The Weight of Culture and Our Strange New World
Just a small sampling of recent headlines reveals what a disorienting cultural moment this is: Man wins a women’s swimming championship, Supreme Court nominee refuses to define the word woman, Biden administration endorses gender reassignment surgery for minors. Back in 2020, theologian and historian Dr. Carl Trueman provided a full account of how something that was unthinkable a generation ago became unquestionable today. The dramatic shifts in how we think about gender and sexuality are among the fruits (not roots) of a much deeper shift in how we think about the human person.
Trueman’s book The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self described the origin story of what has been called “the cultural identity crisis.” Centuries ago, thinkers, writers, and activists began to rethink, redefine, and over-sexualize the concept of self. By describing this process, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self felt like a long-overdue answer key for our cultural moment. Weighing in at over 400 pages, it is the definitive account of the thinkers, ideas, expressions, and consequences of the sexual revolution.
Thankfully, Dr. Trueman also heard the many pleas for a less academic approach to these essential concepts, one that works out the same essential analysis but for those Christians dealing with the everyday chaos of the culture he so aptly describes. The new and much slimmer version is called Strange New World: How Thinkers and Activists Redefined Identity and Sparked the Sexual Revolution.
In it, Trueman tells the story of the development and propagation of ideas that sparked a revolution in how Western people think about themselves and others. Eventually, these ideas transformed how we think about sex and the human body, about social institutions like the family and the role of the state, and about meaning, purpose, and fulfillment.
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Review of Stephen Nichols, R. C. Sproul: A Life, Wheaton: Crossway, 2021.
Nichols, like Sproul, wrote this biography that people may discover the depths and riches of the God who is not only holy but is “holy, holy, holy” (Isaiah 6:3). Therefore, as we reflect on the life and ministry of R. C. Sproul, let us give glory to God, not R. C. Sproul. Dr. Sproul understood that his life was a temporary stewardship testifying to the grace of God in Christ Jesus, who alone deserves all the glory (Revelation 4:11).
In the midst of rising cultural hostility toward Christ and the widespread theological confusion within the church, how can Christians remain faithful to the Word of God? The life and ministry of Dr R C. Sproul (1939-2017), pastor, professor, author, and the founder and president of Ligonier Ministries, is an exemplary model of covenantal faithfulness, doctrinal precision, and convictional passion. In a word, he remained faithful to the Word of God. The life of Dr Sproul is beautifully portrayed through a chronological outline of the major moments and convictions that shaped him in Stephen Nichols’ biography, R. C. Sproul: A Life. This biography is warm and personal, enlightening and thought-provoking, as Nichols interweaves apt anecdotes to highlight Sproul’s theological convictions. Nichols draws the reader behind the public ministry, giving us an insight into the man and the motivation behind the ministry. It is this personal perspective that made the experience of reading this biography so sweet.
Not only is the biography warm and personal, it is also packed with theological conviction. Sproul’s most famous book, The Holiness of God, arose from a deeply personal awakening to God’s holiness during a midnight trek at the chapel of Westminster College in his second year of college. Nichols quotes Sproul recounting this episode where he had a sudden epiphany of the grandeur of God, an “awakening to the biblical concept of God that changed [his] whole life after that” (p. 49).
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A Big Win for Christian Students and Schools
Christians will need to continue to make the case for religious freedom and demonstrate in our lives that religious Americans are the best citizens. The schools, colleges, hospitals, churches, sports leagues, and charities established by Christians benefit everyone, and are therefore indispensable pillars supporting a limited government. The ascendent cult of sexual orientation and gender identity offers none of these things. It only results in a bigger and more intrusive government less concerned with the common good than the goals of ideologues.
The question constantly repeated by those who pushed to redefine marriage a decade ago was, “How will my gay marriage hurt you?” More recently, from those demanding full legal and social recognition for transgender identities, it has been, “How does me being my true self hurt you?” The answers to those questions have been clear for some time.
LGBTQ dogma is not a “live and let live” vision of reality. It constantly demands that dissenters—especially the religious ones who are allegiant to the Creator, whom their ideas deny—be rooted out and punished. Christian business owners, public and private company employees, nonprofits and even parents have felt the demand to comply and agree, or else …
Recently, a few cases have helped right some wrongs against religious freedom. The latest battle involves an attempt by activists to keep students from using federal assistance to attend religious schools. Thankfully, this case went the right way.
In Hunter v. U.S. Department of Education, Alliance Defending Freedom successfully argued that “Title IX allows students to use federal financial aid at private religious schools that operate according to their beliefs,” specifically their beliefs on “gender and sexual morality.”
Since 2021, Title IX has been interpreted to prohibit “discrimination” on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity, with religious institutions receiving exemptions. ADF represented three Christian institutions—two universities and a seminary—that welcome students who receive government help with tuition but operate according to biblical convictions about sexuality.
Activists argued that this violates the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment by involving the government in funding religion.
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His Majesty Lifts the Lowly
Behind Psalm 8, the second “song of majesty” is Psalm 145, where we also find “two modes” of divine majesty. The fourth stanza praises God’s regal highness in the more typical terms: glory and power, mighty deeds, situated in “his kingdom,” under his kingly dominion. This is the stuff of natural majesty. Then the fifth stanza unfolds this peculiar majesty for the enlightened eyes of his covenant people — the people to which God, amazingly, is kind, or literally loyal (verses 13b and 17) by his gracious covenant. Psalm 138 also contains a parallel, at least in showing the surprising majesty of God, and the global advance of his renown, his name.
Mention something “majestic” in nature, and many of us would think of mountains.
We might call to mind some great range of mountains, or a towering waterfall, or an expansive body of water with no end in sight. Majestic features are both imposing and attractive, both impressive and beautiful, both intimidating and inviting. They have a strange pull on the human soul, drawing on us to draw near, but with reverence and care.
In our language, as in biblical terms, the word majesty captures not only bigness but also beauty, awesome power combined with pleasant admiration, both great height or size and yet potential safety. Majesty brings together both greatness and goodness, both strength and splendor (Psalm 96:6). It’s not only a fitting descriptor for mountain majesties but also for God, who is, above all, “the Majestic One” (Isaiah 10:34). Psalm 76:4 declares in praise to him, “Glorious are you,” and then adds, “more majestic than the mountains.”
How Majestic His Name
Such divine majesty pulses with an expansive, evangelistic force. God is not only majestic in fact but also in renown. His greatness, his power, his glory are not to be hidden and kept secret, but to spread through sight and word far and wide, attaching his name to such greatness and glory. His majesty is to be known, and he to be known, by name.
In a song of high praise, Psalm 148 bids both kings and commoners, young men and maidens, old and young alike to praise God’s exalted name as an extension of his majesty:
Let them praise the name of the Lord,for his name alone is exalted;his majesty is above earth and heaven. (Psalm 148:13)
So also Micah’s famous Bethlehem prophecy speaks of a great ruler arising, from the little town, who “shall stand and shepherd his flock in the strength of the Lord, in the majesty of the name of the Lord his God. And they shall dwell secure, for now he shall be great to the ends of the earth” (Micah 5:4).
Of course, nowhere is God’s majesty accented as memorably as in the first line of Psalm 8 and its refrain in the last. This is Scripture’s signature celebration of divine majesty. Yet here, God’s majesty is not like the renown of mere human splendor, whether of ancient Egypt or Babylon or Rome, or like the renown of a Washington or Napoleon, a Lincoln or Churchill. This psalm, perhaps surprisingly, largely assumes God’s natural majesty (as we might call it), equally visible to unbelieving eyes, while accenting his peculiar majesty — the summit of his beauty requiring a miracle of his grace to see and enjoy.
Two Modes of Majesty
Psalm 8 manifestly sings of glory — God’s glory, set above the heavens (verse 1), and man’s glory, appointed by God, as one he has “crowned . . . with glory and honor” (verse 5). And so, that memorable opening line, reprised as the final note, hails the majesty of God’s name:
O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth!
Here, under the banner of God’s majesty and excellence as his glory, we find two levels, or modes. First is what we might call a natural mode: the heavens (verses 1 and 3), the moon and the stars (verse 3), and we might presume the quintessential natural majesties like mountains and waterfalls and oceans, vast physical expanses that remind us of our smallness and the awe-inspiring bigness and authority and power of the one who made such majesties.
But then, second, is what we might call a special mode of his majesty, which is the particular emphasis of Psalm 8: verse 2 mentions the mouths of babies and infants (that is, the weak) testifying to his strength in the face of foes and the enemy and avenger. Then, at the heart of the psalm, verses 3–8 marvel at his grace toward mankind. In view of such natural majesties as the heavens (“your heavens”!) and moon and stars, and mountains, “What is man that you are mindful of him?”
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