For many people who are in support of same-sex marriage and the California Supreme Court decision yesterday, there's an innate sense of fair play and equality that is a bedrock value of Americans. I think many feel compelled by this sense of fairness to extend marriage to homosexual couples. But this is misplace because there is no fairness or equality not already extended. There is no right that is being denied. There is no just claim here.
People are persuaded that same-sex marriage is a civil rights issue equivalent to race. We belatedly recognized in our law that race was benign and minorities equal and we face a similar evolution of our values with homosexuals. There is a fundamental flaw in this reasoning.
Race is morally benign, homosexuality is not. Race is an intrinsic aspect of one's being, homosexuality is a behavior. Homosexuality is part of the larger category of sexuality and sexual behavior, and there's been a full-blown cultural effort since the 60s to convince us that sexuality is amoral. No moral judgments are proper about how people choose to practice and use their sexuality. Thus we first witnessed the explosion of sex outside of marriage, living together, single parenthood, and teen sexuality. And we've been told we cannot judge because it's amoral. Just recreation. Just biology. Just personal choices.
And same-sex marriage is part of that larger cultural push to convince us that sexuality is amoral. We cannot judge or make distinctions. But it's a lie. And homosexuality is not benign as race is, and so the attempt to draw the comparison to civil rights is false. There are no civil rights being denied homosexuals as blacks once were. Same-sex marriage is not an extension of civil rights, and thus our state constitution has been misinterpreted and misapplied by our court.
This is what Greg had to say about this argument in an article that gives wholly secular arguments against same-sex marriage.
"They said the same thing about interracial marriage."
This challenge has great rhetorical force, but it is a silly objection.
Consider two men, one rich and one poor, seeking to withdraw money from their bank. The rich man is denied because his account is empty. However, on closer inspection, a clerk discovers an error, corrects it, and releases the cash. Next in line, the poor man is denied for the same reason: insufficient funds. "That’s the same thing you said about the last guy," he snaps. "Yes," the clerk replies. "We made a mistake with his account, but not with yours. You’re broke."
In the same way, it simply is not relevant that the same objection has been used to deny both interracial and homosexual marriage. It’s only relevant if the circumstances are the same, regardless of the objection. They are not.
Same-sex marriage and interracial marriage have nothing in common. There is no difference between a black and a white human being because skin color is morally trivial. There is an enormous difference, however, between a man and a woman. Ethnicity has no bearing on marriage. Sex is fundamental to marriage.
This approach won’t work to justify polygamous or incestuous unions ("In the past people wouldn’t allow interracial marriages, either."). It is equally ineffectual here. The objection may be the same, but the circumstances are entirely different.
Our state Supreme Court today has legalized same-sex marriage. It's erroneous to report, as the newspapers are, that "gay marriage" has been legalized. Gays have been able to marry in California as long as we've had marriage laws. This isn't a case of equal rights, but special rights. For the first time in our state, it's considered a protected right to marry someone of the same sex.
And not only does it grant special rights, it imposes on the citizens of the state to support relationships that they have principled moral objections to. Marriage is a privileged condoning of a relationship in the interest of the state, and therefore is granted tax breaks that in turn place demands on every tax payer in the state. We happily privilege marriage because families benefit our society. It's a recognition by the government, which is, of course, nothing more than the aggregation of the citizens. So when the state recognizes and approves of something, the citizens do so.
And as we've already seen in state legislation, the view is also imposed on us in the form of instruction in public schools. Already in our state, gender terms related to marriage and parenthood are banned since they supposed discriminate against gender-confused individuals. But nothing like this is really morally neutral. It represents a moral view that these "alternative lifestyles" are, if not acceptable, beyond moral judgment. So children in our public schools are being given moral instruction that proscribes moral objection to homosexuality and many other gender-confused identities.
I'm sympathetic to the idea that argument that some issues of rights should be decided by the courts and are not a matter of majority opinion. That was clearly the case with racial minorities and is the case with the lives of the unborn. However, what the California court did today is extend the law to grant special rights in a way the law was never intended to recognize. These are new and strained application of rights that are not the purview of courts whose interpretation has distorted that state constitution today to condone what it was never meant to support.
The pathetic fact is that our culture is philosophically and morally handicapped. Morality is assumed to be settled only in religion, so that if something is not a religious issue, anything goes. There is no concept any longer of natural law, a fully accessible rationale for drawing moral distinctions based on what we can all observe. It's a sad thing to have to point out what should be so obvious: men and women are different, physically made for each other, and therefore same-sex relationships simply aren't equal and interchangeable. There is good reason in religiously neutral reasoning for society to prefer heterosexual marriage over any other kind of combination. But we are handicapped and incapable any longer of such clear distinctions.
Good news from Willow Creek about quite a paradigm shift:
After modeling a seeker-sensitive approach to church growth for three decades, Willow Creek Community Church now plans to gear its weekend services toward mature believers seeking to grow in their faith.
The change comes on the heels of an ongoing four-year research effort first made public late last summer in Reveal: Where Are You?, a book coauthored by executive pastor Greg Hawkins. Hawkins said during an annual student ministries conference in April that Willow Creek would also replace its midweek services with classes on theology and the Bible....
Greg Pritchard, author of Willow Creek Seeker Services, told CT the church "sporadically has recognized it was not teaching a robust enough biblical theology and needed to turn the ship around.
"It is a huge shift," Pritchard said of the church's planned changes to its services. "But they're still using the same marketing methodology. Willow appears to be selecting a new target audience with new felt needs, but it is still a target audience. Can they change? Yes, but it will take more than just shifting their target audience."
This is what I had to say about the study on December 5 last year:
Church is for the community of believers. The pastor is the shepherd who guides and teaches the sheep=believers. But at Willow Creek, the sheep fend for themselves and the programs are for unbelievers. Willow Creek calls itself a church but is in reality a perpetual evangelism rally. Hybels isn't a pastor, he's an evangelist. The problem comes when people attend thinking they're getting church, when really the sole focus of the church is evangelism. Billy Graham never started a church or claimed to pastor people. He did his job as evangelist and then encouraged local churches and pastors to do their job of feeding and discipleship. I think Hybels and Willow Creek would serve the Body better if they didn't claim to be a church. Churches and pastors don't leave believers to "self-feed."
Willow Creek says they're "seeker-obsessed." Great. We need evangelists with that obsession for the lost. That's a specific gift of the Spirit in the New Testament. And pastor is a different one. A church can't have that obsession to the exclusion of discipling the believers in its care. Do the job of an evangelist and then send new believers to a church instead of leaving them to "self-feed."
One of Brian McLaren's answers in the AP interview USA Today carried seems to be one of the recurring themes of his writing and that of the Emergent Church. And it happens to be, I think, one of the most erroneous and dangerous views that drives much of, what I consider, their misdirection. By misdiagnosing the problem, their solutions are in error.
Here's McLaren's answer to a question about truth:
Obviously that's a challenge. The flip side of that question is look at the Catholic Church: For all of its orthodoxy, it could have bishops covering up for molesting priests. And evangelicals, for all their claims of orthodoxy, can be barbaric to gay people and can blindly support a rush to war in Iraq and can be, as we speak, fomenting for war with Iran. ... Obviously, I have a lot of critics and they often say, 'You're wanting to water down the Gospel to accommodate to post-modernity.' I say, 'No, I really don't want to do that. But what I do want to do is acknowledge first the ways we've already watered down the Gospel to accommodate modernity.' ... I think the naivete of some of those critics is that they're starting with a pure pristine understanding of the Gospel. It seems to me we're all in danger of screwing up
The question repeats one of those words that plays into the mistake the EM makes: absolute truth. This is usually taken to mean that we know what's true without error. We are infallible in what we take to be true. That's not what the phrase means, but that's how it's mischaracterized. "Absolute" modifies the fact, not the knower; it's a property of the true facts, not how we take them to be true. But this misunderstanding is so entrenched now that it's better to try to avoid it by referring to "objective truth," i.e., there are true facts unrelated to subjects (people) and whether or not we believe them. They are objective rather than subjective.
McLaren's answer seems to veer off topic, but I think in his mind it's very on topic because it's one of the significant underlying beliefs that drives the Emergent Movement, in my view. That is: Because we can be and have been mistaken about what we take to be true, we can't know that anything is true. I've read this idea many times in the EM literature and it's a non sequitur. It simply doesn't follow that because we can be mistaken that we should opt for doubt and skepticism, that we have to abandon the idea of truth.
A companion idea promulgated is that because people who believe in objective truths can be unattractive, nasty, mean people, we need to abandon the idea that we can know true things.
And these ideas are what are at work in McLaren's answer here. He jumps from the idea of truth and a request for what the boundaries of what might be considered "emerging" might be to pointing to failures in churches that believe in orthodoxy. The proposition he asserts but never states is that because churches that believe in orthodoxy fail and can be in error, the idea of orthodoxy is false and beyond our ability to know and define.
One of the fundamental features of the EM is that we have to abandon the idea of orthodoxy because we can't know for sure what it is. Instead of working at trying to improve our stock of true beliefs, we should abandon the project. Instead of being aware of our fallibility, which we all admit to at the outset, we should adopt doubt. And that is the dangerous idea at the heart of the EM. It simply doesn't follow that because we are fallible we should doubt and despair of ever knowing what's objectively true. That there is no such thing as orthodoxy, since that concept is premised on the idea that we can discover true beliefs God has revealed to us in His Word. Instead our fallibility and error should be cautions that drive us to be more vigilant students of God's Word, building better and stronger cases for our beliefs, keeping us humble and showing charity toward those with whom we disagree as we endeavor to improve our stock of true beliefs.
Doubt and skepticism do not necessarily follow from fallibility and error. Yet that is the big leap underlying much of the Emergent Movement project.
We often get asked by people with a desire to use their interest in apologetics to train others how to get started. Well, here's one answer to that desire.
Join Frank Turek, Greg Koukl & others at the CrossExamined Instructor Academy (CIA). Learn how to impact your world with "I Don’t Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist" on August 13-15, 2008, held at Southern Evangelical Seminary near Charlotte, NC. You'll be trained to defend Christianity in a public speaking opportunities.
CIA is an intense three-day program where you will learn how to present "I Don't Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist," which involves four main topics: Truth, God, Miracles and the New Testament, and how to answer questions about those topics in a hostile environment. During those three days, in addition to hearing lectures and participating in discussions, you will be asked to present portions of "I Don't Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist" and answer questions from several instructors. These instructors, who will coach and challenge you, will include Frank Turek, co-author of I Don't Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist, Greg Koukl and Brett Kunkle of Stand to Reason, and Jason Reed, Professor of Philosophy at Southern Evangelical Seminary.
Iron will sharpen iron, and you will be prepared to take your interest, desire, and skills into the public square to train others and defend Christianity. Register at CrossExamined.
One of the reasons the Emergent Church Movement has appealed to many people is that it, I believe, submits to cultural misconceptions about Christianity and orthodoxy. Based on their own writings, the leaders of the Emergent Movement agree with those false ideas and adjust their theology and practice to them rather than trying to correct them. The introduction to a brief interview with Brian McLaren illustrates some of these misconceptions.
The second sentence characterizes McLaren's break with "rigid orthodoxy." On the one hand, that is a redundancy if by "rigid" it's meant that there are limits to what is "Christianity." Any kind of - orthodoxy, theological, political, philosophical - has a definitional line or else the terms loses all meaning. McLaren himself has limits, as he expresses in the last answer. On the other hand, if "rigid" is meant instead to characterize orthodoxy as narrow without allowing any discussion or debate, then that is misconception. Christian orthodoxy allows quite a bit of debate. It did in the first few hundred years of the church as theology was explored and defined more precisely, and even after those careful formulations there is still room for disagreement. For instance, Christology isn't narrowly defined, but there are orthodox limits. This is called "the Christological box." Within certain the boundaries of certain views of Christ that are considered unorthodox there is a lot of room for discussion within orthodoxy.
The next sentence states that the "emerging church reclaims ancient practices and prayers and creates new ones." Well, that isn't unique to the emergent church because there are many aspects of liturgy and practice that date back to the early church, some of which in more liturgical churches have been in practice for a very long time. Many churches even hold worship services, especially to mark major holidays such as Easter and Christmas, with vigils that date back to the very early church. So why is the emerging church credited with reclaiming ancient practices while liturgical churches are simultaneously characterized as "rigid"? Reclaiming ancient practices isn't what makes the Emergent Movement distinctive. It's their theology and philosophy, not their practices.
A couple of paragraphs later, the writer of the introduction claims that "conservative Christians remain suspicious of the movement and its approach to theology." Now "suspicious" is another one of those words that labels negatively. Why aren't conservative Christians described as "critical." After all, the criticism of the Emergent Church has been accompanied by a great deal of principled reason and argument. We're not suspicious because we don't like innovation and change. We're critical because of the substance of what is being proposed. True, many churches are resistant to change in practice. But it's not mere practice that the McLaren and his colleagues are innovating; it's the substance of Christianity.
The Emergent Movement can be attractive when someone has misconceptions about Christianity. What's worse is that over and over in their own writings, the leaders of the Emergent Movement accept these misconceptions and build their case on them.
(HT: The Christian Mind)
From the Telegraph:
The parents of a premature baby born below the legal abortion limit spoke of their 'miracle' after they took her home for the first time on Monday.
Ellie-Suzanne Fish was born four months premature on September 3 last year, five days before the current limit of 24 weeks.
She weighed 1lb 4.7oz and was given just a 10 to 15 per cent chance of survival then had to endure three operations, including two on the brain.
But she is now nine months old and a healthy 14lbs, and has been allowed out of hospital for the first time.
Ellie-Suzanne was born before the day the law recognized her as having any rights or being a person. So what was her status once born? She suddenly became a person with rights because her location has changed? Births like her shows the arbitrariness of the current law trying to draw lines after conception.
