A friend asks how the “mere Christendom” I envision would handle off-budget (i.e. private) gay “marriages.” Would they be illegal? A related issue, given that this mere Christendom is a ways off, has to do with what we should be looking for in the mean time. Evangelical Christians in North America do not have their …
Wrenching at My Head
If you don’t want somebody driving, then don’t give him the keys. If you gave somebody the keys, don’t complain about why and where they are driving. So Roy Hibbert of the Indiana Pacers was fined 75K for his use of a “homophobic” slur. What are we to make of this? The issue is not …
When He Walks Contrary to Us
Schizophrenia is no less schizophrenia if one of the voices happens to be talking sense. Hard schizophrenia is no less difficult if murderous insanity is linked up tight with weird, pathetic, and arbitrary scruples. In fact, if such an arbitary pattern is applied long enough, one may detect a method in the madness. I am …
Not Whether But Which, As I Keep Saying
It is not hard to understand the chaos and pandemonium going down around us if you keep certain inescapable realities in the forefront of your mind. Cornelius Van Til called it epistemological self-consciousness. C.S. Lewis referred to the idea this way in his great novel, That Hideous Strength. “I mean this,” said Dimble, answering the …
Broken Loose
We live in a bad neighborhood, meaning this world of ours, and so this means that we have two kinds of problems. The first would be, naturally, the bad dudes roaming the neighborhood. The second problem would be those endearing but exasperating naifs living inside the house with us, who persist in leaving invitational lights …
Hermeneutics As Sexual Identity
Something Orwell could tell us, were he here, is that the perversion of language is the mother of all subsequent perversions. In Politics and the English Language, he pointed to language that consisted “largely of euphemisms, question begging, and sheer cloudy vagueness.” Sheer cloudy vagueness. “My name is Justin Lee, and I’m a committed Christian …
A Fixed Given
One of the reasons conservative Christians are doing poorly in the public square debates over human sexuality is that the philosophical ground has shifted under our feet over the course of the last generation or two. We are trying to fight for a different conclusion from the same ground that our adversaries have defined for …
Our Gosnell Gulag
The Gosnell moment, for that is what it is, presents a clear opportunity for a real change of cultural heart. There are moments when some suppressed or ignored horror comes sharply into focus, and after that, it is not really possible to go back to the way it was before. This is what happened when …
Libido Dominandi
One of the things that the pomos get right, at least as far as their own intentions are concerned, is the observation that intellectual frameworks are always rationalizations that are there to help set up the subsequent power play. As a universal explanation, I think that this reveals more about what they are up to …
Lord of the Whole Shebang
What follows is a point that will have to be made again and again in the coming years, but that is no reason not to make it now, right? The reason evangelicals have been outmaneuvered on the politics of same-sex marriage is because modern evangelicalism is now structurally liberal, and they are structurally liberal because …