Can you imagine the outcry if the Times published a column saying that Jews or Muslims must be “made” to quit believing a tenet of their religion? If socialists must be “made” to disavow any of their political convictions?
But not when the target is conservative Christians who persist in their heresy.
—Rod Dreher, “Christians ‘Must Be Made’ to Bow“
Post authored by:
R. Scott Clark
R.Scott Clark is the President of the Heidelberg Reformation Association, the author and editor of, and contributor to several books and the author of many articles. He has taught church history and historical theology since 1997 at Westminster Seminary California. He has also taught at Wheaton College, Reformed Theological Seminary, and Concordia University. He has hosted the Heidelblog since 2007.
More by R. Scott Clark ›
This brazen declaration of war is about far more than just love, happiness and marriage rights. It is really about the disintegration of man’s dignity as the spiritual image bearer of the Holy Triune God. This insidious process began during the Enlightenment when Deists and fellow free-thinkers elevated ‘reason,’ science, and mechanistic laws of nature above the One God in three Persons, thereby depersonalizing and reducing man to an emergent product of nature.
Henceforth, man is no longer a person, nor is he or she either male or female but rather a dehumanized sexless aggregate of matter in motion while the powers and abilities of his mind are nothing more than energies acting on grey matter, that is, chemical interactions and the firing of synapses. In short, man is nothing but an evolved hominid or bio-machine, a conscious product of energy acting on matter over millions of years, a process called evolution.
The disintegration of man’s dignity as a creature of God is not the result of science, as evolutionary cosmologists falsely claim, but rather the product of a depraved conscience and will turned toward evil that justifies the depersonalization and abuse of others as the exercise of freedom. It is hostility and outright hatred of the Holy God and His image-bearers disguised behind linguistic sophistry.
With the true God out of the picture, then so too are the fall, sin, immutable truth, universal moral absolutes and the entire structure of morally grounded presuppositions, norms, standards, principles, law, sexual ethics, social institutions and society built thereon. In the resulting void, everything—no matter how depraved– is now possible (Psalm 36: 1-4):
Pedophilia Is Not a Crime, Says Rutgers Prof Margo Kaplan
http://washingtonweeklynews.com/pedophilia-is-not-a-crime-says-rutgers-prof-margo-kaplan/#
Frank Bruni’s original article in the NYT, on which Dreher comments, states
“Beliefs ossified over centuries aren’t easily shaken. But in the end, the continued view of gays, lesbians and bisexuals as sinners is a decision. It’s a choice…It disregards the degree to which all writings reflect the biases and blind spots of their authors, cultures and eras. It ignores the extent to which interpretation is subjective, debatable. And it elevates unthinking obeisance above intelligent observance…[T]he New Testament…outlines bad and good behaviors that almost everyone deems archaic and irrelevant today.”
It’s so difficult to engage with this sort of stuff because THIS sort of writing screams ‘the biases and blindspots of their authors, cultures and eras” and simply trashes every other opinion. The whole tone of it is disgusting. It inveighs against bigotry, but it is the epitome of bigotry. The belief that the Bible is just a man-made book, wildly out of date and irrelevant in teaching that there are such things as ‘sins’ and ‘sinners’, and good and bad, is itself a decision, a choice. These people are making a choice to substitute some other authority than God. Bruni tells us which god he worships: he tells us we “religious people” should be dumping our faith’s history and “bowing to the enlightenments of modernity.”