Persecution

It's long been evident to me, at least, that greens and Scientism's Calamity Janes will get government to take reproduction in-house, granting some the right to bear children and forbidding others. At first parents like my own who had bad genes that passed on cystic fibrosis and hemophilia will be told "no." Dad wrote the novel Winterflight with this premise as its plot. The book was published back in the late seventies and if you haven't read it, you should.

In time, the justification won't be the cost of healthcare and eugenics, but a one or two-child policy similar to the one China is trying to leave behind. Our policy will only differ from China in that we won't be able to justify it by saying there's not enough food. There always will be...

Neither the slaughter of one-quarter of our children we liltingly refer to as "abortion," nor the promotion of sodomy and the denial of First Amendment rights of Christians who object to it, will be repealed in our courts. Any remedy will have to be legislative.

Legislation, though, depends upon the will of the people and at this point we, the people, do not have the will to stop either of these obscenities. Nor very many others.

How might this change?

The history of the early church shows the way. The men who knew Jesus went out preaching, and in time the Roman Empire turned away from effeminacy, sodomy, female rebellion, and child slaughter that was characteristic of their pagan religion.

Now, though, Christendom is in its death throes. Seventy-five years ago, J. Gresham Machen said America was living...

This is a talk given by ruling elder Ken Patrick at a conference held this past Saturday at his church, Trinity Presbyterian Church (PCA), in Ludlow, Kentucky. Titled "Maintaining a Christian Witness in an Increasingly Pagan Culture," the conference's other speakers were Trinity's pastor Chuck Hickey and an attorney from the Alliance Defending Freedom, Jeff Shafer. I attended the conference with my son, Joseph, and his fellow pastor Paul Belcher (both serving Christ Church in Cincinnati). Hope you find this talk as wise and helpful as Joseph, Paul, and I did.

* * *

Maintaining a Christian Witness in an Increasingly Pagan Culture

by Ken Patrick

Before we begin, let me talk about my qualifications to divine the future: I’m not a prophet; I don’t have a “word from the Lord” in the sense that I’m about to share any divinely sourced revelation with you; God didn’t appear to me in a dream.

What I’m going to share are simply observations on what may come to pass if current trends continue, and what I would do if I were in charge. If you find yourself disagreeing with what I say, hopefully you’ll stay until I’m finished. We’ll have a Q&A session where you can ask a question, and of course you can pigeon-hole me afterward.

So, to answer my own question right up front—is there a Christian ghetto in our future?—I think the most likely answer is “of course, yes” at least in an intellectual sense and perhaps in a real, physical way as well. I think it’s very possible that we’ll see both. Before I begin describing what these Christian “ghetto” scenarios might look like, let’s establish why many of us think...

Here's a good interview with my friend, Phil Jensen, of Sydney, Australia. Phil and his wife, Helen, spent a weekend with us in Bloomington twenty years ago, and we've often been helped by our conversations then as we have done the work of ministry in a university community.

If you didn't know, the so-called Southern Poverty Law Center is a witches' brew of rabble rousing and has nothing whatsoever to do with the rule of law. It's much worse than any chapter of the ACLU. As to the "poverty" of their causes, lately they've been spending their time and resources serving as advocates for the poverty-stricken and oppressed gay lobby.

(NOTE: “Johnny” is a diminutive of “John.” After titling this piece, it occurred to me that using the title “Johnny get your gun” would be seen as disrespectful, so I’ve changed it to “John, get your gun.” I respect John Piper and apologize for a title that didn’t show proper respect for him.)

The Reformed church has been all atwitter over John Piper’s response to Jerry Falwell encouraging the students of his Baptist college to get a gun and help protect the campus against armed attack. John tells his readers that he talked with Jerry before writing him up. Then, he frames his response to Jerry this way: 

The issue is about the whole tenor and focus and demeanor and heart-attitude of the Christian life. Does it accord with the New Testament to encourage the attitude that says, “I have the power to kill you in my pocket, so don’t mess with me”? My answer is, No.

Of course, this is an uncharitable summary of President Falwell’s position since no one carrying a gun on Liberty’s campus is primarily concerned about himself. Christians don’t carry guns because they don’t want to be killed themselves, but because they want to be faithful to defend others—particularly women and children. This is our calling as Christian men. We defend the innocent and defenseless. It would have been more kind for John to phrase it this way: “I have the power to defend my sisters in Christ here in my holster, so don’t mess with them!”

(Henry Holsters are the superb work of a member of our church, Andrew Henry. Buy one.)

I haven’t read any of the responses to John’s anti-gun piece except Doug Wilson’s. Doug makes a good point when he begins his defense of John this way...

(Note from TB: This post is by longtime contributor, Rev. David Wegener.)

Evil is real. It is in our hearts and families, our churches and synagogues, our city councils and state houses the world over. We’d like to pretend it doesn’t exist, but it still appears in all its horror from time to time, in ways we cannot ignore. Our attention is drawn to it when we read about …

• Auschwitz, Dachau, and Treblinka, concentration camps where Jews were exterminated.
• Josef Stalin or Idi Amin or Pol Pot and their murderous reigns of terror.
• Genocide in Rwanda and Burundi and Bosnia in the 1990s.
• American dumpsters filled with unborn babies, killed just prior to their due date.
• The Chinese government’s one-child per family policy.
• ISIS and the atrocities they commit against Christians in Iraq and Syria.

This year, I read a book about evil. Peter Balakian, an Armenian-American historian, has written about the genocide committed by the Turks against the Armenians prior to, during and after World War I in The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America's Response. 24 April 2015 marked the 100th anniversary of the massacre. On that date in 1915, the Turks killed hundreds of Armenian leaders (poets and writers and priests and politicians and teachers).  

Sadly, talking about this massacre is difficult today since the Turkish government will still not admit that the massacres occurred...

Believers in China are divided by whether they are a part of a so-called "patriotic" church or not. And if not, we can suppose their churches are thought to be unpatriotic and are persecuted.

Sure enough, China's President Xi Jinping and his Communist Party have announced a crackdown on Christian churches. Those followers of Christ and their churches who associate with foreigners and don't declare their loyalty to communist socialism may expect the state to punish them. About 1,000 people were arrested for their defense of human rights last year, many of whom are Christians. Breitbart reports:

In late August, police arrested China’s most prominent Christian lawyer, Zhang Kai, who defended and gave legal counsel to a number of Christian churches throughout the country, especially against the government’s cross-removal campaign. When Zhang’s father approached the authorities in early October to request information on his son’s detention, he was told that Zhang is a “threat to national security” and that his whereabouts are a state secret...

[President] Xi declared that all religions must adapt to socialist policy, calling this “a common principle for all religions to comply with... The Chinese government has set up internal “patriotic associations” for all five recognized religions—Buddhism, Catholicism, Daoism, Islam, and Protestantism—in an effort to keep control over religion within China.

China's socialism is America's egalitarianism. Both nations have their national demons they worship and both nation's demons demand their children for their sacrificial rites...

For over a decade on this blog, I've used the word 'sodomy' to refer to... well... sodomy. One of the first to explain to me that the word was offensive was my seminary advisor, Dan Jessen. Since responding to Dan, I've been forced to respond continuously,1 and do still. On FB this week a young woman faulted me for using the word. She pronounced what I'd written to be "extreme," adding helpfully that "extremism of all kinds is dangerous."

What's really dangerous, though, is sodomy. Sodom shows how dangerous it is. God rained fire and brimstone, executing all the people of the city for their indulgence in "gross immorality." And what are we to learn from this? Jude tells us God killed the Sodomites so they would be "exhibited as an example in undergoing the punishment of eternal fire."

But at the time, I'm guessing Sodomites would have laughed at being called "sodomites." They would have thought it extreme and pointed out that extremism is dangerous. They would have been tight with Darryl Hart and David VanDrunen's call for the nakedness of their public square. They liked naked...