Welcome to Upsy Down Town
“Fifty years ago the Christian world view was accepted as the norm by most of the western world. Twenty years ago it was tolerated as the view of some.
Today, in Upsy Down Town, if you want to stand for the Christian way of thinking on almost any ethical issue, expect to be swimming against the tide…”
– Stephen Rockwell, who teaches at George Whitefield College in Cape Town, writes about how to live in Upsy Down Town.
Who counts as an extremist?
“Shortly after the last general election, prime minister David Cameron said that the UK had been a ‘passively tolerant society’ for too long. ‘Passively tolerant’, he says, is a society in which people were told ‘as long as you obey the law, we will leave you alone’.
This is rather odd…”
– Oak Hill Principal Mike Ovey considers some ominous proposals in the UK.
‘2067: the end of British Christianity’
“It’s often said that Britain’s church congregations are shrinking, but that doesn’t come close to expressing the scale of the disaster now facing Christianity in this country.
Every ten years the census spells out the situation in detail: between 2001 and 2011 the number of Christians born in Britain fell by 5.3 million — about 10,000 a week. If that rate of decline continues, the mission of St Augustine to the English, together with that of the Irish saints to the Scots, will come to an end in 2067…”
– Damian Thompson writes in The Spectator. A powerful reminder that the gospel is Britain’s only hope.
And Adam Ford has this observation.
A day late, a dollar short
“Tony Campolo has become the latest evangelical leader to declare for gay marriage. It is perhaps not a surprise …
What is surprising in the statement is the complete absence of any thoughtful argumentation in his articulation of his position.…”
– Carl Trueman comments on Tony Campolo’s change of mind on ‘gay marriage’.
Photo: TonyCampolo.org
Which way, Evangelicals? There is nowhere to hide
“This is a moment of decision, and every evangelical believer, congregation, denomination, and institution will have to answer. There will be no place to hide. The forces driving this revolution in morality will not allow evasion or equivocation.
Every pastor, every church, and every Christian organization will soon be forced to declare an allegiance to the Scriptures and to the Bible’s teachings on marriage and sexual morality, or to affirm loyalty to the sexual revolution. That revolution did not start with same-sex marriage, and it will not end there.”
– Albert Mohler calls Bible-believing Christians to be ready to give an answer.
Do you love me? Putting the carriage before the horse in the same-sex marriage debate
“It’s important that we get our heads around the nature of this debate otherwise we’ll just continually be responding to the wrong point, nor will we be in any position to helpfully reflect back to our wider society just what is going on and, perhaps, get them to reconsider…”
– David Ould considers the nature of love and marriage. Check it out.
Stage Two exile – are you ready for it?
“The Western church is about to enter stage two of its exile from the mainstream culture and the public square. And it will not be an easy time.
In case you missed it, Exile Stage One began a few decades or so ago, budding in the sexual revolution of the sixties before building up a head of steam some 20 years ago. Finally some Christians sat down to talk about it 15 or so years ago, and that set the ball, and the publishing companies rolling…”
– at The Gospel Coalition Australia, Steve McAlpine, Associate Pastor at Providence Church in Perth, calls Christians to be prepared for what is coming.
A sexual ponzi scheme?
“An article in the Washington Post last week (“How to break free from monogamy without destroying marriage”) described the dynamics of an open marriage and the various “apps” now available for facilitating extramarital relations.
The amorality might have been shocking twenty years ago but today such well-traveled territory likely provokes little more than a yawn. Yet the article is still instructive for what the author’s analysis (or lack thereof) tells us about contemporary culture…”
– Carl Trueman writes at First Things. (h/t Tim Challies.)
I oppose same-sex marriage (and no, I’m not a bigot)
“The passing of the Irish referendum on same-sex marriage has triggered a round of Australian advocates announcing that it is now ‘our turn’. We lag behind the UK, many European countries, some states in the US, and (perish the thought!) New Zealand, and we ought to get with the programme.
The Leader of the Opposition, Bill Shorten, in line with the new ALP dogma, has announced that he is introducing a private members bill into Parliament next Monday…
How could anyone stand opposed? The terms in which the pro-marriage redefinition case are stated make it sound as inevitable as the dawn, and as unstoppable as the tide. And these same terms make opposing a redefinition of marriage sound primitive and even barbaric. There are those in favour of change, we are told, and then there are the bigots.”
– Dr. Michael Jensen writes at the ABC’s The Drum.
Related: The Australian Christian Lobby lists some of the consequences of same sex marriage for the free exercise of religion.
Why Australia should not rush to follow Ireland
“So many questions, so little free debate. …
Changing the definition of marriage has far reaching consequences. It is time to press pause and think again.”
– The Australian Christian Lobby raises a number of questions in the midst of a push for same sex marriage in Australia.
A Requiem for the Boy Scouts
“The Boy Scouts were doomed the moment the national leadership decided to preserve the organization at the cost of the values and ideals that gave it birth.
Speaking to a national meeting of Boy Scouts of America leaders, President Robert Gates, former Secretary of Defense and former Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, called for the B.S.A. to abandon its policy of allowing the participation of openly gay scouts, but not the involvement of openly-gay adults…
By any honest account, the policy adopted in 2013 was a compromise that anyone could see would not hold. … the B.S.A. put itself in a no-man’s land of moral evasion.”
– Albert Mohler on the predicament facing the Boy Scouts of America.
Related: Dr. Robert M. Gates at 2015 Boy Scouts of America National Annual Meeting. Watch from 08:40.
What does the Bible really teach about Homosexuality? — Repost
“If I had to choose only one book to recommend to someone (whether a Christian or non-Christian) who wanted to read a basic overview of what the Bible says about homosexuality and what that means for today, this is it.”
– Andy Naselli on “What Does the Bible Really Teach about Homosexuality?” by Kevin DeYoung.
You can download a 36 page sample and study guide via Andy’s site, and order a copy from various booksellers.
Update: See Kevin DeYoung speak on this topic (March 2015) at a special event at College Church in Wheaton, Illinois. 63 minutes.
See also the panel Discussion after the address – 54 minutes – with thanks to Crossway.
Related: Human Sexuality and the ‘Same Sex Marriage’ Debate, from The Sydney Doctrone Commission.
Update – Schools, Scripture, Banning of Books and Sexual Orthodoxy
“My previous post mentioned that some books used in Special Religious Education (SRE) in NSW had been summarily banned by the Department of Education and Communities, apparently on the grounds that they conveyed classical Christian teaching about sexual morality.
In that post I said:
It is to be hoped that on review the Department will realise both that the way this was done is entirely unacceptable, and also that the content of the books concerned is not as harmful as it has been alleged to be.
One of those hopes has been realised, but the other has not…”
– at Law and Religion Australia, Associate Professor in Law, Neil Foster revisits the SRE ‘book banning’ in NSW. His comments are well worth reading in full – and be sure to follow the links.
The Failure of Winsomeness
“The United States has avoided Europe’s fate for a long time, but the churches here have finally lost the ability to coast on cultural momentum. The churches that don’t retrench around building their internal strength and coherence around orthodoxy – and that requires far more than catechesis, but it requires at least that: teaching our story to our children – and evangelizing from that position of strength, aren’t going to survive. The overculture is just too strong. The forces of atomization and desacralization are very hard to resist.
This is a reality that many Christians, Christians of all kinds, do not want to face. …
… if we believe that being winsome and likable and all that is going to earn us any points with the overculture, we are making a dangerous mistake. Assimilation is not going to be allowed absent giving up what makes Christians distinctive from the rest of the culture.”
– at The American Conservative, Rod Dreher urges Christians to prepare for the long night ahead.
Is Christianity dying?
“Bible Belt near-Christianity is teetering. I say let it fall.
For much of the twentieth century, especially in the South and parts of the Midwest, one had to at least claim to be a Christian to be ‘normal.’ During the Cold War, that meant distinguishing oneself from atheistic Communism. At other times, it has meant seeing churchgoing as a way to be seen as a good parent, a good neighbor, and a regular person.
It took courage to be an atheist, because explicit unbelief meant social marginalization. Rising rates of secularization, along with individualism, means that those days are over—and good riddance to them.…”
– Russell Moore, president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention responds to a recent study on church attendance in the USA. (h/t Justin Taylor.)
Related: Back in 2000, Peter Jensen (then Principal of Moore College) spoke at the ACL Synod Dinner and made these observations about Sydney –
“The 1950s saw large church and Sunday School attendances. The churches seemed to be flourishing. But an acute observer would have been very worried even then. The Christianity of the people was not evangelical. It was a sort of ‘common Christianity’, a ‘lowest common denominator’ Christianity. It had a strong moral emphasis; Christianity was about behaviour not belief; parents sent their children to Sunday School in the hope that they would grow up decent citizens rather than committed Christians. To be born once was enough; to be born again was excessive. The ranks of church-goers were swollen with the unsaved. The real religion was materialism.”
– Read it all in the ACL News of March 2001 – PDF file. (Text-only version here.)
What we believe
The message at the heart of Christianity is really quite simple…