Thoughts from the Dentist’s Couch

Lying under the drill today, I was playing the man and trying to show that it did not hurt at all.

While there, my thoughts turned to torture.

The project to provide a Christian rationale for war and oppression in the USA (and here in the Daily Telegraph - the NeoCons have hijacked my favourite paper) walks down the old sick road of defining “the lesser of two evils” and then turning that into a positive justification for evil.

As with the “Just War” so now moderate torture is now OK.

Experience shows that the torturer quickly regresses into going beyond official guidance just as “Just Warriors” in combat soon go beyond the decent limits which the intellectuals love to imagine.

“Do unto others as you would have them do to you”.

Which part of that sentence is too hard for our Christian friends in the moderate torture camp do you think? Perhaps they just lack imagination?

A few minutes in the dentist’s chair without anaesthetic might remind them what pain plus helplessness feels like.

Sick unto death - What is wrong with evangelical thinkers?

A few days ago an amazing article by Wayne Grudem (US evangelical theologian) was being flagged in blogspace.  It was Prof Grudem inviting people to pray for a Republican victory in the recent elections.  What I found remarkable was the way he credited the President with successes using a grid of understanding which was astonishingly right wing.  Extremely liberal economic theories tied to a taste for legislation in areas of morality and medical ethics.

Here is the link to Wayne Grudem’s post.

Like Errol Hulse’s pro war rant I refered to earlier in the year it is the enthusiasm for the Iraq war and occupation which startled me.  He seemed to feel it was a reasonable response to Islamic terrorism and even believed it would help with Gospel proclamation!  The Prof really is in a high Ivory Tower if he thinks that.

Like so many Evangelicals he gets lathered up at the homosexual agenda and embryo research but seems to think that maiming and killing tens of thousands of people in a pointless war is just a peccadillo.  Trigger happy American kids are winning neither heart nor minds in Iraq and they just should not be there.   The same faction which predicted the war would be popular with ordinary Iraqis now tell us there will be a bloodbath if the troops leave.  They were wrong last time and that prediction may be wrong too.

There seems to be a belief that you really can figure out every matter of right and wrong from first principles and an assumption that warfare and oppressive legislation are easily justifed by such a process.  It is the rationalism of the madhouse.

Are Christians really meant to be good for society?

Last Sunday I preached on “Salt and Light”. I pointed out that the virtue of salt there is that it tastes salty and NOT that it is a preservative. I am sure that the reference is to be being tasty to God - as in Leviticus 2:13

Season all your grain offerings with salt . Do not leave the salt of the covenant of your God out of your grain offerings; add salt to all your offerings.

and Jesus is not worried about preserving our culture. The context is that of being persecuted for the Gospel’s sake since that is when we are likely to play down our convictions to avoid suffering.

It occurs to me that the persecutors could be right. Loyalty to Jesus could make us a disruptive and divisive element.

The traditional Anglican interpretation of “salt and light” is that we are the preservers of all that is good in our culture and that we must continue to strive for social improvement. As I get older that looks more and more like a red herring. In any case, it isn’t working.

John MacArthur - from the horses mouth (well, keyboard I suppose)

The afformentioned Gent has caused a stir among the reformed by insisting that real faith is always born with real repentance and none lives in the renewed heart without the other. I think he is right but some have claimed he is smuggling in “works righteousness” which is an offence worse than selling your children in the eyes of some.

Here is a link to his current blog if you are interested (and I think you ought to be if you are in ministry).

Common questions about the Lordship position-part 1

The Sanctity of Human Life.. a meaningless concept

Christian people react with an instinctive disgust to abortion on demand and medical murder of the handicapped or terminally ill.

It is an offence to us because we see human life as valuable and the nearest thing on earth to the life of the eternal God. We rightly invoke the Bible teaching about mankind bearing the image of God.

But we have also adopted the silly slogan of the “Sanctity” of human life.

In other words, our reverence of the Holy God is to be reflected in our reverence for the holiness of human existence. God is holy therefore his image is also holy.

This is not a reasonable position since God does not treat us as holy. He has cursed us and laid burdens of grief, frustration and death upon us precisely because we have lost our essential holiness.

Humanity is unholy, unsanctified and lost.

Nevertheless, we are not without value. Christ has died to save the world and his sacrifice revalues us all. Everyone deserves respect and no one is to be despised. The redeemer has placed a value on every scrap of humanity including the unborn child.

Where there is faith in Christ there is a sanctity which comes as a gift from God. Believers in Jesus are often called “saints” in the New Testament - even where their behaviour falls far short of their new designation.

Right wing campaigners seem to believe in the sanctity of unborn Western lives and that adult Middle Eastern lives are unholy and cheap. Would it not be better to say that all human life is valuable and not to be wasted?

It may be necessary to kill in some extreme circumstances but killing the unborn for economic or social reasons is as shameful as waging war for such low purposes.