As we enter into the spiritual battlefield of 2023, we would do well to remember that while Herod did his worst in the early years of Christ’s life, he did not ultimately succeed in thwarting the redemptive purposes of God. When Jesus said, “I will build my church and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it” He meant what He said. But as we play our own small part in that work, we must not lose sight of the fact that we do so in a world where many operate according to the same devilishness as King Herod.

Now when they had departed, behold, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream and said, “Rise, take the child and his mother, and flee to Egypt, and remain there until I tell you, for Herod is about to search for the child, to destroy him.” And he rose and took the child and his mother by night and departed to Egypt and remained there until the death of Herod. This was to fulfill what the Lord had spoken by the prophet, “Out of Egypt I called my son.”
Then Herod, when he saw that he had been tricked by the wise men, became furious, and he sent and killed all the male children in Bethlehem and in all that region who were two years old or under, according to the time that he had ascertained from the wise men. Then was fulfilled what was spoken by the prophet Jeremiah:
“A voice was heard in Ramah,weeping and loud lamentation,Rachel weeping for her children;she refused to be comforted,because they are no more.”Matthew 2:13-18
Dear Friends,
These verses from the second chapter of Matthew’s gospel remind us that following His birth, the earliest months of Christ’s life were set against a backdrop of terrible evil and profound darkness. The celebratory hymn of the angels (in Luke 2:14) was followed by the sound of weeping and loud lamentation as Herod, in his twisted attempt to destroy the Messiah, ordered the murder of every male child under two years of age in Bethlehem.
As we remember and rejoice in the coming of our Saviour 2,000 years ago, let us not lose sight of the fact that the world is not any less dark now than it was then. We may not live in the wake of Herod’s violence, but the actions of civil governments continue to demonstrate the same contempt for what God has ordained – particularly when it comes to the sanctity of human life and His created order.
It is astonishing that just three days before Christmas, the Scottish Government has just this week secured parliamentary support for its Gender Recognition Reform Bill. The age requirement for those wishing to legally change their gender has been lowered from 18 to 16, there is no longer any requirement to secure a medical professional’s diagnosis of gender dysphoria and the period of time a person is required to live in their ‘acquired gender’ has been reduced from two years to three months (six months for those under 18s). Not only does this immoral and irresponsible legislation have the potential to place true women and girls in danger, it will cause untold damage to many teenagers at a time in their lives when they already face many pressures and experience much confusion.
Meanwhile, Liam Macarthur MSP’s Assisted Dying for Terminally Ill Adults (Scotland) Bill is due to be introduced to the Scottish Parliament in early 2023, which if successful, will make assisted suicide (a form of euthanasia) legal in Scotland. Where similar legislation has been passed in other countries (for example, Canada), previously agreed safeguards are already being disregarded by some Doctors who are proposing assisted suicide to patients who are not terminally ill and the list of those who are eligible is likely to be widened next year to include even those with mental health issues.
While on the subject of the sanctity and preservation of human life, I would direct you to a recent speech given by Andrew Bridgen MP in the House of Commons and to the call from UK Doctors for a Government investigation. I realise that to question either the efficacy or safety of Covid-19 “vaccines” is, in the eyes of many, to tread on sacred ground. However, as one who continues to have concerns about the mRNA experimental gene therapy injections (as I highlighted in a letter in September 2021 and to our denomination’s Covid-19 committee the same year), I could not in good conscience fail to alert you to these developments. I don’t know what is more alarming, the fact that there have been thousands of serious Covid-19 vaccine-related adverse events and deaths reported in official national databases, or the apparent unwillingness of health bodies and governments of the world to take any notice.
Whatever may be the reason for this, and whatever people’s motives might be for such sinister policies as the Gender Recognition Act and Assisted Dying for Terminally Ill Adults (Scotland) Bill, the fact remains that we are living at a time when the sacredness of human life is disregarded and the most basic foundations of a God-honouring society are being systematically overturned and destroyed.
Scripture tells us that whereas Christ came into that world to give life in all its abundance Satan exists to kill and destroy (John 10:10). Our battle then, is not ultimately with flesh and blood, but with the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.
With this in mind, I am convinced that we must truly give ourselves to prayer. In particular, we must pray that:

The bride of Christ would take up the whole armour of God, that she might be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all to stand firm (Eph. 6).

Those responsible for such destructive evils of our day would be brought to repentance, silenced or removed (Dan. 4:31-32).

Those seeking to identify as a gender other than the one given to them by God would be delivered from a corrupted mind (Rom. 1:28) and find salvation in Christ.

The church would recover her prophetic voice to the world and not be guilty of giving an indistinct sound (1 Cor. 14:8; Isaiah 1:17; Prov. 31:8-9). See our friend David Robertson’s recent blog post, for example.

As we enter into the spiritual battlefield of 2023, we would do well to remember that while Herod did his worst in the early years of Christ’s life, he did not ultimately succeed in thwarting the redemptive purposes of God. When Jesus said, “I will build my church and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it” He meant what He said. But as we play our own small part in that work, we must not lose sight of the fact that we do so in a world where many operate according to the same devilishness as King Herod. Let us not therefore neglect our God-given responsibility – individually, locally and as a denomination – to pray hard and to contend for the faith once for all delivered to the saints.
May God have mercy on our land, grant repentance and revival to His bride, and may each of you know the blessing and peace of the True King, our Lord Jesus Christ, in all the days to come.
With love from your pastor and friend, in Him,
Paul Gibson is a Minister in the Free Church of Scotland and is Pastor of Knox Church in Perth, Scotland. This article is used with permission.
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For Perkins, the “substance” of these judicial laws that were given to the Jews binds not just “Jews but also Gentiles…” Contrary to the R2K consensus, these judicial laws are universally binding not because their foundational equity is to be equated with, and reduced to, natural law without remainder, but because these judicial laws expand and complete what is contained in natural law!

Recently, I received the following message through my blog from professor R. Scott Clark in response to an article of mine that recently appeared on The Aquila Report. After discussing the matter on the phone with this brother, I’ve decided to address a few things.
Your account of “R2K” seems like a caricature. Who defends the “R2K” view you describe?
Anyone who knows the 16th & 17th centuries knows that general equity = natural law (e.g., Wollebius & Perkins) and that is intended to be applied to civil issues such as kidnapping.
Ecclesiastically it applies to the church but that doesn’t exhaust it’s use.
My response will be limited to the professor’s use of William Perkins along with a corroborating footnote pertaining to Johannes Wollebius.
Here we can find a relevant quote from William Perkins, with an excerpt of that quote immediately below. (Bold and italicized emphases mine throughout article.)
Judicials of common equity are such as are made according to the law or instinct of nature common to all men and these in respect of their substance bind the consciences not only of the Jews but also of the Gentiles for they were not given to the Jews as they were Jews, that is, a people received into the covenant above all other nations, brought from Egypt to the Land of Canaan, of whom the Messiah according to the flesh was to come; but they were given to them as they were mortal men subject to the order and laws of nature as other nations are. Again, judicial laws so far as they have in them the general or common equity of the law of nature are moral and therefore binding in conscience as the moral law.
It’s to misread Perkins to infer that in the civil realm it is just the law of nature that is binding upon all men. Instead, we should take Perkins to mean that it is the law of nature that makes the judicial laws of Israel suitably binding upon all men. To miss that point is to miss Perkins’ point. The law of nature establishes the foundation upon which civil laws can be applied to all nations.
Perkins distinguishes elsewhere particular judicial laws that were peculiar to Israel’s commonwealth that don’t have this same quality of nature, which further punctuates his point. Example: the brother should raise up seed to his brother. (Johannes Wollebius holds a similar view that distinguishes judicial laws that are grounded in natural law from those that are not.*)
The judicial laws in view were not themselves natural laws, for the judicial laws were both made and given to men under Moses “according to” what was already instinctive to them. Moreover, these judicial laws were given to the Jews not by virtue of their unique covenant standing before God but in their common created capacity of being “mortal men subject to the order and laws of nature as other nations.” So, the judicial laws are neither to be seen as fundamentally moral nor particular to a covenant nation but rather as having expansive moral import based upon something even more fundamentally primitive in nature, which makes way for their trans-nation application.
R2K wrongly takes the fundamental moral basis upon which judicial laws can be found universally applicable and turns that natural law foundation into the only feature that carries through to the nations. In doing so, R2K denies Perkins’ position, which couldn’t be clearer. It is the judicial laws themselves that have universal judicial application and not merely the instinctive properties of natural law contained within them: “Again, judicial laws… are moral and therefore binding.” Perkins also informs us of the reason why the judicial laws can be universally and morally binding, which is because “they have in them the general or common equity of the law of nature.”
WCF 19.4:
Apropos, for civil magistrates to govern according to the general equity of Israel’s judicial laws (WCF 19.4) is to govern strictly according to those civil laws that were rooted in the common equity of the moral law and not according to the judicial laws that pertained to the land promise or other non-moral aspects of Israel’s society. Yet R2Kers (like the referenced professor) offer an alternative paradigm of governance, which would limit civil magistrates to govern strictly according to natural law yet not according to Israel’s judicial laws that are rooted in natural law. Aside from departing from the nuance of Perkins and Wollebius on the binding moral relevance of Israel’s civil code, one need only consider the historically global results and degeneracy of such governance in order to appreciate the ineffectiveness of natural law in the civil realm. But that shouldn’t be surprising since natural law was never intended to be a model for wielding the sword! The civil laws were given for a reason, and in the minds of men like Perkins et alia the intrinsically moral civil laws are forever binding upon conscience because of their divinely inspired relation to natural law:
“Judicial laws so far as they have in them the general or common equity of the law of nature are moral and therefore binding in conscience as the moral law.” William Perkins
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I accept the fact that one can love people of the same sex or love multiple people at the same time, but I will not give you approval for sexual behavior with these people any more than I will give approval for people who love someone married to someone else or even those who love somebody but are not married to that to person to engage in sexual behavior. I’m not going to probe into anybody’s personal affairs nor will I find the need to comment on them, but if I am asked to affirm such behavior, I cannot do so. I believe that “love is love” indeed, but not that any kind of love justifies sexual behavior—precisely because not every form of sexual behavior can help one in reaching that end in God I identified above.

One of the administrators at my school recently asked faculty to contribute a “solidarity statement.” The email specified what was being sought:
For your statement, we’re asking you to share how you personally will engage in the work of creating an inclusive and equitable campus community that truly values all. What, specifically, will you do in your classroom, in your advising meetings, in your mentorship or research with students, or in other areas of your professional life? Our BIPOC and LGBTQIA+ students, as well as those who identify with other historically marginalized groups, need to know they have allies at St. Thomas who will actively stand and act in solidarity with them. And as teachers, we have the wonderful opportunity to not only serve as allies for some but to educate all.
You may have heard of this through Rod Dreher’s blog at The American Conservative. [i] Some colleague of mine leaked this to Mr. Dreher. I didn’t do it, nor do I know who did. But I fully approve of the leaking. As Mr. Dreher notes, this is the “woke version of a loyalty oath.” As he quotes my leaker colleague, this is “a clear violation of academic freedom,” putting untenured faculty in the position of either saying nothing and thus endangering the possibility of tenure (silence is violence, don’t you know?) or penning “some b.s. made up stuff and violat[ing] your conscience.” Would a statement that simply affirms the dignity of all human beings fit the request? Would a statement that supports positions contrary to Catholic teaching on sexual morality be acceptable as part of this project at a Catholic school? Would a statement that affirms Catholic teaching on sexual morality be deemed to show solidarity? Some colleagues wrote a joint letter asking that the project be shut down. Another colleague asked whether this was a requirement, and the answer was given that it is fully optional. Of course, it wasn’t shut down and these statements now are available on the interior-facing website. I read through a number of them. Some are fully woke statements, beginning with statements of identity such as “As a cisgender white male” before committing to looking at everything through a progressive political lens, always considering one’s own sinfulness in light of it, and acting on some specified course of action such as asking for “all-gender restrooms.” Others are rather formulaic and generic recitations of some of the phrases of the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion hymnal. Still others are rather clever statements that fully comport with a Christian viewpoint and focus on the Jewish and Christian teaching about the image of God, the good of liberal education to help us understand each other, or pick out some element of the faculty member’s research or teaching that is getting at racial or sexual biases without committing the professor to the progressive worldview that animates the DEI office and much of the university administration. In short, they don’t sink to the level of “some b.s.” I applaud these colleagues for keeping their integrity, but I think the difficulty is that actual concrete speech on my campus as on many others keeps getting pushed away. One can get away with saying something general if it strays from the DEI-orthodoxy in these statements but rarely something particular.
I did not write a solidarity statement for the university at the time, but I’ve been thinking about what it might involve, as a believing Catholic Christian and political conservative, to write a real statement that is not limited to generalities. So here is my attempt. It represents my views alone.
First, for all students of any and every description.

I vow to treat you all with the dignity that is yours because you are made in the image of God, with free will, a rational mind, and an end that has been given by God himself. That end is to know, love, and serve God, so as to live as happily as you can in this life and in the fullest happiness forever with God.
Though we were made with these capacities and this destiny, the human situation is that we are a fallen race. Because of a catastrophe at the beginning of human history, in which humans rejected that call to follow God, we are all sinners. We sometimes refuse to God’s will for our lives, even when it is blazingly obvious that accepting it will make us happy. I will keep in mind that you—like me—are morally and spiritually frail and can make decisions that are wrong or even morally bad. I will not cancel you because God does not do so.
Instead of canceling humanity, God’s solution was to become one with all of us, uniting himself to human nature in the person of Jesus Christ, who followed God perfectly even to the point of death at the hands of the most powerful government in the world. Because of that perfect obedience, he rose again from the dead in his human body, ascended into heaven, and then sent his Holy Spirit to his Church. Every human being’s end can be achieved through being united to Jesus Christ and his Church. You may or may not be Catholic, but you have chosen to attend a Catholic university. I will do my best not merely to teach you about particular subjects, but about how to view the world through the lens of this wonderful belief that God not only created you in his image but came to make that tarnished image shine again and fill it with his life.
I will do my best not only to make you feel valued, but to know your value.

Second, for BIPOC students (Black, Indigenous, and Persons of Color), I’d like to say first what I will not do in my solidarity.

First, apart from this little statement I will never think of you or talk about you as “BIPOC,” which seems to lump everybody into a category on the basis of whether you think of yourself or are categorized as “white.”
Because this category is completely arbitrary and does not take into account your own very diverse experiences and understandings from your own particular communities, nor your deepest held beliefs, I will not assume all or even most “BIPOC” people think alike on issues of politics, policy, and the deepest things.
Nor will I ever tell you, as so many do these days, that “you’re not black” or that “you are brown people speaking with a white voice,” or any of the other political pressure statements designed to keep people in a particular political stable by threatening them with excommunication from some ethnic or racial group.
I will not think of you as victims nor encourage you to think of yourselves as victims. You live in a great country in which, though white racism still exists (and will always exist, just as envy, hatred, lust, resentment, and every other sinful thought and attitude will exist until Jesus comes to judge the living and the dead), it is rare on the ground. You have endless opportunities in this great country of ours, and there are both countless individuals and institutional measures designed to help people of all backgrounds.
I will not grade you differently from white students. You have the same dignity, the same great possibilities, and the same need for critical and constructive feedback as white students. To expect less of you has been called “the soft bigotry of low expectations” and it is wrong.

What will I do?

I will hold you to the same standards as everybody else, knowing that you can handle the truth about your work and you can improve it with solid effort and the help available to you.
To that end, I will engage you as I do every other student, offering you the same opportunities to get extra help by meeting me in my office, getting feedback on your work—including comments on drafts of papers—and helping you in thinking through the issues you are learning about in my class, other classes, or even just in life.
I will talk to you in the same way in class and out as I do every other student. Academically, this means that I will help you hone your ideas and challenge you. In class, I will occasionally banter with you, make jokes about you and your verbal mistakes that are funny, and in general make you feel as though you belong as I do every other student regardless of race.
When I say I will talk to you the same way, that also means I will not talk down to you. This is your bonus for choosing a political conservative as a professor. As social psychologists discovered several years ago, white liberals tend to use a “competence downshift”—also known as dumbing down their language—to many minorities, especially black people, whereas “if you’re a white conservative, your diction won’t depend on the presumed race of your interlocutor.”[ii]
That further means I may express disagreement with your views, even on tough issues that sometimes have race as an element. I don’t believe in a great deal of what is said about racial issues from a progressive perspective, and you might not either. A college classroom is the place to hash out arguments in search of the truth. When many people in academic and public life say they want an “open and honest discussion” about issues, they really just want to hear their own views affirmed. We may agree on some issues and disagree on others—just as happens when everybody’s from the exact same racial, ethnic, or cultural background!—but we can argue about the merits of the positions and seek the truth together.
I will also work to oppose the very existence of the DEI office, which I do not believe actually helps students of color all that much, though it provides cushy jobs to people in higher education and further politicizes campuses.[iii]

Now, for the students identifying as “LGBTQIA+.”

For all of you, I will treat you with all the respect that is due to you as human beings and will treat you with the same respect indicated above. That means speaking honestly to you. If I get to know you in class or out and the subject comes up, I will encourage you not to locate your true identity in either your sexual desires or a perceived “gender” that is separate from your biological sex. I will encourage you to locate your true identity first and foremost as a child of God, made in his image and called to eternal life with him. Other aspects of you such as your desires and your ideas might be important to know in learning how to teach you or help you in various ways, but they are not who you are.
I accept the fact that one can love people of the same sex or love multiple people at the same time, but I will not give you approval for sexual behavior with these people any more than I will give approval for people who love someone married to someone else or even those who love somebody but are not married to that to person to engage in sexual behavior. I’m not going to probe into anybody’s personal affairs nor will I find the need to comment on them, but if I am asked to affirm such behavior, I cannot do so. I believe that “love is love” indeed, but not that any kind of love justifies sexual behavior—precisely because not every form of sexual behavior can help one in reaching that end in God I identified above.
I am happy to call you whatever you say your name or nickname is, but I will not use pronouns of you that are different from your biological sex and instead represent what you consider your gender. I will not go out of my way to use what I think your correct pronouns are, but I will not use other pronouns. Some people think this is hatred, saying that to do so means “denying your existence.” I do believe you exist, and I also believe that you were fearfully and wonderfully made by God either as a male or a female. Gender identity is a sense of one’s identity as either male or female. That sense might be wrong if it doesn’t match with your biology. I believe that it is accepting that gift and call of your nature that will ultimately bring you happiness. I stand in solidarity with you as a person and thus will not affirm anything that is untrue about you because I believe that such falsehoods will hurt you.
Similarly, if called upon to explain my positions to you, I will do so with care and love. If called upon to tell a friend the truth, it is wrong not to do so even if it upsets the friend.
I will work to protect you from unjust discrimination and hatred. That includes anybody who calls you vile names or refuses to serve you in getting the necessities of life. I will even help you get the use of a single-stall restroom if you feel uncomfortable using the restroom of your own sex. I cannot, however, support measures that allow you to use the restroom or locker room of the opposite sex. I believe that women and men deserve privacy from the other sex in these settings. I also cannot support measures that allow biological men to participate in sports against biological women. It is unfair to allow men, who enjoy a number of biological advantages in strength and speed, to compete with women.

A final word to each and every student.

I think the very idea that we ought to compose “solidarity statement” to individual groups is a bad idea because it seems to assume that you should mistrust people and assume the worst in them—that they discriminate against you on the basis of race or that they hate you because they disagree with you. I began by noting that my solidarity is with every person. I mean that. And I promise never to write another solidarity statement again. If you agree with me on this point, I ask that you stand in solidarity against such initiatives.

[i] Rod Dreher, “The Grand DEI Inquisitor,” October 25, 2021.
[ii] Isaac Stanley-Becker, “White liberals dumb themselves down when they speak to black people, a new study contends,” Washington Post, November 30, 2018. The article quotes one of the researchers as saying that this difference is due to the fact that “we know empirically that white conservatives are less likely to be interested in getting along with racial minorities,” making it sound as though conservatives are somehow hostile to minorities. But you should understand what this really means: conservatives are not interested in getting along with anybody on the basis of race. We’re interested in what you think, believe, and do.
[iii] A new study by the Heritage Foundation—a conservative think tank, to be sure—looks at the introduction of such diversity officers at the K-12 level and discovers that though they do a lot of political activism, their work does not close any racial achievement gaps. In fact, they sometimes exacerbate them. I’ll bet the same would be true at the university level. See Equity Elementary: “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” Staff in Public Schools.
The featured image is “In der Schulklasse” (19th century) by an anonymous artist, and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
David Deavel is Senior Contributor at The Imaginative Conservative, editor of Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture, Co-Director of the Terrence J. Murphy Institute for Catholic Thought, Law, and Public Policy, and Visiting Professor at the University of St. Thomas (Minnesota). He holds a PhD in theology from Fordham and is a winner of the Acton Institute’s Novak Award. With Jessica Hooten Wilson, he edited Solzhenitsyn and American Culture: The Russian Soul in the West (Notre Dame, 2020). With Liz Kelly, he co-hosts the Deep Down Things podcast. Besides his academic publications, Dr. Deavel’s writing has appeared in many journals, including Catholic World Report, First Things, National Review, and the Wall Street Journal.
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