Home

  • Unlawful Conjugal Relations, and the Double Standard of Money and Islam

    The woes of a British publisher who was jailed in Dubai for "unlawful conjugal relations" (i.e., with someone she’s not married to) in public makes me think of the obvious: what if someone was jailed for this in a "Christian" country with a lot less money (and that’s most of them these days, compared to Dubai.)

    In my novel The Ten Weeks, just such a situation in a very Christian country is presented to two teenagers.  I’m confident that, given the hard time this woman is facing, she would gladly take what either of the teenagers took in the novel, which (in one case) was brutal enough.

    It used to be that conjugal relations outside of marriage were unlawful in our sociey, but that hasn’t been the case for a long time.  So why do our dogmatically tolerant Western societies flinch from the usual assault on Third World things they don’t like, i.e., U.N. sanctions, a diplomatic blitz, media whine, military intervention, etc.?

    To start with, the United Arab Emirates (of which Dubai is a part) is a very wealthy country, buying up Western assets, especially dollar denominated ones, with the flood of petrodollars that are coming in with current oil prices.  At that elevated wealth level, money not only talks, it yells.

    Beyond that, our elites have a strange blind spot for Muslim moral enforcement, especially in the U.K., as Melanie Phillips reminds us of.

    Between the two, this woman will have to do what everyone else does when in trouble abroad: get a good lawyer and hope for the best.

  • But What if the Food is Really Bad?

    The Brits have gone “over the top” again on political correctness, this time with food preferences:

    Toddlers who say “yuck” when given flavorful foreign food may be exhibiting racist behavior, a British government-sponsored organization says.

    The London-based National Children’s Bureau released a 366-page guide counseling adults on recognizing racist behavior in young children, The Telegraph reported Monday.

    The guide, titled Young Children and Racial Justice, warns adults that babies must also be included in the effort to eliminate racism because they have the ability to “recognize different people in their lives.”

    The bureau says to be aware of children who “react negatively to a culinary tradition other than their own by saying ‘yuck’.”

    First question: who determines what’s really “flavourful?”

    Like many of you, I’ve been there and done that eating a wide variety of foods and travelling to a wide variety of places.  My status as an omnivore has been tested with the fish stomachs in Tianjin, the chicken in Bryansk so dry you could only cut it with the grain, the reindeer in Kuopio, and the like.  How do these Children’s Bureau types know when infants are being fed really good food of any kind or “ethnic” food that the “ethnics” wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot (or three metre) pole?

    Beyond that, this dictum comes from a country that has probably the worst native cuisine in Europe, perhaps the world.  Any visitor to London knows how hard it is to find an “English” restaurant.  That not only speaks of the polyglot nature of London today, it also speaks of the fact that most white British people know their cuisine leaves a lot to be desired of.

    The Children’s Bureau is wasting its time solving problems that don’t exist.  What they’re doing is bullying people into their own mould, which is no different than they accuse their enemies of.

    Commenting on my own bullying problems growing up in Palm Beach, one visitor was amused that I would complain about problems with “Anglo-Saxons.”  Maybe that explains why I like my non-white friends so much.  I think that the Anglophone world is going crazy, and they’re doing it by substituting one form of groupthink coercion with another.

  • Doctrinal Fidelity and the Church of God

    I’ve noticed that Administrative Bishop Bill Isaacs, in his excellent series on the upcoming General Assembly agenda of the Church of God, has not reached Item 15 on Doctrinal Fidelity. The amendment to the minutes being proposed is as follows:

    For any violation of doctrinal fidelity, including teaching, preaching or publishing anything contrary to or in conflict with the Church of God Declaration of Faith, the offending minister shall be subject to disciplinary action. The offending
    minister, after submitting to the prescribed program of restoration, must be re-examined at the appropriate level.

    I supposed that, after a quarter century in the Church of God, patience has departed from me.

    Coming from the background I do and covering the Anglican/Episcopal world as this blog does, the issue of Doctrinal Fidelity is a crucial one, and not just concerning the Baptism in the Holy Spirit with the initial evidence of speaking in other tongues.  The lack of doctrinal and theological fidelity has been the undoing of much of Main Line Christianity.

    I basically support this resolution; however, for many in the Church of God, it will have some unintended consequences.  The most significant of these is that the church will be forced to adjudicate such matters according to what the Declaration of Faith actually says and not just what "everybody believes."

    Let’s take one of the issues that detonated this, the issue of the Baptism in the Holy Spirit.  There are some people who basically equate the Baptism with speaking in tongues.  But that’s not what the Declaration of Faith says; it states the following:

    In speaking with other tongues as the Spirit gives utterance and that it is the initial evidence of the baptism of the Holy Ghost.

    In a May 1991 article for the Church of God Evangel, I wrote the following about this:

    The Church of God teaches that speaking with other tongues "is the initial evidence of the baptism in the Holy Ghost."  To understand this better, we need to consider what is meant by evidence.

    When the district attorney prepares a case for prosecution in court, the most important thing he or she must do is to assemble the proper evidence to prove that a crime did take place and that the defendant committed it.  Without evidence, everyone in town may "know" that a crime took place and that the defendant did it, but without the evidence it cannot stand in court.

    So it is with tongues.  We may think or know we have the baptism, but without the tongues we can’t prove it to ourselves or to others.

    I think that Tim Hill was thinking along similar lines in his sermon at the Tennessee campmeeting.  (He brought up some other good evidence too!)  As an aside, I believe that the central purpose of the Baptism in the Holy Spirit is the fulfilment of Acts 1:8.

    As its stands, the Declaration of Faith is a document with a fair amount of breadth to it, as I pointed out here:

    Beyond that, if we look at our Declaration of Faith as it exists today, it doesn’t cover as much territory as you might think.

    You can be an Old Earth Creationist and be in conformity with the DoF. You can be a subordinationist and be in conformity with the DoF (which is more than you can say for the Elim Church in the UK.) You can be a posttribulationist and be in conformity with the DoF, although many in this church don’t know that. You can believe many things that can get you in a lot of trouble in many corners of Evangelical Christianity and still be in conformity with the DoF.

    I am trying to look ahead. Honestly I don’t like the idea of our church having to enforce the current or any other “doctrinal standard.” But I like less the idea of our church falling victim to be manipulated by people who would take our church away from Biblical Christianity. We’re seeing the beginnings of that in parts (but not all) of the Emergent Church. Beyond that, Evangelical Christianity in this country hasn’t quite gotten the knack of being countercultural; its desire to be “where the action is” exposes it to compromise as a price to continue its place in the mainstream of society. (Or, more accurately, to make it think it’s in the mainstream.)

    And, for whatever shortcomings the current document has, I wouldn’t favour amending it either.

    This is a measure I pray our church uses sparingly, but it’s one that it needs to have at its disposal.

  • That’s One Way to Undo the English Reformation

    Evidently things are coming to a head in the centre of the Anglican Communion with secret talks between bishops in the Church of England and the Vatican over a "Plan B" in a church facing the ordination of women bishops and expanding the role of open homosexuals.

    Senior Church of England bishops have held secret talks with Vatican officials to discuss the crisis in the Anglican communion over gays and women bishops. 

    They met senior advisers of the Pope in an attempt to build closer ties with the Roman Catholic Church, The Sunday Telegraph has learnt.

    Dr Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, was not told of the talks and the disclosure will be a fresh blow to his efforts to prevent a major split in the Church of England.

    In highly confidential discussions, a group of conservative bishops expressed their dismay at the liberal direction of the Church of England and their fear for its future.

    I have two comments on this issue.

    1. The Vatican is being more "proactive" than I thought they would be when I wrote Think Before You Convert back in 2004.  Then again, I was focused more on the situation on this side of the Atlantic, where people’s affiliation is more fluid.  From the Vatican’s standpoint, this is a situation that’s too good to pass up, although their own church already "on the ground" in the U.K. is too liberal to take full advantage of it.
    2. I still think that Anglicanism is compromised from the start in opposing women bishops owing to the headship of the monarch, the "Lady and Governor" of the church.

    But the weight of the possiblities cannot be underestimated.  It could lead to the practical undoing of the English Reformation, which would be Roman Catholicism’s greatest victory in Europe in a very long time.

    ,

  • Is It Now God AND/OR Country?

    That’s the question that Out of Ur poses today:

    I’ve got a special treat for you to commemorate Independence Day—a preview of the summer issue of Leadership due out later this month. The issue focuses on the intersection of church ministry and politics (not an irrelevant subject this year). Here is a snippet featuring Charles Colson and Gregory Boyd debating the biblical basis for loving one’s country…

    It’s something I’ve wondered for a long time.  It’s easy to beat this around in the abstract, but the real core issue here is that American Evangelicals tend to have too high of a view of the state as an instrument of righteousness, one not justified by the New Testament.  As I said in my post-Katrina piece Church and State: A Slightly Different View:

    Just because the government is ordained of God doesn’t necessarily make it the morally ideal instrument that people make it out to be. We discussed in our posting last week on the judgement of God that events such as hurricanes, earthquakes and other disasters can be instruments of God’s authority. In the Old Testament, brutal states such as the Assyrians were termed to be God’s instruments towards the punishment of the Israelites for their sins. Man is a poor student and frequently needs a hard lesson to learn. Modern people profess to be shocked by this, and ascribe this to a Judeo-Christian world view, but in the ancient world the pagans felt even more strongly about this. The Roman historian Tacitus, hardly a fan of Christianity, said that "the gods care little for our well-being, but greatly for our chastisement."

    And I don’t think that it is prima facie "unpatriotic" to say this:

    Our Founding Fathers didn’t have a very high view of government either. That’s why, after years of taxation without representation, quartering rude British troops in their homes and other indignities, they fashioned a government with a multitude of checks and balances within and the check of federalism and a people endowed with rights by their Creator without.

    Unfortunately today we have too many people on both sides whose view of government is just too high. On the left, this is understandable: government coercion is the only way their agenda will be carried out, so they have no choice. On the right, the legacy of World War II, which raised the image of government within the population, is a powerful one, even with people who should know better.

  • Dennis McGuire at Tennessee Campmeeting

    This week’s podcast features G. Dennis McGuire, General Overseer of the Church of God, preaching at the Church of God Tennessee Campmeeting on Monday, 17 June 2008.  The entire service is included.

    The opening soloist is Dr. Kim Alexander, Assistant Professor of Historical Theology at the Church of God Theological Seminary.  I had an interesting exchange with her on church funding, social justice and appropriate Marxist headgear when Travis Johnson came out of the closet on Jonathan Stone’s blog back in the Spring.

  • When Christian Ministers Bail Out on Marrying People

    In the wake of California’s mandating same sex civil marriages, some in that state are considering just that:

    Some clergy think churches should divorce themselves from the wedding business.

    The controversy over same-sex marriage – along with a growing sense that many couples who marry in churches never return – has prompted faith leaders to say it’s time to reconsider how California couples tie the knot.

    After the California Supreme Court ruled gay marriage legal, the bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of California began encouraging all couples to marry outside the church.

    "I urge you to encourage all couples, regardless of orientation, to follow the pattern of first being married in a secular service, and then being blessed in the Episcopal Church," Bishop Marc Handley Andrus wrote his clergy June 9.

    This model is used by many European countries, according to John Witte, director of the Center for the Study of Law and Religion at Emory University. He said that approach has been practiced in France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Scandinavia and other countries for many years.

    Although the article doesn’t touch on the issue of discrimination, an exit from civil marriages by churches would eliminate charges/lawsuits that they were discriminating against same-sex couples.

    It’s true that, in much of Europe, churches aren’t allowed to perform civil marriage ceremonies.  That’s because the state has basically taken away the right of marrying people from the church (that’s certainly the case in France.)  This leads to some interesting situations, as I describe concerning Belgian King Leopold III and Lilian Baels, whose son Prince Alexandre de Rethy visited my family’s home in Palm Beach.

    But isn’t marriage a divine institution?  Didn’t God marry Adam and Eve in the Garden?  He didn’t need the state then, did he?  So why does he "need" the state now?  By conceding the ultimate legitimacy of marriage to the state, churches basically proclaim that their god is the state, not Yahweh.

    Christian churches–especially if our elites continue to promote same-sex civil marriage, which they will–need to come up with an alternative to civil marriage for Christians.

    ,

  • The Endless Personal Conflict Between Anglican and Catholic

    I get on a regular basis contacts from people who find themselves “betwixt and between” on their “Christian tradition.”  The reason for that is that they see that I’m “betwixt and between” myself!  The most recent one comes from a woman who I’ll answer while reproducing her email message:

    As an Anglican who is also in Intern in Jesuit ( Ignatian ) Spiritual Direction; married to a somewhat lapsed, RC and deeply conflicted over the current direction of the Episcopal Church; I am confused as to your views.  Do you regret having converted to  RC from the Anglican Communion?

    Absolutely not!  I’ve described my years as a Roman Catholic the spiritual experience of a lifetime, and I have no intention of backing down from that.  Becoming Roman Catholic did the following:

    • It got me out of the trap of being in a “rich kid” church, an experience everyone raised in the upper reaches of this society needs to have somewhere along the way.  (That. BTW, is what irks me more than anything else about Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori’s response to GAFCON: it’s easy to say you want to “serve the hungry and needy in their communities,” but when they come back on a global scale and want to run the church, you can’t bring yourself to let go.)
    • It was the first church I was an adult in.  When you grow up in a church, you’re always “someone’s kid.”  In the Roman Catholic Church I was my own person, buttressed by the way they threw me into parish ministry.
    • It solidified my intellectual formation as a Christian, something no Protestant church has matched before or since.
    • It drew me into the Charismatic Renewal, which is largely why I’m at where I’m at today.

    I absolutely second your idea that Anglicanism was/is a great “lost opportunity”; to my mind, it “should have” worked better than it has!

    That’s a great tragedy.  It’s easy to think that modern day revisionists are entirely responsible for the sad shape Anglicanism finds itself in today, but the seeds for this date back to the disaster that was Oliver Cromwell, a traumatic experience that soured Anglicanism on any kind of “enthusiastic” Christianity.  Ever since groups such as the Methodists, Tractarians and Charismatics have tried to shove Anglicanism off of its “dead centre,” but unfortunately too much of Anglicanism doesn’t distinguish between a living via media between Catholicism and Reformed Christianity and a bland religion that’s offensive to no one.  On this side of the Atlantic, I show how that played out in Taming the Rowdies.

    One of the great things about the Africans is that Islam has deprived them of the luxury of waffling, something which I would like to think that secularism would do here.

    I was raised Presbyterian ( father ) and my mother was Roman Catholic so, at 19, when I was drawn to a wonderful, urgan Episcopal Church…I felt I had found the “Middle Ground” to balance the scales of my upbringing ( I saw it , oddly, as serving the needs of my “inner Catholic” as I had long been drawn to the Catholic Liturgy which, in 1977, the Episcopal Church still maintained in a very beautiful way ) and I was, ultimately, confirmed by our Bishop at the age of 26.

    Now comes the tricky part.

    Most people who move about between Anglican, Catholic and Orthodox churches do so because the liturgy and other outward trappings are familiar and make transitions simpler.  That certainly influenced me.  However, the central objective of the church is to facilitate the eternal destiny of its members and those around it, as I describe here.  That, unfortunately, is where TEC has bombed it completely.  The Archbishop of Canterbury can say that “I believe that it is wrong to assume we are now so far apart that all those outside the GAFCON network are simply proclaiming another gospel” all he wants to, but the fact is that TEC’s own Presiding Bishop has put eternity on the back burner and GC 2006 voted down proclaiming that Jesus Christ is the only way to God.

    How that works out in the life of each and every believer is something that we must deal with one at a time with our God.  It’s too bad that our churches spend so much time on secular goals, or trying to get the square pegs that darken their doors into the round holes they have created.  But hard choices seem to be the rage these days, and this is just one more of them.  I think that’s part of what Paul was referring to when he exhorted us to  “…work out your own Salvation with anxious care,” (Philippians 2:12) but the stakes are too high to view it otherwise.

    ,

  • Indonesia: Today Ban Ahmadiyya. Tomorrow, Ban…

    Most Christians have never heard of this Muslim sect, but in Indonesia they’ve got a target on their backs:

    A breakaway Islamic sect’s struggle to survive has become a major test of tolerance for Indonesia, the world’s largest Muslim-majority country. Conservative, hardline Muslims are confronting moderates over the existence of Ahmadiyya, a 100-year-old minority sect that does not accept Mohammad as the last prophet of Islam.

    The Ahmadis, who have worshipped in their own mosques and communities here since 1924, believe that their founder, Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, is the messiah and last true prophet of Islam. The claim has energized and enraged Indonesia’s disparate Muslim hardliners, who in recent years have united in a campaign to ban Ahmadiyya, labeling its followers "heretics" and "deviants".

    Indonesia’s mild-mannered and religiously moderate President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono and his government are caught in the middle. In a campaign season, where conservative religious groups have electoral clout, his administration has so far managed to please neither side.

    And, of course, the implications of the success of this campaign aren’t lost on anyone there:

    Rights groups, on the other hand, claim that Yudhoyono’s government is pandering to militants and failing to uphold Indonesia’s tradition of religious tolerance. "You ban Ahmadiyya, then you ban the Shi’ites, Christians and Buddhists," Indonesia’s former president Abdurrahman Wahid recently told Reuters. Wahid, also a former chairman of Indonesia’s largest Muslim mass organization, the 40-million strong Nahdlatul Ulama, said hardline groups did not represent most Indonesians and that the government should not cave to radical hardliners…Islamist mobs have in recent years shut down over 90 Christian churches and prayer groups in West Java alone. To Christian and other religious minorities, Yudhoyono’s June 9 decree is a disturbing sign that the government is willing to prioritize hard-line Islamist demands over its constitutional commitment to protect religious freedoms.

  • GAFCON: Where Everyone Raises Their Hands and Praises the Lord

    David Virtue offers us a "photo gallery" of the end of the GAFCON meeting in Jerusalem, highlighting the final agreement the conservative Anglican gathering came to.

    But take a look at this photo after the signing:

    Pentecostals and Charismatics spend a lot of time emphasising how they raise their hands to praise the Lord–and how everyone else doesn’t.  Looks to me like there aren’t many "anyone elses" left in Christianity.  If the Anglicans have taken to it, what hope is there for the Baptists to hold out?

    ,
Design a site like this with WordPress.com
Get started