How to Survive a Cultural Crisis

Public opinion appears to be changing about same-sex marriage, as are the nation's laws. Of course this change is just one in a larger constellation. America's views on family, love, sexuality generally, tolerance, God, and so much more seems to be pushing in directions that put Bible-believing Christians on the defensive.

It's easy to feel like we've become the new "moral outlaws," to use Al Mohler's phrase. Standing up for historic Christian principles will increasingly get you in trouble socially and maybe economically, perhaps one day also criminally. It's ironic that Christians are told not to impose their views on others, even as the threat of job loss or other penalties loom over Christians for not toeing the new party line.

In all this, Christians are tempted to become panicked or to speak as alarmists. But to the extent we do, to that same extent we show we've embraced an unbiblical and nominal Christianity.

Here, then, are seven principles for surviving the very real cultural shifts we're presently enduring.

1. Remember that churches exist to work for supernatural change.

 

The whole Christian faith is based on the idea that God takes people who are spiritually dead and gives them new life. Whenever we evangelize, we are evangelizing the cemetery.

There's never been a time or a culture when it was natural to repent of your sins. That culture doesn't exist, it hasn't existed, it never will exist. Christians, churches, and pastors especially must know deep in their bones that we've always been about a work that's supernatural.     Continue at Mark Dever

Attorney General Sues Florist for Refusing to Provide Flowers for a Same-Sex Wedding

Attorney General Bob Ferguson of Washington State is suing Arlene’s Flowers & Gifts for refusing to provide flowers for a same-sex wedding. The owner of the flower shop, Barronelle Stutzman, says she is a Christian and cannot in good conscience participate in a same-sex wedding ceremony. Nevertheless, Attorney General Ferguson says the refusal is illegal and told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer the following:

As Attorney General, it is my job to enforce the laws of the state of Washington. Under the Consumer Protection Act, it is unlawful to discriminate against customers based on sexual orientation. If a business provides a product or service to opposite-sex couples for their weddings, then it must provide same sex couples the same product or service.

So Ferguson is suing to fine Arlene’s Flowers & Gifts for every infraction of Washington’s Consumer Protection Act. It would cost the company $2,000 per infraction. That means that, if enough gay couples were refused service, Arlene’s Flowers & Gifts could go out of business.

Robert Ingersol and Curt Freed are the gay couple in question, and they had been customers of Stutzman for over ten years. So the florist wasn’t refusing service to gay people in general. The florist simply didn’t want to participate in a same-sex ceremony. She describes what happened when Ingersol asked for her to provide flowers for his wedding:

He said he decided to get married and before he got through I grabbed his hand and said, ‘I am sorry. I can’t do your wedding because of my relationship with Jesus Christ.’ We hugged each other and he left, and I assumed it was the end of the story.   Continue at Denny Burk

Five Gay Marriage Myths

Myth #1: Marriage is fundamentally a voluntary union of persons in a committed relationship

We tend to think of language as something posterior to thought. A thought comes into your mind and then you find the right words to express it. Anthropologists and neuroscientists are currently doing some fascinating work on the relationship between thought and speech and have discovered that things are a little more complicated. Speech does not merely proceed from our thoughts like a one-way street. Rather, researchers have been finding that there is also traffic flowing in the other direction: how we speak affects how we think about the world on a level that our conscious minds may never even be aware. As psychologist Lera Boroditsky put it in a Wall Street Journal article summarizing some of this research, “the structures in languages (without our knowledge or consent) shape the very thoughts we wish to express”.

There are fascinating examples of this from all over the world, but the phenomenon is just as evident close to home. In the last forty years, we’ve seen how the way people speak about unborn children (i.e., calling them “foetuses” or “lumps of tissue” instead of babies) has had an unconscious effect on how so many people think about the ethics of abortion. Or again, how we think about homosexuality has been enormously influenced by pairing homosexuality with words that already had a positive semantic range, such as gay. In David Kupelian book The Marketing of Evil, he showed that these and many other language shifts did not just happen, but arose out of a deliberate strategy for changing the way Westerners perceive certain key issues.   Continue at Robin Phillips

Watching Pornography Increases Support for Adultery and Same-Sex Marriage

The Story: New scholarly analysis suggests that the more exposure heterosexual men have to pornography, the more likely they are to support adultery, pre-marital sex, and same-sex marriage.

The Background: "Our study suggests that the more heterosexual men, especially less educated heterosexual men, watch pornography, the more supportive they become of same-sex marriage," Indiana University assistant professor and study co-author Paul Wright told the Washington Examiner.

"If people think individuals should be able to decide for themselves whether to have same-sex sex, they will also think that individuals should be able to decide for themselves whether to get married to a partner of the same-sex," Wright added. "Since a portion of individuals' sexual attitudes come from the media they consume, it makes sense that pornography viewers would have more positive attitudes towards same-sex marriage." 

In a related study published in the American Journal of Media Psychology, Wright found that males who have recently consumed Internet pornography are more likely to approve of premarital and extramarital sex. 

This was the case even after for controlling for the contribution of age, ethnicity, and religiosity.  Continue at Joe Carter

The Pope on Gender and the end of Western Civilization

Every year in December, the Pope delivers an address to the Roman Curia. The annual speech has been dubbed “The State of the Union” for the Roman Catholic Church. The Pope gave this year’s address earlier today, and it is already making waves—for all the right reasons.   

News reports and punditry have focused most of their attention on the speech’s implications for gay marriage—namely that the Pope opposes same-sex unions of any kind. Nevertheless, the focus on the legal question of gay marriage is a rather shallow analysis of the speech. Make no mistake. The Pope’s words are nothing less than a broadside against any notion of same-sex marriage. But what he said actually goes much deeper than that.

He argues that there is a “crisis” threatening the very foundations of the family in the western world. The crisis is not merely about a particular social construct, but about what it means to be “authentically human.” The family is in crisis because mankind in the western world has forgotten what it means to be created in the image of God as male and female. The Pope takes on not merely homosexual marriage, but the entire foundation of modern gender theory—the idea that gender is something that you choose, not something that you are. I think it’s worth quoting him at length on this point:   Continue at Denny Burk

Get Ready for Christians Going to Jail

Twenty-three years ago when I was going to jail for civil disobedience, a pastor told me he believed Christians shouldn’t go to jail. I told him I thought the day would come when he would go to jail, not for refusing to go along with abortion, but for refusing to go along with homosexuality. I said the courts would demand that his church not discriminate against homosexuals when hiring teachers for their church school. And eventually they would tell him he must not speak against homosexuality from the pulpit, because that would be hate speech. That seemed far-fetched to many at the time. To show how far we've come since then, read John Piper’s blog posted in July:

Some Foreseen Effects of Legalizing So-Called Same Sex Marriage

When I preached on the implications of the legalizing of so-called same sex marriage I said, “Pretending that [marriage] can exist between people of the same sex will send ripple effects of dysfunction and destruction in every direction, most of which are now unforeseen.”

Here is an example you may not have foreseen. There are hundreds of others on the way.

It has been reported that in the case of Elane Photography v. Willock (NM Ct. App., May 31, 2012) a New Mexico state appeals court held that a photography firm's refusal to provide its services to photograph a same-sex commitment ceremony violates the New Mexico Human Rights Act's prohibition on discrimination in public accommodations on the basis of sexual orientation.   Continue at EPM

“Let Marriage Be Held in Honor” — Thinking Biblically About So-Called Same-Sex Marriage

Hebrews 13:1–6,

Let brotherly love continue. ² Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for thereby some have entertained angels unawares. ³ Remember those who are in prison, as though in prison with them, and those who are mistreated, since you also are in the body. ⁴ Let marriage be held in honor among all, and let the marriage bed be undefiled, for God will judge the sexually immoral and adulterous. ⁵ Keep your life free from love of money, and be content with what you have, for he has said, “I will never leave you nor forsake you.” ⁶ So we can confidently say, “The Lord is my helper; I will not fear; what can man do to me?”

Today’s message is built around eight points designed to give a biblical vision of marriage in relation to homosexuality, and in relation to the proposed Marriage Amendment in Minnesota. I asked that Hebrews 13:1–6 be read not because I will give an exposition of it, but to highlight that one phrase in verse 4: “Let marriage be held in honor among all.” That is what I hope to advance, for the glory God and for your guidance and your good.

1. Marriage is created and defined by God in the Scriptures as the sexual and covenantal union of a man and a woman in life-long allegiance to each other alone, as husband and wife, with a view to displaying Christ’s covenant relationship to his blood-bought church.

 

This is seen most clearly from four passages where these truths are woven together.

1. Genesis 1:27–28

Genesis 1:27–28: “God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. ²⁸ And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth.”

2. Genesis 2:23–24

And then God linked his design in manhood and womanhood with marriage in Genesis 2:23–24. When the woman is created from his side, the man exclaims: “This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man.” ²⁴ Therefore, a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.” 

In other words, God created man male and female so that there might be a one-flesh sexual union and covenantal cleaving with a view to multiplying the human race, and displaying God’s covenant with his people, and eventually Christ's covenant with his church.   Continue at John Piper

Liberal Democrat David Blankenhorn: Protecting Marriage Protects Children

This is an article from 2008 that appeared in the liberal Los Angeles Times. (H/T Dina)

Excerpt:

I’m a liberal Democrat. And I do not favor same-sex marriage. Do those positions sound contradictory? To me, they fit together.

[...]Marriage as a human institution is constantly evolving, and many of its features vary across groups and cultures. But there is one constant. In all societies, marriage shapes the rights and obligations of parenthood. Among us humans, the scholars report, marriage is not primarily a license to have sex. Nor is it primarily a license to receive benefits or social recognition. It is primarily a license to have children.

In this sense, marriage is a gift that society bestows on its next generation. Marriage (and only marriage) unites the three core dimensions of parenthood — biological, social and legal — into one pro-child form: the married couple. Marriage says to a child: The man and the woman whose sexual union made you will also be there to love and raise you. Marriage says to society as a whole: For every child born, there is a recognized mother and a father, accountable to the child and to each other.   Continue at Wintery Knight

Should We Oppose Same-Sex Marriage?

I appreciate the responses to my previous posts on this issue and, after reading some of the questions, thought somewhat pressed to write this last one. OK, so we know what Christian marriage is. We preach that, teach it, and expect believers to embrace Scripture’s instructions regarding sexual conduct, although we are still sinners who must continually repent, trust in Christ, and receive his pardon. Got it. But what about the public argument?

As I said in the last one, we aren’t authorized to speak in God’s name where he hasn’t spoken, but we are commanded to do so wherever he has. This is where it gets dicier, though. I’d like to frame my response, first off, in terms of two extremes that we have to avoid:

1. Treating references to homosexuality in the Old Testament as either irrelevant or directly applicable to the current question.

You see this in public debates of the issue, where extremists on both sides talk over (and past) each other. One thing they often share in common is interest in quoting passages from the Old Testament on the question. Then the person on the left reminds us that the sanction mentioned is stoning. “Do you want to stone gays?”, one shouts. “No, but I believe what the Bible says about homosexuality.” “Well, right next to that verse it says that you should stone disobedient children—Oh, and not eat pork, and not touch a woman who is having her period.” Bottom line: the skills of biblical interpretation are about equally as bad on both sides of the table. 

The statements in Leviticus are part of the Mosaic covenant. They pertain uniquely to the covenant that God made with Israel as a nation. The laws that governed every aspect of private and public life, cult and culture, were a unique episode in redemptive history. Their divine purpose cannot be rationalized in terms of sanitation, public health, or personal well-being. The whole focus was on God and his desire to separate Israel from the nations, preparing the way for the Messiah to come from her womb. Therefore, there is no more biblical warrant for stoning homosexuals today than there is for avoiding Scottish cuisine.   Continue at Michael Horton

Evolution’s End? President Obama Calls for Same-Sex Marriage

Is President Obama’s “evolution” on same sex marriage finally complete? His call for the legalization of same-sex marriage yesterday is an historic and tragic milestone. An incumbent President of the United States has now called for a transformation of civilization’s central institution. And yet, no observer of this president could be surprised. The arrival of this announcement was only a matter of time.

The White House confirmed this within hours of the President’s announcement. As The New York Times reported on May 10, “Advisers say now that Mr. Obama had intended since early this year to define his position sometime before Democrats nominate him for re-election in September.”

Previous news reports indicated that the 2012 platform for the Democratic Party would likely include a call for same-sex marriage. The pressure was on the White House, with the President caught in an awkward and embarrassing situation in which major figures on both sides of the controversy believed that his public position did not reflect his true convictions.

In December of 2010, the President told Jake Tapper of ABC News, “My feelings about this are constantly evolving.” Last October, he told George Stephanopoulos, “I’m still working on it.” As Dan Amira of New York magazine summarized that comment, “President Obama won’t say if he’ll stop pretending to oppose gay marriage before the election.”   Continue at Al Mohler

See also: A Solemn and Sincere Warning to President Obama

What I Hope We Remember After President Obama’s Public Support of Same-Sex Marriage

 

The Blasphemy of Barack Obama

It’s one thing to support gay marriage. It’s quite another for a professed Christian to bear false witness about Christ to make the point. That is why Joe Carter doesn’t mince words in an open letter to President Obama. Carter writes:

Implying that Jesus supports same-sex marriage—and there really is no other way to interpret your statement—is nothing short of blasphemous.

No, Mr. President, Jesus does not support same-sex marriage. Even a liberal Christian like you should not be able to make such an historically and theologically absurd claim with a straight face. The history of Christian thought on sexual ethics from the time of the stoning of Stephen to the Stonewall riots has been consistent that engaging in homosexual behavior is strictly and clearly prohibited by God’s Word…

To imply that Jesus would support same-sex marriage is contemptible. I realize it probably won’t hurt you come election time—too many Christians are more concerned about saving your seat in the Oval Office than they are with slander against our Savior—but I encourage you to repent of your blasphemy.   Continue at Denny Burk

Five Reasons Christians Should Continue to Oppose Gay Marriage

Yesterday, to no one’s surprise, President Obama revealed in an interview that after some “evolution” he has “concluded that for me personally it is important for me to go ahead and affirm that I think same sex couples should be able to get married.” This after the Vice-President came out last Sunday strongly in favor of gay marriage. Not coincidentally, the New York Times ran an article on Tuesday (an election day with a marriage amendment on one ballot) about how popular and not controversial gay television characters have become. In other words, everyone else has grown up so why don’t you? It can seem like the whole world is having a gay old time, with conservative Christians the only ones refusing to party.

The temptation, then, is for Christians go silent and give up the marriage fight: “It’s no use staying in this battle,” we think to ourselves. “We don’t have to change our personal position. We’ll keep speaking the truth and upholding the Bible in our churches, but getting worked up over gay marriage in the public square is counter productive. It’s a waste of time. It makes us look bad. It ruins our witness. And we’ve already lost. Time to throw in the towel.” I understand that temptation. It is an easier way. But I do not think it is the right way, the God glorifying way, or the way of love.

Here are five reasons Christians should continue to publicly and winsomely oppose bestowing the term and institution of marriage upon same-sex couples:

1. Every time the issue of gay marriage has been put to a vote by the people, the people have voted to uphold traditional marriage. Even in California. In fact, the amendment passed in North Carolina on Tuesday by a wider margin (61-39) than a similar measure passed six years ago in Virginia (57-42). The amendment passed in North Carolina, a swing state Obama carried in 2008, by 22 percentage points. We should not think that gay marriage in all the land is a foregone conclusion. To date 30 states have constitutionally defined marriage as between a man and a woman.   Continue at Kevin DeYoung

How to Win the Public on Homosexuality

President Obama's support for same-sex marriage is making headlines but not news. That's probably because he was in favor of same-sex marriage before he was against it and now in favor of it again. Campaigning in 1996 for state senate in Illinois, Obama said in a typed statement, "I favor legalizing same-sex marriages, and would fight efforts to prohibit such marriages." Running for statewide and then national office apparently changed his perspective, at least temporarily.

But there's another reason much of the country has shrugged off no-news headlines about the culmination of President Obama's "evolution": 50 percent of Americans now agree with him. In the last 16 years, support for same-sex marriage has nearly doubled. Gallup shows an increase in support from just 27 percent in 1996 to a high of 53 percent in 2011 and now 50 percent in 2012. Since 1996, Christians have debated homosexuality almost non-stop, and several Protestant denominations have reached the same conclusion as Obama. He told ABC's Robin Roberts today:

In the end the values that I care most deeply about, and [Michelle Obama] cares most deeply about, is how we treat other people and, you know, I, you know, we are both practicing Christians, and obviously this position may be considered to put us at odds with the views of others but, you know, when we think about our faith, the thing at root that we think about is, not only Christ sacrificing himself on our behalf, but it's also the Golden Rule, you know, treat others the way you would want to be treated.  Continue at Collin Hansen

SEE ALSO:

The President and Gay Marriage: The Truth at Last 

President Obama’s Scriptural Defense of Gay Marriage