Tag: Human Rights

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This might just be the most patient (and brave) man I've heard speak

This is Douglas Wilson. I’m pretty sure if he had spoken on sexuality in an Ontario university, the “diversity” crowd would have shut him down as often happens with other speakers with whom they disagree. I am amazed he was allowed to continue. His patience in the face of hostility, ignorance, pride, and stupidity is inspirational.

These are long, and well worth the listen. Especially the Q&A time.

The entire series can be seen here.

This poster was distributed by the speaker prior to the event:

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A followup post to "All Things Are Political."

Sometimes others express my opinions better than I do. This repost from the Gospel Coalition presents a cautionary tale for Protestant Christians:

CHRIS CASTALDO|12:03 AM CT

Freedom-Fighting Catholics

“It all comes down to catechesis.” Monsignor Irvine was known for memorable quips. A little leprechaun of a man, he was full of good-natured humor and wit (it was he who also told me, “Chris, if you go into the ministry, be sure to take God seriously and not yourself”). You can imagine, therefore, how my ears perked up when I recently spoke with Francis Cardinal George and heard him say nearly the same thing. “It’s all about catechesis.”

I don’t usually have dinner with the Cardinal (just for the record), but on this occasion I happened to be sitting beside him for an hour discussing the interface of Catholic theology and current affairs. The context of his comment was the Department of Health and Human Services mandate. With an admirable measure of candor, the Cardinal not only articulated his concern for the threat to our nation’s religious freedom, he also lamented the paucity of Christian thinking on the issue. However, far from a negative bemoaning of the problem, he was strikingly enthusiastic about the current “discipleship opportunity.”

Fortnight for Freedom 

Starting June 21, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) launched a Fortnight for Freedom, intended to expose the government’s violations of religious liberty. In an interview with CNN, Cardinal Donald Wuerl, Archbishop of Washington, explained that leading up to July 4, there will be prayer vigils, religious rallies, and homilies at Mass to build awareness among the faithful. In his words, it is about “prayer, education, and action.”

It is interesting to observe this movement through the lens of “catechesis.” Once again, quoting Cardinal Wuerl who spoke on Sunday before a rally at George Washington University, “We’re here to educate about freedom. We started this campaign to say religious liberty is eroding.” To understand precisely what part of liberty the Cardinal understands to be eroding, you’ll want to read the recent USCCB statement titled “Our First, Most Cherished Liberty.” Here is one of several places in the document where the theme of catechesis emerges:

Catechesis on religious liberty is not the work of priests alone. The Catholic Church in America is blessed with an immense number of writers, producers, artists, publishers, filmmakers, and bloggers employing all the means of communications—both old and new media—to expound and teach the faith. They too have a critical role in this great struggle for religious liberty. We call upon them to use their skills and talents in defense of our first freedom.

One such writer is Timothy Cardinal Dolan, Archbishop of New York, whose new ebook,True Freedom: On Protecting Human Dignity and Religious Liberty (Image Books), was released June 19. Over and against the government’s secular creed, which supports abortion providers with tax dollars, imposes the HHS mandates, and threatens to redefine marriage, the Cardinal envisions a “culture of life” in which men and women, made in God’s image, are free to live out their faith. Quoting Pope Leo XIII, Cardinal Dolan begins: “True freedom . . . is that freedom which most truly safeguards the dignity of the human person. It is stronger than any violence or injustice. Such is the freedom which has always been desired by the Church, and which she holds most dear.” The Bishops’ message might be unpopular, but it is eminently clear.

The Challenge of Communication

As every pastor knows, catechesis involves two distinct challenges: content and delivery. You labor to craft a message from God, and when your exegesis is done, you’re only half-finished. Along this line, the Catholic Bishops are now facing a communication challenge. According to sociologist William D’Antonio and his team at Catholic University, whose recent study Catholics in America: Persistence and Change in the Catholic Landscape wasfeatured in USA Today, these challenges include the following:

  • 86 percent of Catholics say “you can disagree with aspects of church teachings and still remain loyal to the church.” Only about 30 percent support the “teaching authority claimed by the Vatican.”
  • 40 percent say you can be a good Catholic without believing that in Mass, the bread and wine really become the body and blood of Christ—a core doctrine of Catholicism.
  • When asked why they don’t go to Mass more often, 40 percent say they are simply not very religious.
  • 88 percent say “how a person lives is more important than whether he or she is Catholic.”

While the antichristian bias of government and media is a formidable challenge to U.S. Catholic Bishops, the more immediate predicament may actually be the lukewarm theology of men and women who identify themselves as Catholic. To be sure, there is no room for triumphalism here. We Protestants see enough nominal faith in our own ranks. But it may raise a point worth considering.

The enterprise of catechesis can only succeed when one’s public identity is manifestly defined and critiqued by the objective truth of divine revelation. Any bifurcation between public and private life pulls the carpet out from beneath the whole project. Evangelism, discipleship, and the fulfillment of Christian vocation are all predicated on this conviction; otherwise, there is a smattering of religious opinions and nothing more.

Men and women will only listen to their pastors and take action when they believe that they are hearing the voice of God. How do churches arrive at this place? This, too, underscores the point of my favorite Irish Monsignor: “It all comes down to catechesis.”

Chris Castaldo serves as director of the Ministry of Gospel Renewal for the Billy Graham Center at Wheaton College. He is the author of Holy Ground: Walking with Jesus as a Former Catholic and a main contributor to Journeys of Faith: Evangelicalism, Eastern Orthodoxy, Catholicism, Anglicanism. He blogs atwww.chriscastaldo.com.

 

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"Everything is Political" or is it?

There is an alternative magazine called This Magazine. on it’s masthead it has the subtitle, “Because Everything is Political.” Aside from the journal being really anything but alternative (just more uber-left anarchist stuff), it raises an interesting question:

Is everything indeed, political?

I attended a pastor’s breakfast today that helped me to focus a bit on this question. The reason for the meeting was Ontario’s new anti-bullying bill which is a lot more about social engineering in schools than it is about protecting anyone from getting hurt or harassed. In fact, the law pretty much guarantees that things will get a lot worse for a lot of students under this piece of legislation. More can be read about it here.

The issues raised at the breakfast are valid; as a result of new curriculum in Ontario public schools, the question of the homosexuality, bisexuality, etc., (the categories are getting pretty long and complex) have become settled: no one has the right to be on the dissenting side of the debate, no one can learn otherwise in a public school in Ontario. Those who oppose the rightness, goodness, and normalcy of such behaviour must be reeducated. The acceptance of what the Bible calls sexual sin will be enforced from Kindergarten through grade 12. In Wisconsin, where this curriculum has been adopted, grade school students must participate in a gay pride parade at their school.

Pastors are urged to organize to fight this legislation, and the general slide to lawlessness in public schools. I can sympathize with that. But I think, though, that a political solution might not be the right one, because the problem isn’t a political problem, but a spiritual one.

Secularists see the political realm as the one area of life that really matters. It is there that society, family, the individuals and institutions are shaped for the future. This makes sense, because a secularist does not acknowledge spiritual reality.

To respond to bad public policy with political activism seems, at least on the surface, to be the obvious approach, and, although difficult, the simplest. But the Christian needs to remember that all of life is God’s domain, in spite of the fact that unbelievers move only in the secular-political realm (because for many, that is the only reality acknowledged). So there are places, ideas, realms, if you will, that should be  obviously spiritual: human sexuality, marriage, and family for instance.

Marriage has, allegedly, been  redefined to include unions that are same-sex. That redefinition is only political, and the political has no authority to do so. Marriage is God’s to define, and define it He did. Widening the debate a little, God has also spoken very clearly about same-sex relationships, and they are forbidden. Sex, however, has also been politicised to the point that the spiritual has been crowded out.

But the Christian knows otherwise: There has never been a same-sex marriage in human history, because such unions are not marriage.

So I think the real culture wars will be less on the political/legislative front, and more to issue of denying the legitimacy of political domination of God’s Rule. Normalizing homosexuality, sanctioning same-sex marriae, and all that accompanies these moves are illegitimate actions for governments. These are not their domains of power or influence, except that power and influence has been usurped.

This is why schools are still going on about bullying: bullying is a spiritual problem, a problem of sin, not a political one. The political does not acknowledge the reality of sin, the need of salvation, or the reality of a God Who judges, so how can the political come up with a solution?

I am not opposed to Christians organizing and doing some things politically, but a couple of thoughts came to me at this meeting. The first was, if Christians were faithful and consistent, why would these trends be so prevalent in our culture today? We are at a spiritual low ebb, and we have sunk lower than we can even recognize. For example, if we consider the most popular Christian book titles (for those who still read), we find first of all, the Bible (purchased by millions, read by hundreds). Following this are books about self, self, and how to have a happy self; or “Christian” fiction. Contemporary Christian music often falls between mind-altering repetitious chanting of the same few lines, aka “worship,” or creepy love songs that seem inappropriate when addressing deity. We have more books, internet, radio, television, DVDs, video games, etc., that all fall under the “Christian” category, and yet we are possibly the most Biblically illiterate generation since the Reformation. We really are, “amused to death.”

The second thought that came to me at this meeting truly hit home, and hard. It was an exhortation from a pastor from a large charismatic congregation in Stoney Creek. He said, “The government is not afraid of the church at prayer. The government is not afraid of the church’s message. But they are afraid when Christians are united and organized!” This garnered some loud “Amens!” from the group, but I found it summarized the political idolatry many Christian organizations, as well as churches and individual Christians, have fallen into: we have exchanged the political for the spiritual.

To wit: If the world isn’t afraid of our message, what’s wrong with our message? As far as I know, the apostle Paul did not organize a political response to Rome, yet his message was so well understood by Rome that he was beheaded, and thousands of Christians were killed for their faith. That tells me that the message was heard and received, and rejected by the government of the day. What message does the government hear from us today? The message of the early church was rejected by early Rome because it placed God as God, and rightly named the rulers and religions of the day as idolatrous. This is why being so political seems so misguided: the church legitimizes governments’ powers when it plays by their rules, rules that are false and idolatrous.

Romans 1:16–17 (ESV) says,

16 For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it [the gospel] is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek. 17 For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith for faith, as it is written, “The righteous shall live by faith.”

I don’t know where in the New Testament that God blesses political prowess. But God has promised salvation through the gospel, and salvation is what sets us free from sin (all sin).  Have we really exhausted that power, so that we have to become a political threat to our government before there is change? Do we really think that?

I am not advocating quietism or anything like that. I think Christians should boldly and clearly state God’s truth on all matters of life, and that the government has no right to act in some of the areas it does. The power it claims does not rightfully belong to a government, even if it is a majority. The things of God are God’s, and we would do well to behave accordingly. We must continue to be salt and light, to clearly state Christian truth, and to live the truth so that our lives are seen as a real alternative to live’s lost in confusion.

If you are reading this are thinking that it would be nice for Christians to get out of politics, and therefore out of the way, you’re missing the point. We will always be in the way, and exposing the lie that political reality is the only true faith, or that mankind’s deepest yearnings are satisfied in parliament.