Dear False Teacher: The Puritan Thomas Brooks Would Like a Word with You
“False teachers strive more to win over men to their opinions, not better them in their [Christian walk].” False teachers want you to forget that the sin of homosexuality is rebellion against the creation ordinance (which is the same sin leveled by letters of the alphabet soup, LGBTQ). Rebellion against God’s created order, which he calls good, isn’t erased because the person committing this sin is someone you love.
Dear Mr. False Teacher,
Permit me to write boldly to you. You have repeated your shallow shibboleths in sermons, blogs, and conferences, and you have tried very hard to pretend that secular society is a neutral playground, a marketplace of ideas where Christianity is welcome to flourish.
You punt for nuance every time and have made every clear teaching of the law and gospel a grey area of ambiguity.
You have sought the middle road on every issue: gay marriage, transgender normalization, Black Lives Matter, and abortion.
You always seek the third way.
But it’s getting harder for you to persuade your flock because some of them see that a raging spiritual war has washed out the middle road and the third way.
I believe that you are at a crossroads.
So let me put it straight: if you are a true Christian who has fallen into some bad theology, I’m throwing you a rope. Why not grab it?
Your rhetorical strategy was to yield the moral language to the left–using transgender pronouns, normalizing all things LGBTQ+, and generally asking, “Did God Really Say?” anytime biblical clarity came with a cost. Maybe you tell yourself that you mean well. Perhaps you truly believe your innovations are better than God’s word because you fancy yourself more merciful than God. You and your friends redefined the biblical concepts once foundational to all Christians, like being born again, forsaking sin, and finding liberty in Christ.
By redefining biblical words through secular definitions, you almost persuaded yourself and others that:
- Being “born again” meant coming to grips with your personal truth.
- “Forsaking sin” meant not offending unbelievers with God’s word.
- “Finding liberty in Christ” meant doing whatever your feelings dictate.
Believe me. I understand your dilemma. Let’s not forget that I once promoted garbage ideas, such as “pronoun hospitality,” and garbage aphorisms, such as “homosexuality is a sin, but so too is homophobia.” I repent before God and men. Christians “repent of their particular sins particularly,” as the Westminster Confession of Faith XV.V teaches. As God’s Word says, “If we confess our sins, [God] is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness” (1 John 1:7-9).
Perhaps you think I am exaggerating the problem?
Did you miss the federal government program that puts LGBTQ+ in all government schools as part of an anti-bullying mandate?[1] But instead of warning your flock of danger, you told them that “Love is Love,” therefore, the Christian’s responsibility in the government schools is “Love, Don’t Leave.” (Way to go using an aphorism instead of the Bible. It’s catchier; you can say it around unbelievers without offending them, and you won’t risk bringing God into the equation.)
Did you miss that after the State of Tennessee passed a law protecting minors from self-mutilation under the Frankensteinian umbrella of “gender-affirming surgery,” the Biden Administration’s Department of Justice leveled a lawsuit against the state of Tennessee?[2] Did you catch that? My friend Andrew Branch put it best: “It’s official: A 14th Amendment claim by the federal government over castrating minors.”
And although by now you are likely “feeling triggered” –as your peer group likes to call it–I suggest you man up, Mr. False Teacher, because Mr. Thomas Brooks would like to have a word with you.
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How “Throw My Body in the Ditch” Theology Relates to Sexual Ethics
The church fought to teach that Jesus Christ “suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died and was buried;” But it wasn’t only doctrine about Christ they fought for. They also taught “the resurrection of the body.” The early church placed great importance upon the body. What we do in the body matters. What happens to our body matters. The church didn’t separate flesh from spirit as we do. And they certainly didn’t have a “throw me in a ditch” theology.
What started as a new dishwasher turned into an expensive kitchen remodel. When we pulled our broken dishwasher out of its happy spot, nestled under our cabinets, we soon discovered a rotting floor. We had mold.
We decided to keep pulling up floor, tile, cabinets, walls, whatever, until there was no more mold. We came to a stop when we got to our bay window area over the kitchen sink. The whole wall, studs and all, was covered in mold. That outside wall had to go.
When we got further into the project we discovered an even bigger problem. The issue which gave rise to all of our problems was a faulty foundation. Apparently cinder blocks holding hands does not a foundation make, especially when there is no drain to move water away from the house.
I could have rebuilt without touching the foundation. We could have kept fighting all the battles above the surface, and maybe even won a few of those. But it would only be prolonging the inevitable. Once the foundation is surrendered the whole thing will eventually give way.
The same is true with our Christian response to current issues of sexuality. I would argue that we are “losing” these battles because we surrendered the foundation long ago. We don’t have a leg to stand on. Today, I’ll explain one of these foundations.
Just Throw Me in a Ditch!
I’ve heard more than a handful of Christians joke that they don’t care what happens to their body after death. “Just throw me in a ditch,” they’ll say, “I’ll be in heaven with Jesus.” The idea is that our earthly body is just like a tent you’d take for a weekend camping trip—it’s only temporary. But it’s also kind of an icky and dilapidated tent that gives us all kinds of problems.
Undoubtedly, such language is taken from 2 Corinthians 5. Here Paul refers to the body as a “tent”. And he says that our preference would be “away from the body and at home with the Lord.” In other words, when I’m home with Jesus just throw that tattered old tent in the ditch.
But is that really what Paul is arguing?
If he is, it would go against not only his Jewish upbringing but also the early church. Jewish tradition completely rejected the idea of cremation and stressed a need for burying the dead. It was sign of dignity and showed the worth of the created body. Rather than moving away from this tradition, the early church continued in this.
Let’s briefly go to Paul again. Notice 1 Corinthians 15:3-4,
For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, 4 that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures… (emphasis mine)
Why does Paul add “buried” in there? I mean, if he died and was resurrected, isn’t it kind of redundant? And why does John tell us all about Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea and the tomb that Jesus was placed in?
For one, it’s to show that He was truly dead and truly resurrected. But it’s also to show us that Jesus was buried as a king. What happened to His body mattered. Because the body matters—even in death.
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AI, ChatGPT and Ministry
Just as we made machines that can lift more than we can and move faster than we can, we have now designed machines that can know more and communicate more in a shorter period of time. If thinking is defined as memory, factual recall, and the ability to swiftly convert factual recall into written (or verbal) communication, then we have designed machines that can think better than we can.
We have always produced machines to reduce our labour. These machines are necessarily stronger than we are. The Industrial Revolution produced machines that could build bigger, better and faster than human hands could manage.
In the 20th century, we produced machines that could calculate more and faster than we could, machines that could store and remember more information than we could. We then produced machines that could combine this and beat us at chess. In other words, by one metric, even the computers of the 20th century were ‘smarter’ than us. Our software could reveal more in seconds than our library research could have produced after hours of page turning.
The last years represent another threshold. We have now produced machines that can mimic and understand language. Combined with massive storage, and a huge range of examples, we now have machines that can write faster, and sometimes, better than we can: essays, descriptions, instructions, poems, riddles, jokes, speeches, or sermons. Similarly AI can now code software better than we can, and perform visual design of graphics, websites, presentations and eventually, live-action movies, and simulations. Whereas we thought that creative activity would always be the domain of the human, we have now trained computers to mimic the creative process and perform it faster than we can.
For example, I asked ChatGPT to write a prayer by Charles Spurgeon. After about ten seconds, it had the following:
“O Lord, we would delight ourselves in You who are the chief of all delights. We thank You that of Your own good pleasure You bring salvation to sinful men. We confess that before You made us to differ, we were as others are, dead in trespasses and sins, having no hope and without God in the world. We bless You for the eternal covenant by which You foresaw us and chose us to be Your own, and for the precious blood of Christ by which we are redeemed. We pray that we may never lose sight of the exceeding sinfulness of sin, the infinite mercy of divine love, and the fullness of grace that dwells in Jesus. May the Holy Spirit who has begun the work of grace in us carry it onward to completion until we are complete in Christ, and find our joy and satisfaction in His service; for the Lord’s sake. Amen.”
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“I’m Sad”
So easily we lose the childlike simplicity of prayer; a child speaking to his/her father. We start to think more about the people around us that we can see than the God above whom we cannot. We pile up stock phrases or mumble our way to an amen as we prematurely reach for our fork. Even when we are trying it can be hard.
One night at the supper table our kids were taking turns praying before we started the meal. Moments earlier our second youngest daughter had been kicking and screaming because she didn’t get to sit beside her sister. Consequently, she didn’t feel like praying so I attempted to convince her that God still wanted to hear from her even if she was angry. Through sniffles and snobs she prayed: “Father Heaven, I’m sad. Amen.”
The essence of prayer is communication with God and that was what my daughter was doing; telling God how she felt. A significant portion of the Psalms do the same thing – the author pours out his heart and bares his soul to a God who listens. Consider the following from the pen of king David:
I am weary from my groaning;with my tears I dampen my bedand drench my couch every night.
PSALM 6:6
What is David doing in these lines? He’s letting God know how he feels. David is doing what we all do each and every day: communicating.
Prayer, when understood as communication with God, is a simple act, yet it becomes complicated by at least two factors. First, we cannot see the One to whom we are speaking.
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