird stuff – some really good stuff, yes – but weird. Among the really good and really weird was a novel entitled, Descent Into Hell. Now, if all you know about Williams is that he was one of the inklings, and that, therefore, the weirdness of Descent will be that there’s some random poetry for no apparent reason, and a lot of exalted prose, and that the storylines are highly unconventional, you’d be right. But that’s true of all the Inklings. What makes Williams’ work especially and uniquely weird is the content itself. Descent, just ONE of Williams’ novels has: prophetic dreaming; ghosts; a spirit realm that interacts with the mortal realm; doppelgängers; and succubuses. Yeah, pretty weird right?
Well, Williams takes all that weird and he uses it to write beautiful and guttingly accurate portrayals of the human condition. Particularly in the first scene where we meet the succubus. Lawrence Wentworth is a frustrated, though somewhat celebrated historian. He’s smitten with young Adela Hunt, who is in a relationship with the much younger, handsomer, and arroganter Hugh Prescott. After a romantic failure with Adela and with his academic and professional rival receiving a knighthood, Lawrence is at a particularly low point in his life. Williams talks about how he could have chosen, indeed, he was fully capable of choosing, to rejoice with his rival that a historian with whom he’d had a publishing war was knighted. But instead he chose to hate. And he nursed that hate. And he brooded on his anger at Adela for being interested in Hugh, and not having any interest in him. Wounded pride and vanity become hatred. And then something remarkable happens. You know it’s remarkable because I’m remarking on it! Adela shows up.
Alone.
And then Williams writes this section which may be some of his very best and most brilliant. His insight into human nature, into desire, into the lies we tell ourselves, into how we twist and distort , how even our loves are cruel, Williams captures it wonderfully:
A little way up it stood a woman's figure. The thing he had known must happen had happened. She had come.
He pushed the window up--careful, even so, not to seem to go fast, not to seem to want her. He leaned out and spoke softly. He said: "Is that you?" The answer startled him, for it was Adela's voice and yet something more than Adela's, fuller, richer, more satisfying. It said "I'm here." He could only just hear the words, but that was right, for it was after midnight, and she was beckoning with her hand. The single pair of feet drawn from the double, the hand waving to him. He motioned to her to come, but she did not stir, and at last, driven by his necessity, he climbed through the window; it was easy enough, even for him-and went down to meet her. As he came nearer he was puzzled again, as he had been by the voice. It was Adela, yet it was not. It was her height, and had her movement. The likeness appeased him, yet he did not understand the faint unlikeness. For a moment he thought it was someone else, a woman of the Hill, someone he had seen, whose name he did not remember. He was up to her now, and he knew it could not be Adela, for even Adela had never been so like Adela as this. That truth which is the vision of romantic love, in which the beloved becomes supremely her own adorable and eternal self, the glory and splendour of her own existence, and her own existence no longer felt or thought as hers but of and from another, that was aped for him then. The thing could not astonish him, nor could it be adored. It perplexed. He hesitated.
The woman said: "You've been so long."
He answered roughly: "Who are you? You're not Adela."
The voice said: "Adela!" and Wentworth understood that Adela was not enough, that Adela must be something different. even from Adela if she were to be satisfactory to him, something closer to his own mind and farther from hers. She had been in relation with Hugh, and his Adela could never be in relation with Hugh. He had never understood that simplicity before. It was so clear now. He looked at the woman opposite and felt a stirring of freedom in him.
He said: "You waved?" and she: "Or didn't you wave to me?"
He said, under her eyes: "I didn't think you'd be any use to me."
She laughed: the laugh was a little like Adela's, only better. Fuller; more amused. Adela hardly ever laughed as if she were really amused; she had always a small condescension. He said: "How could I know?"
"You don't think about yourself enough," she said; the words were tender and grateful to him, and he knew they were true. He had never thought enough about himself. He had wanted to be kind. He had wanted to be kind to Adela; it was Adela's obstinate folly which now outraged him. He had wanted to give himself to Adela out of kindness. He was greatly relieved by this woman's words, almost as much as if he had given himself. He went on giving. He said: "If I thought more of myself?"
"You wouldn't have much difficulty in finding it," she answered. "Let's walk."
He didn't understand the first phrase, but he turned and went by her side, silent while he heard the words. Much difficulty in finding what? in finding it? the it that could be found if he thought of himself more; that was what he had said or she had said, whichever had said that the thing was to be found, as if Adela had said it, Adela in her real self, by no means the self that went with Hugh; no, but the true, the true Adela who was apart and his; for that was the difficulty all the while, that she was truly his, and wouldn't be, but if he thought more of her truly being, and not of her being untruly away, on whatever way, for the way that went away was not the way she truly went, but if they did away with the way she went away, then Hugh could be untrue and she true, then he would know themselves, two, true and two, on the way he was going, and the peace in himself, and the scent of her in him, and the her, meant for him, in him; that was the she he knew, and he must think the more of himself. A faint mist grew round them as they walked, and he was under the broad boughs of trees, the trees of the Hill, going up the Hill, up to the Adela he kept in himself, where the cunning woman who walked by his side was taking him, and talking in taking. He had been slow, slow, very slow not to see that this was true, that to get away from Hugh's Adela was to find somewhere and somehow the true Adela, the Adela that was his, since what he wanted was always and everywhere his; he had always known that, yet that had been his hardship, for he must know it was so, and yet it hadn't seemed so. But here in the mists under the trees, with this woman, it was all clear. The mist made everything clear.
If you missed the tragi-comic hideous beauty of this passage because the language is a bit fine and fancy (or if the quote was a tl;dr kinda thing) let me explain. Lawrence was in love with Adela. But he also hated her. His fixation and fantasization created a love that the real Adela could never live up to. Notice how Lawrence recognizes that the real Adela’s laugh always has a bit of condescension. Adela is arrogant and aloof and while she’s beautiful and bright she doesn’t put one at ease. In short, she’s her own person with her own wants, desires, needs, goals, aspirations, talents, and weaknesses, virtues, vices, frailties, and sins. Adela, like all people are a mixed bag of blessing and curse. But the Adela of Lawrence’s fantasy is perfect. And she’s devoted to Lawrence. The real Adela is not.
But here comes Adela – the Adela that Adela could never be; and she’s everything that Lawrence ever wanted. And notice what she tells Lawrence when he questions why this Adela would want him. She says that he doesn’t think about himself enough.
And he agrees.
And this is the key and central motif/ theme/ tragic flaw in Lawrence. He’s only thinking about himself, but he’s convinced himself that deep down he’s a very kind and gracious and selfless person.
And this is where the demon exploits him. For this Adela is a demon; she’s the succubus Lilith. She tells Lawrence that he needs to think of himself more, which is the exact opposite of what he needs. And she leads him by the hand into a succubitic liaison – his descent into Hell comes through an act of pleasure with a demon telling him to be more selfish.
And isn’t that always the way it goes? I mean, not that people experience coitus with the ancient demon of Jewish legend, but that the descent into Hell, the path to a truly demonic, mind comes through thinking about oneself?
Williams’ concept here is a fascinating one and one that is particularly pertinent to, and prescient of today’s moral dilemma. We are a society of narcissists who are constantly thinking of how we’ve been victimized and taken advantage of, and yet, blindly, ironically, comically, we’re a society that cannot see other people AS people, but only means to our own enjoyment!
Lewis’ concept of the demonic in Screwtape is particularly present in our society. In Lewis’ demonology, Satan and his servants exist and expand their selfhood only through the consumption of other selves. Selfhood is a zero-sum-game in Hellspeak. Which is utterly foreign to the biblical concept of selfhood, which states that the expansion of ourselves comes not through absorbing and subjugating others, but through self-sacrifice. By making ourselves smaller we become greater. But the monadic philosophy of Hell will have none of this. Satan can only be bigger if you become smaller. Yet, God makes himself higher by stooping low in humility, even humiliation. I think Lewis’ instincts and insight here are necessarily true and make sense of the seeming challenge of Triune mutual love and glorification.
Christian societies know this, and that’s why, among many reasons, Christian societies reject pornography and prostitution. Pornography and prostitution objectify and commodify, they victimize, not only because pornography and prostitution are sinful, but because they make a person less than they are by creating a fantasy version of them. Of course, these things happen in essentially all human relationships. Very few of us have significantly accurate notions of other people, as they themselves truly are. Some of that isn’t our fault: human beings are mysteries even unto ourselves. And the fact that we have gaps in our knowledge about others ought to be an invitation to explore other people’s personalities and find the treasures stored up in others. On the other hand, some of our inaccurate, incomplete, and inadequate notions about others ARE our fault and are actively destructive.
It is impossible to truly love someone as they are unless you know them as they are – at least not fully and actively. Loving our neighbors, if it’s to be more than platitudes, means knowing them as they truly are. Which will not always be pleasant. Despite what tattoos and internet memes suggest, walking a mile in someone else’s shows doesn’t always vindicate them; it may validate your suspicions that they’re deeply rotten people – but at least you’ll understand the mechanisms that operate in their own unique rottenness.
And again, let’s return to Williams and the irony of being a society of self-proclaimed victims while simultaneously ignoring the fundamental humanity of others. I’ve mentioned how porn and prostitution, as well as all kinds of other forms of dehumanization are destructive and contrary to the Christian ethos. But just as dangerous is the valorization of victimhood. I’ve written and spoken about this topic at length, but there is one point in particular that bears careful consideration, because Williams’ insight is new to me and is worth reading this whole essay – at least it was worth me writing it!
All I wish to add is that Williams sees positioning ourselves as the victim as a very safe and secure descent into Hell. It removes agency and precludes self-examination. Lawrence made himself the victim and once he did he lost the ability to accurately assess himself.
What Williams realizes is that Lawrence, by making himself the victim, does to himself exactly what he did to Adela: he dehumanized himself. And going to Hell is a process; a process of dehumanization. Surely that’s not ALL going to Hell is, but Hell wouldn’t be Hell if it were not the infinite and eternal dehumanization of the Hellions. The danger of valorizing victimization, of emphasizing and congratulating people for expressing grievances, for only considering how we’re sinned against and not sinners, creates a false version of self, a demonic version of self, an idol, a doppelgänger in our own skin! When we celebrate victimhood we’re celebrating people engaging in the process of dehumanizing themselves. When we make victimhood virtuous, we accelerate the process of dehumanization – we encourage people in their descent into Hell.
Rise and Shine
In Acts 9 we have a well-known, but oft skimmed passage. Here we read about Tabitha, who has the memorable, but unfortunate Greek name “Dorcas”, who was a beloved Christian woman in Joppa, who died and was raised from the dead by Simon Peter. This story is fascinating because Peter’s arrival in Joppa will be the hinge upon which the rest of the Acts of the Apostles turn. It’s in Joppa where Peter has the vision of the meat-sheet, and learns not to call anything unclean that God has called clean. It’s from Joppa, at Simon Tanner’s house that Peter is called to visit gentiles. Peter comes to Joppa on Dorcas’ account and does a miracle and the city turns to Christ and then he has a transformative vision in Joppa, and from Joppa he’s called and witnesses the Holy Spirit descending upon the Gentiles and this becomes the basis for his position of rejecting the imposition of circumcision and the Mosaic Law on Gentile’s turning to Christ. So, it’s fair to say that the death and miraculous raising of Dorcas in Joppa is a major link in the chain from a primarily Jew-to-Jew form of evangelism to a Jew-to-Gentile form of evangelism. Note well, that Dorcas is a Greek name. Which may be a subtle hint that Tabitha may have been a Hellenic Jew or perhaps was half-Greek (though, I admit this is doubtful since we aren’t told her ethnic heritage and we would expect Luke to give us this datum).
So, we can see this is an important piece in the narrative structure of Peter’s life that God was writing. And Luke, in Lucian fashion, gives us a delightful and delicate pair of repeated terms that bring the whole event together.
Let’s look at the pericope, with the key words underlined:
36 In Joppa there was a disciple named Tabitha (in Greek her name is Dorcas); she was always doing good and helping the poor. 37 About that time she became sick and died, and her body was washed and placed in an upstairs room. 38 Lydda was near Joppa; so when the disciples heard that Peter was in Lydda, they sent two men to him and urged him, “Please come at once!”
39 Peter went with them, and when he arrived he was taken upstairs to the room. All the widows stood around him, crying and showing him the robes and other clothing that Dorcas had made while she was still with them.
40 Peter sent them all out of the room; then he got down on his knees and prayed. Turning toward the dead woman, he said, “Tabitha, get up.” She opened her eyes, and seeing Peter she sat up. 41 He took her by the hand and helped her to her feet. Then he called for the believers, especially the widows, and presented her to them alive. 42 This became known all over Joppa, and many people believed in the Lord. 43 Peter stayed in Joppa for some time with a tanner named Simon. (NIV)
OK, right now you’re probably wondering what, exactly, I have in my coffee mug…incidentally I need to make another pot!...but you’re probably thinking, “Luke, you talked about a pair of words that get repeated for emphasis…the words you underlined are not the same words.” Yep, they’re not. Not in the NIV, anyways.
The pair of verbs we’re considering are: ἀνίστημι an-ees-tay-me (to arise) and: παρίστημι par-ees-tay-me (to stand beside). Now, Luke uses the verb “to arise” pretty often, and, yes, it’s the verb for “resurrect”. So, sometimes it has a Christological significance, but sometimes it seems to simply be the routine verb for “get up”. Here, the first usage is routine, the second clearly isn’t! And the verb “to stand beside” has a whole slew of potential meanings: stand beside, arrive, draw near, present, offer, be present, etc.
And as we can tell, these two repeated verbs are clearly used in decisively different senses in their different uses. Peter “gets up”, and he commands Dorcas’ body [incidentally that has some anthropological significance, but I’ll have to deal with that another day] to “get up”…but it’s obviously a different kind of “getting up”. The widows “stood by” showing Peter the good works Dorcas did and then he “presents” her to them, as though showing them that God has done a good work and an act of mercy by restoring the one who had done good works and acts of mercy.
The dual repetition and sense-change for these two verbs in such close proximity suggests, to me anyways, that Luke wants to call our attention to what’s happening theologically, below the surface. I translated this passage this morning and have been pondering it. I’ll admit I’m not certain I completely (or even mostly) understand what Luke was trying to do! But I have a vague notion that what he’s trying to tell us in the subtext is that if we wish to tell the dead woman to “arise” we have to “arise” at the call to help. Moreover, those who have people “presenting themselves” praising their righteousness, are the kinds of people whom God will “present” to those who praised them, resurrected and honored.
Peter honored God and the people by getting up at the call and God honored him by allowing him to perform a mighty miracle. Dorcas honored God by caring for the poor and helpless, they cried out to God honoring Dorcas, and God honored Dorcas and the poor by raising her from the dead.
I’m sure as I ponder this text more, in preparation for preaching through it in several months I’ll discover a clearer picture of what Luke was trying to say with artistic beauty. But, for now, I think it’s clear that God honors those who honor Him. Those who respond to the call to serve God are the ones who get to serve God. Rise and Shine!
What's Best?
Listen to this 3 part series from my weekly radio broadcast, Truth in Journalism.
Episode 1
Learning From Laodicea
Introduction
There is a concept popular in theology, not only amongst laymen and pastors, but even at the professional and academic levels of theology. This concept is so popular that it’s made its way into culture and even into pop-culture![1] It has been captured in the popular Christian imagination so concretely that it makes its way into commentaries and sermons and is so universally accepted that it colors the thinking of Christians and functions unnoticed in the worldview, affecting us in untold and immeasurable ways.
Revelation 3 says this:
15 I know your deeds, that you are neither cold nor hot. I wish you were either one or the other! 16 So, because you are lukewarm—neither hot nor cold—I am about to spit you out of my mouth. (NIV).
15 οἶδά σου τὰ ἔργα ὅτι οὔτε ψυχρὸς εἶ οὔτε ζεστός. ὄφελον ψυχρὸς ἦς ἢ ζεστός. 16 οὕτως ὅτι χλιαρὸς εἶ καὶ οὔτε ζεστὸς οὔτε ψυχρός, μέλλω σε ἐμέσαι ἐκ τοῦ στόματός μου (NA28).
And right now, almost certainly you know you know the correct interpretation of this passage. Or at least you think you know. And, even if not consciously, operating somewhere in the corners of your mind is the idea that Jesus would rather someone be be totally opposed to Christ rather than to be moderately committed, or nominally committed.
The interpretation becomes a theological concept that could be phrased thus: that being “lukewarm” is more dangerous than being out-and-out against Jesus because the lukewarm person may be self-deceived and therefore harder to reach with the gospel.
And as can be seen pretty clearly, this theological concept has implications in Soteriology; Missiology; Ecclesiology; and Practical Theology, as well. This notion that being “cold”, i.e., being opposed to Christ is preferable to being “lukewarm” has the power to affect pretty much every area of theology – it speaks directly to our Theology Proper and Christology and Pneumatology. It speaks to what God wills and what’s “easier” and “harder” for God to do (at least in the Arminian iterations of this concept).
And all of this is well and good. Bible interpretations SHOULD inform our theology and practice. But there are several presuppositions that go unchallenged that are necessary for this to be the correct interpretation of this verse. And if these presuppositions can be contradicted, or at least proved uncertain, then the textual interpretation vanishes, as does the theological thesis that lukewarm Christianity is worse than open antipathy to Christ. And I don’t think that those presuppositions can withstand serious scrutiny. Nor do I think the idea that lukewarmness is more dangerous than convinced hostility and antagonism to the gospel is a good soteriological model – in fact, it seems to contradict what we know is true about how people (generally) come to faith.
So, what I’d like to do, briefly, is first demonstrate that “hot” and “cold” are not referring to saved and unsaved states (respectively…or irrespectively). Second, I’d like to show that, theologically, preferencing hostility to Christ over lukewarmness is poor soteriology which may lead to poor ecclesiology and missiology. Then we’ll summarize the findings with some action steps in the conclusion – cause, I mean, you have to summarize with action steps!
Evaluating the Interpretation
So, let’s start at the beginning. Is it true that “hot” and “cold” are referring to being saved and “on fire” for Christ on one hand and being totally spiritually dead and even hostile to Christ on the other? Pop-theology would have you think so. But what about the text? What about the word choices?
Significantly, both the words in question are relatively rare. Moreover, both are words that seem to often be used as adjectives to describe water! Zestos (ζεστος) is used only 2 times in both the Greek New Testament and only in these 2 verses in Revelation and Zestos is not used anywhere in the LXX[2]. This rarity suggests Jesus and/ or John are making a deliberate choice, when one considers that they could have used Thermos (θερμος) for hot. And Psyoochros is not the only word for cold. Matthew, John, Luke, and Paul use the word Psyoochos (ψυχος) – there are 4 passages using Psyoochos and Psyoochros (ψυχρος) is used only here and in Matthew in the New Testament. All three times usages of Psyoochros refer to “cold water”. While Psyoochros is rare, in Matthew, cold water is a great blessing. Not only is it rare in the New Testament, but in the LXX, Psyoochros is used only one time – in Proverbs 25:25:
25 Like cold water to a weary soul
is good news from a distant land.
Again, like in Matthew, this is a positive use of the word, it doesn’t mean emotional deadness or antipathy, but cold water is a good thing! What’s more, the distinction between Psyoochros (ψυχρος) and Psyoochos (ψυχος) follows the difference in Hebrew usage of the words QaR (קַר), QoR (קֹר), and the verb QaRaCH (קרח). There is one exception, where the LXX does not follow the Hebrew usage. Jeremiah 18:14 in the Hebrew uses the word QaR, which is translated as Psoochros in Proverbs 25:25, however in the Jeremiah passage the Greek version omits the adjective altogether. Here, again, the word (if it had not been omitted) should have been describing cold water, and in a positive context, which is consistent with other usages. Thus, if we look at the uses of the concept of “cold water” in the entire Bible we see only positive uses. It should be noted that Jeremiah 18:14 has several Text-Critical issues in Hebrew and in Greek. But for purposes of clarity, we’ll put the Hebrew, and Greek Texts here along with the NIV.
14μὴ ἐκλείψουσιν ἀπὸ πέτρας μαστοὶ ἢ χιὼν ἀπὸ τοῦ Λιβάνου; μὴ ἐκκλινεῖ ὕδωρ βιαίως ἀνέμῳ φερόμενον;
14 הֲיַעֲזֹ֥ב מִצּ֛וּר שָׂדַ֖י שֶׁ֣לֶג לְבָנֹ֑ון אִם־יִנָּתְשׁ֗וּ מַ֛יִם זָרִ֥ים קָרִ֖ים נֹוזְלִֽים׃
14 Does the snow of Lebanon
ever vanish from its rocky slopes?
Do its cool waters from distant sources
ever stop flowing?
But here’s the important point – even if the LXX is wrong, nothing changes; Psyoochros, uniformly refers to cool/ cold water, as do its Hebrew antecedents, and it is used uniformly positively. In other words, when this word for cold is used in the Bible it never means anything bad, it always means cold water that’s good.
One last point on the vocabulary and syntax. Notice what’s there and what’s missing. Let’s look at the text again:
15 I know your deeds, that you are neither cold nor hot. I wish you were either one or the other! 16 So, because you are lukewarm—neither hot nor cold—I am about to spit you out of my mouth. (NIV).
15 οἶδά σου τὰ ἔργα ὅτι οὔτε ψυχρὸς εἶ οὔτε ζεστός. ὄφελον ψυχρὸς ἦς ἢ ζεστός. 16 οὕτως ὅτι χλιαρὸς εἶ καὶ οὔτε ζεστὸς οὔτε ψυχρός, μέλλω σε ἐμέσαι ἐκ τοῦ στόματός μου (NA28).
Cold is placed before Hot in clauses b and c but not d. Why? Does word placement matter? I think you would have an extremely difficult (read: impossible) challenge trying to sustain that word-order means anything. A hyperliteral translation says: “that neither cold you are neither hot; would that cold you should be or hot. In this manner, because lukewarm you and neither hot nor cold, I am going to vomit you out of my mouth.”
Where are linguistic keys that inform us that coldness is not desirable, but is better than lukewarmness? If that were the case, wouldn’t we expect something like “You aren’t hot – you aren’t even cold!” The letters to the Churches of Asia Minor are not lacking in qualifications. If Cold were bad, then wouldn’t there be some kind of clue, either verbally (the meanings and biblical theological uses refute this), syntactically (no case to be made), or with some kind of clarificatory expression or clause (none exists)? In short, there is no reason whatever to read “Cold” as lost/ unsaved/ opposed to Christ. None. In fact, the only place we might say that the syntax might suggest the superiority of either Cold or Hot is in clause c “ὄφελον ψυχρὸς ἦς ἢ ζεστός”/ “I wish you were cold OR hot”. Being hot may be the less preferable thermal quality. In clause b both cold and hot are modified by the conjunction “neither”, thus what you do with one you ought to do with the other; here Cold comes before “or”. I don’t think one should, or could, make a syntactical case to establish the moral superiority of Hot or Cold…but if you were to do so (which you shouldn’t) you’d have a better case saying Hot is the less preferable condition!
So, that makes one ask – why then would we presume that Psyoochros means something bad in Revelation 3? It seems to be because people hear Hot-Cold-Lukewarm and presuppose that it’s referring to a spectrum or continuum. But if that’s the case why should we presume that being “Hot” means being good? Zestos is never used anywhere else in the Bible, we have 2 other uses of Psyoochros, both are positive, and we should have a 3rd one that also would be positive!
“Well,” people would argue, “the Bible refers to ‘being on fire’ for the Lord, therefore being ‘Hot’ is good.” Ummm, no. That dog won’t hunt, Monseigneur. All we have to do is look at Luke’s story of Lazarus and the Rich Man – Hot and Cold have very clear meanings there and Hot ain’t exactly seen in a positive light. Moreover, we could simply read the rest of Revelation and see that Hot is kinda painted in a negative light throughout this piece!
Or, we could do what good theologians and Bible scholars do and consider the cultural context. It was clear that Laodicea couldn’t get either hot or cold water because they were too far from the mountains for the water to stay cold, and too far from Hierapolis for the waters from its hot-springs to stay warm and consider that both are good and that both are desirable. We could consider that hot and cold drinks were provided at festivals in those days but never lukewarm water. We could consider that Greco-Roman culture had an affinity for baths and also for refreshment and so hot and cold water both had very positive, but different roles. We could consider our own lives and recognize that most of us take hot showers and like cold drinks on a hot day. We could imagine that living in an age before refrigeration might give us a slightly different perspective on cold water. We could do all those things and recognize that John isn’t not talking about a theological continuum from theological antipathy to apathy to vibrancy, but Jesus and John are merely making an allusion to the fact that the Laodiceans knew how frustrating it was to have a constant supply of water that wasn’t what you wanted because you either had to then heat it up or cool it down before it was useful. The water was there but it wasn’t good for anything!
That seems to fit the data doesn’t it? So why don’t we go with that theory?
Or consider that the theory that “lukewarmness is worse than open hostility” necessarily rests on the idea that the Laodiceans are lost. But where’s the evidence for that? The “Open the Door” passage? Dr. Wallace of Dallas Theological Seminary explodes that theory in his Greek Grammar Beyond the Basics, demonstrating conclusively that the Laodiceans weren’t lost, unsaved souls, but were, indeed, Lukewarm Christians…but Christians, nonetheless.
Why Do We Believe the Unbelievable?
So, these cause two questions to emerge. First, why does this interpretation persist when there is neither a textual, Biblical theological, or historical/ archaeological/ cultural basis for it? Second, why do we let it affect our systematic theology? Well, the second question is simple: all of our Biblical interpretations affect and influence our systematics – they can’t not. And the more common an interpretation is, and the more ingrained it is in our theological imaginary[3], and the more that our theology preferences that particular interpretation and uses it as a proof-text, the more it will shape our theology and particularly our practice. The first question may be a little more precarious to answer, but I think there is a generally trustworthy answer (or pair of answers). We persist in this interpretation (namely that Jesus would rather we be raging atheists or persecutors than Lukewarm Christians) because either we accept it uncritically and/ or because “it preaches”.
Sadly, a lot of things are accepted and preached simply because they preach well. But rhetorical power is not a test of truth. Sure, I get it – I get the allure of shocking your blue-hairs and your football-dads out of complacency by saying Jesus would rather you were an earnest atheist or even an enemy of God than an apathetic friend. You can remind people of how much Paul did for the Church. You can say how lukewarmness threatens your eternal soul because it prevents you from realizing your lost estate.
But all this is circular reasoning. We affirm the rhetorical/ theological point (that Jesus prefers enemies to pseudo-friends) by appealing to the text. But the text doesn’t actually say that. The text simply prefers hotness and coldness to lukewarmness. But while tepidity is given a definition (which seems to be apathy to the things of God manifests in reliance upon worldly wealth (or vice-versa)); we have no definition at all of what hotness and coldness are – other than that they are both desirable.
But, since this concept has become so deeply intertwined with Protestant and Evangelical homiletics and systematics it now backfeeds into our hermeneutics. We use our systematics to inform our hermeneutics to interpret the text that gives us the basis of the theological principle in the first place!
In other words, the only way to substantiate that Jesus would rather that you were openly hostile to the faith than to be an apathetic Christian is to appeal to the text in Revelation 3. But you need the theological point to substantiate the interpretation of Revelation 3, because that is not a legitimate interpretation of the text itself. You must appeal to systematics to draw the interpretation of Revelation 3 that says that Jesus prefers pagans to pseudo-saints, but you can’t get that systematic point from any other text in the Bible! It’s just a big circle. So, let’s step out of it.
Real World Implications
Theology has consequences. This theological principle has consequences. I could give you a whole series of negative implications and applications that this thesis has in our theology and practice, and perhaps in the future I’ll return to this topic in a more substantial way and we can discuss more completely the various implications. But, for today, I think one will suffice.
What do we do with our children? What do we do with our children when we have, underlying all our theology, the idea that God prefers active enemies to apathetic friends? Does that NOT affect our theology? Does that NOT affect our practice? I don’t believe that our actions and beliefs are all that different. We’ll accommodate one to suit the other – and typically we’ll make the accommodation to make our lives easier and less conflicted.
So, let’s consider an example. John and Jane Johnson have a son, Jack, who fights with them every week, refusing to go to church. HE hates it. It’s boring. He throws a fit every time. John and Jane decide that they won’t force Jack to go to church because they would rather that he finds out that the world is rough and he’ll come to want Christ after he gets a mouthful of reality and learns how bitter it is…because the LAST thing they want to do is embitter their child against the gospel! Because, as they well know, if they force Jack to go to church and sit quietly and politely he might just fake it and learn to be a hypocrite; whereas, if he goes his own way and is an honest pagan, God can reach him with the Holy Spirit, because God can’t reach hypocrites. They cannot force their son to be a Pharisee!
Underneath all this is a theology that God can reach his enemies more easily than his friends. Which flies in the face of the entire history of the Church, minus the Conversionistic 19th and 20th Centuries in North America and Europe. But other than 2 centuries in the Anglophone West, Churches have been places where people are discipled into the faith over time.
Yes, the Acts of the Apostles have dramatic pictures of people coming to faith in crisis moments where they are confronted with the gospel. And we should not stop witnessing to people in random encounters. But to presuppose that that’s normative not only to the Apostolic Age, but should be normative NOW, is an unsustainable leap that doesn’t match the Church’s 2,000 year history of catechizing children and people interested (but not fully committed to the faith).
All over the world people are recognizing that, oftentimes, discipleship happens for years even decades before true conversion is effected. Historically, catechesis is the norm and “confrontational” evangelism is the outlier. But John and Jane don’t read historical theology. They just want to stop fighting with their son. And the easiest way to avoid conflict with a child is to surrender…like cowards do. And cowards always have an excuse – and the idea that it’s actually for Jack’s spiritual good to not be in church as an unbeliever and it’s better for him to stop going to church and continue living a godless life is cowardly, self-serving, deadly, and may cost their son his salvation.
Friends, think of how nonsensical it is. Does God really prefer people to be blasphemous murderers than people who sit in church apathetically? Really? If you believe that you need to have your head examined. God hates godlessness and ungodliness.
What we’re saying is that God prefers sinfulness to dutiful, but emotionless, obedience. Emotionless obedience isn’t as good as zeal, but it’s better than hateful disobedience, is it not? Tell me what you’d prefer in your home? I’m guessing you’d prefer your kids to be apathetically obedient to being hateful and defiant?
We need to fix our soteriology and our ecclesiology. We need to recognize that having kids in church hearing the gospel, hearing teaching, practicing in worship, giving their wealth, reciting creeds, getting used to the rhythms and paces of liturgies, learning to hold sacred things sacred, becoming part of a community that loves what is good and hates what is evil is a good thing. Of course, it’s no guarantee of their salvation; but nobody’s saying that (well, nobody in the Protestant and especially Evangelical camps). But the tragedy is that we don’t force our kids to sit through sermons, bible teaching, to learn creeds, to get used to liturgical rhythms, to hold the sacred as sacred, to love what’s good and hate what’s evil because we don’t want those things either. American Christianity has become pop-theology and hip-music, largely without depth, largely without commitment, rarely with accountability. We are not challenged to love the good and hate the evil, but instead we’re given political lectures, and self-help mantras. We don’t want to fight with our kids over holding these things sacred because, largely, we don’t either. We’re lukewarm and don’t know it, so we excuse the apathy and antipathy of children saying that it’s better for them to have nothing to do with Christ than to be lukewarm because we’re so lukewarm we don’t insist on our children learning and practicing the faith! And isn’t it ironic…donchya think?
Pastors and Parishioners are creating lukewarm pulpits and lukewarm pews and so lukewarm Christians come up with excuses to validate their lukewarmness. Pastors use the popular interpretation of Revelation 3 to try to shake up their flock to get zealous and repent! Lazy and cowardly Christians use this passage as an excuse to not fight the good fight of the faith as far as their kids go. Churches, use the principle that lukewarm Christianity is worse than enmity with God to justify all kinds of poor praxis with the all controlling mantra that things must be “authentic”. Ironically, the passage pastors use for shock value is the passage people use to justify, ironically, even more lukewarmness!
A Call to Action
So, although it should be obvious, here’s my call to action: get deeply involved in your local fellowship; learn the Bible; serve; disciple others and be discipled; worship Christ; celebrate the sacraments; be zealous and repent. If your church is all pop-psychology and politics, try to get it focused on the gospel; talk to your pastor and/ or elders; fight for godliness. If they are unable or unwilling to be hot or cold but remain lukewarm: leave. If you have kids, get them to a church where they will actually be in church. Don’t pretend you’ll die for Christ if you won’t fight with you 11 year old.
A Concluding Image
Lastly, consider this. Imagine two children: Jack Johnson (remember him?) and Tommy Thompson. Jack’s parents, John and Jane, went to a pop-psychology/ politics/ cool-kids church on Sundays (well most Sundays…well…some Sundays) where their kids went to kids’ church and got a 5-minute lesson and did crafts. Jack, when he aged-out of the system at 15, went to real church for a few months and then started fighting because it was boring and the Johnsons decided to let him sleep in and play video games. Tommy, on the other hand, went to a church 2 times a week, where the pastor taught the Bible carefully for 30 minutes on Sunday and an hour on Wednesday.
By the time Tommy is 18, he’ll have heard about 7,500 hours of solid Bible teaching and participated in communion hundreds if not thousands of times. He will have recited the Nicene or Apostle’s creed hundreds of times. He will have watched his parents give money to the church thousands of times. He would have seen from the time he was a baby that Christ and the Church are the highest priority.
By the time Jack is 18 he’ll have heard maybe 100 hours…MAYBE…of Bible teaching; with no creedal recitation, no sacramental participation, no witnessing of giving, and no prioritization.
Which child is more likely to know, understand, believe, and follow the faith? All things being equal, you’d be a fool to not think Tommy’s in better shape.
I grant that this concluding image has a lot to more to do with Ecclesiology than the topic of the interpretation of the passage in Revelation 3:15,6. But these are not unrelated concepts. Churches have gotten soft on theology and serious worship because they don’t want people “going through the motions” which is linked with “inauthenticity” and therefore “lukewarmness”. Parents, even zealous parents, can give in and permit their children to live like pagans for fear (real or imagined) that if they’re forced to practice the faith that that will engender resentment (it might) or hypocrisy (it might) and that open enmity with God is preferable to lukewarm faith (it is most certainly not)!
Conversion is a process, despite justification being a punctiliar crisis event. Yes, people are saved “in a moment” but the process leading up to that moment and building from that moment is, indeed a process. Removing all the practices that allow that process to be effective (removing serious worship and catechism) for the sake of being “authentic” is bad Soteriology, and bad Ecclesiology, based on bad Theology and Pneumatology.
Much more could be said about this, but suffice to say that bad theology has consequences. The popular interpretation of Revelation 3:15,6 is a bad one, that leads to bad theology, that has tragic consequences.
[1] The great theologue Katy Perry notices that some people, while not lukewarm are hot, then cold…yes…then no.
[2] LXX is the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Old Testament.
[3] That’s not a typo. A theological “imaginary” is the theological counterpart to the concept of a “social imaginary”. In essence a theological imaginary is the set of ideas, concepts, symbols, that create our “idea” or “image” of theology. It’s similar to “worldview” but operates at a more sub- and unconscious level.
Hungarian Homosexuality
Listen to it here!
Cybele and the Castrati
Listen to it here!
So, a funny thing happened on the way to our nation becoming a place of insanity. We decided that we could look through literary history and find evidences of Transgenderism everywhere – even where it wasn’t, but that’s another story. Our intellectual elites have been scouring ancient mythologies to find “evidence” that everyone recognized gender fluidity back in the day.
It’s true that there have been people who suffer from gender dysphoria for as long as people have been around – the evidence for that seems pretty clear. And the Trans-Rights movement has been keen to catch on to this logically fallacious line of reasoning that states that since there have always been Trans people that Transgenderism must be inherent and therefore good.
Now, I’m not going to dive into why the above line of reasoning is simply a string of non-sequiturs. It is, and that’s important to notice, but that’s not where I want to focus right now. What I want to focus on is that the Trans-movement’s argument from antiquity is a pretty bad one. It’s bad for a whole host of reasons, the poor logic notwithstanding.
The poor argumentation I want us to critique is the anthropological argument. Because the argument from antiquity presupposes what it’s trying to prove – that embracing gender dysphoria will lead to greater human flourishing. Yet, we have evidence that this isn’t the case. Indeed, one of the best evidences that “Gender Reassignment Surgery” in the ancient world didn’t work is that people in the ancient world knew it didn’t work!
Catullus, the Roman poet tells the story of Attis, a young Phrygian (Modern Day Turkey) who, in a mad frenzy induced by the goddess Cybele castrated himself so that he could serve her in women’s clothes as a “galli” – castrated male dressed in women’s clothing. The poem is full of pathos and pain and sorrow and regret.
It’s worth reading (even in English it is excellent). It’s nearly 100 lines in tight-packed Latin, so I’m not going to post the whole poem, but you can read it here in English and Latin. But when we read this ancient masterpiece, we read of nothing but madness, “abhorrence of love”, regret, and the vindictiveness and cruelty of the goddess. Cybele doesn’t love her Galli. They are slaves – mutilated slaves…mutilated slaves who must serve a goddess for whom they cast aside their identity becoming castrati.
The whole poem is worth reading, because, even in English it is excellent. Here’s an excerpt from Eli Siegel’s translation:
After soft slumber then, and the being freed from strong madness,
As soon as Attis himself in his heart looked at what he had done,
And saw with clear mind what he had lost,
And where he was,
With mind much in motion,
He ran back to the waves.
There, tears running down from his eyes,
She looked upon the empty seas,
And thus piteously spoke to her country,
In a voice having tears.
“O my country, that gave me life!
O my country that gave me birth—
Whom I leave, being a wretch,
As servants who run away leave their masters.
I have taken my foot to the forests of Ida,
There to live with snows and the frozen hiding places of beasts,
And to visit, in my frenzy, all their hidden living places.
Where then, in what part of the world, do I justly see you to be,
O my own land?
These eyeballs of mine, unbidden, long to gaze at you, while, for a time, my mind is without uncontrol and wildness.
Shall I, taken from my own home, be carried far away into these forests?—shall I be away from my country, what I possess, my friends, parents?
Shall I be absent from the market, the place for wrestling, the racecourse, playground?
Heart, sad heart, again, again, you must tell your sadness.
For what way was there a human could be which I could not be?
For me now to be a woman—I who was a lad, then a youth, a boy, the flower of the playground!
I was once the glory of the palaestra;
I knew crowded doorways;
Thresholds were warm for me;
There were flowery garlands for me to adorn my house with when, at sunrise, I left my sleeping place.
What shall I now be called?
A maidservant of the gods,
An attendant of Cybele?
Is it for me to be a Maenad, part of myself, a man in barrenness?
I, shall I live in icy, snowy regions of verdant Ida,
Pass my life beneath Phrygian high peaks,
In the company of the hind whose home is the woods,
Along with the boar who goes up and down the forest?
Now, now what I did makes me sorrowful,
Now, now, I wish that it hadn’t occurred.”
It’s important to remember, by the way, that it’s not as though the Romans were opposed to degrading human nature – nor were they all about human flourishing. Well, to be fair, they cared about flourishing if you were a wealthy citizen, but they didn’t really care much about slaves or non-citizens. The pagan worship of Catallus’ day could be horrific. And Catullus, like many famous Romans in that era, unabashedly engaged in homosexual acts, as well as heterosexual. He was from a world of prostitutes, and slavery, and the rape of young boys, and orgies, and vomitoria, and indulgence and physical degradation of all kinds. So, let’s not think that Catullus is some shrinking violet, or some iteration of the Straight, White, Christian Male. Catullus writes about the madness of self-mutilation in service to a deity because this was a real thing that really happened – and sexual mutilation was not limited to paganism, either. Catullus writes about this hoping to speak to his fellow Romans about the madness and regret and shame and anger and cruelty of such a religion, and also about what is entailed in the worldview of such a religion.
And modern statistics would seem to bear out the sorrows of young Attis. According to one longitudinal study in Sweden, post-op patients/ victims of gender reassignment surgery are so deeply unhappy that their suicide rate is nearly 20 times that of comparable peers. While we may never know ALL the causes of gender dysphoria, we are aware of some. We know that those who suffer from gender dysphoria have a good likelihood to have suffered severe child abuse. My guess is that the vast majority of those suffering from gender dysphoria was severely abused as children, or were bullied and abused and sought a new identity to fit in. Whether there are genetic causes or neurological substrata is unknown. In 2019 an article was published claiming to have identified brain differences in male-to-female transgender people, in autopsies, but the Gliske article was retracted, and so it seems that environment is the only cause for which we can reliably point to some kind of antecedent predictor.
In other words, there may be a “transgender gene”, but it has yet to be found. There may be a brain abnormality that leads to gender dysphoria, but it has yet to be identified. What we can say confidently is that children who are abused, and especially sexually abused, seem to be particularly more susceptible to developing gender dysphoria. Of course, it isn’t ALWAYS sexual abuse that’s a predictor. Consider also the parents cheering on their little boys when they say they are confused or they wish they were a girl, or vice-versa. These parents are not, in any way, helping their children. No, they’re indulging in Munchhausen Syndrome by Proxy, gaining Woke-creds at the expense of their children’s psycho-spiritual trauma and ought to have their children taken from them, and then they ought to be put in jail for child abuse.
People suffering from gender dysphoria are really truly suffering. The confusion and the pain that must exist for people who constantly feel like they are in the wrong body must be unbearable. And these people need compassion, and mercy, and therapy, and medication (when appropriate). But most of all they need Christ.
Catullus knew that when young men castrate themselves their experience is born out of a madness and folly that’s followed by regret. These miserable servants of Cybele lived a life of regret. But there is no regret from the goddess. She wishes only to keep her property, or prey if you prefer. Those who seek to escape out of their regret are not permitted to do so…seemingly out of nothing more complex than petulance and spite. In the story of Attis we read how the vindictive goddess looses a lion to drive the mutilated man back to being a Maenad:
Cybele, loosening the tight yoke of her lions,
And urging on that foe of a crowd of living beings, a foe eager to the left,
Spoke in this way:
“Come now,” says she, “come, go fiercely, let madness hunt him from here, make him, by the coming upon him of madness, take himself to the forest again—he who would be too free and get away from my rule.
Come, lash in back with your tail, endure your whipping yourselves, let all about sound with your high, thick roar, shake your bright mane fiercely on your thick neck.”
So speaks Cybele in anger, and, with her hand, makes the yoke easy.
The monster enlivens his courage,
Rouses himself to a fury in himself.
He speeds away, he roars.
With foot swiftly covering the ground, he breaks brushwood.
But when he came to where the water stretched from the shore gleaming in whiteness,
And saw gentle Attis by the flat spaces of the sea,
He rushed at him.
Attis runs with mad energy into the woods.
He was a handmaid in these woods all his life.
Goddess, Cybele, great goddess, lady of Dindymus, let all thy fury be far from where I am, O my queen.
Let it be others you drive into frenzy, others you drive into madness.
The poetry is full of powerful, pathetic imagery. Notice the descriptions, the repetition of madness, the jealous and vindictive nature of Cybele, the cruelty of her and the lion, these are all contrasted with “gentle Attis”. The Latin here is “teneram” which has a wide range of meaning, it means soft, gentle, sensitive, delicate, but also effeminate, feminine, or even youthful and immature. Much of the poem’s Latin genius is built around the use of feminine terms to describe the man Attis. The goddess is cruel, vicious, demanding, imperious, impetuous, and vengeful. Yet she’s a woman. She’s the wild woman, like Artemis, who wanders the woods with a lion at her heels. But she’s also a fertility goddess (I mean, they were all kinda fertility deities, amiright!). But in Cybele we see what I think Lewis would have called the worship of the Infernal Venus.[1]
In one version of the myth (which seems to be what Catullus is drawing from), even more tragically, Attis was on the eve of marriage when Cybele revealed herself to him and drove him into madness. The poem itself doesn’t mention a loved one, but there is certainly the hope of a future as a man that was taken from him. In some versions Attis was made a god, or at least the consort of Cybele. But what Cybele represents, at least in this poem, is the dangerousness and cruelty of the wild-woman who wants to defy gender roles. The Greek pantheon and mythos, which seems to be the basis of Catullus’ conception of Cybele, had no lack of stories about women who defy typical roles, obviously there’s Artemis, but also Athena, we have Atalanta, and the Amazons – and that’s just the “A”s!
But what the poem is driving at here is that Cybele is not content to simply play the boy, she wants boys to play the girl! She could be off, prowling the woods with her lion, living the virginal life of a wood-goddess. But she’s not content to do so. She demands that others cut off their ties to normal sexuality. Perhaps, an undercurrent is that the wood-goddess, rejecting her role as magna mater, must efface all other hints of normal sexuality and fertility. She won’t be the fertility goddess and she won’t have any fertility around her. Cybele, at least in this poem, is rejecting, not just society, but biology, and the basic anthropological impulse to have sex and procreate – to create and cultivate and civilize. Cybele is a Petra Pan, who makes her Neverland a Hellscape for her lost boys.
And things haven’t changed. The gods and goddesses of the Transgender Normalization Cult are cruel, they demand people be what they cannot be, and must mutilate themselves in attempts to be so. The data are clear that “gender reassignment” (a fairy-tale term if ever there was one) doesn’t work. It leads to increased suicide rates.
It is astonishing to me that psychiatrists and doctors who promote these mutilations haven’t had their licenses revoked, as they are clearly in violation of the Hippocratic oath. Let me ask you – let’s say you’re a parent and your child is suffering from thinking he’s a dog. He doesn’t feel like a human, he feels like a dog and insists you call him Fido and wants to eat out of a bowl and be put on a leash – would you do it? Let’s say you take him to a mental health specialist and they suggest he have “species reassignment surgery”. He’ll have hair implants, a caudal prosthesis (he’ll be given a tail), his tongue will be lengthened, and every effort will be made to make him look as much like a biped with a flat face can be made to look like a quadruped with a snout. And the shrink says, oh also there is an increased risk of suicide for post-op patients.
Ummmmmmmmmmmmmmmm…no. How much of an increased risk of suicide are you comfortable with? 0%? Cause I’d be at 0%. But you play the game. Just tell me when the increased risk of suicide gets too high: 10%; 20%; 30%; 40%; 50%; 60%; 70%; 80%; 90%; 100%...surely you got there…but apparently there are some people who aren’t there yet, because kids are getting hormone “therapies” (what an obnoxious lie that term is), and the risk of suicide is MUCH higher. How much higher? 200%? 500%? 1,000%?! Nope 2,000%.
No one but a criminal would do anything to anyone that led to a 2,000% increase in suicidality. Yet this is what our gender-specialists are advocating!
Now, I know…I know that I haven’t read all the literature on why gender dysphoria is inherent and why I need to get on the child-mutilation bandwagon. But, I’m not particularly interested in reading it. Sure, some who like to appeal to the Liberal Myth of the Informed Reader are going to dismiss my arguments, out of hand, because I’m not hip to every single piece of psycho-babble printed by these ghouls. But the thing is, you don’t need to be a clinician to know that boys have penes and girls have vaginae, and no amount of cosmetic surgery is going to change every single twist of DNA in your body.
People who suffer from gender dysphoria need psychological and psychiatric help, as well as a large dose of the Word of God, and the New Birth in Christ, which is the only means of human flourishing. The fig leaves of transvestism and the fig-felling of mutilation won’t fix problems – they will only exacerbate them. Finding wholeness, acceptance, purpose, meaning, and healing in Christ will. These people need medication not mutilation; they need compassion not castration.
America needs to reject Cybele; men need to stop saying “yes” to the dress, and we need to return to reality, to Nature, and to Nature’s God.
[1] The Roman worship of Cybele revolved more around her aspect as magna mater, or the great mother. It seems that by the time the Romans adopted her as a patroness (and apparently many patrician families regarded her as such) her image had been scrubbed a bit and the “galli” wiped out of the worship as being particularly unroman. Thus, knowing exactly what source material Catullus was drawing from and what version of the myth he’s using is pretty much impossible. Cybele was an old goddess, which may have been a revamping of an even older one. The oldest Anatolian pantheon seemed to primarily be Cybele herself, often riding on big-cats, standing on two of them. She was the mother goddess, and the nature goddess. The Hittite culture brought in many other deities, but it seems by the time of Greek colonization Cybele was back. The Greeks, especially the Ephesians, syncretized Cybele and Artemis, making them both the wild-virgin huntresses “Artemis Archeress”. The Romans preferred Cybele to be the mother again, the mother even of Jupiter! While the Romans didn’t make her goddess of hearth and home, she was still a fertility deity and the mother of cities (since she was Aeneas’ mommy too, per Virgil). All this to say that the mythology of Cybele was constantly changing and this “mother” was sometimes a virgin, sometimes athwart a big cat, sometimes a huntress – she was what each culture wanted her to be. Catullus draws however, on the earlier idea, perhaps a combination of the Anatolian and Greek image – she’s a wild-woman, who can drive men mad, but who has no interest in men as men. She is, in Catullus’ mind, not simply a wild woman, but a dangerous one.