Tag: post modernity

The meta-modern church: some thoughts about church in the post-post modern era

There’s a lot of energy being expended by Christian institutions fighting a sort of rearguard action against post-modernity. The assumption seems to be that to be Christian is to be wedded to modernism with its objective (propositional) truths, authoritative institutions, and an anthropology that thinks human change (and conversion) comes through rational argument and information, rather than experience or emotion.

One wonders if the energy being expended trying to fight not just for the Gospel, but for a philosophy and a cultural moment rapidly in the rearview mirror when it comes to how most western humans understand the world and themselves is part of the conditions producing the so-called ‘pastor drought’…

There are reasonable reasons to be suspicious of some forms of post-modernity. Post-modernity is built on the idea that we as humans are limited in our ability to know anything, and are always a product of the perspective created by our own personal experience, whether we know it or not. Some forms of post-modernism deconstruct institutions (like the church), and question absolute truth claims (like the Gospel) on the basis that authority structures are inherently self-interested in perpetuating an objective truth claim they can’t justify. Embracing post-modernity and its emphasis on experience, subjectivity, and the emotions, has led many to deconstruct themselves all the way out of Christianity. And yet, there’s much we should, and could, learn from post-modernity and its epistemic humility (the idea we can’t really come at things totally objectively, and are limited, is a pretty good starting place for figuring out our limits), we humans are wired to learn and be formed by experience and via our emotions, and we will expand our understanding of the world by hearing voices outside our own experience (or tradition) in ways that might help us get closer to the truth.

One of the things post-modernity ate, whether accidentally or on purpose, is not just the idea of objective propositional knowledge about lots of areas of life (perhaps with the exception of math and (some forms of) science) is the idea of a meta-narrative; a grand organising story underpinning reality. It left us with a fractured, pluralist, community made up of individuals and identity groups with many stories shaped by their own experiences. Figuring out how to be the church in a post-modern context, without trying to be a modernist institution wielding institutional authority and making the same old truth claims that nobody wants to listen to (unless they become a sort of archaic modernist themselves, trying to live as an outsider in a brave new world) has been tricky. We probably don’t need to convert post-modernist thinkers to modernists in order to convert them to Christianity; though sometimes it feels like it; instead, we might need to give people the experiential and emotional data that makes belief in the Christian story plausible (and of course, Sam Chan’s book on Evangelism in a Skeptical World is a great companion for this task). Trying to simultaneously deconstruct the church and its (modernist) practices in the face of the critique from post-modernity, and re-construct it as a community plausibly living and telling the Gospel story has involved a clunky gear shift for the church as a whole, and lots of institutional inertia is still pulling us in the opposite direction; this isn’t helped by those who are committed not just to Christianity, or Jesus as Lord, but to modernism itself, as the way, the truth, and the life.

The rear guard action hasn’t really worked by many measures of a healthy or flourishing church here in the west; and perhaps it’s because we’ve put our eggs into propping up a not super-effective construction of church, rather than putting our energies and efforts into deconstructing both the church and post-modernity; this is an area that Mark Sayers and John Mark Comer have been pressing into (explicitly at one point, Sayers says he got tired of his post-modern friends deconstructing their way out of Christianity and decided to shift gears not to deconstruction of the church, but deconstruction of society and re-construction of the church.

And maybe it’s time to stop the rearguard action, and, though it’ll be a massive headspin, jump straight to the vanguard…

The rearguard is the soldiers standing at the back of the army trying to hold ground while the rest of the army retreats to some sort of safety to regroup; the vanguard is those soldiers at the front of the army on a charge; those who blaze new ground for the people behind them to step into.

The thing about post-modernity is that while it has been helpful in a whole bunch of deconstruction work, and brought lots more voices to the table, it hasn’t done much construction. It hasn’t left us with a better picture for how to co-exist in communities of difference (say, the modern secular state), but has created an environment where opposing truth claims are grounds for conflict, where people play the politics of self-interest, and lobby to win not just protection for their own truth, but the eradication of any others. Post-modernity didn’t create the conditions for hope, but for cynicism. One place this is evident is in the TV comedies of post-modernity, and one way a shift in the fabric of society to a post-post-modern outlook, is the death of cynicism (or nihilism even), and the return of hope (often built around communities of difference, where people are joined together in a common purpose (think Parks and Rec, Community, etc); what’s even more interesting is that more recent comedic efforts from the writers who brought us this turn from cynicism have been grappling with the afterlife (in The Good Place, and Upload), and maybe probing a little around the edges of questions about the ‘eschatology’ of the west (will technology save us? How do we live well now given what we do and don’t know? etc). There are still artefacts of a more post-modern outlook (hey there Ricky Gervais), but a shift is happening.

David Foster Wallace made this case a while back in an interview with Larry McCaffery, when he said:

“The problem is that, however misprised it’s been, what’s been passed down from the postmodern heyday is sarcasm, cynicism, a manic ennui, suspicion of all authority, suspicion of all constraints on conduct, and a terrible penchant for ironic diagnosis of unpleasantness instead of an ambition not just to diagnose and ridicule but to redeem. You’ve got to understand that this stuff has permeated the culture. It’s become our language; we’re so in it we don’t even see that it’s one perspective, one among many possible ways of seeing. Postmodern irony’s become our environment.”

“All we seem to want to do is keep ridiculing the stuff. Postmodern irony and cynicism’s become an end in itself, a measure of hip sophistication and literary savvy. Few artists dare to try to talk about ways of working toward redeeming what’s wrong, because they’ll look sentimental and naive to all the weary ironists. Irony’s gone from liberating to enslaving.”

And…

The postmodern founders’ patricidal work was great, but patricide produces orphans, and no amount of revelry can make up for the fact that writers my age have been literary orphans throughout our formative years. We’re kind of wishing some parents would come back. ”

He wrote an incredible essay on the issues with post-modernity and television in E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S Fiction, where he also said:

“There’s a brashly irreverent rejection of “outmoded” concepts like integrated plot or enduring character. Instead there’s a series of dazzlingly creative parodic vignettes, designed to appeal to the forty-five seconds of near-Zen concentration we call the TV attention span. Unifying the vignettes in the abscence of plot are moods — antic anxiety, the over-stimulated stasis of too many choices and no chooser’s manual, irreverent brashness toward televisual reality”

The art, or cultural artefacts, of post-modernity are entrenched in post-modernities defining characteristics; the death of metanarrative and the championing of experience and emotion over ‘integrated plot or enduring character’ — and of course, cynicism, irony, and deconstruction about institutional authority or tradition. The truly post-modern church is a sort of pastiche of the culture it apes; every moment of the service is curated to produce an emotional response, or experience, nothing is long or deep, the over-arching plot of the Bible, or even character formation understood as a long hard slog in the same direction, are replaced with the cultivation of ‘moments’; silver bullet and quick fix self-help sermons, coupled also with a cynicism about the Christian tradition and the practices of the institutional church one’s new ‘movement’ or ‘independent church plant’ is seeking to detach from as it ‘contextualises’ and re-imagines itself in the style or form of modern entertainment.

But there’s a shift. And maybe instead of fighting the post-modern seeker sensitive church, or the deconstructed ’emerging church,’ or trying to idealise (or idolise) some period in history — whether the modernist moment, or the medieval moment with its cathedrals, liturgy, and enchantment, or the halcyon days of persecution and nimble, subversive house churches of the pre-Christendom era — we should ask what we can learn from each era as we deconstruct not just the church with the lens society brings to us, but so that we can see where our churches and our forms, practices, and beliefs have been produced by particular moments in time, and seek to reconstruct ourselves not explicitly in contradiction to the spirit of the age, but explicitly in ways shaped by the Christian story. And if we’re going to get caught up in the war against ‘post-modernity’ — maybe modernism isn’t a great ally in that conflict (though there might be parts of modernity that resonate with us), and maybe meta-modernity offers a more hopeful ‘common ground’ for conversations with the culture and engagement with the form and content of Christian belief and practice, such that in our deconstruction of post-modernity and its truth claims we might help prod people towards this new meta-modern moment.

The shift from post-modernity is happening in those areas that most profoundly shape our view of the world, where once this was the task of philosophers, now it is the task of the TV comedy writer, even politics sits downstream from culture. It’s not just in literature where what David Foster Wallace described as post-modernity’s deconstruction or ‘patricidal work’ has been felt; it’s everywhere. Our literature — even our sitcoms — are part of the culture that shapes our outlook (where culture is at least, in part, a product of shared ‘cultural texts’ or artefacts). And the shift from irony and deconstruction is in full swing. One way this has been described as a movement is as the ‘new sincerity’… Here’s a video exploring how this is working in the world of the sitcom.

The ‘new sincerity’ has, in some quarters, merged into this new idea of ‘meta-modernity’ or metamodernism. Meta-modernity includes a return to a more hopeful outlook, and even to meta-narrative. This shift also accounts for the popularity of those figures who offer a grand, organising, account of life in the world — for example, the Jordan Peterson phenomena.

This isn’t ‘new’ or cutting edge; a guy named Luke Turner published a ‘Metamodernist Manifesto’ back in 2011; but it’s slowly (I think) becoming clear that metamodernity’s critique of the deconstructing, cynical, hopelessness of post-modernity, and the identity politicking world it creates, isn’t particularly sustainable, and that a metamodernist approach offers at least one way out of the void that doesn’t require a return to modernity (and a loss of the good deconstructing work that post-modernity was built on). Turner says, of metamodernism:

“Whereas postmodernism was characterised by deconstruction, irony, pastiche, relativism, nihilism, and the rejection of grand narratives (to caricature it somewhat), the discourse surrounding metamodernism engages with the resurgence of sincerity, hope, romanticism, affect, and the potential for grand narratives and universal truths, whilst not forfeiting all that we’ve learnt from postmodernism.

Thus, rather than simply signalling a return to naïve modernist ideological positions, metamodernism considers that our era is characterised by an oscillation between aspects of both modernism and postmodernism. We see this manifest as a kind of informed naivety, a pragmatic idealism, a moderate fanaticism, oscillating between sincerity and irony, deconstruction and construction, apathy and affect, attempting to attain some sort of transcendent position, as if such a thing were within our grasp. The metamodern generation understands that we can be both ironic and sincere in the same moment; that one does not necessarily diminish the other.”

From a Christian perspective this is not without problems; but there is lots in the Christian view of the world that ‘oscillates’ (to use a word from the manifesto), or resonates, with the goals of metamodernism.

The conflict between Christianity and metamodernity will kick off, as it does with any other philosophical outlook, with the claim that some ‘objective form’ of the Christian word, or truth exists; the claims John’s Gospel makes when calling Jesus not ‘a’ word, but ‘the word who was with God, and was God’… and that Jesus, the word, is both definitively ‘the way, the truth, and the life,’ and the one we turn to for the truly good life, or, as Peter says in John’s Gospel: “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life. We have come to believe and to know that you are the Holy One of God.” That said, because we live in a world where the future has not yet been realised — as people who live with the hope that eternal life will be found in Jesus and a new creation — Christians can, and should, recognise that we live alongside those looking for life, and truth and a ‘way’ elsewhere; and where post-modernity deconstructed truth claims in such a way that divergence has bred competition for dominance, metamodernism offers a more humble stance on the idea that we might, as people, pursue grand narratives as valuable and meaning making; and it invites us, as humans, to search for the grand narrative that both resonates with human experience and desire the most, and produces goodness and hope. It adopts a stance that is open to such truth claims, rather than ironic and cynical.

So here’s some ideas for what a church (or the church) for the metamodern world might look like; those who’ve followed along here for a while might recognise some of these qualities being aligned with the New Eden Project as an idea, and it’s true. These ideas are related.

So a church wanting to flourish in a meta-modern world would be a church that embraces and supports, and even, creates, ‘metamodern’ cultural artefacts; those that reject irony and cynicism and replace them with beauty, and a pursuit of something transcendent (even if that search often lands in humanism, community, and relationships, it will engage and critique that landing — resonating with what it can, like Paul in Athens, rather than simply rejecting such texts out of hand).

A church wanting to engage with this world will frame the Gospel as a grand story, or metanarrative, that we are invited to ‘live in,’ not simply a proposition (and indeed, will frame the whole Bible as a story); it will present this story as one that is more compelling than the others, and as the ultimate ‘true’ grand narrative, without adopting a sort of monotheistic zeal that leads to the destruction of all others and their gods (Deuteronomy with sledgehammers style), but will deconstruct other grand stories on the basis that they do not produce the results one hopes for (Paul in Athens style).

Such a church will see itself as a community built around that story to give it plausibility as we embody a certain sort of life together that has both emotional and experiential appeal because it is built on goodness, and hope, and beauty, and character (or virtue, and a rejection of cynicism and utilitarianism.

It will stop thinking that the answer to the shifts in western society is to bring back modernity, or to deconstruct post-modernity, and instead will set out being constructive; and so will move away from purely ‘rational’ propositionalising of the objective truth of the Gospel, and will instead try to match the truths of the Gospel up with people’s experiences and emotions; investing the time and energy of its people into culture making and institution building to produce the sort of cultural artefacts that work alongside the plausibility structure of Christian community to support the truthiness of the Christian story.

It will stop looking to the world of engineering, business, and marketing to shape ‘churchmanship’ and instead will value the arts, and the people industries, seeing church not as an event where a truth is propositionally proclaimed, but a community that lives out a narrative together.

And ultimately, it will engage the world with a posture of hope — in part because of how our story ends, but also because hope is what the world is looking for, rather than despair and cynicism — and even if that doesn’t work to reach more people, it would be a breath of fresh air for those of us already in the church. Wouldn’t it.

10 Reasons The Plausibility Problem is the book the church needs on homosexuality

It’s a few months now since my brother-in-law Mitch and I reviewed Born This Way, a book touted as the book the church needed to help us think through ministry to same sex attracted people. It’s fair to say we disagreed with the approach the book took. Now. Months later. Here is the book we both think is the book the church needs on homosexuality. Ed Shaw’s The Plausibility Problem. And here are 10 reasons why we believe this is the case.

But first. On book reviews and conversations

Before getting into the meat of the review, I (Nathan. To be clear, when this post uses “I” it’s Nathan, when it is “we” it is us) just want to make a couple of observations about the widespread criticism our first review received from people because it didn’t treat the book on its own terms (or on the author’s terms). I’m tacking them on here because they are actually pertinent, in some way, in terms of why we think this other book is the book for our times.

Before we get too far along — the original review of Born This Way has been updated a couple of times since posting, one of the significant updates was to include a link to a review of Born This Way by Liberty Inc’s pastoral worker Allan StarrBorn This Way’s author Steve Morrison has responded to this review with a gracious counter argument

I guess the question I’m still grappling with, and I think Mitch might be too, is when a book is billed as “the book the Church needs” on an issue, just how much of that hyperbole should be allowed to go unchallenged? How much should we review a book on its own terms, and how much we should review it in terms of the way it is being used or positioned in a wider conversation. A conversation that we are passionate (and interested) participants in?

It was both the nature of Born This Way, and the nature of the feedback to our review, that made me quickly come to grips with a couple of generation gaps that I don’t think us Aussie reformed evangelicals are bridging. These are labels that apply to Matthias Media (the publisher), Steve Morrison (the author), and Mitch and I as reviewers. This is the sort of tribe we all belong to, with a few geographic and denominational quirks… my observation is that there’s a generational turning point where people either generally agreed with our review, both in its substance and style, or thought it was terribad — the main criticisms of these older types were that we did not take the book on its terms and assess it accordingly, and that we wrote such a substantial critique, posted it online, and included stuff like the promotional material around the book in our treatment of the book as though they have equal weight. On this last point, I wrote something a while back about how the media is shifting to talking about a thing as though it’s the main thing, to talking about and participating in conversation, as though that’s the main thing… all of this is to say I think there are a couple of clashing worldviews operating, even within this ‘tribe’ we all belong to, which explains many of our problems with the book. I think the reason there’s such a sharp contrast between people of profoundly different demographics is because a shift happened somewhere in the last 40 years or so (this figure bleeds out at the margins — there are older people who go one way, and younger people who go the other— because it’s an environmental thing too), and this shift has two significant factors for the conversation surrounding these books, and homosexuality more generally:

  1. People grew up, and were educated, in a society that is profoundly post-modern.
  2. People on the younger side are what media sociologist types call ‘digital natives’ — a loose demographic grouping of people who believe that media is democratised. And that eyeballs and internet attention are the metric that matters. The people who watch a video online matter as much as the people who read a book, so long as they are participating in the online conversation. The implications of this are that anyone can have a platform, a book is part of a conversation just as much as a blog post, a video, a Facebook discussion — and more people might interact with the latter than the book itself. Anyone can have an opinion — expertise is ok, but not essential, ‘truthiness’ in a sense that something resonates with our experience or feelings is more compelling than traditional ‘authority’ (the sort that might come from publishing a book).

Which dovetails nicely with the thrust of our critique of Born This Way (apart from the damage we think it does to the people it talks about). Born This Way is a thoroughly modernist book written to an increasingly post-modern world. Our review was a thoroughly post-modern review of a modernist book (we broke almost all of author John Updike’s rules for graciously critiquing a book — though I think there are some new rules for people graciously reviewing books that might fit nicely with the shift described here, and I suspect giving the author a continued voice in the conversation — should they want it — is a big part of graciousness).

Born This Way’s approach to the issue is essentially: Want to know what to think about homosexuality? Here’s what words must necessarily mean (prescriptive terminology is essential). Here’s some science facts. Here’s some Bible verses. Here’s a conclusion with some important prescriptive terminology changes. Go and do what you must do when you draw some conclusions from these propositions.

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This is the way our tribe tends to approach issues. Our authority, quite rightly, is the Bible. But the way we use it (and I think this is less definitively ‘right’) is as an atomised bunch of propositional statements (which is easier when it involves clear imperatives — rules and regulations). We’re also happy to draw conclusions from what Augustine called God’s second book — the world around us, via science — so long as the Bible guides our interpretation of said ‘book’…This is all well and good if you think faithful Christianity overlaps with a modernist view of the world. If that is you, and you want to reject the ‘evils’ of post-modernity, then Born This Way might be the book for you… except for the hurt it might cause people you love, who it talks about, but even that sort of concern is a bit post-modern. And it’s this last bit that we think makes Born This Way not just a book that the church in this age doesn’t need, but instead, a book the church should not want. Why would we want a non-pastoral book trying to speak objectively into a subjective space where people need pastoring? The Plausibility Problem takes a different tack, and one we believe is much more helpful. It is, in many ways, the anti-thesis of Born This Way, where Born This Way goes left, it goes right, at every turn. I felt like one of the criticisms of our review was that we hypothesised an alternative and impossible book in our criticism of Born This Way, and that this was unfair because such a yardstick does not/could not exist. But here it is, and given the choice between the two, in terms of meeting the needs of the church in ministering to same sex attracted people (and creating communities where same sex attracted non-Christians might give the Gospel a hearing), We’d pick the Plausibility Problem for every person, every time.

I’ve noted elsewhere recently that post-modernity is more interested in a quality, plausible, story. A story where someone can see themselves as an actor, and see the narrative fitting with their own view of the world, and their self-identity. Story trumps proposition. Luckily the Bible is, I think, better understood as one grand Christ-centered narrative of God’s relationship to his world and humanity, rather than a bunch of rules and regulations (even the rules come in the context of a story, and often as stories). So our authority actually lends itself to this approach.

 

So. What does a book for this sort of world look like? It looks like Ed Shaw’s The Plausibility Problem: the church and same sex attractionHere are 10 reasons why this is the book the church needs in order to reach the sort of world and worldview outlined above.

1. It identifies the ‘plausibility problem’ and emphasises Jesus’ story as the solution. But this is also Ed’s story

Where Born This Way attempted to be objective and deal with the facts from science and the Bible, The Plausibility Problem takes a narrative approach from start to finish. It’s about replacing the world’s narrative about sex, identity and fulfilment, with God’s narrative. Where we suggested the Gospel was something like a tacked on extra in Born This Way, it’s the foundation of Shaw’s approach.

From the world’s perspective, Christ’s call to a wholehearted, sacrificial discipleship seems implausibly unattractive for anyone, regardless of their sexuality or particular circumstances. If we are to persevere in the life of discipleship ourselves and persuade anyone else to join us, we must somehow communicate that what is offered is not a set of rules, but a dynamic relationship with the living God. — The Plausibility Problem, Foreword.

One of the other problems we had with Born This Way was its attempt to be objective meant that the author never declared how what he was writing related to his own experience. This was deliberate, but it also created what we perceived to be significant issues with the book in terms of its pastoral application (or lack thereof), because pastoring is interpersonal, and its lack of understanding of some of the complexities of same sex attraction. Being objective about something subjective (like attraction and associated feelings and desires) doesn’t intuitively work. We’d also argue that objectivity is a sort of modernist myth, that it doesn’t actually serve anyone to remove yourself, your experience, or your agenda from what you’re saying. Shaw avoids these problems by acknowledging his bias, and his experience, straight up.

I write this book as an evangelical Christian who experiences same-sex attraction. Ever since the beginning of puberty, my sexual desires have been focused on some members of my own sex. What I thought might be just a teenage phase has never gone away and I remain exclusively same-sex attracted in my mid/late thirties, despite all my best efforts and prayers to change. So the plausibility problem is my problem… I believe that the Bible is God’s inspired (and thus inerrant and authoritative) Word to the people he’s both created and redeemed. Through its pages, my loving Father God tells me everything I need to know about everything that matters to him (2 Timothy 3:16–17). And those pages very clearly say that homosexual practice is wrong in his sight – remember the proof-text parade in the previous chapter. I am absolutely convinced of this, despite my own same-sex attraction and those who now tell me God never really says that, or has recently changed his mind. But it’s not even those famous individual verses that I find most persuasive.

Quoting his friend (and fellow same sex attracted author) Wesley Hill (via Washed and Waiting), Shaw says “I abstain from homosexual behaviour because of the power of the Scriptural story.” The Plausibility Problem invites the church to become a place where people can discover the power of this story.

Shaw’s basic premise, one we agree with, is that our conventional (modernist) approach doesn’t work in a post-modern world, it leaves those of us who do believe what the ‘proof texts’ in the Bible say about sexuality with the titular plausibility problem. Our inability to produce relationships in our church communities that make living a life that is faithful to this teaching possible means people aren’t listening when we tell them to live this way. He identifies a generation gap where a new generation of people aren’t prepared simply to accept the “just say no” approach.

The evangelical church’s basic message to them: ‘Just Say No!’ just doesn’t have any real credibility any more. It embarrasses many of us to even ask them to do it. It sounds positively unhealthy. It lacks any traction in today’s world – simply producing incredulity from the majority. Melinda Selmys (a Catholic who experiences same-sex attraction) communicates this well: Negative chastity, the kind of chastity that limits itself to saying ‘Thou shalt not,’ has consistently failed to persuade the postmodern world because it is madness.

2. It uses ‘story’ as a mode to provide an alternative and plausible counter story to the stories we’re bombarded with by our world

Sometimes it feels like the Devil has all the good stories.

We Christians have been trying to combat real stories from the gay community of love, injustice, and real emotions, with cold hard facts and rational arguments. In a post-modern world, feelings trump thinking, and stories trump facts. Shaw attempts to counter this by providing stories that demonstrate the possibility of a life shaped by the Gospel — his story, and the stories of others who also experience same sex attraction.

This mode supports his basic premise, that real stories of the plausibility of life as a same-sex attracted follower of Jesus… Being part of the Gospel story actually works. We believe it. Because we see it in Shaw. And we’re invited to imagine how this might work for others — for those in our church community, and those not yet part of our church community.

Shaw sets up the book by telling two powerful stories of Peter and Jane. Peter and Jane are Christians lured away from faithfulness to God’s story by the competing stories of our world, and invites us to see the problem this way. We’re bereft of alternative narratives and bombarding somebody feeling the lure of these stories with a bunch of science and proof texts from the Bible will only really convince one type of thinker — a modernist — and a modernist who is prepared to let their head rule their hearts, and their sex drive. A modernist who is also prepared to critically think through and ignore the counter-messages our world smashes them with. In short, we’re not sure the modernist approach works for all that many people any more, which helps answer a question about ‘what the book the church needs’ on this issue looks like…

“How can you look Peter in the eye and deny him sex forever? How can we ask Jane to turn her back on the one human relationship that has brought her joy? It just won’t seem plausible to them. It doesn’t sound that reasonable to us either. And what doesn’t help them or us much is the standard evangelical response to what they’re facing. We’ve basically adopted the slogan from the 1980s anti-drugs song: ‘Just Say No!’ That’s often all we have to say – exacerbated by the proof-text parade if anyone raises any objections… That used to convince. That used to be a plausible argument for most. To be an evangelical has always meant holding to the truth of ‘The divine inspiration of Holy Scripture as originally given and its supreme authority in all matters of faith and conduct’. And when it comes to homosexual practice, those Scriptures are pretty clear; evangelicals like clarity, and those verses were more than enough clarity for many, for years. We all knew where we stood.”

3. It focuses on the relationship between sexuality, Jesus and identity

One of the interesting implications of approaching life in this world using a story framework is we’re invited to consider the motivations behind actions, not just the actions themselves. That’s how and why stories are compelling. This question of motives, character, or identity, also seems to be more consistent with how the Bible approaches questions of sin.

Sinful behaviour is produced by sinful hearts. The Plausibility Problem doesn’t shy away from the truth that our sexuality is broken by sin, it is especially strident in its criticism of the widespread idea, both from the wider world and the more liberal end of the church, that something being natural necessarily makes it good. In this sense it deals more helpfully with the born this way concept than Born This Way.

‘How can being gay be wrong if you were born gay?’ That’s a question I’m asked a lot. And it’s a good one: my same-sex attraction feels part of me in that sort of way. As a theory on the origins of homosexuality, being born gay works for me better than any of the others on the market today, although every same-sex attracted man or woman will, no doubt, have their own personal take on this most complex and controversial of areas… whether you agree with the ‘gay gene’ theory or not. It is certainly the one that fits best with my lived experience of same-sex attraction (if not everyone’s). It is the most powerful case for affirming homosexuality today. And, I guess, that’s why some evangelical Christians have put a huge amount of time and energy into fighting the idea that same-sex attraction is genetic or innate… I want to argue, even if the ‘gay gene’ were found tomorrow, we would still not need to worry about this particular battle being lost: a genetic basis for homosexuality would not make it right… You see, one of the central truths of the Bible is that we are all naturally sinners from birth and yet are still held responsible for our sin.

Our actions are the products of our identity, and realigning our identity to line up with God’s story is what the Gospel invites us to do. It changes the character we play. Or, in Ed’s words, the Gospel tells us who we are. The Plausibility Problem makes the sexuality question a question of identity, and asks us to consider what we’re going to put first.

What I most want to avoid is any other identity that might attempt to displace my fundamental identity as a Christian. For the thing that defines me most in life is not my sexuality but my status – in Christ – as a son of God.

This Gospel tells me that I am – in Jesus – a child of God. That is why I can call him Father. That is why I can call Jesus my brother. That is what his Spirit confirms by dwelling inside of me. That is who I am: God’s own dear son. And thinking like that is crucial to living the Christian life… When people say, ‘Relax, you were born that way.’ or ‘Quit trying to be something you’re not and just be the real you,’ they are stumbling upon something very biblical. God does want you to be the real you. He does want you to be true to yourself. But the ‘you’ he’s talking about is the ‘you’ that you are by grace, not by nature.

4. It invites us to tackle this problem together, as a church (because it’s a problem we’ve created together)

One ofThe Plausibility Problem’s greatest strengths (and its most important insights) is that it invites us to move this conversation away from being an issue for a particular individual to solve, and instead, to think of it as something to work through together. Our new identity in Christ isn’t a new identity that simply applies to us as individuals, becoming a child of God brings us a host of brothers and sisters in Christ. Shaw’s diagnosis takes this issue away from the realm of the same sex attracted individual, and gives responsibility for our same sex attracted brothers and sisters to all of us.

… when a same-sex attracted Christian embraces a gay identity and lifestyle, we need to recognize that it might be, to some extent, not just their fault, but ours too.

Shaw invites us to stop placing responsibility for change on the individual sinner, and invites us instead to be a changing community where this shift in identity is both plausible and desirable, because it’s a new identity we’re all invited to share as we leave an old story behind.

I know that too often, church meetings have encouraged me to let my sin, rather than my Saviour, define me. That I have left those meetings reminded more of my same-sex attraction than my new status in Christ. They have unintentionally encouraged me to spend too much time contemplating my love of some men rather than contemplating God’s love for me. I need to hear a more biblically balanced message. One that does not brush my continued sin under the carpet, and which must keep encouraging me to repent of it (1 John 1:8–10), but which prevents my sin from ever defining me.

If the primary identity that all our churches commended to all our church members was our shared identity in Christ, that would do more to defeat this plausibility problem that we all face than almost anything else.

5. The plausibility framework offers an alternative way forward

What can we do about it? Well, this is where this book is designed to help. Its basic premise is simple: we just have to make what the Bible clearly commands seem plausible again. We need to remind ourselves, and remind Peter and Jane, that Jesus says this to us all: I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full. (John 10:10)

Shaw sets about doing this with practical on the ground examples of what a more plausible church community might look like. He diagnoses the problems — or missteps the church has taken—based on his own experience and the experience (and testimony) of many other same sex attracted Christians. These missteps aren’t just related to same sex attraction, they describe fundamental problems with what (and how) we normalise in our communities, and ask us to consider what happens to people who fall outside those norms.

The missteps include buying into the world’s stories that:

  1. Your identity is your sexuality
  2. A family is mum, dad and 2.4 children.
  3. If you’re born gay, it can’t be wrong to be gay.
  4. If it makes you happy, it must be right.
  5. Sex is where true intimacy is found.
  6. Men and women are equally interchangable.
  7. Godliness is heterosexuality.
  8. Celibacy is bad for you
  9. Suffering is to be avoided

None of these missteps, or false stories, are raised without Shaw also offering solutions based on the Bible’s story, a theology of church as people being shaped together by the Gospel, the thoughtful work of others, and his own experience. The stories he tells give us lived examples of how to respond to these missteps in a way that makes life as part of the church plausible, and one way we know it is plausible is because it explains why Shaw, and others, stick with Jesus. The structures he invites us to re-build and rely on are:

… the pre-eminence of our union with Christ when it comes to forming our identity; the reality that church is our one everlasting family; the doctrine of original sin; the full authority and total goodness of God’s Word; friendships, not just sex, bringing us all the human intimacy we need; marriage being all about the union of Christ and his church; godliness being all about Christ-likeness, not who you are attracted to; the fact that singleness is truly a great gift; and the reality that following Jesus means taking up your cross and suffering like him.

6. It invites us to see singleness within the church community as a plausible alternative to marriage and sex

The call to sexual purity isn’t just a call for the same sex attracted. It’s a call for the married heterosexual. It’s a call for the unmarried heterosexual. And being a church where it’s plausible to feel fulfilled and truly human while not having sex is a massively difficult thing if all the church says is “sex is a good part of our humanity and you need to get married to do it” or buys into the idea that fulfilment comes from finding completion in another person, your “other half”… Shaw has experienced life in a church culture that does this, that buys into the idolatry of marriage and heterosexual sex. And he calls us out of it. Part of that call is the call for all of us to pursue godliness, rather than heterosexuality, which is a really important note to hit when it comes to thinking about our sexual orientation.

7. It acknowledges that the struggle is real (but worth it)

The book is breathtakingly honest. Shaw is real about his attractions, his temptations, his struggles. He confesses and he invites us to confess too because confession like this is what will make this issue real for people, and helps identify Jesus as the real way forward. The struggle is real. Suffering is real. Self-denial is costly. It would be misleading to over-simplify the cost of following Jesus in this area, but it’s refreshing to not just see the cost, but think about how we might be invited to bear the cost together with those we love who experience these sorts of moments because they’ve decided not to pursue the fulfilment of their natural desires for the sake of the Gospel.

I have what I call ‘kitchen floor moments’. I call them that because they involve me sitting on my kitchen floor. But I’m not doing something useful like scrubbing it, although it could always benefit from that. Instead I’m there crying. And the reason for my tears is the unhappiness that my experience of same-sex attraction often brings. The acute pain I sometimes feel as a result of not having a partner, sex, children and the rest.

8. It invites us to consider intimacy apart from sex

One of the best and most pastoral problems Shaw diagnoses with our implausible church communities is that we’ve bought into the worldly narrative that intimacy is sex. He mentions that this conflation of two separate concepts has killed our ability to properly be friends with people, and to properly see intimate friendship without suspicion. Boundaries are great for stopping bad sexual stuff happening, but it’s possible that we’ve over-corrected. One piece of evidence he cites on this front is the growing belief in scholarly circles that there must have been something sexual going on between David and Jonathan. He urges us to rediscover friendship and non-sexual intimacy as a way forward. One of his really helpful points, even for married couples, is that our spouses can’t possibly fulfil all the needs we have for human love or intimacy. This is part of the idolatry of marriage and the spouse – the expectation we might bring that they will fulfil some desire of our heart that they’re not equipped to fulfil which will ultimately lead to disappointment.

The world in which we live cannot cope with intimate relationships that aren’t sexual – it makes no sense, it’s just not possible. So I’ve had to pull back from deepening friendships with both men and women out of fear that they are being seen as inappropriate. None of them were – but the supposed impossibility of non-sexual intimacy meant we felt under pressure to close them down. That’s been very hard at times. But what’s been hardest is how the church often discourages non-sexual intimacy too. Our response to the sexual revolution going on outside our doors has sadly just been to promote sexual intimacy in the context of Christian marriage. And to encourage people to keep it there by promising this will then deliver all the intimacy they’ve ever wanted.

If we’re wired for relationships, intimate loving relationships, the sort that reflects the intimate, loving, relationships of the Trinity, then for life to be plausible for single people in our churches, including the same sex attracted, we need to be much better at intimate friendships. This might mean more hugs, more deep and meaningful conversations, and more attempting to truly know someone by looking them in the eye and paying attention so that you actually understand them – with people other than your spouse.

9. It suggests same sex attraction is a part of one’s personhood that can be valued and that can help one understand God, and reminds us that all sexuality is broken

This isn’t a main point of the book, by any stretch, but in articulating a path towards faithfully finding his identity in Christ, and the love of God, Shaw has this to say as an aside.

To be fully human and follow Christ faithfully, there are many things we must do, but among them must be some sort of embrace of sexual difference. I somehow need to embrace what the Bible teaches about the importance of sexual difference, despite the restrictions it puts on my preferred expression of it. To view sexuality as a good thing, even though God bans me from acting out my desires in a sexual relationship with another man… But then surely my sexuality can be nothing more than a negative aspect of my life – if there is no prospect of me changing enough to be able to consummate a heterosexual marriage? Not if I pay attention to these precious words of pastor John Piper: …the ultimate reason (not the only one) why we are sexual is to make God more deeply knowable. The language and imagery of sexuality are the most graphic and most powerful that the Bible uses to describe the relationship between God and his people – both positively (when we are faithful) and negatively (when we are not).

My sexuality has allowed me to understand and appreciate the incredible power of the sexual language that God uses there and elsewhere: to communicate the passionate nature of his love for people like me! My sexuality might not lead me into a loving marriage, but it does consistently lead me into a greater appreciation of God’s love for me in Christ. That is one of many reasons why I’m profoundly grateful for it…

Most evangelicals are getting to the stage where we don’t expect ‘conversion therapy’ or ‘reparative therapy’ to produce an orientation change (while we also want to acknowledge that sexual orientation can be relatively fluid for some people). Shaw’s honest reflections about his own experience, coupled with his constant emphasis on the Gospel and his identity in Christ, should help us frame our language and expectations here too. Even if the aim is ‘celibacy’ rather than ‘heterosexuality,’ same-sex attraction might not be something to be ‘cured’ at all. Rather than asking somebody to flick some sort of switch that turns their attraction off, perhaps its more helpful to think about what it might look like for an exclusively same sex attracted person to maintain that attraction, but have it defined first by their attraction to Jesus. This is where the attempt to make attraction or orientation the same as “temptation” and thus something to be resisted, rather than re-oriented around a greater love and attraction, so misguided in Born This Way. Shaw gives a picture of the challenges presented to our same sex attracted friends when we get this wrong… the goal for Christian godliness for the same sex attracted individual is not heterosexuality, or asexuality, it is Christlikeness.

If heterosexuality is godliness, the big change that’s most been needed in my life is for me to become heterosexual. And so I’ve prayed hard and searched hard for an effective antidote to my same-sex attraction. The pursuit of holiness has nearly always equalled the pursuit of heterosexuality for me. What has so often encouraged me to give up on the Christian life has been my lack of progress in becoming heterosexual. I’ve never been sexually attracted to a woman. Yet every so often, a short period of not being sexually attracted to a man for a while has given me hope – only to have that dashed when my type of good-looking man has walked onto my TV screen or into my life. As a result, I’ve kept feeling I’m making no progress as a Christian – still struggling with the same wrong sexual desires I did back when I was sixteen. That’s when it has felt least plausible to keep going as a Christian. Feeling like you have made no steps forwards for twenty years makes you unwilling to keep going. Remembering the call to be like Jesus in everything has shown me not only the countless other ways I’m not like Jesus, but also the progress I have actually been making in becoming more like him over the last twenty years. This progress has often come in the midst of, and as a direct result of, my enduring struggle with same-sex attraction.

Shaw expresses a desire that the sort of focus we put on godliness for same sex attracted people with their sexuality be spread to other forms of sexual brokenness in the church. Getting this picture of human sexuality right helps us understand that heterosexuality does not necessarily equal godliness, and it certainly won’t in sinful people. Ever. The problem we create when we present our married heterosexuality as unfallen, or less fallen, than same sex attraction is that we isolate those around us who are not married heterosexuals.

All sexual relationships are marred (Genesis 3:7) There has been no perfect sexual relationship since then. Even the ‘perfect’ heterosexual Christian couple who keep sex for marriage have plenty to be ashamed of and embarrassed about their sexuality and their use of it. When I share those feelings of imperfection as a same-sex attracted Christian, I should not be made to feel alone.

Shaw’s plausibility cure for this is honesty. He calls us to spur one another on towards Christ-likeness with our sexuality, same sex attracted or not, and for us to be prepared to be honest (in situations of trusting relationships, but also in open, frank, honesty like the kind he presents in this book, by those who want to lead us in this area).

“… when I have to confess my sexual sins to you, don’t be afraid to confess your sexual sins to me. In that way, we can spur each other on to Christ-likeness, and on to love and good deeds through the triumphs and tragedies…

…Greater honesty about the challenges of being sexual beings has been one of the upsides of the so-called ‘sexual revolution’. Unlike many of the downsides, this honesty has yet to spread to the church. Some of us same-sex attracted pastors have recently taken a lead, but we have yet to be followed by the brothers and sisters in Christ who struggle with internet porn, who have survived the pain of adultery or who live in sexless marriages… until some go public with their private struggles (or, at least, until we start to recognize publicly that they are issues with which many church members are grappling), the church will continue to be perceived as sexually self-righteous and sorted – rather than a place where all who are sexually broken (which is all of us!) can get the help and support we need. Many will have to struggle on alone in silence.”

10. It is pastoral.

Shaw’s use of stories, both the stories that make his own experience incredibly real and raw, and stories of how his real needs are met by Jesus, and by his church, give us concrete examples to duplicate in our own lives and as we love and care for those within our own community. This book is profoundly pastoral. It’s purpose is to help us love people in our communities, and wants people in our church communities to know the love of Jesus. Not the cold facts. It speaks into the subjective reality of the same sex attracted person, but more than that, it speaks into the subjective reality of the whole church. It invites us to think, feel and respond. It gives us patterns for that response through stories, and through the lens of the eyes and words of one for whom this advice has been effective.

I (Nathan) found the chapter on church as a family for single people particularly helpful in thinking through some of the ways my own nuclear family can start to include single friends in the rhythms of our family life. Shaw mentions the way many people within his church family provide different aspects of the family experience for him that prevent his life being one of isolation. There are people who hug him. People who eat with him regularly. People who call him to talk about life. People who arrange parties to mark milestones for him, and others who supply meals for him when he’s sick. There are people who invite him on family holidays, or to hang out and play with their kids on Sunday arvos. There are  other single people he chats with. The vision of church he describes is one where love is evident, where a sense that family could be something bigger than other narratives allow, and it’s one that seems doable, where I can pick off a couple of those roles to play for a couple of people in a way that might make the life they are called to just that little bit more plausible.

The beauty is that it’s not just the responsibility for plausibility that gets shared through these sorts of relationships, but the benefits as well.

And, crucially, this new family benefits us all – there is give and take from all of us, all of the time. It strengthens single people, but it also strengthens marriages. It allows children to grow up in an environment where there are multiple adults parenting them. It’s not perfect – there are constant ups and downs. All human relationships get messy at times, but they are a mess worth making. For when it works, it is the most wonderful of experiences for all of us. I pinch myself at times. And the plausibility of the life that I have chosen is closely tied to this experience. When church feels like a family, I can cope with not ever having my own partner and children. When it hasn’t worked is when I have struggled most. The same-sex attracted Christians I’ve met who are suffering most are those in churches that haven’t grasped this at all and that don’t even notice these individuals.

 

 

Is meaning in the reading, or in the writing?

One of the interesting spin-offs of the great worship debate, both here, and elsewhere, is an argument about the use of words, and what gives words meaning.

There seem to be three approaches to language at play here, three ways of arguing about what language means…

1. The etymological approach – we can know what a word means based on what the word means, how it was developed, its origins, and if not that, at least by its dictionary definition.
2. The “reader decides” approach – a word means what a reader interprets it to mean. This is a bit post-modern. We all bring our own agendas to a text, and we interpret and use words accordingly. In a sense this argument, broadly understood, also incorporates the idea that usage dictates meaning. The way a word is commonly understood is the most legitimate, and in some cases, the only, way to interpret a word.
3. The “author decides” approach – a word is given meaning by the words around it. By the context. The genre. The implied or actual author, the implied reader (ie how the author wants the word to be read by his implied audience). This view sees the author’s intention as paramount in interpretation. A word means what the writer wants it to mean.

As a writer I like option 3. I think Shakespeare would agree. I think Christians with a high doctrine of inspiration of Scripture also have to be at least biased to that approach – while recognising that there are valid insights to be brought to the table by all three approaches. In fact, I think that each of these options, held as an extreme, produces logical fallacies.

The fallacy involved in the first is the “Etymological Fallacy” – it’s where we argue that language doesn’t change. We ignore the process of history and the expansion of definitions of words to include new things, or new concepts.

The fallacy involved in the second, or one of them, is the “illegitimate totality transfer” – a fallacy Don Carson identified where you bring in one meaning of a word and say that it’s the total meaning. This is also a problem that can occur with point 1, though we can also import our own personal preference for the meaning of a word into interpretation.

The third point doesn’t involve a fallacy that I’m familiar with – except that the writer can not reasonably expect the reader to know his/her brain. There must be a name for that fallacy. Anybody? It also seems that expecting a reasonable reader is also an unreasonable read of the world.

Fundamentally each approach above reads the text with an agenda – and the real question is whose agenda does a text serve? I’d say my bias is towards the third – because without a writer we don’t have a text in the first place. The text is the product of a writer’s intent, and it’s fair that we consider it in that framework. But, I think there are particular genres where that is, at best, ambiguous. While the experience of reading Shakespeare, and seeing what he wanted us to see, is rich and captures his artistry – it’s fair to say that his writing contains a fair degree of deliberate ambiguity – where he knows different readers are going to bring different agendas, or knowledge, to a text. It seems to me that the best writing does this. So Shrek, and the Simpsons, are examples from pop-culture where there are layers of meaning imbued in a text by the writer – acknowledging point 3. And puns regularly combine all three interpretive methods. Artistry does that.

Here are a couple of case studies – firstly – I used the words “old people” the other day as a bit of a rhetorical device, in apposition to the “angry young man”… the discussion on the post is informative because I basically failed to acknowledge the existence of points 1 or 2 – which meant what I thought, and intended, as art, wasn’t. But, I would suggest that most “exegetes” of my post failed to pay adequate heed to 3, ignoring both authorial intent, and context (on a blog, with a disclaimer).

Secondly, the worship debate itself – many of the arguments against using the word worship in a modern context commit either one of the two fallacies identified above, and, in my opinion, pay little regard to point three. Word studies are only really useful, in my opinion, for identifying the possible meaning of a word within its context – the meaning of the word is given by the way its used, it’s also a fallacy to say that a writer can’t create new meaning for a word through juxtaposing it with other ideas, or using it in a new context. That’s how language expands. It’s why the etymological fallacy is a fallacy. So with regards to worship – we’ve got the New Testament writers building on Old Testament traditions, and New Testament culture to create a paradigm by which the church could define itself and operate, under God. The original readers of the New Testament had different ideas of what the word “worship” might have meant to the ideas we import into it… the original authors of the New Testament had different ideas about what worship meant to their emperor-worshipping first century counterparts. Insisting on narrow etymological interpretations of a word pays no heed to the idea that the New Testament writers were artists, or creating something new, or good writers who drew pictures. And its weird to toss out words just because their definition has broadened, rather than just qualifying their meaning and trying to define them as the author intended.

Anyway. I’ll stop now.

The no-gender agenda

It’s a strange time to be a person. Apparently the solution to all of our sexism problems is to remove the gender distinction. We are all the same. Now, I’m going to take my Christian hat off for the moment, and ignore that the Bible suggest gender is part of the created order (male and female he created them…). And I’d like to open this post by acknowledging that there are disparities in the way men and women are treated that are wrong.

I don’t even care that much if women want to fight on the front line. If a woman is big enough, and strong enough, and is able enough to take the place in a unit that would otherwise have been held by a man, on merit, then who am I to tell them they can’t. I just don’t think that’s particularly likely, and I think it opens a Pandorah’s box of issues within a unit, which isn’t, of itself, a reason not to allow it. Do I think women should be on the front line? No. But if some want to, then that’s their decision, not mine. This whole push to revolutionise the military’s gender agenda off the back of some demonstrably shoddy sexual ethics seems like the symptom of a broader social push to mimimise the difference between genders. I think this move is driven by good motives – but it’s just incredibly stupid.

Doesn’t this just seem completely loopy to everybody else. Boys and girls are obviously different. They don’t just have different parts. They have different hormones. Hormones that produce different emotions. Gender is predominantly a “nature” issue, sure, there are “nurture” aspects to it – but the social side follows the natural side in this case.

I’ve held off saying anything on this topic for a while. But events in the last few weeks are tipping my hand. I just feel annoyed as I watch this issue have bizarre and dangerous outworkings.

A few months ago a Christian student in the US sparked a massive furore in the blogosphere, and probably on talkback radio, when he refused to wrestle a girl on religious grounds. The Friendly Atheist thinks he should have grappled the girl into submission (and a follow up). Angry commenters there suggested it is wrong to recognise differences between the genders. And in many cases it is. I’d say issues of physical strength aren’t one of those cases – the world records in every athletic event out there are pretty clear.

Now. I was told, all my life, not to hit girls. It didn’t stop me bullying my sisters, sometimes physically, until I was old enough and big enough that the physical disparity was clearly unfair. This happened when I was about 15. It should have happened earlier. In hindsight I feel pretty bad about the way I treated my sisters. The older me would beat some sense into the younger me in a number of areas. This would be one of them. Hitting girls is wrong. Guys are stronger. It’s just facts. There are some girls who are stronger than some guys. I’m not denying that there exist myriad women who could beat me in a fight. A girl in my grade 9 class beat me in an arm wrestle. And I was trying. It wasn’t humiliating. She was strong. But there would have been 30 guys in my year who would have beaten her.

I’m sorry, but boys and girls are different. I would have thought that was pretty clear.

It seems that gender is now a fluid concept (unlike sexuality, which you’re apparently stuck with, if recent furores surrounding gay-to-straight conversion apps on the Apple App Store are indicative). Some have suggested that gender is the new frontier post the gay marriage debate. It’s post-modernity meets feminism. And it’s weird. A Swedish couple made headlines in 2009 when they refused to apply a gender label to their child Pop. Or, at the very least, they refused to tell people if Pop was a boy or a girl. A Canadian couple followed suit with their thing, Storm. Part of the problem, I think, with de-genderising a child is you end up dehumanising them as a by-product, in terms of what options are left.

“In an interview with newspaper Svenska Dagbladet in March, the parents were quoted saying their decision was rooted in the feminist philosophy that gender is a social construction. “

A behavioural psychologist pointed out that this exercise was almost entirely pointless.

Pinker says there are many ways that males and females differ from birth; even if gender is kept ‘secret,’ prenatal hormones developed in the second trimester of pregnancy already alter the way the child behaves and feels.

She says once children can speak, males tell aggressive stories 87 per cent of the time, while females only 17 per cent. In a study, children aged two to four were given a task to work together for a reward, and boys used physical tactics 50 times more than girls, she says.

Now, a Swedish preschool is doing its bit to destigmatise gender by refusing to describe boys and girls as boys or girls. Because we wouldn’t want to assign anything to a child that they haven’t asked for – this post was actually prompted by rumours of a similar thing going on somewhere in Australia, but I can’t find it anywhere.

Few would argue that gender stereotypes aren’t in some way the product of social conditioning – stuff like boys wearing blue and girls wearing pink, or even skirts being girls clothes, are products of particular cultures operating in particular times and particular places. Ads for boys and girls toys demonstrate a sort of circularity here where culture reinforces natural differences and essentially amplifies them (some have suggested these ads are essentially symptoms of a disease rather than simply a reflection of nature), that’s what I reckon is going on. I don’t feel like I was manipulated to want to hit stuff with sticks, or to enjoy fire and explosions. I had plenty of opportunity, with three sisters, to play with girls toys, but they were boring, and I was much more interested in more combative play with sticks and glove guns. It was all my choice. Back in my day we had to make our own fun with bits of wood we picked up in the yard. But all the brainwashed people say that.

Boys’ toy ads look like this:

Girls’ toy ads look like this:

Boy, oh boy (or person, oh person) this whole issue is stupid and it makes me want to pull out my Playstation and shoot some bad guys (or people).

That is all.

The problem with the liberals

You might be thinking, on the basis of the title, that I’m going to talk about politics. If you want to know what I think is currently wrong with the Liberal Party read here.

Today’s rant is about “liberal” Christians.

I don’t think there has been anything more harmful to evangelism than the watering down of the gospel. There are plenty of things atheists could say about what the Bible actually says that would be grounds for choosing to reject God. But nothing annoys me more in the dialogue than those weak kneed Christians who try to apologise for God’s behaviour. Especially when it comes to that archaic ban on gayness (which is a genetic trait so can’t be wrong) or those cultural ideas of marriage and family. Read any forum where gay rights are being discussed (and I’m not actually opposed to gay marriage necessarily) and you’ll see the type of people I’m talking about.

It is important to place the Bible in historical context and to understand what the text meant to the original readers. But these liberals need to go back to reading their Bibles. They’re kind of missing the point. Right from the nation of Israel to instructions for Christians the idea is that at some point God has to be counter cultural – or there’s no point? How are the people of God to be different if everything that’s natural is fair game? It just doesn’t make sense.

Liberal Christianity is less logical than atheism. Atheism functions on a type of rational and logical framework. Liberalism takes a bizarre mix of the supernatural element of Christianity and the emotional anything goes morality of Atheism and tries to blend them. It stinks.

We should expect sin to be natural. In fact, I’d go as far as to say we should have an inherent distrust for anything that seems natural to us, as humans, because human nature is sinful.

I can see where they come from, sometimes, we are called to love people. Loving the sinner but hating the sin can be pretty confusing. But to suggest that certain behaviour is ok for Christians just because it’s instinctive isn’t just a slippery slope. It’s a fireman’s pole. Straight down.

The fundamental assumption of Liberal belief – from what I can gather – is that somehow we, in the 21st century, are better qualified to understand the mind of God than those primitive disciples and their apostolic proclamations – and heaven help anyone who tries to base a worldview on the Old Testament.

Science, culture and psychology have helped us understand our sinfulness better – they do nothing to turn that which God calls sinful into something pure.

That is all.