September 2012

In a recent blog post, Russell Moore laid out why he believes blasphemy laws are wrong. He writes, "Fundamentally... blasphemy laws and other uses of state power to enforce religious belief or worship are themselves a repudiation of the beliefs themselves. A religion that needs state power to enforce obedience to its beliefs is a religion that has lost confidence in the power of its Deity."

Take a minute to read his article. Don't worry, we'll wait.

Now, there are numerous problems with this article. For starters...

We now live in a nation under blasphemy laws. Some are written as diversity codes or hate crimes. Many others are unwritten. There is no god but Tolerance and Moral Relativism is his/her prophet. Try opposing sodomy, feminism, abortion, paganism, or antinomianism in the workplace, classroom, legislature, or boardroom...

This morning I read an article on CNN by Brian Mclaren calling Evangelicals to choose between allowing Islamophobia to spread further or seeking a "more charitable approach to our Muslim neighbors." In the article he said, "Many sincere and good-hearted evangelicals have never yet had a real Muslim friend, and now they probably never will because their minds have been so prejudiced by Islamophobic broadcasts on so-called Christian television and radio." 

Let me start with a few facts:

1. I have had a "real Muslim friend." More than one, in fact. Hi **** and ****. How's your daughter ****? (Names withheld for their own safety.)
2. I'm no friend of Christian television and radio.
3. CNN doesn't claim to be Christian. Neither does BBC. Neither does The New York Times.

I've watched a number of news clips and read many articles in the last week that talk about Islam. In fact, I can't seem to get away from them. None of them have been from Christian news sources. Now maybe the news sources can't be trusted, but they are claiming that there has been a lot of violence and even an attack on a US Consulate that killed 4 US citizens. I must confess, Mr. Mclaren, I haven't checked their sources. It could all be a huge hoax. Maybe Christians and other non-Muslims are perfectly safe...

God's created order won't be violated forever. Traditions come and go, but, if patriarchy is woven through creation as Scripture indicates, the pendulum will one day turn. And when it does, it will destroy every feminist altar in its path, revealing father-rule to be every bit the law of creation that gravity is.

The question isn't whether the pendulum will turn, the real question is what the world will look like when it does. And that is a frightening thing to consider....

In a recent column, New York Times columnist David Brooks reflects the prevailing wisdom of Western society on manhood:

Forty years ago, men and women adhered to certain ideologies, what it meant to be a man or a woman. Young women today... are more like clean slates, having abandoned both feminist and prefeminist preconceptions. Men still adhere to the masculinity rules, which limits their vision and their movement.

Everywhere, the story is the same: men are losers in the modern interconnected world; men no longer wear the pants in the family economy; hookup culture is female empowerment; women don't need men like men need women; fatherhood is overrated, children really only need mothers....

Yet even as it's accepted that masculinity is a waning force in the West, our organs of influence and power are being forced to adapt to the resurgent patriarchy of fundamentalist Islam.

One reader e-mailed asking if I was being fair in this prior post where I listed Don Carson with Gordon Fee and Roger Nicole as being guilty of the "betrayal of the Word of God's authority?" The short answer is Don Carson was paid to do so-called "translation" for the production of the New Living Translation in which thousands of words with male meaning components (adam, aner, adelphoi, etc.) were deleted in order to pacify the itching ears of our feminist culture. Carson's NLT also deleted a number of occurrences of the words 'Ioudaios' and 'Ioudaioi' in order to pacify Jews working to get Bible publishers to remove Anti-Semitic "Christ-hatred" from John's Gospel.

After being paid to do this work, Don wrote a book defending gender-neutered Bibles.

Now for the longer answer...